Medical Misinformation Now Pervasive in Doctor’s Offices, Survey Finds

A new survey released Wednesday has revealed the alarming extent to which medical falsehoods have infiltrated healthcare settings, with doctors reporting that misinformation has become a regular part of patient consultations.

According to the survey conducted by the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit research organization, 61% of doctors said they encountered patients influenced by medical misinformation or disinformation either “a moderate amount” or “a great deal” over the past year. Even more concerning, 86% of physicians reported that the incidence of such falsehoods among patients had increased over the past five years—a period encompassing most of the Covid-19 pandemic—with half saying it had increased significantly.

The findings offer a rare glimpse into how frequently physicians face pseudoscience in their daily practice, highlighting how medical professionals’ roles are evolving in response to an information landscape where distorted health claims spread rapidly online and sometimes receive endorsement from government officials.

“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing,” said Dr. Gary Price, president of the Physicians Foundation, in a phone interview. “It cuts to the core of what motivates most physicians, and that’s a desire to help people in the most fundamental of ways. And in a way, it’s a repudiation of all the different things that lead people to practice medicine.”

The impact on patient care appears substantial, with 57% of doctors believing misinformation and disinformation had at least a moderate effect on their ability to provide quality care. Price, a plastic surgeon himself, shared a personal example of a patient who canceled a scheduled operation during the pandemic because they refused to take a Covid test, not believing the virus posed a real danger.

“Even though you feel personally responsible for your patient’s health and, in many ways, the system holds you responsible for it, you no longer have any reasonable control over the outcome,” he explained. “That’s a setup for burnout.”

The survey, which included 1,002 physicians from various specialties and practice settings, comes at a time when health misinformation appears to be intensifying both online and within government circles. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has previously made false or misleading claims about vaccines and other health topics, continues to challenge established medical research, causing concern among infectious disease experts.

Recent events highlight the potential dangers of medical misinformation. Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media before this month’s shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, where the gunman blamed a Covid vaccine for his mental health issues despite no scientific evidence supporting such a connection.

Dr. Seema Yasmin, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University not involved in the survey, emphasized the difficult position medical professionals face: “It’s too much to expect a physician or nurse practitioner, for example, to address complex, deep-seated beliefs in an eight-to-twelve minute consult.”

“Healthcare workers are on the frontlines, they are hearing pseudoscientific statements day in and day out, and it takes great effort to correct these and to provide accurate information to patients, while maintaining relationships in which patients can share things they’ve heard or that they believe,” she added.

This isn’t the first research to document the problem. A 2023 survey by the de Beaumont Foundation found that 72% of physicians reported misinformation had made it harder to treat Covid patients and negatively affected outcomes. Meanwhile, an April poll by KFF revealed that 63% of American adults had been exposed to the debunked myth that measles vaccines cause autism.

The Physicians Foundation, established in 2003 with proceeds from a class action settlement against health insurance companies, provides grants for medical research and physician well-being initiatives.

Price believes part of the solution lies in physicians becoming more active on social media platforms where misinformation often spreads. “The medical profession needs to get into that channel of communications, but not just by posting studies there,” he said. “We need to learn how to communicate better in that medium. We’re just way behind. And I think we need to be just as rigorous about examining the best way to do that as we are at trying to figure out the best ways to do an operation or develop a new medication.”