NBC News
A survey conducted to Doctors and published on Wednesday revealed how extended the falsehoods related to health, and not only on the Internet but also within the offices that doctors talk with their patients.
The survey, conducted by Physicans Foundation, a non -profit research group, revealed that 61% of doctors claimed to have attended patients influenced by erroneous or malicious information in a moderate or high proportion during the last year.
An overwhelming majority of doctors, 86%, said that the incidence of these falsehoods between patients had increased in the last five years, a period that includes most of the Covid-19 pandemic, and another 50% said they had increased significantly.
The survey offers an unusual vision of the frequency with which doctors meet pseudoscience or bulls in their daily practice, and shows how their work is changing in response to a new informative environment in which the distorted statements about health are easily spread on the Internet and, sometimes, they have the support of government authorities.
Dr. Gary Price, president of Physicans Foundation, said the organization decided to conduct the survey because it knew that doctors were frustrated by those falsehoods and wanted to know the scope of the problem.
“It is frustrating and demoralizing,” he said in a telephone interview, “attempts against the very essence of what motivates most doctors, which is the desire to help people in the most fundamental way possible, and, in a way, it is a rejection of all the things that lead people to exercise medicine.”
Most of the doctors surveyed (57%) said they believe that misinformation and erroneous data had at least a moderate impact on their ability to provide quality care to patients.
Price, plastic surgeon, said that falsehoods hinder the work of doctors or, in some cases, make it impossible. He said that one of his patients decided to cancel an operation during the Covid-19 pandemic because he refused to test the coronavirus, since he did not believe it was dangerous.
“Although you feel personally responsible for the health of your patients and, in many ways, the system makes you responsible for it, you no longer have any reasonable control over the result,” he said. For doctors “that’s a recipe for exhaustion.”
Health falsehoods are widespread, especially on the Internet, and affect a wide range of issues, from vaccines to dietary supplements. The survey did not ask about specific types of misinformation, but the respondents were a representative sample of the profession: head doctors and specialists, doctors at the beginning of their career and others with more experience, and others from urban, suburban and rural areas. The survey was conducted online 1,002 doctors.
The survey comes at a time when misinformation seems to be booming, both on the Internet and in the federal government. The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of false or deceptive statements about vaccines and other issues, has continued to attack medical research and worrying experts in infectious diseases with their actions and their rhetoric since he assumed the position.
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The myths against vaccines emerged on social networks before shooting this month at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The attacker blamed the coronavirus vaccine of his mental health problems, including depression, although there is no clear evidence that demonstrates a relationship.
Price said that Kennedy Jr. and other people with authority have the duty to be precise: “Public Health officials are elected or not, they have the fundamental obligation to ensure that the community receives precise and reliable information and to continue guaranteeing that the entire system can be trusted.”
A representative of Kennedy Jr. did not respond on Tuesday to a request for comments, before the publication of the survey.
Dr. Sema Yasmin, a medical professor at Stanford University, and did not participate in the survey, said the results show the difficult situation of doctors.
“It’s too much to expect a doctor or nurse, for example, they address complex beliefs and deeply rooted in a consultation of eight to twelve minutes,” he said in an email.
“Health workers are on the front line, listen to pseudoscientific statements day after day, and have a hard time correcting them and providing precise information to patients, while maintaining relationships in which they can share things they have heard or believe,” he said.
Yasmin, author of What the Fact?a book on media literacy and conspiracy theories, said that more research could be carried out to find out how many doctors they admit to having fallen into the trap of false information.
“Unfortunately, sometimes our colleagues also fall into falsehoods,” he said, “we have to be aware of our own vulnerabilities.”
Physicians Foundation was created in 2003 with the income of a collective agreement after a demand from doctors to insurance companies for their billing practices. Grants subsidies to universities, hospitals and institutions for medical research and to address the well -being of specialists.
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At least another survey of doctors has yielded similar results. In a 2023 by the Foundation of Beaumont, a public health organization, 72% of the doctors said that misinformation had hindered the treatment of patients with COVID-19, and the same percentage indicated that it had negatively affected the results.
Other surveys have shown that misinformation spread widely among the population. In a survey conducted in April, the KFF non -profit foundation, dedicated to health policies, discovered that 63% of American adults had read or heard the false myth that the measles vaccine causes autism.
Price indicated that he would like more doctors to resort to social networks as part of his work to counteract medical misinformation on platforms where he often spreads. “The medical profession needs to enter that communication channel, but not only publishing studies there,” he said.
“We have to learn to communicate better in that environment. We are very late,” he added, “we have to be so rigorous when examining the best way to do it as we are when trying to discover the best ways to perform an operation or develop a new medication.”
