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

Medical Schools Train Students to Combat Medical Misinformation

Earlier this month, the University of Pennsylvania announced the Penn Medical Communication Research Institute (PMCRI), a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication and the Perelman School of Medicine, which will focus on reducing medical misinformation. The Institute will research methods for patients, particularly within vulnerable groups, to access reliable, useful medical information and develop strategies to increase the trust of healthcare providers and the scientific community.

The Institute is reflective of a growing momentum within medical education focused on combating medical and scientific misinformation. Schools are exploring a variety of methods to achieve this.

Brian G. Southwell, PhD, and Jamie L. Wood, PhD, Co-Directors of the Duke Program on Medical Misinformation, and Ann Marie Navar, MD, PhD, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health that, “Encountering patient-held misinformation offers an opportunity for clinicians to learn about patient values, preferences, comprehension, and information diets. Systematically training health care professionals to address patient-held misinformation with empathy and curiosity, acknowledging time and resource constraints, will be a crucial contribution toward future mitigation of medical misinformation.” In turn, Duke’s program, a part of the Duke Center for Community and Population Health Improvement, shares provider guidelines that promote developing “psychologically safe” relationships with patients. In other words, the patients should feel comfortable sharing the information and sources that they use to make medical decisions with their physicians and caregivers without fear of judgment or ridicule. Once physicians and the care team understand where the patient is coming from, they can provide support and guidance to correct misinformation and provide alternative, credible sources.

Other schools are incorporating communication techniques into the medical curriculum so that students can acquire the skills they need to reach broader audiences.

Last Spring at University of Chicago’s Prtizker Medical School, Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP and Sara Serritella, the Director of Communications at the Institute for Translational Medicine, developed and co-taught an elective course for first-year medical students titled, “Improving Scientific Communication and Addressing Misinformation.” Serritella, speaking to the critical nature of the course, cited a 2016 study by the National Science Foundation in which less than one-third of respondents said that they had a “clear understanding” of the meaning of “scientific study.” Medical students, she continued, need awareness of the gap between their understanding and that of the general public so that they can effectively bridge it. The course focused on teaching students the principles of scientific communication, how to identify misinformation, and how to debunk misinformation using infographics. But, more than that, it asked students to consider various audiences and ways to share information that were relatable, understandable, and relevant to those groups. Arora noted that students are well-positioned to play a key role in combating misinformation. “Addressing medical misinformation using evidence-based strategies is one way that medical students can add value and also learn a lifelong skill they will need to improve communication and trust in medical care for their patients,” he said.

At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Kristina Krohn, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, saw a social media-specific need that medical students were well-positioned to breach in the early days of the pandemic. In the Spring of 2020, she developed an elective course titled “COVID-19: Outbreaks and the Media” that is still available. The goal of the course is to enable students to leverage social media to relay health information to the public. While the course offered general communications information including defining an objective and creating infographics, it also included basics such as how to create social media accounts, fact-check data, translate scientific literature into layman terms, and relay accurate information in simple, compelling ways… all via social media. Dr. Kohn explains the reasoning behind the course for medical students: “If we share publicly our knowledge in formats that are open and available to the public, we help people make better choices sooner, but we don’t learn how to do that in medical school. I think it’s a huge skill that we’ve overlooked, and social media has made it so that a medical student can do this. We just need to help them do it well and give them the appropriate teaching and tools,” she said.