Fifty U.S. medical and scientific groups have announced the foundation of a new organization with the goal of dispelling false health news because they are alarmed by the growing dissemination of medical misinformation.
The coalition, which goes by the name of the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science, is made up of reputable organizations that speak for American academics, scientists, researchers, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, pharmaceutical and insurance firms, consumer advocates, public health specialists, and even medical ethicists.
The American Board of Internal Medicine, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health are just a few organizations that have signed on so far.
The coalition intends to attack it head-on.Dr. Reed Tuckson, chair and co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID (BCAC) and a core convening committee member of the newly formed Global Coalition Against COVID, said, “I’ll start by saying that we in healthcare are very aware that American society — the contemporary society that we live in — is characterized to a significant degree by a distrust in almost all of the institutions of our society, and by uncertainty as to the truthfulness or accuracy of the information that is being presented
He contends that the fact that many individuals today obtain the majority of their information from social media, which “is rampant with information that is not just incorrect, but may also be exceedingly damaging to human health,” serves to exacerbate this propensity for mistrust.The formation of the coalition will be announced Thursday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Washington, D.C.
Dana Litt is an associate professor in the department of health behavior and health systems at the School of Public Health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
Though not involved in the coalition launch, Litt’s focus has long been on how and why people make the health decisions they make.
