Bad celebrity health advice is a troubling and growing problem. Because people have such easy access to quacky opinions about health, and because celebrities tend to have pretty big megaphones, a whole internet subculture of nonsense health-advice has emerged, sometimes with potentially dangerous consequences.
For an interview published on STAT, Usha Lee McFarling spoke with Tim Caulfield, a Canadian lawyer and the author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness, about this trend.
The Q&A is worth reading in full, but Caulfield’s answer to the question of why “the voices of celebrities in the health arena [have] become so loud and powerful” is particularly noteworthy:
Celebrity pushers of bunk science, of course, rarely exhibit much doubt about what they’re doing. Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t become Gwyneth Paltrow, Noted Pseudoscience Peddler, by taking a careful, skeptical approach to the claims she broadcasts to her audience.
It’s just not a fair fight, in many cases, given how poorly equipped many people are to evaluate scientific claims. And those two forces Caulfield mentions — the ubiquity of celebrity voices and distrust in science — are connected, of course. Part of the appeal of many of the worst celebrity offenders is that they promise to “tell you what they don’t want you to know” — “they” being a warped, supervillainized version of the (far from perfect, to be sure) medical and pharmaceutical establishments. It’s sad that so many people trust celebrities with their well-being, but it isn’t necessarily surprising.
This article was written by Jesse Singal from Science of Us and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
