WASHINGTON, November 5, 1997 – According to the United States government’s Federal Trade Commission, there are over 400 websites, not counting Usenet newsgroups, which promote products and services claiming to heal, help cure or prevent AIDS, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease and multiple sclerosis.
These sites were discovered during a two-day investigation carried out by the Commission, with the assistance of official health organizations and several consumer protection groups in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
It is common knowledge that people desperate to see themselves ill and to see medicine powerless in the face of their illness become extremely vulnerable to promises or mirages. The hope of a cure can then lead them to spend very large sums of money on unnecessary treatments or whose effectiveness has never been demonstrated.
On the one hand, it is obvious that the circulation of information via the Internet risks bringing the problem of “charlatanism” to unprecedented heights, on the other hand, the existence of numerous self-help groups, with access to information not controlled by institutional medical authorities, allows the population to have a hitherto unknown choice between different approaches. In fact, the safeguard to the problem of quackery exists in these self-help groups where patients can discuss among themselves, beyond the reach of any therapist whatsoever, the merit and, possibly, the conditions of the trial. therapies not recognized by medical authorities.
PasseportSanté.net, according to Associated Press
