No! That can’t be! Impossible!These are just some of the things I didn’t say when I read that a study from the University of Sydney in Australia found that there is a growing problem of influencers promoting medical tests on social media. Doing so could be misleading and potentially harmful. Say it ain’t so!The research, published in JAMA Network Open, focused on five medical diagnostic tests that social media influencers seem to be obsessed with. Those tests include full body scan MRIs, genetic cancer tests, testosterone blood tests, gut microbiome tests, and the “egg timer” anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) test.The problem, the researchers found, isn’t that the tests are useless—if the doctor says you need one, you should get one—it’s that they’re useless to most people. Because they’re often being promoted to people who are already healthy and don’t need them. It all leads to an issue called “overdiagnosis,” which is when a disease is diagnosed correctly but the diagnosis is irrelevant.Social Media Influencers Are Scaring Followers Into Unnecessary Medical TestsTo put it another way, the condition would’ve never bothered you, would have never caused a single symptom, would never have caused a single problem, but now you think you have to solve it with a treatment that requires putting your body through a wringer that it doesn’t need to go through.The study took a look at 982 influencer posts from Instagram and TikTok, all gathered from influencers who collectively had more than 194 million followers while excluding accounts with less than 1000 followers and in languages other than English. It found that 87 percent of them mentioned the benefits of one of the tests yet only 15 percent mentioned the potential harms. Only six percent of the posts bothered discussing the ideas of overdiagnosis or the unnecessary use of these tests.Of course, since it’s social media, the researchers found that a lot of the posts played into people’s fears and anxieties, manipulating emotions to promote tests that will provide a degree of “certainty” when the tests can potentially deliver the exact opposite, and not in the “glad I caught it early” kind of way.Another issue is that some of the tests, while useful in specific circumstances, are great indicators of general health. For instance, the gut microbiota test is based on science, it is still in its early stages of development. The medical world is just starting to learn the importance of gut bacteria, but we still don’t know enough about it for the gut microbiome test to tell the average person anything of value. Similarly, influencers promoting the AMH test prey on young women’s insecurities about their fertility, even though the test’s ability to predict the ability to conceive is unreliable.These tests are positioned as tools for self-empowerment, that you, yes you, hold the power over your health. That might be true for a very small number of people, but for everyone else, it’s a waste of time and money. Plus, you may just walk away with a new anxiety over a malady that does not require medical treatment.The post Influencers Are Scaring Followers Into Unnecessary Medical Tests appeared first on VICE.