5 Crazy Ways AI Can Improve Your Life As A Med Student

Here are 5 crazy ways AI can improve your life as a med student! When I was in medical school and throughout my medical journey, Google was my lifeline for information. But I did wish it could be a little bit more super, offering explanations beyond simple search results. 

But thankfully, with the introduction of more accessible artificial intelligence (AI) software such as ChatGPT, that has now become a reality.

Now if you’re unfamiliar with ChatGPT, think of it as an advanced Google. Instead of simply returning links to webpages, you can provide a more natural prompt. For example, you could ask, “How far is the moon from the earth?”

ChatGPT allows for a conversational approach. You can even ask a follow-up question, such as, “How far would it take light to travel back and forth?”

This continuous dialogue makes it feel like you’re interacting with an incredibly knowledgeable person with access to the entire internet.

ChatGPT does well with prompts. Imagine talking to somebody and giving them some context of who you are. In this case, you could say, “Remember that I’m a med student”.

ChatGPT will acknowledge this information and respond accordingly, offering relevant functionalities.

Now, let’s explore some powerful ways ChatGPT can enhance your medical studies and make your entire medical journey smoother. 

We’re going to talk about some sick ways you can do this to make your studying and entire medical journey a whole lot easier.

Let’s get into it.

But wait a minute! If you want this post in a video format, you can check out my YouTube video below! Make sure to subscribe for weekly content and leave a comment if you enjoy this one!

Create Template Emails

Now, we’re going to use ChatGPT for creating templated emails.

Let’s say you wanted to shadow somebody. You can essentially ask ChatGPT to make a templated email for you.

So you can just write, “I’m a pre-med student and want to shadow someone in neurology. Please write me a templated email to shadow them.”

Let’s see what we get:

Within 10 seconds, we’re able to get this draft that is similar to templates you might find online.

It may take you some time to actually see if it’s something of good quality, but this is a great starter template.

You can go ahead and make it more personalized.

In the same fashion, maybe you want to do research and create an email addressed to our professor. You can say, “I want to do research in the field of neurology – draft an email to the professor.”

Simply insert your name and any details that demonstrate you’ve listened attentively to what they said (mentioning a specific project, publication, or contribution by the professor).

You can adjust the tone to match your personality or remove overly formal or repetitive language.

Now, your email is personalized and ready to send! Very cool.

Create Q&A Banks/Flash Cards

This next one is super sweet. You can use artificial intelligence to be able to look through a PowerPoint or lecture and come up with questions for your review.

For example, let’s use this lecture about atrial fibrillation. Let’s say I want to come up with some questions for this slide alone:

I can copy this slide and paste it onto ChatGPT and type, “Make some questions from this slide”.

Within seconds, it’s already starting to type questions:

Keep in mind that not all of this will be relevant, but simply being able to see the variety of questions that can be asked is great. You can turn this into a question and answer document or flashcards.

Here’s a bonus tip! You can simply say, “Now, convert these questions and answers into a table that I can turn into an Excel document.”

And again, within seconds it’s already making me a table with the questions.

If at any point you feel like the answer you’ve gotten is enough or it’s not heading in the right direction, you can easily click stop.

I can just copy the table and put it into an Excel sheet, and quickly reformat. That’s all I have to do.

I can just do this for the entirety of the lecture and take out all the questions that are repetitive or those that I don’t feel are relevant.

Now, I have an entire document with questions and answers without really lifting a finger.

Use For Applications

Now the third practical application of ChatGPT is utilizing it for your applications, whether you’re seeking residency positions or crafting personal statements.

Let me give you a few ways on how to do this.

Personal Statement

Let’s say you’re applying for a cardiology fellowship, and you want to come up with an outline for your personal statement. That’s what I just did a few months ago.

By no means do I recommend using artificial intelligence to draft a personal statement because you can tell when it’s very rigid and impersonal. Plus, if someone else does the same thing, their statement might sound a lot like yours.

So instead, you can use AI to create an outline.

You can say, “Write an outline for a personal statement into cardiology”.

And again, within seconds, I have bullet points that I can use for the different parts of my essay.

This is a great start. The outline gives me a way to hook my reader in the introduction, followed by the opportunity to present my background and qualifications, and allows me to conclude with a compelling explanation of why I’m drawn to go into the field of cardiology.

P.S. If you are interested to learn how to write a personal statement for medical school and/or residency, then check out this article: (Step-By-Step Method) Write A Perfect Personal Statement For Medical School

Resume

On a similar note, you can use ChatGPT to be able to condense, improve, or correct something in your resume.

I can take my resume and put it into ChatGPT, and say, “Please condense my resume and fix any grammar spellings”.

Now it’s not going to reformat it, but it’s going to look through it and edit or maybe take some parts out.

I can already see how ChatGPT is making my resume more condensed. It could be a little bit more than I wanted to. For example, it’s already taking away all the names of the research papers and just saying that I wrote six of them.

But you can use this as a starter, and then ask it to be a little less condensed and it’ll do that for you.

Writing Notes

The second one on our list is to use ChatGPT to be able to improve how you write notes.

Differential Diagnosis

For example, if I wanted to write a differential diagnosis or a management plan, I can say something along the lines of: “I am a 3rd year medical student and will be presenting a patient to an attending physician. Please be brief and write out my management plan using the following differential diagnosis.”

And then I’ll include the problems of the patient.

You can already see that it’s telling me to order the proper antibiotics and to do imaging to make sure I treat their pain. And if I wanted an individual management plan for each, I could do that as well.

SOAP Note

On a similar aspect, If I wanted to write a SOAP note, I could say “write me a soap for someone coming in with a papular rash on their hands and feet”.

Again, by no means should you be using this as a tool to copy and take away work.

It should be used as a tool or reference of how you can do things better and to get some ideas.

Create Differential Diagnoses

This one is probably the coolest to play with. ChatGPT can be used to create differential diagnoses.

Imagine you are thinking about a patient, or you’re reading about a new case, and you wanted to come up with all the different things to consider.

Let’s say you are dealing with somebody who’s coming in with chest pain. You could have ChatGPT on your phone or pulled up in the desktop and saying, “Come up with a differential diagnosis of 10 for someone who has chest pain to the back”.

And within seconds, I’m going to be able to have a list of the things that can cause chest pain to the back.

Number one is aortic dissection, which is very true. Number two is myocardial infarction. All of these are awesome and this is a very good list of ten.

And then if I wanted more information on the first three, I can say, “Tell me the management plan for…”, and then you can just copy the things from your list.

It’s going to break down the individual ones I gave.

For example, for aortic dissection, it said that it’s a medical emergency, and it listed the things I need to do.

Again, these are not what you will copy into your notes. But you can see what a sample note would look like, or what the thought process would look like, for each of these things.

How I Use ChatGPT As A Full-Time Physician

Lastly, I want to talk about some cool ways that I could easily use ChatGPT as a full-time physician.

For example, as I’m reading about a patient, maybe I have a question. I could easily pull ChatGPT up instead of UpToDate or Google.

Let’s say I have a patient who has bacteremia. The blood cultures are positive and they have UTI, and I want to see how long I should treat them for.

So I can write, “How long should I treat gram-negative bacteremia?”

And just to make it more fun, I can add, “please add citations”.

It gave me guidelines and recommended 7 to 14 days of antibiotic therapy, which is accurate.

And then it gives me some citations for IDSA guidelines. So I have to make sure that I read it first before using it.

It’s also adding additional information and not just what I asked for.

I can say, “please give me more citations.”

And just like a conversation, I don’t have to copy and paste my initial question. It already understands what I am asking for.

So here are a few more citations I can use.

This is perfect for research papers and if you have to do a presentation. 

From just these five examples, and a bonus one, you can see that AI technology like ChatGPT is really going to change how we access information and process it, making our tasks a bit easier.

Now, full disclaimer, by no means should you use this on your medical journey to replicate the work essential for becoming a proficient doctor or student.

Use it to find cool and creative ways of how you can minimize the busy work that doesn’t help in your overall learning. For example, converting information into tables or generating initial questions can provide a solid foundation for deeper understanding.

In full disclosure, I am still actively learning how to use tools like ChatGPT to help me on my medical journey. So if there’s something that I missed, go ahead and add them in the comments section below.

As always, thanks for being part of my journey! Hopefully we were a little help to you guys on yours. 

If you enjoyed this article, then you will also love the following articles:

• How To Quickly Learn Anything [Tree Method]
• How I Optimized My Life As A Medical Student
• Here’s How I Got A 3.9 GPA In Med School [Most Effective Study Strategies]
• How To Ace Your Finals In Med School [The Ultimate Guide]
• How Long Should I Study For Step 1?

Until the next time, my friend…