TL;DR. Using an AI to understand your health is perfectly legitimate, as long as you know what it is for. Six simple rules: ask it to help you understand rather than decide, remember that it can be confidently wrong, share only the information that is needed, use it to prepare your appointment, use it again afterwards to make sense of your notes, and open the conversation with a prompt that sets the frame. The sentence to remember: do not use it to walk into your doctor’s office with more certainties, use it to walk in with better questions.
AI prepares this conversation. It does not replace it.
If you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another artificial intelligence to better understand your illness, a test or a treatment, I understand you very well.
I do the same. When I see my banker, my accountant or my notary and they explain something in a vocabulary I do not master, I sometimes walk out with the feeling that I did not quite follow.
So I look things up. I ask to have it explained differently. And sometimes I too use an artificial intelligence to understand better.
I imagine it is exactly the same when you go to the doctor.
Medicine uses a lot of complicated words. And even when your doctor takes the time to explain things, it is not always easy to remember everything, especially when there is stress, emotion, or a lot of information at once.
So I am not going to tell you:
“Whatever you do, don’t use ChatGPT for your health.”
I would rather show you how to use it well.
The goal is that it helps you understand better, prepare your questions better, and have better conversations with your doctor.
Let us look together at how to use AI so that it helps you understand your health and makes your exchanges with your doctor more useful.
1. Use AI to understand, not to decide
This is probably the most important rule.
An artificial intelligence can genuinely help you understand a word, an illness, a test, or the principle behind a treatment.
You can ask it, for example:
- “Can you explain simply what immunotherapy is?”
- “I did not understand this term in my medical report. What does it mean?”
- “Can you explain the difference between these two treatments?”
- “What questions could I ask my doctor about this?”
On the other hand, avoid asking it to make a medical decision in your place.
For example:
- “Do I have cancer?”
- “Should I stop my treatment?”
- “Which treatment should I choose?”
- “Is this situation urgent?”
The closer your question gets to a personal medical decision, the more your doctor needs to stay at the centre.
2. Keep in mind that an AI can be wrong
ChatGPT and the other artificial intelligences can produce very convincing answers.
The problem is that they can also be wrong with a great deal of confidence.
A well written answer is therefore not necessarily a true one.
For anything important, you can ask:
“Which reliable and recent sources are you drawing on?”
Or:
“What is certain in your answer, what is uncertain, and what depends on my personal situation?”
That helps you keep a bit of distance.
3. Protect your personal data
Avoid sharing more information than is needed.
There is no point, for instance, in giving:
- your name;
- your address;
- your full date of birth;
- your social security number;
- your medical record number;
- your doctors’ contact details.
If you paste in a medical document, remember to remove anything that identifies you.
The simplest rule is this one:
give only the information needed to get the answer you are looking for.
4. Use AI to prepare your appointment
This is probably one of the most useful things it can do.
Before your appointment, you can write:
“I have an appointment with my doctor to talk about [topic]. Here are the questions I have. Help me identify the five most important ones to ask.”
You can also ask it to help you organise your symptoms or your notes:
“Help me put this information in order so I can explain it clearly to my doctor. Do not try to make a diagnosis.”
That way you arrive at your appointment with clearer ideas and better prepared questions.
5. Use it after your appointment too
It is common to leave a medical appointment and realise a few hours later that you did not understand everything, or that you have forgotten some of the details.
AI can then help you put your notes back into words.
For example:
“Here is what I took away from my appointment. Can you explain it to me more simply and identify the points I should check with my doctor?”
Or:
“My doctor used these terms: […]. Can you explain them to me simply?”
Here again, the point is not to replace medical advice.
The point is to better understand what you were told.
6. A simple prompt to copy
If you want to use an AI to better understand your health, you can open your conversation with this message:
I am going to ask you questions to better understand a medical situation.
Help me understand medical terms in simple words.
Distinguish general information from what depends on my personal situation.
Tell me when you are not certain about something.
Draw on reliable and recent medical sources as much as possible.
Do not make any medical decision in my place.
Above all, help me identify the important questions to ask my doctor.
I do not want to be reinforced in my ideas, my intuitions, or in what you believe them to be; I would rather be objectively contradicted than subjectively reassured. When that is the case, I want you to say so explicitly.
Then you can simply ask your questions.
In short
You can absolutely use an artificial intelligence to better understand your health.
But use it as a tool for understanding and preparation, not as a parallel doctor.
It can help you:
- understand better;
- prepare your questions better;
- remember better what you were told;
- have better exchanges with your medical team.
If you were to remember only one sentence, it would be this one:
Do not use AI to walk into your doctor’s office with more certainties. Use it to walk in with a better understanding and better questions.