Who’s actually listening to all the health influencers dominating social media |
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Who’s actually listening to all the health influencers dominating social media
Most health influencers don’t have real credentials — but they are more influential than ever.
A generation or two ago, when you had a medical question, the solution was obvious: Ask your doctor.
But these days, as trust in doctors and other traditional medical authorities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eroded, Americans are more and more likely to consult their Instagram or TikTok feed.
According to a major new study of popular health- and wellness-related influencers from the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Americans — and half of adults under the age of 50 — get medical and/or wellness information from social media accounts.
What they’re encountering is a chaotic ecosystem where MDs promoting evidence-based medicine coexist alongside life coaches selling unproven peptides. Nuanced portrayals of mental health problems and how to manage them commingle with accounts that blend Jungian psychology and astrology. A registered dietitian could be promoting a whole foods diet to reduce chronic inflammation and then the next video is a self-proclaimed “nutritionist” urging you to take sea moss supplements for the same reason.
Alternative medicine is hardly new: A century ago, newspapers hawked all kinds of unproven and potentially dangerous elixirs. But social media has allowed it to proliferate and reach more people than ever before. The pandemic served as an accelerant: The nation spent months inside, scrolling our phones, desperate for information on a public health emergency. People doubted the government’s experts and sought out their own (mis)information.
Public health experts struggled to respond to the widespread skepticism, while influencers rushed in to fill the trust vacuum.
“It’s not an information deficit problem; it’s a trust problem,” Jessica Steier, a public health scientist and co-host of the Unbiased Science podcast, told me. “There’s a holier-than-thou sort of attitude [in medicine], very paternalistic. I don’t think we’re doing [ourselves] any favors.”
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And so even as Covid began to subside, the distrust remained, egged on by people like now-US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., people who took full advantage of social media to push their own political agendas — and, often, to try to sell you something. Today, Instagram Reels and TikTok trends play a major role in the public discourse around health, perhaps rivaling prestigious medical journals.
The Pew study is a rigorous survey of this all-important digital landscape, the focal point of what I now think of as the DIY era of health care. Its findings reveal how and why people engage with this content — and the challenges the medical system faces in restoring Americans’ trust in evidence-based care, challenges that are multiplied by the influencer culture seeping into the federal government under Kennedy.
After reading the report and talking with a few experts, I had three big takeaways from its various findings. Let’s get into it.
People seek out health and wellness influencers because the medical system is letting them down
The Pew study shows how distrust or disengagement with the traditional health care system drives people........