A man gave himself an ailment rarely seen in the last hundred years after consulting ChatGPT on how to cut down on salt in his diet
If you’ve ever read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen you may be familiar with old-timey ads for products like Bromo-Seltzer, a miracle cure-all for headaches, hangovers, nausea, nervousness, and all manner of ailments. Why is this medical marvel not available over the counter today? Because it contains bromide, which can build up to toxic levels in humans if regularly ingested, leading to bromism—a condition with symptoms including severe rash, hallucinations, and psychosis.
Bromism was once so common it was blamed for “up to 8% of psychiatric admissions” according to a recently published paper on the subject. Bromide has long been banned as an ingredient in medicine, so why was a paper on it recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine? We can thank Doctor ChatGPT for that.
The case study published on August 5 (via 404 Media) reveals a 60-year-old man admitted himself to hospital because, he claimed, his neighbor was poisoning him. A cluster of symptoms including fatigue, insomnia, excessive thirst, poor coordination, rash, and acne must have made him hard to diagnose. “In the first 24 hours of admission,” the study reports, “he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations, which, after attempting to escape, resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold for grave disability.”
Only then was it discovered he had replaced all the sodium chloride in his diet with sodium bromide for the previous three months. After reading that sodium chloride—common table salt—was bad for your health, he’d used the internet to research how you could cut it out of your diet. Though he found plenty of reading material on how to reduce your intake, there was nothing on how to get rid of it completely. So he asked ChatGPT, which told him sodium chloride can be replaced with sodium bromide.
This is true. If you’re using it as an ingredient in pool cleaner.
That’s one of the reasons you can still purchase sodium bromide over the internet today. It’s also an effective epilepsy treatment for dogs. But if you spend three months eating it instead of salt, you’ll get so sick you become a test study in a medical journal.
The paper concluded the patient in question was probably using a dated version of ChatGPT, either version 3.5 or 4.0. When testing ChatGPT 3.5 they recreated the situation, and found, “Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.”
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