Google, one of the platforms in the world, has announced it will no longer allow any advertisers to promote what it deems "unproven or experimental medical techniques."
In July, Facebook and YouTube both announced they would be making changes to their algorithms to crack down on misleading health information online. Now, Google is following suit as the latest tech giant to denounce unsubstantiated health information with a policy tweak. The new policy specifically pertains to Google's wide-reaching online advertising network, which is responsible for the ads you see not only on Google itself, but also on a lot of third-party websites.
Read More- Excessive praise of "alternative" or "natural" treatment
- Articles lack links to published research (or link to phony medical journals)
- Articles do not quote licensed medical professionals
- Content seems infomercial-y (it may feature, for instance, all-caps headlines, excessive exclamation points, and bold, flashy text)
- They use terms such as “miracle cure.”
Unproven “Cures” Can Be Life-Threatening
We recently shared a cautionary tale of a young British woman named Houder Mohamed who died of breast cancer at the age of 27 after she had attempted to treat her cancer with baking soda injectionsa fake cancer treatment that she first learned about online. Shortly thereafter, we pointed out a CBD company that was illegally marketing its products as “cancer cures” and a series of dangerous claims about a "miracle cure" that was basically the equivalent of drinking bleach. And then there was the full-on textbook example of a misleading cancer news website called inspiringsurvivorstories.com, on which a man named Rusty Roberts claimed that his mom, Peggy Sue, had survived advanced lymphoma after receiving a combination of vitamins and minerals that "cured her cancer" at a natural cancer clinic in Mexico.
This website we highlighted is a prime example of misleading online cancer information.
These stories barely scratch the surface of the rampant (and, unfortunately, growing) collection of misleading health information that lives on the internet. The harmful claims are pervasive, and falling for them can be life-threatening. Sadly, people fall into these traps all too often–especially people who are in vulnerable positions — those who have, for example, just received a tough cancer diagnosis. When a photo of a beautiful, green smoothie pops up on your computer screen with a flashing headline that says something like "Miracle Cancer Cure Discovered!" it can be tempting to believe it. Drinking a green juice, after all, sounds far better than getting chemotherapy. But choosing to buy into these phony "cures" can truly kill you. A 2018 study out of Yale Medicine found that people who choose alternative medicine over conventional treatment are twice as likely to die from their cancer.
RELATED: "A Lot of People are Selling Hope": The Lure of Vitamins and Supplements
As Dr. Jason Westin, an oncologist and lymphoma researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, told SurvivorNet in a conversation about alternative therapies, "If there were treatment options that weren't based on chemotherapy, that weren't based on targeted therapies, that worked well for our patients, sign me up.” Dr. Westin explained that the reason doctors aren't treating their patients with these alternative therapies (the supplements and "miracle cures" out there) is that they haven't been shown to be effective in clinical research.
What About the Legitimate, Non-Phony Drugs That Just Aren’t Proven Yet?
According to a statement that Google released Friday about its new ad policy, the company does acknowledge that not all "unproven therapies" are bad actors; all of the actual lifesaving cancer treatments on the market today were once "unproven" themselves, after all. But in this case, Google would only allow for the advertisement of a clinical trial to test the experimental drug, not an advertisement for the drug itself.
RELATED: Why I’d Choose a Clinical Trial For Myself
"We know that important medical discoveries often start as unproven ideas and we believe that monitored, regulated clinical trials are the most reliable way to test and prove important medical advances," Google's Policy Adviser, Adrienne Biddings, wrote in a post about the new policy. "At the same time, we have seen a rise in bad actors attempting to take advantage of individuals by offering untested, deceptive treatments. Oftentimes, these treatments can lead to dangerous health outcomes and we feel they have no place on our platforms." Biddings went on to clarify that Google would continue to allow "advertising for research happening in this space for clinical trials and the ability for clinicians to promote their research findings to the public."
Google did not respond to a request for comment from SurvivorNet about how, exactly, the company decides what qualifies as “sufficient clinical testing to justify widespread use.”
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
