THE RAMPANT OF VIETNAMESE TRADITIONAL HERBAL MEDICINE ADVERTISEMENT

Recently, some organizations have been using old people’s images to spread unknown-source medicines on social media, especially Youtube. These medicine are unconfirmed and could have a negative impact on people’s health. This essay will go through two reasons why these advertisements should be abolished and find out solutions for this situation.

Source: Youtube

Firstly, these Vietnamese traditional herbal medicine are unverified. Some promised medicine effects are cure diabetes, kidney stones, help you to lose weight or have a baby boy. However, according to the Ministry of Health, these “heal-all” are just functional foods with nothing but supplement effect. On the other hand, it brings some consequences on consumers’ health such as jaundice, yellow eyes, cardiac or even life-threatening. The Hospital of Tropical Diseases receives an average of 20 patients per month because of these herbal medicine. Other than that, the frequency of these advertisements could cause irritation to the viewers. Just imagine, you come home after a long day of work, have one hour to relax so you want to watch some videos on Youtube and you see are advertisement about some medicine with enigmatical message and phone numbers all over your screen. There is an amount of people reported this situation to Youtube that it make them tired and annoyed.

Secondly, these Vietnamese traditional herbal medicine advertisements are scam. Since advertising any kind of medication on Youtube is only legal in Canada, New Zealand or American but not Vietnam, one theory says that they use the name of popular communication by editing videos, adding other organizations’ logo or integrating professionals’ interview to their videos in order to increase prestige. Some say they even hire someone to pretend that they are healed by using those medicine or use license tampering trick like inform their products as functional food so they can pass Youtube’s censorship policies. Other says that Youtube is lending them a hand just to make profit for both sides because these falsification are easy to notice, even the medicine sources and reliability are unproven. The audience on Youtube are crowded and these ads mostly focus on parents or elderly who lack of knowledge and gullible. They take advantage of viewers’ faith in order to get them to purchase for the medicine. Basically, they are lying to Youtube and their consumers, which is unacceptable.

To sum up, spreading ads for unknown-origin Vietnamese traditional herbal medicine on social media can be harmful to people’s health and finance. Youtube should tighten their advertising policy and consumers should do research before purchasing anything online, especially medicine.