In her 2024 Wellness Academy Lecture, Cam Hostinar, PhD, highlighted the issue of health and wellness misinformation. She described how misinformation spreads in the digital age while providing evidence-based methods for identifying and debunking wellness myths.
In this Q&A session, Dr. Hostinar offers further insight on finding trustworthy health and wellness information, online fact checking, and Artificial Intelligence.
About the expert: Cam Hostinar, PhD
Cam E. Hostinar, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC Davis. She leads research on how the social environment shapes health, with a focus on early-life stress and its impact on stress-response systems. Her research at the Social Environment and Stress (SES) Lab, examines developmental processes at multiple levels of analysis, incorporating endocrine and immune biomarkers, electrophysiological data, and behavioral measures.
Q&A with Cam Hostinar
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Q: Did you have any specific recommendations for us relative to online fact checkers, sources, or specific places to go to look for information?
Dr. Hostinar: That’s a great question. I often recommend, you know, government websites like the CDC, the NIH, the World Health Organization. I wish there were more fact checkers in the health and wellness space. I think there are some fact checking websites in the political space that are quite good, like Snopes and others and NPR.
I think in the health and wellness space you could benefit from more fact checkers. And I would say you can also follow specific experts, if you find that there is an expert who is part of the National Academy of Sciences that you came across, that might be somebody you want to follow. And you could look at their news interviews on YouTube, or you could look at their page. You can look to see if they have a book. So, you could find specific experts on specific topics who have the training in that area, and they seem to have received a lot of recognition from their peers.
So those would be some of my recommendations. But I do think we need more such websites and organizations in this space. There isn’t really a great one that has very accessible information on wellness right now, other than the Office of Wellness Education of course. So, I think there’s room for many of you or many of us to start building some of some of this infrastructure that’s tailored to wellness.
Q: AI is becoming more and more a part of our lives, as we know, and we have varying levels of engagement with it as a whole. How trusted do you think that will be as a resource in terms of its ongoing accuracy and efforts at improving information that people can get? What are your thoughts on AI specifically as it relates to communicating some of this health and wellness information?
Dr. Hostinar: You know, I talk to colleagues in computer science and engineering who are very excited about AI and its potential to learn vast amounts of information. I see how excited they are, but I also talk to public health experts who are extremely concerned about the blatant inaccuracies that emerge in these AI summaries or AI searches, and I think it’s so new that a lot of people who encounter it are not yet aware that it does not have access to fact checking or to peer reviewed scientific information. Oftentimes these algorithms are simply averages or aggregates of what they can find online or what they’ve been trained on, which could include high quality information or low quality information.
So my current stance is one of skepticism. I think AI does better with automating tasks that would take us a long time to do. For example, to alphabetize a list or put it in reverse chronological order. I think it does well with things like that. I don’t think it does well with summarizing scientific information, but I also recognize this may change over the next ten, twenty, thirty years as they start to train AI on scientific information. I would say right now I would not trust it. But this might change years from now if they’re able to find a way to get a human in the loop, or if they find a way to curate the quality of information that goes into the training.
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