It started, as these things often do, with a number on a lab report. Joseph S. Thomas, MD FHM watched as colleagues began overhyping asymptomatic troponin elevations as equivalent to full-blown myocarditis, a claim that required either ignoring or misreading the evidence. That was the signal. The misinformation wasn't coming from the fringes of the internet. It was coming from healthcare workers.
"I started ramping up my own social media as I saw healthcare workers, including fellow doctors, turn away from evidence-based medicine to spread misinformation in order to promote supplements or products," Thomas said. The pattern he describes has a recognizable shape: troponin elevations first, then ivermectin and other COVID treatments marketed as cures, and now what he calls vaccine detoxes. Each wave follows the same logic, which is the misinterpretation or outright dismissal of evidence, often in service of selling something.
Thomas is a hospitalist in Buffalo and one of several digital media editors at the Journal of Hospital Medicine, where he leads video content. He is careful to keep his work at JHM separate from his personal social media presence, which spans TikTok, Instagram, and Substack and has grown to over 23,000 followers. The editorial work, though, reinforces the same instincts. Reviewing new literature for video production keeps him close to the research, and he brings what he describes as a fact-based approach to his own content while also trying to make a human connection, something he credits JHM for modeling in how it covers hospitalists' humanity and caring alongside the science.
The logistical reality of sustaining all of this is worth examining plainly. Thomas does not run the hospitalist practice he works in, and he is frank about how the schedule actually functions. On hospital service weeks, clinical work fills the days and family fills the evenings. Content creation and his other commitments wait for off-weeks. "It's tough sometimes," he said, "but rewarding in a well-rounded way." He credits supervisors who actively support his outside work rather than treating it as a distraction.
What separates correction from noise, in Thomas's framing, is not volume or even reach. It is the combination of rigor and presence, being in the spaces where misinformation circulates rather than simply publishing rebuttals in venues that already converted audiences are likely to see. The physicians selling ivermectin or vaccine detox protocols are on social media. The peer-reviewed corrections, mostly, are not. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is the one he is trying, week by week and off-service week by off-service week, to close.
