Fighting misinformation in health: A critical analysis of the Descartes Foundation’s report on “Information and Health” about so-called “alternative medicines”

This article offers a critical analysis of the Descartes Foundation’s report “Information and Health,” particularly its analysis of “alternative therapies,” and puts it into perspective with its ambitions to promote “truthful, complete, and accurate” information and combat “health misinformation.”

Our analysis shows that this report, although it should not be compared to a scientific article per se, was written in a short period of time and bases its findings on a construct whose scientific validity has not been explicitly established. These methodological limitations raise important questions about the validity of the exploratory statistical analyses presented and call for caution in interpreting their results. The indicators of “health knowledge” and “refusal of conventional treatment or vaccination” are subject to several methodological biases, the limitations of which are not discussed. Overall, from a rigorous scientific point of view, the shortcomings of this report contrast with the media campaign surrounding it, including its presentation at a session of the National Academy of Medicine in France. This discrepancy between media communication and scientific quality raises questions coming from a foundation that positions itself as a defender of critical thinking and claims to be part of the fight against misinformation: Its communication thus fails to meet its objectives and may mislead readers by not discussing the implicit standards it conveys and the methodological limitations of the report.