I’m a 3rd year medical student and I’ve already been caught off-guard a few times by the WILD medical misinformation my patients talk about, and figured that I should probably get ahead of it so that I can have some kind of response prepared. (Or know what the hell they’ve OD’d on or taken that is interfering with their actual medications)
I’m setting up a dummy tablet with a new account that isn’t tied to me in any reasonable way to collect medical misinformation from. I’m looking at adding tik tok, instagram, twitter, reddit, and facebook accounts to train the algorithms to show medical misinformation. Are there any other social media apps or websites I should add to scrape for medical misinformation?
Also, any pointers on which accounts to look for on those apps to get started? I have an instagram account for my artwork and one for sharing accurate medical information, but I’ve trained my personal algorithm to not show me all the complete bullshit for the sake of my blood pressure. (And I have never used tik tok before, so I have no goddamn clue how that app works)
It hurts my soul that this is actually a good addition.
Search for health and they don’t want you to know or doctors don’t want you to know.
That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.
Just search any symptom and add to it “home remedies” what ever will come will probably include medical misinformation.
That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.
Facebook, tiktok, insta. Influencer girls promoting their own products, mineral stones, etc. Groups with conservatives, old people, MAGA, right wing extremists, hippies, yoga guru’s, basically any group with low IQ people who feel hurt and claim a monopoly on the truth. Truth social could be great too. And religious groups of course.
Truth social is one I hadn’t thought of. I should also look into getting on an emailing list from Goop.
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I wonder if there is a list of Joe Rogan guests or an AI summary of the episodes. Also, Snopes covers a lot and won’t rot your brain.
I’ll be looking into free versions of Chat GPT and the like. And I like the idea of AI summaries of Joe Rogan because I don’t think I could actually listen to him without having an actual aneurysm.
My wife is a Rheumatologist. She actually had a patient attempt to use an article SHE WROTE to argue against her diagnosis. The article the patient was “citing” was not even applicable to the symptoms the patient presented.
Be aware that when you seek out medical disinfo on social media, you don’t just increase its visibility in your own feed, but in everyone else’s as well.
One account in the milieu isn’t going to make that much of a difference.
ask your patients where they are getting their stuff from, that way you will also know what places are more popular than others.
I do ask them, but some of the things they say/ask about are just so baffling that I’d like to know about it ahead of time so I know what to respond with or recommend instead. Also, it’s kind of along the lines of needing to know all the slang terms for drugs so I know what they’re talking about when they OD on something or take something that interferes with their actual medications.
There I can help, well kind of: not a medical advice though!
I highly appreciate the effort you’re putting in - and in addition to preparing for everything practice w few communication patterns on how to make them give you the info you need. You won’t be prepared enough for some of the shit people come up with, no chance.
S good example could be a set of guided questions or statements they should disagree or agree with.
I’m not medically educated at all so I can’t come up with food examples but what I’m trying to say is: prepare at least as well for crazy as you’re preparing for hard facts.
And for the drugs I can at least give s language perspective: slang has often very local derivates so while pages Likes these are w good stating point: https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/drug-alcohol-slang/ nothing beats a native speaker.
So you could either start a career as drug addict, or if you lack the funds and time, you could reach out to your local social workers and ask them to give a brief slang training wherever you work. From experience many are very happy to help others who get helping!
Just a few ideas, perhaps something resonates with you! Good luck ❤️
University press releases, they often are very far from what the actual research says
Bookmarked on my personal accounts because then I’ll have access to full text articles through my institutional subscription when I go digging. :)
Not really the internet, but I remember Dr. Oz being a daytime TV show that was full of quackery delivered as though it was coming from an expert.
Dr. Oz and Oprah are featured in Behind The Bastards for a reason. Oprah actually got a 7-episode mini-series.
Instagram reels and TikTok are filled to the brim with medical misinformation.
You may enjoy Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. They do a lot of history stuff but as time has gone on it has more and more been about current events, exploring the history and science behind these grifts. Not exactly what you’re asking for, but Dr. Sydnee is one of my leftist role models and I think they do great work to identify and explain these things to laypeople.
Dunno what type of tablet you’ve got but Apple News is pretty solidly loaded with medical fear mongering that’s sanewashed via being from interviews with “experts.”
Buzzfeed, Newsweek, HuffPost, etc. are your main name-brand culprits. Other magazines/websites also push this garbage but it’s a little more obvious.
Other key words across social media would probably be “nutritionist,” “coach,” “guru,” and other catchy terms that basically mean unlicensed. I’ve never used TikTok but when I was on Instagram years ago those were the biggest offenders.
Signing up for emailing lists is probably a good place to start. I also accidentally subscribed to an RFK apologist Substack when it was recommending health-related writers to me.
