Physicians address the urgent issue of medical misinformation on social media
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Three women physicians addressed the ongoing issue of scientific and medical misinformation on social media and obstacles that health care professionals face in dispelling online myths in a The New England Journal of Medicine perspective.
“Although the spread of misinformation has escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the propagation of deceptive medical claims is as old as the health care profession itself,” Vineet M. Arora, MD, MAPP; Eve Bloomgarden, MD; and Shikha Jain, MD, FACP, wrote. “The ease with which misinformation (incorrect or misleading information) and disinformation (inaccurate information that is purposefully misleading or deceptive) are spread by means of social media, however, presents a new challenge.”
Arora, Bloomgarden and Jain cited data showing that 95% of Americans believe misinformation is a problem, and the U.S. surgeon general has even issued an urgent advisory on the topic.
“Attacking disinformation at its source is essential,” they wrote. “Clinicians have advocated for social media companies to be held accountable for the spread of medical disinformation on their platforms.”
However, the authors noted within the perspective that many health care professionals — one in four at least — who work toward dispelling harmful myths have been attacked on social media, most commonly for posting advocacy-related content.
Such attacks underscore the need for support and training to help health care professionals combat misinformation, according to the authors.
“To help health care professionals successfully tackle medical misinformation online, it’s imperative not only to instill in future clinicians a recognition of the importance of science communication and train them in dispelling medical misinformation, but also to support professionals who are attacked online and to ensure that various stakeholders, including social media companies and licensing boards, hold people who spread disinformation accountable for the harm they cause,” they wrote.
Protecting health care professionals
Aiming to dispel misinformation online can come at the cost of attack and harassment.
Arora, Bloomgarden and Jain referenced survey results that showed up to two-thirds of physicians and scientists interviewed by the media on COVID-19 reported being attacked, with 22% of respondents receiving threats of physical or sexual violence and 15% receiving death threats.
“We have been trying to figure out how to safely use social media and traditional media outlets to counteract misinformation while protecting ourselves, because we’ve all noticed the increase in online harassment and bullying — it was there before COVID, but it’s really accelerated with the pandemic,” Bloomgarden told Healio. “So, while even the surgeon general called on health care workers to take to social media to advocate and counter misinformation, we really felt like we were being asked to do that without safe guidance on how to protect ourselves from doxing, trolling and bullying, and many of us have encountered harassment personally.”
Strategies to prevent such attacks include adopting a group identity — such as the This is Our Shot organization to support COVID-19 vaccination — and also providing clinicians with formal training on how to outline why misinformation is false, the authors wrote. They also added the medical schools and universities can invest in providing such communication techniques, and employers and organizations should be prepared to support those health care professionals who have faced attacked online.
Coming together
The nonprofit Illinois Medical Professional Action Collaborative Team, or IMPACT, organization — co-founded by Arora, Bloomgarden and Jain — is another example of creating a group identity that can help to support physicians combating medical disinformation.
“The purpose of IMPACT is to amplify the voices of health care professionals and lead with evidence-based scientific messaging,” Jain told Healio. “We decided to write this paper a couple months ago, describing how our process came together and why it’s so important for health care professionals to work on addressing and attacking misinformation on social media.”
Bloomgarden added that, as an endocrinologist, she constantly encounters health misinformation regarding wellness and supplements, so the pivot to public health and addressing misinformation was quite natural for her.
“We decided to write this piece with the background of the prolonged pandemic — with the vaccines, we had all hoped this would be over, but instead we encountered myth after myth of misinformation, really egregious fake news that was undermining the trust in our ability to take care of our patients, our families and society, and really had direct implications for us being able to get out of the pandemic,” Bloomgarden said.
Publication
Although a troubling subject, the authors of the perspective were particularly excited to find themselves not only published in NEJM, but on the front page.
“For me especially, I never envisioned myself being someone who would be published in The New England Journal of Medicine, so it was pretty humbling to publish in such a prestigious journal, especially on a topic that I am so passionate about,” Jain said. “It also goes to show the way medicine and academic medicine are evolving. I don’t think 10 to 15 years ago this would have received as much validity in this space, but because we’ve seen the really dire impact that this particular modality of communication has had on public health and science communication over the last 3 years, this type of academic work is becoming more highly respected.”
Bloomgarden shared similar excitement about the publication and importance of the topic.
“It’s a huge accomplishment. I’m really proud of what we’ve written and what we’ve done over the last 2 years,” she said. “I think it speaks to the timeliness and urgency of the issue at hand. Not just that we were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, but it elevates the fact that we had our hand on the pulse of what’s happening and what really matters to health care workers and to medical professionals.”
The publication, with three female authors, also is a “win for gender equity,” Bloomgarden added.
“Certainly, for women in medicine, we’ve seen a lot of decline in productivity in publications [during the pandemic],” she said. “The number of first-author publications for women went down dramatically as we took over multiple different jobs and responsibilities, both at work and at home. So, to have not only our last 2 years of work published in The New England Journal of Medicine, but also to have three female authors on it, I think is a win for gender equity. We were just so pleased to see it there.”
Reference:
For more information:
Eve Bloomgarden, MD, can be reached at ebloomgarden@northshore.org.
Shikha Jain, MD, FACP, can be reached at sjain25@uic.edu.
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