Chicago Tribune

‘One of the biggest problems confronting medicine today’: University of Chicago offers class on misinformation

CHICAGO -- Patients have long been told to turn to their doctors for accurate, trusted health information. But in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors’ voices have sometimes been drowned out by social media users who blast misinformation across the globe, leading patients to make questionable, and sometimes dangerous, choices about their health. Now, a Chicago medical ...
Vineet Arora leads a Zoom class with Sara Serritella for medical students and health care professionals aimed at teaching them how to fight misinformation in medicine at the Biological Sciences Learning Center at the University of Chicago on Aug. 18, 2022, in Chicago.

CHICAGO -- Patients have long been told to turn to their doctors for accurate, trusted health information.

But in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors’ voices have sometimes been drowned out by social media users who blast misinformation across the globe, leading patients to make questionable, and sometimes dangerous, choices about their health.

Now, a Chicago medical school is offering a new class aimed at better equipping doctors and other medical professionals to be heard: a course on how to battle medical misinformation. The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine began offering the class to medical students last year and recently developed a condensed version for nurses studying

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