1. There are claims all over the internet about the use of herbs, palm oil, ginger and lemon, shea butter amongst others as effective treatment for COVID-19.
If a treatment is said to be effective for a condition..

2. It must have been studied and would have fulfilled all the criteria of an effective treatment. Such a study must be reproducible and can be replicated (meaning that if you use the drug in Ibadan and Owerri, in New York and Abuja,

3. In Milan and New Zealand, it will give the same outcome in the same group of patients). The study population must have been properly recruited (In the case of COVID-19...are you studying in patients with mild or moderate symptoms?).

4. It should have been a controlled blinded study (preferably double blinded) meaning that you have two groups of people for comparison and the treatment that was given to each group was not known by both researcher and study population..

5. It must have been randomized which means that you don't pick just anyone to partake in the study.
It must be scientifically proven.

The problem with most of these claims...is that none usually satisfies the criteria listed above.

6. You cannot use a treatment in an unspecified small number of people and start to make grandiose claims.
It is possible that these remedies make the symptoms better. When managing patients, if they have some local remedies that they firmly believe in...

7. As long as it doesn't affect their treatment in anyway...I let them be. For example...if you tell me that taking a spoon of palm oil when you have a cough makes you feel better...by all means, I leave you to continue.

8. However, you cannot tell me that taking a spoon of kerosene when you have the flu makes you better and I'll leave you to continue.

Medicine and science is evidence based. And this evidence is based on certain statistics and numbers.

9. So to all you lemon and ginger drinkers(like my mum), all you shea butter users, all the people that swear by palm oil...just to let you know that you're doing well for yourself. But please, enough of the grandiose claims. It is tantamount to falsehood.