Cloatre Emilie, Pickersgill Martyn, A Atuire Caesar, Enright Mairead, Friesen Phoebe, Kingori Patricia, Ndoye Tidiane, Urquiza-Haas Nayeli
Law, King's College London The Dickson Poon School of Law, London, England, UK.
The University of Edinburgh Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Wellcome Open Res. 2025 Aug 6;10:414. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.24597.1. eCollection 2025.
Stories of unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims, and their impact on individual and public health, are commonplace around the world. Disquiet about such claims is ubiquitous and growing within public, clinical, scientific, and policy discourse, with law commonly presented as having an important role to play in addressing concerns. Action, though, requires regulators to account for competing considerations, including fundamental freedoms, cultural diversity, and the potential for law to exacerbate inequalities. The latter is particularly significant when assessing the veracity of marginalised beliefs. In practice, legal decision-makers walk a fine line between everyday tolerance and occasional intervention. Yet, legal research pertinent to these issues is surprisingly limited. Here, we argue that new knowledge, methods, and collaborations are needed to better understand how regulatory interventions relevant to contested claims are constituted; how they operate in practice; and how they relate to different political and social processes - including acts of public resistance (like campaigns and protests). Only once we are collectively equipped with such critical knowledge of the current nature and possibilities of regulatory relations will it be possible to collectively design more imaginative and inclusive legal responses.
关于未经证实、已被证伪或具有误导性的健康相关宣称及其对个人和公共健康影响的故事，在世界各地屡见不鲜。公众、临床、科学及政策讨论中，对这类宣称的不安普遍存在且日益加剧，法律通常被视为在解决这些担忧方面可发挥重要作用。然而，行动要求监管机构考虑相互竞争的因素，包括基本自由、文化多样性以及法律可能加剧不平等的可能性。在评估边缘化信仰的真实性时，后者尤为重要。实际上，法律决策者在日常宽容与偶尔干预之间小心翼翼地权衡。然而，与这些问题相关的法律研究却出奇地有限。在此，我们认为需要新知识、新方法及新合作，以更好地理解与有争议宣称相关的监管干预是如何构成的；它们在实践中如何运作；以及它们如何与不同的政治和社会进程相关联，包括公众抵抗行为（如运动和抗议）。只有当我们共同掌握了关于监管关系当前性质和可能性的此类关键知识，才有可能共同设计出更具想象力和包容性的法律应对措施。
