Medical Misinformation and Social Harm in Non-Science Based Health Practices : A Multidisciplinary Perspective

Fraudulent, harmful, or at best useless pharmaceutical and therapeutic approachesdeveloped outside science-based medicine have boomed in recent years, especially due tothe commercialisation of cyberspace.

The latter has played a fundamental role in the riseof false ‘health experts’, and in the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers that havecontributed to the formation of highly polarised debates on non-science-based healthpractices—online as well as offline. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this edited book brings togethercontributions of international academics and practitioners from criminology, digitalsociology, health psychology, medicine, law, physics, and journalism, where they criticallyanalyse different types of non-science-based health approaches.

With this volume, we aimto reconcile different scientific understandings of these practices, synthesising a varietyof empirical, theoretical and interpretative approaches, and exploring the challenges,implications and potential remedies to the spread of dangerous and misleading healthinformation. This edited book will offer some food for thought not only to students and academicsin the social sciences, health psychology and medicine among other disciplines, but alsoto medical practitioners, science journalists, debunkers, policy makers and the generalpublic, as they might all benefit from a greater awareness and critical knowledge of theharms caused by non-scientific health practices.