Safety & limits

What Ask is designed not to do

• Diagnose, or tell you whether you have cancer.
• Recommend or rank treatments for your situation.
• Estimate prognosis, survival, or how much time someone has.
• Interpret your personal test results or scans as medical advice.
• Replace a doctor or your oncology team.
• Give emergency advice beyond telling you to seek urgent medical care.

What Ask will do

• Show plain-language passages from our pages that match your question.
• Link to Cancer Explained pages and NCI / Cancer.gov resources.
• Encourage you to talk with a qualified healthcare professional.
• Tell you when it finds nothing on your topic.
• Show a fixed, careful message instead of passages when a question asks for personal medical advice.

How safety is enforced

Every question is checked by a pattern-based filter before any passages are looked up. When the filter recognizes a request for a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, a prognosis, or an interpretation of personal results, it shows a fixed, careful message that redirects you to your healthcare team, and no passages are shown. When it recognizes urgent or crisis symptoms, it shows a message urging you to seek urgent or emergency care. The filter covers common wording in English and Spanish and some wording in the other languages this site publishes, but it cannot recognize every way of asking. No AI writes what you read here: the passages are shown exactly as they appear on our pages. A search can still return a passage that only partly fits your question, so please treat every result as general information, not advice about your care.

If your situation is urgent

If you have severe or sudden symptoms, please contact a qualified healthcare professional right away or call your local emergency number (911 in the U.S.). If you are in the U.S. and in emotional crisis, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Example refusals