Bad Influence (how the internet hijacked our health)

Bad Influence is a timely book on how the internet has hijacked our health. Although being online can help others in many ways, not usually when medical advice is coming from influencers:

The author begins the book with the obvious:

You used to see a doctor. Now you go online.

Jaron Lanier (who famously campaigns against social media) once wrote that ‘It’s impossible to improve health using Facebook. Because every time you get good medical advice, it’ll eventually be overwhelmed by bad medical advice, which will be more engaging’.

Especially when most people have smartphones, if you want to know something, you just go look it up. But that’s not always such a smart move:

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A library can bring you back the right one. Neil Gaiman

Need to focus? Lose weight? Build muscle? Advice is just a click away. But now with fewer face-to-face GP appointments (and the government bringing in online appointments as if that’s a good thing), ‘influencers’ have stepped into the breach.

From ‘weird cleanses’ to dodgy detoxes, and corporate-funded bad nutrition advice, it’s all out there for the taking. And you have to decide which is real, without studying seven years for a medical degree.

In this book, a real medical doctor reveals the truth behind AI-powered diagnoses to ‘preventative’ screening, and how the Internet has now resulted in not being able to distinguish medicine from marketing.

This book is a much-needed prescription for the unregulated world of online health misinformation, by an expert who knows and understands what she is talking about. I’ll be telling my patients to read this! Dr Ellie Cannon

This book will hopefully influence how you access healthcare information. And maybe think twice before you make (often complex) decisions about your body, based solely on your social media feed. Prof. John Tregoning