Opinion ‘But I Saw It on Facebook’: Hoaxes Are Making Doctors’ Jobs Harder

Short article, two excerpts to give an idea of content:

The news came from a colleague — not a doctor but someone who works in the emergency room and has seen firsthand the devastation caused by the pandemic. “There is a cure for Covid-19,” he said. “It must be true because a doctor friend shared a Facebook post about this cure.”
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Public health organizations have been unable to keep up with the deluge of sophisticated medical myths and pseudoscience shared on Facebook. Despite the efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, content from the top 10 health misinformation sites received four times as many Facebook views as content from the C.D.C., W.H.O. and eight other leading health institutions during April 2020.
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Public health organizations have been unable to keep up with the deluge of sophisticated medical myths and pseudoscience shared on Facebook. Despite the efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, content from the top 10 health misinformation sites received four times as many Facebook views as content from the C.D.C., W.H.O. and eight other leading health institutions during April 2020.
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This outcome is to be expected. Fewer and fewer people go to see doctors about a health problem and leave the consultation with treatment that will actually cure them. Curing people isn't economically viable. Instead, pharma companies want people to be just well enough to stay alive (and work to pay for pharma meds) but still be sick enough to need pharmaceutical treatment. Another problem is that when people leave doctors' surgeries having been fobbed off and told their problems are all in their heads, why would patients trust the doctors?

Not curing people is also convenient to governments and insurance companies. It means that old people and sick people don't use up much-needed housing stock for decades, and pensions are paid out for less time. People staying alive much beyond their retirement date means that there are too many "useless eaters" and "useless breathers" around.

All these interested parties - the medical profession, the pharma companies, governments and insurance companies - can't have it both ways. People want to feel well, and if doctors can offer them nothing to make that happen then it is just human nature to go looking for answers that you can't find by "officially approved" methods.

Edit : Typo
 
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Undoubtedly social media can spread harmful medical information, but it can also spread useful information and importantly counteract existing harmful information too.

Would we be seeing NICE here in the UK rewriting its ME/CFS guidelines if not at least in part for the social media campaign?

We are only just learning to use social media, and some are learning to abuse it. However any system to police it needs to ensure it does not just become a way for vested interests to impose control, and to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bath water.
 
Twitter at least has an element of monitoring when I’ve reported stuff on there they occasionally take action. On Facebook nothing I’ve ever reported has been deemed to be outside even their low standards

theres such a mix you really do have to look behind anything to see as best you can if it’s genuine, who is posting it and do they have an agenda -looking into their timelines to see if you want to be associated with them by liking or especially forwarding. It is a minefield. I didn’t even know about AstroTurfing until I came on here.

just. Because someone is a doctor on twitter or Facebook definitely doesn’t mean they are without an ideological agenda
 
Arnie Pye said:
Another problem is that when people leave doctors' surgeries having been fobbed off and told their problems are all in their heads, why would patients trust the doctors?
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That's probably playing an even bigger role than I suspected. Especially with the growing use of the MUS approach, people simply get used to not only medicine being useless and indifferent at helping them, a choice made by not doing serious research and relying on absurd beliefs about the magical power of the mind, but actually insulting about it turns them off medicine completely. The normal expected course would be that medicine take proper care of recording all those failures and actively be researching them. When people realize medicine is actually doing the exact opposite of that, entirely on purpose, they understand that medicine is unable to help, encouraging them to go to unofficial voodoo, since at least it's not insulting like the official voodoo.

Medicine seems to have decided that being insulting to people is the right thing to do, a kind of "tough love" approach, speaking truth to people who believe themselves sick when they are "clearly" not. Well, this is the indirect downside. Along with the direct downside of ill people remaining ill, it adds up to a crisis of confidence that can only be corrected by recognizing the catastrophic failure of this approach, something medicine usually does the other way around, instead doubling down even further. This MUS/FND/BPS ideology is truly the biggest failure of expertise in human history.

In normal circumstances this may not be that big of a factor, but mixed with all the propaganda this is just fuel for mistrust that actually goes all the way to actively defy medical advice. Once you've been blatantly lied to your face by a medical professional, it's really hard to trust again. Medicine, especially psychosomatic ideology, clearly finds this irrelevant and so is willfully blind to the problem, the original failure also makes it impossible to realize the problem because it encourages blindness to outcome, to never look at what happens to "those patients".
 
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