Medical misinformation swirled across social media during the pandemic, but some of it was in a class of its own: It came from medical doctors.
Doctors, of course, are just as human and error-prone as everyone else, but because they spend years studying science and how the body works, presumably they know more than average about how to interpret medical information. So why were they the sending out stuff that wasn’t true?
A new study can’t answer that question with any certainty, but it does try to quantify how many doctors were misleading the public, where they came from and what their specialties were.
Most surprising, perhaps, is that there were only 52 of them found in a fairly exhaustive search of social media sites.
“This was actually comforting to see that they didn’t find more,” said Dominique Brossard, chair of the department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the new study but studies medical misinformation.
Roughly 1 million Americans hold medical licenses in the United States, so 52 is a tiny fraction of the total.