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A survey of doctors released Wednesday showed how pervasive medical falsehoods have become — not only online, but also within the walls of medical exam rooms where doctors and patients talk.
The survey from the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit research group, found that 61% of doctors said they encountered patients influenced by misinformation or disinformation a moderate amount or a great deal of the time over the past year.
An overwhelming majority of physicians, 86%, said the incidence of such falsehoods among patients had increased over the past five years, a period that includes most of the Covid pandemic, with 50% saying it had increased significantly.
The survey is a rare look into how often doctors encounter pseudoscience in their everyday practice of medicine, and it indicates how their jobs are changing in response to a new information environment in which distorted health claims spread easily online and sometimes have the backing of government authorities.
Dr. Gary Price, president of the Physicians Foundation, said the organization set out to conduct the survey because it knew doctors were frustrated by medical falsehoods and wanted to find out the extent of the problem.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing,” he said 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 survey from the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit research group, found that 61% of doctors said they encountered patients influenced by misinformation or disinformation a moderate amount or a great deal of the time over the past year.
An overwhelming majority of physicians, 86%, said the incidence of such falsehoods among patients had increased over the past five years, a period that includes most of the Covid pandemic, with 50% saying it had increased significantly.
The survey is a rare look into how often doctors encounter pseudoscience in their everyday practice of medicine, and it indicates how their jobs are changing in response to a new information environment in which distorted health claims spread easily online and sometimes have the backing of government authorities.
Dr. Gary Price, president of the Physicians Foundation, said the organization set out to conduct the survey because it knew doctors were frustrated by medical falsehoods and wanted to find out the extent of the problem.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing,” he said 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.”
