Frequent misinformation about medicines

You should not be fooled and think that everything that comes from nature is harmless

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Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

On the Internet, and especially on social networks, advice about health and beauty is common content. In the media, these tips are sometimes correct, and sometimes only seemingly harmless. Very often such advice is based on the promotion of plant-based medicines or talks about studies that have been done on small samples or on cell cultures, which is not exactly the highest level of evidence. On the other hand, this is not the only misinformation about drugs: there is reporting that leads to the conclusion that a drug is more effective than it is, or studies from the preclinical stages are presented as the final result. And there are experts who interpret the results wrongly and hastily.

Caution when reporting study results that claim something is an effective drug: in vitro is not the same as in vivo.

And while some plants and plant extracts exist in official pharmacopoeias for specific uses, you should not be fooled into thinking that everything that comes from nature is harmless. Some preparations can have unwanted interactions with other medicines and indirectly harm them.

Turmeric does not cure cancer

An example of this is turmeric, which is advertised as a kind of panacea (medicine for everything), especially as a cure for cancer. However, in women suffering from breast cancer, turmeric, according to some research, can weaken the effect of chemotherapy. Patients who combined curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, or turmeric extract, with the cancer therapy Tamoxifen had less absorption of the drug into the blood, meaning less of the drug was able to work on the cancer cells. It is thought that curcumin should be avoided while a person is receiving chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Also, curcumin reduces the number of platelets and should not be taken with therapies that otherwise reduce the number of platelets or in people who have a lower parameter of the number of these blood elements.

Cancer drugs and alternative cancer drugs are a frequent "target" of reporting, as well as advertisements and covert advertising. Such texts often do not take into account the strength of the evidence for a substance in the treatment of cancer, or state that cancer cures are substances, usually plants or mushrooms, for which there is no evidence that they are effective in the treatment of cancer. Tumors are a very broad spectrum of diseases and have different etiologies, and even tumors of the same tissue or organ cannot be approached uniformly in medicine. However, in the media and especially in social networks, there is a tendency for narratives that claim that something is a medicine, but that there is a conspiracy to hide this substance from ordinary people.

Be careful with preliminary results

In mid-2020, the popular news in a number of media outlets was that bee venom was a cure for breast cancer. It is true that Australian scientists from the University of Western Australia in Perth have come to the conclusion that bee venom kills breast cancer cells in laboratory conditions of cell cultures in vitro, but this is a low level of evidence, because if something is effective on cell cultures it may not be effective and on living people - this requires the results of clinical studies and double-blind randomized studies, which represent a high level of evidence. The danger of such reporting lies in the fact that someone, on the basis of preliminary and insufficiently strong evidence, can self-initiatively expose themselves to "therapy" that takes place in uncontrolled conditions and can be life-threatening.

This does not mean that the media should completely avoid reporting on such scientific works. It should be emphasized that these are preliminary results and that more research is needed to determine whether the substance can serve as a therapy.

Dangerous promotions on Facebook

Far more dangerous are the claims that appear not so infrequently on various Facebook pages, usually promoting alternative medicine. Let's say that some substance, plant, extract - cures cancer. It should also be noted that word of mouth spread that some preparation or plant cures cancer, "from mouth to mouth". The problem with such claims, regardless of where they come from, is that it is too often believed that if something is from nature, it must be healthy and have no side effects or harmful aspects, which is absolutely false. Because of wrong beliefs, people turn to these preparations and situations occur where they refuse timely therapy based on evidence and clinical studies. This is how patients "procrastinate" and then come to seek professional help when it is already too late.

One of the examples of dangerous preparations of alternative medicine that is used as a "cure" for cancer is cansema ("black salve"), the composition of which, in addition to ginger, zinc oxide and graviola, includes the very dangerous Sanguinaria canadensis. People who tried to treat skin cancer with this preparation were left without noses, skin on their faces, with lesions that were equal to third degree burns. Natural does not automatically mean harmless.

This logical error is called "appeal to nature". The fact that something is natural, from nature, does not necessarily mean that it is effective or that it is harmless.

Experts who make hasty statements

In an age when people do not trust doctors and health systems, often because they have experienced unkindness or corruption, they turn to alternative and traditional medicine as a lifeline. And quacks use this very feeling of helplessness of sick people and their families, as well as evident problems in health care systems, in order to make a profit. Too often we see posts that say how baking soda cures cancer, how to alkalize, or suggest taking completely harmless silver preparations.

Another target is Covid-19, and announcements that something is a "cure for Covid-19" or prevents infection are almost daily. There are many examples, and some of them are posts claiming that sweet wormwood (Beyturan, Artemisia annua) is a cure for Covid and that it is "scientifically proven". Such unusual and optimistic claims certainly require strong evidence. And what does the evidence say?

"American scientists from Columbia University in New York and Washington have proven that the extract of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) blocks the reproduction of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, the cause of the disease Covid-19", is an excerpt from articles and announcements about sweet wormwood as a "medicine". for Covid. As evidence, they offer a study in which the authors themselves say that more in vivo research is needed to determine the effectiveness of this plant as a therapy for Covid.

In this case, it is not only a small research on cell cultures, but also an unreviewed so-called preprint study that should be reviewed by experts in the same field and assessed for its credibility. Unfortunately, it also happens that doctors and experts carelessly claim that something could be a cure, without a detailed review of the evidence, concluding only on the basis of analogies and wrong premises, such as:

  1. artemisinin from sweet wormwood is a cure for malaria (true)
  2. other malaria drugs like chloroquine are covid drugs (false)
  3. conclusion: sweet wormwood must be a cure for covid (false).

What is worrisome in the media reporting in the whole matter is that in this example, which is not isolated, journalists really take statements from experts, but the experts' statements are based on bad assessments, on insufficient knowledge of the level of evidence and are rushed. We cannot expect journalists, especially those who are not specialized in scientific and medical journalism, to scrutinize the evidence themselves and check how strong or weak it is. The journalist trusts the expert, but it is an obvious problem of society that often even people who are formally educated to make such statements do not follow the scientific evidence.

Such situations are not and cannot be solely the responsibility of the media, but they testify to how much society has degenerated into inflexibility and lack of scientific literacy.

(Quantum of Science)

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