Doctor Influencers: Should They Exist?

glamour.com:

By Just before the pandemic, ob-gyn , MD, noticed an odd trend in her New York City clinic. “I was seeing a lot of patients talking about how they heard something about how to take care of their vaginas from Instagram,” she says.

And it wasn’t just vaginas they were talking about. Irobunda says women would come in spouting misinformation about or specific medical conditions after following social media influencers.

She quickly realized professional action needed to be taken.As a pandemic project, Irobunda started a blog and created Instagram and accounts and now, two years after embarking on that project, has more than 100,000 followers across both platforms and hosts a podcast called Dr.

Heather’s Advisory Cervix. Irobunda is just one example of a uniquely current phenomenon that has improved access to accurate medical information that has resulted in the dissemination of dangerously erroneous health claims: Meet the medical influencer.As journalist and author says on her podcast, , “Everywhere we go, there’s an influencer for .” She was prompted to explore the medical facet of this in an episode when, stuck in the hospital for a week following her son’s concussion, she noticed off-duty nurses constantly consuming nurse influencer content on their phones.“​​One of the most shocking things I learned is that medical providers are now looking to find out what information people are getting on fertility and chronic diseases, and they’re using that to figure out new ways to talk to their patients and improve their bedside manner,” Piazza says. “But there are also those putting out misinformation about vaccines, COVID, autism, different kinds of diets—and the general public trusts them.