It’s never been this easy to find health information.
We have access to more of it than we’ve ever had at any point in human history. When you wake up at 2am worrying about that ache, pain or rash, you can pick up your phone and ask AI about it. If you’re sleeping alone, you can consult a YouTube video. If you’re old school you can look up NHS advice, and if you’re that way inclined, you can even search for research papers online and go into as much depth as you like.
So – if it’s easier than it’s ever been to find the information – why do so many people say that they struggle to make sense of it? Because access to information isn’t the same as understanding it. And having more information doesn’t help you know what information you can trust.
It’s just too complicated
It’s not enough just to give people information. It needs to be presented in a way they’ll understand.
I’ve covered this subject before so I won’t labour the point yet again but even though NHS guidance recommends that all patient-facing information should be written in plain English, a lot of it – especially things like hospital or consultant’s letters – isn’t.
Medical terms don’t make sense to most non-medical people, and can be confusing, intimidating or utterly meaningless to the people who need to know what’s going on – the patients.
Dr Google and Mr Grok
The Internet is a wonderful thing, but while it gives us access to information about pretty much any subject, it created a problem at the same time as solving another one.
It was quite hard to find detailed information yourself before the Internet (you could go to the library, but most people wouldn’t know where to look). The Internet opened things up, and now just typing in the condition you want information about gives you hundreds of thousands of sources of just that.
AI gives you even more, with the opportunity to ask questions of a chat bot. But all this access creates its own problems.
AI has its benefits. It’s great for translating complex information, it can summarise dense research in a way (and at a speed) that the human brain just can’t, and it allows people to ask questions.
The downside is that it also gets things wrong. And not just that, it gets things wrong confidently. AI chats are well known for telling users what they think they want to hear. In a health context, this isn’t a good idea.
The sheer amount of information is now overwhelming. Who do you trust? The NHS set up NHS Choices in 2007 (now NHS.UK) to give people access to good healthcare advice and try and stem the tide of unreliable online health information, but it isn’t – by far – the only source available. Sorting the good from the bad, and the downright awful, isn’t easy.
The health information overload has been made even worse by contradictory advice. You see it all the time in the media. One week coffee is bad for you, and the next it’s a potential cure for cancer. Most people roll their eyes and just drink it (or not) anyway. But every week there’s a new health-related scare story. How can people know what information to trust?
Deepfakes and mistakes
In 2024, OFCOM found that four in ten adults in the UK had come across deepfake or just plain wrong content in the previous four weeks. And 25% of them had seen false or misleading health information. Worryingly, only 45% said they were confident about which sources to trust.
There are profits to be made from selling people solutions to health problems that they didn’t know they needed or convincing them that there’s something wrong with them. Nutrition and weight loss are classic examples. People have always monetised diet advice and changed it repeatedly.
Things have moved on from the diet books of the nineties, and magazine articles telling us one week that fat is bad for you, and the next week that sugar is worse. Now, we have social media influencers giving terrible advice about weight loss medications (the misinformation around those is unbelievable) and ‘natural GLP-1 supplements’ (don’t get me started.) Then there’s creatine, collagen, protein drinks, all manner of menopause support, lotions for loose skin…it never ends.
So, although most people aren’t struggling to get hold of information, they still don’t know what – or who – they can trust.
Bite sized health misinformation
Another effect of the digital deluge is that it’s changed the way we consume information – and we’re more likely to take it in small, bite-sized chunks. Doom-scrolling, clicking and browsing don’t necessarily lend themselves to taking in complicated information.
A 2026 study of digital health literacy discovered that 31% of people found it hard to distinguish reliable from unreliable health information. We’re becoming more comfortable with consuming information in a ‘quick and dirty’ format: people want something they can understand in seconds, they don’t want to have to stop and Google the big words or ask ChatGPT to translate it into plain English.
This is where trustworthy sources can fall down. Evidence isn’t always confident or certain. It can be nuanced, long-winded, and is often full of statements like, “the evidence is emerging, which sounds wishy washy when compared with a confident “Doctors don’t want you to know this.”
The evidence says:
Maybe, possibly, on average, there’s limited evidence, that this might be the case but that more research is needed.
The influencer says:
“The way you eat is destroying your health – and this is why!”
Guess which one hits harder and makes people take action?
How can we help people to understand better?
There’s plenty of reliable information and excellent research – but if nobody outside of the medical community reads or understands it, how can you make it work?
The first thing you need to think about is your audience. A 2015 study found that that 61% of English adults didn’t understand healthcare information that included figures, calculations, or statistics. Yes, that’s another statistic. The study concluded that there was a need for healthcare communication that actually took the people who needed it most into account. No surprises there.
The audience you need to consider is one that sees a headline screaming “Killer weight-loss jabs” and doesn’t have the time, knowledge or inclination to read the full article or investigate the research behind it.
For some reason, many people trust online news sources – in part this is because their information is clear (if incorrect) and easy to understand.
- If you’re writing about anything health-related, write it for a 9-year-old, and remember that even if it’s come from an academic paper that you’re very proud of, you’re writing for understanding … not for publication.
- Strip out long words, medical terms and jargon. Renal failure? Kidney failure. Paediatric ward? Children’s ward. There’s always a short version.
- Test it with non-experts – ask them if they know what you mean. And don’t over explain. Present the information and prioritise action over long-winded explanations
- Definitely avoid too many statistics.
There is no shortage of good information
The problem isn’t that people can’t find trustworthy healthcare information, it’s that the good information is competing with an awful lot of untrustworthy information and it’s not immediately obvious which is which.
And even when they do find the good-quality information, it’s not always understandable.
Access to good quality healthcare information isn’t the challenge. The challenge is making information understandable and getting people to trust it. And with both in place, you’ll be in a better position to influence behaviour and ultimately achieve better health outcomes.
(originally published on LinkedIn, August 2026)