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Leaders call out sources of disinformation, social media sites
S KYLER JOHNSON'S INTEREST in combating health misinformation started a decade ago after his wife learned she had cancer. Immediately after getting the diagnosis, the couple went online looking for information and quickly found themselves wading through a digital sea of falsehoods, distortions and half-truths.
"You're already dealing with so much uncertainty in those first few weeks (of a cancer diagnosis)," said Johnson, MD, who at the time was a second-year medical student and is now an assistant professor at the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute. "It puts you in a really vulnerable position."
Thankfully, his wife recovered. Because of the experience, Johnson said he developed a better understanding of how to help his own patients make sense of online information. He also saw the more deadly impacts of misinformation, caring for patients who decided against evidence-based treatment and returned many months later with cancers that had progressed to incurable stages.
Johnson dug into the issue more, co-authoring peer-reviewed studies in 2017 and 2018 that found using alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatment was tied to higher risks of death. That led him and his colleagues to a main source of misinformation: social media. In a study published last year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they reviewed 50 of the most popular social media articles on each of the four most common cancers. Nearly a third contained harmful information. Engagement with articles containing misinformation was also significantly higher than with factual ones.
Combating misinformation should be "a major public health priority, both in terms of research and funding," Johnson said.
The problem of health misinformation has long existed, but the past two years have made its urgency grimly clear, especially as hospitals flooded with unvaccinated COVID19 patients in January....