Amidst Tech Turmoil, Physicians and Medical Students Use Social Media as a Platform for Medical Education and Combating Misinformation

In the summer of 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report calling the distribution of medical misinformation through social media an “urgent threat to public health.” And this week, amidst a turbulent period for tech companies marked by extensive layoffs, a New York Times article identified a trend of social media companies divesting in the fight against misinformation. The article said, “Last month, the company [YouTube], owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said. And YouTube is not alone. The cuts reflect a trend across the industry that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms put in place in recent years to ban or tamp down on disinformation ….”

Despite declining resources at social media companies, the medical community appears willing to step up to address the gap. In the past we’ve highlighted the efforts of medical schools to prepare students to take on medical misinformation, which ranges from large investments in institutions for research and study, to incorporating communications and social media techniques into the medical school classroom. There are also a number of physicians and medical students who are building vibrant social media communities for the purpose of proactively circulating accurate and understandable medical information. Below, we profile just a few of the physicians who are engaging audiences via social media with reliable and focused medical information. 

• Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, founder of Grapevine Media, creates content specifically geared towards a population that the mainstream health system tends to ignore. Her company, which creates “Ask a Doctor” videos and posts them on social media, seeks to provide medical information for people of color and/or those of low socioeconomic status. The videos feature doctors of color who answer medical questions in clear terms and with actionable advice for this audience, keeping in mind the challenges borne by those with low incomes. In an interview with NPR, Dr. Fitzpatrick noted that educating people won’t resolve all their barriers to good health, but she reiterated her belief that information can improve wellbeing. "To me, it's so clear all roads lead to trusted health information and understanding health and health care," she said. "But the challenge is how to make it obvious to everybody else." Dr. Fitzpatrick is currently pitching the video content to insurance companies as a means to improve the health of these hard-to-reach populations, while also reducing insurers’ costs.

• Joel Bervell, a 4th-year medical student at Washington State University School of Medicine, creates TikTok videos that highlight areas of racial bias in medicine. He told Medscape in an interview that he views himself as a “medical myth buster.” He educates his 600,000 plus followers on biases in medicine that can negatively impact care for people of color. Medscape provided an example of this goal by describing one of his TikTok videos, “... he explains that the equation used to measure kidney function (glomerular filtration rate [GFR]) has a built-in "race adjustment" that increases the GFR for all Black patients. ‘That overestimation could mean that 3.3 million Black Americans would have had a higher stage of kidney disease and missed out on care and treatment,’ said Bervell.” 

• StatNews described a joint effort by a group of physicians to support a twitter feed, “Health News Around the World,” with vetted, up-to-date health news and stories. 

• Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, MD, runs an Instagram account to provide his 462,000 followers with information on nutrition and promoting a healthy gut via his account “TheGutHealthMD”. His feed answers questions, reviews products, links to podcasts, corrects misinformation, and provides followers with indicators of healthy or unhealthy bodily functioning.

Related: Medical Schools Train Students to Combat Medical Misinformation

Temple’s Katz School of Medicine Incorporates Local Community Into Medical School Admissions

For the selection of the Class of 2026 at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, the admissions team included members of the surrounding community. This made Katz one of the first medical schools to incorporate the opinions of local residents in admissions decisions. Among the five community members, all of whom live and/or work in the neighborhoods surrounding the medical school and hospital, one served as a voting member of the admissions committee (alongside medical school faculty and physicians) and the others interviewed and evaluated prospective students. 

The community members, who mostly hailed from social service backgrounds, received interview training prior to spending about four hours per week facilitating 30-minute interviews and writing evaluations for hundreds of candidates. The community member interviews, which included two to three prospective students at a time, engaged interviewees on topics such as: Why Temple? What does community mean to you? How would you engage with marginalized groups and groups that suffer disparate access to care? How would you handle a sensitive clinical conversation?

While the idea of incorporating local community members into the admissions team had been discussed previously, according to Jacob Ufberg, Associate Dean of Admissions, it was the medical school’s Student Diversity Council—a group of 60 students—who was responsible for implementing the plan. Randolph Lyde, MD, PhD, and Student Diversity Council Chair (at the time of implementation) described the Council’s work, “We feel it makes our admissions process better. It makes our school community better, and it makes us a better steward and partner in our community,” he said. “And hopefully, it will allow us to bring more culturally sensitive and culturally aware students into our medical school.”

Prospective students also found their interview experience meaningful. In a post-interview survey, 90 percent of the interviewees said that the community members had added value to their experience and given them a better understanding of the community and of the medical school’s values.