I’m beginning to believe that influencers will be the death of us.

As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I’ve acquired—or more accurately, reacquired—a conversion van. The plan is to pick up where I left off years ago: gut it, rebuild it properly, and turn it into something I can take on the road. Something that can accommodate me, dogs, another human if necessary, and still feel intentional instead of improvised.

This actually excites me. I don’t intend to give up gaming—I’ve already planned space for my PlayStation—but the van gives me a creative outlet that taps into my woodworking skills and my need to build something tangible. It’s grounding. It’s real.

And then… the influencer enters the chat.

In the process of researching solid, evidence-based renovation techniques, I fell headfirst into the influencer rabbit hole. Endless videos. Confident opinions. Zero consensus. Every assertion delivered as gospel truth, backed by nothing more than anecdote dressed up as empirical evidence.

Different influencer, different “facts.”

If you’re lucky enough to find someone who actually is a professional, about 90% of the time they’re also selling a product. Their evidence may be rooted in reality, but only insofar as it supports whatever they’re trying to move through an affiliate link.

And some of them are just so unbearably smug that you want to shut the computer off and walk out of the room.

Of course, this isn’t limited to van-life influencers. This is an everything problem.

We saw it explode during COVID, when suddenly social media was overrun with “medical influencers” peddling cures and treatments that had absolutely no basis in reality. Some of it was merely stupid. Some of it was actively dangerous.

Remember injecting bleach? A sitting president suggested it, and influencers ran with it. My mother used to say, “If someone told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?” Turns out the answer for a shocking number of people was yes, as long as it came with a ring light and a follower count.

Remember ivermectin? A veterinary antiparasitic, primarily used in horses, widely promoted as a COVID treatment despite a complete lack of supporting evidence. Empirical research showed no therapeutic benefit—but that didn’t slow the hype machine one bit.

To truly appreciate how far off the rails this went, you can buy ivermectin over the counter in Louisiana, home of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John Kennedy. That fact alone should give anyone pause.

Then there’s the MMR vaccine panic. The damage wasn’t caused solely by the discredited “research” of Andrew Wakefield—who is no longer allowed to practice medicine in the UK—but by the celebrity megaphone that amplified it. Once a famous parent latched onto the narrative, influencers took over. The research was debunked. The harm, however, stuck.

Now we’re seeing measles outbreaks again—driven not by medical professionals, but by people with TikTok accounts, strong opinions, and no understanding of epidemiology.

And they all say the same thing: “Do your own research.”

Except “doing your own research” usually means starting with a quack website that conveniently echoes the influencer’s opinion. Actual research—peer-reviewed, reproducible, boring, unsexy research—takes time and effort. It requires reading things you may not like. It requires being wrong.

It’s much easier to hear something once and run with it. After all, everything on the internet is true, right?

As a medical provider, I despised this. Patients would arrive with a diagnosis already locked in because Doctor Google or a social media personality told them they had the same symptoms. In medicine we joke about this, but it’s not funny when cancer is always listed first and it becomes nearly impossible to redirect someone toward more likely, evidence-based explanations.

The real damage here isn’t annoyance—it’s erosion. It undermines legitimate expertise, effective treatment, and even something as mundane as figuring out whether a specific type of insulation actually works in a van.

The only real solution is reviving critical thinking—bringing back a version of “do your own research” that actually means look at the evidence. Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle, and influencers aren’t going anywhere.

Which leaves me with this conclusion:

The only opinions I truly trust anymore are my dog’s and my mom’s.

At least one of them knows when to sit, stay, and mind their own damn business.