Media Outlets Fall for Unverified “Expert” Medical Cures Without Fact-Checking

Samia Allam – Journalist and fact-checker – Egypt

The market for scientifically unproven treatments is seeing rapid growth. A report published by Market.us in 2024 showed that the global market for alternative and complementary medicine was worth around $181.2 billion, and is expected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2034.

The risks associated with unproven treatments are less about wasted money and more about the opportunity cost. When a patient abandons a proven therapy in favor of an untested, illusory remedy, they allow their condition to progress unchecked, sometimes to a point where it can no longer be controlled.

In this report, we look into how “experts” are promoting scientifically unproven treatments in the Arab media. This is happening without these outlets verifying the treatments or the clinical information they promote as cures for diseases such as autism and cancer.

“It is well known that there is no cure!” On July 5, 2025, we noticed a celebratory post on X - “820 cases of autism cured by a Jordanian!” - naming Dr Hamza Alsayouf as the man behind this achievement.

We consulted reputable scientific institutions to verify the accuracy of this claim but found no sources confirming it. What was also notable is that the post on X by “Doha,” an account with only 1,664 followers, garnered 1.4 million views and more than 24,000 interactions in just eight days, and was subsequently amplified across multiple platforms.

The video posted by Doha was an interview with Dr. Alsayouf on Al-Arabiya TV's morning program. We found that the Al Arabiya had originally posted the interview on YouTube on July 7, 2022.

We found that Dr. Alsayouf had posted the Al Arabiya interview on his own Instagram and Facebook accounts on 4 July 2025, and had reposted the same interview from the “Doha” tweet, alongside comments from the public welcoming the treatment. Doha’s own tweet was subsequently deleted and the account disappeared!

The Al Arabiya presenter begins her interview by saying: “Although it is well known that there is no cure for autism, an Arab doctor is talking about a revolutionary treatment that could eliminate the condition.”

She then asks Alsayouf: “So, are we looking at a treatment that will completely eliminate autism, or one that controls the symptoms associated with it?” The Jordanian doctor replies: "In the third study, which we published two months ago in Brain Science, we had around 82 cases of autism. And after more than six months of treatment, the symptoms of autism reportedly disappeared completely in 43 of the 82 cases.” By “completely disappeared,” he claims that all symptoms were gone and the children had “returned to normal.”

According to the doctor’s own words, there are not “820 cases of cure from autism.” As for the study he cites—published in May 2022 in Brain Sciences on the MDPI platform, it discusses improvements in core signs and symptoms in children with autism spectrum disorder after beginning treatment with two medications alongside standard supportive therapies. The study stresses that while these children showed improvement, they were not completely cured of the condition.

We found that the study actually states that 35 out of 82 patients (43 percent) showed highly significant improvement on the Clinical Global Impression of Improvement scale (CGI-I score of 1), with mild to no symptoms remaining on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CASR-2), and complete disappearance of signs and symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, based on clinical assessment. This was after receiving early and chronic treatment for at least 6 months. It also states that only one of these patients has currently stopped taking all medication, while the others remain under treatment. This means that Dr. Alsayouf exaggerated the results of his study during the Al Arabiya interview and quoted results that were not achieved in the study in which he took part, alongside two other researchers.

Al Arabiya TV publicized these results, knowing that they contradicted the study led by Alsayouf himself, which had already been published by the time of the interview. We also found that the study was published less than two months after it was submitted for review. Moreover, one of the reviewers of the study was not a specialist in the subject and had had many of their studies retracted.

Before Al Arabiya, other media outlets also conducted interviews with Dr.Alsayouf, during which he also claimed to have “cured casts of autism cases,” including Al-Hurra TV in 2021 and Al-Mamlaka TV 2022. These interviews were posted on the YouTube accounts of these two channels and on that of Dr. Alsayouf, which also received thousands of views.

Specialist scientific authorities deny “complete cure” for autism

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns that “products or treatments claiming to cure autism are deceptive and misleading, because there is no cure for autism,” and warns against “many products claiming to ‘treat’ autism or autism-related symptoms. Some may carry significant health risks.”

The FDA emphasises that current treatments are for managing irritability associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), i.e. behavioural symptoms, not core communication skills.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also warns that “there are no medications to treat the core symptoms of ASD” definitively, something Dr. Alsayouf continues to claim.

The National Health Service (NHS), the UK's public health system, says that one of the key warning signs that a treatment for autism is fake is that “it claims to ‘cure’ or help people ‘recover from’ autism.”

We tried repeatedly to obtain Dr. Alsayouf’s response to our findings, through his active social media accounts and by phoning his clinic, but so far we have received no response.

In 2017, the WHO estimated that at least one in 10 treatments in low- and middle-income countries was either substandard or counterfeit. It noted that countries spend approximately $30.5 billion annually on these treatments, which pose “significant risks to public health globally.”

Garlic and Egyptian Molokhia as “natural remedies”

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, more and more doctors and health and nutrition specialists have appeared in the media. At the same time, promotion of unreliable and unverified “advice and remedies” has become commonplace.

People may engage in this to “cause controversy,”to become famous by starting a “trend,” or sometimes for commercial gain or to promote “conspiracy theories.”

In his frequent TV interviews, Magdy Nazih, who is usually introduced as a “nutrition, education and food media consultant,” often talks about garlic and “Egyptian molokhia” – not just any molokhia, but that from Upper Egyptian, sometimes called “shululu.” During the pandemic, he claimed that molokhia protects against the coronavirus, without providing any scientific evidence.

One claim he often repeated was that garlic “stops cancerous tumours that are already present. He did so in an interview broadcast in November 2024 on the program “Ana wa Huwa wa Hiya” (“I, he and she”) on the Sada El-Balad channel.

In another interview, for the “Misr Al Gadida” programme on ETC, he repeated: “There are many studies showing that garlic is closely linked with stopping the growth of cancers that are already present … It won’t remove it, but it’s enough that it stops it.”

While garlic has many proven health benefits, including the potential to prevent cancer, we found no reliable scientific evidence that garlic “stops the growth of cancerous tumours” once they have developed. And studies suggesting that garlic “inhibits tumours” are typically laboratory or animal studies, since halting reliable cancer treatment in favour of experimenting with the potential therapeutic benefits of garlic would pose ethical challenges.

A systematic review in 2021 of scientific papers on the relationship between cancer and garlic was unable to reach a definitive conclusion about the effects of garlic on cancer, due to insufficient available evidence and the lack of high-quality randomised controlled trials.

The third expert report of the American Institute for Cancer Research (2018) concluded that “the evidence is too limited to draw any conclusions about garlic and the risks of cancer.” And this is aside from the side effects of garlic and its interaction with some medicines.

Cancer patients are among the groups of people most targeted by those promoting fake treatments, and the results can be tragic. In 2017, the US National Cancer Institute published the results of a study by Yale University School of Medicine, which found that patients who opted for alternative treatments alone (refusing proven conventional treatments like surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy) were significantly more likely to die.

Some Arab media outlets have helped give credibility to these figures by interviewing them. It is the responsibility of programme producers to verify in advance the credentials of their “guests”, so as to prevent their contentious claims directly or indirectly endangering people’s health.

This report was produced as one of the graduation projects for the Arab Fact-Checkers Network’s (AFCN) “ARIJ Fact-Checking Diploma 2025.”