3 . False medical news can lead to patients’ experiencing greater side effects through the “nocebo effect (反安慰剂效果)”. Sometimes patients benefit from an intervention simply because they believe they will- -that’s the placebo effect. The nocebo effect is the opposite: Patients can experience negative effects just because they expect them. This is very true of statins. In blinded trials, patients who get statins are no more likely to report feeling muscle aches than patients who get a placebo. Yet, in clinical practice, according to one study, almost a fifth of patients taking statins report side effects, leading many to discontinue the drugs.

What else is on the fake news hit list? As always, vaccines. False concerns that the vaccine for the virus called human papilloma virus causes seizures (癫痫) and other side effects reduced coverage rates in Japan from 10 percent to less than 1 percent in recent years.

Cancer is another big target for pushers of medical misinformation — many of whom are making money off alternative therapies. “Though most people think cancer tumors are bad, they’re actually the way your body attempts to contain the harmful cells,” one fake news story reads. It suggests that surgery increases the risk of spreading harmful cells.

Silicon Valley needs to own this problem. When human health is at risk, perhaps search engines, social media platforms and websites should be held responsible for promoting or hosting fake information. The scientific community needs to do its part to educate the public about key concepts in research, such as the difference between observational studies and higher quality randomized trials.

Finally, journalists can do a better job of spreading accurate information. News sites are more likely to cover catchy observational studies than randomized controlled trials, perhaps because the latter are less likely to produce surprising results. Such coverage can overstate benefits, claiming for example, that statins could cure cancer; it can unduly emphasize potential risks, such as suggesting a misleading connection with dementia, a serious mental disorder.

5 . Minutes can make a difference when a life is on the line. The American Red Cross has begun offering free training and certification (合格证书) so high school students can act fast in medical emergencies.

Traumatic injuries (创伤性损伤) are the leading cause of death in Americans younger than 45. “What we are trying to do is take lessons that we learned from the battlefield — people with life-threatening injuries might have a much better chance of surviving if they can have immediate treatment,” said Craig Goolsby, a professor of Military Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University. “If people can stop bleeding, particularly bleeding from arms and legs, we have a lot better chance of saving the lives of those people once they reach the hospital,” he said.

First Aid for Severe Trauma (FAST) training is available to teach high school students how to talk to each other effectively during an emergency, how to make sure that the scene is safe so additional people don’t get hurt and how to stop bleeding with a tourniquet (止血带) or direct pressure. “Just some of those really basic things that can be lifesaving before an ambulance arrives,” Goolsby said.

“My team has done a series of research studies over the past several years looking at the public’s ability to apply tourniquets or apply direct pressure. We’ve found that even very brief education, like 15 minutes of education, can have a great effect on how people will react,” Goolsby added. “They start out at a lower level of likelihood of response, get the training, and then all of a sudden, they’re more likely to respond.”

Goolsby noted that in many emergencies, average people on the street jumped in to help people who were injured. “Giving the public these tools and the courage to say ‘I can do this.’ is really important. The FAST program does that. And so we’re excited to be able to empower this next generation of Americans to take those steps,” he said.

6 . What if computers could replace patients? If virtual (虚拟的) humans could have replaced real people in some stages of a drug trial, it could have sped up development of a preventive tool and slowed down the spread of viruses. Similarly, potential drugs that weren’t likely to work could have been identified early, cutting trial costs and avoiding testing poor drug candidates on living volunteers. These are some of the benefits of “in silico medicine”, which is also known as “computational medicine”.

Powerful computers get to work based on the data according to some rules, producing a virtual organ (器官) that looks and behaves like the real thing. With virtual organs, the modeling begins by feeding data into a complex mathematical model of the mechanisms.

In silico clinical trials are already underway to an extent. For the foreseeable future, real patients will be needed in late-stage studies, but in silico trials will make it possible to conduct quick and inexpensive first assessments of safety and efficiency, hugely reducing the number of live human subjects required for experimentation.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for instance, is using computer simulations (模拟) in place of human trials for evaluating new technology systems. The agency has also published guidance for designing trials of drugs and devices that include virtual patients.

Beyond speeding results and reducing the risks of clinical trials, in silico medicine can be used in place of risky interventions (干预) that are required for analyzing or planning treatment of certain medical conditions. For example, HeartFlow Analysis, a cloud-based service approved by the FDA, enables doctors to identify heart disease based on CT images of a patient’s heart. The HeartFlow system has used these images to construct a dynamic model of the blood running through the heart, thus identifying abnormal conditions and their severity. Without this technology, doctors would need to cut into the body to perform an angiogram (血管造影) to decide whether and how to intervene. Experimenting on digital models of individual patients can also help personalize treatment for any number of conditions.