Maybe because seeing a doctor is expensive? Involves a half-day waiting in the line? Plus many people have common sense and know more or less about their illnesses but just need a little advice here and there.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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I work in a hospital, seeing how things work I'm convinced that for anything that is not an emergency a patient which knows how to get information critically armed with an LLM can diagnose himself and identify a proper treatment much better than a specialist would do in a 15 minutes visit.
This is not to say the patient should not do important analytics to identify what the problem is, nor that he should not consult his medic before proceeding with any treatment or taking the diagnosis as correct. However, reviewing carefully what the medic says often reveals the medic was completely wrong. A patient has more time than a medic to take interest in his own disease and can then go to the medic and explain why he thinks an appropriate treatment would be a better one.
I mean, in my hospital if a relative of a medic has a problem in something not related to their specialty, they'd rather treat them themselves than have an expert do that.
This is in the UK. A visit to the doctor doesn't cost anything.
Not even time?
I guess it depends on the time value equivalent of how much you value your health, but the doctor itself is free.
And they'll just tell you to lose weight instead of trying to figure out what's wrong.
Being overweight is the single largest cause of other health issues and it also exacerbates unrelated health issues. Put the fork down.
In the US at least, every insurance plan is required to cover an annual physical at zero cost to the patient.
A wellness visit is not coded the same as an issue visit.
I feel like this is not really news. Just replace AI with "searched online". We've been doing it for years. Even if you live somewhere where seeing a GP is fast and free, it still isn't as convenient as asking the internet, reading that your problem is probably nothing, and shrugging.
Oh, no longer YouTube "the secret cancer cure the government doesn't want you to know?"
Honestly Ive gotten better advice from AI because with something like Google AI studio you can feed all your medical history in and it will use it all as context . You can ask it lots of questions and it won't forget that information. My doctors barely remember my last visit and know nothing about the other specialists Ive seen and they tend to have very little time to answer questions and I feel guilty keeping them too long.