25/09/2026
Patients are no longer coming to the consultation alone. Increasingly, they are coming with AI.
They ask ChatGPT about symptoms, test results, diagnoses and treatments — sometimes before seeing their doctor.
I see this as an opportunity, but also as an important distinction:
Having more information is not the same as knowing.
And knowing is not the same as understanding a patient.
Medicine is not simply the sum of symptoms, laboratory values, imaging and risk factors. Clinical understanding requires context, chronology, examination, uncertainty — and the person behind the data.
AI has given us unprecedented access to medical information.
The next challenge is much greater: can AI help us understand the whole patient?