Home remedies, hydroxychloroquine, and other illusions

Home remedies, hydroxychloroquine, and other illusions

“The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to (the) truth”

Scott Adams

This post is about why the human mind is such a sucker for sops. So if you feel strongly in favour of home remedies or hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, then you should stop right here. You may not like the tone of what I say. And I don’t want any adverse astral energy fields turned against me. This is strictly for the healthily ambivalent folks out there.

I expect that some of you may find my clubbing grandma’s home remedies together with a legitimate medical product somewhat disconcerting. But I think that the underlying misperceptions driving us to hold unfounded beliefs apply equally to both. And also, the combination makes for nice alliteration.

Honey, pepper and homeopathy

The most famous endorsement for “the biggest game changer in the history of medicine” aside, the internet is awash with innumerable other “proven cures” for COVID-19. These range from benign advice such as “eat lots of vitamin C”, or drink “honey-pepper and water boiled with turmeric”, to the dangerously zany (drink colloidal silver). It’s a dubious tribute to one man’s appeal (not to mention our colossal stupidity) that so many people took to drinking bleach! The US FDA had to step in with a public advisory, warning people that drinking bleach may “cause severe reactions”! (https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/danger-dont-drink-miracle-mineral-solution-or-similar-products) There’s also the case of fish-feed prices skyrocketing in that unfettered free market, as a response to people buying it up for its chloroquine content. Many other benign, but unproven or discredited alternative therapies have found a new lease of life, in some cases with the open endorsement by charismatic leaders. Though in one happy exception, parochial pursuits neatly complemented proven science: Turkey’s advice to its citizens to use kolonya for hand sanitizing (most Turkish colognes have at least 60% alcohol).

Moonshine and the malleable mind

It is infuriatingly difficult to prevent your mind from drawing spurious causal correlations in daily life. That’s what makes Didier Raoult claim “We know how to cure the disease” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoult-hydroxychloroquine.html) based on all of 20 selected patients who were given hydroxychloroquine. There are a whole bunch of mental short cuts and biases that cause us to hold such stupid beliefs. There is “I saw it with my own eyes” (naïve realism), compounded by the logical error called the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: an event occurs after another, so it must be caused by the first event. And then there is our quirky ability to selectively remember the successes, and conveniently forget the failures (confirmation bias). Unfortunately, this fallibility is hardwired into all our brains, not just those of the megalomaniacs. In fact this fallibility affected an entire Noble Prize Committee, which awarded the prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1949 to Egaz Moniz for developing the “technique” of prefrontal lobotomy for treating depression. The decision was based largely on the “careful” observations of practising neurosurgeons. Needless to say, prefrontal lobotomy is not performed any longer (though you sometimes wish a few exceptions could be made).

Information overload: Drinking from the firehose

Another reason for our impaired judgement, that is unique to our current predicament, is the humungous volume, velocity and variety of information that is available to us. The (mandatory) chart below shows the number of scientific papers on COVID-19 published in legitimate medical journals and public repositories in the last 5 months. (In contrast just over 650 scientific papers were published during the entire duration of the SARS epidemic less than 2 decades ago).

Figure: Scientific publications on COVID-19 indexed by the National Library of Medicine and selected pre-print servers

And this does not include the millions of other pieces of prose, self-indulgent (such as this one) or otherwise, that are accessible to everyone on the internet. And then there is the infinite scroll of Facebook, and the incessant chatter on Twitter. The deluge is overwhelming. At no point in our history has there been a need for the human brain to process this amount of rapidly accumulating information. Beyond a threshold (which we’ve all crossed), every additional bit of information decreases our ability to draw inferences and make sound judgements. So perhaps that’s when the tired (and hopeful) mind latches on to wildly improbable assertions such as the miraculous healing powers of “virus shut out” pendants, USB sticks (yes! They’re called “5G Bioshields” no less!), and various animal excretory products. Or it simply gives in and ends up binge watching Money Heist.

Taming the mind

Binge watching mind-numbing series aside, there is no easy way to avoid being deluged by information. But information is key, and bingeing on streamed fare has the unpleasant side-effect of increasing body weight and reducing IQ (as I have gleaned from “careful” observation). The best strategy is probably the staid, unadventurous one. Simply follow the advice of legitimate scientific bodies, knowing well that they too are acting on incomplete and rapidly changing information. COVID is here to stay, but we cannot let it rule our minds.