Pandemic Medical Misinformation Has Not Prompted Disciplinary Action: Daily Dose

November 29, 2024

Sydney Jennings

Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On November 13, 2024, we reported on findings from a study published in JAMA Network Open that was designed to compare the level of professional discipline of physicians for spreading medical misinformation relative to discipline for other offenses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study

The study author, Richard S Saver, JD, of the University of North Carolina School of Law and that university’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, analyzed 3128 publicly reported disciplinary actions in the 5 most populous states – California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas. The analysis included data from January 1, 2020, through May 30, 2023. Medical board disciplinary proceedings that resulted in some form of sanction were analyzed. Saver created 11 codes to categorize possible offenses, and noted each action could have more than one code, based on medical boards imposing discipline for more than one reason.

The findings

The most common offenses were:

Physician negligence – 1911 actions, or 28.7%
Problematic record-keeping – 990 actions, or 14.9%
Inappropriate prescribing – 901 actions, or 13.5%

The least common reason for medical board discipline was spreading misinformation (6 actions or 0.1%). Incidentally, alcohol and substance abuse accounted for 320 actions, or 4.8%, while inappropriate relations with patients spurred 198 actions, or 3%.

Authors' comment

"Extremely low rates of disciplinary activity for misinformation conduct were observed in this study despite increased salience and medical board warnings since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic about the dangers of physicians spreading falsehoods; these findings suggest a serious disconnect between regulatory guidance and enforcement and call into question the suitability of licensure regulation for combatting physician-spread misinformation."

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