by The claim that fenbendazole cures cancer has gained popularity on social media. It’s based on an anecdotal account of Joe Tippens, a man who claimed to have been diagnosed with lung cancer and later found his cancer went into remission after taking the dog deworming medicine fenbendazole on a veterinarian’s recommendation.
There isn’t enough evidence that fenbendazole can help treat cancer in people. The drug has only been studied in cells and animals, not in humans. The only way to know if something can be used as a cancer treatment is to test it in people through a clinical trial.
We asked a specialist cancer information nurse at Cancer Research UK for an expert opinion. She told Full Fact: “There’s no proof that fenbendazole kills cancer, or even reduces the number of cancer cells. It’s not a cancer-cure drug, and it doesn’t have any evidence of being safe or effective in humans.”
Fenbendazole is an antiparasitic medication that can be used to treat worms in dogs, cats, and rabbits. It’s also sometimes used in humans to treat worms that aren’t caused by parasitic helminths (helminths are the parasites that cause diseases such as worm tapeworm, whipworm, roundworm, hookworm, and pinworm). However, there isn’t any scientific evidence that it treats cancer or prevents recurrence of cancer in people. In fact, a case study of an 80-year-old woman with advanced nonsmall cell lung cancer who self-administered fenbendazole after a diagnosis of advanced NSCLC resulted in severe liver injury 9 months later. fenbendazole cures cancer
