Medical Misinformation And Social Harm In Non Science Based Health Practices

Fraudulent, harmful, or at best useless pharmaceutical and therapeutic approaches developed outside science-based medicine have boomed in recent years, especially due to the commercialisation of cyberspace. The latter has played a fundamental role in the rise of false ‘health experts’, and in the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers that have contributed to the formation of highly polarised debates on non-science-based health practices—online as well as offline. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this edited book brings together contributions of international academics and practitioners from criminology, digital sociology, health psychology, medicine, law, physics, and journalism, where they critically analyse different types of non-science-based health approaches. With this volume, we aim to reconcile different scientific understandings of these practices, synthesising a variety of empirical, theoretical and interpretative approaches, and exploring the challenges, implications and potential remedies to the spread of dangerous and misleading health information. This edited book will offer some food for thought not only to students and academics in the social sciences, health psychology and medicine among other disciplines, but also to medical practitioners, science journalists, debunkers, policy makers and the general public, as they might all benefit from a greater awareness and critical knowledge of the harms caused by non-scientific health practices.

By relying on a virtual ethnography approach carried out on Italian-speaking alternative lifestyle and counter-information online communities, this book shows how the nature of personal interactions online and the construction of both personal and group identities, are central to the creation and propagation of medical misinformation.

Danger of health misinformation online, long a concern of medical and public health professionals, has come to the forefront of societal concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of their motives, creators and sharers of misinformation promote non-evidence-based health advice and treatment recommendations, and often deny health methods, measures, and approaches that are supported by the best evidence of the time. Unfortunately, many infrastructural, social, and cognitive factors make individuals vulnerable to misinformation. This book aims to assist information and health professionals and educators with all phases of information provision and support, from understanding users’ information needs, to building relationships, to helping users verify and evaluate sources. The book can be used as a textbook in library and information science programs, as well as nursing, communication, journalism, psychology, and informatics programs. The book, written from the e-health literacy perspective, is unique in its nuanced approach to misinformation. It draws on psychology and information science to explain human susceptibility to misinformation and discusses ways to engage with the public deeply and meaningfully, fostering trust and raising health and information literacy. It is organized into three parts. Part I: The Ecology of Online Health Information' overviews the digital health information universe, showing that misinformation is prevalent, dangerous, and difficult to define. Part II: Susceptibility to Misinformation: Literacies as Safeguards addresses factors and competencies that affect individual vulnerability and resilience. Part III: Solutions focuses on education and community engagement initiatives that help the public locate and evaluate health information. Chapters within the three Parts discuss technological innovation and social media as posing novel risks as well as presenting novel solutions to helping the public connect with high quality information and building trusting relationships among the public and information and health professionals.

By relying on a virtual ethnography approach carried out on Italian-speaking alternative lifestyle and counter-information online communities, this book shows how the nature of personal interactions online and the construction of both personal and group identities, are central to the creation and propagation of medical misinformation.

This handbook explores the concept of 'harm' in criminological scholarship and lays the foundation for a future zemiological agenda. 'Social harm' as a theoretical construct has become established as an alternative, broader lens through which to understand the causation and alleviation of widespread harm in society, thus moving beyond criminology and state definitions of crime and extending the range of criminological research. Applying zemiological concepts, this book comprehensively explores topics including violence, moral indifference, workplace injury, corporate and state harms, animal rights, migration, gender, poverty, security and victimisation. This definitive work covers theory, research, scholarship and future visions across four sections, and includes contributions from areas such as criminology, sociology, socio-legal and cultural studies, social policy and international relations. It offers readers up-to-date, original theoretical perspectives and an analysis of a broad range of issues from a 'social harm' perspective.

​Blockchain technology (BT) is quietly transforming the world, from financial infrastructure, to the internet-of-things, to healthcare applications. With increasing penetration of BT into various areas of our daily lives, the need arises for better awareness and greater knowledge about the capabilities, benefits, risks, and alternatives to distributed ledger applications. It is hoped that current book will be one of the pioneering collections focusing on blockchain implementations in the area of healthcare, with specific aim to present content in an easy-to-understand and readily accessible way for typical end-users of blockchain-based applications. There are important areas within the fabric of modern healthcare that stand to benefit from implementations of BT. These areas include electronic medical records, quality control, patient safety, finance, device tracking, biostamping/biocertification, redundant storage of critical data, health and liability insurance, medication utilization tracking (including opioid and antibiotic misuse), financial transactions, academics/education, asset tokenization, public health and pandemics, healthcare provider credentialing, and many other potential applications. The ultimate goal of the proposed book would be to provide an integrative, easy-to-understand, and comprehensive picture of the current state of blockchain use in healthcare while actively engaging the reader in a forward-looking, exploratory approach toward future developments in this space. To accomplish this goal, an expert panel of contributors has been assembled, featuring scholars from top global universities and think-tanks.

This book brings together a range of theoretical perspectives to consider fundamental questions of health law and the place of the body within it. Health, and more recently health law, has long been animated by discussions of particular bodies - whether they are disordered, diseased, or disabled - but each of these classificatory regimes claim some knowledge about the body. This edited collection aims to uncover and challenge the fundamental assumptions that underpin medico-legal knowledge claims about such bodies. This exploration is achieved through a mix of perspectives, but many contributors look towards embodiment as a perspective that understands bodies to be shaped by their institutional contexts. Much of this work alerts us to the idea that medical practitioners not only respond to healthcare issues, but also create them through their own understandings of ‘normality’ and ‘fixing’. Bodies, as a result, cannot be understood outside of, or as separate to, their medical and legal contexts. This compelling book pushes the possibility of new directions in health care and health justice. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The media landscape has changed, and children and adolescents now face a tsunami of entertainment and information. How they sort through this may have significant effects on their education and their health. We’ve called on some of the world’s media experts to discuss what the crucial issues are and what teachers, administrators, schools, parents, and health professionals can do about them – hence, the title – Masters of Media.