Turn yourself into a source of coronavirus facts and a bulwark against the fake, misleading and fraudulent.
(© Charles Taylor/Adobe)
When it comes to fighting the new coronavirus threat, the truth is one of the few things more crucial than a gallon of hand sanitizer. But these days, both can be hard to find if you don't know where to look.
"Humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices."
While it's only been around for a few months, COVID-19 has already produced an ever-expanding universe of conspiracy theories about its origins, its spread, and the danger it poses. Meanwhile, fraudulent cures and myths about treatments threaten to upend public health efforts to contain the epidemic.
But ordinary citizens aren't helpless. Research offers insight into why we're susceptible to misinformation, and armies of fact-checkers can tell us what's real and what isn't. Meanwhile, experts are offering tips about how we can effectively promote facts whether we're chatting with a stranger at the post office or challenging a cousin on Facebook.
Here a four-part strategy to help you fight back against the Coronavirus Misinformation Industrial Complex:
Understand How Bogus Beliefs Work
That crank on the Internet may be your neighbor. Or maybe even you.
According to a 2014 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, nearly half of American surveyed said they believed in at least one grand medical conspiracy theory. Twenty percent agreed, for example, that cell phones cause cancer but officials won't do anything because of corporate pressure, and 37 percent believed an elaborate conspiracy theory about the suppression of natural cancer cures. "Although it is common to disparage adherents of conspiracy theories as a delusional fringe of paranoid cranks, our data suggest that medical conspiracy theories are widely known, broadly endorsed, and highly predictive of many common health behaviors," the study authors write.
In an interview with leapsmag, study lead author Eric Oliver said we're drawn to "conspiracy theories that correspond with our intuitions."
"In the case of medicine, I think there are three big factors: Fears of Big Pharma -- a large percentage of Americans have a distorted sense of what pharmaceutical companies are capable of -- fears of government, and fears of contagion," said Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
Why does it matter if people believe in conspiracy theories about coronavirus? As Oliver's study notes, conspiracy theorists are less likely to rely on traditional medicine, get flu shots, or go to annual check-ups. They could be especially susceptible to disease and inappropriate treatment.
Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who studies conspiracies, elaborated on how this works. "You could have people who think coronavirus is fake and say, 'I'm not going to wash my hand or take preventive action. This is the media making something up, or this is just a plot for the pharmaceutical companies to sell a vaccine.' If you have a lot of people acting that way, that increases the ability of the virus to spread."
Get the Facts from the Experts
How can you avoid being a misinformation source? Educate yourself to make sure you're not spouting fake facts yourself with the instant ease that the Internet allows. "Humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices," writes misinformation scholar Claire Wardle in a 2019 Scientific American commentary. That means you too.
For coronavirus facts, experts recommend looking to the websites of government agencies (such as the CDC, World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health) and top-tier medical organizations (Mayo Clinic, Infectious Disease Society of America).
Respected mainstream news outlets such as The New York Times and National Public Radio offer extensive original reporting on the coronavirus threat. While some news outlets still require users to pay to get full access to stories, others have dropped their paywalls and made coronavirus content free to all. These include the Seattle Times, Bloomberg News and the medical news site Stat.
Locally, look to your region's public health department, news outlets, and medical organizations such as hospitals and health plans.
The Poynter Institute, a journalism watchdog outfit, offers a helpful guide to evaluating what you read about coronavirus. And a paid service called NewsGuard offers a browser plug-in that provides a "trust rating" for popular news sites. "Our goal is to teach news literacy–and we hope all websites will earn green ratings and be generally reliable to consumers," the NewsGuard site says.
"As we combat misinformation, we also need to be mindful of the fact that we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty."
Remember, however, that scientists and physicians are learning more about the coronavirus each day. Assumptions about the virus will change as more information comes in, and there are still many questions about crucial topics like its fatality rate and the ways the virus spreads. You should expect that reliable sources – and experts – may provide conflicting information.
"As we combat misinformation, we also need to be mindful of the fact that we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty," says Boston cardiologist and author Dr. Haider Warraich of Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Double-Check Suspicious Information
No, the coronavirus wasn't created in a Winnipeg laboratory. You can't kill it by drinking bleach or frolicking in snow. And, as the French Health Ministry helpfully advised on Twitter, "Non, La cocaïne NE protège PAS contre le #COVID19" – "No, cocaine does NOT prevent Covid-19."
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all trying to remove fake or misleading coronavirus content, The New York Times reported, and "all said they were making efforts to point people back to reliable sources of medical information." Still, as the Times reports, bogus cures and conspiracy theories are rampant across social media and beyond.
Fortunately, there are many fact-checking resources. Turn to them for ammunition before you amplify – or challenge -- a coronavirus claim that seems suspicious.
Helpful myth-busting resources include:
** The venerable fact-checking site Snopes.com, which has checked multiple coronavirus claims. (Example: No, garlic water won't cure coronavirus.)
** The World Health Organization. (Example: No, mosquito bites can't transmit coronavirus)
** FactCheck.org. (Example: No, a disgraced Harvard scientist wasn't arrested for creating the coronavirus.)
** PolitiFact.org. (Example: No, the coronavirus is not just "the common cold.")
** The International Fact-Checking Network, accessible via the social-media hashtags #CoronaVirusFacts and #DatosCoronaVirus.
Correct Others With Caution
On social media, anger and sarcasm make up a kind of common tongue. But sick burns won't force misinformed people see the light. Instead, try a gentler approach.
"The most important thing would be to first acknowledge their anxieties rather than first trying to rationalize away their misbeliefs," said the University of Chicago's Oliver. "People embrace misinformation and conspiracy theories because they are afraid and trying to make sense of the world. Their beliefs serve a strong emotional function and will be defended as such. Trying to rationalize with them or argue with them may be counterproductive if one can't first put them at some ease."
Turn yourself into a source of coronavirus facts and a bulwark against the fake, misleading, and fraudulent.
So what can you do? "There will never be a magic bullet," the University of Miami's Uscinski said, but one approach is to highlight reliable information from sources that the person trusts, such as news outlets (think MSNBC or Fox News) or politicians.
However, don't waste your time. "If you have people who are believing in the craziest thing, they're probably not going to offer a rational conversation," he said. And, he added, there's an alternative to correcting others: Turn yourself into a source of coronavirus facts and a bulwark against the fake, misleading, and fraudulent. "We can be preventive and inoculate people against these beliefs," he said, "by flooding the information environment with proper information as much as possible."
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Randy Dotinga is former president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a non-profit association of freelance writers and non-fiction authors. He has been a freelance writer since 1999 and specializes in health/medicine, politics, books, and the odd and unusual. You can follow him at @rdotinga.
February 28 | 2020
Medical Tourism Is Booming, Fueled by High Costs and Slow Access
Bridget Snell traveled to Mexico to access an unapproved stem cell therapy for MS.
(Photo credits Suzanne Ouellette, left, and Christian Fregnan on Unsplash)
When Bridget Snell found out she had multiple sclerosis, she knew she would put up a fight. The 45 year-old mother of two, who lives in Duxbury, Mass., researched options to slow the progress of the disease. The methods she had been trying were invasive, often with side effects of their own.
An estimated 2.2 million Americans will travel abroad for medical care in 2020.
Then she stumbled upon autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT), an experimental and controversial procedure that uses the patient's own stem cells to try to halt the progress of the disease. The FDA has not approved this procedure and last year issued a warning about unapproved stem cell therapies.
Despite the lack of established science, Snell weighed her options and decided she would undergo the procedure at Clinica Ruiz, a private clinic in Puebla, Mexico, which boasts of the largest volume of cases in the world using the procedure to treat MS. In April 2018, she went to Mexico for treatment, returned home in a month, and continues to do well.
But a positive outcome is far from assured, says Sheldon Krimsky, adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine.
"Often you can't get a good sense of what the quality of treatment is in another country," Krimsky says, adding that many companies promise procedures whose results have not been clinically validated. "Unfortunately, people are very easily persuaded by hope."
Traveling for Medical Care
Snell is one of many Americans who have traveled abroad to access medical care. Patients Beyond Borders, a medical tourism consultancy, estimates that 2.2 million Americans will do so in 2020. A 2018 BCC report projected a five-year compounded annual industry growth rate of 13.2 percent. Adding to the demand is the aging population, which is expected to reach 95 million people by 2060 – nearly double the number in 2018.
While Snell traveled to Mexico to try a procedure that was not yet available in the United States, other patients do so for a variety of reasons, primarily cost and speed of access. For example, despite having "pretty good insurance coverage," Washington resident Soniya Gadgil needed dental procedures that would have cost thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. An India native, she decided to travel to Pune, India to visit her parents -- and while there, she got the two root canals and implant that she needed. Gadgil saved 60 percent on the final bill.
Leaving the country for medical care is not restricted to dental work or FDA-banned procedures either. Patients visit countries around the world — South America, Central America, and the Caribbean top the list — for a number of other problems, such as knee and hip replacements and bariatric operations. The most common procedures sought abroad are for dentistry, cosmetic surgery, and cardiac conditions.
Traveling abroad to access less expensive procedures is a damning indictment of healthcare delivery in the United States, says Dr. Leigh Turner, associate professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. "We have people who are being forced out of the system because of high costs. Collectively it suggests a real structural problem in terms of the organization of healthcare in the United States," Turner says.
The Growth of the Online Marketplace
Nevertheless, medical tourism is booming and a number of online businesses now meet patients' demand for discovery and facilitation of medical care abroad, like PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, Doctoorum.com, and Wellness Travels.
Anurav Rane, CEO and Founder of PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, says the company presents each potential client with options, a la Expedia. A knee replacement in India costs $2,500, a significantly cheaper option even with a $1,110 round-trip airfare from the United States, Rane says. The average cost for an inpatient total knee replacement in the United States in 2019 was a little more $30,000.
Once the client chooses a specific procedure at a specific hospital, the company facilitates the necessary groundwork including the medical visa, tickets, hotel stay, booking the procedure and pre and post-op stay, and consults with the surgeons or doctors even before arrival. "The hassle of planning is on us," Rane says. Once patients are settled in the accommodations, they undergo the procedure.
Playing in the Legal Shadows
The online marketplace companies and the medical team execute an orchestrated dance – but what happens if the patient is harmed during or after the procedure?
Turner says that medical malpractice, if it occurs, can be difficult to pursue abroad. "There are countries where the courts are notoriously slow and it's very difficult to get any kind of meaningful action and settlements," he says, even if the claims have a legitimate basis.
The industry's biggest challenge is trust.
Snell signed a waiver absolving her surgeons in Mexico of any legal claims. But, she points out, that's standard process even for procedures in the United States. "I signed just as many waivers as I would going into any surgery [in the US]."
While that might well be true, Turner argues, Americans don't waive legal rights when they sign consent forms. "There are some protections for patients here in the United States."
Beyond U.S. Medical Tourism
As expected, it's not just Americans who travel abroad for medical care. Lithuania-based Wellness Travels sees a significant percentage of its clients from the EU. PlanMyMedicaltrip.com has 15,000 surgeons and doctors from 12 countries in its database. Egypt-based Doctoorum works with professionals in its own country and attracts clients from the Middle East. It is looking to expand to include doctors from Jordan and India, among other countries.
The term "tourism" is misleading here because it muddies the picture about what post-op should really look like, says Gediminas Kondrackis of Wellness Travels. "Unfortunately a lot of medical travel facilitators mislead their clients by advertising beach holiday packages and the like. Post-op is really about quiet recovery inside for a few days; being out in the sun is not advisable."
The industry's biggest challenge is trust. "The dentist I went to is actually a friend of mine who has a successful practice for several years," says Gadgil, the Washington resident who had dental work done in India. "I'd hesitate to go to someone I don't know or to a place I have no experience with." Her apprehensions are not unusual. After all, anxiety is an expected reaction to any surgery. Word-of-mouth, cost savings, and thorough research may alleviate some of these trust issues.
"I had natural apprehensions and would have had them had I gone up the road to Brigham and Women's (in Boston) just as I did over the border," Snell says, "but I had done my homework extensively. That took a lot of the fear out of it."
Medical tourism will only increase, predicts Kondrackis. "There is still a lot of room to grow. Higher numbers of medical travelers could help reduce the strain on local healthcare systems by reducing wait times and controlling costs."
While patients who have benefited from medical tourism swear by it, the best cure would be to start at home by establishing healthcare equity, Krimsky says.
On the flip side, says Turner, it is debatable whether medical tourism actually benefits host countries, where local residents might get priced out of procedures at these exclusive clinics. Even if laws in host countries such as India might mandate "charity care" for poorer local patients, that does not always happen, Turner says. The trickle-down theory that these more expensive clinics will broaden access to care is often a pipe dream, he adds.
While patients who have benefited from medical tourism swear by it, the best cure would be to start at home by establishing healthcare equity, Krimsky says. "Now if we had universal healthcare in the United States," he adds, "that would be an entirely different story."
Or maybe not. Rane, of PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, has observed an influx of patients to India from Canada, a country with universal healthcare.
The reason they say they travel for care? Long wait times for procedures.
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Poornima Apte is an engineer turned award-winning freelance writer with clips in publications such as OZY, The Week, TechCrunch, JSTOR Daily and more.
February 19 | 2020
Americans Fell for a Theranos-Style Scam 100 Years Ago. Will We Ever Learn?
Medical scams like Theranos are as American as America itself.
(© Syda Productions/Adobe, left, and on right, photo credit: Drew Kelly, Courtesy of HBO)
The huckster understands what people want – an easy route to good health -- and figures out just how to provide it as long as no one asks too many questions.
"Americans are very much prone to this sort of thinking: Give me a pill or give me a magical bean that can make me lose weight!"
The keys to success: Hoopla, fancy technology, and gullibility. And oh yes, one more thing: a blood sample. Well, lots and lots of blood samples. Every testing fee counts.
Sound familiar? It could be the story of the preternaturally persuasive Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos who stands accused of perpetrating a massive blood-testing fraud. But this is a different story from a different time, one that dates back 100 years but sounds almost like it could unfold on the front page of The Wall Street Journal today.
The main difference: Back then, watchdogs thought they'd be able to vanquish fake medicine and scam science. Fat chance, it turned out. It seems like we're more likely to lose-weight-quick than make much of a dent into quackery and health fraud.
Why? Have we learned anything at all over the past century? As we sweep into a new decade, experts says we're not as advanced as we'd like to think. But the fight against fraud and fakery continues.
Quackery: As American As America Itself
In the 17th century, British healers of questionable reputation got a new name -- "quack," from the Dutch word "quacksalver," which originally referred to someone who treats others with home remedies but developed a new meaning along the lines of "charlatan." And these quacks got a new place to sell their wares: the American colonies.
By 1692, a Boston newspaper advertised a patent medicine that promised to cure "the Griping of the Guts, and the Wind Cholick" and – for good measure – "preventeth that woeful Distemper of the Dry Belly Ach." A couple centuries later, the most famous woman in the United States wasn't a first lady or feminist but a hawker of nostrums named Lydia Estes Pinkham whose "vegetable compound" promised to banish "female complaints." One advertisement suggested that the "sure cure" would have saved the life of a Connecticut clergyman whose wife killed him after suffering from feminine maladies for 16 years.
By the early 20th century, Americans were fascinated by electricity and radiation, and both healers and hucksters embraced the new high-tech era. Men with flagging libidos, for example, could irradiate their private parts with the radioactive Radiendocrinator or buy battery-powered electric belts equipped with dangling bits to supercharge their, um, dangling bits.
The Rise of the Radio Wave 'Cure'
Enter radionics, the (supposed) science of better health via radio waves. The idea was that "healthy people radiate healthy energy," and sickness could be reversed through diagnosis and re-tuning, write Dr. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen in their 2017 book "Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything."
Detecting illness and fixing it required machinery -- Dynamizers, Radioclasts and Oscillocasts – that could cost hundreds of dollars each. Thousands of physicians bought them. Fortunately, they could work remotely, for a fee. The worried-and-potentially-unwell just needed to send a blood sample and, of course, a personal check.
Sting operations revealed radionics to be bogus. A skeptic sent a blood sample to one radionics practitioner in Albuquerque who reported back with news of an infected fallopian tube. In fact, the blood sample came from a male guinea pig. As an American Medical Association leader reported, the guinea pig "had shown no female characteristics up to that time, and a postmortem examination yielded no evidence of ladylike attributes."
When Quackery Refused to Yield
The rise of bogus medical technology in the early 20th century spawned a watchdog industry as organizations like the American Medical Association swept into action, said medical historian Eric Boyle, author of 2012's "Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America."
"When quackery was recognized as a major problem, the people who campaigned for its demise were confident that they could get rid of it," he said. "A lot of people believed that increased education, the truths of science, and laws designed to protect consumers would ultimately drive quackery from the marketplace. And then throughout the century, as modern medicine developed, and more effectively treated one disease after another, many observers remained confident in that prediction."
There's a bid to "flood the information highway with truth to turn the storm of fake promotional stuff into a trickle."
But fake medicine persisted as Americans continued their quest to get- healthy-quick… or get-rich-quick by promising to help others to get- healthy-quick. Even radionics refused to die. It's still around in various forms. And, as the Theranos scandal reveals, we're still hoping our blood can offer the keys to longevity and good health.
Why Do We Still Fall for Scams?
In our own era, the Theranos company rose to prominence when founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes convinced journalists and investors that she'd found a way to cheaply test drops of blood for hundreds of conditions. Then it all fell apart, famously, when the world learned that the technology didn't work. The company has folded, and Holmes faces a federal trial on fraud charges this year.
"There were a lot of prominent, very smart people who bought into the myth of Elizabeth Holmes," a former employee told "60 Minutes," even though the blood tests never actually worked as advertised.
Shouldn't "prominent, very smart people" know better? "People are gullible," said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a psychiatrist and leading quack-buster who runs the QuackWatch website. But there's more to the story. According to him, we're uniquely vulnerable as individuals to bogus medicine.
Scam artists specifically pinpoint their target audiences, such as "smart people," desperate people and alienated people, he said.
Smart people, for example, might be overconfident about their ability to detect fraud and fall for bogus medicine. Alienated people may distrust the establishment, whether it's the medical field or government watchdogs, and be more receptive to alternative sources of information.
Dr. Barrett also points a finger at magical thinking, which comes in different forms. It could mean a New Age-style belief that our minds can control the world around us. Or, as professional quack-buster Alex Berezow said, it could refer to "our cultural obsession with quick fixes."
"Americans are very much prone to this sort of thinking: Give me a pill or give me a magical bean that can make me lose weight! But complex problems need complex solutions," said Berezow, a microbiologist who debunks junk science in his job as a spokesman for the American Council on Science & Health.
American mistrust of expertise makes matters worse, he said. "When I tell people they need to get vaccinated, I'm called a shill for the pharmaceutical industry," he said. "If I say dietary supplements generally don't work, I'm a shill for doctors who want to keep people sick."
What can ordinary citizens do to protect themselves from fake medicine? "You have to have a healthy skepticism of everything," Berezow said. "When you come across something new, is someone trying to take advantage of you? It's a horrible way to think about the world, but there's some truth to it."
"Like any chronic disease, we will have to live with it while we do our best to fight it."
The government and experts have their own roles to play via regulation and education, respectively. For all the criticism it gets, the Food & Drug Administration does serve as a bulwark against fakery in prescription medicine. And while celebrities like Gwyneth "Goop" Paltrow hawk countless questionable medical products on the Internet, scientists and physicians are fighting back by using social media as a tool to promote the truth. There's a bid to "flood the information highway with truth to turn the storm of fake promotional stuff into a trickle," said Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein, a writer in residence at Yale School of Medicine and author of 2018's "Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything."
What's next? Like death, taxes and Cher, charlatans are likely to always be with us. Boyle quoted the late William Jarvis, a pioneering quack-buster in the late 20th century who believed health fraud would never be eradicated: "Like any chronic disease, we will have to live with it while we do our best to fight it."
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Randy Dotinga is former president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a non-profit association of freelance writers and non-fiction authors. He has been a freelance writer since 1999 and specializes in health/medicine, politics, books, and the odd and unusual. You can follow him at @rdotinga.