The care gap wellness influencers know how to sell

The last time I sat in a waiting room long enough to learn the carpet pattern by heart, the woman beside me was watching a video with the sound turned low. Clean kitchen bench. Glass straw. Perfect skin. Her exhaustion, the woman on the screen suggested, might not be ordinary life at all. Cortisol, apparently.

I don’t blame the woman in the waiting room. That is the uncomfortable bit. Try compressing six months of poor sleep, heavy periods, dread, reflux, work stress and a suspicious rash into a ten-minute appointment and you learn a very particular shame: leaving with a blood-test form and the sense that you performed your own symptoms badly.

Into that gap walks the wellness influencer: warm, fluent, available at 11.43pm, and very often selling something. Not always a dangerous thing. Sometimes a powder. Sometimes a magnesium spray. Sometimes just the feeling that somebody has finally joined the dots.

Australian oncologist Ranjana Srivastava wrote this week that doctors dismiss wellness influencers at their peril. She was not saying influencers are right. She was saying outrage rarely changes a patient’s mind, especially after that patient has found a voice that sounds more patient than the clinic ever did.

“I never changed a patient’s mind with outrage.”
Ranjana Srivastava, Guardian Australia

That line lands because it admits something medicine is not always good at admitting. Evidence is only one contest here. The influencer is also competing on tempo, intimacy and narrative.

Where the feed sounds warmer

Better lighting helps the feed, obviously, but the real advantage is plot. You are tired because your cortisol is out. Your gut is angry. Your minerals are depleted. A villain appears; then, blessedly, a ritual.

Srivastava cited research finding that among wellness influencers in one study, 31% were life coaches promising transformation and 28% were business owners selling a product. Conventional doctors, dentists or nurses accounted for 17%, mental-health professionals 4%, and qualified dietitians 6%.

Those numbers are not a neat gotcha. They explain the shape of the room. Many of the loudest wellness voices are not bound by the habits that make medical communication careful, caveated and, frankly, dull. A doctor says, “it depends”. An influencer says, “start here”.

Maybe I am too sympathetic to this, but I think many women hear “start here” less as medical advice than as emotional triage. A hand on the shoulder. A shopping list when the GP appointment gave you a pathology slip and a follow-up in three weeks.

None of that makes the advice benign. It makes it effective.

Business Insider’s recent reporting on the online cortisol panic captured the mechanism neatly: a real biological concept gets lifted out of clinical context and turned into an everyday villain. New York endocrinologist Dr Caroline Messer told the publication that scepticism has to be the starting point when a health claim comes with a checkout button.

“Whenever someone’s trying to sell you something, you have to be so skeptical.”
Dr Caroline Messer, Business Insider

Scepticism takes energy, though. So does booking the appointment, finding the Medicare card, explaining the symptom without sounding dramatic, waiting for results, and then doing it again when the answer is normal but you still feel dreadful.

A reel asks less of you. Before the kettle boils, the dread has a name.

The diagnosis arrives before the evidence

Wellness commerce is clever because it rarely begins with the product. Recognition comes first. The caption knows you are tired at 3pm, jaw clenched, sleeping but not resting. Only then does the product appear, almost politely, as if it has been invited.

Beauty, medicine and self-optimisation have blurred into one morning routine. Marie Claire Australia recently described modern beauty wellness as a world in which a routine might include a collagen ingestible or probiotic supplement alongside hyaluronic acid serum. Refinery29 Australia is writing about the same appetite from the consumption end: the May wellbeing edit folds supplements, experiences and small domestic upgrades into one mood board of better living.

None of this is automatically absurd. My own bathroom cabinet has its half-believed promises: the vitamin D I forget, the body oil that makes me feel as if I have organised my life when I have only moisturised my shins. Rituals matter. A product can be pleasant and still not be medicine.

The slippage is the business model. Once ordinary stress is rebranded as a deficiency, an imbalance or a toxin story, almost anything can become the fix. Magnesium for sleep. Collagen for ageing. Greens powder for nutritional guilt. NMN for longevity. The language is intimate enough to feel therapeutic, but vague enough to travel.

Fast Company recently put the supplement boom in corporate terms, noting that AG1 had helped move powders into the mainstream and was watching the rise of wellness gummies. Its CEO, Kat Cole, told the magazine that the brand could not simply turn its flagship powder into a sweet.

“You can’t put AG1, as it is, in a gummy.”
Kat Cole, Fast Company

On the surface, that is a product-format problem. Underneath, it says something about the market. Wellness has to keep finding forms that fit into the small frictions of daily life: the commute, the desk drawer, the bedside table, the handbag with old receipts at the bottom. The easier the ritual, the less it feels like a medical claim. It becomes lifestyle. Texture. A self who copes.

Cortisol spreads for the same reason. Not because everyone suddenly understands endocrinology. Because it offers a single handle for a messy bundle of symptoms: sleeplessness, weight changes, anxiety, irritability, the weird electric feeling of being both exhausted and unable to stop scrolling.

Good medicine resists the single handle. It asks about context. It rules things out. It says the body is not a mood board. Social media, meanwhile, is built for handles, not histories.

What medicine still owes people

Calling all this gullibility is the lazy answer. It lets the rest of us off too easily. If a woman believes a stranger online before she believes a doctor, the question is not only what is wrong with her media literacy. Something happened in the room where she tried to be believed.

The Conversation’s analysis of 14 million Reddit posts found a striking shift in how people talk about mental health online, including the spread of misinformation in social-media discussions. That matters because wellness advice does not arrive as a pamphlet anymore. It arrives as peer language, ordinary people narrating ordinary distress until the line between community and counsel gets thin.

Srivastava’s harder challenge is for clinicians. Do not sneer. Do not assume authority will carry the day. When the influencer has won attention by being specific, human and repeatedly present, medicine cannot answer only with institutional hauteur.

Healthcare communication could learn from the feed without becoming the feed. Shorter explanations. Better follow-up. More plain language about uncertainty. The sentence, “I can see why that sounds convincing, but here’s the bit that worries me” would do more work than another eye-roll about TikTok.

I am not romantic about this. Some wellness claims are predatory. Some are expensive nonsense in frosted glass. Others turn fear into subscription revenue and call it empowerment. The care gap does not absolve the seller who widens the gap for profit.

Debunking cannot be the whole answer, because debunking arrives after the need has already formed. By the time a cortisol reel has made a woman feel understood, a fact-check is late to the party and badly dressed.

What wellness influencers are selling into the care gap is certainty, yes. Also pace. Softness. The fantasy that the body can be decoded if you buy the right powder and listen to the right woman in linen.

Medicine cannot, and should not, copy that certainty. Its power is in being more honest than the market. To be heard, though, it may have to sound less like a locked door and more like someone who has time to sit down.