ABSTRACT
At both the state and federal level, lawmakers and regulators are increasingly interfering with the physician’s independent duty to provide patients with medically true and accurate information. And alarmingly, these interventions frequently involve state-mandated medical disinformation – false medical claims disseminated with awareness of their inaccuracy or with deliberate disregard for the scientific consensus.
This Article addresses the problem: what happens when this disinformation flows not from fringe or private actors, but from the state itself – embedded in statutes, regulatory mandates, and official policy guidance? It examines state-sanctioned and state-mandated medical disinformation, and it concludes that informed consent doctrine, which was designed to empower patients to make autonomous, voluntary, and informed decisions about their own care, can hold both states and physicians accountable when the clinical encounter is weaponized as a vehicle for disinformation. Recognizing a physician’s duty to supplement or correct disinformation requires only that courts, physicians, and professional societies take informed consent’s substance as seriously as they have long taken its form. Thus, this Article calls for a reinvigorated informed consent: not a procedural formality that the state can co-opt, but a substantive shield the patient can rely on, and one the physician has both an ethical and a legal obligation to uphold.
Gutmann Koch, Valerie, Disinformed Consent (September 1, 2026).
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