Doctors find a friend in ChatGPT

ChatGPT founders never expected it to help doctors beyond the mundane work of writing insurance appeals and patient note summaries, as they feared its mainstream use will give rise to a culture of short-cut diagnoses based on half-baked medical information. In reality, however, ChatGPT is helping doctors in an unlikely field: communicating with patients with #empathy and #compassion.

Dr. Michael Pignone, chairman, of the Department of internal medicine, University of Texas, Austin, used the tool for achieving effective behavioural interventions for a project to enhance treatments for alcohol abuse. Dr Gregory Moore, ex-health and life sciences head at Microsoft and a specialist in Diagnostic Radiology and Neurology, helped a friend come to terms with her advanced cancer using ChatGPT. He was stunned by the empathy shown by the chatbot in breaking the bad news without breaking the patient’s heart.

• Dr Kohane, the editor at The New England Journal of Medicine, used ChatGPT to qualify patients for a federal program for people with undiagnosed diseases
• For Dr Richard Stern, a rheumatologist in private practice, ChatGPT is like a 4 AM friend, helping him enhance his interaction with patients
• On the flip side, many experts are cautioning against the use of the tool in the medical sphere as more often than not, outcomes are either not useful, incorrect, or highly inconsistent

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