A pediatric expert says false health information online is making his job harder and putting young people at real risk.
CLEVELAND — Scroll through social media for a few minutes and you’re bound to find someone offering health advice. Some of it is helpful. A lot of it isn’t. One doctor who treats teenagers and young adults says the consequences of that misinformation show up in his exam room every day.
According to Scott E. Hadland, MD, MPH, MS, chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Mass General Brigham for Children and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, roughly one in five teens regularly turn to social media for health information, with TikTok leading the way. The algorithm, he notes, doesn’t distinguish between accurate content and harmful content. It rewards emotion and engagement, not accuracy.
How to spot a bad source
Hadland said there are clear patterns that signal unreliable health content, and parents can teach their kids to recognize them.
Credentials are the first thing to check. Titles like “wellness coach,” “hormone expert” and “gut health specialist” are not regulated, meaning anyone can use them. Legitimate clinicians typically list a license: MD, DO, NP, RN, or RD.
Next, watch for personal stories presented as proof. One person’s experience is not a study, and it tells you nothing about whether something is safe or effective for your teen.
Then there’s the language itself.
“I tell you what, most health problems take a lot more than just a simple trick, and believe me, doctors want you to know everything about your health, and that’s in fact what we spend most of our days doing is helping families understand their health better by having deep and rich conversations,” Hadland said.
Other red flags include: hidden sponsorship through affiliate links or # ad tags, content designed to provoke fear or outrage, and quick-fix promises for complex conditions like acne, anxiety, or weight issues.
A three-step check worth teaching
Hadland recommends giving teens a simple framework for evaluating what they see online.
First: Who is this person, and what are their actual qualifications?
Second: What’s the source? Are they citing a study or a clinical guideline, or just a personal opinion?
Third: Who profits if you believe this? Supplements, coaching programs, and apps are often the real product behind the advice.
AI is making it harder
Dr. Hadland warns that the rise of AI-generated health content will make things significantly worse.
“I think that these problems are going to get even worse when we have AI influencers who are sharing this information; often the purpose here is to make money for whoever is behind that AI influencer, or in some cases it might actually be malicious.”
What parents can do
Banning social media outright may not be the answer. Dr. Hadland said that approach can actually backfire, pushing teens to consume content more secretly and cutting parents out of the conversation entirely.
His recommendation is to scroll with your teen sometimes. While scrolling, ask what they think of a video before sharing your own reaction. And make sure they know they can bring health questions to their pediatrician without judgment, especially questions about anxiety, eating, sleep, and their bodies, which is where most of this content targets them.
“It’s actually much better for parents to engage with a young person, ask the young person what are they seeing online, what influencers are they following? Why are they following them? What’s the information that they’re learning from them — and to really be curious about this because that curiosity will help parents to drive conversations that they can have in which they highlight the ways in which what a young person might be watching could be false or misleading,” Hadland said.
When misinformation causes real harm
Hadland said he regularly sees young patients whose health problems trace directly back to what they encountered online.
“One thing that I commonly see is increasingly a number of young people coming in with eating disorders, with concerns about their body and how their body looks, because they have seen content online that made them feel uncomfortable about their own bodies or may have given them advice on how to lose weight or take a supplement that might be dangerous,” he said.
When young people bring those questions to their doctor, he said, that’s actually a good sign. It opens the door for an honest, informed conversation — which is exactly where trusted health guidance should come from.
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