Let’s talk about misinformation and fear in the fields of health, wellness, fitness, medicine and physical therapy

I find myself thinking about this conglomeration of issues fairly often. Most frequently it presents itself on social media, where you have influencers who are promoting fear based misinformation in order to drive engagement and or sell a product. If you can recognize the language that comes along with it, this becomes easier to parse out. What feels like it deserves more attention is how the education of any given healthcare professional, trainer, or whatever in between, interacts with their personality and personal biases. What I mean by this is illustrated by something my Father told me when I was young and we would go on small float planes fishing: He said he used to fly glider planes, until a doctor he worked with told him that the doctors were notorious for dying while flying small planes. So why is this relevant? Expertise does not transfer across fields or even knowledge bases but confidence often does. Humans love to relay and retain information through story, which means that you can get a lot “well this happened to my friend, so it must be fact” etc. In fitness, you see people who are in shape, attribute it to things that make very little difference. They use it to sell supplements, or promote workout plans or coaching. It is presented as “if you don’t do or take this you won’t be successful”, basically just a version of clickbait. This appeals to people because they want an easy fix for something that is complex and requires consistency. In physical therapy we see people come in with chronic back pain, who want it to go away overnight, but don’t want to make changes to manage lifestyle factors that add up to a root cause. I have conversations about this with Brett weekly, if so and so would just sleep more, exercise consistently, stop drinking, eat healthier they would probably not only find it easier to manage stress, but also have less chronic pain. It is much easier to convince someone that one stretch, exercise or supplement will fix their issues than it is to convince them to change their habits. Enter misinformation proliferation and sales related to that misinformation. It is more comfortable for people to believe that they ‘just have a bad back, like my dad’ than it is to face the fact that the aggregate of their choices is causing their issue. To be continued..