One of my college room mates ended up with kidney stones at a very young age (early 20s) because of a dietary supplement. He got somewhat lucky; there have been cases of liver failure [3], damage to vision [4], and many other serious health complications. Worse still, diagnosis can be difficult because in the US dietary supplements are covered under separate rules from drugs [1], the FDA is limited to post-market enforcement [2], and ingredient labels are often incomplete or wrong [5,6,7].
If Healthsearch is based on the contents of advertisements and reviews, then it may not be much more than a search engine for at best unsubstantiated marketing claims and anecdotes about the placebo effect, and at worst summarization and promotion of dangerously inaccurate or incomplete product information.
I think this is a good example of a space where generative AI is probably likely to do far more harm than good, and where the best advice remains to seek out the advice of educated and licensed medical/dietetic professionals, where education ensures a minimum of competence and licensure ensures a minimum of skin-in-the-game.
Just remember: if it's a dietary supplement, then it's not a food or a drug. It's a third thing and mostly a wild west. You have no idea what you are putting in your body, and the words on the label are just that: mere words designed to get you to purchase something. Without ground-truth data, it's all GIGO.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/information-consumers-using-dietary...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076034/
[4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2474126419877567
[5] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/whats-in-your-supplement...
[6] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-23r.pdf
[7] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-23r.pdf
If Healthsearch is based on the contents of advertisements and reviews, then it may not be much more than a search engine for at best unsubstantiated marketing claims and anecdotes about the placebo effect, and at worst summarization and promotion of dangerously inaccurate or incomplete product information.
I think this is a good example of a space where generative AI is probably likely to do far more harm than good, and where the best advice remains to seek out the advice of educated and licensed medical/dietetic professionals, where education ensures a minimum of competence and licensure ensures a minimum of skin-in-the-game.
Just remember: if it's a dietary supplement, then it's not a food or a drug. It's a third thing and mostly a wild west. You have no idea what you are putting in your body, and the words on the label are just that: mere words designed to get you to purchase something. Without ground-truth data, it's all GIGO.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/information-consumers-using-dietary...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076034/
[4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2474126419877567
[5] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/whats-in-your-supplement...
[6] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-23r.pdf
[7] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-23r.pdf