Can You Trust ChatGPT For Medical Advice? A Doctor’s Guide

Over the past few years, something has changed when I see patients in the ER. Patients used to come with printouts from Google. Today, they have their AI chat.

According to a Wolters Kluwer’s survey, 60% of clinicians said they spend time discussing AI-generated health information their patients bring with them. And 42% of patients said they frequently or very frequently bring it. OpenAI has reported that more than 300 million people a week now ask ChatGPT health questions.

The era of “Googling your symptoms” is over. Now, it’s a conversation with an AI. People are pasting blood work PDFs, MRI reports and long lists of symptoms into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. The trouble is they often have no way of knowing whether what comes back is accurate, harmless or even dangerous.

People aren’t going to stop. And they shouldn’t have to. Used well, consumer AI is one of the best health literacy tools ever. But used as a diagnostician, it can fail, sometime miserably, in ways that are hard to see.

Why People Are Turning To AI For Medical Questions

The appeal is obvious. There’s no waiting room, no copay and no portal message that takes three days to answer. An AI chatbot is available at 2 a.m., when the lab result posts to your phone before your doctor has seen it.

It also has something most physicians don’t: unlimited time to talk to you. In a widely cited study in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers took 195 real patient questions from Reddit’s AskDocs forum and compared answers from verified physicians with answers from ChatGPT. A blinded panel of clinicians preferred the chatbot’s response 79% of the time. It also rated its answers as empathetic roughly ten times more often.

However, the physicians were volunteers typing on Reddit. And the chatbot’s answers were about four times longer. The model used in the study is now several generations old. But the finding captured something patients feel: AI isn’t rushed.