A Woman Used ChatGPT to Taper Off Medication. It’s Advice May Have Killed Her.

Bowen Wan was a 31-year-old immigrant from China who had made a new life for herself in the United States. As The New York Times reported, Bowen suffered from epilepsy, but was on a new medication that seemed to finally be keeping her seizures at bay – down to only a couple incidents a month. Unfortunately, the anticonvulsant medication lamotrigine (Lamictal), was also causing her unbearable side effects, like slowing her speech and thinking. So she asked ChatGPT for a taper plan to come off lamotrigine. And Bowen didn’t tell her doctor what she was doing. Sadly, it was a medical decision that may have lead to her death. Since 2021, Wan had been on disability leave from her job at Amazon, and her health issues left her mostly homebound.