Why we still cannot trust most online health content
A decade after the search-engine revolution in medicine, the median piece of health content the public encounters online is still inaccurate. We need to do better.
Despite a decade of investment in medical fact-checking, the median piece of health content an Indian patient encounters online remains commercially conflicted, clinically unreliable, or both. The reasons are structural: incentives reward virality, not accuracy; AI generation has lowered the cost of producing plausible-but-wrong content; and clinician contribution remains rare because the platform economics do not reward it.
Editors of this publication take the view that medical journalism has a duty to invest in slow, expensive, sourced reporting. Anything less is harm in a friendly typeface.