Prescriptions for ivermectin and benzimidazole, an unproven cancer treatment, more than doubled in early 2025 after actor Mel Gibson endorsed the medicines on Joe Rogan’s podcast , according to researchers. During the January 2025 episode , which has more than 13 million views on YouTube, Gibson spoke of three friends who had been battling stage-four cancer until they took ivermectin and fenbendazole, part of the class of drugs that includes benzimidazole. "I don’t believe that there is anything that can afflict mankind that hasn’t got a natural cure for it," Gibson said. Ivermectin is an approved drug for treating parasitic infections in humans and animals, while fenbendazole is not approved for human use. After these comments, cancer patients were prescribed the drugs at a rate 2.5 times higher in the first seven months of 2025 than in the same period in 2024, according to a study by researchers at Virginia Tech, UCLA and the University of Michigan published in JAMA Network Open on Tuesday.…