Medical Misinformation in AI-Assisted Self-Diagnosis: Development of a Method (EvalPrompt) for Analyzing Large Language Models

Rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) in health care is sparking global discussion about their potential to revolutionize health care quality and accessibility. At a time when improving health care quality and access remains a critical concern for countries worldwide, the ability of these models to pass medical examinations is often cited as a reason to use them for medical training and diagnosis. However, the impact of their inevitable use as a self-diagnostic tool and their role in spreading healthcare misinformation has not been evaluated. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of LLMs, particularly ChatGPT, from the perspective of an individual self-diagnosing to better understand the clarity, correctness, and robustness of the models. We propose the comprehensive testing methodology evaluation of LLM prompts (EvalPrompt). This evaluation methodology uses multiple-choice medical licensing examination questions to evaluate LLM responses. We use open-ended questions to mimic real-world self-diagnosis use cases, and perform sentence dropout to mimic realistic self-diagnosis with missing information. Human evaluators then assess the responses returned by ChatGPT for both experiments for clarity, correctness, and robustness. The results highlight the modest capabilities of LLMs, as their responses are often unclear and inaccurate. As a result, medical advice by LLMs should be cautiously approached. However, evidence suggests that LLMs are steadily improving and could potentially play a role in healthcare systems in the future. To address the issue of medical misinformation, there is a pressing need for the development of a comprehensive self-diagnosis dataset. This dataset could enhance the reliability of LLMs in medical applications by featuring more realistic prompt styles with minimal information across a broader range of medical fields.