Dr Chatbot is patient and kind. Should doctors fear this rival?

The patient sat across from me with a thick folder of test results, medical reports and referral letters from multiple specialists.

- Chong Siow Ann

More people are drawn to chatbots for medical advice because they come across as more patient and empathetic than human physicians, says the writer. But the risk of AI in medicine is that it offers certainty without accountability and confidence without consequence. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO

It was a record of years of consultations and a ledger of the time and money spent in pursuit of an answer.He came to see me - a psychiatrist - at the insistence of his other specialists though he felt insulted when they told him that his symptoms were “psychological”. He carried a steady conviction, like a heavy weight inside him, that something serious had been missed. With dry humour, he told me he had come to dread the words he heard so often from doctors: “I can’t find anything wrong with you,” and he could sense the exasperation that came with those words.

More recently, he had turned to ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which he found to be more thorough, more patient and endlessly willing to engage with the full complexity of his litany of symptoms.

He has what was once called hypochondria, now renamed illness anxiety disorder. Patients with this condition are all too familiar to most doctors. It is defined by a persistent and consuming fear of having, or developing, a serious illness despite repeated examinations and tests that show no abnormality. It is hard to reassure those who are preoccupied with the idea of being ill. Any suggestion that their complaints may have a psychological basis is experienced not as care, but as dismissal.