What real support looks like
The antidote isn’t more skepticism of AI. Here’s what we’ve built instead: a version of peer health support designed to be easy to find, obviously credible, and – we hope – better than the counterfeit in ways people can feel.
At Health Union, we’ve spent the better part of 15 years building and learning from more than 125 condition-specific communities – places for people managing everything from migraine to lung cancer to multiple sclerosis to connect with others living the same reality. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- The people are real, and that’s disclosed, not disguised. Every community is built around actual patient advocates and moderators – many living with the conditions themselves. This isn’t just a philosophy; it’s written into our community rules: every account must be created and managed by a real person, not a bot or a synthetic identity. It’s a small rule with a large implication – when you’re talking to someone in a Health Union community, you’re talking to an actual person.
- Personal experience, not a prescription. When a patient shares their story in sponsored content, their condition is verified, and they speak only to their own experience – “here’s what worked, or didn’t, for me” – never a directive for what someone else should do. When we work with certified HCPs in a similar capacity, we give them more latitude, since they’re speaking from clinical training – but even then, the guidance is to frame it as “here’s what I’ve seen with my patients, or in the research,” not direct medical advice to the viewer. Either way, the guardrail is the same: real, disclosed expertise, speaking from experience rather than issuing instructions. That distinction matters more than it might sound: one of the more dangerous ads the Times uncovered had a synthetic “expert” claiming a supplement treated a serious illness better than medication. Real people – patients and clinicians alike – describing what they’ve actually seen, clearly labeled as such, is the structural opposite of that kind of claim.
- Moderation is a practice, not a policy page. Trained moderators, some of whom are patients or clinicians themselves, are present in the conversation daily – watching for the kind of miracle-cure claims and predatory marketing the AI influencer wave thrives on, and stepping in when a conversation needs guardrails.
- Depth beats virality. These are not communities optimized for a 15-second hook. They exist because someone with a chronic condition needs a place to ask a specific, unglamorous question and get an answer from someone who’s actually been there.
None of this makes the underlying problem disappear. Bad actors will keep finding new tools, and AI will keep making counterfeit empathy cheaper to produce at scale. Whatever comes next, we’ll keep building communities that connect people with people.
A standard we hold ourselves to
The AI wellness influencer story is a signal that trust in digital health information is more fragile than it looks – and that’s true regardless of what any one company does about it.
Transparency, real moderation, and communities built around lived experience are the choices we’ve made, because we think they’re what determines whether people can trust what they find in a community we run.
That’s a standard we hold ourselves to – not a claim about what anyone else should do.
It’s a conversation we’re glad to keep having in person, too. Health Union CEO Olivier Chateau will be speaking at Fierce Pharma Week this September in Philadelphia, where the throughline will be similar to the one here: how pharma can reach people with a confirmed diagnosis – along with the caregivers supporting them and the HCPs guiding their care – through channels built on real relationships, not manufactured ones.
