Hi! I’m Amanda Erickson, a news editor at STAT filling in here while Tori's out.

What makes people trust one medication — or one doctor, or one influencer — over another? It’s a question that several First Opinion writers grappled with last week. Vikas Patel, an emergency medicine physician, wrote about a patient who stopped taking her statin — a medication with decades of research behind it — because the Internet convinced her it might be leading to brain fog. Instead, she started herself on BPC-157, a synthetic peptide with limited clinical trial data but a rabid following online.

This experience — “the wholesale substitution of consumer enthusiasm for clinical evidence,” as Patel described — illuminates something darker. “In consumer health culture, the volume of evidence behind a therapy has become inversely correlated with public trust in it,” he writes. What’s the way out? Patel knows the arguments can’t be won with data alone. It must be tackled one conversation at a time in the exam room.

In other essays this week, writers looked at the impact that appointment wait times have on medical misinformation. “It’s not a coincidence that medical misinformation is hitting hardest as access to medical professionals has deteriorated nationwide,” wrote Ilana Yurkiewicz, an oncologist and professor of medicine at Stanford. And Alexandra Sifferlin offers one possible anecdote — clinics of last resort, where patients with undiagnosed illnesses are given a team of doctors and cadre of tests, all in the hope of discovering the cause, and the cure, for what ails them. “I believe the commodity that we have that many other physicians in practice don’t is the time to sit and really sink our teeth into the information,” Camilo Toro, a neurologist at the NIH who works with the program told Sifferlin. Read more here.

Which First Opinion essays spoke to you this week? Let me know at amanda.erickson@statnews.com, and thanks for reading!