Man Swaps His Salt for Sodium Bromide—and Suffers Psychosis
Freeman writes:
After seeking advice on health topics from ChatGPT, a 60-year-old man who had a "history of studying nutrition in college" decided to try a health experiment: He would eliminate all chlorine from his diet, which for him meant eliminating even table salt (sodium chloride). His ChatGPT conversations led him to believe that he could replace his sodium chloride with sodium bromide, which he obtained over the Internet.
Three months later, the man showed up at his local emergency room. [...] His distress, coupled with the odd behavior, led the doctors to run a broad set of lab tests, revealing multiple micronutrient deficiencies, especially in key vitamins. But the bigger problem was that the man appeared to be suffering from a serious case of "bromism." That is, an excess amount of the element bromine had built up in his body.
[...] Bromide sedatives vanished from the US market by 1989, after the Food and Drug Administration banned them, and "bromism" as a syndrome is today unfamiliar to many Americans. (Though you can still get it by drinking, as one poor guy did, two to four liters of cola daily [!], if that cola contains "brominated vegetable oil." Fortunately, the FDA removed brominated vegetable oil from US food products in 2024.)
[...] In this case, over the man's first day at the hospital, he grew worse and showed "increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations." He then attempted to escape the facility.
[...] In the end, the man suffered from a terrifying psychosis and was kept in the hospital for three full weeks over an entirely preventable condition.
[...] The doctors who wrote up this case study for Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases note that they never got access to the man's actual ChatGPT logs. He likely used ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0, they say, but it's not clear that the man was actually told by the chatbot to do what he did. Bromide salts can be substituted for table salt-just not in the human body. They are used in various cleaning products and pool treatments, however.
[...] The current free model of ChatGPT appears to be better at answering this sort of query. When I asked it how to replace chloride in my diet, it first asked to "clarify your goal," giving me three choices:
- Reduce salt (sodium chloride) in your diet or home use?
- Avoid toxic/reactive chlorine compounds like bleach or pool chlorine?
- Replace chlorine-based cleaning or disinfecting agents?
ChatGPT did list bromide as an alternative, but only under the third option (cleaning or disinfecting), noting that bromide treatments are "often used in hot tubs."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.