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China Probes Baidu Over False Medical Ads After Student Dies (bloomberg.com)
hackingbear writes: China's Internet regulator said on Monday it will send a team to investigate Baidu Inc over the death of a university student who used the Chinese search engine to look for treatment for his rare cancer, and to find an experimental treatment offered by the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps, which eventually proved ineffective. Before dying, Wei accused Baidu online of promoting false medical information, as well as the hospital for misleading advertising in claiming a high success rate for the treatment, state radio said. The post attracted a large public outcry. Baidu says around one quarter of its revenues come from medical and health-care advertisers.
Well, actually, it sounds like the Chinese government is realizing it needs its own version of the FDA.
The FDA in the US is so effective and yet underfunded, that we could afford to increase its budget by multiple x, and it would still be a wise expenditure of government funds. That organization protects us from far more than we give credit for.
Which doctor? How do you know the doctor you go to will be a specialist for the treatment that you need? You should look up online to see what treatment options are available and which doctors/hospitals/clinics specializes in what forms of cancer. The case in here is that the student had stage iv synovial sarcoma. And chemo and radiation didn't work. That's pretty poor prognosis, so they went down the experimental route. But the hospital that they went to basically falsely promised that they had a 80-90% chance of curing the cancer using a immunotherapy technique not cleared in any country for treating the cancer that he had. I remember reading in one of the articles in Chinese that the technique was already proven to be ineffective against sarcomas. So the issue is that basically the hospital lied. And finally, the kicker of all of this pile of crap, is that the hospital that performed the procedure wasn't even the hospital that was advertising on Baidu. The hospital that was advertising used to be a pretty famous hospital and it was a military hospital which used to be inaccessible to non-military personnel or their families (Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps). However, this has changed in the last several years, but to cope with the huge influx of the number of patients wanting to get the best, the hospital outsourced the cancer treatment to a different hospital. And the outsourced hospital could use the name "Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police Corps) despite not actually being part of the hospital. The the worst part of all of this is that the outsourced hospital also named one other famous organization in the cancer (specifically the immunology) field. They claimed that this treatment was a joint research with Stanford, which of course is a lie as well.
He did go to a doctor. Alas, the doctor's ad claiming a high success rate with the cancer he had was a lie.