5 doctor-approved ways to use AI for health information

LAST SUMMER, LANCE JOHNSON WOKE up in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in his lower right side. He initially blamed it on the pizza and ice cream he had enjoyed the night before. But five sleepless hours later, the 17-year-old from Phoenix was still suffering, so he decided to consult the nearest expert: ChatGPT.

- BY ANGELA HAUPT

“I described what I'd eaten the night before and where the pain was, and I was like, ‘Do you think it’s just my stomach?’” And then it said that it sounded like it was appendicitis based on how long it was lasting and where it was,” Johnson says. “I kept asking it more questions, like could it be anything else? And it said, ‘Based on what you described, you should get it checked out.”

Johnson followed the bot’s advice—and, sure enough, the doctors at the emergency room soon said that he did, in fact, have appendicitis and needed immediate surgery. When he told them he had suspected as much because of ChatGPT’s insights, “I think they were kind of surprised that it would answer something like that—that it would diagnose me before they did,” Johnson says. “I didn’t know anything about appendicitis before. I didn’t even know it was in the bottom right.”