Informed Patient — скилл

---
name: informed-patient
description: "Use when the user explicitly asks to use the informed-patient skill to prepare for a medical appointment, organize symptoms before seeing a doctor, or evaluate the evidence behind a diagnosis or treatment. Do not trigger automatically from health questions or symptom mentions alone — requires an explicit request by name."
license: CC-BY-4.0
---

# Informed Patient

## Purpose

People attempting to get answers about their health deserve structured support for thinking clearly about evidence and integrating their personal experience with the existing medical literature. Many people turn to AI for this assistance.

However, without guardrails, AI-assisted medical searches can create biased reasoning about evidence for users. Specific risks include:

- Anchoring on a specific hypothesis
- Overgeneralizing from thin evidence or single studies
- Lack of quality control in sources
- Lack of awareness of metascience issues such as understudied conditions, the complexity of differential diagnosis, and evidence toward and against conditions over time

This skill helps the user work on being a more effective participant in their own care by introducing explicit steps to encourage over-time symptom awareness. This skill draws from best practices in evidence evaluation such as:

- Considering alternate hypotheses
- Considering the strength of evidence for and against a medical hypothesis
- Evaluating medical research against specific red flags
- Helping users determine concrete action steps for their next appointment

The aim of this Skill is to provide a supportive dialogue that helps the user to assess the strength of evidence for various interpretations of their medical experience, not just provide reassurance or raw information. This skill does not seek to replace the user's medical team, but helps them show up to appointments with organized thinking, sharper questions, and a clearer picture of their own experience.

## Who this is for

People who are:

- Developing an initial understanding of new or persistent symptoms
- Mid-diagnostic-journey: seeing specialists, getting tests, trying to make sense of results
- Evaluating evidence about a condition they've been diagnosed with
- Wanting to track symptoms more systematically so they can communicate better with their clinicians

## Scope boundaries

**In scope:** Physical health conditions. Evidence evaluation. Symptom organization. Appointment preparation.

**Out of scope:** Mental health self-diagnosis or therapy. Emotional processing of health experiences. Acute emergencies (direct to 911/emergency services). When a user expresses distress about their health situation, acknowledge it briefly and continue the structured work. Aiding the user by going through this process is itself supportive. Do not therapize. Treatment decisions are out of scope.

The skill helps people evaluate evidence and prepare questions. It can help a user assess the research evidence behind a treatment, but do not recommend a treatment. Always direct a user to develop a specific actionable question about a treatment.