By Dr. Brett Poniros, DC, CSCS
One of the most common questions people ask us lately is whether AI has any real place in healthcare or performance.
Most people land in one of two camps. Either it's a shortcut that cheapens care, or it's the future and providers will eventually become optional.
Neither one is quite right.
If a practice already runs on strong systems and genuinely puts the patient first, AI can make that experience faster and sharper. If a practice is disorganized or impersonal, AI just speeds up the disconnect.
That's the piece most people miss. AI isn't the variable that determines good or bad care. The provider using it is. For people who are already getting thoughtful, individualized attention, AI in the background can mean quicker answers, more specific plans, and less time spent waiting on information.
A few places this is already playing out well.
People are using AI to get a head start on nutrition planning, plugging in their goals and restrictions and walking away with something specific rather than generic. We cover the fundamentals of that side of things in Real Food, Real Results.
Others are using AI to understand lab results or imaging before an appointment, which means showing up with better questions and a more productive conversation.
And in fields like radiology, AI-assisted tools are catching patterns a person might miss and speeding up detection. A 2025 systematic review of AI in CT radiology found strong average performance: 89% sensitivity and 93.3% specificity across 34 studies, with intracranial hemorrhage detection reaching 98.1% sensitivity. But the same review was clear that these tools work best "as adjunct tools that enhance, rather than replace, the role of the radiologist."[1]
In all these cases, AI isn't replacing judgment. It's giving people, and their providers, more to work with.
The concern worth taking seriously is what happens when AI starts replacing the human part of care instead of supporting it.
A lot of people already feel like a number in the healthcare system. Chatbots and templated responses on top of that only widen the gap.
There's also the issue of what the AI was trained on. The same 2025 review flagged real limitations here too: many studies relied on non-random, single-institution datasets, and some lacked independent verification by multiple experts, both of which can inflate how good a tool looks on paper compared to how it performs in the real world.[1] If the underlying data is skewed, the output can be too, sometimes in ways that actually matter for someone's health.
None of this means avoid the tool. It means someone still has to be checking the work.
Talk to it the way you'd talk to an actual expert. Give it real detail — your age, your goals, your restrictions, your context. Then don't stop at the first answer. Ask follow-up questions. Push back. Adjust based on what actually fits your life.
The more specific the input, the more useful what comes back.
AI isn't here to replace the relationship you have with your provider. It's here to make that relationship more informed.
Used well, it's a strong tool. Used as a substitute for actual care and judgment, it's just a faster way to end up with the wrong plan.
That balance, using what's genuinely useful without losing the person in the process, is exactly how we think about it here. It's the same whole-person thinking behind The 4 Pillars of Health: no single tool, technology included, replaces attention to the whole picture.
At the end of the day, no tool replaces knowing your body, your history, and what you're actually working toward. That's still on us to figure out together.
Dr. Brett Poniros, DC, CSCS is the founder of Apollo Performance Chiropractic & Training in Pleasantville, NY.
