By Dr. Anthony Policastro
A few months ago, I wrote an article on misinformation and disinformation on social media. The definition of misinformation is false and inaccurate information. People spreading it believe they are correct. Disinformation is intentionally inaccurate information. People doing in are deliberately trying to deceive and mislead others.
A group called the Physicians Foundation recently did a survey of American physicians to see what they perceived as the effects of misinformation and disinformation in today’s practice of medicine.
More than 60 percent of physicians felt that their patients were influenced by these two factors at least a moderate amount over the past year.
That seemed to be even worse in rural areas like ours. About twice as many rural physicians see “a great deal” of misinformation/disinformation compared to their urban counterparts.
This is something that is growing with the increased use of social media. In fact, 86 percent of physicians feel that this has gotten worse over the last five years.
Over half of physicians feel that this has a significant impact on their ability to provide quality care.
The good news is that about 50 percent of physicians showed high confidence in their ability to combat this. An additional 40 percent felt somewhat or fairly confident in their ability to combat it. Only 10 percent felt that it was so bad that they could not even talk to skeptical patients.
Many of the physicians did not see it as the fault of the patients themselves. They were of the opinion that reliable information could not easily be separated from misinformation/disinformation by the average patient when they went online. Once again that seemed to be more likely in rural settings than urban settings.
There are some good sources to use for more reliable medical information. The Mayo Clinic (www.MayoClinic.org) is one of the more reliable medical websites.
There are several government agencies that have websites. They include the National Institutes of Health (www.nih.gov), the National Library of Medicine (www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/) Pubmed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) and the Centers for Disease Control (www.cdc.gov).
Two other websites are for the most part good. However, some poor information might be found on them as well. They are webmd.com and healthline.com
There is no way to avoid misinformation/disinformation. At best they give information that will just confuse. At worst they give information that can bring you medical harm. The best approach is to be wary of anything that does not sound right. That is because it likely is not right.