… and what Healthcare Marketers Can Learn from them to rebuild trust

The term “snake oil salesman” brings to mind a fast-talking charlatan in a dusty Western town, peddling miracle cures from the back of a wagon. It’s a powerful symbol of medical fraud. But the origin of snake oil is far from a sham. It began with a legitimate folk remedy brought to America by Chinese immigrants who came to work on the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s.

These laborers used oil derived from the Chinese water snake, which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, to treat joint pain and inflammation. It was an effective treatment at the time passed down through generations. However, when American entrepreneurs saw its popularity, they tried to replicate it. Lacking access to the specific snake or make a determination about what exactly created the intended effect, they used local rattlesnakes, which have virtually no omega-3s. To compensate, they mixed in various substances, from harmless minerals to dangerous toxins.

The original remedy was lost. In its place, a fraudulent substitute emerged to fill a very real need. An information vacuum was created, and opportunists rushed in to fill it. This historical lesson holds a crucial message for today’s healthcare marketers and hospital communications leaders. When credible, expert information is scarce, a void forms. And that void will always be filled — often by those with the loudest voices, not the most expertise.

The Modern-Day Snake Oil: Misinformation in a Digital World

Today, the information vacuum isn’t in the remote towns of the American West. Rather, it’s on social media feeds, search engine results, and “wellness” blogs. Patients, hungry for health information, are met with a deluge of content from self-proclaimed “experts” and influencers. While some offer sound advice, many promote unproven treatments, fad diets, and dangerous medical myths. Some are even promoted by licensed physicians, directing attention to their own e-commerce products, while licensing regulators work within the limited confines of their authority and await a patient harm event.

This creates a significant problem for hospitals and health systems.

The trust that once automatically belonged to medical institutions is eroding. A study on health information sources found that a significant portion of the public turns to social media for medical advice, where misinformation spreads rapidly.

When a hospital’s voice is absent or quiet, the loudest and most confident voices — regardless of their credentials — win the public’s attention. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, consumer markets do too. When patients hear no clear, accessible, and trustworthy information from their local healthcare providers, they find it somewhere else.

This is where your a hospital brand must crease its presence, not just as a provider of care, but as the primary source of trusted health information in your community.

5 Ways to Rebuild Trust and Become the Authority

Healthcare marketers and communicators have a critical role to play in reversing this trend. It requires a strategic shift, prioritizing equally the promotion of services for patient volume to campaigns promoting hospital experts and actively rebuilding and maintaining trust. C-suite executives beyond the communication and marketing function must play a role as well with accountability for their performance to include community engagement and reversing insitutional trust trends. Strategically, this includes:

1. Internal Development: Aligning your brand with your most valuable assets — your physicians, nurses, and clinical experts — you can reclaim your position as the definitive source of health knowledge.
2. External Development: Conducting a risk assessment of vulneral audiences and taking you team’s expertise to these segments.

Here are five actionable tips to make it happen.

1. Mobilize Your Internal Experts

Your greatest marketing assets are already walking the halls of your hospital. Your physicians, nurses, specialists, and technicians possess a wealth of knowledge that your community needs. Too often, however, this expertise remains locked away in clinical settings, and by recruiting them into your messaging channels, your communications team can proactively edit and revise jargon or contextualize it to a mainstream audience.

• Start by formalizing a campaign calendar like you would with any other initiative or campaign. While it runs alongside other marketing and promotions operations without substituting for them, your team can maintain a record of proactive voices aiding in the effort to be better influences and make it a criteria of value documented in your community benefit reporting.
• Creating a formal content contribution program and provide technical and creative support. Identify clinicians who are passionate about education and provide them with the tools and support to share their knowledge.
• This could involve media training, ghostwriting support from your marketing team, or simple video recording kits or a designated “studio” setup either physically or virtually.
• Feature them on your blog, social media channels, and in community webinars. When people see and hear from real doctors and nurses, it builds a powerful, personal connection that no influencer can replicate.

2. Forge Proactive Media Partnerships

Don’t wait for a crisis to connect with local media. Build proactive, ongoing relationships with health reporters, editors, and producers in your market. Position your hospital not just as a place for treatment, but as the go-to resource for expert commentary on breaking health news, seasonal wellness topics, and public health trends.

Create a “sourcebook” of your clinical experts, organized by specialty, and share it with local news outlets. When a national health story breaks, your team should be the first one calling the local TV station, offering your cardiologist or infectious disease specialist for an interview. This positions your hospital as a reliable, authoritative partner for the media and, by extension, for the public they serve.

3. Motivate Your Professionals to Be Advocates

Many healthcare professionals are hesitant to step into the public spotlight. They may feel they lack the time, are concerned about liability, or simply don’t see it as part of their job. Your role is to motivate them by showing them the “why”, and combating misinformations more easily accomplished if its done in advance of an acute crisis.

• Recognize and celebrate their contributions internally.
• Feature their media appearances in employee newsletters or highlight their blog posts during staff meetings.
• You can also tie their advocacy work to professional development goals or create a recognition award for “Community Health Advocate of the Year.”
• By showing them that their voice matters and that the organization values their efforts, you can transform hesitant clinicians into enthusiastic brand ambassadors.

4. Leverage Your Agency as a Strategic Partner

Your marketing or PR agency should be more than just a vendor that executes campaigns. They should be a strategic partner in building trust. Challenge your agency to move beyond traditional advertising and develop integrated communications strategies focused on thought leadership and authority building, working with them to identify audience channels where there is a higher degree of risk for misinformation. Today, that might be newstalk AM/FM radio and church groups while in the early 00s and 10s, it might have been among audiences in search of enriching health solutions through yoga gyms or wellness spas.

• Work with them to pitch your experts for bylined articles in local publications, secure speaking engagements at community events, and launch educational podcast or video series.
• A good agency can help you identify content gaps in your market and develop a plan to fill them with credible information from your team.

5. Create a Content Ecosystem Built on Trust

Finally, all these efforts must be part of a cohesive content ecosystem. Your website, blog, social media channels, and email newsletters should work together to consistently deliver valuable, expert-driven information.

• Focus on answering the real questions your community is asking. Use keyword research tools to see what health topics people in your area are searching for, and then create definitive content that addresses those needs.
• Use your media connections and strategic insight to amplify your experts’ voices and ensure your message reaches the widest possible audience.
• Ensure every piece of content is reviewed for clinical accuracy. Clearly attribute information to your medical experts, including their photos and credentials.
• Make your content easy to understand, avoiding overly technical jargon. By building a reliable and accessible library of health information, you create a powerful moat around your brand. You become the first and best resource for patients, leaving no vacuum for the modern-day snake oil salesmen to fill.

From Reaction to Leadership

The lesson from the original snake oil is  real opportunity for understanding the forces at play in competition for consumers. For healthcare organizations, it’s not only about the competitor with similar products and services. It’s a shared mission to restore and regain trust.

In the absence of an authentic resource, a substitute will always appear. For hospitals today, that means we can no longer afford to be passive participants in the public health conversation. We must lead it.

Historically, those voices have been passive based on the disincentives that range from the perceived risk of politically alienating an audience to the perceived cost of time or opportunity costs.

By prioritizing new incentives, empowering your experts, partnering with the media, and building a strategy centered on trust and accountability, you can reclaim your rightful place as the most credible voice in healthcare.

It’s about more than just marketing. It’s about fulfilling your fundamental mission to care for and protect the health of your community.