this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Some niggling part of my brain keeps wondering if ivermectin is actually a crazy cure for cancer, could anyone break down the science for me? I have a decent understanding of molecular biology, but no idea about what ivermectin is chemically or how it would play in
It kills parasitic infections caused by worms. Cancer is not a parasitic infection caused by a worm. It's like asking if a mouse trap can fix climate change. No, because they are in no way related.
If you want to know the specific mechanism involved, it has to do with properties worms have but mammals don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#Mechanism_of_action
That's not a convincing argument. It suffices to say that ivermectin was considered as a candidate for a cancer drug as early as 2018, with a proposed mechanism of action and everything. It's not as simple as "cancer is not a parasitic infection", because pharmacology is never this simple. That paper also mentions positive study results both in vitro and in vivo. There is also a lot of later research (search
ivermectin canceron google scholar), but it's potentially biased by the horrifying memetic war that happened in America during the covid pandemic.My conclusion from ten minutes of googling is that quite possibly it's a real weak anti-cancer drug much like the already-known ones. It's hard to be sure of those things - we're in an age where there's enough research and publication bias and politics that you can't trust individual studies^1^. And you can't fully trust meta-analyses either, but I can't even find a meta-analysis of ivermectin as used for cancer, so.
(It's pretty safe to say that it's not an amazing cancer drug much better than all existing ones (like some people seem to think) - both on priors, and because if that was the case it'd be extremely obvious from all of the studies already made.)
^1^ I don't mean fraud, I mean that if a hundred teams over the globe try a study of something that doesn't work, five of them will find p<0.05 results by pure chance and quite possibly only those teams will publish it - so until several good replications come along, it'll look like there's a real and well-supported effect. And there can be much subtler problems than this - see, say, how well the studies of psychic powers go.
Okay, that's a fair enough response and I learned something, so thank you.
I mean, if you drank enough of it, I'm sure the cancer would stop growing.
It works similarly to the traditional bleach cure in that regard. Both are 100% effective if used properly.
I hear guns work similarly well.
Edit: read more XKCD, people.
I always like that comic, but wish he had done a bit on one of the ways we used to (maybe someone still does it somewhere? Idk) impregnate cells with DNA. Take a modified .22 bullet, load it with the DNA, and blast it at cells.