According to a major new study of popular health- and wellness-related influencers from the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Americans \u2014 and half of adults under the age of 50 \u2014 get medical and\/or wellness information from social media accounts.<\/p>\n
What they\u2019re encountering is a chaotic ecosystem where MDs promoting evidence-based medicine coexist alongside life coaches selling unproven peptides<\/a>. Nuanced portrayals of mental health problems and how to manage them commingle with accounts that blend Jungian psychology<\/a> and astrology<\/a>. A registered dietitian could be promoting a whole foods diet to reduce chronic inflammation<\/a> and then the next video is a self-proclaimed \u201cnutritionist\u201d urging you to take sea moss supplements for the same reason.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s experts and sought out their own (mis)information.<\/p>\n Public health experts struggled to respond to the widespread skepticism, while influencers rushed in to fill the trust vacuum.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not an information deficit problem; it\u2019s a trust problem,\u201d Jessica Steier, a public health scientist and co-host of the Unbiased Science podcast<\/a>, told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a holier-than-thou sort of attitude [in medicine], very paternalistic. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re doing [ourselves] any favors.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign up for the Good Medicine newsletter<\/p>\n Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox\u2019s senior correspondent Dylan Scott<\/a> has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he\u2019ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what\u2019s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and, often, to try to sell you something<\/a>. Today, Instagram Reels and TikTok trends play a major role in the public discourse around health, perhaps rivaling prestigious medical journals.<\/p>\n 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 healthcare. Its findings reveal how and why people engage with this content \u2014 and the challenges the medical system faces in restoring Americans\u2019 trust in evidence-based care, challenges that are multiplied by the influencer culture seeping into the federal government under Kennedy<\/a>.<\/p>\n After reading the report and talking with a few experts, I had three big takeaways from its various findings. Let\u2019s get into it.<\/p>\n People seek out health and wellness influencers because the medical system is letting them down<\/p>\n The Pew study shows how distrust or disengagement with the traditional healthcare system drives people toward influencer accounts. For starters, uninsured people are much more likely to get health and wellness information from social media or podcasts: 53 percent versus 38 percent of those with health insurance. It makes sense: If people can\u2019t easily access care, they\u2019re going to get their information from somewhere, and they\u2019re getting it online.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t ever disparage the people that buy these products and pay attention to these [influencers] because I find that they\u2019re victims of a system that steers them towards this information and then the platforms reinforce it,\u201d Katrine Wallace<\/a>, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who goes by \u201cDr. Kat\u201d on Instagram<\/a> (with 100,000-plus followers), told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t have access to traditional healthcare, so this is what they have.\u201d<\/p>\n People of color are also more likely to seek out influencer content. Hispanic (47 percent) and Black (44 percent) Americans report significantly higher consumption of social media posts or podcasts on healthcare than white Americans (35 percent). Black people in particular are more likely to say that the information they get from the influencer-sphere is extremely or very different from what they receive from traditional sources of medical authority (24 percent) than white people are (16 percent).<\/p>\n These are groups that have legitimate reasons to be skeptical of medical experts, starting with the fact that they are more likely to experience conscious and unconscious prejudice<\/a> when they go to the doctor or to a hospital. \u201cYou do have medical distrust of the system for Black patients, Hispanic patients, Native populations because of historical stuff like Tuskegee<\/a> or the horrific things that have happened to our native populations and other groups as well over the course of history,\u201d said Dr. Cedric Dark<\/a>, an emergency physician and associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine.<\/p>\n The Pew survey found that almost 20 percent of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans said a major reason they sought out influencer content was to learn about something they did not want to ask their doctor about \u2014 twice the rate of white Americans who said the same. If people don\u2019t feel that they can fully trust their healthcare provider, or worry that their doctor won\u2019t be sensitive to or aware of their specific needs, they might be looking online instead.<\/p>\n Influencers are selling their \u201clife experience\u201d as much as any medical credentials<\/p>\n When people do seek health information on social media, they are often encountering content creators with limited real-life expertise \u2014 but a compelling story to tell.<\/p>\n According to the Pew study, 41 percent of health and wellness influencers say they have a background as a healthcare professional, but only 17 percent of this group claims conventional medical credentials. Of all of the influencer accounts researchers looked at, 16 percent claim no particular credentials at all. Others identify as coaches, entrepreneurs, and activists. (The study combined two large public surveys of 5,000 US adults with an analysis of influencer accounts with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube \u2014 about 12,800 accounts in total.)<\/p>\n Women make up the majority of the influencer sphere \u2014 64 percent of the accounts studied by Pew \u2014 and they are much more likely to cite their life experiences than men are (16 percent versus 9 percent). Being a parent in particular has been a selling point: People will describe themselves as, for example, an \u201cADHD mom\u201d to demonstrate their bona fides to their followers.<\/p>\n What becomes clear when you look at these figures is that people want to feel personally connected to their sources of health information. We know that many people have lost faith in medical authorities, in part because they perceive a paternalistic and judgmental attitude from these experts. Women in particular are likely to encounter bias<\/a> from medical providers, which can sow distrust. Influencers are stepping up and using their humanity \u2014 their lack of conventional expertise in some cases \u2014 to connect with people. Physicians and other experts who want people to have accurate, factual health information need to find a way to resonate with their audience in the same way.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a trust problem,\u201d Steier said. \u201cIt\u2019s not an information problem, right? If we\u2019re trying to reach people, it\u2019s establishing some sort of connection, right? We know that an anecdote is not evidence in and of itself, but we know that an anecdote can help us establish that relationship with the consumer of our information and help our information land.\u201d<\/p>\n Young people take wellness influencers more seriously than anybody else<\/p>\n While I\u2019ll admit I assumed \u2014 based on stereotypes \u2014 that it must be unsuspecting older people being sold snake oil on social media, the Pew report shows how wrong I was. People over 65 are actually the most skeptical of social media health and wellness content: 36 percent say they trust not too much or none of what they see on social media, much higher than the 24 percent share overall.<\/p>\n Younger people (ages 18 to 29) are the most likely to say they watch health and wellness content for its entertainment value. They are also the most likely to be spooked by what they watch: 36 percent of adults under age 30 say they get more worried about their own health based on what they hear from social media influencers, versus 27 percent for people ages 30 to 49 and less than 20 percent for those over 50.<\/p>\n As Dark, the emergency physician and professor, put it to me, there is a cyclical nature to our relationship with science and medicine. In the early 1900s, you had dentists offering cocaine<\/a> to their patients. By the middle of the 20th century, antibiotics<\/a> and new vaccines<\/a> and imaging advances<\/a> had ushered in a new golden age of medicine. Today, the pendulum has swung again. \u201cWe\u2019re back at snake oil,\u201d Dark said.<\/p>\n That should mean things will get better, though it may take some serious health consequences for people to realize the value of evidence-based medicine. But one of the new risks introduced by social media, and the democratization of healthcare information, is that even the next generation of experts is susceptible to misinformation. That is one of the greatest dangers of the influencer ecosystem: that it misleads not only patients, but young doctors as well. Dark says he has already seen it happen in his emergency room, with students seeking clinical guidance from social media \u2014 and sometimes not recognizing when it\u2019s bad advice.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere I am more worried is, where do we go when our medical students are using the same sources our patients are and don\u2019t know where to find the right information,\u201d he said. \u201cMy task and challenge as an educator is to make sure that the next generation of physicians knows how to find reputable information.\u201d<\/p>\n Be smart when encountering wellness influencers in the wild<\/p>\n The health and wellness influencer ecosystem isn\u2019t going away. Even if you personally ignore it, you may have a friend or loved one who tries to push the ideas on you, or tries them themselves. We all need to be smart consumers of this content, to separate the good ideas from the bad, and to be able to talk with the people in our lives who do seek out this content (or who see it without trying all that hard). It can be difficult: Social media tends to reward sensationalism over nuance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t operate in certainties,\u201d Wallace said, noting that genuine scientific information is typically \u201cboring, hedged, uncertain.\u201d But, she continued, \u201ca coach coming on and selling certainty to people, it works, right? \u2026 Somebody who\u2019s selling supplements or coaching or maybe doesn\u2019t have a science degree or a medical degree is basically going to win over more people because the medium rewards confidence and clarity over accuracy and caveats.\u201d<\/p>\n One promising finding from the Pew report is people don\u2019t just believe influencers by default: Only 10 percent of adults said they trusted most or all of the information from these accounts. But another 65 percent said they trusted \u201csome\u201d of it. The trick is knowing which information can be trusted. The trick is knowing the difference.<\/p>\n Based on the Pew report and my conversations with doctors who do some influencing themselves, here are some good rules of thumb about how to approach these accounts and their content.<\/p>\n You should know who you\u2019re listening to. Be aware that sometimes influencers will mask their credentials, claiming to have a medical degree when in fact they have a certification from a notorious degree farm. You might look at their content differently if you know the full story.<\/p>\n \u201cIt sometimes is very difficult to tell. Like if someone comes on and says, \u2018Hey, I\u2019m Dr. Chris,\u2019 and you have to click several links to find out what kind of doctor these people are,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cAnd then you get all the way there and you realize they got an online chiropractic degree or something. But they don\u2019t say that, and you have to really dig to find out what their credentials are.\u201d<\/p>\n 2) Be careful about conflicts of interest<\/p>\n If somebody is selling you something, they probably stand to make money off it \u2014 and knowing that might change how you internalize their advice. Such sponsorships are ubiquitous: Wallace told me she has a dedicated email inbox for Instagram, and every day it is filled with offers of trips, money, and other perks in exchange for promoting a company\u2019s product.<\/p>\n Wallace told me she once attended a meeting that brought together science communicators and MAHA-affiliated influencers, an attempt to bridge the gap between two groups that are often at odds in this influencer ecosystem. They were shocked she wasn\u2019t monetizing her content, she said. It is common practice among the influencer crowd.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is literally their job,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t going to necessarily go see why they\u2019re saying to take this supplement \u2014 because they\u2019re getting like 20 percent on every bottle that they sell. Of course they\u2019re going to say that it\u2019s great and that it helps people.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/T1WxL-people-of-color-and-the-uninsured-are-more-likely-to-consume-health-influencer-content-on-soci.jpeg\"\/)
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