By Sydney Meyer
Medill Reports
Whether it’s online influencers who discourage hormonal birth control, or false claims from U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccines and Tylenol, fact-based information about health and wellness is being debated in various spheres of American life. Reporter Sydney Meyer sat down with Dr. Monica Peek, an academic internist at UChicago Medicine, to learn how medical institutions and individual providers can work to combat dis- and misinformation and establish trust with patients in the communities they serve.
Transcript:
Sydney Meyer: UChicago Medicine recently announced they’re pledging over a billion dollars to community benefits this upcoming fiscal year. This comes at a time when many Americans are re-examining how and from whom they seek medical advice. In 2025, the American Psychological Association called medical misinformation one of the most urgent threats to public health. It’s become increasingly essential for community medical organizations and individual physicians to address the spread of misinformation in their practices. Here to talk about this issue is Dr. Monica Peek, an academic internist at UChicago Medicine. Dr. Peek, thank you for being here.
Dr. Monica Peek: Thanks for having me.
Meyer: I mentioned UChicago Medicine’s commitment to community benefits, and I was wondering how that community presence shows up when you are actually in the room with patients?
Peek: A lot of the community benefit is around community-based resources and education, some of which is outside the hospital walls. Many people think about health not only when they’re in a physician’s office. One of the things that the community benefit dollars are trying to do is let the people in the South Side of Chicago know that our commitment to the South Side health and vitality is unwavering despite some of the sociopolitical changes that are happening right now. During the pandemic, one of the things that the university did was really lean in to try and be a trusted source to combat misinformation. This is, like you said, another time where there is a rise of misinformation and purposeful disinformation that is entering the national discourse about things that should not be controversial. Fact-based information is now up for discussion or re-discussion. And so that is causing a lot of confusion unnecessarily. And so public health institutions or health care institutions are readying themselves to try and be trusted sources of information for the community.
Meyer: In what ways have you seen misinformation or disinformation spread to patients? And I’m wondering if you could talk about groups that are particularly susceptible.
Peek: People who rely more heavily on social media as their source of information, people with lower levels of literacy and health literacy, and so that means they’re less able to discern sources of truth from non-truth, more easily hoodwinked by things that may be smooth, glossy and sophisticated.
Meyer: There are various misinformation or disinformation claims about different health areas, but they all kind of relay the same message, which is that big medicine or Big Pharma hurts more than it helps. And oftentimes they encourage the use of natural remedies. Can you talk about why you think vitamins and supplements and natural remedies have such a hold on people right now?
Peek: Well, I think there are a lot of things at play. First, natural always sounds like it’s a good thing. If it’s natural, it must be healthy, at least healthier. We have an impression that things that are natural can’t hurt us, without thinking like, well, snake venom is natural. That could certainly kill us. There’s sort of a misconception that herbs and natural things actually don’t have any side effects or any downsides to them. Many medicines derive from plants. And that’s how we learned about them in the first place. There are things that are good from herbal remedies. The challenge with the natural or herbal field is that it is completely unregulated. There’s not the kind of scientific evidence required for prescription medicines, so we don’t know if any of the claims that are made are true. Two, there are no rules around truth in advertising. So people can say whatever they want. Three, they’re not even required to put into the bottle what they say is on the outside of the bottle. They could fill it with little pellets of dirt and that would be A-OK. Are you getting what you think you are? Is there any evidence? Based on what? The unfortunate aspect is that there’s a lot of money to be made because if you don’t have to invest in the hard work of trying to prove that something works, then it’s all profit.
Meyer: One thing that you’re getting at is that the clinical process is confusing. And when you have a product that is legally required to lay out all side effects, and you’re comparing it to a product that is not.
Peek: How do you know the difference? Both are advertising on TV, both saying they’re doing good things. There’s no PSA that says, “Hey, listen, everybody, things that are prescribed from your doctor have gone through the wringer with all these tests.” Anytime anyone is on a clinical trial, they have to report all the symptoms they’re having, even if it’s completely unrelated to the actual medicine.
Meyer: A lot of the scholarship that I’ve read, and some of which you’ve written, really emphasizes the importance of listening to patient concerns. Doctors are increasingly being asked to take on kind of a communications role with their patients. Do you feel like doctors are being adequately prepared to do that?
Peek: I would say in general, no. There’s not been like a universal reteaching of all physicians. So for example, in the wake of the opioid crisis, in order to renew your license, every doctor had to take some mandatory training about opioid use disorders, how to treat them, medical management, things like that. So people had a better sense. There hasn’t been that kind of hard stop, like, this is a terrible rise of disinformation. Let’s have some regulation around this and some forced retraining. And some physicians, as everyone knows, have better bedside manner and interpersonal skills than others. That is something that is hard to teach, because a lot of it is dependent on your inherent personality, but it’s more and more important now than ever.
Meyer: If you’re just joining, I am speaking with Dr. Monica Peek, an academic internist at UChicago Medicine. There are definitely groups that have legitimate reasons to be skeptical of mainstream medicine. You yourself have spent a significant portion of your career studying diabetes and its disproportionate negative outcomes in the Black community. You said something that has stuck with me, which was along the lines of the question physicians should ask isn’t necessarily how can we make people more trusting, but how can we make our institutions more trustworthy? What do more trustworthy institutions look like to you?
Peek: That’s an excellent question, and I’m going to answer that by also sort of doubling back to the fact that it’s the institutions that have done a lot of the harm as far as creating mistrust. So it’s not just that African Americans have worse diabetes outcomes. That could be for any number of reasons. But part of the reason is because of the disparate care that they receive when coming to our health care institutions. There has been such a large body of evidence that has documented disparities in care in every kind of disease, every kind of settings. Is this person going to be offered the latest and best in cancer therapy? Are they going to make sure that they’re getting referred appropriately for their annual eye exams to ophthalmology? Are they going to have their labs tested as regularly to make sure that their diabetes is on target? Are they going to be offered this revolutionary class of new medications, the GLP-1 receptor agonists that everyone wants? So when resources are constrained, those who have more money and more social capital and better insurance get the golden prize. Populations who have less money, who live in rural areas and have less access, who are racial and ethnic minorities, any way in which you have less social capital, you’re not going to get all the bells and whistles. And then there’s just that long history that our country has around anti-Black racism. Enslaved persons were sold for medical experimentation. From that, all the way to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which didn’t end until after I was born. We now have safeguards around people that are imprisoned because they used to just do experiments on them without consent.
So these are the lived experiences of people who had active harm done to them by doctors in white coats. It is not the job of those people to then rally themselves and try and just shake it off, but is the job of our institutions to rebuild that trust. What does that look like? We’re going to have to go above and beyond to meet people more than halfway. As a physician, every time I meet a new patient, no matter who they are, what their social identity is, if it’s exactly like mine, if it’s a Black woman, or if it’s radically different from mine, I give them the same spiel about, this is a safe space for you. I’m going to do my very best job to take the best care of you. I’m not there just to make sure that their STD has been treated with antibiotics and that their diabetes is controlled and that I’ve given them their annual influenza vaccine. I’m there also to make sure that when their mom has died and they are still having problems getting out the bed, they have lost their job and can’t afford their medications. We can talk about how we can try and get those medications at a lower cost and what we can do to still make this work. Those kind of spaces that I try and create as a physician is the same kind of work that we have to do as institutions. What kind of signage do we have on the walls? Where are we physically located in the communities? Is the parking $5,000 or is it $5? We are always sending a message that lets them know if they’re valued or not. That is the work that lies ahead of us.
Meyer: Something that’s been sitting in the back of my mind is the federal funding cuts to research. I’m really interested in how research and care intersect. Do those impact physicians’ ability to effectively build trust?
Peek: The federal funding cuts to NIH have disproportionately affected female researchers and researchers who are persons of color that disproportionately investigate health equity, work that is trying to improve the health of marginalized communities and try to make their health not better than everyone else’s, but just as good. Everyone deserves to be healthy. Some of that work was funding initiatives that may have been related to care delivery. And so to your point about miscommunication, this is still an active issue. We are still trying to build trust with communities. And now we’re in a state where we’re increasing the number of people that we’re putting into the mistrustful bucket. The demographics of people who we’re putting into that bucket is much wider than it had been before. They were also cutting funding for other things too. Clinical trials. Clinical trials frequently may be the last option for people who have diseases that failed therapy, and it may be their last hope. What message does that send the community about our government and health care institutions and their willingness to fight for people who are in their potential last days?
Medicine is supposed to be a profession where we do no harm, where we are trying to help people, you know, not just live, but live with dignity, joy, function and purpose. I think people expect more from a caring profession.
Meyer: Last question. And I’m wondering what communicating with people who are skeptical of your area of expertise has taught you about how to do that.
Peek: This was years ago, years ago. Somebody came into the office who had an abscess on her back. And she had a fried egg with like some medical tape. And I said, can you tell me what’s going on? And she said, she had heard that this is what you do to bring an abscess, a boil, to a head. And I was like, that is so fascinating, and thank you for sharing, so I have a better understanding of how you’ve learned to treat this in your family. It tells me that you are trying to do your best to be healthy, and that you’ve also come to see me and to seek additional help. So five gold stars on all that. Now, turns out that actually, that doesn’t help. But before I say that doesn’t help, I’ve given lots of positive feedback and acknowledged all the things that she did to try and help herself. I didn’t shame her. I brought her into the conversation. We’re now a team working toward the goal of getting her better. That’s what we really need to be doing as clinicians. We don’t have to make people feel small. We can use a language that brings them in and still combat misinformation and disinformation.
Meyer: Dr. Monica Peek, thank you so much.
Peek: Thank you for having me.
Meyer: For Medill Reports, I’m Sydney Meyer.
Sydney Meyer is a magazine specialization graduate student at Medill. You can follow her on Instagram at @sydneyjmeyer.