When I want a quick and concise summary of a subject, I look it up in an encyclopedia because I trust it for objectivity and thoroughness. Nowadays it seems that everything is online instead of a series of heavy books, so should I look at Encyclopedia Brittanica there, or the grand experiment of Wikipedia?
Wikipedia as an open-sourced encyclopedia is an online experiment intended for crowd-editing to produce a balance of information from well-educated, well-informed content experts.
If you have ever consulted Wikipedia on your health issue, you may have already noticed: Wikipedia has failed you. Look no further than calling homeopathy “pseudoscience”, maligning experts in the alternative medicine field, promoting the pharmaceutical-industrial reductionistic viewpoint.
Wikipedia consistently fails to meet its own standard and very often violates it outright while acting like a managed narrative system.
Not only has it failed in giving you information, what is worse is that it has become the authority, with media citing it and policy made from it.
What has happened is the crowd-editing has been captured by the loudest, most organized, most obsessive factions. It has built procedural fortifications to perpetuate its narrative, effectively shutting down any efforts at authentic correction. They proclaim neutrality, but it is actually a one-way gate, with their edits replacing scientifically backed claims that they do not agree with.
“The problem is not that people don’t have access to information. The problem is that they have access to managed information — curated by anonymous power, insulated from accountability.” Gary Null, Ph.D.
The Corruption of Science
When a platform is treated globally as the first-stop authority for knowledge, and when that platform is structurally incapable of accountability, the corruption of its content becomes the corruption of public understanding. That corruption becomes policy. And in the realm of medicine and health, it becomes something far worse. – Gary Null PhD
There are over 200,000 health and medical-related topics on Wikipedia. Of those, approximately 700 pages directly cover Complementary and Alternative Medicine therapies and natural health modalities. These articles are separated off from the medical arts and sciences and put under the heading of “pseudoscience” and quackery.
Just look at Wikipedia’s definition: “Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine despite lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability or evidence of effectiveness . . . Unlike modern medicine, which employs the scientific method to test plausible therapies by way of responsible and ethical clinical trials.
Who wrote this? Not reputable medical professionals like the other medical pages. The majority are anonymous, consistently citing Skeptic websites and publications, and eliminating any mention of the hundreds of thousands of journal studies published on the National Institute of Health’s PubMed database showing efficacy.
What is insidious is that Wikipedia becomes a citation hub.
When it perpetuates the narrative of medicine it does, it has the weight of establishing a reputational “fact.” This particular narrative of medicine then propagates across media, publishers, institutions, employers and academia.
Then it becomes self-reinforcing as journalists quote Wikipedia and Wikipedia cites journalists, giving each other legitimacy.
Do No Harm
There is a health crisis in America. Americans’ state of health is steadily declining, life expectancy is shortening, and psychological well-being has eroded for quite some time.
This correlates with the incessant rise in more and more drug prescriptions and surgery, and the same mainstream advice perpetuating more medical problems.
Wikipedia is NOT an authority in health and medicine
Here are some suggestions to take action to not only protect your own health but also help change the health paradigm.
- Simply, don’t use it. What about those other encyclopedias online? Or try PubMed and peer-reviewed databases and named experts with documented publications.
- Document reputational harm and preserve records
- Demand congressional hearings and formal oversight with specific demands:
- Challenge the media’s dependence on Wikipedia
- Withdraw support and pressure major donors
- Support transparent alternatives
Gary Null, PhD is a leader in health freedom and calling out the corruption in science. He has lots of specific ideas in his article Wikipedia: The Failed Experiment to Democratize Science
Gary Null’s experience
He had a profile on Wikipedia, which he personally did not put up. He claims:
“And so I take a look, and not a single thing in the profile is accurate. So, we reach out to Wikipedia to try to make changes. After first looking at their own guidelines, it says that if a living person is being attacked or libeled, then that biography should be taken down immediately. That was in 2007 or 2008. It’s still there.”
He followed it up, and they wouldn’t tell him who made the references. He wonders: How can you get them removed? What they tell you doesn’t work. Why is it still allowed after all these decades, with enormous damage has been done to people’s careers?
And his experience parallels what so many organizations and individuals report: a closed loop of edits, reversions, intimidation and bans, all under the cover of “policy.”
Homeopathy: Medicine or Pseudoscience?
In 2017, I wrote an entire blog about how Wikipedia presents Homeopathy and what the real evidence is.
In it, I cited Dana Ullman, one of America’s evidence-based advocates for homeopathy. He relates stories of how he tried to provide evidence to Wikipedia and was blocked and even banned from editing. Don’t even look up his profile on Wikipedia, it is slanderous.
Avoid Wikipedia
By now, I hope I have shown the answer to the question that I posed in the beginning. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has failed in the health arena, and if it has happened there, where else is it corrupt? And what other institutions that we may rely on are corrupt?
Do not seek health information from Wikipedia.
It contradicts the evidence from a government survey which estimates that 62% of US adults use some form of alternative medicine annually.
Medical schools are incorporating Complimentary and Alternative Medicine in their curriculum.
Even In 2019, the World Health Organization reported, “traditional and complementary medicine is an important and often underestimated health resource with many applications.”
And you know this if you follow my blogs. Please tell your family and friends if they don’t know – and save them from medical harm.
