A Rational Look at the Exaggerated and Misleading Articles from Medical Self-Media

In the age of self-media, every individual can have their own platform to speak to the outside world; for example, this official account of mine is also one of the countless self-media outlets.

Because there is no gatekeeping by regulatory authorities, and because most self-media outlets lack self-discipline in pursuit of commercial interests, self-media articles are of uneven quality, hard to distinguish as true or false, and can easily mislead patients.

Under such circumstances, readers of self-media articles must learn to tell right from wrong.

Over ninety percent of my WeChat contacts are cancer patients and their families. People often see all sorts of explosive "news" in their Moments about cancer being conquered, then forward it to me, asking me to study it or help them judge whether it is true or false.

This kind of "good-news forwarding" has gone on for over ten years. To be honest, I have been harassed beyond endurance. Many highly inflated articles routinely rack up over 100,000 reads. The titles the authors choose are highly inflammatory, catering to the desperate hope for salvation that patients and their families feel.

Behind the sky-high click counts lies these self-media outlets' ambition to carve up the "big health industry" pie. They spare no effort to shock; the headlines are eye-catching, and the content is mostly exaggerated and inaccurate.

Some self-media outlets that obviously exist only for marketing care only about traffic. Whether the articles are truthful, whether they mislead patients and their families—none of that matters to them.

To be honest, I have grown extremely tired of and disgusted by such information. Some WeChat contacts repeatedly send me this kind of material and refuse to mend their ways no matter how often I warn them, so I have no choice but to block them, to avoid being disturbed further.

My time is precious, and I simply cannot stand this information harassment. If I did not block these contacts who love forwarding all sorts of messages, I would receive hundreds to over a thousand such messages every day.

Just reading through these messages would keep me fully occupied—where would I find the energy and time to study and work? If I wasted my time on such "kindness," it would be a gross dereliction of duty toward the patients who come to me for treatment.

To date, virtually all of the viral click-bait articles I have seen from these marketing accounts have been false.

For example, "Country X has invented an anti-cancer vaccine, so from now on treating cancer will be as simple as treating a cold," "Scientists in Country X have discovered that a single herb, dandelion, cures cancer with an effective rate of such-and-such percent," "A death-row inmate, before execution, revealed a secret anti-cancer recipe." Truly the situation looks glorious—but not a single one of these claims holds up to scrutiny.

There are also many charlatans who grandiloquently proclaim how easy their anti-cancer work is and how high their success rate is. For a period, I spent some effort specifically tracking down their so-called astonishing results, and the outcome was that I felt like putting every last one of them behind bars.

As a cancer patient or family member, anxiety to seek treatment is understandable. But one should be cautious about such articles. Many people fall into the authors' traps and end up losing both their money and their lives.

A doctor or medical writer who takes responsibility for what they say would not recklessly publish such articles. Authors who publish this kind of eye-catching piece always have ulterior motives.

Diseases like cancer have confounded medical scientists worldwide for hundreds of years. Every little bit of progress doctors make is hard-won. How could a breakthrough be achieved so easily?

Cancer is not a disease that can be conquered effortlessly. Neither the medical establishment in developed countries nor that in developing countries like ours has yet invented a treatment that can ultimately solve the cancer problem.

Many new treatment protocols have extremely low clinical effective rates and lack supporting clinical data. Most irresponsible reports also come from second-, third-, or even fourth-rate media outlets.

If there were truly a breakthrough medical discovery that could benefit all mankind, the major authoritative medical media would certainly report it. If you trace a so-called hot "medical discovery" back to its source and find that it is only being reported by media whose names you have barely ever heard of, then that sensational "discovery" is almost certainly fake.

Readers can themselves look up the SCI index of the media that first published such major news on Baidu. Reports from media with low SCI indices must be viewed with the highest vigilance.

I would like to remind my readers: before forwarding this kind of information to me in the future, first search Baidu yourself, check the source of the article, and look into the background of the outlet that first published it.

If it is hearsay rather than a report from authoritative journals such as Nature, Science, The Lancet, or Cell, please do not forward these things to disturb me.

Disturb me too many times and I will not hesitate to block you. Do not assume I have as much spare time to waste as you do.

I also hope that all my readers will sharpen their eyes, learn to distinguish the truth from falsehood in such information, and avoid being led by the nose by various marketing accounts.