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Bogus health advice is widespread online, and often follows a few strategies. Misinformation can harm a person's physical and mental health. Look out for big claims and conspiratorial tones, Dr ...
Health misinformation can be easily spread through social media to large amounts of individuals which can make this dangerous. One example of this was in 2020, when President Donald Trump said in speeches and on Twitter that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine could be used to treat Covid-19 .
Misinformation has been spread during many health crises. [17] [28] For example, misinformation about alternative treatments was spread during the Ebola outbreak in 2014–2016. [37] [38] During the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of mis- and dis-information was exacerbated by a general lack of health literacy. [39]
Changing policies also created confusion and contributed to the spread of misinformation. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) originally discouraged use of face masks by the general public in early 2020, advising "If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection ...
Be it finance, health care or politics, there is a global “infodemic” of misinformation that is affecting people’s health and well-being, according to the World Health Organization.
A new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that "just 12 anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms."
The World Health Organization has classified vaccine related misinformation into five topic areas. These are: threat of disease (vaccine preventable diseases are harmless), trust (questioning the trustworthiness of healthcare authorities who administer vaccines), alternative methods (such as alternative medicine to replace vaccination), effectiveness (vaccines do not work) and safety (vaccines ...
A prominent example noted by Radford is a systematic review published in the British Medical Journal showing that paracetamol is ineffective for lower back pain and has minimal effectiveness for osteoarthritis. [3] [45] In his 2012 book Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre heavily criticises the pharmaceutical industry but rejects any conspiracy theories ...