Chatbots provide reliable, well-cited health information; patients can use the answers to decide whether symptoms need emergency care.
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Expert: Parth Bhavsar, MD, Medical Reviewer, TeleDirectMD Health Guides (BMJ Open audit, 2026) The premise that health chatbots hand back reliable, well-cited answers — answers you could trust when deciding whether a symptom needs emergency care — does not hold up under scrutiny. A 2026 BMJ Open audit put five popular chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI, Claude) through 250 health questions and found 49.6% of responses problematic, with 19.6% rated highly problematic or potentially harmful. Grok generated the most highly problematic responses (58%); Gemini generated the fewest. The citations were no better: average reference completeness was just 40%, and no chatbot produced a fully accurate reference list. The format of the question mattered enormously — open-ended health questions yielded 32% highly problematic responses, versus 7.2% for closed yes/no questions. The practical takeaway, echoed by TeleDirectMD medical reviewer Dr. Parth Bhavsar, is that a confident, well-sourced-looking chatbot answer is not medical guidance. Patients should treat AI output as a starting point for discussion with a professional — and never as the deciding vote on whether a symptom is an emergency. Source: https://teledirectmd.com/health-guides/ai-chatbot-medical-information-safety/
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