Doctors Should Also Be Fighting “ Fake News ”

BY BENJAMIN MAZER, MD I see them every time I wait in the inescapably long lines at grocery store. They’re offering me so much. Fat-melting foods that “work like gastric bypass.” Sleep masks that prevent breast cancer. One day diets. And, of course, the perennial “medical miracles.” All these revelations can be mine with a simple magazine purchase. It’s easy to dismiss the medical advice being propagated through the supermarket checkout aisle. Who would take health advice from a magazine sitting next to a box of Snickers and the National Enquirer? This visceral elitism, however, is causing doctors and scientists to miss out on a powerful avenue for improving people’s health. Mainstream health advice was “fake news” before it had a name. It has remained rampant and popular because doctors have refused to engage with the popular press, except for their own profit. When we reject bringing our ideas to the most unpretentious of media outlets, then only mercenaries like Drs. Mehmet Oz and Andrew Weil adorn the covers of these rags. We cannot always stop quackery from being disseminated, but we can drown it out with accurate and nuanced information. So here’s a challenge for my scientific and medical colleagues: publish your next article in Woman’s World. Or maybe in Family Circle, Real Simple, or Glamour. These magazines, and others like them, have circulations of over 1 million readers. If we insist on publishing medical knowledge only in obscure journals ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Andrew Weil Benjamin Mazer Fake News Mehmet Oz Quackery Source Type: blogs