When you trust social media influencers more than your GP — what can only go wrong?

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You're not feeling well. Maybe you're tired all the time. Or there's this niggling ache in your shoulder. 15 years ago, you'd ring your GP. Today, you open Instagram or Facebook. Because somewhere between the six week wait for an appointment and the 10 minutes you get when you're finally in the room, a whole new kind of health expert has moved in. Celebrity wellness gurus and social media doctors, the commodification of health care today on Big Ideas. Hello, I'm Clare Nicholls with you while Natasha Mitchell is away.

Health influences have quietly become some of the most trusted voices in medicine, even when they're not doctors, even when the evidence isn't there. So how did we get here? And what does it mean when fame competes and often wins against science?

Award-winning medical journalist and broadcaster Dr. Deborah Cohen has spent years untangling these questions. Her new book is Bad Influence, How the Internet Hijacked Our Health.

At the York Festival of Ideas in the UK, she's speaking with Simon Gilbody, Professor of Psychological Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of York and the Hull York Medical School. And Deborah starts this session by first testing the audience.

Deborah Cohen (2:13)

Just as a quick stock take, who has turned to the Internet or social media for health information? No judgment.

I have. I just used ChatGPT earlier today for my sins. So just everyone turns there and this is what this book's about.

But it started off, I was in Liverpool and I worked on ITV News and I was health correspondent of Newsnight during the pandemic. And that was brutal reporting. It really was some of the, I say that about every story, it was the toughest reporting I've ever done. Writing the book was the toughest thing I've ever done. But it was really, really hard every day when huge uncertainty, people wanted certainty, massively polarized debate. Any given day, I was either a COVID denier or I was part of a global conspiracy, putting 5G in vaccines. You're talking about that and reporting against that backdrop is pretty hard. And then I went to ITV News where I was their science editor. Bluntly, I was quite burnt out. And I don't know whether anyone's worked in TV here, but TV news is brutal. So it's much smaller ITV News than the teams at the BBC. But news site is tough because it's a very small team and it's its own team within the BBC.

So it's quite a different beast. But carrying that program for two years through COVID was really difficult. I was the only one with any sort of science background and I happened to have a medical background. So for the editor, it was like manna from heaven. Everyone was like, oh, right place, right time. I was like, nope, wrong place, wrong time. Then going to ITV, you're up at six in the morning and you don't really know where you're going to be at any moment. You know, you can get a phone call, right, get the train to Manchester, then you're not, oh no, we need you to go down to Norfolk. And you're probably not, if you do a live broadcast at news at 10, you're probably not getting home at about half 11 A bottle of wine to try and get to sleep and then up again at six. And it's quite an unhealthy lifestyle because you're not sitting down for lunch, you're not sitting down for tea, you're just constantly on the go. And I burnt out. And then it was when I thought, oh, I'll just freelance again, I'll go, because I used to work on Panorama as well. So I thought, I'll just go back to doing docs, documentaries, and then you look up and the media landscape has totally changed. And it's all gone online. What you've seen is this big convergence between traditional TV, where you've got your big camera crews, now all you need is a smartphone, and then traditional print, have all gone to social media. So you've got this big convergence online where everyone's producing content for social media and digital media. And someone said to me, oh, do you want to be an influencer? And I was like, no, I can't be ready to do worse, absolutely not. But I thought, I need to get my head around social media and start looking into it. So this book came about for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was back home in Liverpool, and I was at my auntie's birthday party, and one of my cousin's friends turned to me, I'll do a Scouts accent now, just bought an EMH test online, and that's anti-malarion hormone. And I said, well, why did you do that? And she said, well, it's going to tell me how fertile I am, isn't it? And I was like, well, is it? And she said, well, that's what they said to me on social media. The Influence has said to me, it doesn't tell you how fertile you are. It's used in IVF to help guide treatment, but it can't give you a black and white answer to tell you how fertile you are. But that's how it's being marketed online. So it sort of occurred to me that this huge marketplace that people are going to find their health information. And then at the same time, I was speaking at a conference in Denmark, at the Royal College of GPs in Denmark, and there's this big movement in medicine called overdiagnosis, preventing overdiagnosis and too much medicine. So the idea that we overmedicalize everyday anxieties and symptoms, and we're increasing the sort of pool of what we consider to be medicine, as opposed to things happen in normal life. Sometimes you feel a bit rubbish, and it doesn't necessarily need a diagnostic label or a treatment. The idea that you expand the criteria for what is considered a disease.