My AI Physical Therapist

My Instagram feed is basically:

• The 10 people I follow (including my son’s ceramics account)
• Dogs / puppies / rescues
• Tennis / squash tips and highlights
• Injury prevention / cures for middle-aged athletes

On the last point, my last few years have been marked by a series of minor but chronic injuries. I seem to be in the stage of life of small ligament and tendon strains, injuries that respond well to physical therapy if you can make the time.

The worst has been tennis elbow (lateral epicondylitis). It’s lasted for more than a year, and I’m just now getting better. But I’m finding PT too time-consuming (90-120 minutes so I can do 20 minutes of exercises??) and too much of an insurance hassle.

In a continuation of this trend, a month ago, I got a sharp pain in my hip after a run. After a few dead-end YouTube attempts, I realized I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

Rather than go to the doctor and then back to PT, I turned to ChatGPT. I was amazed with how helpful it was. If you, like me, are still under-using these tools, perhaps this can be an inspiration.

Here’s the original prompt I wrote:

I need you to be an expert physical therapist who can help me diagnose and treat injuries at home. Be thorough in your diagnosis and assume that I am a sophisticated lifetime athlete who can do complex exercises at home as needed. I’m 51 years old. I need to diagnose a pain I have in my right outer hip, just below my hip pointer.

I got the injury after a fast (for me) hilly run after having taken off a few months. This was my 10th run after having taken 3 months off. I had done the same run, 4.3 miles, twice earlier in the week, but my pace in those was 9:30/mile and in this run was 8:20/mile. I felt no pain during the run but after the run it hurt some to stride / step with my right leg, and to go up hills. The pain is greatest when I get up after sitting down for a bit. After a little while it decreases. The pain is sharp and localized to the area just below and above the hip pointer.

From this prompt and a few follow ups, ChatGPT gave me:

• Its first diagnosis (either a tendinopathy in my gluteus medius / minimus or a TFL overuse injury)
• A series of diagnostic tests I could do to narrow down the potential injury
• A full 30 day PT plan that I now have in a Google Sheet that I’m following daily
• This plan includes descriptions of all the exercises with references.

Since this went so well, I’ve kept talking to ChatGPT about how it’s going: how the exercises, felt; how one of them hurt more than expected and could it give me an alternative; how I feel first thing in the morning and over the course of my day. It’s the conversation I would have with my PT every day if he were available.

With this feedback, ChatGPT both modified the exercise regime to better suit how I’m feeling and has modified the diagnosis.

Here’s the latest that I got back this morning, based on my updated symptoms:

Differential Diagnosis Recap

And here’s a visual representation of what I’ve told my AI physical therapist and what that means for my diagnosis—this pretty much blew me away:

I know that for many people, AI is an idea—perhaps even a scary one—and not something that’s part of daily life. And I can understand why many of us might be happier either using none of these tools or waiting for someone to build a “Virtual Physical Therapist” app rather than playing around with ChatGPT or the many other tools available to us today.

I’d encourage you to think about this another way: for $20 / month, an expert in literally any topic you can accurately describe is available to you and to your team.

It’s a shame not to take advantage of that.