Not advocating for AI medical care, but just to shed light on why so many people use it.

Medical gaslighting is a serious issue especially if you’re either young, female, a PoC, have chronic illness, LGBTQ, struggling with addiction, a non-native speaker, etc.

I’m speaking as someone who has been denied care by doctors for an issue that would have killed me if I had not insisted on it and looked up the symptoms myself. Doctors are human, and humans have all sorts of implicit biases even if they’re not straight up racist or sexist. I’ve had a nurse get upset at me and ‘accidentally’ jab me really hard after asking for accomodations for an injection due to chronic pain.

There is a massive gap in healthcare that millions of people are slipping through. Googling symptoms is not easy when you have a dozen things going on, and for diseased with a wide range of presentations. The reason why people are using AI in the place of medical care, is in large due to the lack of universal healthcare in the US, the prevalence of medical gaslighting, the global rise of chronic illness and types of cancer in progressively younger people, the rise in awareness of mental health issues, etc.

If you’re wondering why older people are even more susceptible to this, it’s in part because doctors used to be even more prejudiced, even more illnesses went undiagnosed, old people simply accumulate more health issues over time, and many are finding solace in a tool that was able to diagnose them in 30 seconds when it may have taken them decades of suffering before a doctor even gave a shit.

I’m not saying that AI in medicine is a suitable replacement for a real doctor. But it gives patients more agency that is frequently taken away by doctors who do not treat them as a reliable witness to their own body and denies that their symptoms are real. If you have not had this happen to you yet, good for you. Once you do, you can never go back to looking at doctors the same way again and take their word at face value.

Every person eventually becomes disabled or dead. You are no exception no matter how good your health is right now.