AI chatbot saves woman's life by diagnosing cancer after doctors dismissed her symptoms

ChatGPT has proved itself to be quite handy and the question of will it or won't it replace humans has been lingering in the air.

While there is no certainty if it will take over jobs at this moment, a 40-year-old woman swears by it after her symptoms were repeatedly dismissed by doctors, and she was misdiagnosed, until ChatGPT came to her rescue.

In February last year, a US resident Lauren Bannon started to face difficulty in bending her fingers, mostly in the mornings and evenings.

After four months of to-and-fro with the doctors, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, despite her testing negative for it.

Soon after, Bannon dramatically lost around six kg within a month and started to experience stomach aches. However, her doctors attributed it to acid reflux.

Desperate for answers, she turned to AI for a potential diagnosis.

“I needed to find out what was happening to me. I just felt so desperate. I just wasn’t getting the answers I needed,” Interesting Engineering quoted her as saying.

When she shared her symptoms with ChatGPT, it suggested her to get her thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO) levels tested, hinting that she might have Hashimoto’s disease—an autoimmune disorder where the thyroid gland is attacked by the immune system, causing hypothyroidism.

Even though her doctor had reservations regarding the chatbot's suggestion, she got herself tested, only to confirm the ChatGPT's diagnosis.

Following this, the doctors conducted an ultrasound of her thyroid glands that revealed two small lumps in her neck, that were diagnosed as cancer by October 2024.

"I felt let down by doctors,” Bannon expressed as she claimed that she felt that the doctors were trying to "give out medication" for anything and get her "out of the door".

“It saved my life. I would’ve never discovered this without ChatGPT. All my tests were perfect," she said as she got her thyroid and two lymph nodes from her neck surgically removed in January 2025.

“If I hadn’t looked on ChatGPT, I would’ve just taken the rheumatoid arthritis medication and the cancer would’ve spread from my neck to everywhere else," the publication quoted her as saying.

Meanwhile, experts have cautioned against using AI to replace human expertise.

“When used responsibly, AI can enhance healthcare outcomes — but when used in isolation, it can be dangerous,” Dr Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence, told Fox News Digital.