I Asked ChatGPT a Simple Question. It Literally May Have Saved My Life

As a general rule, one thing you should definitely not do is start typing random symptoms you might be experiencing into Google Search, or, say, an AI chat box. If you’re concerned that something might be wrong, you should probably just go see your doctor. I use ChatGPT a dozen or so times a day for research and getting answers to general information questions. I ask it about everything from how to fix a chainsaw to explaining company earnings reports. That’s probably why I did the thing you aren’t supposed to do, even though I know better. It started a few months ago with something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d get short of breath when doing ordinary things like walking up a flight of stairs or mowing the lawn, or carrying a bag chair to the sideline of a soccer game. In May, I was exhausted after walking with my roller carry-on to the gate of a redeye flight. All of those are things I’ve done hundreds of times, but recently it seemed to take a lot more effort. For months, I chalked it up to getting older, needing more exercise, or maybe just a busy season catching up with me. However, the symptoms didn’t go away—they got worse. I began coughing more often. Breathing deeply made me wince. And worst of all, I was tired all the time. Still, I would have put the symptoms into the category of annoying, not alarming. I have long suffered from seasonal allergies, so the trouble taking deep breaths and coughing was easy to play off as just a bad year for tree pollen. I didn’t think it was an emergency. I wasn’t sick in the usual sense—no fever, no sore throat, no runny nose. Just a slow, steady decline. I’d heard stories about long COVID, maybe that was it? Or maybe it was just stress. I kept putting it off. Until one night when I randomly did the thing I do dozens of times a day: I asked ChatGPT. “I’ve been having some strange symptoms over the past few months. What is most likely wrong?” Then I listed what had been bothering me: an increased shortness of breath when doing routine physical activity like walking up stairs or mowing the lawn a feeling of congestion in my lungs, resulting in coughing that sometimes brings up material… sometimes that includes a slight reddish tint extreme fatigue and increased blood pressure. The AI didn’t hedge. The very first possibility it gave me wasn’t a cold. It wasn’t stress. It wasn’t even anxiety. The top result: “The combination of progressive shortness of breath, cough with possible blood (hemoptysis), and fatigue, especially when paired with elevated blood pressure, could point toward a cardiopulmonary issue, with congestive heart failure (CHF) or pulmonary hypertension among the leading concerns.” Then came the most alarming part. “These symptoms warrant medical evaluation without delay,” it wrote. “Please see a cardiologist or primary care doctor right away — or go to urgent care or an ER if the symptoms are getting worse.” I froze. Heart failure? That felt dramatic. Like something that happens to much older people, or people with a known heart condition. I’m relatively young. I’m not an athlete, but I don’t smoke or consume more than a few glasses of alcohol a year. Still, the answer rattled me enough that I called my doctor the next morning. After a quick physical exam, they ordered a battery of tests. First, a CT of my lungs to rule out blood clots, then bloodwork, and finally an echocardiogram. It’s never a good sign when you’re having an ultrasound of your heart and the sonographer stops, gets up from their chair, and says, “I’ll be right back to finish the rest of these images,” before leaving the room. The only reason that happens is because they saw something very bad, and they’re going to get a doctor. Sure enough, a moment later, he came back in the room with a cardiac fellow. “Do you know why your primary doctor ordered this test?” he asked. “Well, he was worried about blood clots in my lungs, but we ruled that out with the CT,” I replied. “He ordered this test to check for congestive heart failure.” “Yeah, you have heart failure,” the doctor said. Specifically, the echo showed that my ejection fraction, a measure of how much blood your heart empties every time it pumps, was around 25. That’s a little less than half of what is normal. My BNP—a blood marker that rises when the heart is under stress—was dramatically elevated. My heart was struggling to keep up, and my body was sending all the signals. I just didn’t know how to read them. What’s scary is that I almost didn’t do anything. I almost didn’t ask the question. I almost didn’t listen. I assumed I was just out of shape and had a bad case of allergies. Without that initial answer pushing me to take it seriously, there’s a good chance I’d still be trying to power through it—getting worse without knowing why—all the while putting myself at risk of not knowing why. The truth is, heart failure can be subtle in its early stages. The signs aren’t always dramatic. You might not clutch your chest or collapse. You might just feel a little more tired. A little more winded. A little off. But when your heart is struggling to circulate blood effectively, your entire body feels it—and if you ignore it long enough, the consequences can be irreversible. Google, by the way, suggested I might have bronchitis or tuberculosis. Neither of those is something you should ignore, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have TB, and bronchitis doesn’t usually last months, and often comes with a fever. ChatGPT, on the other hand, noticed a pattern. It gave me language to describe what was happening. It raised a red flag. It helped me take myself seriously. And, it nudged me to take the whole thing seriously and get checked out. That’s not just impressive. In my case, it may have been lifesaving. It’s easy to treat AI chatbots like a novelty or a parlor trick. But the thing they are really good at is taking complex information and synthesizing in ways that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. Sometimes, asking the right question at the right time—no matter who, or what, you ask—can change everything. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has frequently said that it thinks the company’s greatest contribution could be in health care. I think that may be true. I am amazed by the ability of technology to reveal information about ourselves that we could never know or understand on our own. We are incredibly fortunate to live in a time where we have such ready access to heart monitoring and other data sensors built into our smartwatches. I share this story to encourage you. If your body is telling you something, listen. If something feels off, don’t wait until it becomes a crisis. Technology is not a substitute for medical care, but it can be a powerful tool for insight, direction, and action—especially when you’re stuck in that limbo between “I’m probably fine” and “I might need help.” Thankfully, modern medicine is incredible, and this is something doctors are well-equipped to treat. I’ve been given more meds than I ever thought I’d be taking at 45 years old, and we’re working on ruling out a few other possible causes of my heart failure (once the insurance company comes around about what’s actually “medically necessary”—but that’s a different story). This is something I’ll be managing for the rest of my life, but thanks to a simple question I asked ChatGPT, I’m hoping it will be a long one. I reached out to OpenAI for comment on this story, but the company did not immediately respond to my request. EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN