WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Tobacco cures all types of cancer, smallpox and chickenpox.
OUR VERDICT
False. There is no evidence that tobacco cures these conditions.
AAP FACTCHECK - Tobacco is a leading cause of cancer and is not a proven cure for the disease, despite claims online.
False claims that tobacco cures tumours, ignoring centuries of evidence proving it causes cancer.
The falsehood appears in a Facebook video featuring an Australian-based podcaster and a retired US chiropractor, Bryan Ardis.
"Just so you know, all cancers are known to be cured by tobacco since the 1500s … They've known tobacco by itself cures all cancers and all tumours…" Dr Ardis says.
"Did you know that smallpox, chickenpox, all herpes are actually cured by tobacco? Well, what are you told? You can only use drugs."
AAP FactCheck has previously debunked claims shared by Dr Ardis, including that antiviral drug remdesivir is associated with COVID-19 deaths.
He has promoted nicotine and tobacco as a cure for a variety of diseases, including Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis, which has also been debunked by AAP FactCheck, as well as by AFP Fact Check and Science Feedback.
While tobacco was used to treat a range of conditions in the 1500s, it has since been widely established as a leading cause of cancer, and there's no evidence that it cures smallpox or chickenpox.
The plant was viewed as a panacea after it was introduced to Europe from the Americas in the 1500s, according to a 2004 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine paper on tobacco's medicinal history.
It notes "during the sixteenth century there were few ailments for which tobacco was not prescribed", including as a topical treatment for lesions likely derived from skin cancer.
As tobacco's harmful properties began to be better understood, however, its medicinal use declined, the paper writes.
Cathy Moore, a global health researcher at the University of Westminster, has written about research on the medicinal use of tobacco.
She said early publications on tobacco's medicinal benefits were anecdotal and the evidence was "dubious to say the least".
"At this time in England, the Tudors were recommending ingesting buttered spiders to cure headaches, so their approach to medical research was very different to ours today," Dr Moore told AAP FactCheck.
"So some did report that tobacco cured what they suspected was skin cancer in a handful of patients, but then it was also being used as a smoke enema to cure drowning.
"So I would say the accuracy of these reports is low."
Today, tobacco is not a recommended treatment for any conditions, she said.
Ian Olver, a cancer researcher at the University of Adelaide, said the claim that tobacco is a proven cure for cancer is "nonsense".
"The fact is that tobacco contains over 70 carcinogens and is linked with at least 16 types of cancer," Professor Olver told AAP FactCheck.
Adrian Harris, a medical oncologist at the University of Oxford, agreed.
"It has been proven many times without doubt that smoking causes lung cancer, and also bladder, oral, head and neck cancer, pancreas cancer," Professor Harris told AAP FactCheck.
All types, forms and routes of tobacco use cause cancer, he said.
Juri Reimand, a cancer researcher at the University of Toronto, said he was not aware of any credible modern research on tobacco as a cancer treatment.
"In contrast, the cancer-causing role of tobacco is widely accepted in the scientific and medical community," Associate Professor Reimand told AAP FactCheck.
Smoking tobacco, or using it in other ways, such as chewing, causes small changes in the DNA of individual cells and, in some cases, affects critical genes, enabling tumours to grow and mutate, he explained.
For someone diagnosed with cancer, using tobacco will cause additional mutations that make tumour cells more capable and aggressive, leading to cancer spreading or recurring, he said.
David Evans, a virologist and expert on pox viruses that cause chickenpox and smallpox at the University of Alberta, said he had not seen any evidence that viral diseases can be treated with nicotine.
Dr Evans said studies in The European Respiratory Journal and The American Journal of Physiology found smoking and e-cigarettes containing nicotine had the potential to exacerbate viral disease symptoms by driving inflammation and damaging protective skin barriers.
"Hyper-inflammatory reactions are what kills people infected by respiratory viruses," he said.
Cary Gross, epidemiologist at Yale School of Medicine, said the link between tobacco and cancer was settled science.
"While it can attract attention, and 'clicks', to tout the potential health benefits of tobacco, one needs to ask about the strength of the underlying evidence, in patients and populations, to support such claims," Professor Gross told AAP FactCheck.
"And it's just not there."
Australia has been one of the world leaders in terms of reducing tobacco use and the spread of inaccurate information risks moving in the wrong direction, he said.
"There are many Australian citizens who are alive and thriving today as a result of these efforts – people who might otherwise have taken up smoking in the absence of these anti-tobacco efforts," Professor Gross said.
"That's a message that we should be rallying behind."
Certain properties of the tobacco plant are being investigated to help develop new medicines, however.
In 2014, a La Trobe University study found that a protein in the flowers of ornamental tobacco plants could identify and destroy human cancer cells.
However, the study was conducted in a laboratory and did not prove that tobacco can treat human cancer patients.
Dr Moore also pointed to a paper in the journal Biotechnology Advances that reported the use of genetically-engineered tobacco as a host plant to produce compounds for disease treatment.
"Because tobacco is such a fast-growing and easily genetically engineered plant it is routinely used in research as a platform for producing medicines that are originally from other plants/organisms," Dr Moore said.
"Molecular farming is the process by which we introduce the genes for e.g. medicinal antibodies, including those used in cancer immunotherapies, into tobacco plants and then harvest the product, but the tobacco plant itself is incapable of producing these medicines."
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