Making misleading health claims online just got a little more problematic

I’ve developed several Google custom searches to make it easier to pick though the data and identify practitioners making misleading and potentially dangerous claims. These custom searches are like having a version of Google that limits itself to the websites of specific groups of alternative practitioners. They're not perfect - you'll get false positives as well as false negatives. But they do work very well.

Here are Google search engines limited only to websites belonging to members of:

• British Chiropractic Association
• Scottish Chiropractic Association
• McTimoney Chiropractic Association
• General Osteopathic Council
• Complementary and Natural Health Council
• Alliance of Registered Homeopaths
• Kinesiology Federation

You might find, for instance, that there are still some British Chiropractic Association members claiming to treat colic. Or you might find that some CNHC members are claiming they can treat ear infections by sticking a candle in your ear. Or maybe you’ll find a homeopath that is telling people that magic sugar pills can help with eczema.

Google's custom search system is far from perfect. It randomly seems to drop results, then pops them back in again. Text that is clearly found on many sites can't be found. But I expect this to improve over time as the indexing improves.

Despite these problems, if you're making misleading claims it’s now far more probable that you'll get caught. Fingers crossed that whoever finds them hasn't got FishBarrel installed.

FishBarrel: Keep what you highlight short & to the point

I’ve been looking through some of the complaints that have gone in via FishBarrel. While I can’t see the background information that people have entered, I can see what was highlighted.

A few of the complaints seem to include really large chunks of highlighted text, which is going to reduce the effectiveness of the complaint and may even mean it gets initially rejected.

Here is an example of some text that was highlighted recently:

Aromatherapy combines massage with the use of therapeutic essential oils which are found naturally in plants. Tricia Swensson The essential oils are applied to the skin and are absorbed into the blood stream which can have a therapeutic effect on the body systems. Aromatherapy massage can help to reduce stress and tension, relieve muscular pain, improve circulation and encourage the removal of toxins from the body. Aromatherapy may help with a wide range of treatments such as: Insomnia Menstruation problems Respiratory conditions Digestive disorders The use of plant extracts for health have been documented for thousands of years, the ancient Egyptians used essential oils for health and beauty and also during embalming. Aromatherapy as we know it was revived when a French chemist Rene-Maurice Gattefosse burnt his hand during an accident; he placed his hand in a bowl which he believed contained water but in fact contained lavender oil he was amazed at how quickly the wound healed leaving no scarring. It is Gattefosse who first coined the phrase `aromatherapie’.

Much of this information is true. The complaint would be far stronger if the specific misleading claims were highlighted individually. Even if there are two sentences with misleading claims next to each other, it’s worth separating them out by highlighting them individually. Here’s how I’d deal with the above text:

#1 Aromatherapy massage can help to reduce stress and tension, relieve muscular pain, improve circulation and encourage the removal of toxins from the body.

#2 Aromatherapy may help with a wide range of treatments such as: Insomnia Menstruation problems Respiratory conditions Digestive disorders

(Note: If the header of your complaint states you’re listing misleading claims, you probably wouldn’t need to enter any background info about the above.)

#3 French chemist Rene-Maurice Gattefosse burnt his hand during an accident; he placed his hand in a bowl which he believed contained water but in fact contained lavender oil he was amazed at how quickly the wound healed leaving no scarring.

For #3's background info, I’d add: “The above text misleadingly implies that aromatherapy is an effective treatment for burns.”

This way it’s clear what you’re complaining about and you’re not asking the ASA to do all of the work for you.

There is one exception I can think of where you might highlight a lot of text and that where the practitioner just lists a large number of diseases that their therapy treats. In this case, highlight the full list.

FishBarrel: The easy way to report misleading health claims online.

Update: FishBarrel is now available from the Chrome Web Store here. If you previously downloaded the file directly, please uninstall and reinstall from the app store.


With thousands of misleading health claims on the web and a report to the ASA taking around ten minutes, I'd regularly come across misleading claims but do nothing about them.
So I built FishBarrel. FishBarrel is a plugin for Google Chrome that manages the process of making an ASA or Trading Standards complaint so that it takes just a few seconds.
FishBarrel also tracks all text complained about in a central database. When you turn on FishBarrel, any text complained about by other users is automatically highlighted. This prevents you from submitting duplicate complaints to the ASA.
Finally, FishBarrel can automatically revisit the websites later and check if the claims have been removed.
Watch the demo (full-screen is best), then download it for free below.





FishBarrel is free. To download, open a Chrome browser, download the plugin and install the crx extension by clicking "continue" in the warning bar at the bottom of your browser window.
There is more information available in the help section of the extension.
Next time you're on a website containing misleading health claims, it will just take a few seconds to send them over to the ASA. I hope FishBarrel makes the difference between ignoring the misleading information and getting the claim removed.
I'd like to say thank you to all of the people who helped me test this, but especially @scepticletters, whose feedback helped improve FishBarrel enormously.
All development was done with the support and collaboration of my web software development company Xibis. The team have helped enormously with the technical development and have provided the server infrastructure. Xibis are specialists in building these sorts of web based productivity systems.