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Correcting Misinformation with Patients: Home

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.

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

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