Health advice is a click away on social media, but doctors caution against trusting "SickTok"

Ask a doctor, any doctor who sees patients, and they will tell you they are increasingly faced with questions that were spawned from people scrolling social media. 

It's become a world of quick and easy solutions for life's puzzling issues; seemingly solving them in 45 seconds or using household remedies. 

However, if you're one of the people who find health tips on TikTok, should you always trust what you find? 

Social media apps are acutely aware of our societal desires for weight loss, building muscle, and looking younger, but Allegheny Health Network's Dr. Amy Crawford-Faucher is wary of what people are seeing. 

"TikTok, or 'SickTok' as we call it, is at its very best useless information, at its worst, harmful," she said. 

Dr. Crawford-Faucher said to remember the old, tried and true saying: if it sounds too good to be true ...

"Everybody wants something fast and easy about anything regarding your health, because it's easier to say, 'I'm going to drink vinegar, and I'm going to melt away belly fat,'" she said. "Well, the reality is, nothing does that." 

Combing through the cabinets in the kitchen may not be chemically risky, but it could impact your mental health. 

"The risk is maybe to get your hopes up too much on something that could be risky or useless," Dr. Crawford-Faucher explained. "Some of the tried and true health-related advice is safer, and ultimately more effective." 

Of course, Dr. Crawford-Faucher said to be wary of so-called "miracle" products, whether they're for weight loss or ED solutions, because those products have no proven track record of success, nor do medical professionals know what they could do to your body. 

Nowadays, Googling your symptoms when sick has become commonplace, but Dr. Crawford-Faucher said AI has removed the need to read the sources that Google finds. Instead, it gives you a summary. 

"The risk is even higher if you get the summary, you take it at face value, and you stop right there," she said. 

In short, she said you shouldn't self-diagnose; instead, use the information as a starting point that you then discuss with a doctor.