Three recent developments in the health and wellness sphere stirred controversies that made public discourse look increasingly like reality television.
A documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos; Deepinder Goyal’s Temple, an experimental wearable exploring signals potentially related to brain blood flow; and former cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s Protocol32, a multi-ingredient wellness supplement, ignited fierce online exchanges. Supporters of the two much-publicised Indian innovations clashed with doctors and other critics demanding evidence. Instead of receiving serious attention, complex scientific issues have become victims of social media users mixing up commercial interest and science, resulting in instant verdicts, personal attacks, and competitive performances of intellectual superiority. Everyone claims to defend science without fully understanding what science demands, and social media certainly doesn’t care for nuances.
Platforms amplify our worst temptations. Announce that a gadget will transform humanity, or declare its creator a scamster, and the audience arrives to consume the predictable: a grand announcement, a furious takedown, recycled insults, and partisan followers. Behavioural research explains this distortion. In a 2017 PNAS study, William Brady and colleagues found that moral-emotional words helped polarising political messages spread on Twitter. A 2021 study published in Science Advances showed that social approval can reinforce expressions of outrage. A 2018 Science studyfound false news spread faster and more widely than true news on Twitter. These findings cannot establish motives behind the controversies, but they do show why dramatic certainty and public combat often deliver greater personal rewards than intellectual restraint.
Science, however, is neither instant nor theatrical. Researchers develop hypotheses, test them, encounter failures, revise methods, and invite independent scrutiny. Peer review matters, yet neither peer review nor subsequent publication is a certificate of eternal truth. Findings may be replicated, qualified, or overturned. Science’s willingness to correct itself is its biggest strength. While science may need years to produce a provisional answer, social media wants permanent certainty by tonight. This mismatch creates a genuine danger for innovation, particularly in health. Founders and researchers cannot be expected to produce definitive clinical evidence before they have been allowed to develop and test an early prototype.
{{/usCountry}}Science, however, is neither instant nor theatrical. Researchers develop hypotheses, test them, encounter failures, revise methods, and invite independent scrutiny. Peer review matters, yet neither peer review nor subsequent publication is a certificate of eternal truth. Findings may be replicated, qualified, or overturned. Science’s willingness to correct itself is its biggest strength. While science may need years to produce a provisional answer, social media wants permanent certainty by tonight. This mismatch creates a genuine danger for innovation, particularly in health. Founders and researchers cannot be expected to produce definitive clinical evidence before they have been allowed to develop and test an early prototype.
{{/usCountry}}The results of experimentation cannot be produced or demanded before permitting experimentation itself. Messenger RNA research illustrates this point. Decades of uncertain investigation, scepticism, setbacks, and sustained investment preceded its successful application in Covid-19 vaccines. An unproven idea is not automatically a worthless idea. Nor is every ambitious health venture another Theranos. That scandal involved deception on the part of Holmes, who was eventually convicted of defrauding investors. It was not merely an experimental technology falling short. There is an enormous ethical difference between investigating uncertain possibilities and knowingly misrepresenting demonstrated capabilities. Calling everything a scam obscures that distinction and is a disservice to legitimate research.
Yet, innovators do not deserve a free pass. When a product is marketed with health claims, responsibilities increase. Evidence for individual ingredients cannot automatically establish the safety or effectiveness of their combination. Similarly, signals recorded near the temple cannot by themselves give accurate measurement of cerebral circulation or predict ageing. Yes, there may be plausible physiological hypotheses worth investigating, including links between superficial vascular signals and cerebral perfusion. But plausibility is just a starting point.
India’s booming supplement, wellness and longevity markets are crowded with hyper-confident promises, often unsupported by convincing clinical research. There’s an overflow of dietary prescriptions, protein targets, weight-loss advice, and supposedly transformative routines. While profiting from an unproven idea is not automatically illegal, concealing uncertainty and exaggerating benefits is. The appropriate response to this is proportionate scrutiny. While exploratory research must be encouraged, stronger proof for consequential health claims must be demanded, and regulatory action must follow when safety or advertising rules are breached.
Unfortunately, regulation alone cannot rescue an audience trained to mistake confidence for competence. The more durable investment is scientific literacy. Citizens should ask: What precisely is claimed? Tested on whom, and against what? Who funded the work? What remains unknown? Such habits offer practical consumer protection far beyond any single controversy. To become a scientifically literate citizen, the essential skill is recognising the difference between a possibility, a preliminary observation, and a reliable conclusion. That habit also makes it harder for either marketing or mockery to hijack judgement.
Chandrakant Lahariya is a physician and author of Pill-Free: You Don’t Need Everything You Have Been Prescribed. The views expressed are personal