2026-06-03
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The Economist.
Last week on Babbage, doctor and author Deb Cohen explained how digital technology,
from social media to wearable devices and now artificial intelligence, are teaming up to hijack our health.
Social media is a certainty factory, where medicine by definition is uncertain.
And medical research rarely is these big breakthrough sort of treatments, although sometimes headlines report it that way.
It's often shavings of risk.
Anecdotes, basically.
Anecdotes, yeah.
It's an anecdote factory.
There's absolutely really good things about being online.
But what has happened is it's become a way, a very quick way,
to market and commercialize interventions that aren't always evidence-based.
All of this makes it especially hard to know who or what to trust.
Our guest today explains that this is actually not a new thing when it comes to health.
You could argue that there's not some sudden pushback against evidence,
but actually that the use of evidence is relatively recent