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

The Medic facepalms at a bank of computer screens.

(Image credit: Valve)

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.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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