Patient outcomes suffer due to negative healthcare experiences. About a third of patients report that they’re less likely to get medical care following a negative experience, demonstrating that providers dismissing patients’ symptoms or concerns may send patients away from the medical system.
Patients are also increasingly seeking holistic care options due to the growing recognition of nutrition’s role in health outcomes and increasing patient disinterest in pharmaceuticals due to more risks and side effects. Supplements, on the other hand, seem to offer a natural risk-free alternative, especially with the general improvement of health and cure-all claims that can be increasingly found in certain products.
When patients want to explore more holistic options and are becoming more educated and interested in their own health but are also regularly dismissed, they naturally start looking elsewhere for answers to their symptoms and may try following online trends that promise easy fixes. However, this trend of growing trust in unchecked online voices lending health advice and overpromotion of unsubstantiated supplement claims often introduces more risk to patients than help.
Following the unqualified
Social media has enabled medical professionals to share evidence-based insights with a far reaching audience and allowed patients to get access to more opinions than ever. However, while there is fantastic information coming from licensed or board-certified healthcare professionals and medical researchers running social media accounts, there’s a growing number of unqualified voices offering health advice without the credentials and science to back their recommendations.
Medical experts are ethically bound from blindly recommending treatment plans, protocols, or products to people they have not examined themselves. Social media influencers aren’t. Despite positive intentions behind sharing personal health journeys or products that seem to benefit certain lifestyles, following these trends could indeed have an opposite effect. And, the further their advice “goes viral” without disclaimers or qualifying context, the more harm the content could cause.
For example, the trend of fibermaxxing recently gained popularity as a “hack” to achieving a healthier gut in which individuals increase fiber intake to meet, even well exceeding, the recommended daily amount. Bandwagoning online influencers promoting probiotics, high fiber eating habits and other supplements to achieve fibermaxxing may not realize that it can be harmful for the 1 in 9 people with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) as this promotes the addition of more bacteria to a gut microbiome that is unbalanced and already in excess of symptom-causing bacteria, potentially triggering uncomfortable symptoms like bloating and gas.
Patients who are nervous to talk to their provider about embarrassing GI symptoms or do not have a real diagnosis because of prior symptom dismissal, are then put in a precarious position of deciding whether to trust online voices or try to seek additional help. It is often easier to try the simple “health hack.”
The unmitigated risks
It’s not hard to believe that many patients do their own research because they’ve felt failed by a provider previously. It can be discouraging when a patient’s provider seems uninterested in discussing their symptoms and possible solutions that resonate with the patient’s lifestyle. The disconnect leaves patients to fill in those gaps with content they connect with online, even though they generally lack the scientific rigor and medical expertise of a medical provider.
The supplement industry in the U.S., compared to the pharmaceutical industry, is much more lax in that the FDA doesn’t require initial commercial approval of dietary supplements. This crucial difference in authorization processes means that you can often find supplements that promote misleading claims of supporting the management of or even “curing” certain conditions long before the FDA takes action against it. Meanwhile, the consumer is burdened with assessing the risks until the FDA receives complaints of harm, despite not being equipped to make data-driven decisions about ingredients.
Where the healthcare industry goes from here
Dietary supplements themselves aren’t the problem. With over 50% of Americans regularly taking dietary supplements, they can certainly be beneficial for a lot of conditions, and some brands do maintain rigorous standards. But supplements aren’t required to be monitored by a medical professional, opening the door for patients to take them inappropriately, which can lead to a medically-prescribed course of treatment being less effective or put patients at a greater health risk, such as kidney and liver damage.
Moving forward, it’s critical for providers to understand how to navigate these conversations so that patients feel understood and supported while delivering solutions that are rooted in clinical evidence. They can take steps to build trust back and weaken the influence of harmful online trends on their patients’ health outcomes by being open to hearing and discussing their research and opinions and acknowledging their concerns.
Providers seeing dozens of patients a day may find this challenge burdensome. It’s clear that the current healthcare model is not conducive to in-depth discussions between providers and patients about consumer-oriented solutions. But as the wellness needs of consumers evolve, so should the system to prioritize quality over quantity and enable providers to spend ample time with patients to hear their concerns and talk through the viability of certain care plans. This kind of goal will require pushing on both ends to achieve over time.
Until then, industry partners can alleviate the pressures on health care practitioners by providing accurate evidence-based information and serving as a resource to help patients correctly navigate their conditions. These organizations are experts in their medical niches and can deliver relevant and science-backed information that supports patients in their care journey.
There aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions, especially for those with chronic conditions. Taking steps to strengthen provider–patient relationships will be vital to creating an environment where patients feel comfortable and actively seek appropriate counsel.
Photo: Motortion, Getty Images
Nicola Wodlinger is the Chief Executive Officer of mBIOTA Labs, a company that transforms therapeutic nutrition through science, empathy, and action, where she envisions a revolution in the intersection of nutrition and medicine. Nicola has launched multiple new brands from the ground up across the e-commerce and digital content space, and has held pivotal leadership roles at iconic brands including Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, where she spearheaded transformative initiatives and built multi-million dollar brand partnerships. She remains steadfast in her mission to create research-driven solutions that put patients first – led by integrity, powered by purpose, and driven to challenge convention for better health outcomes
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