In many of the podcast episodes, guests claimed to know simple solutions to health problems that they believed mainstream institutions were hiding from the public. They also often promoted their products on podcasts.
Cancer researcher Dr. Thomas Seyfried appeared on a podcast in October. He is a proponent of using the ketogenic diet, a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, to treat cancer.
But Grimes said doctors had warned patients not to restrict their diets during cancer treatment.
“There is a very real possibility that you will become very seriously ill and your health will be much worse than if you followed the advice recommended by your oncologist,” he said.
In his podcast, Seyfried compared modern cancer treatments to “medieval treatments” and suggested that radiation therapy and chemotherapy only add one to two months to a patient’s life.
Mr. Bartlett did not respond to the allegations.
Statistics from Cancer Research UK show that cancer survival rates in the UK have doubled in the past 50 years. In the United States, cancer death rates have decreased by 33% since 1990, thanks to modern treatments.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried said he “stands by what he said in the interview.”
Professor Heidi Larson, an expert on public trust in health care, says the solutions offered by the guests are appealing to listeners because they are concrete and free from the side effects of pharmaceuticals.
“But they (guests) are pushing it too far. It pushes people away from evidence-based medicine. I’ll stop doing that.”
Cecil Simmons of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank specializing in disinformation research, believes this type of content can help increase viewership.
“Health-related clickbait content with scary titles does very well online because algorithms amplify it,” she said.
