What ‘Disinformation Resolutions’ Are Missing

When the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) passed its May 2026 resolution against disinformation, it marked a critical milestone in the field. By officially elevating misinformation to a top-tier priority, the organization acknowledged a grim reality: a radically changed media landscape has made bad health information an existential threat to public well-being. It is no longer enough to treat disinformation as a side note to health. Disinformation is now a primary determinant of health.

Similarly, in 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a policy aimed specifically at providers that have used their credentials to spread disinformation. While the proportion of physicians actively spreading disinformation may be low, “…it has seriously undermined public health efforts. These individuals are harming the credibility of health professionals, including physicians, who are trusted sources of information for their patients and the public.”

Looking at these two resolutions side-by-side reveals a shared urgency, but it also exposes critical differences in how medicine and public health approach systemic threats and, crucially, what both institutions are still missing.

The Resolutions

On a fundamental level, both documents affirm that medical and health education professionals have a strict ethical and professional responsibility to disseminate science-based information. Both fields view the weaponization of a professional license to spread falsehoods as an egregious violation of public trust. Because public health and medicine hinge entirely on this baseline trust, when it breaks, the damage ripples far beyond a single doctor-patient or student-teacher interaction.

However, because the AMA and SOPHE target different audiences, their strategies manifest at completely different stages of a professional career. The AMA focuses on the back end, looking at practitioners already in the field and arguing that state licensing boards must hold bad actors accountable. SOPHE, by contrast, targets the front end, focusing on health educators and stressing the need to build health literacy within the student population before it ever enters the workforce.

These two approaches should be perfectly complementary. Health literacy relies on a good-faith information ecosystem — the very thing disinformation seeks to destroy. Literacy teaches a consumer, in this case public health professionals, to ensure their advisor is properly credentialed, but that defense only works if credentials actually mean something. This is where the AMA’s strategy comes in: ensuring that anyone abusing their institutional expertise is stripped of it. After all, defending a burning house requires more than just punishing the arsonist or teaching the residents fire safety. It also requires addressing the very architecture that allows the fire to spread.

What’s Left Out

This is where individual-level interventions hit a wall. While pushing individual-level policies is a step in the right direction, both resolutions ultimately reveal an uncomfortable truth. Professional boards and educators lack the leverage to police a toxic digital ecosystem alone. If health disinformation is a systemic crisis, our institutional defense cannot stop at the boundaries of the public health classroom or the clinic.

Currently, SOPHE’s strategy places the burden of filtering out bad information entirely on the student, requiring them to possess advanced literacy. The AMA’s strategy flips this, placing the burden of accountability squarely on the profession to police its own.

Yet, the media landscape doesn’t just passively trick audiences; it actively recruits and incentivizes rogue professionals. The digital ecosystem aggressively rewards contrarian “experts” with massive algorithmic reach, monetization opportunities, and micro-celebrity status. These are incentives that traditional professional oversight frameworks are completely unequipped to counter.

Because we cannot rely on medical boards to out-moderate algorithms, and we cannot expect the public to navigate a weaponized information ecosystem unassisted, our defensive strategy must evolve.

The missing pillar capable of bridging this operational gap is the cultivation of systematic critical thinking.

Unlike basic health literacy, which often assumes a good-faith information ecosystem, critical thinking is an entirely different paradigm. By teaching skills like lateral reading, emotional self-awareness, and a baseline understanding of how algorithms exploit outrage, we can cultivate an aggressive culture of critical inquiry within medical and public health education. While critical thinking remains an individual-level tool deployed against a systemic problem, it is currently the only defense mechanism that scales fast enough to combat the asymmetry paradox. It arms individuals to filter out bad information before a professional ever has to debunk it.

Ultimately, our leading organizations realize that the landscape has shifted and they are starting to take action. We are undoubtedly building the plane while flying it, but as the information environment grows more hostile, seeing our leading institutions finally putting skin in the game is a reason for tentative optimism. According to John Whyte, MD, MPH, the CEO and executive vice president of the AMA, “Medicine is entering a new era. The forces reshaping healthcare are accelerating. Technology is changing how care is delivered. Trust in science and institutions is being tested.”

The AMA policy was last updated several years ago, yet we haven’t seen many medical or professional boards taking action. Our professional institutions are finally recognizing misinformation for the crisis that it is — now, we have to ensure our educational frameworks give the public the tools to stand with them.

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