After Dale Atkinson decided to fight his diagnosis, his approach was research-first, AI-second. He used ChatGPT as a literature triage layer — feeding in his diagnosis and medical letters, asking "if you were in my shoes, where would you start?" and getting a reading list. He spent six weeks (two to three hours a day) building a custom GPT trained only on the self-curated corpus of papers he found relevant — explicitly instructed not to search the open web, required to cite at least five sources, required to explain its sourcing.

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