The Evidence Grade Register
This is a companion to The Cancer Evidence Handbook: 79 claims about things people take or do alongside cancer treatment, each one with the evidence behind it, what is missing from that evidence, and a question you could ask the people treating you.
Finding something
Type what you have been told about — a compound, a diet, a claim from a video. If the register does not hold it, that is the ordinary case rather than a gap, and the same procedure the book uses is here to run on it yourself.
Or read the grade table, which is every claim the book grades on one page, or the full list further down.
The ladder
Six rungs. The letter says how strong the evidence is, never how much anyone should want it to be true.
- Grade A 6
- Randomised human evidence of benefit.
- Grade B 14
- Good human evidence, with a limit worth knowing.
- Grade C 24
- Human evidence exists and does not settle it.
- Grade D 28
- No human evidence of benefit, or none that survived testing.
- Grade E 4
- Human evidence points the wrong way.
- Grade X 3
- Documented harm, with no benefit to weigh against it.
Every entry
69 interventions, alphabetically. The letters after each one are the grades its claims carry.
- 2-deoxyglucose — D
- Albendazole — D
- Alcohol — B
- Antibiotic timing — B
- Apricot kernels, laetrile — X
- Aspirin — B
- Astragalus — C
- Berries — D
- Beta-blockers — C
- Beta-carotene — E
- Black salve — X
- Broccoli sprouts — D
- Cachexia drug treatment — C
- Cannabinoids — B
- Cannabis — C, C, C, D
- Coffee — C
- Consumer microbiome tests — D
- Culinary mushrooms — D
- Cutting sugar — D
- Dairy — C
- Dichloroacetate — D
- Dietary fibre — C
- Eradicating H. pylori — A
- Essiac — D
- Exercise — A, A, B, A, B, B
- Faecal transplant — C
- Fasting and FMD — C
- Fenbendazole — D
- Fermented foods — D
- Folate — E
- Garlic — C
- Ginger — C
- Graviola, soursop — X
- Green tea, EGCG — D
- Insomnia programme — A
- Ivermectin — D
- Ketogenic diet — C
- Limiting added sugar — B
- Mebendazole — C
- Mediterranean pattern — B, C
- Melatonin — C, D
- Metformin — D
- Methylene blue — D
- Milk thistle — C
- Mindfulness approaches — B
- Mistletoe — C
- Multi-compound protocols — D
- Multivitamin — C
- Niclosamide — D
- Nutrition and resistance training — B
- Positive attitude — D
- Probiotic supplements — D
- Processed meat — B
- Psychological support — D
- Red meat — C
- Reishi and others — D
- Seed oils — D
- Selenium — C
- Soy foods — B
- Statins — D
- Talking therapy — B
- Treating major depression — A
- Turkey tail (PSK) — C
- Turmeric, curcumin — D
- Vitamin B12 — E
- Vitamin C, intravenous — D
- Vitamin C, oral — D
- Vitamin D — C
- Vitamin E — E
The book's six parts
The register follows the book's own structure. Two of the six grade nothing — the first is the method and the last is the conversation — and their pages carry the tools for those instead.
- How to Tell a Real Cancer Claim from a False One Before any compound, a method. These five chapters give you one.
- Metabolism and Food What you eat, what you are told to eat, and what the trials found.
- Repurposed and Off-Label Drugs Real science, a great deal of salesmanship, and how to tell them apart.
- Supplements Vitamins, botanicals and the current favourites, graded.
- The Things That Are Not Pills Where the strongest evidence in this book turned out to be.
- Deciding Talking to your team, joining a trial, grading it yourself.
Whether to believe any of this
A fair question to ask of a website. Everything here is written down: how this register works says where the grades come from, what the rules are, and what this site refuses to do. What changed is every grade that has moved and every reason that has been withdrawn, dated, including the ones that were wrong.