The Influencer Will See You Now
Half of Americans under 50 get their health information from influencers. The people medicine has failed are leaning on them the most.
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Pew Research Center dropped a new study this week confirming what the timeline has been telling us for years: half of American adults under 50 get their health and wellness information from influencers and podcasts. The majority of those influencers—about 60 percent—don’t describe themselves as healthcare professionals. Around one in six don’t claim to have any expertise at all.
The bulk of the reporting on this study focuses on the lack of healthcare credentials among wellness influencers and on the fact that most people take the information they’re given with a grain of salt, despite seeking out the shaker. But the most interesting finding to me is that Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are more likely to get health information from influencers, as are people without health insurance.
A few more interesting nuggets:
Fourteen percent of people who get their information from health and wellness influencers say “learning about things I don’t want to ask my doctor about” is a major reason they look online. But for Black, Hispanic, and Asian consumers, that number jumps to roughly 20 percent. For White consumers, it’s 10 percent.
When Pew asked whether the information from influencers was “extremely or very different” from what people get from their healthcare providers, 24 percent of Black consumers said yes, against 16 percent of White consumers and 14 percent of Asian consumers. Twenty-three percent of lower-income consumers said the same, compared with 13 percent of upper-income consumers.
It makes sense that the populations the formal medical system has historically failed are the same ones leaning hardest on the parallel economy looking to fill the gaps. Plus, healthcare in America has been in free fall for a while now. Appointments are getting shorter, costs are rising, and patients increasingly feel like doctors don’t care about them. The misinformation that poured onto the internet during COVID—and pushed even more Americans to distrust medical institutions—didn’t help. Neither does the country’s long history of medical neglect, experimentation, and dismissal that taught communities of color, Black ones in particular, to fear medical institutions.
Concern compounds when you consider that a meaningful share of these influencers are selling supplements that have never been independently tested, hawking lab panels designed to find a problem that justifies the next thing they promote, or otherwise pushing people toward the darker side of the MAHA Matrix.
Still, influencers are doing something many healthcare providers are not. They’re making people feel seen and understood, which is what care is supposed to do. That many of those influencers are selling supplements and shame is the wellness industry’s crime. That they got the opening is medicine’s.