Misinformation vs. medicine: The surprising finding about physicians

Physicians apparently have supreme confidence in their own ability to counter the medical misinformation and disinformation that their patients bring into the exam room. Why do they feel that way? It’s time to rethink how medicine communicates with the public and reconsider how doctors communicate with patients, said Physicians Foundation President Gary Price, MD, MBA.

Gary Price, MD, MBA: Most surprising to me was that the majority of physicians clearly feel that this is a huge problem for them and taking care of the patients. They're frustrated by it, it contributes to burnout. Over 50 percent, no matter how you ask the question. Interestingly, when we asked physicians if they felt they were equipped and able to deal with it with their patients, 97 percent said, absolutely! Yes, we are. I found that very surprising. If you take a look at what's happened with one of the leading indicators of how well we're doing with public health, vaccination rates, over the last five years, we clearly have not been able to cope with that misinformation and disinformation. We've let our patients down on that, and it's striking to me that almost everyone thinks that they're able to do a great job. This is a little bit the mirror image. When you ask patients about their trust in different professions, their trust in physicians in general has been slowly eroded a little over the last decade. But when you ask them about their own physician, they rank their own position, if not the highest, very high in people they trust. I think physicians are doing a little bit of the opposite with their confidence. They're supremely confident in their ability to talk with their patients almost to a one. But yet they recognize it for at least half the patients, it's a real issue. I think this reflects a disconnect, and it's a call to action for the scientific community, the medical community in particular, but especially for physicians in the organizations that try to help represent them. I think we've fallen behind in understanding how many of our patients are getting their information and what leads them to trust a source. And we can't just deliver them the results of studies anymore. We have to learn to communicate and meet our patients where they're getting their information, where they're placing their trust. And that's something new for the medical profession. It's something we have to learn about. I think it's something our society has to do more research into, and and get some evidence-based answers to how we do that. I really think that we need to look at the way we communicate with patients with just as much intensity and rigor as we do when we're trying to figure out how to make an operation better, or how to develop a better treatment for disease.