Paper short abstract:

Inquiring into practices and relations that constitute community-based health advice, that grows in popularity across the Polish speaking Internet, the paper proposes a term digital distrust to talk about the future of public healthcare system and the expert authority crisis of the Internet era.

Paper long abstract:

"There are in it for money, profiting if we get sick, not if we stay healthy. So I take matter into my own hands, and do my own research". Bozena is one of many Polish-speaking Internet users, who do not trust medical authorities. Instead, they look across the Web for solutions, and often reach out to 'networked publics' (boyd, 2011) - social networking sites, such as dozens of easily accessible Facebook groups, with thousands of members of various ages and backgrounds, interested in medical issues, from homemade cures, Ayurveda, TCM, alternative cancer treatments, to nutritional advice and meditation. It's simple how it works - you post a question, with pictures or not, and soon enough you get numerous comments from people sharing their own experiences and knowledges. Those loose networks of community-care, based on an individual experience of self-care, form a collaborative health advice "system" - a new, peculiar kind of "public" healthcare in social media. It emerges online amongst strangers united by a common cause of gaining or maintaining health, trust towards each other, and a distrust towards the conventional medical authorities. Building on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020), the paper argues that the digital communication have unexpectedly contributed to the medical expert authority crisis, introducing a concept of digital distrust. The paper asks, what the future holds for such highly popular, but grass-root and spontaneous community health initiatives? Can we imagine the future of healthcare in Europe, that somehow acknowledges the community-care, and initiatives beyond the conventional medicine?