Medicine vs. misinformation: How can physicians counter misleading claims about health care?

Medical misinformation and disinformation is a bad problem that’s getting worse for patients.

The Physicians Foundation published “The Effect of Misinformation and Disinformation on Physicians’ Ability to Provide Quality Care,” its survey of doctors to research how they feel about the inaccuracies pervasive across social media and national discourse about medicine and health care.

Misinformation, which is false or inaccurate, and disinformation, false or inaccurate information presented to mislead someone deliberately, threaten patient safety by hurting the decision-making process and undermining the physician-patient relationship, according to The Physicians Foundation.

A full 86% of physicians feel the incidence of medical misinformation and disinformation has increased compared with five years ago, and half of doctor respondents said it was a “significant increase.”

The results included a surprising finding. Physicians consider themselves well-equipped to correct patients’ wrong beliefs, but they have less confidence in patients’ abilities to find accurate medical information.

In this video series, Physicians Foundation President Gary Price, MD, MBA, discusses the results of the study and how doctors can reclaim credibility over false messages.