Healthcare workers’ selfies are being used to sell unproven medical treatments to the app’s enormous global audience. And in the Wild West of loosely regulated supplements, many brands are profiting.
Malinda Weekly saved a life last week. As an emergency room nurse in Chicago, she helped treat a man in respiratory arrest—and earlier last month, she took part in a code on a patient rushed into the hospital in cardiac arrest. He, too, survived.
But according to viral videos on TikTok, she was recently terminated and is now busy peddling medically questionable pills and powders, from cow nutrients to brain boosters, to many of the platform’s more than a billion users.
“After working 417 days as a dietitian I was randomly fired after I became pregnant. So here’s the health hacks I couldn’t share with my patients,” Weekly, in a selfie at the hospital, appears to say in a TikTok post shilling Miracle Moo, a cow colostrum supplement that boasts being the “#1 most recommended product on TikTok.” She has also turned up on pages pushing a similar product called WonderCow.
But Malinda Weekly is an ER nurse, not a dietitian. She has never been fired and is not pregnant. She has never tried colostrum and doesn’t even know what the supplements do. And she has never given Miracle Moo or WonderCow permission to use her likeness to sell their products.
She’s just one of many licensed medical workers whose faces and credentials have been ripped from social media and repurposed to hawk dubious supplements and health misinformation to TikTok users across the United States and Europe—without their awareness or permission.
“How are people getting paid off of my face?” said Weekly, who told Forbes she feels attacked and violated, even though the photos have been lifted from her public social media. “People are being defrauded” and potentially put in danger, she added, because with many supplements, there is no way to guarantee that what you think is in the bottle is actually what you’re taking. (Research has shown supplements are sometimes mixed with unapproved or prohibited drugs that are not on the label and may be harmful.) Not to mention that Weekly’s career and reputation are on the line.
“What if someone sees me in the ER that had bought the product and then something happened to them—then they blame me for it?” said Weekly (she is also starting her own wellness center, but the primary supplement she recommends is Vitamin D). “I don’t take this situation lightly anymore.”
“How is TikTok allowing this shit?” she added. “They’re a billion dollar company; they need to figure it out.”
TikTok spokesperson Mahsau Cullinane said the company is reviewing the content and accounts and will continue to remove any that violate TikTok policies. Forbes used TikTok’s reporting tool to flag several of these posts, including with Weekly, as “misinformation,” “deceptive behavior and spam,” or “frauds and scams.” Within 30 minutes, they came back as “no violation.”
Cullinane also said that TikTok has strict policies for supplements and requires sellers to submit U.S. food labeling documentation prior to listing these products on TikTok Shop.
The supplement ‘bonanza’
Using the prestige of doctors and nurses to legitimize health remedies or wellness fads isn’t new. But social media has made it much easier to market wild claims to audiences far beyond the millions watching daytime television, and TikTok in particular has managed to turn what’s viral online—including pricey over-the-counter drugs vowing to fix your problems—into real-life trends that are juicing the $30 billion dollar U.S. supplement industry.
The platform recently shot an obscure compound called Berberine to fame—making it widely celebrated as “nature’s Ozempic” and a cheaper, more accessible alternative to the buzzy diabetes drug that many are now taking for weight loss (in reality, Berberine has to date demonstrated no significant effect on weight and has side effects like constipation and diarrhea). TikTok has also driven a surge in sales of chlorophyll water (promising brighter skin and better breath) and greens powders (promising less bloating and a stronger gut), but there, too, the scientific evidence is lacking.
“These companies using my photos are totally scamming people and marketing it for things I wouldn’t put my name behind.”ICU nurse Ashley Lorena Adkins
Searching the 7 million posts on the powerful “TikTok Made Me Buy It” hashtag, you can find nutritional super-powders, Himalayan resin and natural deodorant supplements among the top results. On TikTok Shop, users can browse supplements by “health benefits,” like metabolism and immunity, and “age group.” Some of TikTok Shop’s most popular supplements for “Youth” are creatine powders (commonly used by bodybuilders) and so-called energy-and-focus pills claiming to be good alternatives to Adderall. (Cullinane, the TikTok spokesperson, said TikTok Shop is restricted to users over 18.) And though some additives can be dangerous, particularly for teens and younger, many of the brands behind them are profiting.
Forbes has found dozens of TikTok accounts—with hundreds of thousands of followers, and tens of millions of likes—that promote a range of supplements and sometimes dubious health claims using social media photos hijacked from real doctors, nurses and dental clinicians. In addition to cow colostrum, a nutrient-rich milk the animals produce after giving birth that has been fashioned into powders promising to work wonders for the gut and immune system, they include so-called nootropics, which claim to have positive effects on the brain, and other tinctures meant to boost hair growth.
The accounts all follow a similar pattern: The posts feature young female medical workers with scrubs, work badges or stethoscopes, along with provocative claims that they’d just been fired and are now here to divulge the health secrets they’d been forbidden to share. (Some criticize big pharma; more extreme iterations show people on their deathbeds, hooked up to machines and stating the medical truths they wish they’d known sooner.) What follows are photo slideshows that mingle generic health tips with pitches for a supplement, which viewers are urged to purchase through TikTok Shop or Amazon via a link in the bio. The accounts do not disclose who is behind them.
“I preach evidence-based practice and healthcare, and a lot of these companies that are using my photos are totally scamming people and marketing it for things that I wouldn’t put my name behind,” said Ashley Lorena Adkins, an ICU nurse in Arizona. An old Instagram photo of Adkins on her final shift at the hospital before giving birth to her second baby is now being used to push Miracle Moo and WonderCow on TikTok. (She has reported the posts through the app and says “sometimes they are taken down, but most of the time not.”)
Selling these kinds of supplements in the U.S. is a “bonanza,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who oversees the Cambridge Health Alliance’s supplement research program. “It’s a great scheme for those who want to sell something that does nothing for you.”
Look no further than TikTok Shop for the “#1 Grow Taller Height Pill,” going for nearly $400 for a year’s worth, or Amazon for the Japanese stem cell collagen drink costing more than $2,000 for a twelve-pack. (It’s a liquid “sourced from deep-sea regions” in service of “a slimmer silhouette.”)
“The reason why supplements are the perfect area to go into, if you want to mislead consumers about health effects of your product, is that the law protects advertising—basically making it such that you can promote a supplement as if it has a benefit in humans,” Cohen said. In the U.S., “you do not need any evidence in clinical trials, you don’t need evidence that any ingredient in your supplement works that way, and you certainly don’t need any evidence that your supplement’s ever even been tested.”
So long as influencers, brands or social media accounts avoid certain language around diseases, like explicitly promising that a pill will prevent or cure them, “manufacturers or people pitching supplements [have] a very long runway to promote [them] any way they wish.”
Who’s behind it?
WonderCow is made by husband-wife farmers Rob and Erica Diepersloot, who own some 17,000 cows across California and Colorado. One TikTok account promoting WonderCow’s powder ($65) and creamer ($35) on TikTok Shop, @wonderhealthmania, has generated more than 5 million likes, and built an audience of more than 250,000, since it began posting the nurses’ stolen photos in December. (A similar strategy has been used on Facebook.)
WonderCow and Miracle Moo did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether their supplements have been tested. Marketing for both products claims they are backed by science and have proven results.
Shanil Beekarry, author of the e-book “How To Get A Killer Six Pack In Record Time,” is the founder of another supplement brand that is being promoted this way on TikTok. His company, JustFloow, is maker of a nootropic called Genius Mind that will “unlock your mental edge” and is the “#1 Brain Enhancer On Amazon,” according to one TikTok account. Forbes found more than a dozen, with over 2.5 million likes, pushing the cognitive health supplement in viral posts using photos of ER nurse Weekly, a dental hygienist in Georgia and many more medical staffers.
Got a tip about TikTok or ByteDance? Reach out to authors Alexandra S. Levine on Signal/WhatsApp at (310) 526–1242 or email at [email protected], and Iain Martin at [email protected].
Beekarry said his company does not own or control the TikTok accounts and that “we remain committed to delivering high-quality products backed by scientific research.” Asked to direct Forbes to that scientific research, he said: “We are unable to disclose further information in adherence to confidentiality agreements.”
“We were concerned to learn about the unauthorized use of licensed doctors and nurses’ personal photos on certain TikTok accounts that may be associated with our brand,” the England-based entrepreneur said over email. “While we do engage with third-party sub-networks for marketing purposes, we strive to ensure compliance with ethical guidelines. However, we recognize that despite our best efforts, some instances may slip through the cracks.”
“It’s trying to hold back the sea. There’s just a tsunami of these things.”David Vladeck, former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection
Cohen, the Harvard professor running supplement research in Cambridge, said that nootropic supplements have little proven benefit and that colostrum is an area of active scientific research where more studies are needed.
He also said that a significant amount of the original ingredients in most dietary supplements in the U.S. actually comes from China. “The industry wants to be really tight lipped about that because I don’t think they like the narrative that these dietary supplements on our store shelves in Walgreens and CVS and everything are so often based on ingredients from China,” he told Forbes, but that’s where a lot of the money is going back to.
TikTok is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, and experts say the platform could be a highly valuable tool as ByteDance moves into pharmaceuticals in the U.S., with the potential to provide Chinese drug developers with insights on Americans’ health issues and what supplements they’re spending on. “If you could find a way to sell products that would be appealing to them,” one expert told Forbes earlier this year, “you can certainly imagine [building] up a robust pharmaceuticals industry or a competitive product, then advertising it on TikTok.”
‘Trying to hold back the sea’
While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is tasked with ensuring the labels on supplements are accurate and truthful, once pills or health products are blasted out online, they enter a regulatory Wild West, experts told Forbes.
Advertising on social media theoretically falls under the Federal Trade Commission, and the agency has brought enforcement actions against supplement makers hawking deceptive or misleading health claims in the past. But the small and under-resourced agency has struggled to keep pace with the booming and fast-changing world of social media influencers, and who’s saying what on an app used by 150 million Americans.
“People are going to try to and sell you stuff on TikTok, on social media, and claim that they have a cure for everything. But there’s no simple fixes.”TikToker Dr. Michael
“It’s trying to hold back the sea,” said David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “There’s just a tsunami of these things.”
Vladeck said that while it’s concerning that these TikTok posts for questionable supplements appear to be coming from people with medical expertise, the doctors and nurses whose photos are being wrongly used are unlikely to have much success with legal action, and the damages would be modest. (TikTok is protected, too: Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it cannot be held legally responsible for most of what users post on the platform.)
Short of TikTok cracking down on the problem, discerning TikTokers—and even doctors, apparently—are themselves doing the work of policing and debunking.
“People are going to try to and sell you stuff on TikTok, on social media, and claim that they have a cure for everything, but there’s no simple fixes,” a TikToker named Dr. Michael said in a recent video highlighting how the face of a dental hygienist in Georgia is being misappropriated. “Normally I come out with studies and evidence to back up what I say—but for this lot of shit, I don’t really need to.”
“If it sounds too good to be true,” Dr. Michael added, “it probably is.”