A frontline battle against troubling trends.
Doctors and health consultants have long been sounding the alarm over the controversial scorching health takes flooding TikTook and other social media platforms.
Now, nurses are being educated to struggle 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 educated to deal with TikTook 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 claim.
And more people are turning to social media for solutions: Fifty-five p.c of adults said they use social media for health data, according to a 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
That’s prompting nurse practitioners to take issues into their own palms, coaching future nurses to critically consider viral health trends, help sufferers navigate the overwhelming quantity of data online and information them toward evidence-based care.
The Passan School of Nursing at Wilkes University is among the packages shifting its curriculum to deal with the altering data 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, informed The Post.
The viral scorching 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 data.
To meet sufferers where they are, college students in one course are even assigned to make a short, TikTok-style video to talk about a illness course of they’re comfy treating.
But, the curriculum goes beyond making videos or responding to deceptive content material about trends such as mouth taping, which is among the trends that most concern Pontz.
Meghan Pontz, a DNP and college at Wilkes University, is educating college students and sufferers how to critically consider trends. Meghan Pontz, Wilkes University
Taking a new strategy
Nurse practitioners are taking a more proactive strategy, equipping their communities with right data 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 advanced health questions, many primarily based on the algorithms exhibiting content material on their screens.
DNP professors are re-examining how sufferers work together with healthcare suppliers and how they can help sufferers distinguish between reliable medical uncertainty and unsupported claims in a trending Instagram Reel.
They do this by implementing SIFT, a analysis technique that encourages people to stop, examine the source, discover higher or more dependable protection and hint claims back to their origins.
Be cautious with online medical doctors
Even advice doled out by medical professionals who have become TikTokers should 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 analysis and established requirements of care and follow.
Viewers can also test someone 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 should also keep an eye out for whether content material is sponsored, as there may 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 the source deserves their trust.
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