Extracts below. Full text: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/cancer-misinformation-train-when-in...
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Christina Szalinski
November 07, 2025
The woman sitting across from Kathy Miller, MD, had arrived too late. Not late for her appointment — late for the kind of treatment that might have saved her life.
Months earlier, when her cancer was still confined, still beatable, she had chosen high dose vitamin C along with ivermectin and mebendazole — two drugs commonly used to treat parasites — after discovering tips from people on social media who promised that Big Pharma was hiding the real cures.
Miller, a breast oncologist at Indiana University Health, Indianapolis, now faced the delicate task of explaining how far the disease had progressed without saying what hung in the air between them: You could have been cured...
A 2021 study, which assessed 200 of the most popular social media articles on Facebook and other sites, found that about one third contained misinformation and more than 30% contained harmful information. A more recent analysis reported even higher rates of cancer misinformation online, revealing that 81% of cancer cures promoted on TikTok were not evidence-based...
A 2018 analysis found that, among patients with curable cancers, use of alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer therapies was independently associated with 2.5-fold greater risk for dying. Among those with breast and colorectal cancers, the risk for dying was even higher — 5.7-fold for breast cancer and about 4.5-fold for colorectal cancer...
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HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org