Health Web of Hot Mess

“My husband makes me use separate dishes because he is afraid of getting it. I saw something on the Internet about colloidal silver will this help me?”

Around 2013-ish, a woman called me because she had recently been diagnosed with HIV and was distraught. She made the above statement and I felt her desperation and pain through the phone. I also felt anger, because once again I had to crush the hope of another recently diagnosed, terrified person by telling them that all things on the Internet are not true.

I was working at a small nonprofit organization in Houston, Texas that focused on providing the most up-to-date health and treatment information to people living with HIV. Many of the people that came through the doors of the agency were scared and desperate for a cure for the disease. Some of them were so desperate that they were willing to try anything.

A lot of them went to the Internet to find information that could disprove their clinician’s assertion that a cure does not exist. Many of them found what they thought they were looking for on websites feature the elusive “cure” and that often asked them to provide payment to get the secret.

As a trained public health worker, I have come across this situation often. Desperate people will do almost anything to get out of their desperate situation. It makes me angry that there are people who would profit (either monetarily or through some perverse personal satisfaction) from putting information on the Internet that could potentially harm the end-user. Yes, it may be true that some of the posters may actually think they are helping someone, but the damage done from these types of posters is no less potentially harmful to those already experiencing compromised health.

I plan to address this problem in all of its complexity. There must be a way that the public health/social work community can work with the Internet content developer community to provide not just a tool to help locate accurate information, but a community movement that will address this issue.