A decade after Big Pharma banned branded pens and swag for doctors under its own ethics code, telehealth, diagnostics and imaging startups are now using celebrity stories to sell prescription drugs and preventive scans to millions. Why is the FDA allowing it? And why are venture-backed founders turning medicine into marketing?
Yet while traditional pharma can’t hand out branded pens — and must disclose every side effect when using a celebrity in an ad — digital-first health companies are handing out endorsement deals with almost no oversight, positioning celebrities as their new marketing reps.
Ro, the telehealth company behind the latest GLP-1 craze, recently enlisted Serena Williams as a global ambassador for its weight-loss program — just months after striking distribution deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Prenuvo, the $2,500 full-body MRI startup, touts investors Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber as proof of its wellness-elite appeal. Function Health, which sells $500 annual blood panels, regularly name-drops backers like Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and the Hemsworth brothers in press coverage. And Superhuman, a longevity platform, leans heavily on its association with investor Vanessa Hudgens.
The celebrity ties themselves aren’t remarkable — what’s notable is how loudly these brands flex them. In a crowded health-tech market, investor star power has become its own form of performance marketing, engineered to project trust, relevance, and social clout. None of these celebrities shape product or strategy — they shape perception. In health-tech, where differentiation is scarce, fame itself has become the feature.
They’re hardly alone. Hims & Hers has used influencer-driven campaigns to sell tele-prescribed hair-loss and sexual-health medications. Teladoc has employed athlete endorsements to promote its chronic-care services.
Even legacy consumer brands are entering the telehealth fray. WeightWatchers, once synonymous with in-person diet programs and frozen meals, is now reinventing itself as a prescription weight-loss platform — partnering with Amazon Pharmacy to deliver GLP-1 drugs directly to consumers. For Amazon, which already owns One Medical, the move signals an ambition to capture the cultural moment around GLP-1s — and the WeightWatchers audience that now wants faster, pharmaceutical results than calorie-counting can deliver.
Telehealth has undoubtedly expanded access and convenience for millions — but the marketing that now surrounds it raises a deeper question: who’s setting the guardrails?
It’s not just marketing — it’s medicine’s identity crisis.
From peptides to MRIs, from GLP-1s to longevity panels, startups are collapsing the boundary between health and consumer culture. Each sells clinical or quasi-clinical services directly to consumers, yet their growth playbooks resemble sneaker drops or skincare launches more than scientific enterprises. They trade on fame, relatability, and aspirational wellness, not peer-reviewed evidence. In doing so, they reveal a deeper tension: the collision between venture-scale growth incentives and the ethical foundations of evidence-based care.
From Care to Clout: How Celebrity Became Telehealth’s Growth Strategy
When Serena Williams or Cindy Crawford talks about health, markets listen. That’s precisely why startups court them — not for their medical expertise, but for their cultural reach.
Ro’s partnerships with Williams and Charles Barkley reframed prescription drugs as aspirational rather than clinical. In interviews, Ro’s CEO Zachariah Reitano praised Williams’s courage in “changing the narrative” around GLP-1s, positioning her personal use story as empowerment, instead of advertisement.
Today’s “celebrity medicine” ecosystem includes:
• Ro — GLP-1 prescriptions and celebrity campaigns (Serena Williams, Charles Barkley).
• Function Health — longevity lab panels backed by high-profile investors.
• Lifeforce — hormone and peptide programs co-founded by Tony Robbins.
• Prenuvo — luxury full-body MRIs marketed through A-list testimonials.
Studies show celebrity endorsements can increase purchase intent for health products, while factual medical information often fails to change behavior — proof that influence now outperforms evidence in health decision-making (PubMed and Journal of Health Communication, 2022).
For venture-backed telehealth companies, celebrity partnerships offer a shortcut through the hardest part of the business model: trust and acquisition. Telehealth is a crowded field, and customer acquisition costs (CAC) can devour margins. A recognizable face collapses the distance between brand and believer — creating a perception of legitimacy even when the science is thin.
Celebrity is the new credential. In a crowded market, fame becomes the feature.
It provides instant social proof in a market where every company is selling the same promise — better health, faster.
But that logic runs counter to how science-based medicine operates. Evidence-based care depends on reproducibility, data, and physician oversight — not celebrity validation. When medicine is packaged as a lifestyle product, the standard shifts from efficacy to influence.
The VC Strategy Driving Celebrity Medicine
Behind the scenes, this isn’t just about brand-building — it’s about balance sheets. Most telehealth companies raised money in the zero-interest era of 2020–2022 and now face slowing growth, FDA scrutiny, and rising patient skepticism. Celebrities become marketing arbitrage: a high-reach, high-emotion, “earned media” engine that drives virality in a sector historically starved of it.
Celebrity deals compress CAC, boost conversion, and generate earned media — three levers that matter when paid channels saturate and growth stalls.
It’s the same playbook used by wellness and beauty brands for years — except now it’s being applied to prescription drugs, diagnostic imaging, and laboratory testing. And that shift carries consequences.
Celebrity storytelling can normalize medicalization, and it reframes risk-based interventions as aspirational choices — which can distort how the public perceives safety, eligibility, or need.
The Cultural Shift: From Medicine to Membership
The GLP-1 boom didn’t just create a new class of drugs — it commercialized medicine itself, transforming clinical care into a subscription-based business built on vanity, virality, and venture-scale growth. The global GLP-1 market, now valued at roughly $65.8 billion, is projected to soar past $324 billion by 2035, expanding at a 17% CAGR as weight-loss and metabolic therapies redefine modern healthcare. The U.S. medical weight-loss market alone now exceeds $33.8 billion, more than doubling since 2022 — with telehealth platforms capturing a rapidly expanding share.
Within that, a new subsector has emerged: telehealth-delivered GLP-1 care, an estimated $6.9 billion market that’s swelling as digital platforms turn prescription drugs into subscription products. For venture-backed startups, GLP-1s aren’t just a medical breakthrough — they’re a recurring-revenue engine with lifestyle appeal.
Because most insurers still refuse to cover GLP-1s for weight loss, these services have morphed into luxury lifestyle offerings — marketed through celebrity endorsements to affluent consumers who can afford to pay cash. The framing is aspirational rather than clinical, positioning pharmacology as status. And yet the FDA’s absence in regulating this marketing shift has allowed the line between healthcare and high-end consumerism to blur even further.
Every influencer testimonial becomes a micro-ad campaign. Every celebrity “health journey” becomes viral content. A subscription to semaglutide isn’t framed as treatment — it’s framed as transformation.
This convergence of medicine, media, and marketing is deliberate. GLP-1 telemedicine companies aren’t just competing for patients — they’re competing for desirable subscribers: affluent, image-driven consumers likely to stay in monthly programs and share their experience online. Influencer aesthetics and celebrity cachet attract that segment, even as clinical nuance gets lost in translation.
GLP-1s are no longer just drugs — they’re a cultural product now, sold through influence instead of evidence.
When Health Becomes a Lifestyle Product
The problem isn’t just telehealth — it’s the consumerization of medicine itself.
From GLP-1 prescriptions to longevity scans, health services are being sold like products, not care.
Function Health and Prenuvo illustrate the two ends of this new spectrum. Function Health markets longevity lab panels as a gateway to “optimization,” turning diagnostics into an annual subscription. Prenuvo, meanwhile, packages full-body MRI scans as a form of preventive luxury — a $2,500 check-up marketed through A-list testimonials about early detection and self-care.
According to Radiology Today, radiologists warn that full-body MRIs can generate false positives in up to 16% of scans, leading to unnecessary biopsies, costs, and anxiety — a risk rarely mentioned in marketing. Neither company is overtly deceptive, but both recast medical screening as a lifestyle purchase, one designed to inspire FOMO rather than facilitate clinical oversight.
This is the logical endpoint of medicine’s media makeover. What began as telehealth convenience has evolved into a consumer movement where diagnostics, hormones, and peptides are marketed with the same aesthetic as skincare or fitness — personalized, premium, and shareable.
The Ethical and Regulatory Gray Zone
While telehealth has delivered real benefits — from chronic disease management to rural access — its rapid commercialization has blurred the line between patient care and consumer marketing.
Telehealth’s growth has outpaced the laws that govern it. The FDA regulates pharmaceutical advertising, but it doesn’t directly oversee how telemedicine platforms market or prescribe drugs — especially when those platforms blur the line between clinical care and lifestyle branding.
That leaves telehealth companies — which now combine prescribing, fulfillment, and brand storytelling — operating between categories. A preteen could steal her parent’s credit card and easily obtain a GLP-1 prescription from some platforms that don’t require a face-to-face video call or verified ID. Oversight remains minimal, even as prescriptions surge.
The gray area widens with peptides and hormones, the next frontier of tele-longevity.
Unlike GLP-1s, most peptides aren’t FDA-approved drugs — but they’re far from supplements. They exist in a regulatory limbo: too potent to be sold as dietary products, yet too unregulated to be treated as medicine. Compounding pharmacies can legally prepare them under a clinician’s direction, but many telehealth startups stretch that rule by marketing peptides as “research” or “optimization” therapies, often fulfilled through offshore or loosely monitored partners.
Inside the Oversight Gap In Telehealth
These products bypass traditional insurance and reimbursement pathways, enabling direct-to-consumer sales that look more like e-commerce than clinical care.
Pharma has lawyers checking every comma of its ads. Telehealth startups have influencers.
When companies use celebrity credibility instead of clinical evidence, it blurs not only the line between wellness and medicine — but between legality and legitimacy.Ro, for instance, can spotlight Serena Williams’s personal experience with GLP-1s without naming a specific drug or dosage, sidestepping the FDA’s “fair balance” rule that governs pharmaceutical ads. Function Health can post celebrity testimonials about “taking control of your health” without referencing lab precision or clinical outcomes. And Prenuvo can flood Instagram with A-list testimonials about longevity — without addressing the medical reality of false positives and unnecessary follow-up scans.
None of this technically violates the rules — because those rules were written for pharma, not for a new class of platforms that straddle medicine, media, and consumer tech.
From GLP-1s to Longevity: The Next Wave of Celebrity Medicine
The celebrityification of telehealth extends far beyond GLP-1s.
A new class of longevity and hormone-optimization startups—many of them venture-backed and celebrity-adjacent—are selling peptides, testosterone, and anti-aging protocols through the same direct-to-consumer playbook.
Lifeforce, co-founded by Tony Robbins, offers hormone and peptide programs alongside telemedicine consults and at-home blood tests. Superhuman, backed by actress and entrepreneur Vanessa Hudgens, takes a similar approach—using influencer visibility to position peptide-based wellness and coaching as part of a lifestyle movement rather than a medical practice.
These platforms present prescription-adjacent therapies as lifestyle upgrades, not medical interventions—a subtle linguistic shift that allows them to operate outside traditional FDA advertising rules while leaning on celebrity trust as the new credential. It’s the same playbook that turned GLP-1s from a diabetes treatment into a cultural symbol of transformation—only now it’s being applied to the broader promise of longevity on demand.
The FDA Gap: Where Telehealth Slips Through the Cracks
The FDA’s jurisdiction traditionally covers drug labeling and advertising, not the marketing of a platform or medical service. That’s why telehealth startups — which present themselves as “care delivery” or “wellness enablement” platforms — often fall outside those boundaries, even when they prescribe or distribute regulated drugs.
The result is a system where traditional pharma is hyper-regulated for transparency and risk disclosure, while digital-first startups can operate with influencer-style freedom.
Telehealth lives in a gray zone because it’s both healthcare and marketing. When you use a celebrity to sell the idea of a drug, not the drug itself, you’re not technically breaking the law — but you’re breaking the spirit of it.
That spirit matters. The PhRMA Code was designed to restore public trust after decades of excess — golf trips, luxury dinners, and branded swag. Today’s digital-era equivalent isn’t a steak dinner; it’s a TikTok clip of a celebrity explaining why they chose a telehealth platform for weight loss. The medium has changed. The influence hasn’t.
Cultural Influence vs. Clinical Oversight
The danger isn’t just regulatory — it’s psychological. When a celebrity shares their “health journey,” it carries a halo of authenticity that traditional pharma marketing can’t match. But unlike a physician’s endorsement, that influence is unchecked by medical ethics.
In the past, the industry worried about sales reps buying physicians’ loyalty. Now the risk is reversed: VC-backed startups are buying public trust through celebrity intimacy.
It’s particularly acute in areas like GLP-1s and advanced imaging, where treatments are complex, risks are real, and follow-up care is critical.
A single endorsement can blur the distinction between lifestyle enhancement and medical necessity — turning medicine into a consumer decision guided by aspiration, not diagnosis.
“In longevity, the majority of consumers base decisions on popularity and promise. Who tells them they have a bespoke solution which can unlock an extra 10 years, who claims to have produced a new molecule that will reverse skin and cellular aging, who holds the longevity pill. If you’re listening to someone like Andrew Huberman, you’re in the clear. But if you’re listening to someone who believes more in the marketing than in the science, you’re in trouble. We can’t burden consumers with credentialing every claim; it’s far too easy as humans to be enchanted by the sexy and shiny, while ignoring what might be less intoxicating on the surface but in reality far realer.”
— Joshua Herring, President and CEO, Longevity Science Foundation
The celebrityization of medicine doesn’t just sell products. It sells perception — and that can change what people think health is.
The Reality Behind Celebrity Medicine
To understand how we got here, you have to start with the mania.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro didn’t just spark a medical revolution — they ignited a cultural one. For VC-bacled startups, the combination of medical legitimacy, subscription economics, and vanity appeal created the ultimate flywheel. Each new celebrity “ambassador” fuels the perception that these drugs are not only effective but aspirational — a modern wellness rite of passage rather than a tightly controlled prescription therapy.
Venture capitalists like the economics: recurring revenue, DTC margins, and a culturally viral product that sells itself. But the more medicine behaves like a brand, the more it starts to inherit the same moral hazards as beauty and wellness — industries that have long blurred the boundary between health and aspiration.
The Double Standard: Why Supplements Get a Pass — and Telehealth Shouldn’t
That boundary is what makes celebrity spokespeople in telemedicine particularly egregious.
In supplements and wellness — sectors often described as the “Wild West” — celebrity endorsement has been normalized, if not expected. Gwyneth Paltrow can sell vitamins, and Tom Brady can market hydration powders, because supplements fall under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which leaves oversight largely to manufacturers.
But telemedicine isn’t a supplement. It’s regulated care — often involving prescription drugs, diagnostics, and clinical follow-up. When a celebrity becomes the face of a medical platform, the credibility of science is leveraged for marketing, yet the scrutiny of medicine doesn’t always follow.
The FDA has long turned a wary eye to the supplement industry’s unverified claims but stopped short of serious reform. That same permissiveness is now seeping into digital health, where startups cloak medical interventions in the aesthetics of wellness — glossy campaigns, influencer testimonials, and the illusion of clinical endorsement.
It’s the consumerization of medicine without the guardrails of medicine — a dangerous convergence of Silicon Valley speed, celebrity influence, and regulatory gray zones.
The Trust Reckoning: Who Regulates Medicine When Everyone’s an Influencer?
The next phase of digital health will test whether innovation can coexist with integrity. If celebrity influence continues to shape how Americans access drugs and diagnostics, the FDA will face mounting pressure to expand its jurisdiction — or risk repeating the same laissez-faire oversight that let the supplement market spiral into pseudoscience.
As venture capital continues to chase recurring revenue and virality, regulators and clinicians will have to decide whether medicine remains a public trust — or becomes just another category of content.
“From a business growth perspective, in the short term this fame-centric marketing makes a lot of sense, particularly in spaces as noisy as digital and tele-health: break into the market, build brand, and your ARR piles up. Some companies have every right to promote their products when they truly deliver optimized results. Others building business models without the purest intention in delivering on the promise of ‘better health’ fragment the ecosystem, and certainly do not — what’s very clearly missing are guardrails. If they’re built, though, that actually incentivizes companies to build better outcome-focused products, with the promotional activity as their reward for doing so.”
— Joshua Herring, CEO and President, Longevity Science Foundation
Because in medicine, the red carpet may draw attention.
But it doesn’t confer credibility.
Real health innovation will begin when the FDA treats telehealth marketing with the same scrutiny as pharmaceutical advertising.
