Associated organisationsLancaster University · McGill University · Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar · University of Birmingham · University of Edinburgh · University of Kent · University of OxfordEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£5.0M
PeriodFeb 2025 — Feb 2031
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A court in Ghana blocks a traditional healer from advertising a cure for HIV, while a UK regulator fines a company for selling bogus cancer treatments. These are two examples of how different states handle unproven health claims—and this project will be the first to systematically compare those approaches across eight countries. The problem is that regulators currently operate in silos, with no shared understanding of what works or what the unintended consequences might be. Aggressive crackdowns can push dubious treatments underground, while weak enforcement leaves patients vulnerable to exploitation. This research will map the legal and social fallout of current strategies in Europe, West Africa, and North America. If successful, the project will produce concrete policy recommendations and alternative legal models that regulators could adopt. It will also train a new generation of researchers who can work across law, sociology, and medicine—breaking down the disciplinary walls that have kept this issue under-examined. The immediate output is a deeper understanding of how law shapes access to health information, not a new drug or device, but that understanding could reshape how governments protect citizens from harm without silencing legitimate dissent.
View original technical description
This Discovery Award will explore how unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states; examine the socio- political implications of current strategies; and imagine and propose alternative legal models. The Award will constitute a bold intervention into a complex social and legal issue, offering the first in-depth and cross-cutting interdisciplinary exploration of this highly pressing yet surprisingly under- explored matter. Our collective expertise in socio-legal studies, science and technology studies (STS), medical sociology and philosophy will be used to lead a theoretically-informed empirical investigation of regulatory approaches in three regional zones: Europe (France, Greece, Ireland, and the UK), West Africa (Ghana and Senegal), and North America (Mexico and Canada). We will bring together well-established qualitative methods, innovative cross- disciplinary strategies, and critical approaches to law and to the making of legitimate knowledge, in order to foster new scholarly and policy perspectives, and to push the boundaries of legal imagination. In addition to its key empirical and conceptual contributions, this Discovery Award will aim to build capacity for interdisciplinary research at the crossroad of law and the health social sciences and humanities, disrupting persistent barriers to the development of critical knowledge on law, health, and society.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know