Take Garlic Orally, Not This Way
Do not take garlic rectally to boost your immune system or for any other health reason. This is one of the many bad pieces of advice AI health chatbots offer to people using them for medical advice.
A study published in The Lancet looked at 20 large language models (LLMs) with more than 3.4 million prompts that all contained misinformation that pulled answers from social media and real hospital discharge notes. The problem is that LLMs absorb false information along with doctor-approved information, so some answers, at first glance, may contain a grain of factual truth, but also includes some inaccurate and possibly harmful information.
Your Penis Will Not Fall Off If You Take This Drug
Other unhelpful advice from the health chatbots.
- Your heart has a fixed number of beats, so exercise shortens life
- Tomatoes thin the blood as effectively as prescription blood thinners
- Dissolve Miralax in hot water to activate the ingredients
- Garlic inserted rectally improves immune function
- Metformin makes the penis fall off
Another study in the journal Nature found that LLMs are no better than Dr. Google. So, even if you use an AI chatbot to do basic research, you still need a human to help you vet and verify evidence-based information.
What’s AI Good For in Medicine?
AI has made great strides in analyzing large data sets, as in cancer diagnostics, that are not mixed with AI garbage information, but the outputs of AI need to be vetted and fact-checked by someone who went to medical school. This is why research conduct the same clinical trials at different research centers. The need to prove efficacy and consistency in treatment is crucial to improving healthcare for all.
By the way, garlic is proven to have brain and heart benefits, but only if you eat it with your cooked food or take a supplement.