At the age of 18, I graduated from the pediatrician I’d seen since birth and entered the world of adult health care. It was the last time I had a consistent primary care doctor.
I still get a physical every year, but it’s usually with a new doctor each time, depending on multiple factors: my location, my insurance and which office answers the phone — usually after a few calls and never-ending hold music. Timely appointments are tough to come by, so if I need immediate attention, I’ll head to an urgent care and prepare for what could be an hours-long wait.
When I finally do get to see a doctor, it’s often a cold, clinical experience in a white cube of a room with a physician who’s a stranger and knows nothing about my medical history.
Compare that to videos from wellness influencers effortlessly floating across your phone screen, making longevity, happiness, less bloating, glowing skin, peak fitness, long hair and a strong immune system seem as easy as taking a supplement with your lemon water.
Answers to our pressing medical questions have never been so convenient and alluring.
I’m sure many people can relate to the struggle of finding quality health care information and providers. According to a 2023 study by the National Association of Community Health Centers and American Academy of Family Physicians, over 100 million Americans, about one-third of the population, face barriers to accessing primary care. Even more alarming, this number has almost doubled since 2014.
Dr. Mike Varshavski, known as “Doctor Mike,” is a board-certified family medicine physician with over 29 million social media followers. He says multiple factors have contributed to health care’s inability to provide people the answers they seek. These include solo practice family medicine physician offices closing or being bought out, fallen reimbursement rates by insurance companies and the administrative burden facing family medicine physicians. Family medicine is one of the lowest-paying specialties, making students less inclined to pursue it.
The obstacles to access primary care also loom larger for women and BIPOC communities, particularly Black women, who are more likely to experience medical gaslighting, making them less likely to trust a doctor in the future.
Trust is a significant difficulty when accessing health care.
“Survey data indicates that trust in institutionalized expertise has been in decline in the US since the 1950s,” says Stephanie Alice Baker, associate professor of sociology at City St George’s, University of London. “Throughout the late 20th century, a series of scandals involving the pharmaceutical and food industries has sown distrust about the financial and political motives of scientific and medical institutions.”
This distrust was further cemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Pew Research Center, confidence in scientists acting in the public’s best interests dipped by 14% between April 2020 and fall 2023.
Yet right within our grasp, tens of millions of videos on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram feature people whose lives have allegedly been improved by a wellness ritual or product. Collectively, they promote all aspects of wellness, a multitrillion-dollar industry that encompasses mental wellness, healthy eating, physical activity, wellness tourism, weight loss, homeopathic and naturopathic alternative medicine, personal care, beauty and more.
But these videos don’t always have your best interests in mind. There’s a wide spectrum of creators and motivations, ranging from medical professionals who may have corporate sponsorships or be promoting their own products, to those with dubious intentions: influencers with little or no medical training who accept gifts or run ads for the companies whose products they’re promoting. They could also be pushing their own products first and actual wellness second.
The Federal Trade Commission requires that any relationship between an influencer and a brand be disclosed in a manner that viewers can see and understand, such as with #ad or #sponsored. Yet, regardless of the disclosures, these wellness videos give the impression that every aspect of your health is in your control.
“What wellness influencers do very well is make it seem like if you do X, you will be healthier,” says Jessica B. Steier, who holds a doctorate in public health, is the founder and host of Unbiased Science and executive director of the Science Literacy Lab. “It makes people feel like they have a ton of control over their health, and that’s empowering.”
It’s no wonder we get drawn in, lured down the rabbit hole into a trap of misinformation if the influencer doesn’t have their facts straight — or worse, is intentionally misleading us.
As a journalist who’s covered health, wellness and lifestyle for the past 11 years, I’ve reported on countless wellness trends. What I’ve learned from the doctors I’ve interviewed is that what’s most important isn’t the trend of the moment, but the basic tenets of a healthy lifestyle, such as a balanced diet, exercise, sleep, stress management and community. But these aren’t the magic bullets that make wellness trends so marketable.
While overcoming the obstacles to accessing a primary care doctor can be frustrating, it’s essential to have a medical expert you can trust, so you don’t end up relying on information from uncredentialed influencers promoting the latest wellness trends for their own benefit and possibly putting your health at risk.
I asked Brian Southwell, a distinguished fellow and lead scientist for public understanding of science at RTI International and an adjunct professor of internal medicine with Duke University, how he would define misinformation. He points me to a definition he worked on in a 2025 consensus study with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine:
“Misinformation about science is information that asserts or implies claims that are inconsistent with the weight of accepted scientific evidence at the time (reflecting both quality and quantity of evidence).”
One infamous source of health care misinformation online was Belle Gibson, an Australian wellness influencer whose story inspired the Apple Cider Vinegar series on Netflix. In 2013, at age 22, she lied about having terminal brain and other cancers to her Instagram followers, claiming that instead of treating her supposed illnesses with chemotherapy and radiation, she was healing herself naturally with a healthy diet. From there she launched her wellness app, The Whole Pantry, and a cookbook, earning half a million dollars in less than two years.
Fitness influencer Brian Johnson is also known as Liver King on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. In 2021 he promoted that consuming raw animal organs, performing fitness challenges, getting back to an “ancestral” lifestyle and, naturally, consuming supplements from his brand with a $100 million annual turnover could give his followers a muscular body like his own. In 2022, leaked emails revealed that the then-43-year-old had been injecting himself with performance and image-enhancing drugs like steroids and human growth hormone.
The lifestyles that influencers encourage have even resulted in death. Paloma Shemirani died at age 23 from a heart attack caused by an untreated tumor after refusing chemotherapy in favor of an alternative cancer treatment called Gerson therapy — coffee enemas, supplements and a plant-based diet with raw juices — as recommended by her mother, Kate Shemirani, a conspiracy theorist and known anti-vaccine influencer.
There have also been anti-vaccine influencers who died because of COVID-19. There was Dmitriy Stuzhuk in 2020, who told his followers that COVID-19 wasn’t real, and Cirsten Weldon in 2022, who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the illness.
Knowing who to trust in the world of wellness has become even more complicated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr. is not a medical doctor and has no background in medicine. He also surrounds himself with wellness influencers who promote the Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Why might people trust wellness influencers more than their own doctor? When I asked Dr. Garth Graham, cardiologist, researcher, public health expert and director and global head of health care and public health partnerships at YouTube and Google Health, he referenced the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health.
The report, which included over 16,000 participants across 16 countries, found that people consider someone a legitimate health expert not only when they have academic training, but also when they have personal experience with health issues.
“People trust information from people who are similar to them or at least can empathize with their own cultural or personal experiences, so that opens the room for a diversity of voices to be able to contribute to that,” says Graham.
Among the 73% of Edelman report participants who see a clinician regularly, 53% feel that their doctor is “slightly or not qualified” to care for all their health problems, including physical, mental, social and environmental issues. If their doctor can’t address an issue, 65% of these people said they turn to non-institutional sources like friends and family, online searches and social media.
Though it may seem like it, keep in mind that not everything on social media is misinformation.
“Headlines might sometimes suggest that we’re totally inundated with misinformation, and I’m not sure that’s an accurate statement,” Southwell says. “I think that there is a lot of information that we don’t necessarily pay attention to, but that is accurate and useful.”
Your likelihood of encountering misinformation becomes a problem when you consider that, according to a 2025 health information and trust tracking poll conducted by nonprofit information organization KFF, which included 1,283 US adults, 55% of adults say they use social media to access health information and advice, at least occasionally. This includes larger shares of young adults and Black and Latinx adults.
Edelman reports that young people aged 18 to 34 were twice as likely to listen to uncredentialed advice as adults over 55. At least once, 58% of people in this age group said they regretted a health decision they made based on misinformation.
The tricks and tech of the wellness trade
We all gravitate toward trusting people with shared experiences. But on social media, there are additional factors that lure us in. As many seek out health information that will heal us and reverse the clock on aging, ironically, what it often comes down to is time.
“People spend about 2 hours a day on their phones on social media … They see influencers. I’m a physician and I’m online, so they’ll see me too, but they’ll see these people who look approachable and relatable,” says practicing pediatric allergist and clinical immunologist Dr. Zachary Rubin, a medical educator on social media with close to 4 million followers. “They start to develop this parasocial relationship where they think they actually know this person when, really, they don’t.”
After all, you might listen for hours to an influencer you follow online, compared with only 15 minutes with your own doctor.
Wellness influencers speak with authority and confidence, provide easy solutions to complex problems and oversimplify nuanced information. Baker wrote about this in her 2019 book Lifestyle Gurus.
“The three A’s (the impression of authenticity, accessibility and autonomy) are central to how influencers establish trust and intimacy with their followers,” Baker says.
Influencers also make it seem like they’re on the same level as you, says Mariah L. Wellman, assistant professor in the College of Communication at Michigan State University, who is writing the book In Search of Wellness: Social Media Influencers and the Transformation of an Industry. The power dynamics in a patient-doctor relationship aren’t there with wellness influencers.
This makes it much easier for wellness influencers to develop relationships with their followers. They have the time to do so compared to doctors who see patients all day for only short pockets of time. Posting a video that lacks research and evidence also doesn’t take up as many hours as researching and providing evidence-based information.
A network of credentialed health care influencers called Fides was created in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by Andrew Pattison, team lead of digital channels in the Department of Digital Health and Innovation at the World Health Organization.
Fides — which comes from the phrase “bona fide,” meaning “in or with good faith” in Latin, and is also the name of the Roman goddess of trust, faithfulness and good faith — aims to create quality health content that counteracts health misinformation with evidence-based information.
“To create misinformation takes minutes. To debunk misinformation sometimes takes weeks,” Pattison says. “To create good health content takes time, effort, knowledge and research, whereas to create health misinformation, you can do it in 5 minutes and all you need is a phone.”
Wellness influencers also know how to use technology to their advantage. “These influencers that I follow are utilizing every part of the apps possible to push their narrative and sell their products,” says Mallory DeMille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast and a social media creator who uses her background in marketing, communications and social media to post videos that call out problematic wellness influencers.
Consider the influencers you see using TikTok Shop to promote wellness products. According to Capital One Shopping’s research, about 79% of US TikTok Shop products are in the health and beauty category.
Those products are supposed to be bound by TikTok Shop rules that prohibit promoting content if it includes medical claims, exaggerated promises, weight management products, phrases or implications about treating or preventing any disease or claims that imply certain products have pharmacological, immunological or metabolic effects.
I put this to the test by searching for “weight supplements” on TikTok Shop. I came across Kourtney Kardashian’s “Lemme Burn” (which I now receive constant ads for in my feed). When I click on the product, a video voiceover tells me that since the creator started taking the supplement, they no longer have a sweet tooth and have become a whole new person three months postpartum. Text over the video says “summer body coming right up.”
When I click on the account, @mbti.dose, it’s obvious that it’s not a real person. There are countless videos with hands holding various products and different voices encouraging you to buy them.
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