A social psychologist found that showing people how manipulative techniques work can create resilience against misinformation
Misinformation can feel inescapable. Last summer a survey from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies found that 62 percent of people regularly notice false or misleading information online. And in a 2019 poll, almost nine in 10 people admitted to having fallen for fake news. Social psychologist Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge studies how and why people share such information and how it can be stopped. He spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas to discuss this work and his new book, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, which offers research-backed solutions to stem this spread.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
In Foolproof, you borrow an analogy from the medical world, arguing that misinformation operates a lot like a virus. How did you come to that comparison?
I was going through journals and found models from epidemiology and public health that are used to understand how information propagates across a system. Instead of a virus spreading, you have an information pathogen. Somebody shares something with you, and you then spread it to other people.
That led me to wonder: If it’s true that misinformation spreads like a virus, is it possible to inoculate people? I came across some work from the 1960s by Bill McGuire, a psychologist who studied how people could protect themselves from “brainwashing.” He had a very similar thought. That connection led to this whole program of research.
How do we get “infected”?
A virus attacks by exploiting our cells’ weak spots and hijacking some of their machinery. It’s the same for the mind in many ways. There are certain cognitive biases that can be exploited by misinformation. Misinformation infects our memories and influences the decisions that we make.
One example is the illusory truth bias. That’s the idea that just hearing something repeatedly—even if you know that it is wrong—makes it seem more true. These learned automatic associations are part of how the brain works.
In your research, you’ve extended the virus metaphor to argue that we can vaccinate ourselves against misinformation through a technique that you call “prebunking.” How does that work?
Prebunking has two parts. First is forewarning, which jump-starts the psychological immune system because it’s sleeping most of the time. We tell people that someone may want to manipulate them, which raises their skepticism and heightens their awareness.
The second part of the prebunk is analogous to providing people with a weakened dose of the virus in a vaccine. For example, in some cases, you get a small dose of the misinformation and tips on how to refute it. That can help people be more resilient against misinformation.
In addition, we have found that there are general techniques used to manipulate the spread of misinformation in a lot of different environments. In our studies, we have found that if you can help people spot those broader techniques, we can inoculate them against a whole range of misinformation. For instance, in one study, people played a game [Bad News] to help them understand the tactics used to spread fake news. That improved their ability to spot a range of unreliable information by about 20 to 25 percent.
So you help people recognize and resist incoming misinformation broadly by alerting them to the techniques people use to manipulate others. Can you walk me through an example?
Sure. We created a series of videos in partnership with Google to make people more aware of manipulative techniques on YouTube. One is a false dichotomy, or false dilemma. It’s a common tactic and one that our partners at Google alerted us to because it’s present in many radicalization videos.
In a false dichotomy, someone incorrectly asserts that you have only one of two options. So an example would be “either you’re not a good Muslim, or you have to join ISIS.” Politicians use this approach, too. In a U.S. political context, an example might be: “We have to fix the homelessness problem in San Francisco before we start talking about immigrants.”
In our research, we have exposed people to this concept using videos that explain false dichotomies in nonpolitical scenarios. We use popular culture like Family Guy and Star Wars. People have loved it, and it’s proved to be a really good vehicle.
So in our false dichotomy video, you see a scene from a Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, where Anakin Skywalker says to Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy,” to which Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” The video cuts to explain that Anakin has just used a false dichotomy.
After seeing a video like this, the next time you’re presented with just two options, you realize somebody may be trying to manipulate you.
In August you published findings from a study with more than 20,000 people viewing these videos, which called out techniques such as false dilemmas, scapegoating and emotionally manipulative language. What did you learn?
What we find is that, using these videos, people are better able to recognize misinformation that we show them later both in the lab and on social media. We included a live test on the YouTube platform. In that setup, the environment is not controlled, and people are more distracted, so it’s a more rigorous test.
These videos were part of an ad campaign run by Google that had millions of views. Google has now rolled out videos based on this research that are targeted at misinformation about Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees in Europe. They are specifically helping people spot the technique of scapegoating.
In the book, you point out that many people who think they are immune to misinformation are not. For instance, in one survey, almost 50 percent of respondents believed they could spot fake news, but only 4 percent succeeded. Even “digital natives” can fall for fake content. Can this happen to anyone?
A lot of people are going to think that they’re immune. But there are basic principles that expose us all. For example, there is an evolutionary argument that’s quite important here called the truth bias. In most environments, people are not being actively deceived, so our default state is to accept that things are true. If you had to critically question everything, you couldn’t get through your day. But if you are in an environment—like on social media—where the rate of misinformation is much higher, things can go wrong.
In addition to biases, the book highlights how certain social behaviors and contexts, including online echo chambers, skew what we see. With so many forces working against us, how do you stay optimistic?
We do have biases that can be exploited by producers of misinformation. It’s not easy, given all of the new information we’re exposed to all the time, for people to keep track of what’s credible. But I’m hopeful because there are some solutions. Prebunking is not a panacea, but it’s a good first line of defense, and it helps, as does debunking and fact-checking. We can help people maintain accuracy and stay vigilant.
Inaccurate statements and lies from public figures and political and government leaders have the power to exacerbate dangerous upheavals in our political, health care, and social environments. The widespread misinformation, inaccuracies, and lies about the COVID-19 pandemic (about the origin of the virus, the severity of illness, vaccination, and “cures,” to name a few) illustrate the potentially disastrous consequences of false information. Academic medicine must recognize the dangers of such lies and inaccuracies, particularly those related to health, and must understand their sources in traditional and social media and how and why many in the public accept them. Academic health professionals have a unique responsibility to promote and defend the truth in medicine and science, help the public to understand the sources of inaccurate scientific information, and find ways to debunk falsehoods spread by politicians and media outlets. Innacurate information and lies have threatened the health of the population, the function of health systems, and the training of the future health workforce. They must be combatted by truth telling through scholarly work, clinical activities, and educating health professions trainees at all levels. Academic medicine’s institutions should also consider joining the communities they serve and their medical specialty organizations to engage in political advocacy whenever possible. Health professions journals have an important role in highlighting and clarifying important topics and sustaining conversations on them within the academic medicine community. Across all its missions and activities, academic medicine must do its best to combat today’s poisonous misinformation, inaccuracies, and lies, and to enter the larger social and political struggles that will determine the health of society and the future.
An important component of cancer care is communication with patients and caregivers about their disease.
But in a communication age where social media is king, cancer misinformation travels far and fast.
Connecting with patients to combat cancer misinformation may require a multifaceted approach on multiple platforms, according to Erqi Liu Pollom, MD, MS. “I think we can do better in reaching out to patients and filling that vacuum of information so they’re not out there searching on their own,” she said. Source: Stanford Cancer Center.
“What keeps me up at night is thinking about the root causes of the spread of misinformation — the disinformation endeavors and what they may do to public health and people’s emotions and relationships, fostering hate between groups and division in society,” Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, PhD, MPH, program director in the health communication and informatics research branch of the behavioral research program at NCI, told Healio.
Chou referenced an editorial commentary she wrote a little over a year ago for American Journal of Public Health on the results of an analysis of the “#China-virus” hashtag on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, including how it “emboldened xenophobia and racist sentiments.”
Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou
“Online and offline interactions are intertwined. Powerful people on social media can affect the real world and cause harms in vulnerable people; it’s not just words,” Chou said. “That makes me think that, in a way, a cancer diagnosis is one way for someone to become more vulnerable. Without policies in place to protect the vulnerable and change how social media platforms operate, I worry that things are not going to get better and, if anything, get worse.”
The spread of cancer misinformation online isn’t limited to any specific disease or social media platform. It’s everywhere, according to experts in the field who are working diligently to identify the best ways to combat it.
Healio spoke with oncologists and leading communication experts in science and medicine about the prevalence of cancer misinformation on social media, important research into the issue and possible strategies to improve communication platforms and disseminate trustworthy information more effectively.
A problem ‘across multiple health topics’
Skyler B. Johnson, MD, physician-scientist at Huntsman Cancer Institute and assistant professor of radiation oncology at The University of Utah, discovered the scale and scope of cancer misinformation when his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
Like any other person, he went online to do some quick research. But unlike many people without a medical background, Johnson could identify misinformation.
Skyler B. Johnson
“I came away from that experience with quite a bit of empathy for patients,” Johnson said during an interview last year with Healio. “I encounter a lot of patients through my oncology practice who believe misinformation they read online and through social media, and it has led to delays in their diagnosis and treatment. It has led to refusal of proven cancer treatments and, ultimately, their early deaths.”
In July, Johnson and colleagues published results of a study in Journal of the National Cancer Institute that showed one-third of the most popular cancer treatment articles on social media included inaccurate information. Perhaps even more troubling: Most of the misinformation they identified had the potential to harm patients with approaches that could have negative effects on treatment quality and survival.
In a separate, mixed-methods experimental study last year, published in Journal of Cancer Education, Chou and colleagues integrated eye-tracking, survey and interviews to examine how participants assessed cancer messages’ believability when viewing simulated Facebook posts. They wanted to see how people discern credible information from noncredible posts, what caught their attention, where they looked and how they made decisions.
“We found that participants spent a lot of time viewing (dwelling on) the nonevidence-based posts,” Chou said. “It may be because inaccurate messages were generally more vivid and shocking or even emotionally provocative. They have stories, such as, ‘This is how my daughter was vaccinated and she was never the same person.’ There’s a lot for people to look through. And that parallels a lot of the misinformation tactics. Narrative is a powerful tool, but it can also be a tool to instill negative emotions such as doubt and fear.”
In 2018, researchers from NYU Langone Health investigated prostate cancer information on YouTube, which they wrote was the most popular of all platforms, with use by 73% of U.S. adults.
They found that 77% of the top 150 videos on prostate cancer had misinformative or biased information. Additionally, many videos contained outdated information regarding screening guidelines and treatment recommendations.
Another finding echoed that of many social media cancer misinformation studies: misinformative videos had more social media engagement (numbers of comments, thumbs up/down interaction, etc.), including more than twice as many average views per day, than videos with factual information.
“I think it’s extremely concerning that a lot of biased and misinformative health content is reaching so many people,” Stacy Loeb, MD, MSc, PhD (Hon), urologist in the department of urology at NYU Langone Medical Center and one of the authors of the study, told Healio.
Stacy Loeb
Loeb and colleagues took on another YouTube study involving the quality of bladder cancer information. They found 67% of overall information was moderate to poor and 21% of the videos, which had more than 1.2 million views, contained a moderate to high amount of misinformation.
“We’re seeing this misinformation problem across multiple health topics,” Loeb said. “We recently published a study on the quality of prostate cancer information on TikTok. … Among the videos that had objective information, there was a significant amount of misinformation.
“The bottom line is this is a cross-cutting issue that goes across many topics and platforms,” Loeb added. “It’s not specific to prostate cancer or to YouTube, but rather a major problem in society, as there is an increasing amount of unfiltered, user-generated content that is posted online and broadly disseminated.”
Hopeful stories with convenient answers
Brian G. Southwell, PhD, has tried to identify the motivations behind cancer misinformation and the reasons for its existence. He published a 320-page book, “Misinformation and Mass Audiences,” in 2018 and has regularly contributed his communication expertise to the health care sphere.
“It’s a really important question that does not get asked enough: Why is (this misinformation) out there?” Southwell told Healio.
Brian G. Southwell
Southwell, senior director of science in the public sphere at Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International, used the example of a social media influencer-turned-scammer. Belle Gibson rose to fame as a blogger who suggested she overcame brain cancer because of a diet she adhered to, only to be later exposed as a fraud who didn’t even have cancer.
“You can judge her, of course. But how did she rise to fame?” Southwell asked. “Because she was telling a hopeful story. If some people hear you can prevent breast cancer with cannabis oil or whatever, that might sound great. I think there is this certain degree of storytelling, telling stories people want to hear.”
As Southwell said, emotion plays a vital role, as someone either with cancer or with a loved one with cancer is easily drawn to stories of hope, regardless of their veracity, on social media. Stories of misinformation are also more novel and intriguing, whereas factual studies generally take time and produce results incrementally rather than overnight.
“There is nothing magical about false information, it’s just that the people who are creating it have an advantage relative to carefully peer-reviewed journal articles framed in a mundane way,” Southwell said. “‘Halloween Candy is Going to Cure Cancer.’ If you could write the headline first and just fill in the details … you have the advantage of being as sensational as you want.”
Perhaps some of these points — the accessibility of hopeful stories with easy solutions and the clickbait headlines — may help explain why a healthy proportion of cancer misinformation involves the use of cannabis.
Researchers from Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente Interstate Radiation Oncology Center published a study in January of 2019 on the space cannabis holds within the realm of cancer misinformation on social media. The researchers found that:
online search volume for cannabis and cancer increased at 10 times the rate of standard therapies (more in states where recreational or medical cannabis was legal);
cannabis as a cancer cure represented the largest category of social media content (23%) on alternative cancer treatments;
of the 40 high-impact new stories on social media referencing “cannabis cancer,” 32 (80%) were false news that proposed cannabis as a cancer cure and only one (2.5%) was an accurate news story that debunked that claim; and
the top false news story claiming cannabis as a cancer cure generated 4.26 million engagements on social media; meanwhile, the top news story debunking this false news only received 0.036 million engagements.
Although she supports medical cannabis for symptom control, Erqi Liu Pollom, MD, MS, said some of the results surprised her.
“It seemed like the false articles, the articles with inaccurate information, were more popular,” Pollom, assistant professor of radiation oncology at Stanford University, told Healio. “Accounts that are propagating this misinformation were more popular than the legitimate sources like the cancer societies, cancer physicians, etc. [Stories with misinformation] had broader reach than some of the more legitimate accounts.”
Pollom and colleagues also analyzed Facebook and Twitter posts from 31 leading cancer organizations during the study period. They found a drastic difference in engagement of these organizations’ posts on cannabis vs. the top 10 false stories on cannabis as a cancer cure, including average Facebook likes, comments and shares (97.7 vs. 452,050.1).
In addition, National Comprehensive Cancer Network member organizations in states where medical or recreational cannabis had not been legalized had zero Facebook posts or tweets on cannabis during the study period.
“If organizations like NCCN and ASCO could dedicate resources to provide educational material on a specific topic for patients, that probably would be helpful,” Pollom said. “Maybe they’re just not aware that it’s a big issue. That was one of the reasons we did our study, to see how big of an issue this was.”
AI and an active Twitter account
Although monitoring social media is a challenge, it’s not one too vast for researchers and medical professionals to try to tackle.
In July, Chou contributed to a paper published in NAM Perspectives on identifying credible sources of health information that recommended a “within reach” plan involving a system of spot checks for quality and integrity “supported by machine learning technology” and aided by expert human evaluation.
“We need more social scientists, ethnographers, anthropologists … I have a background in linguistics,” Chou told Healio. “AI with important, meaningful human input, working together with a computer scientists and engineers, is needed — and right now. We’re not doing enough. We’re kind of saying, ‘Well, these are the algorithms’ (causing misinformation to spread) as if humans have nothing to do with it.”
Loeb has contributed to this area along with University of Michigan researchers, including Rada Mihalcea, PhD, professor of computer science and director of the Michigan AI Lab. Work they presented at ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in 2019 involved utilizing linguistic, acoustic and user engagement features to develop classification models to identify misinformation in prostate cancer videos.
“We reported preliminary findings that an algorithm to identify misinformative videos about prostate cancer had 74% accuracy,” Loeb said. “And we’re continuing to work on potential automated solutions to assist in the identification of misinformative content that could be potentially flagged or manually reviewed or removed, or that could be used to help design a smarter search filter to help health consumers identify content that’s more likely to be accurate.”
“For health professionals and scientists, an important action item is to participate in the online discourse,” Loeb said. “There is a quote that circulates: ‘The solution to pollution is dilution.’ For those of us who are experts in health topics, it’s important to be a part of the solution by providing high-quality and accurate information or public dissemination.”
Deanna J. Attai
Loeb (@loebstacy) and other colleagues hold monthly discussion sessions on Twitter about prostate cancer and the latest research that anyone can join. Similarly, Deanna J. Attai, MD, associate clinical professor of surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles, serves as a co-moderator (@DrAttai) for #BCSM, a weekly, live community forum for breast cancer.
Meeting patients where they are online may require a multifaceted approach on multiple platforms. In a study published in May in Practical Radiation Oncology, Pollom and colleagues found patients more apt to use Instagram and physicians more active on Twitter.
“I think we can do better in reaching out to patients and filling that vacuum of information so they’re not out there searching on their own,” Pollom said.
Other means of communication
Getting every oncologist in the world to join Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and spend a specific amount of time each day or week on the social media platforms likely is not feasible.
“One of the barriers, I think — not as an academic physician or researcher — is that we’re promoted on academic papers … writing for our colleagues rather than peers,” Pollom said. “I don’t think there’s a viable infrastructure yet in terms of how we can advance our academic careers on social media. That’s a limitation of having physicians spending more time educating online.”
More long-term solutions may require much larger investments of time and money by a larger entity: health care systems. Southwell said the current information/misinformation climate could be an ideal time for “reimagining” how communication systems function within a health care system.
“We need a lot of investment in this translational space, which I don’t think we have,” he said. “You start out worried about all of these patients running into misinformation, and you have to continue to think about that since patients are a part of the equation, but part of the story and the solution are our health care institutions. What are they doing, necessarily, to provide information?”
Improved in-person communication between oncologists and patients also can play a role in limiting a patient’s possible engagement with misinformation on social media.
In an October 2020 editorial he co-wrote in American Journal of Public Health, Southwell suggested an open-ended question such as, “What have you already heard or learned about your treatment/condition?” as a useful starting point.
“You’re respecting that the patient is seeking out their own information on their condition and also getting a quick beat on where they are looking,” Southwell said. “You’re also starting from a place where you’re not assuming or dismissing (their view) right away.”
Lending an empathetic ear is important, Southwell said, as is understanding that the source of their information may be someone important to them and not just something they came across on their social media feed.
“Maybe this came from their Aunt Edna, and they listen to everything she says,” Southwell said. “Getting some sense of the personal referral (is important) because now you know what you’re up against and you can tread lightly. ‘Well, my mother told me this’ or ‘my wife told me this.’ That’s probably going to carry some weight.”
Unlike traditional media, such as newspapers or television, social media is a two-way communication channel. Similarly, within a clinic, physicians who are adept at communication value the shared decision-making process between physician and patient.
“This includes a discussion of risk, benefits, alternatives and the patient’s preferences related to a medical decision,” Loeb said. “We published a study [in Journal of Medical Internet Research] using data from HINTS, a national survey, showing that patients who perceived a worse quality of communication with their health care provider were more likely to watch health-related videos.
“Bottom line: it is very important that patients have an opportunity to have their questions answered and that they are well-informed by their health care provider,” Loeb said. “Otherwise, it is natural that people will look to other sources for information.”
Did you know the vast majority of thyroid cancer diagnoses are FALSE? And yet, the vast majority go ahead and get ‘treated’ anyway, with total removal of the gland, radiation and life long hormone replacement.
Any diagnosis of cancer can be highly traumatic. Given the conventionally held view that screen detected, early-stage lesions or tumors will inevitably grow into invasive, lethal cancers without conventional treatment, receiving a diagnosis represents a psychic wound with adverse physiological consequences that can, in and of itself, injure the patient and reduce their chances of success in treatment.
This is all the more clear in the case of overdiagnosis, where a patient’s condition is misinterpreted to be potentially fatal, when in fact, the natural history of the lesion or tumor in question is that when left untreated it will never do harm, often producing no symptoms in the life of the patient; or, where it does produce symptoms, the patient does not experience significant disability or death before other causes intervene to take their life. There is also the overarching reality that the health risks associated with aggressive conventional treatment of early-stage ‘cancers’ often results in the ‘solution’ being far more harmful than the condition being treated.
The very real trauma (literally “wound”) of cancer diagnosis can no longer be considered a strictly theoretical concern. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicinefound that, based on data from more than 6 million Swedes 30 and older between 1991-2006,a positive diagnosis of cancer increased the risk of suicide up to 16 fold and the risk of heart-related death up to 26.9 fold during the first week following diagnosis versus those who were cancer free.The association was prognosis correlated: the more severe and treatment resistant the condition (e.g. brain cancer was highest), the higher the increase in both suicide and heart-related death. Obviously the implications are astounding, especially considering that a misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis can have lethal consequences, putting the medical system in a position of responsibility for doing profound harm by applying screening programs to asymptomatic and otherwise healthy individuals, who are not given the opportunity of informed consent about the real risks associated with these so-called ‘preventive’ programs.
It should be noted that there are mechanisms available to explain this disturbing association between the trauma of diagnosis and increased risk for death. We now know that the secretion of adrenaline, associated with stress and the fight-or-flight response, actually activates genetic processes within cancer cells that make them more treatment resistant.1Stress associated excess cortisol levels will also down-regulate cancer immunosurvillence in certain individuals. In other words, this is not some ‘magical’ mind-body phenomena, rather, we now know how placebo/nocebo factors related to the latent symbolism and signification of the ritual of clinical interactions and the patient-doctor relationship gear into real physiological processes, whose adverse health consequences have been characterized down to a molecular level.
We have spent significant time researching and writing on the problem of overdiagonsis in the case of breast cancer, where it is now known 1.3 million US women were overdiagnosed for breast cancer over the past 30 years, due to misinformation driven breast screening programs. These women, many of whom were diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a condition know believed to be essentially benign, underwent unnecessary mastectomies, lumpectomies, radiation and chemotherapy treatments, resulting in massive psychic, financial, and health crises that should never have transpired. Many of these women suffer from a Stockholm syndrome-like state (victim identifies with aggressor), participating in promoting unnecessary screenings and treatments to women through breast cancer industry funded cause-marketing campaigns as part of their ‘healing process’ — never quite appreciating the nature of their trauma, while contributing to reproducing the same violation in other women while thinking they are helping to ‘save’ lives.
The Thyroid Cancer Epidemic Is Being Caused By the Medical System
Thyroid cancer is another epidemic level condition that participates in this truly horrific paradigm of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology titled, “revisiting overdiagnosis and fatality in thyroid cancer,” reveals that between the years 1975-1999 incidences of nonfatal forms of thyroid cancer rose (mostly due to papillary carcinomas) dramatically without the concomitant expected decrease in incidences of fatal forms of thyroid cancer – a classical indication of overdiagnosis. In other words, were these thyroid cancer screenings detecting early-stage cancers that were destined to progress to more lethal forms, the statistics would show that along with dramatically expanding rise in early state thyroid cancer detection and treatment a corresponding decline in late stage, more lethal forms. The clear absence of this relationship indicates that like with early stage ‘breast cancer’ there is an epidemic of inappropriate thyroid cancer diagnoses and victims of iatrogenic harm associated with their ‘treatment.’
The authors of the study concluded: “The results of this study support the notion that many thyroid cancers are part of a reservoir of nonfatal tumors that are increasingly being overdetected and overdiagnosed.”
A clear perspective on the problem is available through the National Cancer Institute’s U.S. Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis and Mortality statistics from 1975-2011. In the graph below you find new thyroid cancer cases have been rising on average 5.5% each year over 2002-2011, with death rates actually rising on average 0.9% each year over 2001-2010. We would expect to find the opposite trend if these early diagnosed and treated cases were actually cancer.
Even more cognitively dissonant is their graph of the seemingly successful 5-year survival rate, boldly declaring 97.8% of diagnosed cases between 2004-2010 survived 5 years, falsely implying that their lives were benefited or even saved by being overdiagnosed and overtreated. If any of these patients died at year 6 from an unnecessary treatment related cause, it is common practice to consider it a separate disease process, further generating the illusion that iatrogenic harm had not been done and of the success of the screenings and treatments being employed.
“No new risk factors, but one, can completely explain the surge of [small papillary cancer] lesions: the exponential increase in the use of diagnostic imaging”
The article goes on to describe “a worldwide epidemic of thyroid cancer without a corresponding increase in thyroid cancer deaths,” and explains, “The majority of these cancers are small papillary cancers, the most indolent type of thyroid cancer, with a mortality of less than 1% after 20 years of postsurgical follow-up.” A study is referenced that “suggested that if all thyroid glands were subject to millimeter- thick cuts, the pathologist would detect minute or microscopic thyroid cancers in everyone.”
Ultimately, the condition should be redefined as benign:
“Observational studies have strongly suggested that treatment does not change the indolent course of small papillary lesions, which do not evolve to cause metastatic disease or death. Owing to the excellent prognosis associated with small papillary thyroid cancers, it may be reasonable to put them in the same category as has been suggested for ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast renaming them as papillary lesions of indolent course (PLICs)”
Despite this indolent nature, the so-called ‘standard of care’ is total removal of the thyroid (thyroidectomy) for the treatment of these small papillary lesions (‘cancers’), followed by often unwarranted radiation treatment (a cancer causing treatment) and lifelong, mostly synthetic, thyroid hormone replacement, which itself may carry increased risk of lung cancer.
This notion that many screen-detected cancers, including breast, prostate, lung and thyroid, should be entirely reclassified as benign or of exceedingly low concern, received great support last year with the publication of an National Cancer Institute commissioned expert review on the topic that we reported on in our article: “Millions Wrongly Treated for ‘Cancer,’ National Cancer Institute Panel Confirms.” The information, however, is not getting to the ‘front lines’ of this war soon enough. The collateral damage from the 40-year declared War on Cancer is as real in terms of human suffering and wide-reaching as any major historical global military conflict, and literally depends on diagnostics and interventions gleaned from the most deadly and cruel weapons humans have created: radioisotopes (radiation therapy) and chemical weapons (chemotherapy).
The editorial on thyroid cancer overdiagnosis suggests that one way this false epidemic can be mitigated on the front end is through reducing overtesting: “Overtesting is the use of a test unlikely to produce net benefit for the patient.” The general implications are clear. Information gleaned from modern diagnostic technologies is being misinterpreted, and in some cases misused to benefit a burgeoning biomedical industry that thrives both on the sales of expensive technologies and highly profitable treatments and follow-up care.
Clearly a more nuanced view of cancer in general needs to be instituted to protect against the possibility of mass iatrogenic collateral damage associated with overdiagnosis and subsequent overtreatment. The big ‘C’ – Cancer — is not a monolithic entity, or some irrepressible juggernaut like force of lethality. While there are cancers that take on aggressive, treatment resistant form, these are the vast minority relative to the submerged iceberg of non-lethal forms, some of which can be treated with a combination of anti-cancer foods, alternative therapies including detoxificaiton, mind-body practices and traditional plant medicine, as well as through enhancing the body’s immunosurveillance. In some cases, such as so-called pre-cervical cancer associated with HPV infection, watchful waiting – essentially doing nothing to intervene – results in remission in the vast majority of time. Even so-called invasive breast cancer has been found to be reabsorbed by the body in some cases, according to a Lancet Oncology study. And then there is the fact that conventional cancer diagnosis and treatment methods are almost all invariably carcinogenic – an irony that can not be over appreciated.
Should we be surprised at these results? Perhaps not so if we better understand cancer as an adaptive response to radically altered environmental conditions within the body, which include infections, suboptimal nutrition, toxic and toxicant exposures, and a wide range of incompatible or outright damaging nutritional, environmental and lifestyle changes associated with the post-industrial world. Reducing unnecessary exposures to biomedical diagnostic technologies and highly toxic treatments should be the first step in cancer prevention and not treating the body as if it were designed to be a cancer time bomb ready to explode, rather than a miraculous self-healing meta-organism that is destroying abnormal cells on a moment to moment basis when treated in accordance with its highly intelligent design and requirements for clean food, air, water, and balance in mind, body and soul.
Note: For relevant research on both the harms associated with conventional thyroid cancer treatment, and potential natural/integrative alternatives, view our Thyroid Cancer research page on the topic.
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