YouTube starts mass takedowns of videos promoting “harmful or ineffective” cancer cures
www.theverge.com
It’s attempting to streamline its health moderation policies.

YouTube starts mass takedowns of videos promoting ‘harmful or ineffective’ cancer cures | The platform will also take action against videos that discourage people from seeking professional medical …::YouTube will remove content about harmful or ineffective cancer treatments or which “discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment.”

  • dx1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    This always struck me as a lazy approach. Traditional methodologies for medicine may not be as rigorous as Western scientific ones, but they weren’t just universally so stupid that they couldn’t figure out something didn’t even work. At least not across the board. You want to vet them to the highest standard possible, but you can’t just assume they don’t work by default, a lot of that stuff hasn’t been studied at all.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      if it’s working, it’s working when you test it rigorously. one such big screening of traditional medicines happened in china somewhere in 70s: they collected 2k+ traditional malaria medicines, of which 350+ were tested on mice and found ONE new compound that had any activity and could be used safely in humans, so yes, there’s plenty that didn’t work

      getting new active compounds is hard. most of the time it’s easier to look up to nature, because some fungi or sponge had millions of years to get that one poison that wards off predators just right, and because of that it might be active in humans as well. whether is it useful clinically is another question. using things from traditional medicine is another filter on top of that, but far from perfect based on limited diagnosis available to ancients, limited to nonexistent disease mechanism understanding, limited plant availability, magical thinking, and more

      and yes, there’s plenty of things in traditional medicine market that are known not to work. realgar, shark fin, powdered rhino horn, nigella seeds, cow piss and many more do absolutely nothing at best. intricate magical systems behind their inclusion in medicine don’t add any value or validity

      • dx1@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, that does get into the question of how the other methodologies work. TCM does have that fairly dumb system where they thing of everything in terms of dualities and approach medicine accordingly, like, this plant is “hot” so it will help you if you have a “cool” disease. You can’t make the same generalization about the efficacy of that as you could about another methodology altogether.

        Also anti-malarials are a really specific thing. Practically nothing is going to be a specific antidote so you’re looking at really haphazard things like bolstering immune response. If you take a broader category like say, anti-inflammatories, you’ll find a lot more effective traditional remedies.