Misinformation Increasingly Complicates Care, Physicians Foundation Survey Finds
By Jessica Ridge

Physicians are finding health misinformation and disinformation increasingly widespread, a survey by the Physicians Foundation finds, prompting doctors to take new approaches to patient communication. 

The foundation distinguishes between misinformation and disinformation based on intent, defining misinformation as that communicated unwittingly and disinformation as disseminated knowingly to deliberately mislead. Both types of incorrect information have increased over the past five years, 86% of physician respondents said. 

While a majority of physicians reported feeling equipped to address misinformation and/or disinformation in conversations with patients – 50% expressed high confidence in being able to identify and correct misinformation and/or disinformation that patients bring to their appointments –  40% were skeptical of their patients’ ability to access accurate health information outside of those appointments. 

“A lot of us feel we are constantly battling misinformation, disinformation, whether it’s Google doctor or influencers on TikTok. It’s a battle we struggle with daily,” said Morvarid Rezaie, DO, a Fort Worth palliative care physician who co-chairs the Texas Medical Association’s Committee on Cancer. 

For instance, Dr. Rezaie has seen patients pursue unstudied avenues for treatment and says it’s a delicate balance to strike between hearing out a patient, acknowledging decisions around their treatment are theirs to make, and encouraging a dialogue.  

“A lot of times, [patients with cancer are] grappling, they’re grasping for anything to help extend their life in a meaningful way, and sometimes that steers away from things that are evidence-based.” 

If a patient chooses to pursue what she terms a low-evidence treatment, Dr. Rezaie acknowledges their autonomy while prioritizing their safety. She’ll ask such patients to be open with her about other treatments they’re receiving, so that she can know how it’s going to affect the patient’s allopathic regimen.   

Although the survey doesn’t identify specific vectors of mis- and disinformation,  John Hellerstedt, MD, who was commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services when the pandemic took hold, has observed social media often couples with what he describes as a distressing lack of literacy in scientific, medical, and health information among the public, to create “a golden opportunity for an unscrupulous influencer to capture a big audience.” 

The survey also found varying trends based on physicians’ location: Among rural respondents, 38% reported encountering a great deal of misinformation and/or disinformation from their patients versus 21% of suburban physicians and 25% of urban physicians. Rural physicians were also more likely to report no confidence in their patients knowing how to access evidence-based health information online. 

And merely accessing evidence-based health information online may not be enough to mitigate those statistics, “if [patients] don’t have a preexisting level of medical and scientific literacy that enables them to make sense of what they see,” Dr. Hellerstedt said. 

In conversations with patients who align their medical decisions with evidence-based guidelines, Dr. Hellerstedt recommends thanking and affirming them, and assuring them of how beneficial those decisions are for them, their loved ones, and the community at large. 

Physicians can tell patients “how the information you’re giving them is going to make them healthier and their family healthier and keep them safe and help the community,” Dr. Hellerstedt said. “But [physicians] need to communicate using the language that people understand.”