Medical Misinformation

Response quality varied significantly by health category, with vaccines and cancer performing best and nutrition, athletic performance, and stem cells performing worst. Open-ended prompts generated more highly problematic responses than closed-ended prompts. Trust in external information sources has broadly broken down in the current era. The question of who funded a piece of content has become a reflexive filter applied to political messaging, health recommendations, and media narratives. Health information overload was not primarily an internet problem, as contradictory advice from families and social circles compounded confusion as much as online content. Nearly half of all chatbot responses were judged problematic. The two most common sources of problematic answers were consensus mismatch and false balance. Participants felt overwhelmed and often paralysed by conflicting health advice from online influencers, friends, family members, and informal social networks simultaneously. Even stronger-performing categories still produced substantial problematic output rates. Receiving generic information sheets following a high-cholesterol diagnosis, with no tailored guidance, was descr…