When we talk about misinformation, we often focus on its downstream effects: polarization, lost trust, and distorted public discourse. Still, there’s one corner of misinformation where the consequences are quicker and easier to measure: cancer.
Misinformation about cancer is not the problem. About 40% of people receives a cancer diagnosis during his lifetime. And a growing body of research links misinformation about cancer prevention and treatment not just to a polluted online environment, but to real harm to people’s lives. 2018 study found Cancer patients who chose alternative treatments over conventional treatments were more than twice as likely to die within five years. The risk of death was 4.5 and 5.6 times higher for colorectal and breast cancer, respectively. In other words, choosing alternative treatments was associated with a 350% increased risk of dying from colon cancer and a 460% increased risk of dying from breast cancer.
Why Cancer Is Vulnerable to Misinformation
Misinformation researchers claim is cancer sample topic to accurately study misinformation, because its consequences are very measurable. Unlike political misinformation, whose real-world effects are more widespread and harder to track, cancer misinformation produces outcomes we can directly observe: treatment adherence, survival rates, mortality.
A number of factors make the cancer information environment particularly dangerous.
Cancer is very complicated. This term describes hundreds of different diseases with thousands of treatments and the length of clinical practice guidelines has grown exponentially Between 1996 and 2019. This creates a huge vulnerability for simple answers that sound convincing. There are also strong financial incentives to exploit this vulnerability: alternative medicine In the US, the industry itself was evaluated 30 billion dollars in 2022. This creates strong economic incentives to target desperate patients with familiar, out-of-pocket “treatments” such as high-dose vitamins, supplements, or highly specific diets.
The cruelest thing is that the diagnosis of cancer itself undermines the disease cognitive resources necessary for critical evaluation of information. Psychological stress, fatigue and information overload are common. Patients who must make informed decisions are often the least equipped to do so when it matters most.
How algorithms and identifiers misinform cancer patients
Review these 2024 documents the extent to which misinformation fills the cancer information environment. Research across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter consistently finds that low-quality content gets more views, more likes, and more shares than authentic content. One study found that false articles about cancer are shared 28 times more than the truth. How it reflects the main thing social networks algorithms work: engagement is rewarded, and fearhope and anger make participation more persuasive than careful, evidence-based communication.
But there is a deeper reason why filling the zone with better information has failed, and it comes from person theory. When faith is tied to an important social identity (anti-exploitation worldview, distrust pharmaceutical companies, a community of colleagues looking for alternatives), challenging this belief no longer feels like a real debate. It’s like a personal attack. People don’t renew; they dig.
This applies to a wide range of areas, including cancer. The diagnosis itself is a major personality disorder. In this context, alternative treatment communities can offer things that oncology waiting rooms often cannot: belonging, agency, and hope. Even if the medical claims are false, the social and psychological rewards of these communities are real.
A new study shows this in real time. Following a viral podcast episode in which celebrities promoted ivermectin and fenbendazole as cancer treatments, prescription rates more than doubled and more than 2.5-fold among cancer patients nationwide, accounting for nearly 70 million patients. The sharpest increases were among white patients, men and those living in the South, reflecting the demographic profile of the platforms promoting these claims. Misinformation is not spread randomly. It traveled through identified networks to communities ready to receive it. The reason for this is difficult to analyze: we cannot know for sure whether the podcast led to an increase in prescriptions or whether it reflected a growing, pre-existing conversation about unproven treatments.
One important question is how often people who use alternative therapies avoid or delay evidence-based care. I have discussed this beforeand it would be useful to see more research in this area. Even delays in evidence-based treatment can increase the risk of serious adverse outcomes. When a patient discusses an unproven treatment, the persuasion work and potential impact have already occurred above. Only 18 percent of physicians report any formal training in reviewing unproven treatments. Despite the fact that 99% of oncologists encounter it regularly.
What can help debunk cancer misinformation?
There is no single solution. But the research points to several possibilities.
Clinicians need to be taught the communication skills necessary to address not only facts, but also to overcome misinformation without threatening identity, meeting patients with their values rather than correcting their beliefs. The engagement algorithms of various social media platforms also facilitate the spread of sensationalism and outright lies. When dealing with large amounts of misinformation, researchers and communicators need to focus not only on correcting outright false claims, but also on the social and identity conditions that give rise to susceptibility in the first place.
The same communities that promoted ivermectin COVID helped cancer. The claim was amended; there was no core identity orientation. Fixing one claim without regard to the structural conditions that give rise to the next is a losing strategy.
This ties into something I will come back to in my work on trust: you don’t fix a broken information environment by feeding more facts into the noise. Trusted messengers (a doctor who listens before writing a prescription, a public figure who knows a family well) work because they relate to the people they serve. Misinformation about cancer thrives in the absence of this relationship, in the gap between a fearful patient and an institution that feels distant.
Cancer misinformation is directly related to higher mortality rates, but we still see it as something that individual patients can navigate and individual doctors can address in short appointments, while platforms continue to have their algorithms do the opposite. Ultimately, this makes it one of the most glaring examples of a far-from-healthy lesson: when trust is broken, misinformation doesn’t have to be reliable, it just has to exist. Building endurance It means creating social environments where trusted people, not viral posts, shape our most important decisions.
A version of this post also appears in Misguided: The Newsletter and Your local epidemiologist
