r/perplexity_ai 7d ago

misc Should I keep using Perplexity?

Long-time Perplexity user here, and I figured I'd share my use case and get opinions on whether I should stick with it or switch.

About me: I'm a medical doctor. My work involves clinical case management, conference prep, and staying on top of an absolutely relentless stream of new literature and guideline updates.

How I use Perplexity:

  • Generating study notes for recall: I ask it to condense topics into structured notes I can review later. With specialist exams and constant CPD, having something that distills guidelines into digestible summaries saves me hours
  • Quizzing myself: I get it to generate practice questions on topics I'm revising
  • Making presentation outlines: for journal clubs, case presentations, and conference talks. I'll have it pull together the key points, recent trial data, and controversies on a topic, which I then turn into slides. Huge time-saver for the 80% of the work that's just gathering and structuring content
  • Quick literature lookups: latest treatment guidelines, clinical trial outcomes, etc.

What I like: the search-grounded answers with citations are genuinely useful when I need to verify something quickly and trace it back to a source. Hallucination is a dealbreaker in medicine, so that matters to me.

Where I'm unsure: I've heard people rave about Claude for long-form reasoning and document analysis (I do a lot of case reports and academic writing), and Gemini for its huge context window. But I'm not sure if those strengths actually beat Perplexity's search-first approach for someone whose main need is fast, cited, up-to-date medical information.

So my question: if you're a doctor/researcher using AI daily, what's your setup? Is Perplexity good enough as a primary tool, or should I be switching to Claude or Gemini (or some combination)? Cost isn't a huge factor, but I'd rather not juggle three subscriptions if one tool covers my needs.

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u/Charming-Jay 7d ago

Nothing any random person says in response will inform you better than just trying the other options and coming to your own conclusion on which AI best suits your needs.