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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."
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.
If you believe in homeopathy and are an antivaxxer, you probably get your left and right mixed up.
Homeopaths are only harming themselves (and their children who presumably carry the same defective genes). Anti-vaxxers endanger all of us. So they aren't really comparable.
I know some folks into homeopathy and it's been because they couldn't afford real doctors and medicine
No, it's been because they didn't really understand what they were buying. If you're already poor you're certainly not going to waste money on something you know doesn't work. If I can't pay my electric bill I'm not going to go out and buy a perpetual motion machine.
As someone else pointed out earlier, Steve Jobs wasted his time and money on alternative medicine when conventional medicine had a very strong chance of helping him live another decade or two. Are you going to tell me he couldn't afford actual medicine?
The problem isn't money; it's ignorance.
"Alternative medicine" vendors should have to provide valid, reliable evidence that their claims are correct
They ARE required to do that, IF they are selling medicine. But they aren't.
First, they make no specific claims that their product cures anything. They may imply that it will help, but they don't actually say it. So they don't have to support their claims, since there are no claims.
Second, there is nothing to regulate. Homeopathic "medicine" doesn't have any active ingredients. There is nothing in it.
You can only go so far in protecting stupid people from themselves. In a free society, at some point you have to accept that some people will make stupid decisions.
Btw, the new money hole for stupid people is "alkaline water". My neighbor bought a $4000 water ionizer. She was disappointed when I showed her she could get the same effect with a 50 cent box of baking soda, and that there is zero evidence that "alkaline water" is healthy in any way.
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.
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.
If your vaccines actually work then you'll be protected against the disease, so why worry?
Because vaccines are not 100% effective, and some people can't take them for legitimate medical reasons.
Vaccines work primarily through herd immunity, not individual immunity.
"No shots = No school" needs to be enforced. Religious freedom doesn't give anyone the right to endanger my kid.
Vaccines don't give 100% protection. But 99% is enough to protect a population: some people will still get sick, but not enough to let the disease spread. It then dies out rather quickly for lack of transmission.
However, if you have a bunch of people that have not been vaccinated, the disease will spread among them and then sicken 1% of the vaccinated people they come into contact with. That's the difference between herd immunity and individual immunity.
Also, unvaccinated people provide a pool for the disease to survive and mutate in. Until it happens to mutate into a version against which the vaccine is not effective anymore.
So yes, unvaccinated people are a danger to the others.