Social media coinages like #LongCovid can establish diagnostic categories before medical consensus, quickly spreading to newsrooms, clinics, and legislatures. This bottom-up path shifts authority from clinicians to online communities, surfacing real suffering but also inviting overdiagnosis and quack cures.
— It changes how diseases are defined and resourced in the digital era, with implications for trust, funding, and guideline-setting.
Poppy Sowerby
2025.10.13
78% relevant
The article describes #toxicmoldillness virality on TikTok/Reddit, fundraising, and self‑evacuation behaviors despite a lack of consensus, mirroring how online communities can create and spread diagnostic categories (akin to #LongCovid) that pressure institutions; it cites AAAAI critiques of testing and UK guidance that rejects CIRS symptoms as mould‑caused.
2025.10.07
67% relevant
Like #LongCovid communities, SurvivingAntidepressants.org built a bottom‑up framework (e.g., 'protracted withdrawal syndrome,' hyperbolic tapering) that has influenced discourse and continuing‑medical‑education on deprescribing where formal guidance was lacking.
Cremieux
2025.09.17
55% relevant
Both argue that how a diagnostic category is defined and operationalized drives resources and policy. Here, instead of bottom‑up social labels, the author points to top‑down ICD‑10 coding and school reporting incentives (e.g., Massachusetts’ 400% reporting jump; ~25% rises when districts are rewarded) as the mechanisms inflating autism prevalence and spending.
Leo Kim
2025.08.21
55% relevant
Like online labels that crystallize into policy before medical consensus, the 'chemtrail' frame is reportedly prompting Florida and Alabama lawmakers to pursue bans on non‑existent geoengineering, turning a memetic category into legislative action.
Jesse Singal
2025.08.07
100% relevant
Elisa Perego coined #longcovid on May 20, 2020; within months The Atlantic, the British Medical Journal, and politicians adopted the framing.