AI and your health: making sense of what your doctor tells you
Health is one of the areas where clear information matters most. You come out of an appointment with a head full of new terms and a feeling that there was more you’d like to have asked.
That experience is very common. Medical appointments are short. The terminology is often new. The person you are talking to is knowledgeable and there is a lot to cover in a short time.
AI can help you understand what you have been told and feel more in control of the information you have been given. It helps you understand. Your doctor gives the medical advice.
An important note before we go further. Use AI to understand. Medical advice comes from your doctor. Nothing in this series should be taken as medical advice. If you have a health concern, a new diagnosis or a question about your situation, please speak to your GP or a relevant health professional. AI can help you understand and prepare. The decisions themselves should always involve the people who are qualified to make them.
New to this? How to use the examples below.
Throughout this post you will see lines written in italics inside quotation marks. Those are examples of what you might type or say out loud to an AI such as ChatGPT. They are starting points rather than magic words. Any way of phrasing a question works, so ask in whatever words come naturally.
Change them to suit yourself. Swap in your own condition, your own letters, your own questions. Where you see something in [square brackets], that is simply a gap for you to fill in with your own details.
You decide how deep to go. If an answer is too complicated, say “explain that more simply”. If it is too basic, say “tell me more about that”. You can keep asking follow-up questions until it makes sense, at whatever pace suits you.
What happens after an appointment
Most people have had the experience of leaving a doctor’s surgery and wishing, on the way home, that they had a clearer picture of what they were told. The words made sense in the room. By the time you are back in the car or on the bus, the details can start to fade.
That is perfectly natural when you receive information in a busy setting, often about something that feels important. The brain is doing a lot of processing at once and it takes time for the details to settle.
What AI gives you is a patient, unhurried space to go back over that information as many times as you need to. You can ask the same question in different ways until the explanation makes sense. You can take your time.
David’s experience
David was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, a condition affecting the rhythm of the heart. His GP had explained things clearly and he had been given information to take home but the terminology was new and the appointment had been short. By the time he got home, he had a list of words he wanted to understand better.
He used AI to work through it. He asked for plain-English explanations of each term, asked what the medication was actually doing in simple language and thought through the questions he wanted to raise at his next appointment. He was building on his doctor’s advice, using AI to understand what he had already been told.
“My GP seemed pleased,” he said afterwards. “She said she wished more patients came prepared like that.”
That is a good way to think about it. AI is there to support the conversation with your doctor. It is there to help you arrive at that conversation better informed and leave it feeling more in control.
Understanding letters from consultants and hospitals
Medical correspondence is another area where AI can be useful. Letters from consultants and hospitals are often written in language that feels designed for other health professionals rather than for the person receiving them. Long words, clinical abbreviations and dense paragraphs can make a letter hard going, even when the news itself is simple.
You can share the relevant parts of a letter with AI and ask for a plain-English explanation of what it means. You can ask what specific terms refer to, what the next steps are likely to involve and what questions you might want to raise at your next appointment.
Think of AI as a translator from clinical language into the kind of English that actually makes sense to you.
How to start the conversation
These prompts work well as starting points. The more clearly you describe your situation, the more useful the response will be.
Before you paste in a letter or test result, take out the personal details: your name, address, date of birth and NHS number. The medical wording is all AI needs to explain it. You can also ask the AI how to stop your chats being used to train it.
For understanding a diagnosis:
‘I have recently been told I have [condition]. Can you explain what this means in plain English, including what causes it and what it generally means for day-to-day life?’
For understanding a medical letter:
‘I have received a letter from a consultant and I am finding it difficult to follow. Can you help me understand what it is saying? Here is the key section: [paste the text].’
For understanding medical terms:
‘My doctor used the term [word or phrase]. Can you explain what this means in plain English?’
For understanding test results:
‘I have had a [name of test] and I would like to understand what the results generally mean before I speak to my GP. Can you explain what the different measurements refer to?’
For preparing questions after a diagnosis:
‘I have been diagnosed with [condition]. What are the most important questions I should be asking my doctor at my next appointment?’
Understanding and deciding
There is an important distinction worth keeping in mind. AI can help you understand. Decisions about your health stay with you and your doctor.
Use it to get clear on what you have been told. Use it to think through what questions are worth asking. Then take that understanding into the conversations with your doctor, where the real decisions get made.
The next post in this series looks at how to use AI to prepare for your GP appointments, so that when you are in the room you can make the most of every minute you have.
A note on dates. Everything here was checked when it was written and I go back over my posts regularly to keep them up to date. Apps, prices and rules do change, so for anything important a quick look at the official source is worth it.
Want to try this yourself with a little guidance?
Working through an AI conversation about a health question on your own device, with someone alongside you, is exactly the kind of thing Kevin helps with in one-to-one sessions.
Kevin also runs free library presentations across Norfolk. Come along, see AI in action and ask about anything you have read in the blog, including this.
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