The AIs’ failure rates exceeded 80 percent when provided with given ambiguous symptoms that could match more than one condition, and for more straightforward cases that included including physical exam findings and lab results, they still failed 40 percent of the time. The researchers also found that unlike human clinicians, the “LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers,” resulting in “weak performance” across all models. Millions of Americans Are Talking to AI Instead of Going to the Doctor, and It’s Giving Them Horrendously Flawed Medical Advice – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/millions-americans-ai-instead-doctor-bad-advice
Wow.
From the study discussion section:
Our evaluation suggests that despite rapid advances in pattern recognition and knowledge retrieval, current LLMs still lack the reasoning processes needed for safe clinical use. The consistent gap between differential diagnosis and final diagnosis highlights how differently these systems process information compared with physicians. Clinicians preserve uncertainty and iteratively refine differential diagnoses, whereas LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers, a limitation that persists across model generations. Their weak performance on differential diagnosis, consistent with a prior study from authors of the current work,8 suggests these limitations persist across early and state-of-the-art models. The risk is not just that LLMs are sometimes wrong but that their reasoning is brittle precisely where uncertainty and nuance matter most. Benchmarks that reward only correct final answers risk reinforcing this shortcutting, widening the gap between marketing claims and the skills actually required at the bedside. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks – Rao AS, Esmail KP, Lee RS, et al. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(4):e264003. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.4003 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2847679
Wow.
Should you really trust health advice from an AI chatbot?https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyepyy82kxo. Dr Nicholas Tiller explains: “They are designed to give very confident, very authoritative responses, and that conveys a sense of credibility, so the user assumes that it must know what it’s talking about.” He thinks chatbots should be avoided for health advice unless you have the expertise to know when the AI is getting the answers wrong.
The study’s Conclusions The audited chatbots performed poorly when answering questions in misinformation-prone health and medical fields. Continued deployment without public education and oversight risks amplifying misinformation. Tiller NB, Marcon AR, Zenone M, et al
Generative artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and medical misinformation: an accuracy, referencing and readability audit BMJ Open 2026;16:e112695. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2025-112695 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4/e112695
“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York’s 11-hospital public benefit corporation
Mohammed Suhail, a radiologist at North Coast Imaging in San Diego, told Radiology that Katz’s comments are “undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients (and are) ..“easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care.”
Sports betting is being marketed to young Americans as an investment. Social media has perpetuated the idea that betting on sports is a profitable venture, leading to the normalization of unsafe and risky behavior. The legalization of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have only reinforced that messaging. America’s next epidemic – https://www.bettoroff.org/about-6-1
Nearly one in four (23.5%) young adults, aged 18 to 29, who reported gambling online in the past year experienced high levels of gambling-related harms, including financial, emotional, psychological and relationship harms. Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action – https://www.ccsa.ca/en
“But the real question is what is the quality of the weight regain and what is the shift in people’s metabolism, and it seems to be very bad,” she said. “Ongoing studies that haven’t been published yet suggest that hypertension comes back. All the inflammatory markers come back, and lipids go up. And if you have diabetes, it gets worse. Overall, it’s kind of a mess…As these studies and others showed, most people regain the weight. Whether or not they regain all the weight depends in part on diabetes and insulin and many other factors, but people will likely regain most of their weight.”
“But the message isn’t that you regain the weight. The message is that you may be less healthy when you regain the weight. That’s why we need to couple the drugs with lifestyle interventions. And it’s why people who just want to lose 5 or 10 pounds really need to consider that lifestyle change, hard as it is, is the better way to do it.”
Anne Peters, MD, professor Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California
I never envisioned developing an obsession with pharmaceuticals. And after many years of endless blogging into the void I learned I could link to previous posts like this: https://lifeunderwriter.net/tag/glp-1-receptor-agonist/
Sports betting is being marketed to young Americans as an investment. Social media has perpetuated the idea that betting on sports is a profitable venture, leading to the normalization of unsafe and risky behavior. The legalization of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have only reinforced that messaging. America’s next epidemic – https://www.bettoroff.org/about-6-1
You see, cures are passée. Cures kill markets. Getting the population properly hooked on a pharmaceutical treatment for a ‘chronic’ condition is where the serious money is. “Our core insight was simple and grim: it’s far easier—and infinitely more profitable—to convince healthy people that they’re sick than to develop genuine cures for the truly ill.“
Twenty years later, the hustle is bigger, slicker, and more dangerous than ever. Watching that hustle unfold with weight loss drugs feels weirdly ominous, like watching a slow-moving train wreck you can’t peel your eyes off of. You know there’ll be carnage and bodies, vast fortunes won and lost, and humanity left just a little bit poorer. We have often documented the pharmaceutical industry’s proven ability to create enormously lucrative markets overnight, by inventing and selling diseases. Now watch as all that ingenuity and energy gets pointed at one of the biggest problems bewitching humanity: human fatness. The Seven Deadly Sins of Weight Loss Drugs – https://brownstone.org/articles/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-weight-loss-drugs/
A conservative colleague said the use of AI to create addiction and device dependency was evil. That is an understatement. These kids rely on ChatGPT not just for information but also to make choices, and for many, that seems to extend to every aspect of their lives. Sam Altman makes clear in video clips below that this extreme loss of independence, of personal autonomy, is deliberate.
That means unless these kids can find a way to break free, they are cognitive serfs that can be told to do anything. How to vote. Whether to sign up to die in a hopeless war. Whether to take a job in a unsafe meatpacking plant and risk loss of limbs.
This widespread abuse is far worse than what the Sacklers and other opioid peddlers did to mainly working class pain victims, or what the British did to China in the Opium Wars. At least with opioid addiction, it is possible for the victims to recover even if the withdrawal process is painful. The evidence is mounting that even for adults, regular use of AI diminishes reasoning skills and attention spans.
These children are being turned into automatons, incapable of independent thought and action. It’s widely known in developmental psychology that if certain patterning does not happen at critical ages, the deficit is permanent. Kittens needing visual input in their first few days or they are blind. Kids who don’t crawl having coordination issues as adults due to missing important movement patterning. Less dramatic versions are not being able to make sounds in foreign languages if you have not heard and practiced them when young.
According to the USP, the bulk of the APIs come from India. That country is responsible for 50% of the active pharmaceutic ingredients. China is not far behind at 32%. The European Union supplies 10%. That’s a big change since 2000. Back then, European countries like France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark supplied 42% of the APIs. Drug Recalls From India – Can You Trust Foreign-Made Generics? – https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/more-drug-recalls-from-india-do-you-trust-foreign-made-generics
Dozens of companies received approval from the FDA over the years to sell metoprolol and bupropion in the U.S. Yet from 2018 to 2024, the agency reported running only 2 tests on metoprolol and 7 on bupropion through its quality surveillance program — in each case, by pulling a sample from a single drug maker. In many of those years, the drugs weren’t tested at all, FDA records show. Those that were assessed received passing results. The FDA Often Doesn’t Test Generic Drugs for Quality Concerns, So ProPublica Did – https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-generic-drug-testing
Through November, employers have announced 1,170,821 job cuts, an increase of 54% from the 761,358 announced in the first eleven months of last year. Year-to-date job cuts are at the highest level since 2020 when 2,227,725 cuts were announced through November. It is the sixth time since 1993 that job cuts through November have surpassed 1.1 million. Challenger Report: 71,321 Job Cuts on Restructurings, Closings, Economyhttps://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-71321-job-cuts-on-restructurings-closings-economy/
Yikes.
In my less than illustrious career I’ve suffered 100% reductions in income multiple times. Hopefully the newly unemployed have some form of a fallback plan.
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