Alex Bell was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer at 32 years old. Her family and friends did not understand what she was going through. But she found a community on social media platform Reddit.
The cancer journey left Bell wishing to help others' suffering, plus a focus on compassionate, evidence-based discussion and moderator ethics. Since 2020, she has served as a moderator of multiple Reddit communities. She also founded a subreddit (the term for those communities) called r/doihavebreastcancer.
“People really open up about their concerns, their fears, their health,” Bell said of Reddit, speaking as a panelist during a SXSW 2026 discussion focused on trusting health information in the age of artificial intelligence. “It is incredibly healing to help people go through what you went through.”
Reddit is distinct from other social media platforms because it features text-based, longer-form content (in addition to multimedia, external links and comment-based discussion). Therefore, the speakers noted, it doesn't provide the same dopamine hit that leads to doomscrolling on social media.
“They’re there to read every detail, every piece of information,” Jessica Calef, Reddit's director of health, said during the panel. “They’re there for the data.” In 2025, there were more than 11.5 billion views for health content on Reddit, a significant year-over-year increase.
Acknowledging that this isn’t a position necessarily shared by all doctors, panelist Ania Bilski, M.D., noted she supports patients consulting generative AI and other tools to do health research. Bilski is an emergency medicine physician and vice president of clinical AI at OpenEvidence. Physicians are now asking more than 1 million questions a day on OpenEvidence, with over 40% of U.S. docs using it daily on average.
“As an ER physician, I’m just solving puzzles all day,” Bilski said. When patients do their own research, they are empowered to ask better questions. She even uses Reddit herself as a physician for her own medical questions.
Bilski is not the only clinician on Reddit. More than 1 million people subscribe to the subreddit r/nursing, according to Calef. The clinicians on the platform are there not only to engage with patients, but also their peers. Like patients, clinicians enjoy the shared community. Some also moderate groups—and Reddit is always looking for more moderators, Calef said.
Reddit is a public service, Calef argued, because the public can learn more about specific healthcare concerns and conditions. “We just need more visibility,” Calef said. “The audiences in these online communities are very clearly raising their hand and saying, 'This is what I’m dealing with, and I need more support.'”
Bilski wants to see a number of guardrails around large language models. Transparency of sources is important, as is being able to qualify the quality of that source. OpenEvidence delivers on both fronts, citing sources and ranking them by relevance and credibility. Generalizability is also important: how relevant a source of information is to a given patient.
Finally, Bilski acknowledged the risk for bias in algorithms. “There’s a lot of conflicting medical information, so it’s tough to know what to trust,” she noted.
For the future of AI, a human in the loop will remain crucial, Bilski said. There’s going to be this component of "the human last mile." In particular, doctors are really good at delivering hard diagnoses and having conversations around goals of care. “That’s where humans are really going to flourish.”
Reddit has subreddits for healthcare professionals, patients or both. In those where providers are interacting with patients, they typically must provide their medical license to the moderators for verification. If it is invalid, they will be removed from the group, Calef said.
Editor's Note: This story was updated to clarify that 1 million people subscribe to r/nursing, not that 1 million nurses are on Reddit.