Addressing Misinformation
Counseling patients and their families around misinformation can be a difficult task. Combatting the misinformation and disinformation they've absorbed from social media or from peer groups requires patience, compassion (including understanding of patients' cultural, social, and emotional needs), in addition to being able to explain the evidence for a given treatment. Addressing concerns directly and engaging in shared decision-making helps build a relationship between physician and patient that makes it easier to educate and change perceptions. This guide provides resources and strategies for correcting misinformation and navigating difficult conversations with patients.
News & Updates
AMA adopts new policy aimed at addressing public health disinformation. June 13, 2022.
Narrative & Graphic Medicine
Misinformation uses emotion, values, and narrative to spread. While citing evidence-based studies is crucial, engaging in narrative helps build a relationship with the patient and may make it easier to dispel health myths. Narrative Medicine encourages patients to tell the story of their health with the idea that "receiving patients’ stories helps to build empathy in physicians and, in turn, improves the quality of care" (Wong, 2020).
Graphic Medicine is a form of narrative medicine that offers both healthcare providers and patients (of all ages) new ways to view the medical experience through comics. Dr. Ian Stewart, who coined the phrase, says that "the discipline could include graphic memoirs of illness, educational comics for both students and patients, academic papers and books, gag strips about healthcare, graphic reportage and therapeutic workshops involving comic making, as well as many other practices and source material, both fictional and non-fictional." Read more at Dr. Stewart's site, graphicmedicine.org.
- AAMC: Narrative Medicine: Every Patient Has a StoryStories can offer the kind of contextual richness that promotes and nourishes empathy, prompting a provider to switch from asking “How can I treat this disease?” to “How can I help my patient?”
- Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient careGraphic stories, or adult themed comics, are a popular new cultural trend. Michael J Green and Kimberly R Myers argue that they are also a valuable tool for medicine
- The patient-physician relationship. Narrative medicine: a model for empathy, reflection, profession, and trustWith narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care.
- Vaccinated at the ball: A true story about trusted messengersA piece of comics journalism "Highlighting a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health, a comics journalist tells the story of an effort to increase COVID vaccination rates in Chicago's House Ball community"
- Narrative Medicine Materials in the Himmelfarb CatalogSearch the Himmelfarb Catalog for print and electronic books, plus additional materials, on the subject of narrative medicine
- Graphic Medicine Materials in the Himmelfarb CatalogSearch the Himmelfarb Catalog for print and electronic books, plus additional materials, representing examples of graphic medicine or discussing the subject of graphic medicine
Professional Organization Statements
- Professional Expectations Regarding Medical Misinformation and DisinformationReport of the FSMB Ethics and Professionalism Committee
Adopted by the FSMB House of Delegates, April 2022 - Policy Statement: Dissemination of Non-scientific and Misleading COVID-19 Information by NursesNurses are expected to be “prepared to practice from an evidence base; promote safe, quality patient care; use clinical/critical reasoning to address simple to complex situations; assume accountability for one’s own and delegated nursing care” (AACN, 2021).
