Gut feeling or good science? How accurate is Crohn's disease content on Instagram?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2026-06-18 04:00

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US researchers have scrolled through Instagram reels tagged with '#crohns' and say that there's still a lot of misinformation out there, and quite a lot of it is coming from medical professionals. The team watched 78 of the most-viewed English-language reels on Crohn's disease and evaluated each one for accuracy using a harm/benefit rating system and a benchmark criteria system established by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) - a system used to evaluate the reliability, accuracy, and transparency of online health information resources. They found 17% of the reels were from medical professionals, which were significantly made up of educational content. The team couldn't find a correlation between how much engagement the reel received and how it rated on either scale, but the medical professionals scored significantly higher on the JAMA scale than non-medical users, but this difference wasn't seen on the harm/benefits scale. The videos that were offering medical advice scored lowest on the harm/benefits scale, say the team, adding that there was misinformation frequently in these reels. Most interestingly, 42% of these videos that were rated as 'harmful' were created by medical professionals.