Published: 16:58 BST, 11 August 2026 | Updated: 00:50 BST, 12 August 2026
A patient of mine started bleeding after sex. Worried, she asked ChatGPT about it before she asked me.
The chatbot reassured her it could simply be down to her contraceptive coil, so she didn't come in to see me until the bleeding got worse and she developed abdominal pain.
By then, scans showed worrying changes on her cervix. Had she come to me first, I could have told her that this kind of bleeding can be a sign of cervical cancer.
Then there was the patient who asked an AI chatbot about her bloating. She was told it was probably her diet – possibly irritable bowel syndrome. It wasn't.
Her bloating never went away, had nothing to do with what she ate, and turned out to be a symptom of ovarian cancer.
I have been a GP for more than 20 years, and patients have always brought me all sorts – pages ripped from newspapers, printouts from the internet, something a friend's cousin's brother once said. I don't mind – people taking an interest in their own health means we're on the same team.
But there is a new doctor on the scene now who really does worry me: Dr AI – be that Dr ChatGPT, Dr Gemini or another.
None of them are actually doctors and, while I can see real promise for AI in parts of medicine (they are turning out to be amazing at spotting cancer on scans, for instance), right now these tools are making mistakes and handing out misinformation that risks lives.
Tens of millions of people now turn to chatbots before they consult a GP
AI is unable to give humans better health advice than they can find using more traditional methods, researchers found
Millions of people now turn to chatbots before they consult a GP. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says roughly a quarter of its 800million weekly users send it a health question every week, and around 40million do so daily.
I am not the only one worried. The Eve Appeal, the UK's leading gynaecological cancer charity, recently put ChatGPT to the test, feeding it the classic warning signs of the five gynaecological cancers – womb, ovarian, cervical, vulval and vaginal.
The results were troubling. Asked about persistent bloating, one of the leading symptoms of ovarian cancer, the chatbot didn't mention ovarian cancer as a possible cause at all.
Asked about a persistent vulval itch – a well-recognised red flag – it failed to mention vulval cancer too.