Caught in a web of idiocy

Like a skilfully wielded scalpel, the internet can slice through thickets of ignorance delivering authoritative, critical information virtually instantaneously. So why is it so often used like an out-of-control chainsaw, endangering anyone within electronic reach?

Indolence, for one. People couldn’t be bothered to check the veracity of the emails they forward, even though it’s easy to access Google or a professional debunking site like Snopes.com.

Also gullibility. We believe “authorities”, especially when someone we know helpfully forwarded the information to us.

So, given the combination of indolence and gullibility, perhaps one should just murmur “Thank God for Darwin,” as another wide-eyed innocent provides banking details to a crime syndicate or chooses carrot juice above chemotherapy.

Normally when a chain-email is discredited, those involved just melt away. Just occasionally, though, the peddlers of ignorance are caught out so convincingly that they have to retract.

This week I was cyber spectator to such a climb-down by Nicky Armstrong, a conservative former mayor of Westville and an enthusiastic e-purveyor of quackery, as well as low-grade political abuse masquerading as humour. Armstrong sent to her cronies, to be passed on endlessly as is the nature of chain-emails, medical advice purporting to come from Johns Hopkins, a top American research university.

This particular hoax, rubbishing conventional cancer therapies, dates to 2004. It blames cancer on artificial sweeteners, plastic food wrappings and a bad attitude, and posits an array of alternative, discredited, remedies.

Obviously Johns Hopkins is unamused at being the cited source of pernicious mumbo-jumbo, especially when it can influence the ill to delay medical treatment until too late. Hopkins’ Kimmel Cancer Centre rebuts the hoax in detail on its website, as do the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Research UK, and Cancer SA (Cansa).

Cansa’s research head, Dr Carl Albrechts, is scathing about the “dangerous hypothesis” in the email that “proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor”. Coming on top of everything else, “it makes the poor cancer patient even more downcast and miserable because it is saying the patient’s personality actually caused the disease”.

There is no evidence that a positive attitude significantly helps to cure cancer. According to Albrecht, “this leads to dismay and deep unhappiness in those where the cancer is winning, as [they] are made to feel that the failure of the therapy is their fault”.

The SA version of the hoax comes with Armstrong quoting a warm endorsement — since denied — from SA-trained Dr Grant Tarling, now medical chief of an international cruise company. Pasted into the email are approving remarks regarding the Hopkins hogwash, apparently made by him and sent to his Mummy, who forwarded them to Armstrong.

Normally when a chain-email is discredited, those responsible slide into the shadows, but once the veil of anonymity is broken there is no hiding place in the cybersphere. There were immediately moves to have Tarling professionally censured.

Tarling responded that he was “shocked” that something “so blatantly inaccurate and unscientific has been sent out with my name within it … Nicky Armstrong appears to be the originator and … this has resulted in significant damage to my hard earned reputation as a scientist and supporter of evidence based medicine”.

Alderman Mrs NF Armstrong, as she prefers to be addressed, has since retracted the email. She says Tarling has informed her that it was “absolute crap”.

So for once a life-threatening hoax mailing is stopped dead, with some appropriately red faces for the perpetrators. Score one for the cancer sufferers, but I guess zero for Darwin.

Cansa rebuttal

Hopkins hoax on Snopes