Asda Online Doctor who is leading telehealth provider, conducted a general survey to measure public perceptions and usage of AI regarding to medical issues. The results showed a concerning trend, with a staggering 60% of respondents accepting that they have a hard time to talk about their health problems with doctors, and more than half do not turn to a doctor first when seeking medical advice.
The issue has significant implications for public health, as the study states that adults in UK, who have a hard time to talk to their doctor are turning to other sources such as ChatGPT and Google Search, leading to potentially serious health consequences. Asda Online Doctor asked their team of GMC registered doctors to review answers from AI to discover the possibly harmful advice the British public is consuming on a daily basis.
Most of the UK adults don’t go to a doctor when they have a medical issue
Less than half of UK adults (48%) report that they turn to a doctor first for advice. Instead, most of them turn to other sources such as NHS 111 (13.5%) or a family member (6.5%), and 1 in 5 (19.9%) go online.
Women find it difficult to speak to their doctor about their sexual health. A quarter of UK women report that they find it difficult to discuss thrush with their doctor, and 1 in 8 (12.8%) say they find it hard to talk about menopause.
Young individuals have a hard time as well, with 81.9% of those aged 18 to 24 finding it difficult to talk about their health with doctors. 1 in 3 (30.2%) say they find it hard to talk about their mental health, and nearly 1 in 4 (23.9%) find it difficult to talk about their body weight.
Since most of the UK adults prevent from talking to medical professionals, which leads them to look for medical advices from other sources. Presently most of them are turning to the Internet for information, so that it will help to avoid those difficult conversations.
Around 1 in 3 individual (30.1%) admit to taking medical advice from Google, and 1 in 10 aged 18 to 44 – approximately 2.3 million UK adults – say they have taken medical advice from an AI platform like Google Bard or Chat GPT.
82% of those who have used AI for medical advice say they found the information useful. In fact, AI proved to be the online source people found most helpful, beating out Instagram (81.4%), Google (78.3%), Tik Tok (76.6%), X (formally known as Twitter) (70.1%) and Facebook (69.7%).
Researchers at Asda Online Doctor went to ChatGPT and Google Bard with a variety of symptoms to learn more about the medical advice that they provide. Their medical team then investigated the results to find out how helpful, unhelpful or potentially harmful the advice was.
The study discovered that two-thirds (65.7%) of the advice was helpful, and a much smaller share (11.4%) was unhelpful. However, the investigation also found that a significant proportion of the advice – 22.8% – was potentially harmful, the doctors have noticed that symptoms of ovarian cancer, ectopic pregnancy and HIV infection had been missed.
