Mary Gilmore, Staff Writer
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in our daily lives, one question continues to dominate public and professional discussions: How effective is ChatGPT at providing medical advice?
Recent studies published between 2024 and 2026 offer an evidence-based approach to this question. While ChatGPT shows remarkable promise in areas such as patient education, triage support, and clinical documentation, researchers also highlight significant limitations that prevent it from giving medical advice.
Multiple studies demonstrate that ChatGPT performs impressively on standardized medical assessments. A 2025 review in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence reports that ChatGPT achieved 60% accuracy on the USMLE, 57.5% on MedMCQA, and 78.2% on PubMedQA, placing it within the range of medical professional‑level performance on certain tasks. The same review highlights its ability to streamline clinical workflows, reduce administrative burdens, and support medical education through personalized learning tools.
These findings suggest that ChatGPT can be helpful when the task involves synthesizing existing medical knowledge and explaining conditions in accessible language.
A 2024–2025 review in AI and Ethics explored ChatGPT’s potential applications in clinical medicine, including telemedicine support, symptom assessment, and translation of medical terminology for patients. The authors noted that ChatGPT can improve patient communication, assist with lifestyle guidance, and even analyze structured data such as lab results when paired with more advanced multimodal models.
However, the same review raised concerns about ChatGPT’s lack of human judgment, limited ability to interpret emotional nuance, and risk of miscommunication. These factors are critical in clinical decision‑making. The authors emphasized that ChatGPT’s diagnostic suggestions should never replace professional evaluation.
Across nearly all reviews of ChatGPT, researchers all relayed the same intense concerns about AI. Many stated that ChatGPT may generate confident statements that are entirely incorrect, which can be harmful in medical and psychological contexts. Its lack of emotional intelligence, the overreliance of it, and the ethical issues related to ChatGPT make it a concerning tool in healthcare. The AI and Ethics review specifically stated that the risks of ChatGPT currently outweigh the benefits in many clinical settings.
Additionally, sharing medical advice over AI is not confidential. According to Forbes, “Consumer AI chatbots (i.e., chatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, etc) are not designed for medical privacy (HIPAA-compliant). If you share full records, you may be disclosing sensitive health information into systems governed by consumer terms—not healthcare privacy frameworks. Even Grok recently pushed back publicly at its creator, Elon Musk, warning it is not HIPAA compliant and not a substitute for professional medical advice, despite his calls to use AI for medical advice.”
Social interaction is imperative to humans, and the ability to diagnose a person relies on seeing and understanding what their issue is. So, ChatGPT cannot be a full replacement for medical professionals. Qualified clinicians can see and understand humans the way ChatGPT can’t, leading to the conclusion that healthcare is more reliable with other humans.
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