False Positive - www.1mg.com. (medicalpseudoscience List)

[AyanokojiK1yotaka]

1mg.com, now known as Tata 1mg, is India's leading online pharmacy and healthcare platform. It offers prescription and OTC medicines, lab tests, online doctor consultations, and health information across over 1,000 cities.

[infinitytec]

Hello, thanks for the feedback.
I can see you brought this up in #15 but I'm willing to take another look.

I agree that it appears to be a well-known company, and I'd love to remove it from the list, however I have several concern that make it difficult for me to do so at this time:

1. They promote Ayurveda and sell products for it. My understanding is that this is part of Indian culture, however it is still not evidence-based medicine.
2. They promote homeopathy and sell products for it. Homeopathy is at best completely misguided and at worst is a scam.
3. Their FAQ on hydroxychloroquine is... out of date in relation to its evidence against COVID-19.

I think that removing the site, at this time, would be inconsistent with the goals of the list.

I will leave this issue open for now for discussion.

[AyanokojiK1yotaka]

Thanks for the response and for being open to discussion.

I’d like to respectfully push back on the decision to keep 1mg (Tata 1mg) on a medical pseudoscience blocklist, because the current reasoning appears to conflate platform neutrality with ideological endorsement.

1. Presence ≠ Promotion

Tata 1mg is fundamentally a regulated digital pharmacy and healthcare platform, not an advocacy site for alternative medicine.

It lists:

Prescription medicines

Diagnostics

Doctor consultations

OTC products

Government-recognized traditional medicine systems

The inclusion of Ayurveda or homeopathy products reflects the legal and healthcare framework of India — not a mission to promote pseudoscience.

By this logic, many global pharmacies and retailers would also qualify for inclusion simply because they sell supplements or alternative products.

2. National Healthcare Context Matters

Ayurveda and homeopathy are formally institutionalized under India’s Ministry of AYUSH.

This is not fringe or underground — it is part of the state-recognized healthcare ecosystem.

A blocklist that categorizes compliance with national regulatory structure as pseudoscience risks:

Cultural bias

Geographic misinterpretation

Overbroad classification

3. Core Platform Function

The primary role of 1mg is mainstream healthcare access.

Millions rely on it for:

Prescription fulfilment

Lab testing

Teleconsultation

Evidence-based medical products

Its main utility is aligned with modern medicine.

A platform should not be classified by the least evidence-based product it carries, but by its primary function and intent.

4. Hydroxychloroquine Reference

Early COVID-era informational material about HCQ was widely present across global health institutions when scientific consensus was still evolving.

Using historical informational content from that period as a present-day classification signal sets a precedent that would implicate a large portion of the medical ecosystem.

5. Impact on Blocklist Credibility

Including large regulated healthcare platforms weakens the signal quality of a pseudoscience-focused blocklist.

Blocklists are most effective when they target:

➡️ Entities whose primary purpose is misinformation
➡️ Sites actively promoting non-evidence-based treatments as substitutes for medicine

Tata 1mg does not meet this threshold.

Recommendation

A full-domain listing appears disproportionate.

If specific concerns remain, more precise solutions exist:

Section-level filtering

Content-type classification

Documentation of mixed-content platforms

Rather than blanket inclusion.

Maintaining precision is critical for the credibility and usability of this list — especially for users in regions where such platforms are essential healthcare infrastructure.