Aug 18, 2026 · 22 min · 9 segments
In this episode, Dr. Steve Vargo tackles a scenario more and more doctors are running into: a patient sits down and says, "I looked this up on ChatGPT." How do you respond without sounding…
Steve VargoHost
I was-- I had something else planned, but there's a, a something I've been noticing a lot, and I thought it might be interesting to spend 15 minutes or so on this topic, and the topic is the increasingly large number of people using AI for health issues.
And we, I, I assume many of you have used it to look up health issues, and you probably know people.
My wife has used it to ask questions, and I'm anticipating a lot more patients are gonna start showing up in your office having looked up things on AI and coming in with that information, and it might be right and it might not be right.
But how do we reply to that in a way that is not going to diminish our authority? And I'll get more into that as w- as we talk this through, and I looked at some of the research on consumer expectations around AI and how to respond to that as a doctor when somebody comes in.
In my mind, I kinda go back to the old days of patients would come in, and they would have read something or downloaded something on the internet, and they would show it to us, and we thought, "Oh, that's cute." And we'd look at it and, and almost, we're almost kinda dismissive of it.
Well, the internet got better, and I mean it, a lot of garbage out there, but I don't think we're quite as offended when people actually do their own research before coming in to see us.
That's not, not always a bad thing, and if they're coming in to bring things to us and ask us to, to talk it through, I think that's a good thing.
I think people are gonna start doing that a lot more than they are googling their, their symptoms.
Now, here's where things start getting a bit more interesting, maybe a bit more scary.
Of all the people using AI for health questions, about 81% of them are taking some kind of action afterwards.
For some cases, they're booking an appointment, but a lot of cases, they're changing something.
Again, not all bad, but then let's look at in eighteen percent of those cases, the action they're taking is adjusting their own medication based on a conversation that they had with a chatbot.
I was-- I had something else planned, but there's a, a something I've been noticing a lot, and I thought it might be interesting to spend 15 minutes or so on this topic, and the topic is the increasingly large number of people using AI for health issues.
And we, I, I assume many of you have used it to look up health issues, and you probably know people.
My wife has used it to ask questions, and I'm anticipating a lot more patients are gonna start showing up in your office having looked up things on AI and coming in with that information, and it might be right and it might not be right.
But how do we reply to that in a way that is not going to diminish our authority? And I'll get more into that as w- as we talk this through, and I looked at some of the research on consumer expectations around AI and how to respond to that as a doctor when somebody comes in.
In my mind, I kinda go back to the old days of patients would come in, and they would have read something or downloaded something on the internet, and they would show it to us, and we thought, "Oh, that's cute." And we'd look at it and, and almost, we're almost kinda dismissive of it.
Well, the internet got better, and I mean it, a lot of garbage out there, but I don't think we're quite as offended when people actually do their own research before coming in to see us.
That's not, not always a bad thing, and if they're coming in to bring things to us and ask us to, to talk it through, I think that's a good thing.
I think people are gonna start doing that a lot more than they are googling their, their symptoms.
Now, here's where things start getting a bit more interesting, maybe a bit more scary.
Of all the people using AI for health questions, about 81% of them are taking some kind of action afterwards.
For some cases, they're booking an appointment, but a lot of cases, they're changing something.
Again, not all bad, but then let's look at in eighteen percent of those cases, the action they're taking is adjusting their own medication based on a conversation that they had with a chatbot.
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