Every year more than 200,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed in Spain, but there is still great social ignorance about this disease. The lack of information together with the fear of death that is traditionally had when talking about cancer favors that some false ideas or hoaxes about cancer become myths.
To combat hoaxes and false beliefs, nothing better than being well informed, and this is the goal of the # CáncerSinBulos chatbot, an initiative of the #SaludSinBulos Platform and GEPAC (Spanish Group of Cancer Patients), with the collaboration of the Divente digital health consultancy.
The project aims to banish so many myths born around cancer and also to inform about the large number of false therapies that are offered to patients today, practices that in the best of scenarios take thousands of euros in exchange for their ineffectiveness and Unfortunately, in worse scenarios, they complicate the evolution of the disease, leading to death.
For this first launch, the chatbot has been deployed on a web channel (www.healthbots.es) and Telegram (@CancerSinBulos_Bot), and has been “fed” with the content of the publication “Myths and pseudotherapies created around cancer” of the Spanish Group of Cancer Patients (GEPAC), currently has information and clarifications of 78 myths and 28 pseudotherapies.
The robot is in the training phase, and the final objective is to create a reference platform to deal with false news or fake health news, taking the content to social networks and digital channels where patients and society in general are. , so that users can access them to contrast and verify the information, and in the event of a hoax, be able to identify that it is false information or notify it so that a panel of experts can analyze it and respond in a timely manner.
