Water On The Elbow – BionicOldGuy

I have developed water on my left elbow. It’s a painless but weird symptom. From a search on Google I found this is actually “Olecranon Bursitis”: the bursa, or lubricating sac, on the elbow has been irritated or inflamed somehow, and is accumulating fluid. I’m trying to get into see my doc about this, but I’m not in a hurry because it is not causing any problems. In the meantime I am following the web advice of icing it several times a day, and letting the elbow rest. That means no upper body workouts for now. Fortunately I can still get my biking in.

I had just found out about a new AI-based research tool that’s part of Google’s Gemini called “deep research”. To use is you start up Gemini and change the model type to “1.5 pro with deep research”. This normally requires a paid subscription but you can try it out for free (I recently got a Chromebook, and a one year paid subscription to Gemini advanced was included). I’ve tried this out on topics of interest that I already knew something about, and was impressed by the results. So I thought this would be another nice test case. I typed in “Olecranon Bursitis” in the query. It listed 23 websites it intended to search as its “research plan”:

I could have edited the plan to add other sites to search, but I just hit “start research”, and in a few minutes it came back with a report, which I saved to my drive and you can read here. It explained what the condition was, told me the symptoms, Causes, diagnosis, and treatment, and gave me a list of docs in my area that specialize in this. All pretty useful. This is a pretty simple example so I could have gotten similar results without AI on medical websites, then googling “olecranon bursitis specialist near me”. But I liked that it extracted a summary from a bunch of sites. I’ve tried this on more complicated topics that would have taken longer to search manually, and found the report to be a good head start, which I can follow up on, if desired, by querying some of the links listed.