How to make AI your advocate and find clinical trials when treatment stalls
A caller one year into her cancer fight asked how AI could speak up for her and hunt down trials. Here are the exact prompts, the right databases and the one rule that keeps you safe.
⚡ TL;DR
- Make AI your advocate: It translates your diagnosis, organizes your history and preps the questions to ask your oncologist.
- It can also dig clinical trials out of researcher-only databases and explain them in plain English.
- AI researches. It never prescribes. Take every lead back to your care team.
📖 Read time: 2 minutes
ChatGPT/Kim Komando
I need your help: Add Komando.com as a preferred source on Google
When Jennifer called the show, she wasn’t newly diagnosed. She’s a year into this fight against cancer, and hope is running thin. She asked me one thing: How can AI be her advocate and help her find clinical trials?
Here’s what you need to know, and why it’s personal.
🤍 I hate cancer
After my father died suddenly, I asked my mom to move in with me. I was 26. We were more like sisters.
When the Mayo Clinic said there was nothing more they could do for her pancreatic cancer in 2017, they gave her three months. I refused to accept it.
I took her to MD Anderson in Houston, where she joined two clinical trials. The cancer went into remission, then came back with a vengeance, five years after Mayo’s prognosis. That second look opened doors the first one couldn’t. So when I say don’t stop at the first no, I mean it.
🛡️ Make AI your advocate
You don’t need a medical degree to fight smart. You need a translator and a prep coach. Feed AI your test results, and it explains them in plain English. Ask it to turn your treatment history into one clean page for any new doctor.
Strip out your personal details, then open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok and paste this:
You are my patient advocate. Here are my cancer diagnosis, stage and treatments so far. Explain it in plain English, list the exact questions I should ask my oncologist next, and tell me what a strong second opinion should cover and where the best place is for me to go for that.
Now you walk in informed, not overwhelmed.
🔬 Hunt down every trial
Clinical trials are how patients get tomorrow’s treatment today. The catch: They’re buried in databases written for researchers. Let AI decode them:
You are a clinical trials research assistant. Using my cancer type, stage, prior treatments and location, explain what trials might fit me, what the eligibility terms mean and exactly what to search on ClinicalTrials.gov and the National Cancer Institute’s finder. If there are clinical trials in other countries, tell me about them, too.
Don’t rule out a study for being far away. Many cover travel. And ask your team about expanded access, also called compassionate use. It can get you an experimental drug when you don’t qualify for a trial, often free.
AI finds doors. It can’t choose for you, and it does get facts wrong. Bring every lead back to your care team and let them confirm. That’s how you chase real hope without getting hurt.
Jennifer, the fight isn’t over. And you’re not alone. You’re in my prayers, and I know many of our listeners and readers have done and will continue to do the same. 🙏🏻
📩 Send this to someone who’s been told they’re out of options.