Don’t be fooled by AI doctors
AI doctors are coming. Some will be careful and certified; others will be sales funnels and snake oil. Here’s the part that worries me.
“I Googled it.” It’s the sentence every doctor quietly dreads — and one most of us have earned a guilty look for at least once. Type a couple of symptoms into a search box and you’ll be diagnosed with everything at once: cancer, a heart attack, HIV, meningitis. Because obviously a sore throat and a fever are textbook HIV. Or, you know, maybe not.
Now that the AI hype is everywhere, the headlines have caught up: “How a mother used ChatGPT to diagnose her son,” “ChatGPT can replicate your doctor surprisingly well.” Read enough of those and you’d think we should all be running our own diagnoses through a chatbot.
Before you go further down that path, hold your stethoscope for a moment.
What a chatbot can — and can’t — actually do
A chatbot works only with what you tell it. It can’t examine you, can’t order a blood test, can’t notice the thing you didn’t think to mention. Right now it isn’t really any different from a Google search dressed up in a confident voice. At least, not yet.
But let’s follow the thought a little further. What happens once the AI genuinely does work well?
Follow the money
Picture an AI doctor that’s free to use — and owned by a company that sells drugs. The law already lets you sell over-the-counter products in a supermarket. So why not a friendly bot that listens to your worries and gently suggests Doctor John’s “iodine + calcium” tablets? “These have a chance of helping.” Sure — a chance near zero. It isn’t technically lying. It’s just… questionable. And it’s possible today.
Push harder. We already know there are ethical knots around the drugs doctors prescribe — the quiet incentive to reach for one company’s brand over a cheaper equivalent. Now imagine a big pharma company offering a properly regulated, certified AI doctor, for free, that can prescribe for common illnesses. Who’s checking whether it reaches for the priciest brand — the one that happens to fund the free doctor? At least the appointment was fast.
And then the rabbit hole
Keep going and it gets stranger, especially around treatment. The internet is already full of “alternative” therapies — Unicorn Healing, anyone? — talking people into the weirdest things. Now give that an AI face: an “alternative-medicine AI doctor” built to push someone’s agenda. A chatbot shaman telling you to drink silver water or hold a magic stone to break a fever.there is, sadly, money in this
AI in medicine will do real good. I just want us to walk in with our eyes open — and keep a human in the room where being wrong is expensive. If you’ve thoughts on this, say hello.