Results: Daily Debate: Do medical awareness campaigns work?

The naysayers who dismissed the Ice Bucket Challenge as "hashtag activism" might be wrong. The $100 million in funding the challenge generated has let to breakthroughs in our understanding of what causes ALS and how it can be treated. Researchers now report that AlS - a fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes the muscles in the body to deteriorate is caused by a defective protein, and stem cell therapy has shown promising results in lab tests.

Jonathan Ling, medical researcher at Johns Hopkins, stated in a Reddit AMA that funding from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been instrumental in helping scientists break new scientific ground. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a medical awareness campaign in which supporters shared videos of themselves drenching themselves with ice water, then asked their friends to do the same in an effort to raise money for ALS.