Hi
@jaminhealth -- I noticed this a month ago or so. As I recall, Rich Carson was told by the FDA that because he sold supplements, and the ProHealth forum had people discussing all kinds of ways to try to treat themselves--often with supplements--then a reader might infer that supplements were helping a certain health condition. The FDA could not countenance that, so that told him to shut down the forum--or else...
As tragic as this is, it's only one small facet of the all out war against any kind of health and medical thinking that goes against the grain. Below is a post by
@Hip on the Phoenix Rising forum on why traffic on PR has slowed down so much. -- Nice to see you posting here Jam; we go back a long ways!
ruben said:
I have been a member of PR since 2010. Now and again out of interest I check how many people are also on the site. The numbers seem very low. Anyone know if visitors to PR is down, steady or growing? Maybe people have just given up/resigned to their plight.
Hip replied:
There was a dramatic fall in PR readership in 2018, after the
medic update to Google's search algorithm, which placed alternative health and non-authoritative medical websites much further down in Google's search results. This was part of Google's policy of combatting fake news online.
After the medic update, PR was no longer getting as much web traffic from Google.
Before the medic update, PR had around 15,000 web sessions per month (a session is where a person spends some time reading a website on a particular occasion). Within a few months of the medic update, that figure went down to just 3,000. So PR had about a 5-fold reduction in traffic after the medic update.
It's very difficult to recover from this blow that Google inflicted, since Google is the the most widely used search engine, and if Google is not showing PR threads in its search results, then you don't get new readers and new members.
Other factors behind the fall in PR traffic are the rise of Facebook groups and the like, which may draw away people from PR. There are many general ME/CFS Facebook groups, and there are also specialist ME/CFS FB groups for treatments such as LDN, Abilify and craniocervical instability.
