Doctors are more like machines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Nearly three years after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and ushered in a global frenzy over large language models, chatbots are weaving themselves into seemingly every part of society in China, the U.S., and beyond. For patients like my mom, who feel they don\u2019t get the time or care they need from their health care systems, these chatbots have become a trusted alternative. AI is being shaped into virtual physicians, mental-health therapists<\/a>, and robot companions<\/a> for the elderly. For the sick, the anxious<\/a>, the isolated<\/a>, and many other vulnerable people who may lack medical resources and attention, AI\u2019s vast knowledge base, coupled with its affirming and empathetic tone, can make the bots feel like wise and comforting partners. Unlike spouses, children, friends, or neighbors, chatbots are always available. They always respond.<\/p>\n Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and even some doctors are now pitching AI as a salve for overburdened health care systems and a stand-in for absent or exhausted caregivers. Ethicists, clinicians, and researchers are meanwhile warning of the risks in outsourcing care to machines. After all, hallucinations and biases in AI systems are prevalent. Lives could be at stake.<\/p>\n Over the course of months, my mom became increasingly smitten with her new AI doctor. \u201cDeepSeek is more humane,\u201d my mother told me in May. \u201cDoctors are more like machines.\u201d<\/p>\n My mother was <\/strong>diagnosed with a chronic kidney disease in 2004. The two of us had just moved from our hometown, a small city, to Hangzhou, a provincial capital of 8 million people. Known for its ancient temples and pagodas, Hangzhou was also a burgeoning tech hub and home to Alibabai<\/a>Alibaba<\/a>Alibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall.READ MORE<\/a> \u2014 and, years later, would host DeepSeek.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Hangzhou, we were each other\u2019s closest family. I was one of tens of millions of children born under China\u2019s one-child policy. My father stayed back, working as a physician in our hometown, and visited only occasionally \u2014 my parents\u2019 relationship had always been somewhat distant. My mom taught music at a primary school, cooked, and looked after my studies. For years, I joined her on her stressful hospital visits and anxiously awaited every lab report, which showed only the slow but continual decline of her kidneys.<\/p>\n China\u2019s health care system is rife with severe inequalities. The nation\u2019s top doctors work out of dozens of prestigious public hospitals, most of them located in the economically developed eastern and southern regions. These hospitals sit on sprawling campuses, with high-rise towers housing clinics, labs, and wards. The largest facilities have thousands of beds. It\u2019s common for patients with severe conditions to travel long distances, sometimes across the entire country, to seek treatment at these hospitals. Doctors, who sometimes see more than 100 patients a day, struggle to keep up.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t Although the hospitals are public, they largely operate as businesses<\/a>, with only about 10% of their budgets coming from the government. Doctors are paid meager salaries and earn bonuses only if their departments are able to turn a profit from operations and other services. Before a recent crackdown on medical corruption<\/a>, it was common for doctors to accept kickbacks or bribes from pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n As China\u2019s population ages, strains on the country\u2019s health care system have gotten only more intense, and the system\u2019s failures have led to widespread distrust of medical professionals<\/a>. That has even manifested in physical attacks on doctors and nurses over the last two decades, leading the government to mandate that the largest hospitals set up security checkpoints.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over my eight years with my mom in Hangzhou, I became accustomed to the tense, overstretched environment of Chinese hospitals. But as I got older, I spent less and less time with her. I attended a boarding school at 14, returning home only once a week. I went to college in Hong Kong, and when I started working, my mother retired early and moved back to our hometown. That\u2019s when she started taking her two-day trips to see the nephrologist back in Hangzhou. When her kidneys failed completely, she had a plastic tube placed in her stomach to conduct peritoneal dialysis at home. In 2020, fortunately, she received a kidney transplant.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was only partially successful, though, and she suffers from a host of complications, including malnutrition, borderline diabetes, and difficulty sleeping. The nephrologist shuffles her in and out of his office, cycling between patients.<\/p>\n Her relationship with my father also became more strained, and three years ago, they split up. I moved to New York City. Whenever she brings up her sickness during our semi-regular calls, I don\u2019t know what to say, except to suggest she see a doctor soon.<\/p>\n When my mother<\/strong> was first diagnosed with kidney disease in the 2000s, she would look up guidance on Baidu, China\u2019s dominant search engine. Baidu was later embroiled in a series of medical ad scandals<\/a>, including one over the death of a college student who\u2019d tried unproven therapies he found through a sponsored link. Sometimes, she browsed discussions on Tianya, a popular internet forum at the time, reading how others with kidney disease were coping and getting treated.\u00a0<\/p>\n Later, like many Chinese, she turned to social media platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshui<\/a>Xiaohongshu<\/a>Xiaohongshu, which translates to \u201clittle red book\u201d in Chinese, is a lifestyle e-commerce and social media platform.READ MORE<\/a> for health information. These forums became particularly popular during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Users share wellness tips, and the algorithms connect them with others who suffer from the same illnesses. Tens of thousands of Chinese doctors have turned into influencers<\/a>, posting videos about everything from skin allergies to heart diseases. Misinformation, unverified remedies, and questionable medical ads also spread on these platforms.<\/p>\n My mother picked up obscure dietary advice from influencers on WeChat. Unprompted, Baidu\u2019s algorithm fed her articles about diabetes. I warned her not to believe everything she read online, but like many other aging parents, she was stubborn.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t The rise of AI chatbots has opened a new chapter in online medical advice. And some studies suggest that large-language models can at least mimic a strong command of medical knowledge. One study, published in 2023, determined<\/a> that ChatGPT achieved the equivalent of a passing score for a third-year medical student in the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination. Last year, Google said<\/a> its fine-tuned Med-Gemini models did even better on a similar benchmark, while a specialized model<\/a> trained on Meta\u2019s Llama likewise excelled in medical exams.\u00a0<\/p>\n Research on tasks that more closely mirror daily clinical practice, such as diagnosing illnesses, is tantalizing to AI advocates. In one 2024 study<\/a>, published as a preprint and not yet peer reviewed, researchers fed clinical data from a real emergency room to OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o and o1 and found they both outperformed physicians in making diagnoses. In other peer-reviewed studies, chatbots beat at least junior doctors in diagnosing eye problems<\/a>, stomach symptoms<\/a>, and emergency room cases<\/a>. In June, Microsoft claimed<\/a> it had built an AI-powered system that could diagnose cases four times more accurately than physicians, creating a \u201cpath to medical superintelligence.\u201d Of course, researchers are also flagging risks of biases<\/a> and hallucinations<\/a> that could lead to incorrect diagnoses, mistreatments, and deeper health care disparities.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Chinese LLM companies rushed to catch up with their U.S. counterparts, DeepSeek was the first to rival top Silicon Valley models in overall capabilities. It has performed well on medical tests too. In one recent study<\/a>, researchers found that DeepSeek\u2019s R1 performed similarly or better than OpenAI\u2019s o1 in some medical tasks, such as diagnostic reasoning. Meanwhile, it lagged behind in others, such as evaluating radiology reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ignoring some of the limitations, users in the U.S. and China are turning to these chatbots regularly for medical advice. One in six American adults said<\/a> they used chatbots at least once a month to find health-related information, according to a 2024 survey<\/a> by health research firm KFF. On Reddit, users shared story<\/a> after story<\/a> of ChatGPT diagnosing their mysterious conditions. On Chinese social media, people also reported<\/a> consulting chatbots for treatments for themselves, their children, and their parents.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n An electronics factory worker in Jiangsu province, who declined to be named for privacy reasons, told me he consulted three different chatbots after his mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer, just to check if her doctor was right in telling her not to worry. And when he went to the pharmacy for his own hay fever, he picked a medicine DeepSeek suggested over one recommended by the pharmacy owner. \u201c[Owners] always recommend the most expensive ones,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Real Kuang, a photographer in the city of Chengdu, asks DeepSeek about her parents\u2019 health issues: how to treat her father\u2019s throat inflammation, whether they should take calcium supplements, if her mother should get shoulder surgery. \u201cHuman doctors are not as patient or generous with details and the thought process,\u201d Kuang told me. \u201cDeepSeek made us feel more cared for.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n My mother has told me that whenever she steps into her nephrologist\u2019s office, she feels like a schoolgirl waiting to be scolded. She fears annoying the doctor with her questions. She also suspects that the doctor values the number of patients and earnings from prescriptions over her well-being.<\/p>\n But in the office of Dr. DeepSeek, she is at ease.<\/p>\n \u201cDeepSeek makes me feel like an equal,\u201d she said. \u201cI get to lead the conversation and ask whatever I want. It lets me get to the bottom of everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Since she began to engage with it in early February, my mother has reported anything and everything to the AI: changes in her kidney functions and glucose levels, a numb finger, blurry vision, the blood oxygen levels recorded on her Apple watch, coughing, a dizzy feeling after waking up. She asks for advice on food, supplements, and medicines.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAre pecans right for me?\u201d she asked in April. DeepSeek analyzed the nut\u2019s nutritional composition, flagged potential health risks, and offered portion recommendations.<\/p>\n \u201cHere is an ultrasound report of my transplanted kidney,\u201d she typed, uploading the document. DeepSeek generated a treatment plan, suggesting new medications and food therapies, like watermelon soup.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m 57, post-kidney transplantation. I take tacrolimus [an immunosuppressant] at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. My weight is 39.5 kg. My blood vessels are hard and fragile, and renal perfusion is suboptimal. This is today\u2019s diet. Please help analyze the energy and nutritional composition. Thank you!\u201d She then listed everything she\u2019d eaten on that day. DeepSeek suggested she reduce her protein intake and add more fiber.\u00a0<\/p>\n To every question, it responds confidently, with a mix of bullet points, emojis, tables, and flow charts. If my mother said thank you, it added little encouragement.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou are not alone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m so happy with your improvement!\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes, it closes with an emoji of a star or cherry blossom.<\/p>\n \u201cDeepSeek is so much better than doctors,\u201d she texted me one day.<\/p>\n My mother\u2019s reliance<\/strong> on DeepSeek grew over the months. Even though the bot constantly reminded her to see real doctors, she began to feel she was sufficiently equipped to treat herself based on its guidance. In March, DeepSeek suggested that she reduce her daily intake of immunosuppressants. She did. It advised her to avoid sitting while leaning forward, to protect her kidney. She sat straighter. Then, it recommended lotus root starch and green tea extract. She bought them both.\u00a0<\/p>\n In April, my mother asked DeepSeek how much longer her new kidney would last. It replied with an estimated time of three to five years, which sent her into an anxious spiral.<\/p>\n With her consent, I shared excerpts of her conversations with DeepSeek with two U.S.-based nephrologists.\u00a0<\/p>\n DeepSeek\u2019s answers, according to the doctors, were full of errors. Dr. Joel Topf, a nephrologist and associate clinical professor of medicine at Oakland University in Michigan, told me that one of its suggestions to treat her anemia \u2014 using a hormone called erythropoietin \u2014\u00a0could increase the risks of cancer and other complications. Several other treatments DeepSeek suggested to improve kidney functions were unproven, potentially harmful, unnecessary, or a \u201ckind of fantasy,\u201d Topf told me.<\/p>\n I asked how he would have answered her question about how long her kidney will survive. \u201cI am usually less specific,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead of telling people how long they\u2019ve got, we talk about the fraction that will be on dialysis in two or five years.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Melanie Hoenig, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and nephrologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told me that DeepSeek\u2019s dietary suggestions seem more or less reasonable. But she said DeepSeek had suggested completely wrong blood tests and mixed up my mother\u2019s original diagnosis with another very rare kidney disease.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t \u201cIt is sort of gibberish, frankly,\u201d Hoenig said. \u201cFor someone who does not know \u2013\u2013 it would be hard to know which parts were hallucinations and which are legitimate suggestions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Researchers have found that chatbots\u2019 competence on medical exams do not necessarily translate into the real world. In exam questions, symptoms are clearly laid out. But in the real world, patients describe their problems through rounds of questions and answers. They often don\u2019t know which symptoms are relevant and rarely use the correct medical terminology. Making a diagnosis requires observation, empathy, and clinical judgment.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a study<\/a> published in Nature Medicine earlier this year, researchers designed an AI agent that acts as a pseudo patient and simulates how humans speak, using it to test LLMs\u2019 clinical capabilities across 12 specialties. All the LLMs did much worse than how they performed in exams. Shreya Johri, a Ph.D. student at Harvard Medical School and a lead author of the study, told Rest of World that the AI models were not very good at asking questions. They also lagged in connecting the dots when someone\u2019s medical history or symptoms were scattered across rounds of dialogues. \u201cIt\u2019s important that people treat it with a pinch of salt,\u201d Johri said of the LLMs.<\/p>\n In another study<\/a> led by researchers at Oxford University, published as a preprint and not yet peer reviewed, members of the general public were asked to identify health conditions and a subsequent course of action using either large language models or conventional methods, such as search engines and checking the National Health Service website. Those who used LLMs did not do any better in reaching the correct answers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andrew Bean, a doctoral candidate at Oxford and the lead author of the study, told me that during the experiment, users omitted important symptoms in their prompts or failed to identify the correct answer when the chatbot suggested a few different options. Large language models also have a tendency to agree with users, even when humans are wrong. \u201cThere are certainly a lot of risks that come with not having experts in the loop,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n As my mother<\/strong> bonded with DeepSeek, health care providers across China embraced large language models.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since the release of DeepSeek R1 in January, hundreds of hospitals have incorporated the model into their processes. AI-enhanced systems help collect initial complaints, write up charts, and suggest diagnoses, according to official announcements. Partnering with tech companies, large hospitals use patient data to train their own specialized models. One hospital in Sichuan province introduced<\/a> \u201cDeepJoint,\u201d a model for orthopaedics that analyzes CT or MRI scans to generate surgical plans. A hospital in Beijing developed<\/a> \u201cStone Chat AI,\u201d which answers patients\u2019 questions about urinary tract stones.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the past, one doctor could only work in one clinic. Now, one doctor may be able to run two or three clinics at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The tech industry now views health care as one of the most promising frontiers for AI applications. DeepSeek itself has begun recruiting interns<\/a> to annotate medical data, in order to improve its models\u2019 medical knowledge and reduce hallucinations. Alibaba announced<\/a> in May that its health care\u2013focused chatbot, trained on top of its Qwen models, passed China\u2019s medical qualification exams across 12 disciplines. Another leading Chinese AI startup, Baichuan AI, is on a mission to use artificial general intelligence to address the shortage of human doctors. \u201cWhen we can create a doctor, that\u2019s when we have achieved AGI,\u201d its founder Wang Xiaochuan told a Chinese outlet<\/a>. Baichuan AI declined my interview request.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rudimentary \u201cAI doctors\u201d are popping up in the country\u2019s most popular apps. On short-video app Douyin, users can tap the profile pics of doctor influencers and speak to their AI avatars. Payment app Alipay also offers<\/a> a medical feature, where users can get free consultations with AI oncologists, AI pediatricians, AI urologists, and an AI insomnia specialist who would be available for a call if you are still wide awake at 3 a.m. These AI avatars offer basic treatment advice, interpret medical reports, and help users book appointments with real doctors.<\/p>\n Dr. Tian Jishun, a gynecologist in Hangzhou, agreed to lend his persona to Alipay as the company built up its fleet of 200 AI doctors. Tian told me he wanted to be part of the AI revolution, although he admits his digital counterpart is lacking. \u201cIt\u2019s like the first iPhone,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou never know what the future will be like.\u201d<\/p>\n Zhang Chao, founder of AI health care startup Zuoshou Yisheng, developed an AI primary care doctor on top of Alibaba\u2019s Qwen models. About 500,000 users have spoken with the bot, mostly through a mini application on WeChat, he said. People have inquired about minor skin conditions, their children\u2019s illnesses, or sexually transmitted diseases.<\/p>\n China has banned \u201cAI doctors\u201d from generating prescriptions, but there is little regulatory oversight on what they say. Companies are left to make their own ethical decisions. Zhang, for example, has banned his bot from addressing questions about children\u2019s drug use. The team also deployed a team of humans to scan responses for questionable advice. Zhang said he was overall confident with the bot\u2019s performance. \u201cThere\u2019s no correct answer when it comes to medicine,\u201d Zhang said. \u201cIt\u2019s all about how much it\u2019s able to help the users.\u201d<\/p>\n AI doctors are also coming to offline clinics. In April, Chinese startup Synyi AI introduced an AI doctor service at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. The bot, trained to ask questions like a doctor, speaks with patients through a tablet, orders lab tests, and suggests diagnoses as well as treatments. A human doctor then reviews the suggestions. Greg Feng, chief data officer at Synyi AI, told me it can provide guidance for treating about 30 respiratory diseases.\u00a0<\/p>\n Feng said that the AI is more attentive and compassionate than humans. It can switch genders to make the patient more comfortable. And unlike human doctors, it can address patients\u2019 questions for as long as they want. Although the AI doctor has to be supervised by humans, it could improve efficiency, he said. \u201cIn the past, one doctor could only work in one clinic,\u201d Feng said. \u201cNow, one doctor may be able to run two or three clinics at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t Entrepreneurs claim that AI can solve problems in health care access, such as the overcrowding of hospitals, the shortage of medical staff, and the rural\u2013urban gap in quality care. Chinese media have reported<\/a> on AI assisting doctors in less-developed regions, including remote areas like the Tibetan plateau. \u201cIn the future, residents of small cities might be able to enjoy better health care and education, thanks to AI models,\u201d Wei Lijia, a professor in economics at Wuhan University, told me. His study<\/a>, recently published in the Journal of Health Economics, found that AI assistance can curb overtreatment and enhance physicians\u2019 performance in medical fields beyond their specialty. \u201cYour mother,\u201d he said, \u201cwould not need to travel to the big cities to get treated.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/illo_chinaAI_ard_su_2-scaled.jpg\")
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