Deborah Cohen

Deborah Cohen is an investigative journalist, broadcaster, and keynote speaker on health and health policy.

Speaker Dr Deborah Cohen offers a rare combination of medical expertise and incisive broadcast reporting. With a background as a qualified doctor, she has built a career uncovering some of the most critical and complex stories in health, science, and health policy. Deborah has a skill for making involved health and science stories clear and relevant, breaking down the technical details to inform, challenge, and drive debate.

The Digital Shift: with waiting times increasing, many people turn to influencers and ‘Instagram doctors’ for advice and wellness, resulting in the commodification of health.

Questionable Evidence: the book exposes how many ‘preventative’ screenings, supplements, and wellness trends promoted online lack solid scientific evidence, and can sometimes make users anxious or sick.

Impact on Healthcare: the rise of online self-diagnosis and ‘dodgy’ tests has increased pressure on the healthcare system, with patients often presenting unverified information from digital sources to their doctors.

Bad Influence explores the rise of AI-powered diagnoses, Ozempic trends, wearable technology, and the commodification of health in an age of anxiety and questions just who is regulating the advice that is now totally transforming patient care. 

As the former Science Editor at ITV News and UK and Health Correspondent for BBC Newsnight, Deborah played a pivotal role in helping to shape public understanding during the Covid-19 pandemic, offering independent and balanced analysis of positions both orthodox and dissenting at a time of global uncertainty. Her reporting, provided a clear, science-based counterpoint to a storm of misinformation, ensuring that evidence and expertise remained available in the public conversation.

Deborah has led investigations for BBC Panorama, Channel 4 Dispatches, ITV Tonight, and BBC’s File on Four and her work has helped to drive significant change in medical practice, regulatory policies, and public health discussions. At the British Journalism Awards of 2019 Deborah was named Health and Life Science Journalist of the Year.

Prior to her broadcasting career, Deborah founded the investigations unit at The BMJ, one of the world’s leading medical journals. There, her research led the groundwork for Netflix documentaries, global media exposés, and parliamentary inquiries. Her investigations have led to regulatory overhauls in critical, highly publicized areas including medical device safety, pharmaceutical transparency, fertility treatments, and gender dysphoria care. Those investigations have impacted health systems and policies internationally.

A natural communicator, Deborah Cohen is a superbly informed speaker or panel host, adept at making complex medical and scientific topics accessible to all. She is expert in navigating controversy in polarised debate, and in communicating in crisis scenarios. She regularly lectures academics, medical professionals, and journalists, offering insight into the intersection of media, science, and policy and has spoken recently at Dartmouth College, Oxford Museum, the Science Museum, the Nuffield Trust Health Summit, and Imperial College, London. She is expert in communicating complexity to non-expert audiences as shown by invitations to participate in forums for Harvard, MIT, the LSE, and events funded by Cancer Research UK as well as a panelist at the European Parliament and for Index on Censorship.

Deborah Cohen is now researching the developing role of artificial intelligence in medicine and healthcare.

You can contact Deborah Cohen via a Specialist Speakers agent on our London landline number 0204 616 0868 for speaking and presentation in both in-person and virtual settings.

Here are excerpts from just two recent reviews of Deborah Cohen’s Bad Influence:

‘A timely and eye-opening investigation into how social media is reshaping the way we think about health… Bad Influence takes readers inside a world where personal narratives and viral trends have more power than peer-reviewed research… Essential reading for anyone with a social media account – or anyone who cares about the future of evidence-based medicine in an age of influence.’ Rebecca Coombes, Head of Journalism, British Medical Journal

‘Exhaustively researched – documents the tensions between amazing modern medicine and twenty-first-century quackery. An important reminder of how technology’s tentacles are reaching into every corner of our lives, and the challenge to work out what’s real.’ Laura Kuenssberg

Deborah Cohen has nominated Specialist Speakers as an approved booking agent.