Aug 11, 2026 · 60 min
How algorithms turn health anxiety into a market
Special Episode: Deborah Cohen & Bad Influence
Online health information can expand access and community while also magnifying fear, misinformation, overdiagnosis, and demand for unproven products.
- 1Algorithms reward extreme health anecdotes, making uncertainty and medical nuance harder to communicate.
- 2Commercial wellness products often repurpose tools for illness to sell optimization and monitoring to healthy consumers.
- 3Patients and clinicians need stronger health literacy, skepticism, and attention to the incentives behind online claims.
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Cohen’s sharpest warning is that products designed for illness can be marketed to healthy people as optimization tools, increasing anxiety rather than health.
The brief
Erin Welsh speaks with medically trained journalist Deborah Cohen about Bad Influence, tracing how fertility testing led her to investigate the internet’s broader role in shaping medical beliefs and anxieties.
The internet can provide community and access to information, but social platforms also amplify fear, nocebo effects, alarming anecdotes, and commercial messages that turn anxiety into demand.
Algorithms favor emotionally powerful stories over uncertainty, while gaps in women’s health research and a history of medical paternalism complicate how clinicians should respond to patients’ online discoveries.
Cohen explains why researchers struggle to measure social media’s health effects when technology companies restrict platform data, using ADHD content to explore underdiagnosis, overdiagnosis, and changing diagnostic boundaries.
The health optimization market extends illness-focused tools such as continuous glucose monitors to healthy consumers, often promising control while increasing vigilance and anxiety.
The practical test for health influencers is not just whether a claim sounds scientific, but who benefits from promoting the story or product.
Featuring
Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health
Peter Attia
TikTok Shop
GoogleBooks & mentions
Listen to the full episode and explore every guest, topic, and moment on PodLume.