Health misinformation runs rampant on the internet, but it’s not limited to COVID-19. New research published in The Journal of The National Cancer Institute found that a third of the most popular articles on social media concerning treatment for common cancers contain factual inaccuracies.
“A lot of the misinformation we identified were claims that the current cancer treatments that we have are ineffective or more toxic than they actually are, as well as statements that there are other ‘cures’ that are basically unproven or disproven that include extreme diets or herbal remedies, folk remedies,” says Dr. Skyler Johnson, Huntsman Cancer Institute physician-scientist and assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Utah, who led the study.
Using a webscraping tool, Skyler and a group of researchers pulled 200 of the most popular articles on lung, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer found on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit between January 2018…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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