李天天是中国最大的医药行业网络社区丁香园(DXY.cn) 的创始人。创立于2000年，丁香园现已拥有320万注册会员，其中70%是专业医师。丁香园已经出版78本专业医学图书，20种开源学术期刊。
目前，丁香园还开发了16款移动app，通过智能手机可以为中国的每一个医生提供专业的内容和应用。在丁香园，李天天负责公共关系、政府公关事务、投资以及媒体合作。他拥有肿瘤免疫学硕士学位。他对数据挖掘以及统计很感兴趣，即将获得生物信息学博士学位。
如何以手机打击虚假医药广告
今日中国的医药科研项目数量世界领先，然而这一成果并未惠及大众。事实上，中国公民一直被那些通过散播错误医药信息而获利的广告商所围困。现在到了反击的时候。在线医药社区"丁香园"的创建人李天天解释了他和团队如何支持中国民众打击虚假医药信息的战争。李天天说，一种低调而无处不在的武器便能帮我们赢得这场战争，那就是手机。
本着传播优秀思想的精神，TEDx是由本地人士自发组织的，旨在为本地的创见者带来TED一般体验的活动。在每一个TEDx活动现场，都会有来自TED官方的演讲视频以及本地的演讲者，他们一起为观众带来思考，在观众中间创造联系。这样的立足本地、自发组织的活动叫 TEDx 活动，这里的 x 的意思是“本地独立举办的TED风格活动”。TED官方对这些活动提供指引，但所有的TEDx活动都是自发组织的*。（*受到相关条例的约束）
以下为讲稿全文：
I want to share with you a story. This is a story about a 32-year old single mother in Hangzhou, China.
She was diagnosed with lupus, (系统性红斑狼疮), an autoimmune disease. This disease tricks your immune into attacking your body—your cells, tissues, and organs… but it is a controllable disease. That means that, with the right drugs and treatment, you can survive. Approximately 95% of people with lupus in the United States, Canada, and Europe survive at least five years, and about 80% of these patients can survive for over 20 years with the disease.
So after this single mother was diagnosed with Lupus, we’d expect her to live. But after only 6 months after her lupus diagnosis, she died very suddenly, leaving behind her child.
What was the cause of her death? Was it her disease?
In fact, it was not her disease; she was very badly misled by false medical advertising, or FMA; and she was killed by these false medicines.
What is FMA? FMA means False Medical Advertising. FMA refers to advertisers that advertisers sell false medicines, which is totally unscientific or guarantee the therapeutic efficacy or cure rate. Often, what they’re selling is more related to superstition than to scientific or medical knowledge.
This woman is not alone. In China, it is estimated around 15-30 million people will be affected by FMA each year. When I say “affected”, it means when people use search engines, read newspapers or watch TV, they are bombarded by FMA everywhere.
It is estimated that the total market size for false medicine in China is 300bn-400bn RMB in last year, which are about 50-60 bn US dollars. Among them, around 60 bn RMB is FMA, which are about 10 bn US dollars. This is a lot of money and a really booming industry!
So China might be the largest FMA country in the world, in terms of affected population and market size.
But ironically, China is also the largest producer of scientific research paper in the world in terms of publication numbers. It is said we are going to surpass US and become the No.1 just in this year.
So on the one hand, we are producing the most medical research, leading the world in the development of knowledge that can save lives. But on the other hand, we’re also producing the largest amount of misleading medical information, which can delay treatment and even kill people.
Why is that? I think there may be three main reasons. The first is in China, because we don’t get personal and continued interaction with physicians. In fact, we still have very few general practitioners, even in recent years. Our primary care system is still very weak. I know our government is trying to solve this problem, but it takes time.
Secondly, senior Chinese people are especially vulnerable to false medical information because they have placed high trust in the media as a source for authoritative information for decades. Most of them do not have the capability to distinguish information in the media as true or false. So when FMA floods the newspapers and TV programs, they just accept it without any doubts.
I have found this to be true, even in my own home. My parent-in-laws both have hypertension. The good thing is they still take the right drugs; the bad thing is they also trust those FMA on the media. So they’ve also bought socks, pillows, bracelets, and tea because these things claimed they can also “cure” hypertension. I have been trained as a neurologist for many years but they simply do not trust me. I think another reason is that Chinese parents always want to maintain their role as the so-called “authority figure”. This is a cultural thing.
The third reason for China’s massive amounts of FMA is because of very slight punishment for these crimes from our government. I call it “CRIME” instead of “misconduct” or “mistake”, simply because they are trying to cheat your money and kill you. This is from the Chinese Food and Drug Administration - and I’d like to go through it quickly. They say that, based on their monitoring during the whole year of 2012, plus the first three months of this year of 118 provincial TV channels, 171 urban TV channels and 101 newspapers, that over 90% health food advertising is illegal and 39% among these ads claimed their products have “therapeutic efficacy”. The CFDA also used these words to describe these FMA: “long term, massive, broad coverage, severely misleading, very bad influence, huge risks.”
But what is the punishment? “Administrative Warning.” It is going to be like this: “Hey you, bad guy…you are doing bad things. I have been watching you for 15 months. (Why 15 months?) Don’t do it again. I am warning you. If you do it again…I will warn you again.”
More interestingly, the government does not take any action to discourage the media partners. Not even any warnings. I don’t know why. Some people say in China, we Chinese don’t have the freedom of speech. But it is wrong in this case. I think we have “super” freedom of speech!
So, given that we can’t fight false medical advertisers with a primary care system, or by trying to control our elders, or through a stronger official regulatory system, my team and I began to think—maybe there is another way to battle these FMAs. At the beginning of this year, we put a team together—Eric Chong from the China Hospital Association, Liao Xinbo from the Guangdong Health Department, and Yu Keyi from PUMC Hospital—and we decided to combine our powers to do something to fight back against, and eventually stop, FMA in China.
First, we needed to assess the tactics of our opponent and learn from them if we want to succeed. Basically, they use two major ways to do FMA. Of course there are some other variations, but these two are the most common.
The first model is the “Instant Fix”. FMA will guarantee there is no operation, no drugs, no chemotherapy, and no radiotherapy… they just like magicians, with some magic powder, just hughhhh, and your tumor is gone and you are all good. I didn’t realize we have so many Harry Potters in China.
The second model is the “Cling-on”. The FMA will cling onto and abuse the names of academicians or reputable experts to promote their false information. They abused Zhong Nanshan’s name, Guo Yinglu’s name, both very reputable academicians in China. They even abused Noble Prize Winner’s name. Check it out; it is not just one Noble Prize Winner listed here, not 2 or 3 or 4 or 5, but nine Nobel Prize Winners. And they discovered some “super enzyme” and they already used it to conquer 19 diseases.
OK, we know their tricks. It is fine. We can do the same thing. Now let’s fight! Our strategy is using exactly the same way to fight back. And let’s do it with an unusual weapon—one that all Chinese citizens have: the cell phone.
First, we use cell phone to instantly “fix” these FMA. We called on our followers on Weibo-- it’s China’s version of Twitter-- to use their cellphones to take photos of FMA when they spot it. They then upload these photos to Weibo.
Next, they will use hash tag or @ to mention us and we will collect these pictures and identify them.
After identification, we will retweet these tweets and call for more retweets from our online collaborators, including reputable newspapers and websites on Weibo.
Step by step, the information is amplified and strengthened and more and more people joined our team. Just one post can create an “instant fix” but naming, shaming, and sharing information about these FMA.
Here are some sample tweets on Weibo.
We also used media, quite like FMA, to launch our “Cling-on” model. Eric invited 15 academicians to sign their names on the manifesto of stopping FMA. More than 20 CEOs from China public hospitals also signed their names to call for more efforts on banning FMA immediately. CCTV also joined us; they are the largest official TV station in China, and their joining far exceeded our expectations.
In just 6 months, we have collected and identified 500+ FMA from newspapers, TV programs and websites, with over 500,000 views and over 80,000 retweets. All using the cell phone, social media, and citizen participation.
We’re going to win the war against FMA because we’re not only using their tactics against them, but also creating new tactics. It’s not enough to identify false medical information; what about being able to provide accurate information?
So we asked ourselves-- what can we do on Wechat, another social media in China with over 300 million mobile users to defeat FMA?
First, DXY built a database with accurate information of reputable hospitals and doctors. Then we linked this database with our official account, 丁香医生. You can input disease name with “q” ahead and get right information immediately. “q” means query.
The feedback information includes the outpatient time of reputable doctors or hospitals around you and also their address and contact information.
In just one month, 丁香医生 has acquired 15,000 followers and received 200-300 queries per day in average.
We are still working on the database and trying to collect as much information as possible. But for some reason, there are always some diseases still not included yet and people will get no answer if they send queries, like this one.
So our next steps will include: WeiBo and WeChat promotion, we will definitely keep collecting and promoting. We are also planning to build a disease knowledge database, which can give you evidence-based information if you send a query about some disease. Another database we are considering about is the FMA database with media’s name. So people can browse and search in this FMA database and also find out which media is their partner?
In the future, we hope more doctors can join us in the future. It will be a big shame for Chinese doctors to only focus on scientific research and neglect FMA, which is just happening around them. Its time for all that accurate medical knowledge to be shared, to replace the fake knowledge. DXY has over 3 million members and around 2 million are Chinese physicians. I think we have the capability to call more doctors participation.
We hope more people, like you, can join us in our call to arms. Get on your cell phone; we need your retweet on Weibo or Wechat. This will be “Guerilla Warfare;” we need every netizen’s participation to succeed.
Last, but not least, we need our government to pay more efforts on building our primary care system and stopping FMA, not just through some warnings, but also with a stronger system for punishing FMA.
This is a war and it has only just begun, so let’s work together to build a safer and healthier world, for our children, our parents, and also ourselves.
Thank you.