Undoctored Truths: turning a moment into a movement

What?

On the second morning of the NEXT Medical Festival 2026, the opening session was ours. With my co-founders Dr Natasha Hansjee and Dr Vernon Bainton, we used that moment to start a movement: the Undoctored Truths Alliance.

The room was full of medical leaders in life sciences, all bound by the same governance and ethical obligations, and all quietly worn down. Sick, tired, and feeling powerless against a growing global public health threat, medical misinformation, many had privately become resigned to it, as if this were simply the way things have to be and there was nothing we could do. I have spent years getting accurate, life-saving health information to the public early, across short and long-term risks: vaping, alcohol, antibiotic resistance and more. I was not willing to accept that nothing could be done, and neither were they once we named it out loud.

So what?

A good doctor correcting a bad claim, one patient at a time, is losing a race against software that spreads that claim to millions before breakfast. Resignation is the real threat, not any single falsehood. That is why we called it an alliance and not a campaign: misinformation is a systems problem, and systems problems are not solved by better individuals working harder, they are solved by people organising.

Now what?

Together we are building a globally distributed network of trusted professionals, patients and members of the public to inoculate the world against medical misinformation. That means two things at once: developing novel, proprietary approaches, and aggregating and amplifying the great work of people already fighting this in pockets of excellence, whose voices are currently drowned out.