Explaining Health Misinformation Belief through News, Social, and Alternative Health Media Use: The Moderating Roles of Need for Cognition and Faith in Intuition.

Explaining the spread and impact of health misinformation has garnered considerable attention with the uptake of social media and group messaging applications. This study contributes to that line of work by investigating how reliance on multiple digital media may help support or suppress misinformation belief, and how individual differences in misinformation susceptibility condition this process. Alternative health outlets (AH media), advocating home/homeopathic remedies over conventional medicine can be important sources of misinformation, yet are largely ignored previously. In this study, we first test how reliance on different platforms predicts health misinformation belief. Drawing from the elaboration likelihood model, we further investigate how need for cognition (NFC) and faith in intuition (FI) moderate the relationship between news reliance and susceptibility to misinformation. We conducted a survey in Singapore, Turkey, and the U.S (N = 3,664) to measure how these proposed relationships explain misinformed beliefs about vaccines, genetically modified foods and alternative medicine. We found reliance on online legacy news was negatively associated with the likelihood of believing health misinformation, while the reverse was true for social media and AH media. Additionally, those with both greater NFC and FI were more susceptible to health misinformation when they relied on social media and AH media more. In contrast, neither NFC nor FI moderated the relationship between reliance on online legacy news and health misinformation belief. These findings, mostly consistent across countries, also show that extensive reliance on social media and AH media for news mostly overwhelms the individual differences in predicting misinformation belief.

Social media, vaccine hesitancy and trust deficit in immunization programs: a qualitative enquiry in Malappuram District of Kerala, India.

BACKGROUND: With increased penetration of the internet and social media, there are concerns regarding its negative role in influencing parents' decisions regarding vaccination for their children. It is perceived that a mix of religious reasons and propaganda by anti-vaccination groups on social media are lowering the vaccination coverage in Malappuram district of Kerala. We undertook a qualitative study to understand the factors responsible for generating and perpetuating vaccine hesitancy, the pathways of trust deficit in immunization programs and the interaction between various social media actors. METHODS: In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted among parents/caregivers, physicians, public sector health staff, alternative system medical practitioners, field healthcare workers and teachers in areas with highest and lowest vaccination coverage in the district, as well as with communication experts. RESULTS: The trust deficit between parents/caregivers and healthcare providers is created by multiple factors, such as providers' lack of technical knowledge, existing patriarchal societal norms and critical views of vaccine by naturopaths and homeopaths. Anti-vaccine groups use social media to influence caregivers' perceptions and beliefs. Religion does not appear to play a major role in creating vaccine resistance in this setting. CONCLUSIONS: A long-term, multipronged strategy should be adopted to address the trust deficit. In the short to medium term, the health sector can focus on appropriate and targeted vaccine-related communication strategies, including the use of infographics, soft skills training for healthcare workers, technical competency improvement through a mobile application-based repository of information and creation of a media cell to monitor vaccine-related conversations in social media and to intervene if needed.

Natural language processing of Reddit data to evaluate dermatology patient experiences and therapeutics.

BACKGROUND: There is a lack of research studying patient-generated data on Reddit, one of the world's most popular forums with active users interested in dermatology. Techniques within natural language processing, a field of artificial intelligence, can analyze large amounts of text information and extract insights. OBJECTIVE: To apply natural language processing to Reddit comments about dermatology topics to assess for feasibility and potential for insights and engagement. METHODS: A software pipeline preprocessed Reddit comments from 2005 to 2017 from 7 popular dermatology-related subforums on Reddit, applied latent Dirichlet allocation, and used spectral clustering to establish cohesive themes and the frequency of word representation and grouped terms within these topics. RESULTS: We created a corpus of 176,000 comments and identified trends in patient engagement in spaces such as eczema and acne, among others, with a focus on homeopathic treatments and isotretinoin. LIMITATIONS: Latent Dirichlet allocation is an unsupervised model, meaning there is no ground truth to which the model output can be compared. However, because these forums are anonymous, there seems little incentive for patients to be dishonest. CONCLUSIONS: Reddit data has viability and utility for dermatologic research and engagement with the public, especially for common dermatology topics such as tanning, acne, and psoriasis.

How feedback biases give ineffective medical treatments a good reputation.

BACKGROUND: Medical treatments with no direct effect (like homeopathy) or that cause harm (like bloodletting) are common across cultures and throughout history. How do such treatments spread and persist? Most medical treatments result in a range of outcomes: some people improve while others deteriorate. If the people who improve are more inclined to tell others about their experiences than the people who deteriorate, ineffective or even harmful treatments can maintain a good reputation. OBJECTIVE: The intent of this study was to test the hypothesis that positive outcomes are overrepresented in online medical product reviews, to examine if this reputational distortion is large enough to bias people's decisions, and to explore the implications of this bias for the cultural evolution of medical treatments. METHODS: We compared outcomes of weight loss treatments and fertility treatments in clinical trials to outcomes reported in 1901 reviews on Amazon. Then, in a series of experiments, we evaluated people's choice of weight loss diet after reading different reviews. Finally, a mathematical model was used to examine if this bias could result in less effective treatments having a better reputation than more effective treatments. RESULTS: Data are consistent with the hypothesis that people with better outcomes are more inclined to write reviews. After 6 months on the diet, 93% (64/69) of online reviewers reported a weight loss of 10 kg or more while just 27% (19/71) of clinical trial participants experienced this level of weight change. A similar positive distortion was found in fertility treatment reviews. In a series of experiments, we show that people are more inclined to begin a diet with many positive reviews, than a diet with reviews that are representative of the diet's true effect. A mathematical model of medical cultural evolution shows that the size of the positive distortion critically depends on the shape of the outcome distribution. CONCLUSIONS: Online reviews overestimate the benefits of medical treatments, probably because people with negative outcomes are less inclined to tell others about their experiences. This bias can enable ineffective medical treatments to maintain a good reputation.

Collective self-experimentation in patient-led research: How online health communities foster innovation.

Researchers across academia, government, and private industry increasingly value patient-led research for its ability to produce quick results from large samples of the population. This study examines the role played by self-experimentation in the production of health data collected in these projects. We ask: How does the collaborative context of online health communities, with their ability to facilitate far-reaching collaborations over time and space, transform the practice and epistemological foundations of engaging in n = 1 experimentation? We draw from a digital ethnography of an online patient-led research movement, in which participants engage in self-experiments to develop a protocol for using psilocybe-containing mushrooms as a treatment for cluster headache, an excruciating neurological disease for which there is little medical research and huge unmet treatment need. We find that the collectivizing features of the internet have collectivized self-experimentation. Group dynamics shape everything in "collective self-experimentation," from individual choices of intervention, reporting of outcomes, data analysis, determinations of efficacy, to embodiment. This study raises important questions about the role that individuals play in the creation of medical knowledge and the data that informs crowdsourced research.

Mind navigators of chemicals' experimenters? A web-based description of e-psychonauts.

Within online drug fora communities, there are some "educated and informed" users who can somehow provide reliable information on psychoactive compounds and combinations. These users, also called "e-psychonauts," may possess levels of technical knowledge relating to a range of novel psychoactive substances (NPS). The present project aimed at identifying and describing the e-psychonauts' socio-demographic characteristics and their motivations and patterns of drug intake. A netnographic research methodology, carried out through an unobtrusive observational approach of a list of cyber drug communities (blogs, fora, Facebook, and Twitter pages) was carried out. The fora posts and threads were accurately reviewed, analyzed, and compared using the empirical phenomenological psychological (EPP) method. Data were collected between January and February 2014. Psychonauts typically considered themselves as "psychedelic researchers," "new Shamans," "philosophers," or "alchemists." They appeared to be mainly young, males, unmarried, and Caucasians. They presented with good or excellent employment conditions and with a set of key skills, including attention to their inner "soul"; high standards of knowledge about drugs' chemical and pharmacological issues; and high levels of both IT skills and verbal fluency in reporting their own "on drug" experiences. The e-psychonauts seemed to "test" and at times synthesize a range of drugs to achieve the state of consciousness they find most pleasurable. There is the need to improve both the existing levels of professionals' knowledge on this novel generation of drug misusers and to design and develop novel prevention approaches that are able to attract the attention of the e-psychonauts.

Manifesto em defesa da especialidade médica homeopatia Associação Paulista de Medicina: APM regional Amparo - SP / Manifesto in defense of the medical specialty homeopathy Associação Paulista de Medicina: APM regional Amparo - SP

A Homeopatia é uma especialidade médica, odontológica, veterinária e farmacêutica, regulamentada pelos seus respectivos conselhos de classe. A homeopatia tem um comitê específico no Consórcio Acadêmico Brasileiro de Saúde Integrativa - CABSIN, que até atende ao ministério da saúde para promover politicas públicas baseadas em evidencias, que resultou no mapa de evidências que foi liderado pela Dra. Leoni Bonamin. O CABSIN faz parte de uma rede internacional de pesquisadores que é a International Society for Traditional, complementar e Integrative Medicine Research, faz parte também da Rede Medicina Tradicional e Complementar da América, em que estão juntos 17 países na pesquisa na área de saúde Integrativa, ligada também à BIREME, que está ligada à Organização Pan-Americana de Saúde - OPAS, e a Rede PICs Brasil. Acima destas organizações oficiais que unem os pesquisadores em saúde Integrativa, se situa a Organização Mundial da Saúde - OMS, que lançou a estratégia para incentivo a nível mundial das Medicinas Tradicionais, Complementares e Integrativas ­ MTCis no ano de 2014, que é uma coalizão entre os países membros para incentivar e promover a pesquisa e expansão na área de saúde integrativa em todo o mundo. Desta maneira, a OMS propõe que a política publica nacional entre os países membros fortaleça e incentive a implementação das MTCIs entre os países membros, de forma ética e baseada em evidências, e o Brasil é um destes 98 países que possuem regulamentada uma política nacional de práticas interativas e complementares. Especificamente no âmbito do SUS do Governo Federal, a Política Nacional de Práticas Integrativas e Complementares ­ PNPIC`s, foi ofialmente regulamentada no ano de 2006, e a homeopatia faz parte deste programa deste o início, expandindo e consolidando em nível nacional a presença das PICs no Brasil. Além disso, a Organização Mundial da Saúde e o Governo da Índia assinaram no ano de 2022 um acordo para estabelecer o Centro Global de Medicina Tradicional da OMS. Este centro de conhecimento global para medicina tradicional, apoiado por um investimento de US$ 250 milhões do Governo da Índia, tem como objetivo aproveitar o potencial da medicina tradicional, complementar e integrativa de todo o mundo por meio da ciência e tecnologia modernas para melhorar a saúde das pessoas e do planeta. O Centro Global de Medicina Tradicional da OMS se concentrará na construção de uma base sólida de evidências para políticas e padrões sobre práticas e produtos de medicina tradicional e ajudará os países a integrá-los conforme apropriado em seus sistemas de saúde e regular sua qualidade e segurança para um impacto ideal e sustentável. Este novo centro de pesquisa se concentra em quatro áreas estratégicas principais: evidência e aprendizado; dados e análises; sustentabilidade e equidade; e inovação e tecnologia para otimizar a contribuição da medicina tradicional para a saúde global e o desenvolvimento sustentável.