Let’s not risk the physical or mental health of the population

It was announced a few days ago that a new law had been passed in the French Parliament that regulates and professionalizes the activity of influencers on social media. Commercial promotion of dangerous or fraudulent medical products and practices is prohibited. What is happening in Argentina?

The role of influencers has taken off in recent years, becoming real guides and models for thousands and thousands of people, giving promising explanations that lack any scientific rigor. Treatments, surgeries, miracle diets, and fitness routines without medical approval, which is known as “medical intervention.”

Influencers are a big deal for us. Not only because they spread messages without supporting evidence, but also because they tend to generate currents of bigotry and populism that revolt against those of us who are real health professionals, those of us who spend hours and hours behind a desk treating patients, understanding the problems and stories of life. Patients who come to our office after multiple failures before false promises from social networks, frustrated, frustrated and on occasion with some complications to this untrue intervention.

In the field of nutrition, the matter is more complicated and complex, because it does not end with only spreading false messages on networks, promoting restrictive diets with different slogans, or selling magical solutions or slimming products, but unfortunately people who do not have the license as a health professional, they manage groups of patients obese people, and accompany them through their experience. In this way, there are therapy groups that are implemented directly on Instagram, by WhatsApp groups, and they even hold proximity meetings where they deceive patients by telling them that through their workshop they will receive a virtual gastric banding, because after that encounter, it will radically change their relationship with food.

Plastic surgery and aesthetic medicine are not immune from this situation and for decades have developed strategies to post with celebrities based on recommendations, but at the present time, with the advent and widespread spread of social networks, some negative repercussions. A bad recommendation, whether due to advertising or exchange, when not backed up by scientific support and clinical evidence, jeopardizes not only the integrity of the profession, but also the health of the person who receives the message, who, with admiration for character, takes his words as “scientific evidence.”

Today any individual, without any kind of medical training and of course without the ability to understand the harm that a bad recommendation can cause, has the power, simply by being “influential” and having many “followers”, to give indications or recommend surgical procedures, without being able to understand that Medicine is a “science” and that, as such, it requires knowledge to practice and recommend it.

When we understand that everyone is perfect in a certain area, recommendations will reduce risks and we will all be protected. Until this happens and the population is taught to trust only academic reference sources, regulating the medical recommendation activity of “non-medical influencers” is a very good start. We hope that all countries of the world, including Argentina, will follow this example.

Let’s not confuse the population with false messages. Let’s not risk your physical or mental health.

Dr. Virginia Busnelli is a registered dietitian and Dr. Juan Manuel de Diego, a plastic surgeon, is a reference in Body Sculpting Surgery at Cranief.