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Introduction: The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) chat programs has opened two distinct paths, one enhancing interaction and another potentially replacing personal understanding. Ethical and legal concerns arise due to the rapid development of these programs. This paper investigates academic discussions on AI in medicine, analyzing the context, frequency, and reasons behind these conversations. Methods: The study collected data from the Web of Science database on articles containing the keyword "ChatGPT" published from January to September 2023, resulting in 786 medically related journal articles. The inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed articles in English related to medicine. Results: The United States led in publications (38.1%), followed by India (15.5%) and China (7.0%). Keywords such as "patient" (16.7%), "research" (12%), and "performance" (10.6%) were prevalent. The Cureus Journal of Medical Science (11.8%) had the most publications, followed by the Annals of Biomedical Engineering (8.3%). August 2023 had the highest number of publications (29.3%), with significant growth between February to March and April to May. Medical General Internal (21.0%) was the most common category, followed by Surgery (15.4%) and Radiology (7.9%). Discussion: The prominence of India in ChatGPT research, despite lower research funding, indicates the platform's popularity and highlights the importance of monitoring its use for potential medical misinformation. China's interest in ChatGPT research suggests a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI applications, despite public bans on the platform. Cureus' success in publishing ChatGPT articles can be attributed to its open-access, rapid publication model. The study identifies research trends in plastic surgery, radiology, and obstetric gynecology, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and reliability assessments in the application of ChatGPT in medical practice. Conclusion: ChatGPT's presence in medical literature is growing rapidly across various specialties, but concerns related to safety, privacy, and accuracy persist. More research is needed to assess its suitability for patient care and implications for non-medical use. Skepticism and thorough review of research are essential, as current studies may face retraction as more information emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online healthcare platforms serve not just as a medical knowledge-sharing community but also bring about effective interactions between professional physicians and patients. However, it is unclear whether online technology adoption affects such interactions in the same way between traditional Chinese medicine and modern medical departments. By utilizing a large sample of online doctor-patient interaction information from 168,870 doctor-specific interactive webpages recorded in a famous Chinese online healthcare community, this paper studies the differences between 17,513 traditional medicine doctor homepages and 151,357 others from more than 100 different specialty areas. Our chosen platform is representative since it covers about 800,000 physicians working at over 10,000 hospitals across all major provincial regions in China. We document that online medical service users tend to accept and use online health care services. However, patients seeing Chinese medicine doctors exhibit the following unique characteristics. They still prefer choosing doctors according to third-party information and may be reluctant to pay for the current online service price level. This problem is hard to overcome by the platform in the short run. Patients need a long-term process to adapt to the upgraded medical environment gradually. Therefore, establishing a personalized doctor recommendation system has become the most urgent demand presently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]