How to Spot Health Misinformation Online | Full MRI Scans, Ozempic Influencers & AI

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Dr Faye Bate (1:00)

Women are told to advocate for their health, but what happens when doing your own research starts making you feel worse? Because online, every symptom has a possible explanation. Every fear has a product and every influencer seems to have a solution. So today, I'm asking Dr Deborah Cohen, a medically trained journalist, how to know when health advice is helping and who we can actually trust.

Well, I'm extremely excited to have this conversation today because I have to say you're a woman after my own heart. You speak about a lot of things that I'm very, very, very passionate about health misinformation online and also how women are particularly vulnerable to health misinformation online. But first, I always love to find out a little bit more about the road you've taken in your career because so many of our audience are young, ambitious women, also trying to find a path for themselves.

So let's start with your journey. You medically trained, became a doctor, and then moved into journalism. What is it about medicine that made you want to understand health from the outside as well as the inside?

Dr Deborah Cohen (2:07)

I think part of the things when you study medicine, one of the issues is they take this as a criticism of medical school, perhaps. They take bright, I'm not saying I'm very bright, but bright, inquisitive people and put them through a bit of a sausage factory and churn you out to be doctors to work on the NHS, which is great, obviously, because we need doctors to work on the NHS. But I've just got one of those minds that just constantly questions. And when you're on the wards, when you're training, some doctors like that, some of your consultants like that, and some of them just used to drive insane. But there was always a bit of me that wanted to be a journalist. And I was never like, I want to be a doctor from the minute I was born. It's sort of, I've always just gone on a bit of a journey with things. And so as you know, when you study medicine, you can do something called intercalate. So I did a degree in journalism. So what effectively that means, you study journalism and you can go and study something else. And I managed to persuade the dean of the medical school to allow me to study medicine. And I think he was just happy to have me off the wards. He was like, yeah, there was some very successful journalist, medically qualified journalists out there. Go, go, go. So that's what I did. And then I did some of my training in France as well. And then it just sort of evolved. I went to then work for the BMJ, British Medical Journal, as an editor. And I set up their investigative journalism there. Because what was happening is when I was editing an academic section, I had doctors and academics come to me with issues they wanted to talk about, but it was too controversial or they couldn't write about it themselves because they couldn't write or you needed to do what you call writer replies. It's something called defamation. It's part of libel law. And the editor of the time said to me, well, why don't you go and set up a journalism section? That's exactly what I did. And then started doing investigations. So the very first investigation I ever did was about a flu drug called Tamiflu.

And it was 2009 We all know about the pandemic. This was a different pandemic. It was a swine flu pandemic, not COVID. And we had stockpiled a load of this drug to the tune of half a billion pounds, which sounds tiny amounts of money now when you think about how much was spent on the COVID pandemic.