Social Media and Wellness Deception

Abby J. scrolls after the lights go out. She isn’t hunting for anything in particular. She is being hunted.

Her feed serves up an ad for Tai Chi chair exercise and a meditation app. She swipes past them. The Instagram algorithm is timing her in milliseconds, clocking every pause, every split second she lingers before she moves on. It can track the location of her phone, that of her Facebook friends, where her purchases are made, and other digital data. It keeps adding to her profile.

The wellness pitches never let up. They come in captions, songs, and cartoons, or from fitness influencers. Be proactive. Don’t wait till it is too late. Buy now. She’s seen different versions of do-it-now since she first owned a phone.

Tonight, however, a caption gets her attention – “Kim Kardashian Endorses Lifesaving MRI Scans for Cancer and Aneurysm.” Coincidentally, Kim was diagnosed two years later with a brain aneurysm. It did not require treatment. Abby hovers over “Learn More.”

She’s ready to take charge of her health.

She is not taking charge. She is being played.

Fear Built for Only You

Was that headline true? Partly. Kim did reveal the small brain aneurysm found on an MRI in an October 2025 episode of her reality show. But the post never mentions that small aneurysms are common and that most never need treatment.

Is Abby J. gullible, or does misinformation slip past our natural defenses? Jonathan Swift wrote it in 1710: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Researchers at MIT tracked 126,000 stories shared on Twitter. Factual stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 test subjects, and a falsehood was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. The study found that humans, not bots or algorithms, drove the difference. That gap isn’t an accident. It’s a flaw in how human attention works, and the algorithms amplify it.

Truth is slow. It hedges. It bores. A lie is fast, certain, and dramatic, everything a scrolling finger wants at 11:30 at night. Linger on a health scare once, and the algorithm shows you more. It notices whether you hit “follow” or ask to hide an ad. Abby pauses on health-anxiety posts more often than on anything else. So the algorithm sends her more.

The Storefront Wellness Built

Health scams used to run off grainy websites, hawking miracle cures from someone’s basement. Now they’re polished, well-funded, and they hide behind one soft, unregulated word: wellness.

Researchers at the University of Sydney combed through 982 viral Instagram and TikTok posts promoting medical tests marketed straight to consumers: whole-body MRIs, multi-cancer blood tests, hormone tests, and gut microbiome kits. Eighty-four percent had a promotional tone. Only fifteen percent mentioned potential risks. Sixty-eight percent came from accounts with an unannounced financial interest in the tests.

Take the whole-body MRI that caught Abby’s interest. It has significant limitations in detecting breast and prostate cancers. Whole-body MRI doesn’t have the resolution to see early breast cancers. However, a dedicated breast MRI with different coils and I.V. contrast can. For prostate cancer, a PSA blood test, followed by a dedicated high-resolution prostate MRI can differentiate benign prostate growths from early tumors far better than whole-body MRI. In other words, whole-body MRI is a poor choice for finding the most common cancers in women and men.

Nearly everyone scanned has at least one abnormal finding, and the vast majority of those findings turn out to be irrelevant, including benign growths that would never have grown, spread, or hurt anyone. And no trial has shown that these scans help people live longer.

Here’s the timing problem nobody puts in the ad copy. A cancer typically grows for years before it forms a mass about one centimeter across, the size of a small pea, which is the minimum size to be seen on a whole-body MRI. Get scanned too early and you get a false sense of security, not a warning.

Before buying a direct-to-consumer test, ask another question: if it comes back positive, do you have a doctor who can walk you through what it means? If the answer is no, you’re not buying healthcare. You’re buying a ticket into an anxiety maze.

Check Out the Facts

Misinformation doesn’t stay in its lane. Abby scrolls past a few more screens, but the $2,500 price tag nags at her. Maybe it works for a Kardashian. She isn’t one. She finds the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) site and finds what they recommend for a woman her age. The answer: blood pressure, cholesterol, a Pap or HPV test for cervical cancer, diabetes screening, and whatever else her own doctor recommends.

What about people as young as she is getting colon cancer? She searches for MRI and colon cancer detection under age 40 (she is 37). The answer: whole-body MRI isn’t a reliable way to find early colon cancers or polyps. USPSTF recommends if she has symptoms or a family history, she should ask her doctor about a colonoscopy. For everyone else, routine screening starts at 45. She puts her phone on vibrate and goes to sleep.

Slow down before you buy. Ask who profits from the claim in front of you. Turn off your notifications. Turn off your phone every night. Put it in the drawer, not on the pillow. Your texts will keep till morning, same as they always have.

You can’t fix the internet. You can stop it from treating your brain like free real estate.

Next month: When algorithms turn lethal.

James Katz, MD, MPH