Are doctors and patients knowledgeable enough to discern fact from fiction in modern medicine?

In 2025, good health information is as close as the nearest connection to the Internet.

But so is bad information about physical and mental health, medicine and science, and that is a growing problem.

The Physicians Foundation published “The Effect of Misinformation and Disinformation on Physicians’ Ability to Provide Quality Care.” The new survey of more than 1,000 doctors revealed a troubling tendency: the potential to undermine the physician-patient relationship, “making it harder for physicians to provide effective, trusted care.”

The issue is not necessarily new in health care. To start 2025, Annals of Internal Medicine published a primer on countering mistaken beliefs of patients. This report highlights a KFF study about medical misinformation about some high profile issues in health care, from two years ago. There have been false claims involving GLP-1 antidiabetes and antiobesity drugs. Physicians for years have been countering falsehoods about childhood vaccines, and the fight over accuracy of vaccine safety claims has expanded under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A poll this year found some physicians believe a ban on social media giant TikTok and its plethora of medical inaccuracies would improve American health care.

But the latest data shows a gap between physician beliefs about their own abilities to detect medical misinformation and disinformation, and about their patients’ abilities to do so, said Physicians Foundation President Gary Price, MD, MBA.

This slideshow presents the findings of the Physicians Foundation poll, as published in August 2025.