Panic World When the internet convinces you you're sick
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Oct 22, 2025 Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet, and Heather Holdridge, Managing Director at Real Voices Media, dive deep into the wellness industry’s connection to misinformation and its darker implications. They discuss how wellness trends exploit genuine health grievances, radicalizing individuals and intertwining with political movements. Topics range from the impact of social media on youth health perceptions to the commercialization of wellness capitalism, highlighting urgent solutions to combat health misinformation.
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Truth Seeds Misinformation
- Successful health conspiracies start with a grain of truth that exploits real failures in medicine and public health.
- Misinformation leverages that truth to radicalize and monetize anxious people online.
Origin Story Of Morgellons Community
- Mary Leitow rebranded a 1600s report and created Morgellons.org after online patients clustered around shared symptoms.
- That early community convinced itself of a distinct disease despite medical skepticism.
Symptoms Misread As Proof
- Patients collected fibers and showed them to doctors, which clinicians often interpreted as evidence of delusion.
- Lab studies later showed fibers were mostly cotton or common materials, not an unknown pathogen.