The Indian Medical Association will have a special committee to screen social media for misleading medical material that are now posted and shared within minutes among lakhs of people on Facebook and WhatsApp. Wherever necessary, the IMA will post counter-propaganda content to drive home the message of lack of efficacy and side-effects.
IMA State president A.V. Jayakrishnan told The Hindu on Monday that this issue was being discussed at the ongoing conference of the association in New Delhi, and the screening could well become a national-level exercise.
Social media is awash with unproven alternatives to surgical or other invasive treatment methods in modern medicine, whose efficacy has been proven, Dr. Jayakrishnan said.
“Social media is misused by proponents of unscientific medicines or methods of treatment. This is dangerous to public health,” the IMA president said. Even well-educated persons tend to believe in such material.
Dr. Jayakrishnan also pointed out that even practitioners of modern medicine resorted to promotion of pseudo science, and material relating to this is posted on social media.
“A medical journal is vaguely quoted from, to promote those forms of treatment that have not been put through established testing methods,” he says.
One such instance is the mid-brain activation claim that drew thousands of children.
Parents fell for claims that their children could benefit immensely out of mid-brain stimulation, and paid around Rs.20,000 for a four-week course. Rationalists and medical science experts debunked the claim of activating midbrain with a form of yoga.
“The claim was that children would develop some form of extrasensory perception, and that they could even read blindfolded. All these claims fell flat,” Dr. Jayakrishnan says.
