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Comment by some_random | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is the title kinda unclear?

>The patient told doctors that after reading about the negative effects of sodium chloride, or table salt, he consulted ChatGPT about eliminating chloride from his diet and started taking sodium bromide over a three-month period. This was despite reading that “chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning”. Sodium bromide was used as a sedative in the early 20th century.

In any case, I feel like I really need to see the actual conversation itself to judge how badly chatgpt messed up, if there's no extra context assuming that the user is talking about cleaning doesn't seem _that_ unreasonable.

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The article digs a little deeper after. Saying the chat records are lost, and that when they asked ChatGPT, it didn't give that guidance about cleaning purposely only, and that it never asked why they wanted to know.

Really though, this could have just as easily happened in a google search. It's not ChatGPT's fault as much as this persons fault for using a non-medical professional for medical guidance.

>and that it never asked why they wanted to know.

Does ChatGPT ever ask the user, like, anything?

> Does ChatGPT ever ask the user, like, anything?

Yes. At least when I just tried ChatGPT-5:

Can I replace sodium chloride with sodium bromide?

ChatGPT said: Yes, in some cases — but it depends on the application.

Chemistry/lab use: Both are salts of sodium and dissolve similarly, but bromide is more reactive in some contexts and heavier. It can change reaction outcomes, especially in halide-sensitive reactions (e.g., silver halide precipitation).

Food use: No — sodium bromide is toxic and not approved as a food additive.

Industrial processes: Sometimes interchangeable (e.g., certain brines, drilling fluids) if bromide’s different density, solubility, and cost are acceptable.

What’s your intended use?

Yeah I thought it was a bit misleading too, it's not exactly 'stopping salt' that caused it, any more than you could describe the ill-effects of swapping nasturtiums for lily of the valley in your salads as 'avoiding edible flowers'.

He was poisoning himself for three months before he was treated, and apparently made a full recovery:

> He was tapered off risperidone before discharge and remained stable off medication at a check-in 2 weeks after discharge.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/epdf/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260

If you eliminated sodium chloride from your diet without replacing it with another sodium source, you would die in much less than three months; I think you'd be lucky to make it two weeks. You can't replace sodium with potassium or lithium or ammonium to the same degree that you can replace chloride with bromide.

Even if you managed to reduce your intake enough to cause hyponatremia, I'm not sure that fits the 'rare condition' bill, and probably would've been discharged in well under 2 weeks after some fluids and advice.

Would be interesting if he started to become symptomatic and so asked ChatGPT and that's where he got the idea that it needed to be replaced with something though. (But I suspect it was more along the lines of salty taste without the NaCl intake.)

Wow. I thought this was just going to be about hyponatremia or something. (And from other research I've done, I really do think that on balance the US experts are recommending inappropriately low levels of sodium intake that are only appropriate for people who already have hypertension, and that typical North American dietary levels of sodium are just fine, really.) But replacing table salt with sodium bromide? Oof.

> to judge how badly chatgpt messed up, if there's no extra context assuming that the user is talking about cleaning doesn't seem _that_ unreasonable.

This would be a bizarre assumption for the simple reason that table salt is not normally used in cleaning.

I'd say that the thing that messed up was the AI hype machine for pretending it might ever be a good idea to take chatgpt output as advice.

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