Dr TikTok: patients diagnose chronic illnesses with anonymous commenters’ help

Malina Lee, a 31-year-old wedding baker based in San Antonio, Texas, joined TikTok during the Covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Like many people at the time, she was bored and began using the platform to pass the time and advertise her business. She didn’t expect a cancer diagnosis.

Four years after Lee joined the app, a commenter with the username “PickleFart” told her that her neck looked asymmetrical in a way that could suggest she had a goiter – an enlarged thyroid gland – and that she should get it checked out. The anonymous amateur clinician turned out to be right – Lee had thyroid cancer, received treatment quickly, and, less than a year later, was cancer free.

TikTok users are increasingly reporting that the app’s hyper-specific algorithm has steered them towards detecting medical problems before they were aware of them themselves. In many instances, users reported that symptoms described by other TikTokers matched their own inscrutable set of ailments, which led to diagnoses. In instances like Lee’s, human commenters were responsible for diagnoses that doctors had missed or not yet identified.

Lee is not the only user that PickleFart, whose real name is Billie Jean Tuomi, has accurately diagnosed in a comment section. By her estimate, Tuomi has commented on dozens of videos alerting content creators of potential thyroid problems – and correctly spotted serious problems in at least four cases that she knows of, including Lee’s.

Tuomi’s career as the “thyroid avenger”, as some have started to call her, is personal in its origins: she herself was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2012, and after two years of treatment was declared cancer-free. But obtaining a diagnosis and undergoing the subsequent treatment were difficult processes. She now finds herself trying to spare strangers on the internet what she went through.

“It’s something that you don’t ever stop struggling with – it’s constantly on my mind,” she said. “The earlier you get diagnosed, the easier it is to treat, so I feel like it’s important to say something if you see something.”

Craig Mittleman, director of the department of emergency services at Lawrence + Memorial hospital in Connecticut, said in the last five years of his 36-year career practicing medicine, he has seen a sharp increase in patients coming in with internet-influenced diagnoses – for better and for worse.

“In some ways, it’s allowed patients to feel empowered to ask certain questions and be more informed,” he said. “But I also find that we are often, as emergency physicians, spending a lot of time debunking information that patients present, which they’ve procured through social media.”

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Source: The Guardian, 12 April 2026