The Oligarchy Killing Access to Alternative & Integrative Care
Editorial Staff
| DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE
The title of John Weeks' feature in his Sept. 4 TheIntegrator Blog is chilling: "Self-Interested Whims of the Oligarchs: Google and Facebook Kill Access to Alternative and Integrative Medicine." Here are a few excerpts; a modified version runs with permission in the November AT:
"The blog post to which my attention was called was entitled ‘When Big Brother Went High Tech.' The news from energy medicine author Lynn McTaggert jerked [the] attention of the integrative community to a story I'd long anticipated: Google's censors turned their attention to the still wild political-economical-medical frontier of ‘alternative medicine.' Osteopath and internet businessman Joseph Mercola reported that 99% of the traffic to his sometimes pugnacious mercola.com ‘'natural health' website was killed. ‘Integrative medicine' was not spared. Visits to the much more tame Dr. Weil site from that field's godfather dropped 66%."
"Changed Google algorithms cut in half traffic on [McTaggert's] e-magazine site ... She reported Mercola's even more devastating losses while also sharing [his] belief that Google's additional manual manipulation of search targets cut down additional traffic where the algorithms hadn't already driven in the knives. Why? Via associative laws – such as Google's investment in pharmaceutical solutions – McTaggert puts [Big Pharma] at the calamitous keyboard. ... McTaggert calls it ‘a massive concerted effort by Big Tech and giant corporations to censor the information you are allowed to see.'"
"What of smaller, less vocal and less powerful users? One of these, who wished to maintain anonymity, contacted me to note that his site and that of a colleague had each dropped by 50%. Neither was ready to blame Google, perhaps fearing repercussions.... [However], he directed me to a frightening though excellent resource that lays out the pattern of intentional suppression of traffic."
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