When Natural Medicine created their ‘introduce yourself’ post on Steemit, it was largely met with enthusiasm.

Except for one guy.

Whilst enthused about the free expression allowed by the decentralised nature of the Steem platform, he felt concerned. Would people immediately think that natural medicine was benign and harmless, when the opposite could be true?

Would enthusiasm about natural remedies give people suffering serious long term conditions false hope?

We must be careful, he argued, lest the blockchain becomes ‘another fringe of the internet full of dangerous misinformation’. He urged those who wrote under #naturalmedicine not to give people ‘false hope’.

Reminding us that life before modern medicine was ‘brutish and short’, he argued that natural remedies were a ‘luxury of the west’ and whilst the mainstream health care system was far from perfect, ‘the combined knowledge of hundreds of thousands of trained professionals over a few hundred years’ gave it validity.

The implication was that natural medicine lacked such validity, and was dangerous.

My first response was defensiveness – in fact, I sat on this for a while before responding. My co-founder Wren voiced our concerns very well – this thinking was ‘monopolistic’ and to claim that modern medicine was ‘better’ because of it’s ‘rigorous testing’ was arrogant and belied the fact that natural remedies had actually helped people survive for thousands of years. Modern medicine may have developed cures for smallpox and polio, but other healing modalities were just as valid – yoga, naturopathy, Ayurveda, TCM – these all have a valid place alongside modern medicine to help us thrive and be whole. Indeed, I agreed with Wren’s argument that they are just as efficacious, particularly as they too are often very much, as she said, ‘grounded in science which often is merely finding out what old wisdoms have known all along’.

It is not either/or, she argued, but a matter of lived experience and valid experiences that were incredibly useful in filling the void that modern medicine sometimes cannot. Indeed, in the months following this introduction post, we’ve found that time and time again – modern medicine can help people, but often or sometimes can’t (and often it is prohibitively expensive or not available to those in other places such as the Phillipines, for example). It is natural remedies to which people turn when conventional medicine practitioners shrug their shoulders and say: ‘it is a mystery’ or say 'continue taking 'x' pill', regardless of the experiences we may be having with it.

I was worried this was really an information war. Were we about to field this account from an onslaught of negativity?

On one hand, we had conventional medicine – a discipline which has peer reviews, research funding and a great deal of legitimacy on the basis of the general tendency of society to seek science as the ultimate authority – which, in the vast majority of cases it does, yet companies like Beyer have been known to 'fudge' data to fit the narrative they're trying to sell.

On the other hand, we have a vast body of information that has come from thousands of years of practice as well as anecdotal knowledge, as well as studies to support it, that favours a more holistic approach and one that favours the ‘natural’.

Which ‘information’ is more legitimate?

Which ‘information’ should we rely on for our health?

Which ‘information’ wins?

Who controls which information is seen?

On Facebook many accounts that share holistic or fringe medicine. Thousands of accounts have been ‘purged’ without reason or notification, including those of the very person who suggested the idea of a Natural Medicine account on Steemit, who has since taken an extended break from the platform. She wrote to me the details of what happened to her on Whatsapp, and gave me permission to share it here.

Like many of us sharing on Natural Medicine, she had a bad experience with big pharma and conventional medicine where the doctor had prescribed a drug for her that was ‘new’, without warning of the side effects or without telling the family that he was incentivised by a drug company who had really done little testing on the product. So, she started ‘Natural Cures Not Medicine’ back in 2013 to raise awareness of big pharma and to educate people so that they could look into alternatives. They’d write articles about all sorts of topics related to healthy lifestyles, sharing articles and Youtube videos who had real life experiences. The website grew fast, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Then, they started receiving strange comments on what they were sharing, antagonistic posts that refuted the information that was shared. We know these know as trolls. By 2017, Facebook started putting blockers on certain articles and images, and then came the whole fake news war. They started receiving notifications saying that they were violating the terms and conditions of the platform. Last December, they were blocked from sharing any content at all, and by June, despite appeals, it was gone completely. Since then, any page that goes against the official mainstream news narrative of the USA and the western world has been shut down in the same way. The Free Thought Project and the Anti Media, friends of hers, were shut down in the same way and anyone associated with them had their profiles removed.

Whilst it is important to alert people to skewed information from conventional medical affiliates such as Big Pharma, fake alternative medical news is dangerous. Can the shutting down of such alternative media be warranted, that case?

Perhaps it’s a question of looking at this *on balance*. On one hand there is the fraud and unreliable news that undermines trust in the medical establishment that are trying to save lives, destabilising how much the public can rely on science and research. On the other hand, alternative medicines that do provide help to many is undermined when it is censored. So much for freedom of speech.

Good information from either side can be hard to come by. Journalists rely on snazzy headlines and buzz feeds, not boring and hard to wade through medical papers or long reads based on balanced, technical terminology. Whilst it used to perform the function of filtering information with sourced and believable information, it is easy swayed, like anything, by financial incentives.

Whilst it is clear to me that it is unfair that alternative media sites are shut down, it is also reasonable for those working in medical research and medical fields to feel concern about alternative media that might be pushing an agenda that has no real basis in research or science. This is the refrain that I often here in response to natural medicine: ‘back it up with research and science’. I still believe that is important, and I am reluctant to share anything on the Natural Medicine blog feed that might not validated in some way – not necessarily on the steempost itself, but in debate and questioning about the topic.

Fake medical news is dangerous, whether you’re working with conventional medicines or alternative ones. Without research or funding into these natural medicines, and just as many lies spread about natural medicines as there are about conventional ones, freedom of information is more important than ever – on both sides. That’s why many of us here do say ‘I am not a medical expert, please do your own research’. We also believe that anecdotal evidence and thousands of years of work in Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda also provides a good body of evidence that is just as valid as scientific research papers. We also recommend seeing a professional.

The onus must be on us to ask questions and to dig deeper, not on governments or Facebook to restrict what we have access to or what we don’t.

This is not a war, as I see it, between ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative’ medicine, it’s about who controls information and how lack of information can severely limit people and prevent further growth in either field. As I wrote in an article for last Freedom Friday, Australia is currently stopping health care rebates for modalities such as naturopathy. Now, my naturopath pours over research and data to inform her pratice, a practice based on thousands of years of herbal knowledge and scientific research too. The herbal products she uses are from ethical companies who pride themselves on a solid body of research to back them up. This isn’t selling tobacco and telling people it’s good for them. This isn’t selling dubious elixirs with alcohol and morphine. Yoga is not just busting out a backbend a hundred odd years of research about it’s efficacy. The government mandate is just as guilty for spreading fake information about alternative therapies as some alternative sites might aggressively do about the medical field.

Personally, I want the freedom to decide, and to wade through the information myself. I’m smart enough to see if something is quackery and to distrust sensationalist language, from either information field.

My response to the concerned Steemian on that #introduceyourself post read:

Rest assured we won't be supporting quackery, nor suggesting that people don't seek conventional medical advice for serious health concerns. My father has cancer, and I can't thank western medicine enough for keeping him alive. I use western medicines to ensure I can breath, because I haven't found another cure (yet) for my asthma. We certainly aren't planning to give people 'false hope', but to encourage and support alternative ways to consider their health. However, I would argue that natural medicines are very much grounded in science, and there is much 'science' to prove their efficacy, as well as thousands of years of research, use and proven results. Often, science is merely finding out what old wisdoms have known all along. There's little wonder that our faith in the health system has flagged. I can only use another example here, where I went to a GP in desperation because of my anxiety. Within minutes she'd given me antidepressants. There was no way this was going to be the answer for me, especially when I read everything I could about this medication online, and we know that antidepressants can cause a lot of damage. Going to a naturopath - who has a science based practice - identified the root cause of my problem where the GP was too willing to medicate without even considering where my anxiety might be coming from (in this case, the adrenal glands). Without natural medicine, I'd be a mess right now. My husband too has never had a diagnosis for his IBS, yet a FODMAP diet (also scientifically proven) has been a wonderful natural medicine for him. So I will support it, absolutely and completely. Happy to engage in further conversations - please do find us on Discord.

I left the last lines in there because they are important. They’re about conversations, and respect, and a willingness to discuss. His response was lovely – he felt that perhaps he was being too alarmist, and that perhaps I was the right person to run Natural Medicine. I hope I’ve proved him right.

We are so lucky to have this anarchic-crypto space in order to freely discuss natural medicines without fear of reprisal or censorship. We’re trying to build a community that can do it safely. We’re lucky not to be motivated by financial gain or the plagues of advertisers that skew information – the information we share is honest, real and from people willing to share and willing to learn and listen. We aren’t all anti conventional medicine, and the large majority of us recognise that it has it’s place and we thank it for what it provides. Most of us are digging up the research papers to inform our own understanding and we are certainly willing to step in and make suggestions for others who might be harmfully self-medicating without understanding of what the side effects of these natural medicines might be.

If you’re up for freely sharing information about natural medicines, and being part of the conversation, please join us on our Discord channel or use the tag #naturalmedicine on your posts so we can more easily find you.

Happy Freedom Friday!!

What are your experiences with alternative vs mainstream medical news?

Should we censor at all, and if so, who should be responsible for this?

How much is the media accountable for fake news?

What are your experiences with conventional or alternative medicines?

This post was written in response to @eaglespirit’s ‘Freedom Friday’ initiative. This week, she has teamed up with @informationwar – please find the guideline post here. Anyone is free to write from Friday to Sunday on the topic ‘Freedom of Information’ and you can take any slant you like – clearly, freedom of information is important to me in my role at Natural Medicine.

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