A couple of highlights from around the web that made it into our feeds this week.
The Doctors Are Real, but the Sales Pitches Are Frauds
Perhaps expected by many, but a growing wave of scams is using artificial intelligence to impersonate trusted physicians in order to sell fake supplements or push fraudulent health products. This article does a great job explaining how these sophisticated impersonations, powered by A.I. tools that can mimic image and voice, are spreading across platforms from Facebook to YouTube, often faster than regulators can take them down. As Dr. Caroline Apovian of Harvard bluntly put it, the campaigns are “insidious and dangerous,” preying on vulnerable patients who may not realize the endorsements are fabricated. (from nytimes.com)
The Trump Administration Will Automate Health Inequities
A physician's warning that the Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan could hardwire health inequities into the future of American medicine. By limiting which data can be collected and which research counts as “legitimate,” the policy risks training tomorrow’s medical algorithms on skewed or incomplete information. The history is sobering: from race-based lung function tests to flawed kidney calculators, we’ve seen how biased metrics, once embedded, persist in clinical practice for decades. With AI now moving to the center of care by influencing diagnoses, treatments, and insurance decisions, Dr. Spencer argues that rolling back safeguards and narrowing data collection could calcify inequities at scale. It’s critical we all remember that technology alone doesn’t guarantee progress; the integrity of the data beneath it matters most. (from theatlantic.com)
The Big Takeaways from Health Secretary RFK Jr.’s Contentious Senate Hearing
It was hard to miss the heated Senate Finance Committee hearing this week, in which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his sweeping reforms to the CDC and HHS while repeating long-debunked claims about vaccine safety. Senators from both parties pressed him on many issues, including his reliance on discredited advisers and his hints at altering the childhood vaccine schedule. This rhetoric, coupled with agency shake-ups, risks undermining trust in vaccines that have been rigorously studied and credited with saving millions of lives. The testimony highlighted the high stakes of leadership at the nation’s health agencies: public trust, scientific integrity, and access to lifesaving immunizations. (from statnews.com)
Taken together, these stories pose a hard question: when technology can mimic our voices, curate our data, and shape our policies, where do we locate the authentic? In medicine, integrity always shows up in the slow work, with transparent methods, durable evidence, and informed consent. Which is why this week we’re ending with fiction that sits with the same themes, image, authorship, and what’s left of the self when the world keeps re-recording you.
Project
By Rachel Cusk
The narrator considers writing an actor’s “autobiography” by making it up, and then unspools a spare, piercing meditation on performance, recording, and the uneasy trade between reality and representation. It begs the question: Who gets to author a life? (from thenewyorker.com)
Related:
- What We're Reading: 08/08/25
- What We’re Reading: 07/07/25
- “The Sacrament of Utility” Dr. Craig Smith’s 2025 Commencement Address at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine