“About 80% of your glucose gets handled by skeletal muscle. So when muscle shrinks, glucose just hangs around. I call it insulin resistance.”

Today I want to tell you a story about a man who tried to outsmart salt.

Yes. Salt.

The same thing humans have been sprinkling on food since before Wi-Fi, crypto, and whatever Elon is tweeting about today.

And somehow… this ended in psychosis, hallucinations, and a hospital stay.

Let’s begin.

SC, a 38-year-old man, arrived at the emergency room with severe psychosis.

The nurse offered him a glass of water.

SC refused.

Because he believed his neighbor was poisoning his water.

But don’t worry, SC wasn’t just some random conspiracy guy.

He studied nutrition in college. (I BS you not!)

Which on the internet apparently qualifies you to defeat two centuries of chemistry.

Three months earlier SC read on ChatGPT that table salt, sodium chloride, is bad for you.

Now the real medical advice here is painfully boring.

Salt is not poison. Just don’t eat it like popcorn.

But moderation doesn’t get clicks.

SC wanted a smarter workaround.

SC decided the real villain wasn’t sodium.

It was chloride.

His logic sounded very scientific:

Sodium is common in blood. Chloride is common in blood. Therefore chloride must be the problem. (Genius I know..)

Bulletproof reasoning.

So SC went looking for answers online.

During his search, sodium bromide came up. It’s a chemical cousin of salt that sits right next to chloride on the periodic table.

SC interpreted this as the perfect substitute.

So he ordered sodium bromide online.

And started salting all his meals with it.

Eggs. Soup. Everything.

At first, nothing seemed wrong.

Then things slowly started falling apart.

Extreme thirst.

Muscle cramps.

Nausea.

Crushing headaches.

Then the psychological symptoms arrived.

SC started hearing voices.

Seeing shadowy figures.

He became convinced his upstairs neighbor was shaking the ceiling to poison him.

His brain had essentially turned into a haunted house.

Eventually he dragged himself to the emergency room.

Doctors ran blood tests and immediately saw something strange.

SC appeared to have extremely high chloride levels.

Which made absolutely no sense.

Because he had been avoiding chloride completely.

Here’s the chemistry twist.

The machines hospitals use to measure chloride cannot distinguish chloride from bromide.

They behave almost identically to the sensor.

So the lab machine basically lumped them together.

What looked like high chloride was actually bromide poisoning.

A condition called bromism.

Your brain runs on two main signals.

One excites the brain.
One calms the brain.

The calming signal works partly by letting chloride ions enter brain cells.

Bromide sneaks into the exact same system.

But it behaves slightly differently.

Instead of balancing things properly, it over-amplifies the calming signal.

This can lead to:

Confusion
Hallucinations
Paranoia
Psychosis

In simple terms, the brain’s software starts glitching.

So how did doctors treat SC?

They gave him the one thing he had spent months avoiding.

Salt.

Regular sodium chloride, through an IV.

Flood the body with real chloride → push bromide out → kidneys remove it.

After about three weeks, SC recovered.

The very substance he feared…

literally saved his life.

This story isn’t really about AI.

It’s about something much more dangerous.

Humans who only accept information they already agree with.

You can have Google.

AI.

Medical journals.

But if your brain only listens to answers that confirm your theory, you can still end up seasoning dinner with poison.

Salt itself is not the villain.

Your body needs chloride for:

Nerve signals
Muscle contraction
Stomach acid
Brain function

The real health risks usually come from:

Ultra-processed food
Excessive sodium intake
Terrible diets overall

Not the small pinch of salt on your eggs.

Now I talked enough.

Your turn.

What is the wildest health trend you’ve seen online that made you think someone will eventually end up in the ER because of it?

Reply and tell me.

The craziest ones might end up in the next issue.

Until next Saturday,

Dr. Kevin Cutthebull, MD
Chief Surgeon of Common Sense

P.S. This is my promise: I’ll keep sending you fresh guides every week… until you eventually beg me to stop giving them for free. (it’s always gonna be free 😎). You can download my favorite guide of the week here, no opt-in required → (Download Here)