As people continue to watch social media (SNS) contents that can mistake dog anthelmintic "Fenbendazole" for cancer treatment, there are voices calling for the establishment of a monitoring system to prevent further damage.
It is the voice of cancer treatment medical staff who revealed through research that 30% of cancer-related content encountered on SNS such as YouTube is wrong information that has not been medically verified, and 77% of such unverified information is harmful information that can cause harm.
Sejong Chungnam National University Hospital announced on the 28th that a paper titled "Understanding the Social Mechanism of Wrong Cancer Information on YouTube Spread and Lessons: Information Pathology Research" was published in the recent issue of JMIR (Journal of Medical Internet Research), an international journal on mobile health.
The research team selected 702 YouTube videos (227 channels) of Fenbendazole, a self-prescription drug for dogs that caused controversy as an alternative treatment for cancer, and extracted 90 videos with more than 50,000 views from September 2019 to September 2020 to analyze the data.
As a result of analyzing the search and recommendation video data, it was found that self-administered videos using fenbendazole as a cancer treatment were continuously uploaded and accumulated over time.
As a result of the analysis, it was confirmed that 76.9% of the wrong information contained harmful information. Professor Kwon Jung-hye pointed out, "We need a monitoring system by health authorities to filter false information."
In addition, it was confirmed that the content network recommended by fenbendazole acts as a wrong infrastructure that increases viewers' belief in fenbendazole as an alternative treatment for cancer.
Although there is no medically proven evidence for fenbendazole efficacy, it is a misinformed video that patients can help, leading to side effects such as delayed proper treatment and refusal of currently prescribed treatment, and there is a lot of problem in the future.
Professor Kwon said, "As this study attempted to narrow the knowledge gap between what to do and how to deliver accurate information through social media, it is necessary to improve awareness through campaigns to correct policy misinformation or education of patients and guardians.
Writer: Yeyoung Jeon
(Picture from Unsplash)
Comments