Fighting the Infodemic: A Physician’s Battle Against Medical Misinformation

In late November 2021, as the world began moving on from the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Joseph Thomas was still witnessing its devastating effects. Working as a hospitalist in his third year, he came across a haunting tweet from a colleague: “Checked my ICU list after being gone for a few days for the holiday… Every single one of my COVID-19 patients died while I was gone. All of them.”

The message triggered a flood of traumatic memories—families saying final goodbyes, the physical discomfort of wearing N95 masks for hours, and patients dying alone. What made it worse was seeing social media posts denying these realities.

That evening, Dr. Thomas experienced a breaking point. “I don’t think I’m okay. I don’t think I’m going to be okay for a long time,” he told his wife before collapsing in tears. This emotional breakdown reflected a broader crisis among healthcare workers during the pandemic. A 2023 study by G. Camelia Adams found that despite employing adaptive coping strategies, physicians’ psychological and physical health difficulties remained high or worsened over the course of a year.

Rather than retreating, Dr. Thomas channeled his distress into action. He began creating educational content online, first on Facebook and eventually expanding to TikTok as @DocWithBowtie. “It was either that or find another couch to cry on,” he explains.

His approach mirrors how he interacts with patients in person—establishing rapport rather than being dismissive or mocking, even when confronting misconceptions. This strategy recognizes a fundamental human reality: “Social death is more frightening than physical death. We would rather be accepted by our social groups than be right,” as David McRaney explains in “How Minds Change.”

The challenge intensified as some physicians began spreading misinformation about COVID-19, claiming to know “root causes” and cures that mainstream medicine was supposedly hiding. These individuals gained millions of followers across social media platforms while ironically claiming they were being silenced. Many promoted unregulated supplements or treatments lacking scientific evidence while telling followers to “follow the money.”

Fighting such misinformation proves exceptionally difficult. As Brandolini’s Law states, “The amount of energy needed to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

Dr. Thomas advocates for transparency and acknowledging the gray areas in medicine. “Science is never black-and-white or all-or-nothing, and neither is humanity,” he says. This includes discussing the emotional toll healthcare workers experience, countering the stereotype that doctors are completely impartial and unaffected.

When addressing misinformation, he focuses on the human impact behind statistics. When a colleague cited COVID-19’s 99% survival rate to downplay its severity, Thomas pointed out that 1% still represented 3.3 million potential deaths, with many survivors facing long-term health consequences.

The physician recommends several strategies for combating medical misinformation:

1. Meet people where they are, using various platforms and communication styles based on the intended audience.

2. Recognize that pseudoscience thrives on oversimplification and fabricated explanations for what science hasn’t yet fully explained.

3. Investigate financial motivations—whether from pharmaceutical companies, supplement sales, or lawsuits against evidence-based medicine producers.

4. Humanize medical discussions by acknowledging healthcare system limitations rather than selling simple solutions.

Though sometimes discouraged by hostile comments, Dr. Thomas finds motivation in messages from people who got vaccinated or reconsidered health decisions based on his content. “It’s the people reading those comments who are in between the extremes, just trying to do right by their health and their loved ones,” he says.

While COVID-19 has entered an endemic phase, what researchers call the “infodemic” of medical misinformation continues to rage. Dr. Thomas’s work represents a crucial form of public health intervention—a vaccination against the spread of dangerous medical myths in the digital age.

“My videos put facts in front of people as a vaccination against the infodemic,” Thomas says. “I hope you are empowered to do the same.”