7 Ways You Can Use AI to Improve Your Health and Fitness
Burt Rosen, 59, is a mountaineer and innovative marketing guy who, as he puts it, 'happens to have two cancers.' Each cancer is its own complex case – one is in the kidney, the other is a metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors – and together, they require the work of a whole network of specialists. As you can imagine, his patient portals are something, so much so that he recently asked ChatGPT, 'if I upload CT scan results, can you translate it into English so I understand it?' In seconds the doctorspeak came back with bold subtitles, simpler wording, and a nice summary. 'AI is my helper now,' Rosen says.
While many people haven’t touched artificial intelligence yet, it’s already widely used in health care. Doctors are using AI to help diagnose and document, and patients like Rosen are leveraging its powers. In fact, one in six Americans already use AI monthly for health info and advice, according to a poll by KFF, a healthy policy research centre. But is all of this really a good idea?
First, know that chatbots – ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and others – are an immensely powerful type of AI called an LLM (large language model). At the same time, they are 'incredibly smart and shockingly stupid,' as computer scientist Yejin Choi said in her classic TED Talk.
For instance, in 2023, ChatGPT passed the United States Medical Licensing Exam. Then in 2024, it did even better, scoring 98% on some sample questions from the most advanced level. (How good that is: 60 is a passing grade, and the average score for IRL test takers is 75 percent.) Yet sometimes ChatGPT spits out complete fiction known as 'hallucinations'. When asked how it knew about a diabetes drug, for example, ChatGPT said it received a master’s degree in public health.
In addition, unlike standard software that’s coded to do specific tasks, LLMs aren’t programmed like that – they combine information on their own, so nobody knows exactly what’s going on inside them. Which means there’s no way to troubleshoot and reprogram one when something goes wrong.
So, no, AI will not replace your doctor any time soon. But chatbots can help you navigate your way to better health – if you know how to harness the power and avoid the pitfalls, says Isaac 'Zak' Kohane M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School. As editor-in-chief at NEJM AI – an entire scientific journal about health AI by the New England Journal of Medicine – he’s a guy who knows plenty about both. AI can help you do the following things:
1. AI Can Help You Know What’s Really Going On Inside
Google is basically a library. But AI – far beyond just retrieving prerecorded facts – can give your symptoms context, understand how you like to be communicated with and knit pieces of your health puzzle together. What it gathers can help you know what to ask the doctor, decode medical jargon (unless you want it!), give you a rough second opinion, and provide possible answers for what’s going on when docs just can’t seem to figure it out.
That last point is one of AI’s current superpowers. Medical specialists are great for pinpointing and providing relief for conditions that fall within their expertise. But specialties can also block the holistic view – as anyone knows who has pinballed from neurologist to psychiatrist to neck specialist to sleep doctor to figure out what’s behind their headaches. AI looks across the entirety of the medical spectrum to suggest alternatives.
For instance, Courtney Morales Hofmann is the mum of a kid who, at age 4, stopped developing properly. He was in chronic pain and one leg would drag behind him. They saw 17 doctors over three years, and never received a diagnosis. When ChatGPT first came out, Morales Hofmann sat down one night to feed all of her son’s radiology reports, lab tests, and medical info into it. The tool proposed a dozen possible diagnoses and after some back-and-forth, she believed she’d found a likely cause. Two weeks later, doctors confirmed her son’s condition, and a month later, surgery addressed the issue.
Yet the results aren’t always so helpful. In a 2023 study, pharmacists (using a version of ChatGPT available then) found that the bot gave good answers to drug-related questions about a quarter of the time. In a 2023 study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health, scientists saw that the tool not only gave some bad information on medical questions but also 'provided deceptively real references', While AI has changed a lot since those studies were done, the point is the same: If a chatbot isn’t backing up its claims by citing genuine experts or other authorities, you should be very wary. Also: Bots scrape from medical literature, so biases there will show up in your search.
2. AI Can Help You Get the Details Right
AI is only as good as what you feed it. As you would with an office intern, give it specific assignments, being clear about things like how much detail you want and how technical the language should be. For instance, for a problem with his elderly father, patient advocate Hugo Campos told ChatGPT to think, act, and speak like a specialist. He typed: 'You are a dermatologist fellow presenting a case of a 94-year-old male patient with six weeks of pruritic rash on arms, thighs, and lower legs.' This encouraged ChatGPT to provide detailed and professional answers.
The reverse works, too. If you’re stymied by the visit summary your doc dropped in your patient portal, run it through AI with the prompt 'As if you are a teacher explaining this to a 16-year-old, summarise the visit and pull out any action points.' And have some fun with it. After Burt Rosen got that scan summary, he asked AI to summarise it in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, 'cussing allowed'. Its reply ended with this: 'Now go ahead, talk to your docs, but remember – keep fighting like the badass you are.' When’s the last time your GP said that?
3. AI Can Help You Dig (a Lot) Deeper
While the doctor’s time is limited, AI is always at your service. Say you’re a big workout guy and your doc wants you on statins. You’ve heard they can cause rhabdomyolysis ('rhabdo'), a sometimes fatal condition in which your muscles break down. You ask ChatGPT: 'Talking like a doctor, discuss the options for an elite athlete with high cholesterol who doesn’t want to take statins due to concerns about rhabdo.' Maybe the tool spits back generic exercise recommendations, missing the 'elite athlete' part. Don’t stop there! Ask it to act as an exercise physiologist, detailing how much and what kind of exercise would raise the risk of rhabdo, and the tool will go more granular. Chat lets you keep talking back until you have something you can work with.
4. AI Can Help You Double-Check Important Decisions
If your doctor’s orders feel as if they’re making things worse, not better, or you’re considering surgery, it’s important to seek a second opinion. AI is an easy way to get another set of 'eyes' on your case until you can see another IRL doctor. 'Use these AI models as super-low-cost, no-social-risk, instant second-opinion sources. That’s a great opportunity,' Dr Kohane says. Feed your lab reports and other information into the bot, but first, protect your privacy by removing your name, your doctor’s name, and all dates and locations. Then ask it if there is a diagnosis the results would point to that wasn’t mentioned. Ask it what type of doctor could best offer a second opinion. And then get a second opinion from an actual doctor. This is critical.
'As Reagan said to the Soviets, "Trust but verify,"' Dr Kohane says. 'AI models are getting better fast, but they still make plenty of mistakes.' Keep all the caveats in mind, but jump right in, he says. 'Don’t wait until you have a problem; experiment with them now.' Because AI sometimes hallucinates, ask it for sources before taking its advice – and check every link, because sometimes it makes those up, too!
5. AI Can Help You Pull More Data From Your Data
AI may already be working for you more than you think. Wearables that track health metrics – sleep, blood sugar, heart rate, and heart rate variability – take in your health data and use AI to process it and come to a conclusion (your 'body battery' is low; your 'sleep score' is high, etc.). 'A lot of what these tools are doing is making the invisible visible so you can track trends and support healthy behaviours,' says Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, a global think tank devoted to digital health.
Take sleep tracking. 'We know that self-reported sleep doesn’t have high fidelity to what’s actually happening, because it’s influenced by fatigue and perception, among other things,' she explains. But when your device points out that you sleep terribly after two drinks, for instance, you can adjust.
A wearable like a continuous glucose monitor takes health management to a whole new level. You don’t need a finger stick or a doctor to tell you what one particular type of fruit or bread or barbecue sauce does to your body versus another. Or what sleeping less or more does to your glucose. You have a far greater degree of insight and control over your health. That said, 'these are not diagnostic tools and have never claimed to be – and we mustn’t overinterpret them to be,' Goldsack says. They’re useful for trends and goal setting and driving healthy behaviors. But, she adds, the trends can’t be mistaken for diagnoses.
6. AI Can Help You Be An Empowered Partner
The better informed you are, the more effective a partner you can be with your doctor. For instance, when a patient with unstable blood pressure wanted to try a wearable monitor, he used AI to find scientific reasons to present to his doc – who agreed it made sense. Key point: He asked GPT-4 to 'write your response at a JAMA-submission level.'
7. AI Can Help You As a Workout Buddy
You (or your trainer!) may already be using AI to programme your workouts. If you’re in a fitness desert, or if you are motivated and pretty much know what you’re doing in the gym, it could be useful. But as with anything AI-related, sometimes the programming is helpful; other times it’s vague. And in an experiment at MH that involved having Chat GPT be a personal trainer for a month, the bot took too long to suggest seeing a doc for an injury. If something doesn’t feel right, ask it more. And check where it’s getting its info.
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