Problem is medical claims are highly regulated in the West. So there is a likely legal liability for youtube in the US and in the UK. In fact, they might have already had pressure from regulators.
It would help if YouTube would say so. I'm not sure Google's usual total opacity is going to play to their favor here. As I said in another comment, I personally see no reason to trust their judgment in these matters, but if they said "Hey, we're getting regulatory pressure from X about Y and we need to remove your stuff" that would be a step in the direction of restoring my trust. (I've got other reasons I'm very unlikely to ever trust them very much overall, but I am capable of nuance, so I have no problem saying I would at least trust them more.)
I don't understand how she keeps escaping being shutdown or even arrested.
The Canadian government just banned a Naturopath product with actual rabies saliva in it which was used to treat children. At least there's progress.
For the record, I think anyone peddling pseudoscience regarding medical conditions should be shutdown hard and fast. People who suffer from chronic pain or incurable illness can become desperate and turn to charlatans whose snake-oil can produce terrible effects. It isn't harmless to prey on such insecurities.
You can't eradicate the nonsense you can just change its nature. In some ways I think having complete nonsense out there is healthy in terms of promoting skepticism amongst normal people.
In the past year I've gone from suffering heart problems so bad that I was becoming completely unable to sleep at night to having them nearly fixed [1]. (Point here being, we are waaaay beyond anything "placebo" could possibly do. Bright, shining, clear-as-day signals here.) I've done this by finding information from various sources about supplements that can address these problems.
Now, being a HN denizen and reasonably rational, I've done this by figuring out nutritional deficiencies and reading various papers. So I'm not taking random herbs or anything; I'm taking amino acids and magnesium and some other things that I can find various papers that suggest that they may help. I can even find actual doctors who seem to be quite reasonable and respected in their field recommending the core of regimen I'm on, so I'm far away from looney-land. However, in strict scientific terms, that is as far as science has gotten... some papers that suggest that further research is necessary, but said further research has not (as far as I can tell) been done yet, and substantial case reports from doctors but not much in the way of formal studies.
Everything I've tried, generally speaking the worst case scenario is that Nothing Happens, the upside is "maybe my heart will start working better", and the monetary cost has been negligible to me, so I've been able to work through things and figure out what helps, and the things that didn't help my particular problem.
(It is often pointed out that drug companies have little incentive to study the effectiveness of unpatentable substances on disease. My Celiac may be skewing the results, but based on the digging I've done into may various issues over the years, I have to say that it certainly appears to me that there is good reason to believe that there are a lot of cures, treatments, and ameliorations available for a whole host of diseases that are often studied in a cheap paper with a small sample size, or even in the form of case studies, but that are never followed up on because nobody's got the funding if it isn't going to produce a drug. If you've got something even slightly rare and you aren't getting a good treatment, I highly recommend trawling through the sludge of the internet and filtering it through a scientific understanding. You may be surprised at what you can find. You'll certainly find sludge, but there may be unexpected diamonds in there. Very often many of the interventions carry little risk beyond not working and are very cheap to try. I always double-check and triple-check the risks first, but sometimes it's as simple as "have you tried vitamin B supplements?" or something, where the risks are generally very well understood.)
But drawing a bright shining line between the resources I used to do this and "psuedoscience" is going to be very, very difficult. In fact at times the two were outright mixed together, and I had to untangle them myself. Yes, we know the worst stuff when we see it, absolutely, and I am not suggesting this space should be unregulated. However, I am suggesting that free speech is still a concern here, and I will personally be very unhappy if you lop what could very well be 30 years off my life in the name of "protecting" me.
Is it a challenge to filter this stuff correctly? Yeah. Nobody said life would be easy.
[1]: Conventional medicine put me on a heart monitor for a month and proceeded to announce to me that it was all normal that my heart was beating so wrongly that it was literally keeping me up at night. I have to admit this was definitely a bit of a blow in my confidence in the medical field. It all worked out for the best in the end anyhow; fixing the underlying deficiencies is a better idea that trying to take any medication to patch over the broken system, which is probably what would have happened. As my own further digging into the problem revealed, heart arrhythmia medicine can be a lifesaver in some circumstances, but it is also almost as like to cause the problems as to improve them. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped me, because my problem was, again, missing nutrients, and generally you can't medicine over that.
(So, for the aforementioned reasons, I don't have an official diagnosis, but I'm pretty sure it would be called "Vagal Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation". My mother suffers from AF, though I'm not sure of the exact subclassification, and I get my celiac from my father, so... yay genes.)
Sweetmyx has zero embryo cells in it. The embryo cells were used to test how the human taste receptors would respond to Sweetmyx.
The article then goes on to name several videos with titles like "increase energy," "improve concentration and memory," "improve sleep," etc.
Are there any lawyers around who know of a legal definition for "medical advice" or "medical claims?" Because these videos sound a lot like medical advice despite his insistence that they aren't.
Youtube censorship sucks sometimes, but this guy experimenting on himself is not nearly rigorous enough to figure out what's really happening when he is taking these supplements. When a person sets out to improve themselves with drugs, test the process on themselves, and interpret and analyze those results themselves, it's a viper's pit of biases. Obviously the experimenter has a huge personal stake in the experiment (arguably the largest; his person is the experiment!) and that generally is great for motivation but bad for science.
I like playing with nootropics but I'm also relatively healthy and I can't imagine how damaging it might be for a seriously ill person who is taking advice from youtube in a desperate and futile attempt to improve their condition and survive. The ethics are pretty complex, above my pay grade for sure.
If you're talking about the FDA, the basic rule is that you can't claim a product treats or cures any diagnosable condition it hasn't been certified for. Claims like "improve concentration" and "improve sleep" are generally permissible, where specific statements like "helps with ADD" and "cures insomnia" are not.
Based on those video titles, I don't see anything which constitutes medical advice in the narrow sense. Someone could well have decided the overall effect was tacit medical advice, but these titles in isolation aren't clear violations.
Any time you see something non-specific like "boosts the immune system" or "increases energy" it means the product is likely worthless because those claims don't actually mean anything.
It's the reason so many "nutrition" companies can get away with claiming all kinds of things such as "burn fat faster". That statement means something to you and I, but it's not a medical statement.
They might be "meaningless" to actual medical professionals or people with decent knowledge of the ways that companies skirt product labelling laws. But the average layperson who might buy these products is probably neither of those things and is more likely to interpret them literally.
so highly regulated that I can buy a one-time dose vial of mystery liquid at my local liquor store that promises harder erections and improved cognition, without the active ingredients printed anywhere.
If this was triggered by pressure from any group like the FDA, i'd sure be curious why they decided to start regulating medical woo-woo at the YouTube level, and not at the "homeopath that can cure any cancer" level, which is totally prevalent in the U.S.
When I had a commute I used to count the car windshield banner stickers that advertised the sale of miracle juices, berrys, extracts, whatever. Those 'Avon-esque' pyramid schemes are dangerous from both sides -- both for suckers that get pulled in as sellers , and for the folks consuming the stuff hoping to cure colon cancer, but that stuff is still as prevalent as ever..
When, exactly, does western medical regulation kick in? It seems to be when you're making lots of money on-shore.
If that’s your version of very clear, maybe you shouldn’t be giving people advice.
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