OpenEvidence Takes Colostrum

Robert Wachter — best-known as the founder of the “hospitalist” movement in the 1990s — has been promoting OpenEvidence (OE) rather tirelessly lately, endorsing it in a press release last June, again in a recent interview with NEJM Catalyst, in other interviews, and in his recent book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.

He claims to have no financial ties to OE.

Wachter’s supposed “giant leap” boils down to LLMs that give him basic medical advice (a patient with Afib should be on blood thinners, for instance), affirming parasocial relationships at work, a book to sell, and a feeling that he’s 5-10% better at his job.

• In his book, he quotes OE’s founder Daniel Nadler about how Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) workers helped make OE “stop saying racist shit.” Wachter is apparently oblivious to the exploitation of workers in marginalized communities — including healthcare workers and medical scientists — for RLHF tasks like data tagging, and the toll eliminating “racist shit” and worse can take on their psyches, families, and relationships.

With these modest and debatable claims of benefit atop ignorance of the human and other costs of the LLMs he celebrates, Wachter also keeps anthropomorphizing OE by saying things like, “It’s smarter than I am.”

Let’s keep Wachter’s feelings of inferiority to an LLM in mind as we check on how OE answers a question about bovine colostrum powder, an extension of my post yesterday about how the science claims of ARMRA, one of the most prominent peddlers of bovine colostrum powder, are based on pay-to-play OA.

Certainly, something as smart and pure as OE would never accept paid article placements as evidence?