Our method
How our grades work
Every treatment page answers one question — does this actually help against cancer in humans? — with one of five grades. Here is exactly how we decide, so you can check our work.
The five grades
Multiple good studies in humans agree it works, or it's established standard care. Your medical team will know it.
Real human evidence exists and points the right way, but it's early, small, or mixed. Worth a serious conversation with your doctor.
No good human studies either way — often lots of lab or animal work, lots of stories, no real test in people yet. We say exactly what's missing.
It has been properly studied in humans and mostly failed, or the way it's claimed to work doesn't survive scrutiny.
Good evidence says it doesn't work — or it can genuinely hurt you, interfere with treatment, or has hurt people already. We explain the harm plainly.
What counts as evidence
Not all evidence is equal. We weigh it the way scientists do:
- Randomized trials in humans — the gold standard. People are randomly given the treatment or not, so we can tell whether the treatment, and not something else, made the difference.
- Other human studies — observational studies and case series. Useful, but easily fooled: people who choose a treatment often differ from people who don't.
- Lab and animal studies — cells in a dish and mice are where ideas start, and where most of them die. "Kills cancer cells in a dish" is true of bleach. It is never, by itself, a reason to take something.
- Stories — individual experiences matter to us and we collect them respectfully, but a story cannot say what caused what. Most people trying alternative treatments are also receiving conventional ones.
The interference flag
Some "natural" things change how chemotherapy, radiotherapy or other drugs behave in your body — sometimes making treatment weaker, sometimes more toxic. When the evidence raises that concern, the page carries a clear warning flag near the top. Always tell your oncology team about every supplement and remedy you take. They are not there to judge you; they are there to keep your treatment working.
Our process
- Research: we search the published literature — trials, systematic reviews, and the databases doctors themselves use — and read the primary sources.
- Writing: a human writes the page in plain language. Modern AI tools help us search and draft; a human checks every claim against its source before anything is published.
- Medical review: pages are reviewed by a named medical professional, whose name and sign-off date appear on the page. Pages awaiting review say so, visibly.
- Updates: we monitor new research weekly. Every page shows when it was last updated. If the evidence changes, the grade changes — in either direction.
- Corrections: if we got something wrong, we fix it and say we fixed it. Spotted an error?
What we are not
We are not your doctors, and this site is not medical advice. We give you the map; your medical team helps you walk the ground. Never start, stop or change a treatment because of something you read — here or anywhere — without talking to them.