Using ChatGPT before a medical appointment? How to get the best support for your health questions

by Kirsten McCaffery, Julie Ayre, Liliana Laranjo, The Conversation

edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Andrew Zinin

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Add to Preferred Sources Credit: Airam Dato-on from Pexels Erin is in her early 40s. She works part time in a demanding job and has two kids in elementary school. She feels constantly exhausted; she's often angry and feels like she can't think like she used to. Her friend tells her it's perimenopause.

She books an appointment to talk to her primary care doctor. She doesn't know anything about perimenopause, so she asks ChatGPT what it is and what treatments are available.

Erin is not alone. Between 30% and 55% of adults report they have used ChatGPT or other large language models or chatbots for their health. And this use is increasing.

Even if you're not using an AI chatbot, a simple Google search will often produce an AI summary.

So how does this affect patient care? And how can you make the process safer and more effective?

A recent survey in the United Kingdom found that while some people asked chatbots health questions because they were curious, more than one in three used them to decide whether they needed to see a primary care doctor.

Around half found chatbots more convenient than regular services, with questions frequently occurring at night or in the morning, outside the hours of traditional health services.

Of those who used a chatbot, more than half believed it had been good for their physical and mental health.

A 2026 analysis of over 500,000 health conversations with Microsoft Copilot found one in five related to personal symptoms and treatments. Many queries related to someone else, such as a child or family member.

These findings echo results from our own nationally representative Australian survey. More than one-third of those who used ChatGPT for their health did so to find out what symptoms meant. Half used it to learn about a specific health condition.

Health information can be very complex and is often poorly communicated. Consultations are short, and patients frequently report not having enough time or confidence to ask clinicians all the questions they want.

By comparison, chatbot advice is readily available and personalized. Users can ask for greater clarity and simplicity without constraint or fear of judgment.

There are important reasons for alarm if chatbots are used when people need urgent medical attention and the answers they give are unsafe.

In the U.K. survey described above, one in five respondents decided against seeking medical advice from a professional after consulting a chatbot.

There is currently little real-world data on the safety of people using AI chatbots for health decisions, other than a few individual case studies of harm.

This week, the media have also reported on the death of 31-year-old Bowen Wang, who died in February after ChatGPT gave her the wrong advice about cutting back her epilepsy medication.

However, simulation studies examining the accuracy of chatbot health advice show cause for concern.

One study investigated AI responses to 222 patient questions that were relevant to primary care. Between 5% and 13% of the responses were unsafe, with the potential to lead to "serious patient harm," depending on the AI chatbot used.

Another study found that although chatbots were accurate 94.9% of the time using hypothetical clinical scenarios (with prompts by the research team), accuracy dropped to 34.5% in searches conducted by study participants (using the same clinical scenarios supported with the same chatbots).

It also found that using an AI chatbot may be less effective than searching the web to identify an underlying condition. For deciding whether to seek professional care, chatbot use was similar to a web search, with only 43% accuracy.

One of the key issues is that people often do not provide enough detail in their prompts to obtain accurate results. However, effective prompting is difficult to do (if untrained) and, importantly, requires a careful trade-off between specificity and privacy.

Nor do consumers cross-check information, despite sources sometimes being incorrect or irrelevant. Only 1% of users click on the links provided by Google's AI summaries.

In an ideal world, patients and clinicians can collaboratively discuss the use of chatbot advice to help support shared decision-making.

But patients vary in their decision to disclose their chatbot use to their doctors. Many don't—from 83% of patients in a Polish survey to 32% in the U.S.

Reluctance to disclose use was due to fear of a negative reaction or concern the clinician might feel undermined.

But recent U.S. data suggest generally positive views from clinicians about patient AI use under certain conditions.

Of the 1,692 clinicians surveyed, 70% considered patients' use of AI chatbots for general health information or decision-making positive or said it had no impact on their practice.

But around 50% said they would rarely or never want their patients to use AI to interpret medical test results or reports.

Disclosing AI chatbot use enables clinicians to correct any inaccuracies and use it in shared decision-making.

But clinicians say they're currently poorly trained and lack time (and reimbursement) to support their patients' AI use.

While some resources are available, patients need much more help in using chatbots, and clinicians need more guidance on how and where to direct them for support.

The new SMART guide, designed by an international team of clinicians, researchers and AI health experts, spells out five key steps to help people use chatbots more safely:

People also need to know they can access human-led, 24/7 triage services for free, such as 1800MEDICARE in Australia (1800 022 222) and NHS 111 in the U.K. These services are essential to ensuring people get the right advice and care when they need it.

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.