Sharing medical misinformation is dangerous

Everybody has that friend — or if you aren’t that friend, then you’re probably that person — that loves to share articles about how nature offers better cures for ailments than anything man could make.

Sure, they’re kind of annoying, but it’s your friend and you may think what they’re doing is pretty harmless. If you like what it says, you may share it yourself. I see that a lot with people who are really into medicinal marijuana that do that very thing.

But, taking marijuana as an example, there’s a difference between what something can actually do and the claims of what it can do. Sure, marijuana can help with pain, anxiety and restore appetites, but there are a lot of sites with articles being shared that say marijuana can EVERYTHING from cancer to autism.

Sure, it may seem harmless, but taking something like that at its word can be dangerous, especially when a person actually forgoes science-based treatment for marijuana or other, often useless, alternative treatments. Sometimes, it can lead to a person being worse off than they were before, sometimes they can even die.