Start reading recent internet conversations about AI, and you’ll find an anecdote that surfaces with increasing frequency: ChatGPT delivered lifesaving medical advice.
“Three weeks ago I woke up from a nap and found some red spots all over my legs,” begins one such account in a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VtLMIx21Ec) from Bethany Crystal, who runs a consulting business and lives in New York. After an exchange with ChatGPT, she recounts it telling her, “You need immediate evaluation for possible bleeding risk.”
“What ensued was a harrowing three day experience that got increasingly scary,” says Crystal, who was eventually diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called immune thrombocytopenic purpura that can lead to low platelets and increased bleeding. She says she may not have gone to the emergency room in time if ChatGPT had not been insistent.
Hundreds of millions of people now consult ChatGPT weekly for wellness advice, according to its maker, OpenAI. In early January, the company [announced the launch](https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-health/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) of a new platform, ChatGPT Health, which it says offers enhanced security for sharing medical records and data.
It joins other AI tools such as [My Doctor Friend](https://about.mydoctorfriend.ai/) in promising to partner with patients on navigating health care.
Doctors and patients say AI is already having a profound impact on both the way that patients receive information about their health and practitioners’ ability to diagnose and communicate with their patients.
## Unlimited time to engage
There’s a saying in medicine: “If you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.” In other words, the most obvious problem is usually the problem. This is often the default approach to making a diagnosis for time-crunched doctors.
“I’ve heard from a number of patients who said, ‘Well, guess what? I’m a zebra,’” says Dave deBronkart, a cancer survivor who [writes about](https://www.epatientdave.com/) patients using AI to help with medicine.
Unlike doctors, ChatGPT has nearly unlimited time to engage in exhaustive inquiry with patients. deBronkart says he often hears stories about AI identifying symptoms that differentiate unusual or rare conditions from more common ailments.
Moreover, he points out, AI’s diagnostic catalogues go beyond generalized medical knowledge. “Turns out my doctors are really good at horses,” says deBronkart. “They just don’t know all the special stuff.”
## A new kind of patient
Many patients recount using different AI platforms to help with daily well-being and management of chronic conditions as a complement to oversight from medical professionals.
Sixty-year-old Burt Rosen – who works in marketing for a local Oregon college – uses it to help manage symptoms and treatment for the two different kinds of cancer he’s been diagnosed with, renal clear cell carcinoma and a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
“I’m in the, ‘I went to the cancer store on the buy one, get one free day,’” he jokes.
Recently, says Rosen, he told AI he was experiencing migraines and nausea after sleeping. AI asked him what position he was sleeping in and suggested he use two pillows instead of one. Pressure can build when lying flat, it explained, and cause migraines.
His headaches disappeared.
Rosen also uses it to track his symptoms over time in order to find correlations with diet or other triggers, or to understand the range of treatment options. He frequently shows it test results and asks it to translate them into comprehensible English.
## Risks to trusting AI
The list of unanswered questions and potential hazards ofusing AI in medicine is long.
As a consumer product, ChatGPT Health is not regulated by health privacy lawsthe way a medical provider’s systems are in a clinical setting
When it comes to mental health, OpenAI is currently named in multiple active lawsuits.
