“If nothing is done about it, we are just hurting ourselves and nobody else.”

Luis Barrientos has been a health care worker for a decade and has heard many examples of misinformation in his field. From ditching prescribed medicines in favor of home remedies to refusing vaccines, there are many cases of misinformation he finds frustrating. Luis reflects on his experiences with misinformation and the dangerous impact it can have on the rest of the world.

Niko Barrientos: Can you tell me what is your name and what do you do for your work?

Luis: My name is Luis and I’m a case manager for Molina Health Care. What I do is I do home visits to homes, hospitals, clinics and provide these home visits to our members. We do this to determine or assess some of our members who are sick.

Niko: How would you describe your day-to-day at your job?

Luis: Basically, day to day is that I get to talk to different people different members with the insurance. Every case is different and is dependent on the person, for some people I’m doing the visit, because I need to do a medical assessment. For others, it’s making sure that they are being taken care of and following the doctors’ orders.

N: Why did you get into this line of work and do this job?

L: I like to help people most of our members are people with low income so I make sure that they are getting that proper care that they need. Not just because they are patients or members. They deserve the same as any other regular person. Because I speak Spanish, I visit every side of Milwaukee, mostly south and north side with our members. But, really all over where are members are including the suburbs.

N: Where do you personally get your news from, like local news, world news, national news?

L: Just the regular news places like an ABC, NBC and just places on the TV.

N: Is TV the only place you get news from or do you get news from apps?

L: I do get some news from social media, but I wouldn’t consider that to be reliable news. Typically, if it’s medical news or anything medical like that I stick with a more reliable sources of news. Nothing with things like Facebook or any other of the social medias.

N: How would you define misinformation or fake news?

L: My definition of fake news would be, for example when I’m following up with one of my members due to covid vaccines. When it comes down to numbers, they tell me they read it on Facebook or any one of these social media. They tell me all these crazy, crazy things with numbers telling me people are dying left and right or how about the vaccine doesn’t work. I pretty much hear that every day. 

N: Would you say those fake numbers or theories you hear are the only examples you experience with fake news?

L: I hear so much misinformation from our members and the patients that I deal with. Especially, with the covid happening right now, they simply say it’s something that’s not true or they don’t want to validate it. So, that’s mostly what I’ve been dealing with over the last year. The flu vaccine is another one that we hear that they don’t believe in that vaccine. But, mostly over the last year everything has been about covid, covid vaccines and how it’s the government trying to tell people to take it. Then you see the same people I spoke to a few months back, but now they’re in the hospital and they’re asking for the vaccine and some of them have even passed away from it. Then those people still don’t believe in it and they’re telling us that it’s all fake and it’s all the government.

N: How does that affect your ability to do your job?

L: It has a big impact on the ability to do your job, especially when the people you are talking to aren’t believing in the vaccine. I also work with pre-natal and post-partum moms or moms that are pregnant. A lot of them don’t believe in the vaccine or don’t want to take it because they believe it will impact their pregnancy or might terminate the pregnancy. The thing is we’ve had a number of cases already in Froedtert where a number of moms are losing their lives or the babies lives due to getting covid. As to why this isn’t information out there in the public, we don’t know. As someone that works with them, I know, because I have to go visit the patient and go to them at the hospital and talk to them for contracting covid. After they are cleared from covid or after the fact when they lose their baby.

N: I know you talked about with covid, vaccines and that. Are there other themes or conspiracies that you hear about often? Like before covid or is covid the main one you hear?

L: Prior to this it was mostly the people who could get state insurance, they feel like they’ve earned the insurance or it belongs to them because they’re citizens of the United States. They feel that they were born here and raised in this country that anything that’s free they should have more priority than anyone who isn’t a citizen of the United States. So that was one of the main ones. We also deal with housing issues, because we do also cover going from one extreme to another going from medical vaccines. We have a high population here in Milwaukee with homelessness, so we also deal with a lot of that. So, that’s another thing we were dealing with and we’re still dealing with it. I think we will continue to deal with this into the future, especially with homelessness

N: Have you found something on social media you first thought to be true, but turned out to be untrue?

L: Yes, social media gives you so much information. I’m also guilty to listening to something on social media and believing to be true without doing the proper research on whatever I’m being told. It’s usually as simple as somebody dying, something that happened in the war or something happening in another country when it’s not true. I’m also to blame, because I’ll believe some of the things you see on Facebook being one of them. People will post just anything and everything just to lie. It’s just to get attention or maybe to just be known by others. So yeah, I have fallen for those.

N: Do you believe that people being in low-income areas has something to do with how easy misinformation to be spread.

L: No, I don’t think so because something like social media is all over. The same with low income with the same as middle class or even upper class. They can simply in my family I have people in lower and middle class and they believe everything that they read on places like social media. So, it has nothing to do with income at all, it comes in all forms.

N: Is Milwaukee different in misinformation or fake news compared to other places? Better or Worse?

L: No, I don’t believe that Milwaukee is any better or worse than other states or big cities. We are right next to Illinois and Chicago being a big city, I think all of us around here are the same. When it comes down to it. You can even see that it’s different compared to down south, because we are up north. The cities down south, I have family in cities in Texas and their beliefs are totally different from us. They don’t believe that this is a real virus, they don’t believe in masking. Compared to here up north to down south, the people are completely different. Being up here and down south is different when it comes down to it. From just what I’ve heard, because I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve just heard from my family members. From what I know about places around here like the state of Illinois, we’re pretty much the same around here.

N: Why do you think there is so much misinformation, do you think it’s because of things like social media? Why do you think there is an abundance of it today?

L: It’s not just social media. Now, I’ll just say if you look back even like 10 years, yeah, a lot of it has to do with social media, but social media as always sort of been around. If it wasn’t the internet, you had magazine before filled with misinformation, but I think a lot of now today has to deal with social media. I think a lot of it has to do with the area you were raised in and who you were raised by. Not in particular, who you were raised by, but in what areas you were raised. For some reason, when I say some areas, I’m not talking about low income. Yeah, it can be low income and maybe they are misguided or didn’t learn right. This can go up to the middle class and high class for people. I think it just boils down to the way you were raised and taught in life. It doesn’t matter what anyone else tells you or teaches you. If you’re told by your parent and peers, you’ll believe it to be right. It has to start from somewhere, somebody has to take action and start teaching people. Of course, we’re human we make our own decisions, but at least at nothing else give them the tools to find the right answer?

Niko: How dangerous do you think misinformation is to impacting the world?

L: It’s a very serious matter, I’ll give you just a couple of examples. It’s been told to women that taking birth control will make them gain a lot of weight, I’ve heard that years and years, so women don’t want to take it, that’s just one example. Another one is if you’re a diabetic and you do all this, like the doctor will recommend you so many milligrams of metformin. I’ve heard it where I teach and living with diabetes, instead of taking the 1000mg, don’t listen to the doctor, just take 500mg. People telling them not to take, because the doctor is just trying to push drugs. It maybe true to some point, but it could really, really could affect you. There is just so much that can go wrong with misinformation, especially with things like medicine or home remedies people will start taking. Even misdiagnoses or people who don’t believe what the doctor tells them and later on feels the doctor should have been more stern. Then it goes both ways because you get misinformation from the provider itself. The more that we don’t believe in that covid is real and it has nothing to do with the government, it will just keep spreading it’s gonna continue. We’ll never get 100% of the people to believe a certain way, but if nothing is done about it, we are just hurting ourselves and nobody else.