Should we believe health influencers?

2024-04-22 09:00:00

Health has not escaped the surge of influencers who are rampant on Instagram, as on TikTok, with growing success. While we can be delighted to see medical information being provided to as many people as possible in a popularized form, the proliferation of content constitutes a jungle in which it is sometimes difficult to navigate. Behind these numerous accounts are health professionals – doctors, physiotherapists, dentists – but also sports coaches, naturopaths and osteopaths.

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How can you not get lost in this colossal mass of content whose quality, unfortunately, sometimes leaves something to be desired? In the list of health influencers, we find Marine Ltemporel, who is a doctor and who has more than a million subscribers on Instagram; Grégoire Gibault, aka Major Mouvement, occupies second place with his 839,000 followers and Thibault Geoffray, who is a sports coach, closes the podium with his 824,000 subscribers.

The law of June 9, 2023

The temptation of advertising promotion is great for influencers with a strong audience, but a law now regulates content in order to limit the risk of abuse. Law 2023-451 of June 9, 2023 aims to regulate commercial influence and to combat the excesses of influencers on networks, because, unfortunately, they exist. This law prohibits the promotion of products, acts, processes and methods presented as comparable, preferable or substitutable to therapeutic acts, protocols and prescriptions.

READ ALSO Supervision of influencers: what the law wants to changeThis law is fundamental and absolutely necessary because behind the plethora of content there are sometimes statements that are very far removed from current scientific data. All influencers share the same stage, whether they are health professionals or not, and their content has equal value in the eyes of their followers. For example, nutritional advice provided by a coach coexists with that of nutritionists, each being free to praise their method or application for losing weight.

The danger of popularization

Are health influencers really reliable? The answer is yes for the majority of them, especially if they are healthcare professionals. Indeed, the latter are bound by their code of ethics which exposes them to disciplinary proceedings in the event of abuse and more particularly promotional practices aimed at placing products.

However, we must treat with great caution the advice sometimes given in a simplistic manner and which might be counterproductive or even damaging. How many Internet users suffering from a shoulder have watched videos offering “three or four exercises to do if your shoulder hurts”? If it were enough to do the same three exercises for shoulder pain, the expertise of health professionals would be a myth and their many years of study would be useless. However, there are dozens of possible causes of shoulder pain, from bursitis to capsulitis to functional disorders of the mechanics of this joint complex that only health professionals are able to analyze. . There is no standardized exercise protocol that might address all situations. Worse yet, certain movements might be perfectly indicated for one diagnosis and contraindicated for another.

Videos are an opportunity for certain influencers to sell their methods or their books and some of them are, unfortunately, unscrupulous regarding the health of their subscribers. So, how to navigate this trap? First by checking that medical information is indeed provided by a health professional, ideally a practitioner of the specialty concerned by the subject of his video. In addition, the diagnosis must be clearly specified. Thus, offering exercises for shoulder capsulitis will make sense because the diagnosis is announced, whereas offering exercises in the event of “shoulder pain” will be at best risky – and sometimes lucky –, at worst likely to make the situation worse. As for the health advice provided by the myriad of coaches, some are serious and reliable, while others are irrelevant and dangerous. If the law now regulates the commercial excesses of certain unscrupulous influencers, the certification of information in the era of fake news is more necessary than ever. In this vast world of influence, just like on social networks and the Internet, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between quality information and misinformation.

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