When overwhelmed by uncertainty and distress, finding a sense of progress can be a good source of relief. A way that people are creating this sense of progress now is through sharing various (and often dubious) readily accessible treatments for COVID-19. Below is a collection of these gathered from social media sources. The treatments were easy to find, and each had at least a thousand listed interactions (comments, likes, shares, views, etc.). Associated back stories and further elaborations that could be found have been included in the form that they were originally shared on social media. Feel free to add to this list if you have any additions. This is not a list of recommendations and should not be taken or disseminated as such. Hopefully, it turns out to be a good bit of entertainment and a way to think about the sentiments and beliefs prevalent during this time. Do the proper research. The “validity” of nearly all the listed treatments have been investigated by Snopes and other established fact-checking entities.
Of these listed treatments, you probably already know before looking which ones you would believe and which ones you might not, so a more interesting question is, which treatments do you think someone else might believe? For me, this list turned out to be an interesting way to think about different impacts of COVID-19. What are the thoughts of those who created and decided to share these treatments? Did they do so with genuine conviction? Or was it instead done with a deceptive intent? Do you find any of them comical or particularly compelling? These treatments have been widely shared for one reason or another. Do any of them strike you as comforting, intriguing, funny, concerning, or irritating? How come? Which do we choose to take seriously, and which do we not? What makes one better than any of the others? What effects might the ones that we view as misinformation have on someone who instead finds them valid?
It can be tough to imagine what comes after something as disruptive as the pandemic, and it can be even more difficult to imagine how others might be affected and what they might be going through. It makes for an awkward time to share and talk about what we want to do, what we could do, and what we think we should do when there are so many different lives and perspectives playing out at the same time. Before putting this list together, when I thought about the others’ situations, my own circumstances, and what I could do to help others or myself, my thoughts felt like they would lock up, and I couldn’t figure out how to make any headway in knowing what the heck is going on. Do I really know what other people are experiencing? When should I feel thankful or upset about my own circumstances? I’m certain that there are people whose situations I can’t imagine whether they are at ease or feel trapped by worry and panic. “How much am I being ignorant of?” was the heavy question weighing down my thoughts. Although this list started out as just a way to share some light-hearted humor, I think I settled on sharing it out of a couple ideas because it gave me a way to think about how different people are being affected and responding to this global phenomenon, more freely. It lowered the stakes. It took off some of the burden of wondering whether the attitudes and motivations I imagined were an affront to someone’s experiences that I might not have considered. Oddly enough, taking these treatments and their driving motivations out of context, I felt like I finally had a space where I could begin to examine the faults in my thoughts without just shutting down from all the uncertainty. I feel dumb, for sure, when I realize I was oversimplifying, misjudging, or trivializing, but it is a whole lot better than noticing, becoming discouraged, and then giving up. I felt that at least I could start making some progress.
Hopefully this list can help you find a way to start thinking about experiences and perspectives if this is something that you might also have also been struggling with, and that it helps to make it easier to evaluate your assumptions, re-evaluate, and ultimately gain some applicable insights to your own situation and those of others. While I was pulling the list together, questions about who would believe what or how might someone feel about X just naturally bubbled up. If you want to give this a try, remember that you can always go at your own pace, especially while transitioning from imagined experiences to the close-to-home reality we hear about in the news and on social media. If you would rather not try, I think you will still find items in this list to be surprising, entertaining, and perhaps insightful in a different kind of way. However you choose to approach this list, I hope it can help you to find a new way to think about the different attitudes and responses to life with the pandemic, how they came to be, and where they might be taking us. Again, feel free to comment or edit the list if you come across anything you would like to add.
List of purported treatments compiled from social media:
- Saltwater gargle in the morning and evening and after leaving the house
- “Corona virus before it reaches the lungs it remains in the throat for four days and at this time the person begins to cough and have throat pains. If he drinks water a lot and gargling with warm water & salt or vinegar eliminates the virus. Spread this information because you can save someone with this information.”
- Drink hot ginger or lemon tea with baking soda
- “Mix and drink as hot tea every afternoon,” the post says. “The action of the lemon with hotter baking soda immediately kills the virus [and] completely eliminates it from the body.”
- Drink freshly boiled garlic water
- “Good news, Wuhan’s corona virus can be cured by one bowl of freshly boiled garlic water. Old Chinese doctor has proven its efficacy. Many patients has also proven this to be effective. Eight (8) cloves of chopped garlics add seven (7)cups of water and bring to boil., Eat and drink the boiled garlic water, overnight improvement and healing. Glad to share this.”
- Heat the inner nose and throat using a hair dryer
- Video has been removed
- Sipping water every 15 mins will prevent the new coronavirus from entering your windpipe and lungs
- Use hot water when you shower or take a bath to kill the virus
- Eat a fried egg with vinegar
- Eat a boiled egg
- “A woman had a baby and the new born child could talk right away and the baby said ‘the second wave of Coronavirus is coming and each person needs to eat a boiled egg so they won’t catch the virus’ then the baby passed away and went to heaven”
- Cut open and sniff a raw onion 8 times each day
- Consume quinine/seltzer water and zinc vitamins
- “Every person needs to share this because there’s a lot of bullshit going on right now that everybody needs to know about. And I’m going to throw some common sense at you because most people aren’t looking at this. Go get some quinine and get some zinc.”
- Treatment of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine, zinc vitamins, and azithromycin
- Sear an orange, with the peel still intact, with open flames until black and allow the smell to permeate the room
- “Steam Sea Salt and Orange peelings. Inhale the steam for 15 minutes. It Suppose to Prevent Corona Virus from entering the body. Seen it on social media and yes I’m doing it”
