ethics_reflection.md

Ethics, Safety, and Misinformation Risks

Intended use. MedAssist supplies patient‑friendly explanations and links to reputable sources. It does not diagnose or prescribe.

Risk controls.

• Scope limits. The UI and prompt instruct the model to provide general information only, not medical advice.
• Emergency routing. Keyword screening triggers an emergency message directing users to call local emergency services.
• Citations. Answers cite source numbers and list URLs so users can verify statements.
• Plain language. Reduces misunderstanding and supports informed conversations with clinicians.

Residual risks.

• Model hallucinations. Mitigated by retrieval, constrained prompts, and short outputs. Users still must verify with clinicians.
• Out‑of‑date content. Corpus entries include URLs to current sources. Maintain by periodically reviewing topics.
• Bias and access. Plain‑language summaries may still reflect biases of upstream sources. Consider community review.

Data privacy. No data is stored server‑side. Hugging Face Spaces may log usage per platform policy.

Future improvements.

• Add date stamps and automated link checks.
• Add multilingual support and accessibility testing.
• Add calibrated uncertainty statements for low‑confidence answers.