A Powerful New Tool in Understanding Medical Jargon
ChatGPT is a chatbot from OpenAI. Launched on November 30, 2022, it quickly had the teaching community in a tizzy due to its incredible ability to produce complex essays. If you think I’m kidding, give in a prompt like: “Write me a compare and contrast essay that examines the themes of exploitation and corruption in 1984 and Animal Farm”, and watch what it spits out in under 30 seconds. It’s pretty incredible. It isn’t necessarily an A+ paper, but it is serviceable. Teachers are having to navigate how to get students to use this new tool as a research tool, and not as an engine for plagiarism. My husband has been on the cutting edge of navigating teaching in an environment in which large-scale language models are making it easier than ever to cheat on your English homework, even being interviewed by CTV News on the subject. I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, and recently discovered a new use for this powerful technology… deciphering medical reports!
I am fairly good at reading medical reports. Working as a criminal defence lawyer, I often encountered expert reports from medical practitioners that formed part of the Crown’s disclosure (for the benefit of my American readers, the Crown is the prosecutor). I also had to retain medical practitioners as defence experts. This necessitated learning my fair share of medical jargon. However, even with this background, I often find myself stumped reading parts of the radiologists’ reports on my MRIs. I know that I’m not alone in experiencing jargon frustration. Radiologists’ reports are often posted to my various MS communities on Facebook for help interpreting the medical jargon. We all know that we should wait to discuss the results of our MRIs with our neurologists, but that doesn’t stop anyone from paging Dr. Google while waiting for those appointments.
Programs like PocketHealth and MyChart give us access to our medical records. If you are anything like me, you want to know the results of tests like MRIs as soon as possible. You don’t want to wait weeks or even months for the results. I had my latest MRI on January 2, 2024. The radiologist’s report was posted to PocketHealth on January 8, 2024. My appointment with my neurologist isn’t until February 20, 2024. I don’t want to wait a month and a half to understand the results of my MRI. This time around, I used ChatGPT to help me to decode my radiologist’s report. Removing any personal identifiers, I plugged in the sections of the report that I wasn’t sure that I understood fully and I asked ChatGPT to paraphrase in layman’s terms. In a matter of seconds, I had a far more digestible version of the report. The medical jargon was stripped away, leaving me with a plain language translation.
The other benefit to ChatGPT is that it is interactive, so if you still don’t understand something in the interpretation, you can needle down on the part that you don’t understand with further questions. Better yet, ChatGPT can be used to translate medical reports into other languages. So if your first language isn’t English, but your radiologist’s report is written in English (and very medically technical English at that), you can have the chatbot translate it not just into layman’s terms, but into layman’s terms using your first language.
I don’t suggest that ChatGPT is any substitute for actual medical advice. But it is a powerful tool for those of us who are determined to try to read and understand our medical reports while we await our appointments. If you’re inclined to consult Dr. Google, then consulting Dr. ChatGPT might be even more helpful. It can assist in making medical reports more understandable, and it can complement the healthcare provider’s efforts to ensure that patients are well-informed.
In good news, my latest MRI indicates that there are no new lesions since my previous MRI. Kesimpta and lifestyle management continue to keep my MS quiet (I’m too superstitious to say this without adding: “knock on wood”).
