David Scales MPhil, MD, PhD

David Scales MPhil, MD, PhD is an internal medicine hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. His research focuses on medical communication in clinical and online settings, including understanding how structural factors affect our information environments to allow misinformation to propagate and misconceptions to persist. Dr. Scales’ work leverages qualitative and quantitative methods to build community-based interventions to address the problem of health-related misinformation, training “infodemiologists” to help build resilience to information distortion within their communities using "community-oriented motivational interviewing." 

 

Dr. Scales completed an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University before he received his MD and PhD from Yale University, where his sociology dissertation examined how the World Health Organization seeks to control the spread of diseases across international borders. After a post-doc in spatial epidemiology at healthmap.org, David completed residency at Cambridge Health Alliance. David’s clinical interests focus on providing care to the immigrants and refugees both in the U.S. and in the Middle East. With a certificate in medical interpreting in Levantine colloquial Arabic, David’s public writing has focused on medical communication – in the doctor-patient relationship, between healthcare providers, and to the general public. He has written for Aeon, Undark, Columbia Journalism Review, MedPage Today, and was a special correspondent for WBUR’s CommonHealth.