What is Truth?
In last week’s blog, I talked about working in a post‑truth environment where facts alone no longer carry the day in your clinic. This week, I want to talk about the leadership skill that keeps you grounded in truth despite the shifting information environment we face today. I read ASAE’s “Truth Under Pressure” article this morning and it inspired me to take on this topic this week.
Discernment is the habit of slowing down your thinking long enough to ask, “Is this actually true, or does it just feel true to me right now?” It is essentially personal fact‑checking, applied before you hit send, speak up in a staff meeting, or change a patient’s plan of care.
The Bigger Context: Truth Under Pressure
ASAE describes our moment this way: truth itself is under pressure. Facts are questioned, narratives compete for legitimacy, and information integrity has become a strategic leadership issue—not just a communications issue—for any organization that produces or relies on data.
They outline three plausible futures that, frankly, already echo what we see in an O&P practice:
The Verified Web: Digital systems emerge to prove identity and verify content sources, reducing some misinformation but raising new questions about privacy, who gets included, and who is deciding “truth.”
Polarized Reality: Information fractures into tightly bounded “narrative ecosystems,” each with its own influencers and “truths,” making cross‑community dialogue harder.
Cognitive Contagion: Cheap, AI‑generated content floods the environment, polluting data sets and making it harder to distinguish signal from noise.
If you lead an O&P practice, you don’t live outside that world; you lead inside it. Your patients, payers, and staff show up each day carrying their own narrative ecosystems, exposure to cognitive contagion, and expectations about what makes something “true.”
In that kind of environment, discernment is not abstract philosophy; it is a daily clinical and business skill.
You separate what you know from what you assume when a patient’s powerful story conflicts with your objective data and your experience.
You notice when your frustration with payers, prior denials, or national headlines is coloring how you interpret new policies or requests for documentation.
You pause before accepting the loudest staff opinion or most viral post as reality about “what everyone thinks” in your practice.
Discernment is not about becoming cynical; it is about becoming precise. The goal is not to doubt everything, but to know why you believe the things you are about to act on.
Your Worldview: The Lens on Your “Facts”
Every person carries a worldview into the exam room and the business office. Your worldview is the internal set of beliefs about fundamental truth (is it absolute or relative?), how people behave, what counts as evidence, who can be trusted, and how change happens. That worldview subconsciously edits your perception and thoughts before you ever open your mouth.
In O&P, that might sound like:
“Patients won’t follow through unless you lay down hard rules.”
“Payers are always out to deny care, so they can’t be partners.”
“Data is for audits, not for real‑time decision‑making.”
None of those statements are universally true, but if they sit in the background of your thinking, they will feel true and shape how you interpret both stories and statistics. ASAE’s “Polarized Reality” scenario is really a macro‑version of this: groups living in different narrative ecosystems, each convinced their interpretation is the truth.
Discernment starts with being honest about your own worldview and how it is helping or hurting your leadership and participation in a world where truth is contested.
Mental Fact Checking
In this post‑truth environment, you must do in your own mind what you wish your patients, payers, and team members would do with your messages: test them. Think of it as a simple, repeatable discernment checklist:
What are the objective facts I can point to in OPIE or other systems, and what is my interpretation of those facts?
What emotion am I feeling right now (threat, pride, fear, fatigue), and how might that be steering my conclusion?
What data or perspective would change my mind or verify my thoughts, and have I even looked for it? (do I want to know?)
Am I giving more weight to the most recent story I heard than to a larger pattern in our actual outcomes, documentation, and financials?
Am I aware that the article, post, or comment I’m reacting to may be emerging from someone else’s narrative ecosystem or from a content stream polluted by cognitive contagion?
Using these questions in real time is “fact‑checking your own brain.” It helps you reconnect the subjective (stories, feelings, fears) to the objective (measurements, documentation, policy) in the way your patients, payers and personal relationships need from you.
Discernment becomes powerful when it is embedded into your daily rhythm, not reserved for big crises or high‑profile misinformation events.
In patient care: You listen fully to the pain story, then anchor your recommendations in gait analysis, alignment data, and documented outcomes, explaining how both worlds fit together—even when the patient’s “Google truth” says something different.
In team conversations: You separate culture gossip from repeatable patterns in performance, retention, and patient feedback before redesigning workflows or calling a meeting about “the communication problem.”
In business decisions: You acknowledge uncertainty openly, sharing what the data show, what is still unknown, and what experiments you are willing to run next, rather than pretending to have more certainty than the environment allows.
Even if the broader internet moves toward a more “verified web,” the real work will still be between your ears—how your worldview, your emotions, and your habits of thought shape what you treat as true in the moment. In a world where truth is under pressure, trust is earned when people can see that your worldview is examined, your data is real, and your decisions are made with discernment rather than impulse.