Dear Joanne,
You are a GP, and last week you shared a widely read message on LinkedIn about “health gurus”. By that you mean the self-proclaimed health experts on social media. TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are swarming with charlatans telling their tens of thousands of followers with great assurance that they should not take birth control pills because it is a ‘criminal hormonal experiment’. Or that they should not take antibiotics under any circumstances, because it is “dangerous for the gut microbiota”.
And so now you regularly meet unwanted pregnant little girls in your clinic, or people with serious infections who urgently need antibiotics. But they don’t believe you, because you’re just a doctor, and what they know about health now, compared to self-proclaimed experts is much more consistent, with a huge reach—130,000 followers. They can’t be wrong, that idea. (The answer remains the counter question: “Do you know who also had many followers?”)
The fact that there are already so many critical questions to be asked about the hormonal effect of antibiotic pills or treatment guns makes it even more complicated: The claims of some health experts are not just nonsense, but a colorful mix of critical questions, lots of bells and whistles, a touch of insanity and inappropriate affirmation. In others, madness, mercantile motives, or a combination of both prevail, and sorcery drips from it. Under the name @devragendokter, I started an Instagram attack with reliable medical information. That your followers are only a fraction of the many charlatans is a bad sign of the times.
Impostors in all their forms must be fought to the core, as you are doing now. And fortunately, poison-filled for years, anti-quackery society, recently treated Germanic medicine, which tells cancer patients that their tumor stems from trauma, and offers them crazy texts like: “Forget the diagnosis, have fun.”
Charlatans should also be completely ridiculed. This is exactly what Sjamadriaan’s adorable Twitter and Instagram account is. Created by science journalist Adriaan ter Braack, who describes itself as an “all-out wrecking ball”. The amount of deranged madness about our health that Ter Braack has managed to wring out from the depths of social media is truly mind-boggling. He explains that wellness influencers are both a disease in and of themselves a contagion. Sjamadriaan’s autobiography best quips him: “Science is not an opinion—I suppose.” This summer, he’s been busy fighting the frenzy over the new “vitality patches” topic: sunscreen. Because this gives you cancer, according to health experts. Sunscreens are the new vaccine.
What is there to do other than fight the health gurus intrinsically and expose them as idiots? Stop letting them speak as experts. The Op1 talk show introduced Fajah Lourens as a health expert, and Renze Charlotte Labee as a brain expert. Why? Of course: because they’re famous, they look good and they speak more easily than the real experts: scholars with their tough words and their unworthy TV reservations.
In the way they gain the brilliance of expertise they completely lack, real doctors like you have to swim against the tide. mud stream.
