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Erin is in her early 40s. She works part time in a demanding job and has two kids in primary school. She feels constantly exhausted, she’s often angry and feels like she can’t think like she used to. Her friend tells her it’s perimenopause.

She books an appointment to talk to her GP. She doesn’t know anything about perimenopause so asks ChatGPT what it is and what treatments are available.

Erin is certainly not alone. Between �����Ի�  percent of adults they have used ChatGPT, or other large language models or chatbots for their health. And this use is .

Even if you’re not using an AI chatbot, a simple Google search will often produce an AI summary.

So how does this impact patient care? And how can you make the process safer and more effective?

Why do people use AI chatbots for health?

A recent found while some people asked chatbots health questions because they were curious, more than one in three used them to decide whether they needed to see a GP.

Around half found chatbots more convenient than regular services, with , outside the .

Of those who used a chatbot, more than half believed it had been good for their physical and mental health.

A 2026 analysis of over 500,000 health conversations with found one in five related to personal symptoms and treatments. Many queries related to someone else, such as a child or family member.

These findings echo results from our own nationally representative Australian . More than one-third of those who used ChatGPT for their health did so to find out what symptoms meant. Half used it to learn about a specific health condition.

Health information can be very and is often poorly . Consultations are short and patients frequently report not having enough time or confidence to ask clinicians all the questions they want.

By comparison, chatbot advice is readily available, personalised, and can be prompted for greater clarity and simplicity without constraint and fear of judgement.

What are some of the risks?

There are important reasons for alarm if chatbots are used when people need urgent medical attention and the answers they give are unsafe.

In the described above, one in five respondents decided against seeking medical advice from a professional after consulting a chatbot.

There is currently little real-world data on the safety of people using AI chatbots for health decisions, other than a few of harm.

This week the media has also reported on the death of , who died in February after ChatGPT gave her the wrong advice about cutting back her epilepsy medication.

However, simulation studies examining the accuracy of chatbot health advice show cause for .

One investigated AI responses to 222 patient questions that were relevant to primary care. Between 5 and 13 percent of the responses were unsafe with potential to lead to “serious patient harm”, depending on the AI chatbot used.

Another found that although chatbots were accurate 94.9 percent of the time using hypothetical clinical scenarios (with prompts by the research team), in searches operated by study participants (using the same clinical scenarios supported with the same chatbots) accuracy dropped to 34.5 percent.

It also found using an AI chatbot may be less effective than searching the web when finding out about an underlying condition and was similar to a web search for deciding whether to seek professional care, with only 43 percent accuracy.

One of the key issues is people often do not provide enough detail in their prompts to obtain accurate results. However, effective prompting is difficult to do (if untrained) and importantly, requires a careful trade-off between specificity and privacy.

Nor do consumers cross-check information, despite sometimes being incorrect or irrelevant. Only click on the links provided by AI Google summaries.

Patients don’t always disclose their use

In an ideal world, patients and clinicians can collaboratively discuss the use of chatbot advice to help support .

But patients vary in their decision to disclose their chatbot use to their doctors. Many don’t – between  of patients in a Polish survey to  in the US.

Reluctance to disclose use was due to fear of a negative reaction or concern the clinician might feel undermined.

But recent suggests generally positive views from clinicians about patient AI use under certain conditions.

Of the 1,692 clinicians surveyed, 70 percent considered use of AI chatbots by patients for their general health information or decision-making was positive or had no impact to their practice.

But around 50 percent said they would rarely or never want their patient to use AI for interpretation of medical test results/reports.

How to get better outcomes

Disclosing AI chatbot use enables clinicians to correct any inaccuracies and use it in .

But clinicians say they’re poorly trained and lack time (and reimbursement) to support their patients’ AI use.

While some , patients need much more help in using chatbots, and clinicians need more guidance on how and where to direct them for support.

The new guide, designed by an international team of clinicians, researchers and AI health experts, spells out five key steps to help people use chatbots more safely:

• Slow down and think before asking health questions to a chatbot
• Make your questions clear
• Ask yourself “what am I sharing?”
• Remember to check the facts
• Talk to a real person when you need to.

People also need to know they can access human-led, 24/7 triage services for free, such as in Australia (1800 022 222) and in the UK. These services are essential to ensuring people get the right advice and care when they need it.