Advertising fake medical science should be a crime

CC If these are used for emotional or spiritual well-being, that’s awesome and should be encouraged.”

> Healing magnets, water dilution, and other pseudosciences contributes to lethal trends

Greg Waldock Staff Writer

believe if you sell spiritualism as a

science, you are a bad person, and should be considered a criminal.

Healing is complicated. For some, it’s a precise scientific process backed by the global medical community and peer- reviewed data. For others, it’s a spiritual process with rituals and traditions honed by generations of practitioners. It’s not a strict divide—after all, a lot of modern medicine comes from traditional practices refined over the years. However, they are separate concepts, used for different things. When you pretend that a spiritual tradition is a science, people can—and do—get hurt. I’m not here to disparage Indigenous

healing methods, pagan rituals, or the power of religious prayer. Those are all extremely important things to the people that practice them, and if you believe any of these practices can heal

- ie PS, ee sys

te he Peay , t aioe ie

pee SL 3

ia

‘a

es

the soul, the more power to you. Many traditional healing methods really

do help people heal physically too, with the use of certain herbs which contain certain chemicals. If these

are used for emotional or spiritual well-being, that’s awesome and should be encouraged. That’s not what kills people. The use of these traditional remedies (or reinterpretations of them) and presenting them as peer-reviewed, provably-effective medicine does.

Take magnets, for example. How do they work? Scientifically, it involves electric currents being pushed through materials that react by generating a field, with that field increasing in strength with more magnetic material. So, it’s no surprise pseudoscientific products advertising the science-proven healing power of magnets over the iron in your blood would pop up. Magnetic bracelets, rings, necklaces, and other ornaments are found in shopping malls across Vancouver, covered in very science-y terms like “ferromagnetic”

and “realignment.” Only one problem: The amounts of iron in human blood is SO sparse, it generates no magnetic field. At all. The most powerful magnet on Earth would have basically no impact you. Those magnetic healing bracelets are as legitimately scientific as Magneto, but people will wear them instead of seeking help for depression, or getting antibiotics, or talking to

a doctor. It’s an entire industry built exclusively on encouraging fear

and offering total non-solutions.

This kind of emotional exploitation has no place in a society like ours, where we at least try to care about the health of other Canadians. Slapping a picture of a smiling man in a doctor's lab coat on a bottle of plain water and claiming it’s been “ionized to empower the immune system” is more than just a cynical business plan; it’s outright lying to people. A pill containing a statistically negligible amount of nightshade should not be sold next to actual antidepressants that—unlike the

> Not telling the truth about history dooms us to repeat it

Jessica Berget Opinions Editor

photo of a children’s history textbook

as gone viral lately because of the way it portrays European settlement and colonization. For those who haven't seen it, the textbook claims “When the European settlers arrived, they needed a land to live in. The First Nations agreed to move to different areas to make room for the new settlements.” Not only is this a complete fabrication of history, it trivializes Indigenous history and ignore the genocide and brutal colonization of Indigenous peoples. | believe that if we don’t teach people—especially

children—the reality of the atrocities that happened in history and ignore them completely, we are damning ourselves to repeat them.

It is important for people to learn these things as early as they can. For children, this is the time that they start to develop empathy and the ability to think critically about the world around them. Therefore, it is essential for them to learn about the injustices of history and humanity.

We can't shield children from these things because they are going to learn or find out about it eventually, so it is best that this kind of sensitive material is taught to them with maturity and honesty. Kids are smarter than they are

given credit for. They can take in this kind of information and learn from it, and I think the people who say this kind of material is too sensitive for kids to learn about are a part of the problem. I’m not saying they should all be taught about the details of the rape and genocide of the Indigenous peoples, but a general overview of the history, colonization, and assimilation will provide them with an insight of how these things happen and how we can prevent them. If we are not aware of the mistakes we have made in the past, how can we prevent them from happening again?

This isn’t the first case of history being literally rewritten in textbooks. In another popular post that was circulating

invisible amounts of nightshade—have a verifiable impact on brain chemistry. I’m not just saying that it’s immoral to present these things as science—it should be illegal. If 1 sold real steak at a restaurant but advertised it as vegan soy steak, I’d be shut down and facing fines in a day. The idea that medication should be a near free-for-all for the best-advertised products is ridiculous. The poor understanding of science is something we on the West Coast should feel strongly about. It’s not a coincidence whooping cough has reappeared in towns with large anti- vaccination movements like Chilliwack and Abbotsford. It’s not a coincidence that our province, with its resurgence of preventable disease, also has some of the worst mental health care in the country. These products pretending to be scientifically-proven are feeding a culture that has already killed people in our community. This is not a culture our laws should be allowing to fester.

° BS c o 5 Oo c = o S zt > o ° Bs ° < oa

social media, a photo was shown of

a textbook that claimed that African people came to America as workers, instead of slaves. This is a subtle but very crucial way that history can be manipulated into something that seems harmless, but has a lot of significant history behind it that we have to unpack and understand.

By changing the details of something so significant, the event loses its meaning and glosses over the colonization and genocide of an entire culture. Only until we start presenting history with the reality of these events can we start to prevent these things from happening again.