More than “True”: Toward a Comprehensive Regulatory Approach to the Communication of Misinformation by Health Professionals

Abstract

Health misinformation has been identified as a major threat to individual and public health, and many governments and health institutions have been occupied with how to contend with its spread. The problem has been especially acute during times of crisis, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has identified and sought to understand the manner in which misinformation originates and spreads, and a variety of legal and policy responses have been proposed or enacted to try to curb the spread of misinformation and its associated harms. However, a sub-area of health misinformation that has not been examined with as much attention, despite its significant influence on the health information landscape, is how regulators contend with misinformation that is spread by health professionals – the experts most people turn to for reliable health information and advice. This thesis seeks to understand how regulated health professions are dealing with the problem of health misinformation among their professional members, focusing on medicine and nursing as two of the most common and longstanding health professions. Through three main methods, consisting of a tracing of the history of the regulation of health misinformation, a comparative jurisdictional scan of the legal and policy schemes that intersect with health misinformation in regulated professions, and a content analysis of case law dealing with allegations of health misinformation spread by health professionals, I examine the relative strengths and limitations in how health professions regulators have dealt with the problem of health misinformation by health professionals. I argue that while some effective policy approaches to the problem exist, regulators are not consistent in their approaches to defining, identifying, responding to, or preventing the communication of health misinformation by the professionals they regulate. Drawing from the concept of knowledge-based-consensus, I propose that a more effective approach to professionals’ communication of health misinformation could be achieved by using a more consistent set of regulatory strategies that would center around an organizing principle of ensuring that the evidentiary standards on which professionals rely are consistently identified and transparently communicated to patients and the public.