Slashdot Mirror
Wellness App Author Lied About Cancer Diagnosis
Freshly Exhumed writes: Wellness advocate Belle Gibson, who translated her high profile as a cancer survivor into publishing success, has admitted her cancer diagnosis was not real. Ms Gibson, 23, who claimed to have healed terminal brain cancer by eating wholefoods, made the admission in an interview with the Australian Women's Weekly. The success of Gibson's book, The Whole Pantry, and her smartphone application, which advocates natural therapies, has been largely dependent on her high-profile as a cancer survivor. Sadly, we've seen this sort of behaviour before. It would seem that Belle Gibson has emulated Dr. Andrew Wakefield in knowingly decieving the public in ways that could possibly be dangerous to the health of believers.
Wait. A person who made dubious claims that had no scientific backing to them was actually lying? What next? Water is wet?!!
I think pretty much everyone but the nutjob, true believers in psuedo-science knew all along that this woman was lying.
So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:
The 26-year-old's popular recipe app, which costs $3.79, has been downloaded 300,000 times and is being developed as one of the first apps for the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch. Her debut cook book The Whole Pantry, published by Penguin in Australia last year, will soon hit shelves in the United States and Britain.
So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide ... that she never had?
... anybody who accepts it as the sole cure for their ailment is putting their health in the hands of such charlatans and quacks.
No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies
My work here is dung.
That could be 'cured' via a special diet. First off, were that true, bicarbonate would be chemotherapy and secondly, this sounds to me like practicing medicine without a licence. The nutritional version of "crying fire in a movie crowded theatre" shouldn't get special exception simply because it's about nutrition and people wanting to do good things for their children and themselves by not eating crap. She hurt people by broadcasting this nonsense.
Will she refund all of the money she made? Doubt it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I'm reminded of a world personality that tried a similar therapy, sadly with Darwinian results; god bless Steve Jobs.
Seems this is just a case of fraud and greed rather than someone lying to promote a cause they truly believe in:
"In early 2015, media scrutiny revealed that Gibson's cancer claims appear to have been fabricated, that she had lied about her age and other details of her personal life and history, and she had used campaign donations to lead a profligate and affluent lifestyle instead of delivering the money to charitable institutions as promised. There are claims she rented an expensive town house, leased an office suite and luxury car, underwent cosmetic dental procedures, and holidayed internationally from the proceeds of money purportedly raised for charity"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Separately, I wish all these self professed wellness "gurus" would jump off the nearest cliff and rid the world of their stupidity.
It never ceases to amaze me how people want so badly to believe this crap that they just blindly accept some pretty extraordinary claims without proof.
What utterly boggles the mind is absolutely nobody ever fact checked what she said ... not her cancer diagnosis, not her recovery, not a damned thing ... she basically said "I had cancer and now I don't, I cured it with unicorns and ponies and stuff I read on the interwebs, hey, why not buy my app?"
Hell, she published a damned book, and nobody ever checked a single fact to make sure she wasn't lying.
Sorry folks, but as usual, if someone makes an extraordinary claim, they better provide some evidence. Or you should be treating them like they're full of shit.
From the anti-vaxers to the people who think the can cure cancer with healing crystals ... people should stop being so damned trusting and naive. Because generally the people making these claims are full of shit, stand to gain financially.
Hell, the great quack Atkins never did a scrap of research despite selling tens of millions of books. Which means everything he ever said or the products which sprung up around him were more or less complete bullshit.
i just don't understand why people are so willing to believe in quackery with zero evidence.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If a person claims authority on a subject based on falsified experiences isn't that pretty much the essential definition of FRAUD? (Particularly if money is made in the process.)
If your advice is connected to peoples' actions that could have ramifications for their health and safety, then negligent manslaughter might be included as well.
Look at it this way, if we started this, we'd at least have fewer celebrities talking about health issues, which is ultimately a net good.
-Styopa
There are men - and women too, I suppose - who hunt down people who claim to be veterans. Watched video just recently, some old Marine chased down some panhandler posing as a veteran, and made him take the Marine Corps jacket off. Told him if he EVER saw him with it on again, he was going to stomp the shit out of him.
This woman deserves as much as any fake veteran has ever received at the hands of real veterans.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"eating right can HELP MITIGATE THE OCCUENCES OF CANCERS DUE TO WHAT YOU EAT" - Tftfy...
Eat all the healthy foods you like, it won't do jack for cancers caused by other factors like smoking, drinking, overtanning, etc... And this is just the kind of ignorance that this nasty piece of excrement posing as a human being expolited when peddling her snake oil.
Personally I hope that she gets tied up in lawsuits based off this for the rest of her miserable life.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Maybe not cure cancer, but almost certainly eating right can prevent it.
No, eating right almost certainly cannot prevent cancer. It almost certainly can reduce the chances of getting cancer, but it has no hope of actually preventing it. It is a very small but incredibly significant distinction.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That's not how cancer works. Cancerous cells are constantly arising and being killed by the immune system. Let's assume that eating healthy food reduces the incidence of metastatic cancer. Then it is preventing cancer in many instances. To claim that it prevents all run-away cancer processes would be a stronger claim with a much higher bar to meet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There's nothing valorous about picking on the homeless. Sure, it's fraud, but just treat any panhandling story like a circus act because there's a damned good reason to make it more appealing than accurate.
Steve Jobs had the most treatable, survivable type of pancreatic cancer. He decided to do yoga and change his diet and do acupuncture instead of real treatments. Then he died. That's just how stupid some people are.
What an unscrupulous being:
source, source 2
Personally I hope that she gets tied up in lawsuits based off this for the rest of her miserable life.
Getting brain cancer would be karma.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That there are people who are willing to lie, even if their lies cause suffering to others, does not surprise me in the list.
What concerns me is the media's role in all this, who for the most part accepted her story without any questions or fact checking. There were so many inconsistencies in her story that even the most basic background check should have exposed her. I'm shocked that no one tried to even talk to her doctors to follow up on her medical claims, for example. Or a quick phone call to the charities she claimed to be supporting would have also exposed her charitable claims.
Her claims should never have been allowed to stand as long they did.
Maybe not cure cancer, but almost certainly eating right can prevent it.
Wrong. Very very incredibly wrong. Substantially more than half of all incidents of cancer are the result of random mutation. No amount of "eating right" will change that.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Honestly I'm tired of this stupid fucking "eating right means you never get sick" religion that seems to be going around (spread by some stupid celebrities like Bill Maher.) Eating wrong can cause problems (most common of which would be liver and heart disorders caused by eating too many sugars or too many electrolytes, followed by undernourishment from not consuming enough amino acid groups) but eating right isn't going to guarantee you'll never get sick.
Oh, and by the way, the actual store "Whole Foods" promotes some of these snake oil ideals:
- They sell very expensive homeopathic medicines which are proven to be worthless
- They maintain a list of banned foods that aren't harmful (glutamates, such as potassium glutamate) while including some foods that are known to kill some people (i.e. peanuts.)
- They sell a LOT of junk food that is VERY high in sugar, but claim to be a health food store.
Honestly the sooner this organic foods/whole foods religion dies, the better.
If eating better reduces the risk of cancer, then by definition it prevents SOME cancer. Remove the "SOME" and the statement still implies "SOME". If you assume "ALL" instead of "SOME", it does break, because "ALL" and "NONE" are rarely true absolutes.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You are SO full of shit, I'm surprised you can hear yourself think over all the noise from the flies swarming about.
Decades of research and trillions of dollars have done A LOT for cancer patients. In the past, cancer survival rates were so discouraging that the 5 year mark was considered terrific. The fact that you posted that comment, suggests that research has come a long in treating cancers. Instead of survival times of 6 months- 2 years, we now have significant numbers of people surviving past the 5 year mark. Hey, maybe we should start talking about things in terms of 10 year survival, but that's a long time for cancer patients to die of heart attacks, accidents, diabetes, etc. Pinning down survival rates would be much more difficult. Cancer research is already complex. We've done such a good job (yes good) of treating cancers (not curing) that jackholes like you ignorantly spill vitriol on the web. Classical Hodgkin's lymphoma was considered a death sentence 50 years ago. Now, the 5 year survival rate for Stage IV Hodgkin's is 65%. It's so treatable that we force teenagers to receive therapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma, because it's idiotic not to. Seminomas, which are cancers of testicles (more or less), have a 70% chance of survival even when it's Stage IV, meaning the cancer is widely metastatic and over the place. Stage II melanoma has survival rates of 90%. Our therapies are also getting better and better, with fewer side effects. Yes, they're expensive as hell, but they literally took decades of research to develop.
No, we haven't cured every type of cancer out there and we're still doing a terrible job with others (pancreatic carcinomas and glioblastomas come to mind). That said, we've come a long way with so many other types of cancers and even if they aren't cured, they're living longer and without disease/symptoms. You don't think that was worth the decades of research and trillions of dollars? Well, fuck you too then!
Wrong. Very very incredibly wrong.
You are absolutely wrong. Eating right does prevent some cancers, because eating right reduces the risk of cancer, thus can be said to prevent. This is not "all or nothing" claim, which you are making it. Reducing the risk, means you prevent some.
Just as the opposite is true, increasing risk means "causes at least some" as in Smoking. Does smoking cause cancer if someone smokes their whole life and dies at age 100 of old age? Why yes, yes it does. It doesn't cause it in everyone. Increasing risk means helps cause ... decreases risk means helps prevents.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
the vast majority of lung cancer is people who smoked. the rest are usually found or believed to be caused by long term exposure to cigarette smoke, or other pollutants. only a tiny tiny fraction (2%) is thought to develop a cancer of the lungs without any adverse environmental inputs being the chief factor. it is one of the few cancers that is largely preventable through behavior/avoidance.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It makes sense though. You start with a small lie and you get sucked into it and pretty soon it's a lifestyle.
For example, I once claimed to understand computers in order to get a job and now I'm chief architect of a multinational tech giant. A user once asked where the missing files were and I was so flustered I blurted out "I don't know, maybe they're in a cloud somewhere", and suddenly the whole industry of cloud storage was born. Meanwhile I have a sneaking suspicion that the IT group has given me a Speak-and-Spell as my new laptop. I would complain but I think I'm more productive now.
Not true; diet is known to have lots of effects on cancer treatment. Many of the treatments involve taking lots of toxic medicines, and a healthy diet can make the difference between a successful treatment, or not.
Learning the wrong thing is just as stupid as believing some book based on an individuals claimed experience.
The lesson here is just that the specifics she claimed were not true for her; it actually tells us nothing about the relative value of nutrition in cancer treatment; it doesn't support or refute any science at all, and in fact, it has nothing to do with science and it never did.
Reasonable beliefs about diet and cancer risk/treatment can only be based in medical science. Anything else is wild speculation, and a false speculation is just garbage.
This is just the kind of ignorance I'd expect to see on slashdot voted up to +5, especially since it is nasty and full of excrement-language and logical fallacy. It even throws out the word "snake oil" while also making unsubstantiated medical claims. But the opposite bullshit is not truth, it is just horseshit.