Online wellness claims are often utter bunk. Here’s how to spot a fake

Today though, few of us can escape the cesspool of misinformation and its influence, which can be benign or fatal.

Many of us are vulnerable to the rubbish these ‘influencers’ are spouting.

“What can make this information more effective is if you think it’s going to have impact on you personally,” says Professor Adam Dunn, the head of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health at the University of Sydney.

And our health is personal to all of us. Misinformation is also “stickier”, he says, when it’s politically attached.

An interesting example of this was the COVID anti-vaxxer movement, which brought together a weird mix of crystal-holding hippies and extreme far-right conservatives who believe in libertarianism, aka sovereignty of self.

This makes sense when you consider the origins of the wellness movement that emerged in California in the 60s and 70s as part of the counterculture, marrying ideals of freedom, experimentation and equality.

It is rooted in individualism, Derek Beres, a co-host of the podcast “Conspirituality,” told PBS News. “[It] is all about the sovereignty of the self, and sovereignty is one of those words that crosses over between those two communities.”

On social media, that translates into individuals who share compelling stories of self-transformation that stand in for actual expertise or evidence, writes Stephanie Baker, author of Wellness Culture. She adds that they frame themselves as “persecuted heroes” daring to go against the mainstream media, medical tyranny and Big Tech.

Emotive personal stories and fear-based messages make misinformation “very appealing and more interesting than evidence-based, accurate information”, explains McCaffery.

These posts – which may be the only format of ‘news’ that some people see – rarely use alienating medical jargon, and “may correspond with previous bad experiences they have had with healthcare or government services which has undermined their trust and confidence.”

While all of this can make us more susceptible to health and wellness misinformation, in a world of information overload, and a space where science is evolving and not even the experts always agree, how do we decipher fact from fiction?

“I don’t think there’s a more complicated area,” admits Dunn, who suggests AI tools might help in the future to automatically assess the credibility of information. “The whole area of nutrition and wellness is a huge mess, and it’s very hard to know who to trust.”

Instead of giving more air time to the people “who are holding up their signs and yelling the loudest”, he says we must focus on arming ourselves with the tools to avoid the impact.

One way to do this is through critical appraisal, which is not always foolproof. Dunn points to a study that found the higher the education levels, the more sceptical people were about climate change.

“People who are relatively highly educated are more able to justify their world view and the decisions they make based on their world view, even if they’re completely wrong,” he says. “Just teaching people critical appraisal might not be enough.”

We can hone critical appraisal skills by building our “bullsh-t radar”, Mughal says. How do we do that? One way is to look out for absolutist statements.

So, claims like the ‘worst’ items or ‘best’ courses don’t consider individual differences in response and lack nuance.

Appealing to research without providing citations, context or considering the strength of the evidence is another red flag, Mughal adds, as are appeals to nature. Why? “Because [if it’s not ‘natural’] it must be just poisonous or toxic for you, right? There are natural things that kill you everywhere.”

Finally, he says, a common tactic of those spreading misinformation is to dismiss or encourage distrust in modern medicine while pushing their own unregulated, untested supplements and products.

To the bullsh-t radar list, Dunn adds conflict of interest, which is typically obvious if someone is trying to sell a product and deferral to authority by suggesting a claim is true because a “Dr” or “professor” said it. Instead of blind trust because of someone’s title, we should look to the quality and credibility of their work.

Though we’re not all equipped to understand what is and is not quality work, there are tools that can help, says McCaffery, including Trust it or Trash it, The CRAAP Test and the YouTube Hit Pause campaign.

She adds: “If lots of major information sources are saying the same thing it is more likely to be reliable. If just one source says something – it is worth checking other sources.”

This can all improve our health literacy, which “describes how well people understand medical language and information, how confident they are to ask questions about their health”.

And asking questions is key.

“I understand [some of these claims are] scary, but I’m trying to bring people back to reality,” says Mughal, who runs online courses to teach others to spot misinformation. “I’m trying to ask objective questions, to get you to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for evidence or to question people’s claims. Question my claims as well.”

“And as long as more people are doing that, I think we can eradicate or almost nullify the power that these kind of wellness claims have on people.”

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