Patients are seeking medical advice on Instagram and TikTok, where it’s hard to tell fact from fiction.
Stephanie Santos Paulo finds that doctors are divided on whether medical professionals should be joining the conversation
Consultant geriatrician Elena Mucci had no idea what Instagram was before creating an account, on the advice of her trainees, at age 45. Five years later, she is still making short videos in which she shares the medical knowledge she has amassed over 25 years of clinical practice.
Her magnetic social media presence has attracted 290 000 followers and even a couple of visits from presidents of African countries, who have flown to see her in her private clinic in Hastings.
Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine debate on whether being on social media is an advantage to doctors, Mucci said, “If you’re a doctor with all that knowledge, you need to share it. That knowledge is now consumed via social media.”
Nearly one in four people in the UK reported turning to social media and artificial intelligence chatbots for health guidance, in a survey of 2000 people conducted by the health tech startup Semble.
Similarly, in the US more than one in five people made health decisions based on information seen on social media, according to survey data from more than 7270 adults, published in JAMA.
But while health information online is abundant and easily accessible, the quality of advice given can be questionable. In the US survey 78% of respondents believed that health information on social media was false or misleading.
Experts have called for tighter regulation of medical content on social media, arguing that health influencers, whether medically trained or not, are subject to biases such as entrepreneurial and financial interests.
Meanwhile China’s internet content regulator has gone as … [Paid subscription needed to continue reading the article…]
SOURCE: BMJ 2026. by Stephanie Santos Paulo, freelance journalist; 395 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2026-101156 (Published 28 October 2026) Cite this as: BMJ 2026;395:e10115.