Meetup 30

What happens when wellness culture meets misinformation?

Fueled in part by the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, alternative medical paradigms are enjoying growing popularity and cultural power internationally — even, in some global settings, gaining traction among policymakers and health institutions.

Though the inputs to this phenomenon are diverse, some of the emergent power of heterodox perspectives about medicine, health, and wellness can be traced to their presence on social media platforms, which furnish particularly hospitable venues for the circulation of unvetted, inaccurate, false, or manipulated information. By serving as a de facto source of easily accessible and apparently reliable medical information — especially in settings where formal medical resources are less equitably distributed — online platforms are shaping both population health outcomes and public perceptions related to health.

In this Meetup Brocher, the participants will discuss how digitally disseminated misinformation is affecting public health at global and local scales, examine the social, political, and economic dynamics that are driving the growth of online health misinformation and wellness culture, and explore opportunities for mitigating the impacts of these concerns.

Wednesday March 11 2026, 3PM Geneva Time

• Chair: Sally Davies, writer and editor
• Martha Lincoln (martha.lincoln@gmail.com)

Martha Lincoln 

Associate Professor, Anthropology, San Francisco State University.

• Marco Zenone (mzenone@uottawa.ca)

Marco Zenone 

Assistant Professor, Health Communication, University of Ottawa