TikTok Herbalists, Wellness Influencers and Freshly Minted MDs - Please Sit Down
There Are Some Heavyweights in the Building and People Are Trying to Find Us
The online “wellness” space has become so crowded with performers that people who actually need help can no longer find it.
The noise is deafening.
The substance is vanishing.
And the clinicians, physiologists, and grounded practitioners — the people who can truly help — have been pushed to the margins.
The Flood of Performers
The problem isn’t just the spakling wellness girlies and wise middle aged nutritionalists.
It’s the entire spectrum of people performing knowledge:
the newly graduated MD, flashing credentials, who has never seen a sick body outside a tutorial
the credentialed-but-unseasoned “nervous system specialist”
the lash influencer offering trauma advice
the nail-tech-turned-healing coach
the subsidised 26-year-old doctor with a script pad and a ring light
the marketer who rebrands themselves as a breath expert after going on a healing retreat
Different costumes, same behaviour:
confidence without comprehension.
This isn’t harmless.
It’s not neutral.
They are blocking access to the people who can actually help.
Painted Wellness vs Lived Wellness
There is a legitimate world of bodily repair — women recovering from surgery, childbirth, trauma, illness; scar revision; stretch-mark treatment; real tissue recovery. There are legitimate places where prevention and cure can be found for families where asthma, eczema and narrow palates abound.
Real healthcare.
Real Prevention.
Real Cure.
Real work: restoring neuromuscular connection to the abdominal wall so posture, stability, and lower-back integrity last into old age.
Most women never receive this care. They’re left with diastasis, pelvic instability, chronic back pain, scar adhesions, and breath patterns that never recovered after childbirth — real injuries that influencer wellness doesn’t even have the language for.
Settling and sleep advice for children who mouth breathe.
And this is exactly what gets erased when the feeds fill up with performed wellness:
lashes
nails
baby botox
filters
curated glow
staged workouts
This isn’t repair, prevention, cure, resilience or recovery.
It’s decoration.
It’s costume.
It’s branding.
They’re painting wellness on themselves while real women are trying to rebuild after life.
The Capitalism Engine Behind It
There’s a deeper problem underneath all of this. The wellness landscape has become a by-product of capitalism — the pressure to monetise attention, to convert trust into income, to turn care into content. Everyone is expected to make money out of each other. And when your revenue depends on engagement, the incentive is not to help someone think clearly but to keep them confused enough to keep clicking. It becomes just another way of grabbing someone and pulling the wool over their eyes.
Credentials Are Not Understanding
A certificate — including an MD — is entry-level awareness, not mastery.
Understanding the body takes decades.
Brought up by a CSIRO research scientist who taught me to doubt, test and question everything. Dogma and surface acceptance never lasted long — they simply weren’t allowed — I spent twenty years in ICU and dialysis learning, observing, manipulating physiology hour by hour.
After twenty years, I thought I knew everything.
Then I worked in allergy and fixed breathing.
This when I realised I didn’t know anything.
Manipulating physiology is the groundwork.
Seeing whether it actually changes — and how it changes — is where depth comes from.
Where intuition is built.
Where humility is forged.
You don’t get that from a degree.
You don’t get that from a weekend course.
And you definitely don’t get it from a branding agency.
New doctors with shiny credentials, financially supported and socially polished, often walk into the world with a confidence completely unrelated to the complexity of the human organism.
They become influencers with stethoscopes — unseasoned, overexposed, and louder than they are wise.
The Harm: They Block Access to Real Help
People who are actually struggling —
the exhausted mother, the inflamed child, the breathless adult, the dysregulated young person, the woman recovering from surgery, the chronically fatigued — go looking for help.
And what do they find?
Pages of:
aesthetic health
“healing journeys”
10-step resets
supplement funnels
new doctors performing expertise
influencers selling confession-as-authority
lash experts offering trauma therapy in between nail sets
Meanwhile, the clinicians and physiologists — the people who actually understand the body — become nearly impossible to find. And that is the real harm.
People who are suffering need competence, not content. They need physiology, not performance. But the online environment now rewards the exact opposite — visibility over understanding, confidence over competence, aesthetics over depth. And this makes it incredibly hard for ordinary people to know who to trust.
The Collapse of Accountability
It’s arrogant. It’s dangerous. And it is causing people actual harm. Twenty or thirty years ago, this kind of behaviour would never have been allowed. People close to you would have told you—firmly—that you were overstepping. Elders, colleagues, family, mentors would have criticised you openly and you would have listened. There was social correction. Now there is only the algorithm, and the algorithm rewards arrogance.
What Real Help Looks Like
Real care is quiet.
It doesn’t photograph well.
It doesn’t perform.
It looks like:
sitting with a 32-year-old on her first diaylsis, panicking as her breath speeds up from the sudden drop in blood volume
noticing breath through mouth shape and proportionate limb-to-body growth before they speak
reading pH in colour and peripheral perfusion, not in a blood-gas readout
quietly observing dysregulation in behaviour and affect
recognising inflammation in frosty skin and lips instead of IgE levels
explaining breath to someone without filming yourself doing it
It is repetitive.
It is slow.
It is unglamorous.
It is demanding.
It requires thousands of hours of real bodies, not thousands of followers.
You cannot perform your way into this level of understanding.
A Simple Request
If you’re a new doctor:
Go and learn the body before you teach it.
If you’re an influencer:
Go and get well before you sell wellness.
If you want to help people:
Serve someone who won’t like your post.
You’re not helping. You’re getting in the way. And people deserve better than that.
Wellness influencers, please sit down.
Some of us are trying to help.