This response appears to discourage "holistic" treatments with "no herbal products have been shown to be effective for treating cancer", despite a large body of evidence to the contrary (like green tea reliably slowing metastasis, and garlic for slowing tumor growth by immune system support + a bunch of other pathways (GARLIC IS SO OP)).
As far as I remember "effective for treating cancer" usually means an increase in cancer survival time. Drugs that do show some slowing of tumor growth but where the patient still dies at the same time are not considered effective for treatment of cancer.
There are many poisons that you can give people that slow tumor growth but that don't increase patient lifespan, do it makes sense to define "effective for treating cancer" that way.
The NIH has a page called Cancer Myths and Misconceptions that you come across if you end up looking into cancer for long enough, aimed at bio-illiterate patients and their families.
Around half the things on that page are wrong at face value, and a solid percentage of those are contradicted by the pages and studies the NIH themselves link as a part of the answer.
This seems bad. The percentage of people that are going to look through the actual studies or even linked cancer.gov pages with expanded info instead of looking at the NIH's incorrect summaries is low, so most people end up getting the wrong impression and making care/preventative decisions based off of that.
The trend is that they are identifying statements that are inconclusive as "myths", implying that they've been disproven and can be safely ignored, when this is clearly untrue.
I present a revised "NIH Cancer Myths Myths" page
Format: <Class of thing that the NIH did wrong for this "myth"> followed by why it's misleading and some more correct takes (mostly without linked supporting papers, sorry, I'll go back and add them at some point if I feel like it - this is a "source: trust me bro, I looked into most of these thoroughly at various points in my life" writeup :).
Error: Not endorsing "conspiracies" even when some amount of caution is probably warranted, considering the literature
Error: Giving misleading answers and then not elaborating
Misc. commentary
What They Got Right
The following are appropriately nuanced and AFAICT correct responses