Chatbots outperform doctors in diagnosing many diseases, study finds
Some medical decisions do not come with a single clean answer. A doctor may know what disease a patient has, yet still face a harder question: what should happen next? Should surgery move ahead if the patient takes blood thinners? Should a medication plan change because of a bad reaction in the past? Should a suspicious lung mass be biopsied right away, watched, or investigated with more imaging first? Those judgment calls sit in the gray zone of medicine, where context matters as much as textbook knowledge. A new line of research led by Stanford Medicine suggests that large language models, or LLMs, can help there too, especially when they are built to work with physicians instead of simply spitting out answers. In a study published in Nature Medicine, researchers found that a chatbot working alone outperformed doctors who relied only on internet searches and medical references when handling complicated clinical management questions. Yet doctors who used a chatbot matched the chatbot’s performance, suggesting that the strongest results came from collaboration rather than either side …
