‘The more outlandish the claim, the more likely it will stick in people’s minds’ – expert’s warning as fake news & cancer ‘cures’ put patients at risk

Wasn’t sure where to post this.
Not really that specific to cancer.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-ne...ncer-cures-put-patients-at-risk-42394600.html

‘The more outlandish the claim, the more likely it will stick in people’s minds’ – expert’s warning as fake news and cancer ‘cures’ put patients at risk

Professor Declan Devane of the University of Galway

Eilish O'Regan

March 20 2023

 

Medical systems all over the world are gushing over having people yell STOP at their symptoms and many equally farcical claims, are in mass denial of a mass disability event they are pretty much responsible for creating, and answer to that with nonsensical gaslighting blaming all illness on magical thoughts and beliefs.

And they think that disinformation is an issue in medicine? While being pretty much the biggest source. You can either have scientific medicine, or you can have pseudoscientific medicine, but you can't have both.

Once you mix them up, it's like crossing the potable water and sewer streams: you can't unmix, you now have diluted sewer water, it's no longer potable.

 

We even see that with the UK MEA, in that they at times share items on social medial that should contain a warning at the top. I guess in part it is because the miraculous cures or the determined self cures make far better news stories than ‘thirty years in and I get to go out to a cafe once a month, but only if it is a good month’.

I suspect if we count up the news articles and social media reports on individuals with ME those about recoveries and miracle cures, though they represent the 4 to 5%, will equal in number or even exceed those about the remaining 95 to 96% who don’t return to anywhere near premorbid functioning.

 

There is obviously something about human nature in this, but I'm not a big fan of (whilst aware that is the nature of the beast with news articles) the tone of isolating the most doolally and not noting the bits in-between.

To me it just reminds me a bit of the stuff we've had to read so much from biopsychosocial types trying to use tone to infer 'they think it is a virus' and pitching people trying HELP apheresis in Germany like it was (whilst still a dice roll) in a way that was belittling and felt contemptuous and conflicted in tone: https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1671

One thing that I keep wanting to flag is that I do not get why all the pretend psychological stuff, and generally accepted invalidation of allowing those who aren't ill to think it's their business to judge on how someone in a situation they've never weathered 'should be thinking or dealing with life' is damaging, rude and dangerous too.

It freaks me out 'how far gone' as a society we seem to be from 20yrs ago as a society on knowledge of psychology and having reversed that knowledge from when it was acknowledged basic common sense you don't go inferring that crud and if you did you caused damage to that person (you know, real 'mental health' type knowledge of the type where you say psychologically inappropriate behaviour to someone is unkind and damages).

And I think straw-manning stuff that mightn't either be as extreme as represented or as likely to be taken up as inferred has been used to distract from all that crap sneaking in through the back door as if it is harmless.

'anything not psych is potentially risky' isn't factually correct, and just because something hasn't had a huge trial as a 'cure' doesn't mean there aren't at the clinically individually relevant (where they aren't things with risk of harm) bits and bobs worth trying under that bucket, with very little to be gained from someone doing unscientifically modelled or adapted for the condition 'motivational courses' (I'm not sure they deserve the term of either psych or mental health given the masures that they use, and harm is sure as possible as anything else with those if they aren't 'matched' to need they tend not to have the ability to diagnose these days).

It isn't and it is as if not more insidious and actually I think plays a direct and indirect strong path to leading anyone who ends up on somethign truly wacky to having done so by deliberately turning fact on its head to create a culture of drip-drip-drip 'sick or disabled are responsible for being better' and taking away others' ability or willingness to have straightforward conversations where they aren't mad, invalidating people that should be basic moral obligations that they heed they should educate themselves to be able to do.

I'm sure that the bloke behind this doesn't have any of this agenda, that isn't what I'm saying, but it is agenda never-the-less if people aren't directly mentioning the dodgy psych stuff - it infers that can only be safe by comparison given how prevalent that stuff is, if there isn't a warning on that too. And yet I'm sure even if he wanted to the weight of 'don't get embroiled' with having anti-mental health levelled at someone calling out anti-mental-health stuff basically silences it from happening.

 

The outlandish ones have certainly stuck in my mind, though I certainly wouldn't try them:

• Garlic
• Drinking your own urine
• Black salve (applying corrosive chemicals to your skin)

 

Unrelated to this but there are regular posts on the LC subreddit warning about premature recovery posts and how people should wait and see how it goes before saying anything.

There have also been many, many posts and comments from people who made such posts and later said they relapsed, sometimes worse.

Wait, no I mean very related to this. Silly me. We all know that The Secret here is to declare to have recovered and insist so no matter how it goes. This is the only physician-validated eminence-based Secret treatment.