ST. LOUIS — When internal medicine doctor Farzana Hoque met with a patient Tuesday morning, he asked about something he'd heard online: COVID-19 vaccine recipients trying to detox their bodies of the shot by bathing in Borax laundry detergent.
"He was very scared. He read it on some Internet source," Dr. Hoque said.
A recipe by Dr. Carrie Madej instructs people to "detox the vaxx" by using household ingredients like baking soda, Epsom salt and Borax.
It's been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, but appears to now be largely erased from TikTok and YouTube.
Still, it drew the attention of Saturday Night Live, where it was skewered in this weekend's cold open.
Aidy Bryant played Texas Senator Ted Cruz and echoed a line form Dr. Madej saying "I read online that you can take a bath in Borax, and that will cleanse you of any nanotechnologies."
"Not true at all," Dr. Hoque said.
All jokes aside, Hoque said there's no scientific research to support detox baths — or another common recommendation: cupping — will leach anything from your body. But Madej's recipe, she said, can do harm.
"Think twice if you were planning to go into a shower with this Borax because it can be very caustic and harmful for your skin and eyes," she explained.
SLU Computer Science professor Flavio Esposito said "content is king," explaining social media companies do best when they have a lot of content, a lot of different content and users who spend a lot of time on the platform.
Each interaction with a platform creates data on a given user. This allows the companies to tailor content and target it to the people who are most likely to keep watching.
"The algorithms are sort of becoming better and better and selecting which one that would actually see which one," he explained.
Dr. Hoque said there are medical professionals spreading good information online, and she is happy to see that platforms seem to be removing misinformation.
Esposito said he would like to see more legislation around the misinformation issue.
Hoque said the research is clear about one thing: vaccines save lives.