Adapted from a talk given at TEDx-Buffalo, June 2025
On November 28, 2021, scrolling through Twitter, I came across a tweet by @SailingKateMD: “Checked my ICU list after being gone for a few days for the holiday…Every single one of my COVID-19 patients died while I was gone. All of them.”1
It was my third year as an attending hospitalist. The world was moving on from the still-deadly pandemic, while we continued to struggle with waves of COVID-19 patients. We had new treatments, and vaccines were on the horizon, so we felt slightly less helpless, but I was still seeing more death than I ever had before.
As I read that tweet, I heard the voices of families saying goodbye to their loved ones, felt the deep impressions of the N95 mask on my face, and saw patients dying in their beds. Heartbreakingly, I saw the social media posts pretending it wasn’t happening.
As I walked into my kitchen, tweet still glowing on my phone, my brain screamed. All the helpless feelings were spilling out, my mental lid no longer holding them in. So, I turned to my favorite mindless activity: throwing on some headphones and doing the dishes.
The soapy water usually washed away the bad thoughts, but instead, I felt like I was drowning. I quietly put the sponge down and removed my headphones. I gingerly walked to the living room, where my wife sat on the couch. As I sat down, I said, “I don’t think I’m okay. I don’t think I’m going to be okay for a long time.” Then I tearfully collapsed.
My wife frantically scrambled across the couch, taking my sobbing, shuddering body in her arms. Every dying patient, every piece of disinformation I’d seen, and every argument I’d made in support of masks and other mitigations suddenly exploded out of me. I hadn’t cried that hard in over a decade. Eventually, exhaustedly, my tears subsided, and we went to bed. But I still wasn’t okay. I needed to find a way to confront the disinformation to help the public and, honestly, myself.
A 2023 study by G. Camelia Adams looked at physicians involved in the initial peak of the pandemic. The researchers determined that “Despite efforts to employ adaptive coping, physicians’ rates of psychological and physical health difficulties remained high or worsened over one year.”2
When things ramped up in 2020, I, like many other physicians, became as adept as possible in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Beyond the hospital, I began posting educational content on my little corner of the internet. As I often tell people, “It was either that or find another couch to cry on.” I started with Facebook, then a blog, then Instagram, but “the kids” were getting information elsewhere, so I made a TikTok account and officially became @DocWithBowtie.
I approached the camera the same way I approach patients in real life. Establishing a rapport with patients became essential because of how easily folks can be misled by disinformation. A dismissive or mocking response never works in these situations because, at the heart of it, this is a person trying to address their own health. Ideally, we provide factual evidence (or point out the lack thereof), and that’s enough. Except it isn’t. A culture of rejecting science has developed, strong enough to provide refuge and shape communities. When patients return to those communities after an appointment or hospitalization, they easily fall back into the same old thinking patterns, since acknowledging the misinformation may result in rejection by peers. As David McRaney discusses in “How Minds Change,” “Social death is more frightening than physical death. We would rather be accepted by our social groups than be right.”3
My own efforts ramped up in 2020 as I saw doctors spreading disinformation and influencing people into rejecting evidence-based medicine. They claimed to know “root causes” and cures your regular doctor “doesn’t want you to know about.”
Now, with kernels of truth hidden in their catchy yet unsupported messages, they make it difficult for laypeople to discern fact from fiction. They have millions of followers across multiple social media accounts, speak from podiums at press conferences, and meet with political leaders, yet claim they are being silenced.
They invite you to “follow the money” while charging for unregulated supplements or treatments that lack evidence and are only effective at draining your wallet.
It’s hard to push back on their all-or-nothing logic and oversimplification. Brandolini’s Law states, “The amount of energy needed to refute [disinformation] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
So how do we as hospitalists fight back? We must be increasingly transparent and discuss the gray areas. Science is never black-and-white or all-or-nothing, and neither is humanity. That’s why I talk about the times I’ve cried. The prevailing stereotype is that doctors are completely impartial and unaffected. My colleagues and I are trying to show that was never the case.
Pseudoscience loves to make things up to fill our known gaps in scientific and medical knowledge. To counter it, we have to learn to acknowledge those gaps for ourselves and our patients so we can face them together. It’s pausing to acknowledge the situation with a
simple “This sucks. I hate this for you.” It’s humanizing.
When confronting misinformation, I focus on humanity. A fellow healthcare worker once cited the 99% survival rate of COVID-19 to downplay its impact, but 1% still means 3.3 million people whose lives and families would have been shattered. Furthermore, survival doesn’t mean 100% recovery; many endure long-term, sometimes severe, consequences. Oversimplified statistics erase human stories, so I always pause and reintroduce the human costs behind the numbers.
In Jamil Zaki’s book “Hope for Cynics,” he talks about the difference between modern cynicism (a negative mindset that seems clever but shuts down information and hides behind negative assumptions) versus hopeful skepticism (in which we examine things critically, but are open to new data if there is good evidence behind it).4 Medicine is full of hopeful skepticism as we review our practices and knowledge.
With that attitude in mind, what strategies can we use to dispel myths? My fellow physicians have discussed borrowing techniques from other fields, like SIFT, from librarians (stop, investigate the source, find trusted coverage, and trace to the original context), and climate science’s three-step method (state the fact, identify the related myth, then explain the fallacy).5
While the COVID-19 pandemic has “settled” into an endemic phase, the pandemic of disinformation, or infodemic, as identified by Dr. David Scales and colleagues,6 is still raging, and both are far from over. Where COVID-19 required funding of scientific research into refining vaccines and treatments, the infodemic requires the efforts of people like us, identifying pseudoscience and stopping its spread. As we examine ourselves and employ the strategies in this article, let’s keep these things in mind.
- Meet people where they are. Whether you like longer, nuanced blog posts or short, succinct TikToks that may introduce further reading, it’s important to share from a variety of sources based on the intended audience.
- Pseudoscience loves oversimplification and making up explanations to fill in the gaps that science hasn’t quite figured out yet.
- Follow the money—the Sunshine Act empowers people to look up any physician and see how much they have taken from “Big Pharma.” Is it a few lunches (like when you look me up) or a much higher amount? Or maybe they make a profit from unregulated supplements or lawsuits against the makers of evidence-based medicines.
- Humanize the moment—it’s easy to hide behind social media posts and meme-able disinformation, but look for the people simply informing you and acknowledging gaps in the system, rather than selling you their product.
In the Fall of 2022, I was asked, point-blank, if I thought what I was doing was actually making a difference or if I was just making content for the sake of it. My best friend asked, “Have you actually changed anyone’s mind?” I said I wasn’t sure and defaulted to that
previous line, “it was either try to educate people or cry in a corner.” That might have been it, except my wife immediately piped up with, “Didn’t you show me a message yesterday from the pregnant woman who got vaccinated because of your posts?”
As usual, she was right, and she went on to discuss multiple comments she had seen or messages I’d told her about where people pointed out how I convinced them the vaccines were safe, or at least that they should think twice about avoiding them.
Sometimes I focus on the big, dramatic posts and commenters who belittle me for advocating for public health. Those aren’t the people I’m going to convince. It’s the people reading those comments who are in between the extremes, just trying to do right by their
health and their loved ones. My videos put facts in front of people as a vaccination against the infodemic. I hope you are empowered
to do the same.
Dr. Thomas
Dr. Thomas is a hospitalist at Buffalo Medical Group and a clinical instructor for the Buffalo Catholic Health System internal medicine residency and the D’Youville Physician Assistant Program, all in Buffalo, N.Y. He also writes the blog Managing Health Expectations, serves as a Digital Media Fellow for the Journal of Hospital Medicine, and uses social media for education and advocacy.
References
1. KP, MD. @sailingkateMD. Checked my ICU list after being gone for a few days for the holidays…https://x.com/sailingkatemd/status/1465117961526644737?s=46November28, 2021. Published November 28, 2021. Accessed August 30, 2025.
2. Adams GC, et al. Physicians’ mental health and coping during the COVID-19 pandemic: one year exploration. Heliyon. 2023;9(5):e15762. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e15762
3. McRaney D. How minds change: the surprising science of belief, opinion, and persuasion. New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin; 2022.
4. Zaki J. Hope for cynics. New York, NY: Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; 2024.
5. Arora VM, et al. Supporting health care workers to address misinformation on social media. N Engl J Med. 2022;386(18):1683-1685. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2117180
6. Scales D, et al. The Covid-19 infodemic—applying the epidemiologic model to counter misinformation. NEngl J Med. 2021;385(8):678-681. doi:10.1056/NEJMp2103798