Comment by Aurornis

Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall where testing combined with years of clinical experience are needed to evaluate something.

A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has started trying to fill this void by providing seemingly more definitive answers to vague inputs. There's a lot of content that exists to basically confirm what the viewer wants to hear, not tell them that their doctor is a better judge than they are.

This is happening everywhere on social media. See the explosion in content dedicated to telling people that every little thing is a symptom of ADHD or that being a little socially awkward or having unusual interests is a reliable indicator for Autism.

There's a growing problem in the medical field where patients show up to the clinic having watched hundreds of hours of TikTok and YouTube videos and having already self-diagnosing themselves with multiple conditions. Talking them out of their conclusions can be really hard when the provider only has 40 minutes but the patient has a parasocial relationship with 10 different influencers who speak to them every day through videos.