Cancer Prevention Beliefs: Where Have We Gone Wrong?

Professor David Kerr discusses beliefs and attitudes toward cancer prevention.
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-- TRANSCRIPT --
Hello. I'm David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine at University of Oxford. As I've become older and perhaps wiser, as a cancer doctor, I've become much more interested in the concept of prevention. We know the lifestyle factors that - if we can modulate - will reduce the risk for cancer. These include a balanced diet, eating vegetables and fruits, reducing red meats, reducing processed meat and alcohol, avoiding smoking and passive smoking, and exercising.
We understand this, but we also know that the belief system, people recognizing and understanding these factors, is very strongly tied to their ability to put lifestyle changes into action. If you don't know what causes cancer, then you cannot adapt to your lifestyle to improve it.
There was an interesting article fairly recently in The BMJ by an excellent Spanish group, in which they evaluated, using a clever online tool and a nonprobability sample, beliefs and attitudes toward cancer prevention. They dug out a group of people who profess vaccination skepticism or conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists are people who believe the Earth was flat, and in fact, that there was a reptilian master race, which could disguise themselves as human, and were seeking to conquer the world and rule all of humankind. This is quite extreme.
Think about the internet and the extraordinary degree of information that's available. There is good information, of course, from reputable websites, with great advice about the causes of cancer and how to avoid them. Misinformation is the spread of beliefs, not for any particular gain but just for spreading rumors. Of course, because of the internet, misinformation can be rapid, pervasive, and convincing.
Disinformation is, in a way, misinformation, but it's manipulated for financial gain or for power. Of course, there are some extreme examples of that disinformation. The reptile-super-race type… These are unusual people looking at it that way.
Anyway, they did an online survey and had a significant subpopulation of these people who have - let's say - alternative views. What was very interesting, although there were some differences in trying to understand the difference between accepted causes of cancer and mythical causes like eating genetically modified foods and all sorts of peculiar notions people have just picked up on the internet, was that the people who were - let's call them nonconventional thinkers - tended to believe a little more in the mythical causes of cancer.
Interestingly, overall, when the question was posed whether everything could cause cancer, whether the people were considered to be the controls - I'm using the word "normal," I hope not pejoratively - vs the subgroup of "anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists," both were exactly the same. Of everybody asked in a population of around 1900 individuals, 45% said, "Yes, probably just about everything causes cancer."
That gives us a problem because unless we can actually educate people properly about the true underlying causes of cancer, how can you ever adopt lifestyle changes like avoiding the sun, using sunscreen, etc. unless you genuinely get a feel for what the true and proven associations that the causative agents of cancer might be?
Wasn't that interesting? I guess the hypothesis was that the "unusual" people would be much more accepting of mythical causes of cancer. However, when the authors asked whether it is possible that everything could cause cancer, 45% of both populations said yes. That's so nondiscriminatory that it is utterly useless.
It shows the extraordinary extent of the public health challenge that we have, that if we are to live longer, live better, and reduce the incidence of cancer, we must learn much more deeply in our education, start sooner with children, and so on, and not leave it just to the internet, just to Dr Google, but to make a concerted sensible effort, probably from childhood, to educating on what we think the causes of cancer are.
Thanks for listening. For those of you who listened who are "flat-earthers," who do believe that reptiles are seeking to conquer humankind, I'd be very interested in your thoughts. I'm interested in what "normal" people think too. You know who you are - perhaps.
I'd be very interested to see what you thought about the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation, but underpinning it is just a basic lack of knowledge. How have we let the world down in terms of our capacity to communicate that? I'm interested in your thoughts.
For the time being, Medscapers, over and out. Thanks for listening as always.
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