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How fake medical news is SERIOUSLY damaging our health: From vaccines and heart pills to cancer drugs and diets, as experts report a rise in misinformation online, a special investigation tackles the dangerous myths threatening our health

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Public Health England told The Mail on Sunday it was ‘concerned’ about the amount of health-related fake news online. Meanwhile, the Government is expected to publish a White Paper later this year on reforms to internet and social media laws. This is urgently needed. Half of us admit to turning to social media rather than medical professionals for advice on health problems. And just last week, a survey revealed a 9,000 per cent rise in the past three years in internet searches relating to serious symptoms.

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FAKE NEWS: STATINS DON’T WORK AND CAN EVEN KILL

Statins, the cholesterol-lowering pills first introduced in the 1980s, are hotly debated. Today, they are prescribed to at least eight million Britons in order to lower their heart-attack risk.

But over the past decade a cottage industry, driven by a small group of medically qualified sceptics, has grown up around the notion that statins don’t prevent heart attacks, so are a waste of time. They also claim that drug companies have downplayed the side effects of the drugs. ‘There is no evidence of a single person suffering a heart attack or dying from not taking statins,’ claimed one, Dr Aseem Malhotra, in a recent newspaper article.

He describes himself as ‘one of the most influential cardiologists in Britain’, broadly promotes the idea that diet alone is a better approach to improving heart health.

In the US, the leading anti-statin voice is Dr Joseph Mercola, who has almost two million Facebook followers. He claims: ‘Statins may actually make your heart health worse and only appear effective due to statistical deception… [they] increase your risk of serious diseases including cancer.’

Meanwhile, on YouTube, a video viewed a million times from Bob DeMaria, a self-proclaimed ‘doctor of natural health’, claims that eating half a red apple, a plum and some carrots every day halves cholesterol, making diet more effective than statins.

It may sound like amusing nonsense, but one recent study found that heart-disease patients who believe stories such as these and quit their drugs are nearly 20 per cent more likely to die from their condition as a result.

More than half of over-55s stop taking statins after just one year, according to recent reports. Yet evidence from hundreds of thousands of statin-users is overwhelming – the drugs do work, cutting heart-attack and stroke risk significantly.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...ing-health.html