The New York Times - Influencers Call These Medical Tests Lifesaving. Here’s What You May Not Know.
Celebrities and other influencers promote increasingly popular medical tests such as full-body M.R.I. scans. The recent study by Dr Brooke Nickel and colleagues, examined these posts along with those for products that claim to detect cancer in blood or analyse a hormone linked to fertility, testosterone levels and the gut microbiome.
The results of that study, which scrutinized nearly 1,000 TikTok and Instagram posts from accounts with hundreds of millions of combined followers, were published Wednesday. The paper found that an overwhelming majority of these posts were misleading, painting an overly rosy picture of these tests and rarely including scientific evidence.