More than one-third of Canadians have turned to the internet for medical advice because they couldn’t access a doctor or other health professional, according to a new survey whose respondents also reported encountering a rising tide of health misinformation in their everyday lives.
“This is a double whammy that no other generation has had to experience,” said Joss Reimer, president of the Canadian Medical Association. “We’re seeing both a crisis of access to care along with this crisis of misinformation, and together, those create real life-and-death situations when people don’t have access to accurate health information.”
The survey, conducted by Ottawa-based polling firm Abacus Data, was commissioned by the CMA, which represents doctors across the country, and was released on Tuesday.
The CMA and other health care organizations have been highlighting how a lack of access to medical professionals – especially family doctors – is affecting Canadians’ health. An estimated 5.4 million Canadian adults, or 17 per cent of the population, don’t have a regular health care provider, according to the most recent Statistics Canada survey from 2023. Another large national survey put the figure at approximately 6.5 million, or 22 per cent.
The new survey for the CMA found that 80 per cent of respondents trusted physicians and pharmacists to provide accurate health information. Nurses, at 79 per cent, were trusted nearly as much.
But when Canadians can’t reach one of those professionals, they sometimes turn to an online ecosystem awash in false or misleading health claims, the survey concluded. Thirty-seven per cent said they had to rely on online medical advice because they couldn’t speak to a doctor or medical professional, and 23 per cent said they experienced a bad or adverse reaction or a negative impact after following online advice.
Sixty-two per cent of those surveyed in November of 2024 said they encountered health information they later discovered was false or misleading occasionally, often or all the time – eight percentage points higher than in 2023. (The survey was conducted online with 3,727 Canadians from Nov. 12 to 19. The comparable margin of error for a random sample of the same size would be plus or minus 1.96 per cent, 19 times out of 20.)
That increase surprised David Coletto, chief executive officer of Abacus Data. “Even in the course of a 12-month period, we see statistically significant changes in reported exposure to misinformation,” Mr. Coletto said.
Such online exposures can have real-world consequences, he added. For example, the survey found that health misinformation led to increased anxiety for 43 per cent of respondents; strained relationships with family or friends for 33 per cent; and delays in seeking appropriate medical treatment for 38 per cent.
Mr. Coletto also noted that the generational divide in where Canadians get their information is growing more stark, with younger Canadians counting on social media and older Canadians continuing to rely most on television news.
The survey sought to measure how susceptible Canadians are to health misinformation by asking respondents whether some widely debunked health myths were true or false. Twenty-six per cent of respondents, for example, said it was true that mercury in vaccines can cause autism, while 28 per cent said they weren’t sure if that statement was true or false – despite multiple high-quality studies concluding that there is no link between vaccines and autism.
Abacus pooled the answers to its misinformation test to produce a “misinformation susceptibility index” and concluded that 43 per cent of Canadians are highly susceptible to misinformation.
Still, the survey found that a significant majority of Canadians trust government institutions, including Health Canada (trusted by 78 per cent of respondents), the Public Health Agency of Canada (76 per cent) and provincial public-health organizations (74 per cent).
Timothy Caulfield, a health misinformation researcher and professor in the faculty of law and school of public health at the University of Alberta, said that level of trust was one encouraging note in the otherwise “grim” survey results.
“We often hear about this distrust in government and Health Canada and public-health agencies, when in reality, most Canadians do trust those institutions,” he said.