Alex Bell was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer at the age of 32. Her family and friends didn’t understand what she was going through. But she found a community on the social media platform Reddit.
Ms. Bell’s experience with cancer inspired her desire to help others with their suffering, and she wanted to focus on compassionate, evidence-based discussion and moderator ethics. Since 2020, she has served as a moderator for multiple Reddit communities. She also founded a subreddit (the term for these communities) called r/doihavebreastcancer.
Bell, one of several panelists at SXSW 2026 on the trustworthiness of health information in the age of artificial intelligence, said that on Reddit, “people are really opening up about their concerns, their fears, their health.” “Helping people go through what you went through is incredibly healing.”
Reddit is different from other social media platforms because it features text-based long-form content (in addition to multimedia, external links, and comment-based discussions). Therefore, the speakers pointed out, you won’t get the dopamine hit that leads to doomscrolling on social media.
“They’re there to read every detail, every piece of information,” Jessica Karev, Reddit’s director of health, said during the panel discussion. “They’re there for the data.” In 2025, health content on Reddit will be viewed more than 11.5 billion times, a significant increase year-over-year.
Panelist Dr. Ania Bilsky acknowledged that this is not a position necessarily shared by all doctors, but said she supports patients who turn to generative AI and other tools to conduct health research. Bilski is an emergency medicine physician and vice president of clinical AI at OpenEvidence. Physicians currently ask more than 1 million questions per day on OpenEvidence, and more than 40% of U.S. physicians use OpenEvidence every day on average.
“As an ER doctor, I’m just solving puzzles all day long,” Bilsky said. When patients do their own research, they can ask better questions. As a doctor herself, she uses Reddit to ask her own medical questions.
Bilsky isn’t the only clinician on Reddit. Calef said more than 1 million nurses have joined the platform. Clinicians on the platform are there to engage with patients as well as their colleagues. Just like patients, clinicians enjoy a shared community. There is also a group of moderates, Karev said, and Reddit is always looking for more moderators.
Karev argued that Reddit is a public service because it allows the public to learn more about specific medical concerns and situations. “We need more visibility,” Karev said. “The viewers in these online communities are clearly raising their hands and saying, ‘This is what I’m working on and I need more help.'”
Bilski wants to put a lot of guardrails around large language models. Transparency of information sources is just as important as being able to assess the quality of that source. OpenEvidence works on both fronts by citing sources and ranking them by relevance and credibility. Generalizability, or how relevant a source is to a particular patient, is also important.
Finally, Bilski acknowledged the risk of algorithmic bias. “There’s so much conflicting medical information that it’s hard to know what to believe,” she noted.
For the future of AI, Bilsky said, constant human involvement will continue to be important. Ania said the “last mile of humanity” will include this element. In particular, doctors are very good at making difficult diagnoses and having conversations about treatment goals. “That’s where humanity truly thrives.”
Reddit has subreddits for healthcare professionals, patients, or both. When a healthcare provider interacts with a patient, the healthcare provider is typically required to provide their medical license to the moderator for verification. If they are invalid, they will be removed from the group, Kalev said.
