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About 30 percent of cancer-related content on social media, including YouTube, is misinformation not verified medically, a recent study showed.

A research team, led by Professor Kwon Jeong-hye of the Hemato-oncology Department at Chungnam National University Sejong Hospital, said Monday that it published a study, "Understanding the Social Mechanism of Cancer Misinformation Spread on YouTube and Lessons Learned: Infodemiological Study", in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).

To grasp the spreading structure of cancer-related information on YouTube, the researchers selected 702 YouTube video clips (227 channels) related to the self-prescription of fenbendazole, an anthelmintic used against parasites in animals. Afterward, they extracted 90 videos (excluding overlapping recommendations) uploaded from September 2019 to September 2020, recorded 50,000 or more views, and analyzed the data.

http://www.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=15156

I do wonder about how this relates to other content, medical or not, on social media. Is it more than the norm, or less? Which are the most aggregious?

I would predict that the more tied to a political platform or movement, the more misinformation. For example, when basic science about the pandemic became political (at least in the US) then misinformation about it blossomed.

I’m ok with this. If you trust the YouTube videos your cousin shares on Facebook over medical professionals, then by all means… you do you, you f—-ing nincompoop.

At least 30% of [insert literally anything you want here] contents on social media/thr internet in general is unproven/outright fake info

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I wonder how much lower this could be if cancer treatment didn't cost people so much money, and if wait times to get seen weren't so long...

Thats far less than i expected

“30% of cancer contents on social media are unproven info.”

Including this statistic posted above.

Tell this to my aunt who thinks that doctors are hiding mistletoe tea from us as a cancer cure.

Yeah, I'm really not sure where that number came from.

I think a distinction should be drawn between pain and comfort management VS disease treatment for these purposes. I'm broadly fine with the latter being characterized as misinformation and a problem to be dealt with, but the former is often "unproven" and in some ways unprovable except by patient reporting, and in cases where only a minority find a treatment useful for those purposes it can be difficult to study and determine, as well as ethically questionable if its simply a placebo effect assisting those who distrust medical establishments and their pills, including placebos. I dont see much of an issue with alternative pain and quality of life treatments if they are not directly medically inadvisable like quaffing bleach or something. Alternative treatment stuff should probably be cracked down on though.

I don't know why people are so suspicious of doctors and drug treatments. I kind of get the desire to believe that drinking tea made from some rare plant on a remote island will cure cancer for you in two weeks. That sounds better than chemo and radiation and surgery and months of recovery with only a 65% chance of surviving it all; for sure. But I don't understand the wild conspiracy stance that goes alone with it. Somehow thousands and thousands of doctors, drug makers and all the other medical professionals are in on this conspiracy to hide that magic tea from you, and that makes perfect sense to people.

Those same people love the mobster movie line, "Three people can keep a secrete... if two of them are dead!" because somewhere they know in their own lives how hard it is to keep a secret, but somehow they will believe everyone in the entire medical profession is keeping a simple cure-all from them and not a single nurse or college researcher has leaked it.

(Poorly) editorialized title, reported

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Probably the ease at which the information can be validated is inversely proportional to the misinformation content.

Social media turns out to be a massive eugenics project.

Brought to you by big pharma where they pay for their approved science

If you chose dewormer over clinically proven drugs for your cancer because you saw it on Facebook, you kinda deserve the early death.

It’s based on the research protocol in the article.

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public forums on alternative cancer treatments are deeply infiltrated by big pharma and AMA professional trolls. You can find good research on alternative cancer treatments in non US journals. Its difficult research and often only the abstract is in english.