Man Hospitalized With Psychiatric Symptoms Following AI Advice
Case in point: a man who followed a chatbot's health plan ended up in hospital after giving himself a rare form of toxicity.
The story began when the patient decided to improve his health by reducing his intake of salt, or sodium chloride. To find a substitute, he did what so many other people do nowadays: he asked ChatGPT.
Related:
OpenAI's chatbot apparently suggested sodium bromide, which the man ordered online and incorporated into his diet.
While it is true that sodium bromide can be a substitute for sodium chloride, that's usually if you're trying to clean a hot tub, not to make your fries tastier. But the AI neglected to mention this crucial context.
Three months later, the patient presented to the emergency department with paranoid delusions, believing his neighbor was trying to poison him.
"In the first 24 hours of admission, he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations, which, after attempting to escape, resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold for grave disability," the physicians write.
After he was treated with anti-psychosis drugs, the man calmed down enough to explain his AI-inspired dietary regime. This information, along with his test results, allowed the medical staff to diagnose him with bromism, a toxic accumulation of bromide.
Bromide levels are typically less than around 10 mg/L in most healthy individuals; this patient's levels were measured at 1,700 mg/L.
Bromism was a relatively common condition in the early 20th century, and is estimated to have once been responsible for up to 8 percent of psychiatric admissions. But cases of the condition drastically dropped in the 1970s and 1980s, after medications containing bromides began to be phased out.
Following diagnosis, the patient was treated over the course of three weeks and released with no major issues.
The main concern in this case study isn't so much the return of an antiquated illness – it's that emerging AI technology still falls short on replacing human expertise when it comes to things that truly matter.
"It is important to consider that ChatGPT and other AI systems can generate scientific inaccuracies, lack the ability to critically discuss results, and ultimately fuel the spread of misinformation," the authors write.
"It is highly unlikely that a medical expert would have mentioned sodium bromide when faced with a patient looking for a viable substitute for sodium chloride."
The research was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases.
Related News
Signs of a Rare Type of Cancer May Be Hiding in Your Voice
Scientists May Have Identified a Natural Alternative to Ozempic
New Research Confirms Weight-Loss Drug Link With Sudden Vision Loss
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
3 hours ago
- Fast Company
Philips CEO Jeff DiLullo on how AI is changing healthcare today
AI is quietly reshaping the efficiency, power, and potential of U.S. healthcare, even as government health policy and spending drastically shift. Philips, the legacy electronics manufacturer turned medtech provider, is leading the AI healthcare revolution, streamlining and accelerating the workflow of patient care. Philips North America CEO Jeff DiLullo shares how technology can have the biggest impact on health outcomes today—from radiology scans to cancer diagnoses, and what it takes for leaders in any industry to rethink the way we work to best meet the moment. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. AI seems to be changing everything. There's a lot of talk about it, but in some businesses, I feel like the conversation about it is ahead of the actual implementation or the impact, and I'm curious how true that might be in medtech. How is AI impacting things now, today, versus what you think it can do in the future? If you remember, we released the Future of Health Index. One of the things that we realized is that AI, in some of these compartments I'm talking about, is quite mature. FDA cleared, very safe for clinical use. Other areas, it's more experimental. But the trust factor of the use of that AI is actually quite nascent. It's the biggest barrier right now to larger scale deployment. Yeah. That health index that you mentioned, the 2025 Future Health Index, I mean, there was this sort of trust gap in it, right? That something like 60, 65% of clinicians trust AI, but only about a third of patients or certainly older patients do. How do you bridge that gap? Is it Philips's job to bridge that gap? Whose job is it? So I have the benefit of having two Gen Zs and a millennial, they are digitally fluid. They don't worry at all about the AI models that are coming on the other side of this because they're used to it and they understand it. Older patients, not so much. The magic is always the healthcare practitioner that's directly interfacing with the customers or the patients. If they believe what they're doing, if they know it's credible, if they're using it to augment their analysis or their diagnostics, not replacing it, I think ultimately we'll see an uplift. It's our job to provide valid FDA-cleared, very good diagnostic capability leveraging AI. But if our doctors and nurses believe what we're doing and they see the value in increasing their time with patients and also a little de-stressing, we think it's going to really pick up in a parabolic way in the next few years, at least in health. I can understand and see how AI can quickly help some of the back office functionality in healthcare, but you're talking about for practitioners, right? How does that practically work today? So I'm going to give you, let's talk radiology. It's the biggest field right now, diagnostic, right? The earlier the diagnostic, the better the outcome most likely. And when I think of a radiologist, I have to wait a month and a half. I'm in a pretty nice part of Vanderbilt University area, like a lot of health tech around me in Nashville, but I've got to wait over a month to get a scan. So in radiology, we start with the box or the design, right? I have an MRI that is highly efficient. I can move it around, I can put it on a truck. But today, I can get a scan done in half or even a third of the time. The AI built into the system software makes it much faster. Just a few months ago, I had a scan that took only 20 minutes—whereas a couple of years ago, the same scan would have taken about 45 minutes. The smart speed that we have on the system actually compresses the scanning time. It doesn't fill in the blanks, it removes the noise. You actually get a better scan in a shorter time. If you're a radiologist having to do 12 or 15 studies a day, but you can do 20 studies a day, I get more patients through, I drive more reimbursement, it's better for the hospital, it's better for patient care. Then I take it into workflow, and today I can pinpoint things that are happening in that digital image and send it to a radiologist and say, 'You should look here,' in just very simple speak. It's very complicated stuff, but the AI is already mainstream today where we can actually pinpoint areas for radiologists to look at and make a determination. I can digitize the whole process today with digital pathology. And I can have a finding where somebody's waiting, do I have cancer or not? I can do this in hours now because it's all digital. And that kind of workflow and orchestration is a game changer. And the issue of AI hallucinations, which show up with some of the generative AI things, does that apply to healthcare? Are there different kinds of safeguards? Because I guess there's a human who's checking. There's so many things today, like smart speed I just talked about, being able to run that radiology workflow to compress the time of diagnostics, run the tumor boards in hours, on-demand meetings like you and I would on Zoom or teams, all of that is happening today, but not happening at the pace it could. My point is, go do that right now. Every health system, go do that. As you start to unpack these more generative AI models, I think there's real reason to be cautious and make sure we have the right controls and the governance on them, but not experimenting in them also is not an option. We kind of have to. But we see leading institutions, MGB, Stanford, Mount Sinai in New York, we see them really working with population health data to really try to train models on very specific and even broad use cases. There's so much to do right now. In other words, you don't have to go all the way out to the silver bullet of, we're going to live forever or we're going to solve every health problem. You can make the system we have right now more efficient and more effective today. Bob, when you first drove a car, was the first thing you did to go to the Autobahn? Probably not. There's so much to do in the neighborhood. There's so much to do in my town that I can really get good at what we're doing and drive productivity at scale. You need to have the innovation and the creativity to get us to the next place, but 80% of it we can do today. That is just game-changing in terms of how we deliver today, and that's what we think is really the next opportunity here for healthcare. And I think that'll happen with what's mature in AI and virtual capabilities in the next few years because the need is so great.
Politico
3 hours ago
- Politico
HHS embraces AI
EXAM ROOM The Department of Health and Human Services has emerged as the leader in artificial intelligence use among all federal agencies. In 2024, HHS reported 116 different ways to use AI for generating content and responses — up from just seven the year before, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, which monitors agencies for Congress. The GAO reported 271 different AI tools in use last year. A recent analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, reveals how three HHS agencies have implemented AI. Notably, they're largely using chatbots to help them work more efficiently. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: In 2023, the CDC launched ChatCDC, a bot built on OpenAI's large language models that can summarize meeting minutes, internal documents and studies. It also uses the bot to write code for data analysis. The CDC is experimenting with an updated version that uses more internal documents, but as of January, it hadn't yet been released. The Food and Drug Administration: The FDA has launched a chatbot to help staff respond to emails, summarize meeting minutes and perform a wide variety of basic tasks. While FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has promised faster regulatory review turnaround, staff have argued that the tool is prone to mistakes and incapable of assisting with the review process. The FDA has also experimented with using AI for an array of tasks, including labeling drugs and looking for data patterns and anomalies. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: CMS uses AI to prevent and detect fraud, waste and abuse and analyze prescription drug costs. The takeaway: HHS continues to lead the way for AI use. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he sees digital technology and AI as key tools for improving health care outcomes and reducing costs. WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is calling for an investigation into Meta following reporting that the company allowed its chatbots to 'engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.' Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@ Ruth Reader at rreader@ or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@ Want to share a tip securely? Message us on Signal: CarmenP.82, RuthReader.02 or ErinSchumaker.01. INFLUENCERS A newly launched psychedelic medicine foundation wants to become the 'American Cancer Society of ibogaine access.' Mission Within Foundation, which officially launched today, plans to use the $2 million in funding it has secured from private donors and foundations to promote the psychedelic drug ibogaine, derived from an African shrub, as a mental health treatment. The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies ibogaine as a Schedule I drug with no currently acceptable medical use and a high risk of abuse. It can pose heart risks and has been linked to about two dozen deaths in recent decades. The foundation plans to lobby for safe and legal access to ibogaine treatment in the U.S. and offer fully funded psychedelic therapy retreats to veterans and frontline workers with post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, depression and addiction. It will also team up with the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas on three ibogaine research studies. Who's who: Dr. Martín Polanco, who runs The Mission Within, a psychedelic medicine clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, is one of the foundation's founders. He's treated more than 5,000 people with traumatic brain injuries and mental health conditions like PTSD, including many veterans, using ibogaine and the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT, a desert toad secretion. Polanco has the ear of Reps. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) and Lou Correa (D-Calif.), co-founders of the Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies Caucus, who've been working in Washington to advance psychedelic medicine. Correa traveled to Polanco's clinic in Tijuana last year to talk with him in person and see whether his work justified further research on the drugs in the U.S. The foundation, which is also advocating for psychedelic medicine more broadly, is supporting Correa and Bergman's Innovative Therapies Centers of Excellence Act, which the pair introduced in April. The bill seeks $30 million for Veterans Affairs Department research on psychedelic therapies and would create five centers of excellence to research alternative treatments for veterans. What's next: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a law in June putting $50 million in state funding toward clinical trials of ibogaine as a mental health treatment. And the state budget Arizona's Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, signed into law the same month included a commitment of $5 million for studying ibogaine. Mississippi plans to hold a joint hearing of the House and Senate Public Health and Human Services committees on ibogaine on August 28.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Carlsmed's Personalized Spine Implants Get Significant Reimbursement Advantage
Carlsmed Inc. (NASDAQ:CARL), an AI-powered innovator in spine surgery, is poised for significant growth following key advancements and strong analyst projections. The company recently secured additional Medicare reimbursement for its aprevo personalized interbody implants for cervical fusion procedures, effective October 1, enhancing its financial outlook. This favorable reimbursement, granted through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) New Technology Add-On Payment (NTAP) program in the Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems (IPPS) Final Rule for fiscal year 2026, means cervical fusion procedures using aprevo devices will be eligible for an additional $21,125 beyond standard Medicare Severity-Diagnosis-Related Groups (MS-DRGs) for qualifying inpatient benefit extends to private payors as well, utilizing unique ICD-10-PCS procedure codes. Carlsmed, which priced its initial public offering of 6.7 million shares at $15 per share in July, focuses on AI-enabled personalized spine surgery solutions. Its aprevo cervical system, having received FDA Breakthrough Device designation, is anticipated for a U.S. commercial launch in of America Securities (BofA) has initiated coverage on Carlsmed with a Buy rating and a price forecast of $16, recognizing the company's potential to establish a new standard of care in spine fusion. BofA analyst Travis Steed highlighted Carlsmed's differentiated technology and robust outlook, assigning a premium valuation of 5x 2026 estimated revenue. This premium, higher than recent medtech IPOs and other spine companies, is justified by Carlsmed's projected high revenue growth and strong gross margin profile. BofA conservatively forecasts Carlsmed will add around 20-25 new surgeons each quarter through 2027, indicating a steady increase in adoption. Carlsmed forecasts impressive top-line growth: 66% in 2025 and an annual 40-45% through 2028. Its asset-light business model is expected to support profitability, with gross margins in the mid-70s and capital expenditures at just 1% of sales, significantly lower than the approximately 10% for traditional spine peers. BofA estimates the total spine market at roughly $1.4 billion, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 1.5%. In the first quarter of 2025, the global spine market (including biologics) saw 2.6% organic growth, driven by a 4.1% increase in the U.S. market. Despite the market being largely commoditized and dominated by major players like Medtronic Plc (NYSE:MDT), Globus Medical Inc (NYSE:GMED), Alphatec Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:ATEC), Johnson and Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), and Orthofix Medical Inc. (NYSE:OFIX) (who collectively hold about 70% of the market), spine surgeons notably favor new technology. The remaining 30% of the market is split among many smaller companies, creating an opportunity for new market entrants with disruptive technology like Carlsmed's to gain traction. BofA sees significant market share capture potential for Carlsmed, with analyst Steed estimating total revenue of $133 million in 2028, representing only about 1% of the total U.S. spine market. Price Action: CARL stock is trading higher by 0.88% to $13.70 at last check Monday. Read Next:Photo via Shutterstock UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? This article Carlsmed's Personalized Spine Implants Get Significant Reimbursement Advantage originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
