Battling medical misinformation: An important patient safety issue for health care professionals (APSF, February 2025)

Summary

Medical misinformation can have a profound impact on perioperative patient safety. With users numbering in the billions, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Messenger and YouTube command an ever-increasing share of the public’s time, attention, and dependence. Consequently, they have also become primary sources of information for politics, sports, general knowledge, and news for the general public. Statistics published by Pew Research in 2022 show that adults under the age of 30 actually trust information from social media almost as much as national news outlets, and in 2023, half of US adults get news at least some of the time from social media.

The relationship between medical care and information on the internet has been fraught since the early days of the internet, predating the more recent increase of medical misinformation. According to the United States Office of the Surgeon General, medical misinformation is “information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time.

Misinformation can affect understanding of public health concerns, as was seen in the recent Covid pandemic when concerns were expressed regarding social distancing, mask mandates, and vaccination. Perioperative medicine is no less affected, as highlighted in this blog in the Anaesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) newsletter.