Cancer patients are dying due to misinformation on social media, turning down life-saving treatment in favour of “radical diets” and natural “cures”, oncologists have said.
Doctors gathered in Chicago for the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) general meeting said that some patients are delaying the start of their treatment until their cancer becomes metastatic, or incurable.
Some patients are choosing alternative treatments such as diets and essential oils instead of life-saving medicines, the doctors said, with patients falling victim to those who “deliberately push unproven treatments or ideas”.
The oncologists said that the field was “losing the battle for communication” in the age of misinformation.
England’s chief doctor added that the rates of misinformation around cancer seen by the NHS had become “alarmingly high” recently.
Richard Simcock, the chief medical officer at the charity Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “I have recently seen two young women who have declined all proven medical treatments for cancer and are instead pursuing unproven and radical diets promoted on social media.
“As a doctor, I want to be able to use the best available therapies to help people with cancer. A person is perfectly entitled to decline that therapy but when they do that on the basis of information which is frankly untrue or badly interpreted it makes me very sad. It’s clear that we have work to do to build back trust in evidence-based medicine.”
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Source: The Times, 2 June 2025
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