Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD

By Jacob Ingram
Fourth-year IU Medical Student

Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD
ISMA President-elect
ISMA Wellness Steering Committee Chair

Physicians have responsibilities that extend beyond patient care. One is to serve as accurate sources of information about health, medicine, and related topics. Another, perhaps even more important today, is to serve as advocates against misinformation that threatens the understanding and health of patients and fellow members of our communities. When the flow of misinformation reaches torrent levels, trust is inevitably eroded.

Perhaps more than at any time we can recall, misinformation is throttling trust, in part through bogus health claims on social media. An ancient herbal extract cures a remarkable variety of diseases. A new daily exercise program that requires less than 10 minutes takes off a pound a day. If you experience fatigue, lack of focus, or occasional abdominal discomfort, you are likely infested with parasites that you can purge by simply taking two capsules daily for two weeks. 
 
Not only is the information bogus, but the tone typically delivers trust an additional wallop. This secret remedy has been withheld by the medical establishment for years. Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare corporations don’t want you to know, because it would undermine their revenues. You need to act now, because this ad is about to be removed by these same greedy operators that want to keep you in the dark.

The pitchmen often cite clinical and scientific studies performed by unnamed experts or name drop prestigious institutions such as the Mayo Clinic or Harvard University, without providing any specific citations. And unlike pharmaceutical and medical device ads in print media and television, they never encourage you to speak with your doctor, who by implication is part of the same medical-industrial complex that has been withholding the truth all these years.

And to add insult to injury, many of these ads aren’t even real. Instead of featuring actors, they have been generated by AI, which is programmed to use fear tactics, plausible-sounding claims, and clickbait strategies to separate consumers from their cash. Highly educated people, even physicians, cannot always tell the difference between an ad featuring real people and AI-generated imitations of physicians, scientists, and ancient-looking sages.

These bogus health ads are placing the health of our fellow citizens and neighbors at risk. We know numerous patients, friends, and even colleagues who have experienced no benefits despite faithfully gobbling up such products for months and even years. Others, however, have actually grown sicker, some due to defects in the products and others because they discounted their doctors’ advice and stopped taking their medicines.

Equally insidious, however, is the effect of such tactics on trust. Again and again, we hear the same thing: “I just don’t know who to trust,” or “You can’t trust anyone.” Everyone, it seems, is out to get you, and their psychological tricks, Madison-Avenue marketing methods, and multi-million-dollar budgets render the average person incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Truth and trust are swept away in a flood of misinformation.

Such fears are backed up by data. For example, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, based on a sample of 1,000 respondents from each of 16 countries, shows that people are becoming less confident about making health decisions, in part because legitimate health professionals are increasingly competing with unscrupulous peers, dubious content creators, and artificial intelligence, which are exerting progressively increasing sway.

Confidence in making health decisions has declined by 10 percentage points in just the last year, the largest such drop ever recorded; 64% of respondents believe that consumers fluent with AI can outperform their physician in at least one health task; and more than two-thirds affirm at least one bogus claim about foods, vaccines, and medicines. In short, health is a domain in which confusion and distrust are swelling.

This is highly ironic, in part because we live in an age when we have never understood more thoroughly the biological basis of health, our powers to diagnosis and treat diseases have never been more robust, and access to credible health information has never been more widely distributed and at lower cost. Yet the average person finds it harder than ever to know who to trust, and as a result an increasing number of people trust no one.

The decline in trust is opening up challenges and opportunities for people who care not only about health but also democracy, including physicians. First off, what can we do to ensure that patients encounter their physicians face to face, as opposed to getting their health information and advice from impersonal web-based sources or even AI-generated fake health professionals? Building trust requires time and effort that physicians need to invest.

How can we more effectively promote a health system that allows patient-physician relationships to develop and endure over time, so that each patient is cared for by the same physician for years or even decades on end? Changing alliances between medical practices, mergers and acquisitions by hospitals, and renegotiated health insurance contracts should not force patients to seek care from strangers.

All of us, especially physicians, need to speak out as effective advocates for truth. Our rich educational opportunities and professional experience carry with them a responsibility to be heard, especially among our patients and community. Democracy flourishes in thriving communities, and our state’s 20,000 active physicians need to join democracy’s defenders in combatting health misinformation and the toxic seeds of distrust it sows.