2023-10-25 13:46:00
This week, Inserm is launching the general public campaign “We benefit every day from being interested in health”, to raise awareness of false health information and encourage everyone to turn to rigorous scientific sources.
“Sorry, miracle products don’t exist”, hammers home a communication campaign from Inserm (National Institute of Health and Medical Research), which is waging war against fake news in health matters. Carine Delrieu, director of communications at Inserm, piloted the system.
The campaign is broadcast in the form of spots. It features magical products to treat skin problems, help you lose weight quickly or even treat depression. It is broadcast until November 23 on the replay sites of television channels (MTF1, FranceTV, M6 group) and on YouTube.
Inserm is teaching about fake news in health matters, is this campaign a “first” for you?
We have had this desire to be very active in providing good information to citizens, and hunting down false information, for four years. This campaign is the latest in a series of initiatives. We first launched a series of videos for social networks called Detox Channelthere are now more than thirty videos and posts that take stock of false information or a question that we have seen circulating in the media or on our social networks, questions from ordinary citizens (Editor’s note: among the topics covered “A thousand solutions for erections”, “The microbiota, second brain”, “Chocolate is good for your health”…), with, each time, the intervention of one of our researchers or one of our researchers who specializes in the issue.
We can talk about osteoarthritis, vaccines…
We launched this initiative just before the Covid crisis.
We have also published a book called “Fake health news”, prefaced by Michel Cymès, which aims to disentangle the true from the false and to put an end to preconceived ideas. It has sold over 5,000 copies and all content is available for free on our websiteInserm.fr
Finally, we have information and campaigns. The one we are launching this week tells people “It’s normal not to know” but we must obtain information from reliable and credible sources such as Inserm, a public organization specializing in biomedical research. We want to be a reference point for the public, not the only one, in addition to our research mission. We clearly saw during Covid that this was a role that public organizations had to assume.
“There are a lot of false promises about osteoarthritis”
How were the themes chosen?
We have chosen the themes where we see the most false products circulating: depression, weight loss, everything related to osteoarthritis and joint problems. Finally, this is an area where there are a lot of false promises. .
It’s not exclusive. The goal is to encourage people to get information, and our Inserm site is there for that. Health is serious, and false information can be dangerous.
The meaning of this campaign is to reach out, and we allowed ourselves a little humor with products that we called “Bye Bye depression”, “Revigorator”… the aim of the game is above all not to cultivate vagueness, but to say that if it is too good to be true, it is not true.
Has fake news increased in health matters since the Covid crisis?
Yes. We have never seen so much false information circulating, and it’s dangerous, it’s not just jokes.
Nevertheless, there is an awareness in research organizations of the need to pay attention to information. And the media and opinion relays take the trouble to do what we call “fact-checks”, or to always have scientific backing, it is up to us to respond more quickly than we were used to to do, with volunteer researchers.
“The great mass of people just ask to be informed”
The general public has also taken the reflex? Don’t you associate yourself with these “institutions” that you should be wary of…?
The vast majority of people just want to be informed, but you are right, from the moment we are a public body, we are sometimes suspect. This is not a reason to give up, on the contrary.
The work is immense, but the scientific word now makes sense. And we have to go where people get information, on social networks, even if it is much more complicated to assert a scientific approach there. We have 170,000 subscribers on Twitter, we are on YouTube, Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook.
Can we contact you directly?
We can do this on these networks and on our general public website, consulted by a million people per month.
What are the most asked questions?
We had a lot of questions about messenger RNA, and that’s quite normal, a lot about genetic scissor techniques, the famous CRISPR-Ca9, osteoarthritis, a lot of questions about nutrition, a lot of questions about diet. ..
We also have questions about women’s health, many questions about endometriosis, questions from pregnant women, questions about this plant called Artemisia and its supposed effects on malaria, questions about wine, about coffee, how many cups you can drink. We have suitable answers. On probiotics, fasting, especially in cases of cancer. Finally, the IUD: can it make you sterile?
This is a question we asked ourselves forty years ago…
It doesn’t matter, the important thing is to ask yourself and ask the right people.
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