Medical Misinformation and Social Harm in Non-Science Based Health Practices

Fraudulent, harmful, or at best useless pharmaceutical and therapeutic approaches developed outside science-based medicine have boomed in recent years, especially due to the commercialisation of cyberspace. The latter has played a fundamental role in the rise of false 'health experts', and in the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers that have contributed to the formation of highly polarised debates on non-science-based health practices-online as well as offline. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this edited book brings together contributions of international academics and practitioners from criminology, digital sociology, health psychology, medicine, law, physics, and journalism, where they critically analyse different types of non-science-based health approaches. With this volume, we aim to reconcile different scientific understandings of these practices, synthesising a variety of empirical, theoretical and interpretative approaches, and exploring the challenges, implications and potential remedies to the spread of dangerous and misleading health information. This edited book will offer some food for thought not only to students and academics in the social sciences, health psychology and medicine among other disciplines, but also to medical practitioners, science journalists, debunkers, policy makers and the general public, as they might all benefit from a greater awareness and critical knowledge of the harms caused by non-scientific health practices.

Anita Lavorgna, PhD, is Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Southampton. She is currently leading research projects on internet-facilitated wildlife trafficking and harmful alternative health practices. Anita's research pivots around cybercrimes (especially trafficking activities online), serious and organised crime, and the propagation of misleading and fraudulent health information. Anna Di Ronco, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Sociology Department of the University of Essex. Her research interests lie in the regulation, representation, and enforcement of incivilities regulations, and individuals' resistance to social control in the physical and digital space. Her more recent projects look into the local collaborative governance of prostitution in European cities and into the role of social media in supporting (otherwise criminalised or silenced) environmental activism.

1. Introduction Anita Lavorgna and Anna Di Ronco; 2. Towards a better criminological understanding of harmful alternative health practices: a provider typology Anita Lavorgna and Heather Horsburgh; 3. Science denial: psychological processes underlying denial of science-based medical practices Sara Prot and Craig A Anderson; 4. Understanding the demand for illicit lifestyle medicines online: an analysis of the risk perception of consumers Rosa Koenraadt; 5. 'First do no harm': exploring non-evidence-based practices within the Ukrainian health sector Anna Markovska, Ganna Isayeva, and Sergyi Ostropolets; 6: 'Don't trust the experts!': Analysing the use of populist rhetoric in the anti-vaxxers discourse in Italy Ester Massa; 7: Quantum physics and the modern trends in pseudoscience Enrico Gazzola; 8: Who are the experts? Examining the online promotion of misleading and harmful nutrition information Heather Horsburgh and David Barron; 9: Activism against medicine on social media: untangling the #novax protest in Italy on Twitter Anna Di Ronco and James Allen-Robertson; 10: Traditional herbal medicine and the challenges of pharmacovigilance Nayeli Urquiza Haas and Emilie Cloatre; 11: Framing of CAM-adjacent health scams in the UK media: an interdisciplinary perspective Anita Lavorgna and Felicity L Bishop; 12: Dossier Hamer: the role of investigative journalism in exposing pseudomedicine Ilario D'Amato; 13: Concluding thoughts Anita Lavorgna and Anna Di Ronco