17/02/2024
DEBUNKING HEALTH MYTHS AND CLEARING UP MISINFORMATION
An Introduction
“An apple a day will keep the doctor away.” Most of us have heard this popular health tidbit at least once in our lives. But, is this advice too good to be true?
And here in Kano, the concept that eating/swallowing seeds while eating guava gives a person appendicitis is also quite popular.
Back in 2014, during the outbreak of Ebola Virus in Nigeria, we find that the period was rife with misinformation and disinformation around health and treatment.
Claims such as bathing in warm, salt water was an effective treatment and kola nuts has been found to halt the virus, were spread all over the country.
These stories became the most piece of misinformation around Ebola. It was trending on pretty much all media platforms.
Such misinformations were even tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are a lot of health misinformation and medical myths out there. You hear them all the time. Before you know it, they’re accepted as law.
For example, during the seventeenth century Black Death, there was a strangely bizarre cure called the Vicary Method. It involved plucking feathers from a chicken’s rump and then tying the chicken to the patient, so that the chicken’s now bare backside was touching the person’s swollen lymph nodes. Funny, eh?
Well the notion behind this interesting weird cure was that people believed that chickens breathed through their bottoms, so therefore the chicken would draw the infection out of the person.
Yeah! Health Misinformation is far from new, as early knowledge about human disease focused on superstitions, myths and religion.
Medical myths often become part of our culture as they get passed from one generation to the next.
With the abundance of health information today, it can be hard to tell what is true or not. Health misinformation has led people to decline vaccines, reject public health measures and use unproven treatments.
It may not be fully understood why people share or create harmful information. Their intentions can be mixed, unclear and even change over time.
In our future posts, we hope to debunk those medical myths out there, clear up health misinformations and disinformations, and provide you with facts, under the heading “Debunking Health Myths and Clearing Up Misinformation”, which will come as a series of short, straight forward, informative, insightful and totally not boring write ups.
Together, we have the power to build a healthier information environment. Limiting the prevalence and impact of misinformation benefits individual and public health.
Until next post, stay healthy.
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