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| - Recently, a claim was being widely circulated on social media that Harvard University has named the ‘Sujood’ posture, which is essentially the act of prostration in Islamic prayers, as the best remedy for backaches.
Several Facebook accounts shared this claim.
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Instagram account @taazakhabarofficial0, which describes itself as a ‘news and media website’ also posted this claim on its page. (Archived link)
View this post on Instagram
While checking for when this information was first shared, we found that the claim was not new and had gone viral in 2023 as well.
On August 16, 2023, X user @AllahGreatQuran had shared something very similar. The post garnered over 600,000 views and was reshared close to 5,000 times. (Archived link)
Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. Subhan’Allah pic.twitter.com/cLAcLI5n5e
— Allah Islam Quran (@AllahGreatQuran) August 16, 2023
Another verified X user @Al__Quraan also posted this around the same time. It has gathering over 850,000 views and reshared 5,700 times. (Archived Link)
Harvard University Declares Sujood Posture as the Best Medicine for Back Pain. pic.twitter.com/y83Wnk9Ek4
— • (@Al__Quraan) August 18, 2023
We were able to find several other X posts from 2023, which propagated the same claim. (Archives 1, 2, 3)
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Fact Check
To find the primary source related to the claim, Alt News ran a keyword search on X. This led us to an X post from Harvard Health’s verified X account (@HarvardHealth) from 2021. (Archive)
You might be considering surgery or other intervention to treat your back pain. But less may actually be more for this common problem, and in many instances the best medicine is good old-fashioned movement and exercise: https://t.co/kS15FLlj5F #HarvardHealth pic.twitter.com/TJv0YNtavv
— Harvard Health (@HarvardHealth) June 30, 2021
The post had a link to a 2020 article published by Harvard Health, which is affiliated to Harvard Medical School. While the article talks about the importance of regular exercise to keep spinal problems at bay, nowhere does it mention the ‘Sujood’ posture. However, we noticed that the image accompanying the article is similar to the Islamic practice of prostration during daily prayers.
Thus it is likely that a section of social media users may have misattributed the representative generic image in Harvard Health’s X post as Harvard Health promoting the ‘Sujood’ posture as a remedy for back pain and later shared the claim with an image of an Muslim person. The fact is that Harvard Health’s article, which talks about strategies to combat back pain, has no reference to the Islamic act of prostration, known as the ‘Sujood’, ‘Sijda’ or ‘Sejdah’.
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