Lyme patients can use ChatGPT to organize medical info, prepare questions, and clarify concepts but should not replace professional medical advice with AI suggestions.
How Lyme Patients Can Safely Use ChatGPT, Without Replacing Medical Advice
By Admin at GLA
These days, we’re relying more and more on ChatGPT and similar AI to answer our questions, write our emails, and even provide emotional support. It’s nice to get an answer at your fingertips, and ChatGPT can almost feel like a personal assistant or a friend.
But we must remember that as smart as ChatGPT can be, its intelligence is artificial, and therefore not always right. It isn’t a person who can offer real TLC, it’s always learning and doesn’t know everything about medical conditions (or anything else), and the information it provides is sometimes just downright incorrect.
So how can you, as a Lyme warrior, use ChatGPT to your advantage? Let’s walk through some ways this service can be both helpful and harmful, and how to use it effectively.
What ChatGPT Can Do for Lyme Patients:
- Organize information for appointments: Going to the doctor can feel overwhelming, especially if it’s a first appointment and you need to explain your whole history in a short amount of time. You can tell ChatGPT your entire story and ask it to generate a concise (one-to-two-page) summary, pulling out the most salient points such as symptoms, dates, and treatments tried. Then, of course, evaluate what ChatGPT comes up with and make sure it matches your actual experience, asking ChatGPT to make tweaks as necessary or making them yourself. You can then bring the summary to the doctor or send it to them in advance on a patient portal. The summary should sound like it’s from your voice and come from you. (To keep track of symptoms or methods of symptom management, try the Lyme Wellness Initiative’s Daily Symptom Diary or Weekly Symptom Management Technique Journal; you can then feed this information to ChatGPT).
- Prepare questions for your doctor: You can tell ChatGPT what you want to discuss with your doctor and what questions you’d like to ask and see if it has any additional questions to recommend. Remember that you are the patient experiencing the symptoms and you’re the human who wants to engage in collaborative care with your provider; ChatGPT can simply help prepare you for the conversation. You don’t need to let a provider know that certain questions are AI-generated; just pick the ones that seem appropriate and add them to your own list.
- Come up with language to help you partner with a doctor: When you’ve gone from doctor to doctor, you might understandably go into new appointments on the defensive or telling a doctor what you have or what to do, all of which can be off-putting. Tell ChatGPT what you hope to get out of an appointment and ask it to help you come up with language that will allow you to approach a provider with curiosity and respect as you seek collaborative care. “Based on my symptoms and risk factors, could it be possible that I have tick-borne illness?” is much more likely to get the results you want—a consideration of tick-borne illness—than going into an appointment saying, “I put all my symptoms into ChatGPT and I have Lyme.”
- Clarify terminology or general concepts: Even if you take notes (recommended!) during an appointment, it can be hard to remember exactly what a doctor said. Or you may want further information about something they recommend. ChatGPT can help clarify terminology or give you an overview of a what certain treatment is or how it might work (it cannot, however, recommend the treatment plan itself). When using ChatGPT for this type of information, be sure to check its sources: are they legitimate? Does the information cross-check with information provided by multiple reputable medical sources? If you present a new treatment option to a provider, use the reputable source it originates from. Saying, “I read on the CDC website” will go a lot further than “ChatGPT suggested…”
- Let you know what others have tried: You can ask ChatGPT what other patients with your symptoms and history have tried. It can give you ideas, but you need to then discuss those ideas with your health care provider. Do not follow advice from ChatGPT without first talking to your health care provider. Again, evaluate the source of the advice and see if the recommended treatments or therapies align with advice from trusted sources.
What ChatGPT Cannot Do for Lyme Patients:
- Diagnose Lyme or co-infections: ChatGPT might have some ideas about what you have based on the symptoms you tell it—same as a Google search or WebMD could yield any number of “diagnoses”—but only a licensed human medical provider can diagnose Lyme or other tick-borne illness. (For ways to approach a doctor about information you found on ChatGPT, see Come up with language to help you partner with a doctor above.)
- Replace a physician: As smart as ChatGPT can seem, it doesn’t actually replace human care. Only a licensed physician can diagnose and treat medical conditions based on their clinical evaluation of your symptoms and history.
- Recommend treatment: ChatGPT can let you know what the latest treatments are or what others have tried, but it can’t tell you what’s best for your case. After cross-checking sources of ChatGPT’s recommendations for accuracy, safety, and bias, discuss the recommendations with your health care provider.
- Replace human TLC: ChatGPT can validate your feelings, which can be really helpful for Lyme patients who may be feeling misunderstood or isolated. But remember that as emotionally intelligent as ChatGPT may seem, it doesn’t replace an actual human. ChatGPT can’t give hugs!
As long as you’re using your human critical thinking skills and using ChatGPT appropriately, it can be an effective tool to help you on your Lyme journey.
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