In the early 2000s, the rise of Google became the bane of every doctor’s life. “Google the symptoms of a headache and you’ll get told you have cancer,” has become universally accepted as a punchline. Over time, doctors adjusted and the general public gradually became more discerning about getting health advice from the internet.
That is, until AI took over. Now, more and more patients are arriving at their GP surgery with a diagnosis from a new physician — Dr AI. “And I think the difference [to a standard Google search] is they come in really confident that they’ve got the right diagnosis,” says Rebecca Payne, a GP and researcher at Bangor University. The evidence of this stretches far beyond Payne’s GP surgery: in America, one in six adults use chatbots such as ChatGPT at least once a month for health advice, according to statistics from 2024.
