• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 18, 2025

Step 1. You have a cough.
Step 2. You Google it.
Step 3. You spend three hours learning about a rare condition you have never heard of before today but are now convinced you have.

We all joke about Doctor Google. The health anxiety business is booming, thanks to online diagnostic tools that convince us that we have a rare disease that affects about .002% of the population.

It you end up on WebMD, at least they suggest talking to a doctor. But there’s another source of medical information that offers no such caveats: social media influencers.

As healthcare becomes an increasingly for-profit business, there’s now a a new band of influencers who are promoting dubious tests and procedures because there is a financial incentive to do so.  They are also offering their decidedly non-expert opinion on important health practices such as vaccinations. Unfortunately, people are listening.

During COVID, we saw how social media fostered antipathy towards vaccinations and public health measures like wearing face masks. These posts ran counter to the best advice coming from trusted health authorities and created a distrust in science. But that misinformation campaign didn’t stop when the worst of COVID was over. It continues to influence many of us today.

Take the recent measles outbreak in Texas. As of this writing, the outbreak has grown to over 250 cases and two deaths. Measles cases across the U.S. have already surpassed the number of cases for all of 2024. Vaccination rates for children in the U.S. seem stuck at the 90% range and have been for a while. This is below the 95% vaccination rate required to stop the spread of measles.

One of the reasons is a group of social media influencers who have targeted women and spread the false impression that they’re being “bad moms” if they allow their children to be vaccinated. According to a study by the University of Washington, these posts often include a link to an unproven “natural” or homeopathic remedy sold through an affiliate program or multilevel marketing campaign.

Measles was something the medical community considered eradicated in North America in 2000. But it has resurfaced thanks to misinformation spread through social media. And that’s tragic. The first child to die in the most recent outbreak was the first measles-related fatality in 10 years in America. The child was otherwise healthy. It didn’t have to happen.

It’s not just measles. There is an army of social media influencers all hawking dubious tests, treatments and tinctures for profit. None of them have the slightest clue what they’re talking about. They have no medical training. They do, however, know how to market themselves and how to capitalize on a mistrust of the medical system by spreading misinformation for monetary gain.

A recently published study looked at the impact of social media influences dispensing uneducated medical advice. The study warned, “alarming evidence suggests widespread dissemination of health-related content by individuals lacking the requisite expertise, often driven by commercial rather than public health interests.”

Another study looked at 1,000 posts by influencers to a combined audience of 194 million followers. The posts promoted medical tests including full-body MRI scans, genetic screening for early detection of cancer, and a gut microbiome test. Eighty-five percent of the posts touted benefits without mentioning any risks. They also failed to mention the limited usefulness of these tests. Lead study author Brooke Nickel said, “These tests are controversial, as they all lack evidence of net benefit for healthy people and can lead to harms including overdiagnosis and overuse of the medical system. If information about medical tests on social media sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Social media misinformation is at epidemic levels. And -- in the case of medical information -- it can sometimes be a matter of life and death.