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$1.4 Million Raised on GoFundMe For 'Garbage' Homeopathy Cancer Treatment Scams (gizmodo.com)
"Medical crowdfunding has become a billion-dollar industry practically overnight, led by sites like GoFundMe," reports Gizmodo, citing new research on its dark side: over a million dollars in donations "funneled to ludicrous, unscientific treatments for life-threatening diseases like cancer."
The authors of the study, published Thursday in The Lancet, searched for a particular kind of medical crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe: campaigns for cancer treatments that involved the use of homeopathy. Homeopathy might easily be considered the lowest-hanging fruit of medical quackery. The theory behind how it works is nonsensical (in short, its proponents claim water can be programmed with the "memory" of toxic substances that will then treat the symptoms they normally cause); there are no good studies that show it works; and its practitioners are some of the most brazen cranks this side of P.T. Barnum still kicking. "These treatments are the bunkiest of the bunk, just complete garbage," lead author Jeremy Snyder, a bioethicist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, told Gizmodo.
Snyder and his co-author found that over 200 GoFundMe campaigns, as of June 2018, had been created to help fund homeopathic cancer treatments...and were shared on Facebook more than 100,000 times in total. They collectively asked for more than $5 million in funding, and raised $1.4 million from over 13,000 donors.... Snyder and his co-author also tried to find out what ultimately happened to the people behind all these campaigns. Sometimes, the campaigns would have final updates reporting the person had died; other times, they were able to track down obituaries. In total, they found that 28 percent of the people had died by the time of their search. But even that might be an underestimate...
A third of campaigns even explicitly stated that all contributions went to people who'd chosen to avoid doctors. "I have a huge amount of sympathy for these people. They're very sick and desperate," Snyder says. "But it's concerning to see them be taken in by these claims." Gizmodo adds, "That's to say nothing of the kind people who are being roped into donating their money to medical charlatans."
"[W]e believe it is not our place to tell them what decision to make," GoFundMe said in a statement. They added that "ultimately it is up to the GoFundMe community to decide which campaigns to donate to."
Snyder and his co-author found that over 200 GoFundMe campaigns, as of June 2018, had been created to help fund homeopathic cancer treatments...and were shared on Facebook more than 100,000 times in total. They collectively asked for more than $5 million in funding, and raised $1.4 million from over 13,000 donors.... Snyder and his co-author also tried to find out what ultimately happened to the people behind all these campaigns. Sometimes, the campaigns would have final updates reporting the person had died; other times, they were able to track down obituaries. In total, they found that 28 percent of the people had died by the time of their search. But even that might be an underestimate...
A third of campaigns even explicitly stated that all contributions went to people who'd chosen to avoid doctors. "I have a huge amount of sympathy for these people. They're very sick and desperate," Snyder says. "But it's concerning to see them be taken in by these claims." Gizmodo adds, "That's to say nothing of the kind people who are being roped into donating their money to medical charlatans."
"[W]e believe it is not our place to tell them what decision to make," GoFundMe said in a statement. They added that "ultimately it is up to the GoFundMe community to decide which campaigns to donate to."
If you believe in homeopathy and are an antivaxxer, you probably get your left and right mixed up.
Million dollars ain't shit nowadays
Bring down politics and war
Fucking wait and see what fucking happens
It's all very well being smug about homeopathy, but even Steve Jobs was convinced by "alternative therapies", when traditional medicine could have given him another 20 years.
Should it be a criminal offence to mislead somebody into taking actions that will lead to their certain death, e.g. telling someone not to seek professional medical attention & to take sugar pills instead when they have cancer? "Alternative medicine" vendors should have to provide valid, reliable evidence that their claims are correct, just like the pharma companies are supposed to. Not a perfect system but at least you can sue a pharma company when they lie about their drugs.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Yes you're going to see alternative "treatments" of varying efficacy (CBBD causing tumor apoptosis vs say, magnet gloves...) because the alternative is to irradiate and poison yourself to death over 2-3 years and die anyway.
That's the reason these things exist. Cure cancer and I bet they go away. Calling the current regime a "treatment" for most cancers is goddam whitewashing. Get cancer, find out. There is no cure, people will try anything.
That's nothing. There's been over $18 million raised to build a wall to boost the ego of a demented wannabe dictator. A wall that would be a little less effective than homeopathy cancer treatments.
But hope springs eternal. They've only got $24,982,000,000.00 to go. Where sheep go one, they go all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know some folks into homeopathy and it's been because they couldn't afford real doctors and medicine. I can buy some fake cure on Amazon for $50 bucks. That won't even get me in a doc's office if I don't have insurance.
Nearly all medical go fund me's fail. It's only that there's so many of them that makes it a billion dollar industry (that and a billion dollars isn't a lot of money anymore, not globally, it's just that we humans are bad with numbers over a few thousand). I suspect that's what's going on here. Folks aren't expecting to get enough money for cancer treatment (which can be millions) so they're doing what they think they can.
Bottom line most people can't live without hope. Nerds often can, and it's one of the things that makes us nerds.
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This is a great experiment. It will show the true nature of homeopathy. As these people who take homeopathic treatment die of a possible curable cancer (by normal treatment), it will show that homeopathy does not actually work.
You got conned by a life-long fraud and wrestling promoter and Hillary Clinton backer turned Conservative Fuhrer and traitor. Mueller will see you now.
I worked with someone who believed in homepathy and the power of crystals to cure diseases. Her attitude was "So what if there is no proof it works; what if it does and everyone is wrong?" She was well educated, and not ill, but for whatever reason would not accept any data that conflicted with her belief. That is in line with a recent study I heard about that shoiws presenting data that conflicts with a person's viewpopint just hardens their position rather than convinces them to change it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have a friend who is well educated, though in the arts, who reacted very negatively when I made a comment about the silliness of homeopathy. I was informed that in Europe it was generally accepted and had repeatedly been proven effective. He blamed big drug companies for bogus studies showing that it didn't work.
Guess this type of argument actually pre-dates Trump.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
This solves two problems. Those who undergo this "treatment" will die off and the fools who fund this nonsense will be out their money.
This is chicken shit.
200 GoFundMe campaigns raised $1.4 million from 13,000 donors, over several years ?
This is a giant problem that requires government intervention ?
Come on, we live in a "free" society and there are stupid people everywhere.
Most of the donors were just being "nice" to a dying person who didn't trust doctors.
Now lets pay some attention attentions to the 10's if not 100's of BILLIONS of dollars that Big Pharma robs from us every DAY!
... unless you're currently suffering from acute Hypoglycemia, then a handfull of homeopathic globules could be a good idea.
Or table sugar or a non-diet soda, both will do the same trick for a fraction of the price.
The Captcha of 'interned' is quite fitting when it comes to this topic: IMHO everyone pushing that stuff should be put in jail to protect the general population from their scam.
Most of those people didn't chose homeopathic treatments while their oncologists had treatments to try. They probably were at the end of the line with conventional and experimental treatments.
When there was no hope, the homeopathic treatments offered home. It was a false hope, but made the people getting feel better about it for a while.
No, I will not call homeopathy "medicine", because it is not. However, while homeopathy is basically a really screwed up belief, medicine is not doing so well. It would not be an overstatement that it is one of the worst and perhaps the worst performer in the STEM field. Still nothing really good on cancer, took half a century with AIDS and still no real treatment, still nothing effective against the flu or the common cold, the upcoming antibiotics crisis, etc. In addition hugely disproportional costs, probably because treatments are generally not really good. The list of failures of medicine is really long and it is totally inadequate for what science and technology can do today and what other STEM fields achieve.
As a result, people look for alternatives. And when you do not understand science and see the pretty bad options medicine has for cancer (e.g.), it is understandable that homeopathy may look like an "alternative". That it is not based on science and offers basically the 0-rate of cures (patients gets better by themselves, which even for cancer is not zero), is something people have trouble seeing. But the root-cause for this thing being still around is that the offering by medicine is so bad. Hence the fix for things like homeopathy is to have medical research finally get their asses in gear and start doing solid science, start bringing cost down and effectiveness and quality of outcome up. And, in particular, get their egos under control and admit where they really stand and begin to do something about it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Fools and their bitcoin are soon parted.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I have a friend who is well educated, though in the arts, who reacted very negatively when I made a comment about the silliness of homeopathy.
Not "well" educated. May have learned some facts but never got what facts are or how they are found.
I was informed that in Europe it was generally accepted and had repeatedly been proven effective.
A complete lie. What happened a while ago is that some private insurers started to offer paying for some "alternative" treatments (only cheap ones). It makes perfect sense for them to do so economically, as they are competing for customers (you select your on insurance in most of Europe) and many of their customers are clueless how medicine works and unaware of that. The utter failure of politics was to not stop that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Homeopathy scams are much, much more popular with the poor (as is faith healing in general).
Human beings will always seek out hope, and bastards will always be there to sell the false kind to them.
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I don't think you fully appreciate just how complicated medicine is. There are a lot of factors in every disease and progress is necessarily slow.
As for factors, what you call "cancer" is actually a few dozen distinct diseases with similar etiology (DNA somewhere in some cell broke) but completely different presentations and treatments. What works for one does not necessarily work for the other. HIV is a retrovirus made of RNA and mutates constantly. There are two distinct strains and several different recognizable subgroups. The flu isn't a retrovirus but similarly mutates constantly. Every year we get a little genetic drift and every few years we get a genetic shift and we get screwed until it gets under control.
As for progress, the progress we've made is incredible in the last decades. Your comparisons are completely off base. If an electrical engineer lets the magic smoke out of a few components on a PCB he just gets new components or a new PCB. If a physician or medical researcher destroys a few organs in a patient he just killed a human being. You simply cannot move fast and break things in this field. Breast cancer (probably the best funded) survival is now over 90%. Want to see truly huge gains? Try leukemia.. HIV has improved, too. PrEP can prevent the spread and maybe in a few generations we won't have to worry about finding a cure for it because we have eradicated it like we did smallpox. Oh! Remember seeing that one recently? No. You didn't. Because vaccines have made it possible to completely eradicated diseases. Polio is only endemic in a handful of countries now. Why? Because medicine DOES work.
Maybe you're not happy with the speed of progress but that's because of your broken standards, not because we're moving too slow.
how much of it is money laundering?
One thing that's really been vexing the big pharmaceuticals who must prove their products have an effect greater than placebo is the fact that the placebo effect itself has gotten stronger in recent years. Nobody understands how or why. Seriously, look it up.
People give millions every year to TV evangelists, conmen, conspiracy theory pushers... what's the difference?
I'm much more concerned at the billions given to churches and the Vatican to polish their gold-and-diamond-encrusted religious items, than some nutter funding another's own willing death.
In my European country (which may not be true in a few month's time, which kinda gives away which one it is), claiming or even implying that homeopathy - or indeed any non-medical treatment - cures cancer is actually illegal without proper peer-reviewed science behind it.
We also have laws that psychics and other charlatans must only advertise if they have a visible clause that it's "for entertainment purposes only".
Neither are generally accepted anywhere, except by morons.
here in America it is. And I think the reason Homeopathy is "less popular" here is that we've got the Evangelical faith healers who compete with the Homeopaths.
It's actually become a major source of irritation in the athiest community because more Americans are professing "none" for their religion (which takes them out of the running for faith healers) but then turning to pseudo science "woo" like homeopathy.
Regardless it's not about money, it's about hope. In America money gets involved because there's lots of solutions to health problems that are unobtainable w/o lots of money. Buddy of mine spent a year living with kidney stones because he couldn't come up with the money for the proper meds. I found out later or I'd have just come up with the money for it, but in the meantime he drunk magic tea that was supposed to cure him. To this day he'll tell you the tea worked because eventually the stones passed. The tea was just a placebo.
This in and of itself wouldn't piss me off if he'd also had the proper meds (he could have been done with the pain in a few months instead of a year if he had). Now, he knows damn well the tea didn't do squat (the water mighta helped though) but like I said, folks need to feel like they're doing _something_. Hope sells well.
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It's nice to know that GoFundMe doesn't care about people getting scammed. That's why I completely avoid crowdfunding websites.
Booooo on gofundme. Just boo.
In the cawes I know, that's because many natural medicine is just called "homeopathy", capitalizing on the term's popularity.
So, at the end, people are double-tricked and get something useful, instead of sugar pills.
The real problem is the corporate medical complex that is unable to make people healthy. If you spend six month going to different specialist spend 100k and get a diagnosis of idiopathic converson disorder and are worse off than before you turn to qiack medicine.
Quack doctors are cheaper than real doctors, and they invariably have better bedside manner. There is a real placebo affect when you drink that snake oil.
If you are gonna die you might as well take a bunch of overpriced vitamins rather than undergoing millions of dollars of expensive test that go nowhere.
Hooray for quack medine
The Banerji Protocols, evolved by Dr Prasanta and Pratip Banerji offer a standardised diagnostic system, different from the case history taking process associated with classical homeopathy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Documentary Film) http://www.banerjiprotocolsned... Ohsawa, I., et al. Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic antioxidant by selectively reducing cytotoxic oxygen radicals, Nature Medicine, Advance Online Publication, May 7, 2007. Nature Publishing Group, Available online: http://www.nature.com/natureme... Pollack, G. Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh views from the water’s edge, Thirty-second annual faculty lecture, Jan 30, 2008, Univ. of WA. Available online: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/d... Shigenobu, K, et al. Fundamental properties of electrolyzed water, Journal of the Japanese Society for Food Science and Technology, 2000, Vol. 47 No. 5 pp. 390-93. Abstract available online: http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/... Watanabe, T. et al., Histopathological influence of alkaline ionized water on myocardial muscle of mother rats. J. Toxicol. Sci., 1998, Dec. 23:5, pp. 411-7. Dittman, R. Bio-Terrain, Evolutionary Biology and the Practice of Medicine in the Early 1900s: An Intro to René Quinton’s Marine Plasma. Explore! Vol. 15 No. 4 2006. Pischinger, A. The Extracellular Matrix and Ground Regulation: Basis for a Holistic Biological Medicine. North Atlantic Books, 2007, pp. 3-11. Flament, P. et al. The three-dimensional structure of an upper ocean vortex in the tropical Pacific Ocean Nature, 17 October 1996, Vol. 383, pp. 610-613. Available online: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... Pischinger, A. The Extracellular Matrix and Ground Regulation North Atlantic Books, 2007 . Lo, Shui Yin. The Biophysics Basis for Acupuncture and Health. Dragon Eye Press, 2004. Pal, S. et al. Water at DNA surfaces: Ultrafast dynamics in minor groove recognition. PNAS July 2003, Vol. 100, No. 14, pp. 8113-8118. Water–The Great Mystery is a recent documentary produced by Intention Media. The film interviews top scientists and researchers and presents the latest information on the structural and spiritual properties of water. It will leave no doubt in your mind that water is capable of almost anything. http://www.vibrantvitalwater.c... Tiller, W., Dibble, W., and Kohane, M. Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergence of a New Physics, Pavior Publishing, 2001, pg. xi. Rein, G. et al. Structural changes in water and DNA associated with new physiologically measurable states. Journal of Scientific Exploration 1994; 8(3) pp. 438-439. McTaggart, L. www.TheIntentionExperiment.com, results of the experiment available online: http://www.theintentionexperim... Smith, C. W. Quanta and coherence effects in water and living systems, J. Alt and Comp Med, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2004, pp. 69-78. Department of Energy Non-chemical technologies for scale and hardness control. DOE-EE-0162 Correa, M., et al. SCD probiotics in the remediation of water contaminated with pathogenic bacteria and copper in Reseda Lake, Los Angeles, U.S. 2009. Emoto, M. The Message from Water, IHM Press, Japan.
and say it remembers being x thousands of $
Gee. Considering how many times I flushed the toilet and used it to transport shit, let's hope it doesn't hold grudges.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Europe here. It's not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well it's a bit more complicated than that (when isn't it) But I'm sure you would want to know a better picture. It has not, and never can be proven to work here in Europe. But we do have the head of state in waiting (Prince Charles whose only job is waiting for the Queen to die) who promotes it. We have a Royal homoeopathic hospital as well. No sensible person uses it, but there are a lot of people who do. Mostly middle class worried well taking it for colds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is one leading academics on alternative medicine who was a sugar pill pusher as a doctor, but decided to study it as evidence based medicine and found it to be bunk. I've seen him on tour with Simon Singh (sued by the back crackers for saying they knowingly lied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). So yes it is popular amongst the chattering classes and the NHS does spend money on it (probably saving cash, sugar pills are cheaper than antibiotics and both do the same level of good for a cold.) but it's far from mainstream and is often derided by comedians.
Are you calling my future King a moron? Well fair play to you. Carry on.
What do they call alternative medicine that actually works?
Medicine!
Your website shown in your Slashdot profile uses the .uk domain. You're not hiding much by saying you're a Brit. Unless that's somehow embarrassing (I dunno, maybe it is?)