Episode Details

Deb Cohen is an award winning investigative journalist and correspondent who trained as a physician and has worked with the BBC and BMJ. She just published BAD INFLUENCE, a book which takes us deep into the wellness-industrial complex—the confluence of the supplement, testing, tech, and pharma industries, and how they sell health anxiety to healthy people.

Here are some of the points we discussed:

—The big market in healthy, well people. Tests, wearables, imaging, supplements, etc

—Algorithms feed the health anxiety in an amplifying, vicious loop on the social media platforms. When the algorithm knows you better than you.

—The special qualities of influencers, likable, relatable, vulnerable, appearance as friends, certainty, cultivating parasocial relationships. “I understand you, I see you, I hear you.” Often with financial conflicts of interest. Plus hidden financial benefits.

—The inverted pyramid of evidence and displacement of trust. Anecdotes believed and accepted as best evidence instead of rigorous randomized trials. A big flip, doctors losing trust to influencers and the sponsors of influencers.

—The Nocebo effect of harm through expectations

—The epidemic of neurologic tics during the pandemic traced back to TikTok, a viral contagion with 5.8 billion views (Figure made with Notebook LM)

—Potential for regulation of patient/consumers/prosumer influencers

—Celebrity influencers and the recent NEJM paper

—Many ideas for how we can mitigate this mess (Graphic by Notebook LM)

—Many illuminating patient examples: Femtech, silicon breast implant illness (BII), beta blocker experiment, a bogus bioresonance of hair test in a woman with GI symptoms, full-body MRI of brain lesions (transmitted to the patient by an automated message) that were a false positive.

—The term “wellness”

—Concierge physicians

Thank you jojofinance, Vote Against Billionaires, Gretchen Faucett, Mary Powers, Jessica Coffman, and hundreds of others for tuning into my live video with Bad Influence! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Ground Truths has subscribers from every US state and 214 countries. There are over 302,000 followers of Ground Truths so nearly 90,000 folks who can easily convert to be free subscribers.

Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. If you’re not a subscriber, please join!

If you found this interesting PLEASE share it!

A couple of other things to note:

—Thanks to the voluntary paid subscribers who support our summer internship program for high school, college, and grad school students. On August 6th, we had a poster session with our SRTI summer interns (pictured below) which was an extraordinary event with about 100 posters!

—I hit a publication milestone that I had not ever envisioned. More than 400,000 citations with an h-index of 259, as tallied by Google Scholar

Thanks to all for your support of Ground Truths