How Outrage Took Over Women’s Health on Social Media

] had my own private practice for 18 years, where I took care of more than 3,000 women. I’ve explained complex medical topics to millions of people on live national television for almost 20 years. I’ve written six books. And I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours sitting across from patients, walking through risks, benefits, and options, one conversation at a time. So I know two things pretty well: how health information actually helps women, and how attention works. If it bleeds, it leads. Fear gets clicks. Outrage gets shares. And a confident person telling you that everything you’ve been told is a lie will almost always outperform a doctor explaining nuance in medicine, saying, “Well, it depends.”

Lately, that’s what women’s health and wellness online feels like to me. Scroll for five minutes and you’ll be told your doctor is gaslighting you, your breakfast is poisoning you, and the women who disagree with your choices are the enemy. Somewhere along the way, a space that was supposed to help us feel better started making us feel worse. Angrier. More afraid. More suspicious of each other.

Outrage is a business model

This isn’t an accident. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that each moral-emotional word (think “shame” or “outrage”) added to a social media post increased its spread by about 20%. The algorithms reward heat, not light. So the loudest voices learn quickly that “this one ingredient is destroying your hormones” travels farther than “here’s what the evidence shows, and here’s what we still don’t know.”

I want to be fair here. Some of that anger comes from a real place. Women’s symptoms have been dismissed for generations. Menopause has barely been taught in medical training. Plenty of us have walked out of an appointment feeling unheard. That frustration is legitimate, and I’ve felt it too, on both sides of the exam table.

But there’s a difference between channeling frustration into better questions and turning it into rage for profit.

Fear makes us worse at taking care of ourselves

Here’s what worries me as a physician. Fear and doubt don’t make women healthier. They make us freeze, or swing to extremes, or abandon things that genuinely help because someone with a ring light said they’re dangerous. When every choice feels like a moral test, it gets harder to make the calm, informed decisions our health actually requires.

And vitriol doesn’t just hurt the target. It changes the people watching. It teaches us to approach every new idea with our fists up instead of our minds open. The last thing we need in this world is more fighting and less open-mindedness.

This has become the opposite of what wellness is supposed to be. Real health requires curiosity: the willingness to say “please tell me more,” to change your mind when the evidence changes, and to accept that what works for your best friend might not work for you. It requires following the premise of “first, do no harm.” It requires community, the kind where women can ask a “dumb” question without getting torn apart in the comments. It also requires humility about what we don’t know. I would rather sit in a room of five doctors whose opinions differ from mine than sit among a crew of physicians who mirror back the same exact approaches. How else will we expand our knowledge base and seek to learn new things?

What I’m asking of us

I’m not asking anyone to stop questioning. Question everything, including me. I’m asking us to notice how content makes us feel. If something leaves you scared, furious, or convinced that another woman is your enemy, pause before you share it. Ask who benefits from you feeling that way.

We can hold high standards for the science and still be kind to each other. In fact, I think that’s the only way this works. Let’s find the plot again: curious, open-minded, and on the side of a loftier ambition than a follower count or the number of likes.

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