On her blog, she claims she cured her terminal brain cancer by avoiding gluten and sugar. Shocking, I know, but: this is not how cancer works. You know what stopped the progression of my cancer? Chemo (derived from exotic plants and fungi, for real!), surgery, drugs, and a shitload of all-natural radiation, delivered via a linear particle accelerator that is even more powerful than my beloved kale juicer....
April 23, 2015
"The 23-year-old Australian bullshitted the entire world about having terminal brain cancer..."
"... and profited from her completely fictional story via her 'natural wellness' app, The Whole Pantry."
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48 comments:
Some just want to believe in unicorns.
She's hot.
You cannot reason someone out of a belief that they were not reasoned into.
I've dealt with people who have "alternative health beliefs" for 50 years. A few, like Steve Jobs, come to regret their enthusiasm. Very few in my own experience.
So awful.
I hope she's going to jail for this.
Cancer is a disease that we've mostly beaten -- and still people are dying because they want to try alternative therapies. (Steve Jobs -- I'm thinking of you.)
(Full Disclosure: But for chemotherapy, I would have died ten years ago.)
Question for Law-profs and the like:
If this had happened in the U.S. and someone with a treatable cancer had died as a result of depending on her treatment (and those facts were all somehow provable) -- would there be a chargeable homicide felony? Is there a statute covering homicide-by-fraud?
"You know what stopped the progression of my cancer? Chemo (derived from exotic plants and fungi, for real!), surgery, drugs, and a shitload of all-natural radiation, delivered via a linear particle accelerator that is even more powerful than my beloved kale juicer," writes Xeni Jardin.
Xeni Jardin? Is that where they get those exotic plants and fungi?
Michael K. wrote: I've dealt with people who have "alternative health beliefs" for 50 years. A few, like Steve Jobs, come to regret their enthusiasm. Very few in my own experience.
Please clarify. Do the majority who do not come to regret their enthusiasm retain it because "alternative health beliefs" are efficacious? Or do they just croak before their brains start working?
If I'm dying, I'm lying!
People want to believe The Alternative - whatever it may be - is smarter and wiser than the proven and established. Hence, the popularity of The Food Babe, and all of Dr. Oz's alternative stuff.
Nevermind that so little of it is medically defensible or even scientifically valid. It's all about bucking the system and being a rebel.
The amount of lying on these tough, hot-button issues seems to be increasing, although that might be just a function of the internet 24/7 news cycle.
Rolling Stone on rape -- liar
Major media on Michael Brown's "Hands-Up don't shoot" -- liars
This gal on cancer -- liar
Entire generation of baseball power hitters on steroids -- liars
Obama attorneys to Texas Federal Judge on Immigration policies -- liars.
You can keep your Doctor post-Obama-Care -- liar
Is there a new meme gathering steam that lying is an acceptable means towards certain really, really, important ends?
I'm wrong or sloppy on many things, but I can't even remember the last time I lied about something.
Lying about having brain cancer, and trying to capitalize on it?!!?
Oy Vey
Also:
http://whatstheharm.net/index.html
clint said...
Cancer is a disease that we've mostly beaten
Sadly this is not really true, except in a few cases, but it is not for want of trying.
The problem is the immense complexity of gene regulatory circuits and their control of cell cycling. It is interesting that Jobs could not get his head around this complexity and the current, relatively poor understanding of this complexity. It was obviously not for lack of intelligence on his part. Apparently he had a mind that dealt poorly with a uncertainty and relied on a strategy of seeking simple, albeit useless, solutions in this particular case. A lot of artistic people seem to deal with much of science in a similar manner.
She didn't bullshit the entire world. Must people who heard her story knew it was BS. The only people she fooled were those who were stupid and those who were very desperate.
Sadly this is not really true, except in a few cases, but it is not for want of trying.
The statistics on cancer are confusing. Depending on how the data is digested cancer is either still a huge killer, or it's not. Time was not so long ago that if heart disease didn't getcha, cancer would. Now it seems MERSA and C. difficile colitis are racking up kills faster than cancer.
"The amount of lying on these tough, hot-button issues seems to be increasing"
Oh, stop it. You know very well that survivors tell the truth -- rape survivors, cancer survivors, you name it. Get with the program.
http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/viewfactsheet.aspx?csid=75
"In 1975, the incidence rate for all cancers combined in the United States was 400 new cases for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 199 deaths for every 100,000 persons.
...
In 2007, the latest year for which we have updated statistics, the U.S. incidence rate for all cancers combined was 461 new cases diagnosed for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 178 deaths for every 100,000 persons. Although the incidence rate in 2007 was higher than that in 1975, the increase is largely attributed to earlier diagnosis and aging of the population. This rate has been declining since 1992, when cancer incidence peaked at 510 new cases for every 100,000 people. Similarly, cancer death rates have been declining since 1991, when they peaked at 215 deaths for every 100,000 people."
She's got a lot in common with Doctor Oz.
Among Americans, I'm betting a regression analysis would show that the correlation coefficient with people who bought her products or believed her and who voted for Obama is well into positive territory.
@ Fern
Good stats - I think the main success in the "War on "Cancer" is based on the steep decrease in cigarette smoking, but not much else.
That's a terrible con job though that could have actually killed people. Not so different from some religions, really. She'll probably realize what she did when a relative gets cancer or something.
Still avoiding sugar is not a bad thing. Two schools of thought: one that sugar, as a very easy energy source, is also very easy for cancer to use. Another, from both integrative types and MDs, is that it's not that important.
And completely contradicts Steve Jobs' sugar-filled fruit fasts. I'm convinced that he was not so much going natural, but rather leaning on the faith of his youth, much as some return to chuch during crises.
I was on the bus one night with some poor woman who was trying to cure her cancer via the Gerson Method. She had bags of veggies from whole foods and was telling the person on the phone how she has found the answer. I felt so bad for her.
The Food Babe is another one along with Dr Oz (who has a wife that does Reiki and can cure your aura...). This chick like Jenny McCarthy goes with the almighty gluten free cure (poor sad little wheat!). What gets me is, Jenny claims to have cure her son...so why haven't others been cured using her methods? Why don't people see that?
I wonder how many of these people are atheists. The people (like Maher) who seem to go all in like this and see "toxins" everywhere tend to be atheists who have supplanted faith in God or a higher power to these "healing therapies."
I've dealt with people who have "alternative health beliefs" for 50 years.
My cousin, Kim. True believer in alternative "medicine" right up to her last breath. Breast cancer. Wouldn't let the "butchers" cut into her, or the pharmaceutical industry "poison" her.
So, she's dead. Left behind a son, daughter, and husband.
Smart woman, too. College educated, and for quite a number of years made very respectable money working for IBM.
Yeah...I saw the same bullshit on the evening news.
"Please clarify. Do the majority who do not come to regret their enthusiasm retain it because "alternative health beliefs" are efficacious? Or do they just croak before their brains start working?"
They are very hard to convince they are wrong and I long ago gave up trying.
I once treated a guy who had been a candidate for local office in Orange County and who was petty well known. I've forgotten why. Anyway he had been treating his cancer of the rectum with celery juice. When it got out of hand I had to do something but he was convinced that he had not used enough celery juice.
I used to have patients ask me to give them Laetrile. It is useless but had a great popularity in the 60s and 70s. If they were terminally ill, I told them I had no objection but that I would not give it and not to pauperize themselves buying it.
It was useless to argue, especially when I had little to offer.
Cancer treatment is far more effective now. The pessimism by ARM is not justified. Cancer rates are a function of age. We all died of something. As fewer die of infectious disease and heart disease, they die of cancer. Just at an older age.
I was a medical student when I saw the first cures of childhood leukemia. It was absolutely the most wonderful thing I have ever seen. Acute leukemia of childhood is now 85% curable in white children and a little lower in other races.
For most of my life I have said, been saying, that all sorts of poisons * **are natural,** too*! Even before I could, for one example, even begin to distinguish snark from sarcasm.
"Just sayin'" ain't something I was just saying in the Internet years; that's not when I first started saying such a thing.
I was a "just sayin'" sort from so early on that it might be characterized as from childhood. Whether born or bred, or some combination of both, there that impetus was from earliest times, and from that time to this, I have not been able to shake off entirely that impulse.
So it has always gone.
Top 5 Causes of Death in US in 2014
1. Heart diseases - 600,000
2. Cancer - 580,000
3. COPD+ - 142,000
4. Stroke - 130,000
5. Accidents -126,000
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php#top_10_leading_causes_of_death_in_more_detail
A few weeks before my cousin died, she consulted her local quack, who told her she'd be fine, all she needed to do was buy this ionizer.
So she bought the ionizer, and drank ionized water, which threw her electrolytes so far off her mother had to take her to the emergency room.
Somewhere in hell there's a room reserved for these quacks.
The NIH spent some 2 billion to investigate the claims of holistic, alternative, yadayada medicine, and came up empty.
Yet the same people who jeer at a few fringe conservatives for not believing Darwin subject themselves ---no, make that EMBRACE---homeopathy, acupuncture, osteopathy, naturopathy, Pyramid Power, Gaia, ESP, auras, spoon-bending psychics, Freudianism, feng shui, rolfing, harmonic convergence, "organic" foods, unprecedented/human-caused "climate change", re-incarnation, herbalism, telekinesis, aromatherapy, ouija boards, seances, chakras, channeling, GMO's as Frankenfood, wymyn's way of knowing, megavitamins, colonics, and----most of all and especially----the Nostrum of all Prog Nostrums: Scientific Socialism.
(Funny how those same progs can jeer at some conservatives for not believing Darwinism, yet promote a society that's organized from top to bottom, IOW through Intelligence by Design".
1. Heart diseases - 600,000
2. Cancer - 580,000
3. COPD+ - 142,000
4. Stroke - 130,000
I certainly have earned my risk factors for each and every one of #1 through #4. ; )
Of course, on any given day, I might be killed on account of an accident (#5 on the list). Of course, being me, if I could question such a thing from my grave, I'd question whether, in fact, it was an "accident," as opposed to a deadly crash resulting from an individual's choice to pay attention, first and foremost, to something OTHER than responsibly and with full focus driving a car.
As for that ringing Belle of dishonest bullshit, of course she deserves to be discredited. Full stop.
As do so many others deserve to be discredited, across the spectrum of so-called expertise.
My saying ^ does not diminish the Belle-ringer's complete lack of embracing the notion of responsibility, much less actually embracing responsibility, even less taking it.
I know that I must say all of that, and so, therefore, I just said of all that, in order to be able to say a particular thing at some other time.
I think I was unfair in singling out religion for a comparison earlier. Political systems must be included too. People can hold on to the belief, evidence to the contrary, and belief they, or the country, just havent been practicing strongly, purely enough.
And that kills people as well.
Interesting how the alternative medicine crowd slavishly follows "modern scientific medicine" for diagnoses, but wigs away from it for treatment.
My sister-in-law-to-be looked strange at our wedding. She had wrapped the cancerous one of her breasts in a large cabbage leaf, and its rather unbreastlike profile distorted her blouse. It has since gone stage 4 and she is now drinking "oxygen water," which is only available in its natural state - you cannot just bubble oxygen through some tapwater - at a European spa. Her husband's atherosclerosis is the result of mysterious but deadly invisible cardiac parasites, and I forget what the cure is. Something homey: huge doses of cinnamon bark?
My favorite was a couple of vegetarians clad in beaded leather who were homeopathic piss drinkers. I met them as they bolted doughnuts that had been deep-fried in animal fat. They confessed they did not feel very good; the youthful zest and exuberance were gone. But the answer was at hand. They needed to drink more piss, at higher concentrations. That was the general health and relationship cure, and it was just terribly sad how few Americans understood it.
My experience parallels Dr. K's. You just wait to be asked (sometimes you wait quite a while), provide some suggestions which are ignored, stay quiet if not asked, and watch the finances crumble. One of these days, when the winter storms are raging outside, I expect to open the door and find a shivering grasshopper there, smelling of cinnamon.
It started with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." When the left and the Democrat party decided to go all in for the lying sexually harassing Bill Clinton, the chains of truth were broken in America. On the left generally, it comes from Lenin and having to break a few eggs to make an omelet. DNS justify the means is the way of tyranny. Recognizing the importance of the means is civilization and high culture.
ARM is right.
Cancer is really a family of related diseases, only some of which are effectively treated. I work in the area (12 yrs now) an know a little bit (it's very complex and there are surprises). There are many signal transduction pathways that are mediated by interconnected classes of proteins encoded by a host a genes and regulated by multiple levels of transcription factors, chromosome remodelers etc. Dysfunction through chromosomal structural variation, genetic or epigenetic means alter or disrupt the behavior of a large array of genes that can cause cancer. Next Gen sequencing now allows us to get a far more precise handle on the causes of the disease for each individual, but the cures are still remote.
There are some exceptions however on the positive side. In clinical trials immune regulating proteins have been successfully used to induce the patients own immune system to clear tumors. When it works (in 25-50% of cases of stage 4 melanoma) the cancer is fully cleared and the patient is thereafter immune to that form of the disease. There is hope and real progress: it's just a very complex family of diseases.
Improvements in cure rates for cancer are primarily due to improved screening and early detection, rather than new treatments.
As a copyeditor, I've been offered jobs to help publish ads and brochures for various quack remedies. (Such as one vendor claiming that he could cure chronic kidney failure with nutritional supplements, without dialysis or kidney transplants.)
I routinely turn down those jobs, no matter how much they're willing to pay me.
I'm not going to earn money by misleading desperate patients.
There will always be snake oil salesmen and suckers who believe them.
It's sad when the latter is someone you love, but whaddya gonna do.
We can't make the world safe for the gullible.
Hey, if we can BS our way into a war...meh.
Cancers do feed on sugars, so cutting off sugar might be a complementary things to do to destroy cancer. But By itself it's not going to cure cancer.
Thst being said, there is a lot of quackery in alternative medicine. But it's not all quackery. This particular instance is not just quackery but fraud.
Cancers feed off of everything people feed off of; therefore, the "secret" of effective cancer treatments is something that is more lethal to cancer cells than to non-cancer cells.
Is there any evidence at all that this is true for gluten-free foods, or reduced sugar foods?
Of course, cancer-treatment fraud is inevitable because the conventional "cut-burn-poison" treatments are both unpleasant and often of limited effectiveness, and the disease is life-threatening, and therefore the will-to-believe in "alternatives" is strong.
Nonetheless, quacks preying off those desperate to find alternative threatments are despicable.
And if you want to get into the quack-cures business, what's important is, after you've made all your fantastic claims, just be sure to anchor your ship in Quacktown's Safe Harbor with the "Not approved by FDA. Not intended to treat or cure any disease" disclaimer.
In the smallest, greyest mouseprint you think you can get away with, of course.
Saying that she deserves punishment is just blaming the non-victim.
Has she yet declared her candidacy for the GOP nomination?
My cousin, Kim. True believer in alternative "medicine" right up to her last breath. Breast cancer. Wouldn't let the "butchers" cut into her, or the pharmaceutical industry "poison" her.
So, she's dead.
My mom's cousin, who was a nurse, was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was in her 60s. She refused chemo not because she wanted to try alternative medicine but because she knew what chemo was like and she knew what her odds were.
After watching my dad go through chemo (and dying anyhow shortly thereafter), I decided that my odds of survival after chemo would have to be about 95% for me to suffer through that.
The only reason my dad didn't die sooner is that he was otherwise so healthy - ate well, didn't drink much (for a guy from Wisconsin), didn't smoke, exercised (initially thought he had pulled a muscle running a 10K, but it was non-Hodgkins lymphoma).
It was either an opportunistic lie or a broad spectrum disorder (e.g. syndrome). Either way, there is profit.
I represented a series of insurance companies in the 1980s who'd refused to pay for the cancer quackery of an infamous Houston-based physician. His entire practice was built on anecdotal claims of success. Looked at closely, they fell into three categories:
(1) People who'd never had a definitive diagnosis of cancer to begin with;
(2) People who'd had traditional therapies (surgery, radiation, chemo) but who hadn't assessed the results of those before seeking the quack remedy; and
(3) People with cancers that are very slow-growing or naturally wax & wane -- for which the quack nevertheless claimed cures.
The fourth category, of course, were the people who died, many of them after foregoing conventional therapies that might have cured them or at least extended their lives. In one of my cases, the plaintiff -- a self-made multi-millionaire CEO -- had a tumor in his pancreas the size of a golf ball when he was diagnosed in September; by the time of the trial in late January, it was the size of a grapefruit, and the CT scans showed that it was necrotic (dying) at the center. The quack testified that necrosis proved his therapy was working; the real docs unanimously agreed that meant the tumor was raging out of control and had outgrown its blood supply. The plaintiff was dead by April.
My mother wasted thousands of dollars on chelation therapy for my stroke-bound stepfather. His strokes were related to arteriosclerosis. She did this not because she thought it would work, but because she wanted his family to know that she did everything she could to help him. Family loyalty trumps logic and science every time.
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