Not all health information on the Internet is created equal. Vulnerable people being fooled by unscrupulous healthcare influencers is, sadly, an alarming and ever-increasing phenomenon. Misinformation, especially when it comes to health-related issues, can cause irreparable harm and when it does, the calls to regulate or ban social media content creators are understandable. But as we mark October’s health literacy awareness month, it’s worth considering whether this approach to misinformation is the right one. After all, if we’ve failed to equip people to evaluate the message, we have no business shooting the messenger.
While our concerns about false health claims are entirely valid, building people’s capacity to critically assess information by raising health literacy levels offers a far more durable solution than attempting to control content. Empowering individuals with strong health literacy skills addresses the root problem of mis-and disinformation, rather than just its symptoms.
Health literacy has been steadily gaining ground across the world as a pillar of public health policy. The Council of Europe’s 2023 Guide to Health Literacy explicitly links it to trust-building and equitable healthcare access, while the WHO has repeatedly emphasised that health-literate populations make better decisions, place less burden on healthcare systems, and are naturally more resilient to misinformation. Countries like Finland have already demonstrated the power of this approach, embedding health literacy into school curricula from an early age, teaching children not just what to think about health, but how to think about it. Rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with dubious influencers, raising health literacy levels means we can cultivate populations capable of distinguishing evidence from anecdote, understanding risk and benefit, and asking the right questions.
Emphasising health literacy aligns perfectly with the shift taking place in healthcare systems across the world, away from a focus on treatment and towards that of prevention. The UK’s 10 Year Plan exemplifies this transformation, with similar long-terms healthcare strategies announced in Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and across Europe. Chronic disease epidemics, ageing populations, and spiralling costs are global issues and the challenges are universal: rising rates of long-term health conditions that are largely preventable, unsustainable treatment costs and a crisis in recruitment and retention of healthcare professionals.
Prevention, however, requires active participants, not passive patients. It demands populations who understand how lifestyle choices impact health outcomes, who can interpret screening recommendations, and who recognise when to seek care and when to self-manage. It requires accessible, trusted information. It requires health literacy.
The impulse to control information extends beyond social media influencers. Seventy UK healthcare and patient organisations recently called for restrictions, suspensions, and limiting results to ‘approved’ sources when Google’s AI healthcare summaries appeared in 2025. Impacted by a drop in traffic to their websites, the signees rightly expressed concern at the inaccuracy of some AI summaries, the lack of contextual cues, and the no-click approach which means users cannot click through to trusted information sites. Yet it is also the case that some of these same organisations failed to demonstrate their own digital credibility by having websites that lacked basic digital markers that search engines and AI use to assess trustworthiness, e.g., proper structure, clear authorship, and the technical signals that distinguish expert content from misinformation. Many of us are already using AI for summaries, and much more besides, in the healthcare space, and it is only a question of time before higher calibre AI models and knowledge of quality prompts – AI literacy – improve accuracy scores. At the time of writing, most of the most commonly used AI platforms cope very well with summarizing complex medical information.
The choice we face is not just how to manage today’s crisis of misinformation, but how to nurture tomorrow’s capacity for collective wisdom. In an age where health information flows freely and AI is ubiquitous, authoritative gatekeeping is not only untenable but is at odds with the spirit of open access to knowledge that defines our digital world. A health-literate society – one that includes the influencers as well as the influenced – working alongside digitally and AI-fluent providers of trustworthy information, could make the call to control not just unnecessary, but obsolete.
Catherine Richards Golini
Catherine Richards Golini is Patient Resource Manager at Karger Publishers. Holding a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Swansea University, and with published research on patient communication, she is also a skilled plain language writer and reviewer of plain language summaries and patient materials. With expertise in health discourse, medical communication, and patient communication, Catherine also brings a wealth of experience in educational course development and language assessment. She cofounded and served as director of EALTHY, the European teachers’ association for medical and healthcare English, demonstrating her commitment to advancing medical language education.
