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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Health & medicine fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about health & medicine. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

13,677 published reviews in this topic

PolitiFactHealth & medicine

Soursop cures cancer.

Publisher’s rating: False

Research reported by Medscape describes a study of how social cues affect people’s responses to cancer-treatment misinformation online. The researchers’ posts included a claim that soursop, also called guyabano, was a natural cancer cure that outperformed chemotherapy. That is a direct match to the claim being checked, but the excerpt does not describe a clinical investigation of soursop or provide evidence measuring whether it treats cancer. The study recruited 1,051 adults and randomly assigned them to see cancer-treatment misinformation posts either with prompts and a flagging policy or without them. The reported finding was that prompts indicating other users had flagged posts as false and potentially harmful increased willingness to intervene and reduced willingness to share the claims. The excerpt therefore supports that soursop-as-cure was treated as misinformation in the study; it does not, by itself, establish the medical basis for that classification. Related reporting here is not a report of PolitiFact’s investigation.