Social media told her to abort. A doctor on who to trust instead.

A pregnant mom asked an online moms group about her baby's Turner syndrome result, and one commenter told her to abort. Stephanie Waggel, a physician who founded Improve Medical Culture, says one screening test and one stranger's comment are no basis for an irreversible decision. She explains why patients trust influencers and AI over their doctors, and how to tell who to trust instead.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:19 The moms group comment that said abort
1:50 Some women never know they have Turner syndrome
4:32 Prenatal test results now arrive without a doctor
7:03 A screening test is not a diagnosis
7:58 Why a stranger online feels more trustworthy than your doctor
10:13 10 minutes with your doctor vs two days of comments
11:02 Distrust of institutions is getting worse every year
13:12 AI is convincingly wrong, and only experts catch it
13:33 She had AI check a study for bias and it failed
15:34 Who to trust instead: doctors you can verify
16:15 Why expert med influencers end up working for free
18:01 How to tell if a doctor online is legit
20:51 From 'she's just fine' to 'the baby's suffering'
21:56 Take home messages

About this episode:
Stephanie Waggel, a physician and founder of Improve Medical Culture, returns to discuss her KevinMD article, "Social media told her to abort her Turner syndrome baby." She explains Turner syndrome as monosomy X, a condition whose effects run from substantial fertility and heart problems to nothing noticeable at all. She describes how prenatal screening results now reach patients through a portal, often before a doctor can walk them through it. A screening test can produce false positives and false negatives, she notes, and needs confirmation by amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling before any irreversible decision. Setting the abortion question itself aside, she focuses on where the advice came from. From her own informal survey of moms groups, she names why patients trust strangers: familiarity with influencers they see daily, faster answers, room to ruminate and distrust of institutions. She calls AI convincingly wrong, noting that when she had it check a study for bias, it missed that a supposedly blinded study was not. Her answer is to follow med influencers whose training you can verify, using a checklist borrowed from how she learned to vet websites in medical school. She closes with three take-home messages: question even published research, take AI with a grain of salt and choose verified experts over snake oil salesmen.

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#Pregnancy #PrenatalTesting #MedicalMisinformation