At American Council on Science and Health, Mauro Proença warns against relying on chatbots for medical advice. The story he reports is certainly sobering: A research team decided to set up popular chatbots with deliberately false information:

In an article published in Nature, journalist Chris Stokel-Walker highlights how badly Large Language Models can confuse correct with incorrect information. Someone entering symptoms of sore, itchy, pink-tinted eyes over the past 18 months might have been told by several popular chatbots that they had “bixonimania,” a supposedly rare condition tied to blue-light exposure and said to cause 1% eyelid coloration (hyperpigmentation). It sounded manageable. It also didn’t exist.

Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, led the team behind the experiment that fooled researchers, not just machines. The articles were posted online on a preprint website that gives early access to research. To limit the risk of real deception, Thunström gave the condition a deliberately absurd name (“-mania” is psychiatric, not ophthalmological) and planted clues throughout the preprints, including thanks to “Professor Maria Bohm of the Stellar Academy” and her “laboratory aboard the USS Enterprise,” plus a disclaimer stating the whole article was made up.

None of it stopped the spread. Copilot called bixonimania “an intriguing and relatively rare condition.” Gemini blamed excess blue-light exposure and suggested seeing an ophthalmologist. ChatGPT confirmed the diagnosis whether users asked about bixonimania directly or just described blue-light-related eyelid hyperpigmentation.

“Should you trust an AI doctor? Relying on Gemini for health advice could be fatal,” September 21, 2026

Apparently, the bots are more likely to accept planted nonsense if it appears in clinical documents. What’s really sobering is the extent to which such nonsense can contaminate the research environment. In this case, it has led to at least one retraction.

Young women increasingly turn to social media influencers for health advice

Also at ACSH, Adriana Torosian tells us that

Fifty-seven percent of American women aged 18 to 29 say they get health and wellness information from social media influencers, compared with 47% of young men, according to the 2026 Pew Research Center analysis of a national survey. They’re also roughly twice as likely to encounter content about treatments outside mainstream medicine …

Social platforms rank content by engagement, not accuracy, and once a user follows one wellness account, recommendation algorithms tend to serve more of the same, with no editorial or clinical review to separate established treatments from unproven ones.

“Why young women get health advice from TikTok—and what to do about it,” September 24, 2026

It’s a good thing most of these young women are probably young and healthy. Torossian recommends that mainstream practitioners reach out to them on the platforms they now use: “The task for medicine, then, isn’t to out-market influencers so much as to match the parts of the experience that made them worth turning to in the first place.”