Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Apr 12, 2022
Date Accepted: May 23, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Health misinformation online: Framework to guide research and practice
ABSTRACT
To understand clinical trade-offs and align treatment decisions with personal values, about two-thirds of patients search for information online.1 Along with credible information, people must deal with health misinformation that takes multiple shapes and could mislead patients’ beliefs and treatment decisions. To protect patients from misinformation, we developed a framework that clarifies the characteristics of harmful health information and information for which verification by additional information search may be futile, instead, to verify it, experts' opinions should be solicited. Our work is grounded in a thorough review of misinformation taxonomies developed in political, social, and communication science. In practice, the framework aims to guide and unite the efforts of scientists, clinicians, and policymakers in developing a comprehensive approach toward protecting patients’ decisions from the harms of misinformation.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.