Top 5 Worst Internet Health Information Sites: Introduction

The Internet has made the searching for and sharing of health information much easier than in the old days when this generally meant hours in a medical library.  Along with this ease of information access has come the problem of health misinformation becoming rampant on the Internet.

Some of this misinformation simply comes from sales sites trying to hype up their products or bash their competitors for their own agenda.  Other misinformation can come from simple misconceptions of how the body works or repetition of misinformation.

The later reminds me of the commercial where they say they cannot put it on the Internet if it is not true.  Unfortunately, there are people who actually do seem to think this is true.  For example,  I have been in so many debates with people who think that the big squishy blobs they pass from the so-called “liver flushes” are actually real gallstones just because they read on the internet that they are.  This despite the fact that those big, squishy blobs do not have the shape, texture, color, density or much of anything else in common with real gallstones.

Part of the problem is that it is human nature to be attracted to negativity.   If there is a bad accident people do their best to get a glimpse.  If someone is going to jump off a building people gather around and some may even encourage the jumper.  And people do not watch NASCAR races to see the cars go round and round, they want to see the carnage of wrecks.  When it comes to health information there is not much of a difference.  People tend to believe anything negative they see or read, which has led to so many myths about health and health products being spread on the Internet.  For example, how many people fell for the canola oil myths such as its mustard oil being used to make the chemical warfare agent mustard gas?  Mustard gas is a completely synthetic chemical that has nothing to do with canola or any other plant.  Then there is all the misinformation about soy, which I have addressed numerous times previously such as these posts:

http://medcapsules.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=106

Another part of the problem is that people often do not want to take the time or to put in the effort in to verifying claims.  They want information spoon fed to them.

Once an idea is learned it is hard for people to give up that idea because they are used to an comfortable with that idea.  Furthermore, if they fell for obviously ridiculous claims they may feel ashamed because they fell for the sham.  Take for example someone who repeatedly picked through their feces to collect those big, squishy blobs they were told were gallstones.  Even though they have no characteristics of real gallstones, they are too large to pass through the bile ducts, they are often reported in amounts larger than the gallbladder can hold, they melt unlike real gallstones, etc. people still fall for this scam.   When all this evidence is presented to them proving that those blobs are not real gallstones, but rather saponified oil, they often continue to argue that they are real gallstones because they do not want to admit they were duped.  As evidence to this see my videos on the “liver flush” scam and the replies to the videos.   The playlist for all 11 videos can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNqWHZj4fMo&feature=PlayList&index=0&list=PL55328493D7C85E66

I have spent decades writing about health information and trying to correct rampant health misinformation in both allopathic and holistic medicine.  When the Internet came about I started posting on various health boards posting evidence against many claims. Unfortunately, this has also led to my being banned from numerous boards.  For example, I was banned from the American Leukemia and Lymphoma Society message boards after posting medical journal abstracts proving the viral links to leukemias and lymphomas.  After all,  if they admit the cause of these cancers then next comes the proof of cures since there are various ways to destroy these cancer viruses.  And since there are already cures for these cancers this means there is no reason for their existence since their goal is to con people out of their money to fund their executive salaries and expenses.  I was also banned from another health message board after proving how inaccurate HIV testing was including the fact that hepatitis can cause false positive HIV tests.  I later found out the board was actually run by a pharmaceutical company.

Allopathic sites are not the only sources of such censorship though.  I was banned from numerous boards on Curezone.org  for providing evidence against many of the claims being made on the site.  Eventually I was completely banned for posting evidence that the amounts of iodine that were being recommended on the iodine support forum were causing iodine poisoning that the sellers were falsely blaming on a “bromine detox”.

Bottom line is that if you are going to get your health advice from the internet you should research the claims from various non-commercial sites to find out if the information is factual or hype.

The next  series of blog posts are going to cover details from some of the Internet sites I have dealt with or studied explaining why I would not recommend them as sources of health information.