Why Using AI For Your Rehab Might Be Making It Worse.

It is so easy to open up ChatGPT and ask it anything. It has become an ordinary part of life. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer it thinks you are looking for. If you feel a pain in your calf during your marathon training or you feel your back go during a lift, you can pop your symptoms into the message bar and within 30 seconds, you have an answer. It is so convenient. But convenience is not the same as competence. When it comes to your body, the gap between the two can cost you months of recovery.

AI cannot examine you

A rehab plan is only as good as the diagnosis behind it, and diagnosis starts with hands-on assessment. A good assessment should include watching how you move, feeling for swelling or tenderness, and measuring your range of motion. A sore knee could be patellofemoral pain, a meniscus tear or IT band syndrome. Pain in the shoulder could be a rotator cuff tear or tendonitis. Every condition requires a completely different approach, and identifying differences in severity requires a trained practitioner, not a text box.

An AI chatbot only has what you type. It cannot palpate an area, assess your gait or notice subtle compensations. It can only go off what you know about your injury.

The Accuracy Problem

Multiple studies have found that popular AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, give Musculoskeletal (MSK) information with inconsistent accuracy. One study found ChatGPT-3.5 was only 65% accurate when generating clinical recommendations for low back pain, improving to only 72% once an experienced practitioner refined the prompting.

One evaluation of ChatGPT-4's responses to common musculoskeletal complaints found it tended to encourage self-diagnosis and self-treatment, with its biggest accuracy gaps showing up specifically in trauma-related injuries. This is not only inaccurate, but it will slow your recovery.

Generic Advice For Specific Individuals

Even when an AI's information is broadly correct, the information it gives is built from population-level patterns, not from you.

It does not know your training history, your previous injuries, how your job keeps you sitting for nine hours a day and that you are under constant pressure to get projects done, that you are only sleeping six hours a night on a pillow that you should have replaced years ago, or that your headaches are being caused by tightness in your traps.

A genuinely personalised plan has to account for all of that, and it has to change as you progress. Think of your rehab programme as a living thing. Exercises get swapped, loads get adjusted, red flags get identified week by week based on how your body is actually responding.

AI and RICE

ChatGPT loves RICE. When you input a prompt relating to an acute injury, ChatGPT will trawl through years of historical internet data to find an answer. However, the MSK community have largely moved away from this, now preferring the more modern and holistic approach that PEACE and LOVE brings.

Current literature suggests that the PEACE and LOVE approach, which emphasises protection, optimal loading, addressing psychosocial factors, improving vascularisation, and incorporating exercises, may provide a more comprehensive and evidence-based strategy for managing acute injuries, when compared to RICE.

Why Seeing an MSK Specialist in Person Still Wins

An MSK specialist, whether that is a chiropractor, sports therapist or physiotherapist, brings three things no chatbot can replicate:

• A Proper Diagnosis - Hands-on assessment and specific orthopaedic tests to identify exactly what the injury is and rule out anything more serious.

• A Plan Built Around You - Your injury history, your sport, your goals, and your body's actual response to treatment, not a generic average pulled from the internet.

• Ongoing and Proactive Care - Progress gets checked at every session, and the plan changes in real time as you heal, instead of staying static because you have not changed the prompt yet.

If you are dealing with a sports injury, do not leave your recovery to guesswork. At Proactive, we get to know your injury, your lifestyle, your treatment preferences. We get to know you. We enable you to be strong, educated and strong enough to return to activity as soon as you are able. Something AI will never do.