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)
Go on Facebook, look up and type any illness + cure
4chan comes to mind. /fit/ would probably have a bunch of BS for you to trawl, /ck/ will probably have dietary misinfo, maybe /sci/ as well.
That will actually be helpful towards the weird stuff that men get into in addition to wholly unnecessary “hormone replacement therapy” (aka juicing on steroids)
My wife is a Rheumatologist. She actually had a patient attempt to use an article SHE WROTE to argue against her diagnosis. The article the patient was “citing” was not even applicable to the symptoms the patient presented.
Not really the internet, but I remember Dr. Oz being a daytime TV show that was full of quackery delivered as though it was coming from an expert.
Dr. Oz and Oprah are featured in Behind The Bastards for a reason. Oprah actually got a 7-episode mini-series.
Any homeopathic group or moms advice group.
Reddit, facebook, quora…
Facebook, tiktok, insta. Influencer girls promoting their own products, mineral stones, etc. Groups with conservatives, old people, MAGA, right wing extremists, hippies, yoga guru’s, basically any group with low IQ people who feel hurt and claim a monopoly on the truth. Truth social could be great too. And religious groups of course.
Truth social is one I hadn’t thought of. I should also look into getting on an emailing list from Goop.
They both should have associated accounts across multiple social media sites.
That’s actually super helpful. I’ll need a few “content creators” to seed the dummy account with.
Search for health and they don’t want you to know or doctors don’t want you to know.
That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.
The more you engage with a type of post the more they will give yo that type of post so go on tiktok or threads and just engage with a bunch of them and you will see more of it but just know that especially by engaging you will actively be worsening misinformation. I know you said 1: million doesn’t matter but especially if you are looking for source material your initial engagement could easily cause a post that would otherwise stay in those mini cults to get spread
It hurts my soul that this is actually a good addition.
The Facebook groups. They’re so batshit. I’m going to PM you a screenshot I took because I can’t share photos on this community for some reason.
ask your patients where they are getting their stuff from, that way you will also know what places are more popular than others.
I do ask them, but some of the things they say/ask about are just so baffling that I’d like to know about it ahead of time so I know what to respond with or recommend instead. Also, it’s kind of along the lines of needing to know all the slang terms for drugs so I know what they’re talking about when they OD on something or take something that interferes with their actual medications.
There I can help, well kind of: not a medical advice though!
I highly appreciate the effort you’re putting in - and in addition to preparing for everything practice w few communication patterns on how to make them give you the info you need. You won’t be prepared enough for some of the shit people come up with, no chance.
S good example could be a set of guided questions or statements they should disagree or agree with.
I’m not medically educated at all so I can’t come up with food examples but what I’m trying to say is: prepare at least as well for crazy as you’re preparing for hard facts.
And for the drugs I can at least give s language perspective: slang has often very local derivates so while pages Likes these are w good stating point: https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/drug-alcohol-slang/ nothing beats a native speaker.
So you could either start a career as drug addict, or if you lack the funds and time, you could reach out to your local social workers and ask them to give a brief slang training wherever you work. From experience many are very happy to help others who get helping!
Just a few ideas, perhaps something resonates with you! Good luck ❤️
Look for any common condition using any search engine and discover just how misinformed the global population really is.
I am an ICT professional with over 40 years experience and in my own field it’s often obvious how a technical response sounds right but is in reality absolute bollocks.
I know from lived medical experience that the same is true for medicine. However, being outside my own field it’s much harder to detect, even with quotes and citations.
I got you.
Any pyramid scheme that has anything to do with food or health. Their books are troves of made-up shit. Sometimes they’ll say true things (i.e. highly processed foods are less nutritious than whole foods), but then tell you to eat highly processed food five times a day.
They’ll have several hour-long meetings where they talk about how the magic crystals, protein bar, or energy shake is changing their life.
Their websites are fucking whack-a-doodle. There’s usually one quack with an MD rubber-stamping, fabricating, and/or misrepresenting evidence.
Facebook.
