Nurses are being trained to take on social media medical misinformation | Latest Tech News
A frontline battle against troubling trends.
Doctors and health specialists have long been sounding the alarm over the controversial sizzling health takes flooding TikTookay and other social media platforms.
Now, nurses are being trained to combat back against the wellness trends and misinformation spreading across their sufferers’ feeds.
With medical misinformation turning into rampant on social media, nurses are now being trained to sort out TikTookay trends. Kaspars Grinvalds – stock.adobe.com
From “nature’s Ozempic” to sunscreen myths, health advice runs rampant under the “For You” tab, even when the science doesn’t always back up the declare.
And more people are turning to social media for solutions: Fifty-five p.c of adults said they use social media for health info, according to a 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
That’s prompting nurse practitioners to take issues into their own arms, training future nurses to critically consider viral health trends, help sufferers navigate the overwhelming quantity of info online and information them toward evidence-based care.
The Passan School of Nursing at Wilkes University is among the packages shifting its curriculum to handle the altering info panorama, from undergraduate programs through Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) levels, Meghan Pontz, a nurse practitioner and professor of follow at the Passan School of Nursing, told The Post.
The viral sizzling takes aren’t new territory for healthcare suppliers. Pontz conceded that many of them have glorious hooks and that social media is more and more where sufferers get their info.
To meet sufferers where they are, college students in one course are even assigned to make a short, TikTok-style video to focus on a disease course of they’re snug treating.
But, the curriculum goes past making videos or responding to deceptive content about trends such as mouth taping, which is among the trends that most concern Pontz.
Meghan Pontz, a DNP and school at Wilkes University, is educating college students and sufferers how to critically consider trends. Meghan Pontz, Wilkes University
Taking a new method
Nurse practitioners are taking a more proactive method, equipping their communities with appropriate info by also focusing on proactive health educating.
“We’re looking at our curriculum to make sure that we’re weaving health literacy, media literacy and misinformation response directly into coursework, rather than having this as a sidebar conversation in clinical practice,” Pontz said.
The adjustments come as more and more sufferers arrive at medical doctors’ workplaces and clinics with complicated health questions, many based on the algorithms exhibiting content on their screens.
DNP professors are re-examining how sufferers work together with healthcare suppliers and how they’ll help sufferers distinguish between respectable medical uncertainty and unsupported claims in a trending Instagram Reel.
They do this by implementing SIFT, a research technique that encourages people to stop, examine the source, discover better or more dependable coverage and hint claims back to their origins.
Be cautious with online medical doctors
Even advice doled out by medical professionals who have develop into TikTokers ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
“You should regard that [advice] with a level of caution and be able to verify what that TikTok or video is saying,” Pontz said, advising viewers to look for peer-reviewed research and established requirements of care and follow.
Viewers can also test somebody claiming to be a healthcare supplier has a National Provider Identifier (NPI), a distinctive identifier required for US health care suppliers.
Pontz said suppliers discussing evidence-based drugs in short-form videos will also “provide resources or links to their information, typically in their bios or in the comments of the video.”
Both the NPI and extra sources can help social media customers independently confirm the data being conveyed to them.
Another crimson flag? Claims of a magic cure-all or silver-bullet resolution.
“Nothing is a blanket statement in medicine,” Pontz added. “There is not a garlic diet that’s going to fix diabetes as the only health intervention.”
Viewers ought to also keep an eye out for whether or not content is sponsored, as there could also be “financial incentives that can put something in a better light than it really is,” Pontz said.
The purpose isn’t to inform sufferers to stop trusting social media, altogether. Instead, DNP professors are serving to college students and sufferers query what they’re seeing and decide whether or not the source deserves their trust.
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