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)
Also try looking up random medications names and see what comes up ? As a complete layman that is usually what I do when I (or a family member) am taking or about to take some new meds. Of course with a generalist scientific background, the best I can do is try to compare different sources and apply some critical thinking/common sense, but I assume a lot of people don’t do that (and be fair, I don’t always do it either). And/or trust the doctors who are sometimes incompetent self-important assholes (not generalizing at all, but I’ve heard and seen first hand my fair share of horror stories)
I have to know all of the medications for my board exams, but knowing what bullshit the pharma companies are advertising would be useful. There’s a lot of people who will ask for Ozempic and then be horrified when they learn about the side effects (or the price of the medication). I worry a lot about the “compounding pharmacies” that will mail people knock-off Ozempic with minimal medical oversight. It’s just a matter of time before someone gets killed by the pancreatitis or something.
Yeah my comment is probably not that useful to you since I am in France where the medical misinformation issues are different from other countries. Here it’s illegal to advertise drugs that are only sold with a prescription, but pharmaceutical companies sell all kinds of make-believe bullshit drugs that are basically expensive placebos.
Here’s a couple of pics of some funny ones a friend saw in a pharmacy just the other week
(The right one says “doubts - indecision”…)