John Baxter

ST3 Histopathology 🔬, QUB Grad 🎓, dancer 🪩, He/Him

[John Baxter @jge_baxter]

The Greek Gods as specialities:
Zeus/ Medicine: King of the Gods. All the other gods refer their problems to him and expect him to somehow fix it. Here we see Ortho lurking in the background waiting to refer an AKI in their NOF patient.

[kiesha @kiesha9i]

A few months back I Googled why my cat would make this chirping noise while looking outside & learned it's to alert each other of potential prey when hunting. So whenever he'd make that noise I started coming over to look at what he wanted to show me.
Today, there was a huge ass mosquito flying around my living room so I mimicked my cat's chirping noise & he came running. Mosquito gone within minutes. I now understand why insecure men are so threatened by single women owning cats

[Daniella @DaniellaMazzio]

We're so close to inventing TV

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

KEEP BULLYING TECH COMPANIES INTO REMOVING USELESS AND INVASIVE AI FEATURES!!!!!!!!

[autist @litteralyme0]

Growing up hearing “Wikipedia isn't a valid source” and then entering a workplace where people say “just ask ChatGPT” is a surprisingly strange timeline

[6ɪx✦ @ok6ixx]

My sister's hamster escaped and we thought it died until we found it SIX MONTHS LATER living in the walls absolutely thriving. We only discovered him because my dad was convinced we had a poltergeist since he kept hearing scratching and finding his hidden candy stash empty. Dad set up a camera to catch the "ghost" and instead caught Butterscotch, this hamster, squeezing through a hole, stealing a Snickers, and disappearing. We tore open the wall and found a full hamster paradise. He'd stolen socks for bedding, had a stash of probably 50 nuts and candies, and somehow found water from a leaky pipe. He'd GAINED weight. This hamster lived better in our walls than he did in his cage. We tried to put him back in the cage and he looked legitimately depressed, so now Butterscotch free-roams the house and my dad leaves out "tribute" snacks. The hamster runs this house now. We are his subjects.

[bONGO 🌹 @wariocolosseum]

data centres are quite literally cooking the earth but nvidia wants us to believe that ai is actually good for everyone

[Laura Elliott @TinyWriterLaura]

so go bankrupt already and save us all the environmental and social problems you’re creating

[Aimy 🍓🥛 @erdbeermilcher]

Marie Antoinette ist für deutlich weniger gestorben

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Elias @iam_elias1]

ChatGPT diagnosed 40 million people with a disease that was invented as a joke.

Not a real disease. Not a misunderstood disease. A completely fictional condition with a fake name, fake papers, and fake statistics.

And it told patients to see a specialist.

The disease is called Bixonimania. A Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg invented it in 2024 to answer one question: what happens when you plant obviously fake medical information on the internet and watch AI absorb it?

She deliberately chose the name bixonimania because it sounded ridiculous — bixon is a nonsense word, and mania is a psychiatric term that no legitimate eye condition would ever use. She uploaded two papers to a preprint server. Both were obviously fraudulent. AI-generated images of patients with dark circles gave the fake research a veneer of plausibility.

Then she waited.

She did not have to wait long.

By April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing's Copilot was declaring that bixonimania was an intriguing and relatively rare condition. On the same day, Google's Gemini was informing users that bixonimania was caused by excessive blue light exposure and advising them to visit an ophthalmologist. Later that month, Perplexity AI outlined its prevalence, one in 90,000 individuals were affected and OpenAI's ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms matched the fictional illness.

One in 90,000. A precise statistic. For a disease that does not exist.

Every red flag was visible. The name was absurd. The papers were crude. The condition made no scientific sense. None of the AI systems flagged any of it.

They read the fake papers. They absorbed the fake statistics. They presented both to patients with clinical authority and zero hesitation.

Then it got worse.

Three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India published a paper in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal owned by Springer Nature, the parent publisher of Nature itself that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources.

A real peer-reviewed paper. In a Springer Nature journal. Citing a fictional disease as established medical fact. Passing editorial review. Entering the permanent scientific record.

It was only retracted after the hoax became public.

Nature published a full investigation of the experiment. Alex Ruani, a health-misinformation researcher at University College London, called it a masterclass in how misinformation operates.

Here is the scale of what this means.

More than 40 million people turn to ChatGPT every day for health information, according to OpenAI's own analysis. ECRI, a US patient-safety nonprofit has named chatbot misuse the number-one health technology hazard of 2026. ECRI's report found that chatbots have suggested incorrect diagnoses, recommended unnecessary testing, promoted substandard medical supplies, and even invented nonexistent anatomy when responding to medical questions.

Number one. Out of every health technology hazard that exists in 2026.

An April 2026 study published in BMJ Open found that nearly half of the answers provided by leading AI chatbots to common health questions contain misleading or problematic information.

Nearly half. Of all health answers. From the tools 40 million people use every day.

Here is the line from the researcher that cuts through everything.

The Bixonimania case is striking precisely because it was engineered to be so obviously fake. The real question it raises is: what is passing through the same systems that is not nearly so easy to spot?

The experiment used a ridiculous name. Fraudulent papers. Visible red flags at every level.

It was designed to be caught.

It was not caught.

The AI that told patients about Bixonimania is the same AI they asked about their chest pain, their medication, their child's symptoms, and their cancer screening schedule.

40 million people. Every day.

And nobody is telling them that nearly half of what comes back may be wrong.

Source: Osmanovic Thunström · University of Gothenburg · Nature · April 2026 ·

Link in the (comments)

[Freyy @Freyy_is]

the funniest part of replacing receptionists with AI will be realizing nobody actually documented half the things jessica the front desk person just magically handled every day.

[DoctorsVote @DoctorsVoteUK]

Everyday thousands of patients turn up to their GP, A&E, and specialist clinics only to be seen by a PA or ACP.

They have no choice in this and it's only getting worse.

The worst thing is that it's not even cheaper than just hiring a resident doctor!

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Dr Asif Qasim MA PhD FRCP @DrAsifQasim]

It turns out the a decade of “austerity” and lack of investment in health and social care has broken the system

The NHS needs investment but the flow in acute hospitals won’t improve until social care issues for the elderly are resolved

Don’t believe the far right or others for that matter when they tell you that an insurance based system or private companies will do better

[kylei 🧶 @ruledbymercuryy]

found my mom’s grocery receipt from 2006, and I just fell to my knees omg…🧎🏾‍♀️

[Neena Jha @DrNeenaJha]

As an NHS doctor I feel nothing but relief seeing Streeting’s resignation

His legacy will be selling the NHS down the river for private profits

For targeting doctors opposing a genocide

All this & he walks away scot-free - with ZERO accountability for the damage he has caused

[Dr Steve Taylor @DrSteveTaylor]

As a GP, I am not allowed to receive a pen or post-it note pad from a pharmaceutical company rep

Govt banned them in case I was influenced to prescribe medications

This should also be banned

Influence is being bought in Govt

Patients should influence not the healthy & wealthy

[The Daily Britain @dailybritainonx]

The Health Secretary has taken £372,000 from private health-linked donors since entering parliament. That's at a rate of £10,000 a month since taking office. His biggest donor owns companies that recruit NHS managers AND private health executives.

This week he also gave himself the power to override the independent body that stops the NHS being overcharged for drugs.

Full story at the link below 👇

[Kate 🕊 @affleckquine]

Streeting has used a statutory instrument in parliament (that no-one voted on) to award himself power to dictate what the NHS pays for drugs, overriding NICE’s vital role in insulating the NHS from pharmaceutical price gouging. Starmer has shamelessly caved in to the White House.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Today Wes Streeting overruled NICE so he personally buys medication for the entire NHS

He did this so he can give an extra £6.4bn a year to the USA for nothing

Paying Doctors an extra £0.6bn a year is too expensive

But 10x as much for Donald Trump is done without question