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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.
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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A hippie marketing guru who considered LSD one of the most important things he did in his life was conned by alternative medicine bullshit? No way! I don't believe it!
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 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.
"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.
He probably could have got more than that. When his liver cancer was first found, it was a super rare kind that was very slow growing. It could have been surgically removed with little chance of returning and no lasting effects (your liver 100% regrows to its fully needed size very quickly, hence you can donate one liver lobe to somebody, and the remaining lobe grows to full size in both you and your recipient.)
Yet Jobs, following this hippie medicine shit, and against very strong objection from his medical team, went to a naturopath that put him on a juice diet. Two liver transplants later, he's dead, all because of willful neglect on his part. Totally avoidable, and two livers were wasted. As a kidney transplant recipient myself, that pisses me off, especially given his personal jet gave him the ability to list in all 9 UNOS regions (means you'll quickly go to the front of the list.) I had to wait 3.5 years vs a few months for him, and I was lucky because I was offered and accepted from a high risk donor. I have IgA nephropathy, I couldn't even do shit to stop by kidneys from failing, and this asshole who let his liver die on purpose got shortcuts.
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 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.
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.
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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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.
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.
This is dangerous bullshit, and people readily believe it.
Yes, people die of cancer. Yes, there is a high risk involved with the therapy because, yes, chemotherapy is poisoning your body and radiation therapy is bombarding it with ionizing radiation (hint: that's the kind of radiation that's really good at killing people).
The reason we subject patients to this is that this gives them a chance for survival. By now we're pretty good at finding just the right dosage to kill the cancer and not the patient. This is very dependent on the patient and his or her physiology and that alone should tell you that it's not something that you as a complete layman should do at home.
Since doctors are not by default sadists that thrive on inflicting pain and suffering on their patients (well, maybe with the exception of dentists), they don't do this because it's easy for them or because it makes them shitloads of money (it's not. If you want shitloads of money as a medical professional, get your very own MRT, aka the money printing machine. Oncology is the field where you spend hours and hours with every patient, desperately trying to figure out JUST that special sweet spot where you JUST don't kill him while getting rid of his cancer). They do this because it's the only chance.
If you're stupid enough to instead rely on water and sugar to cure you, you pretty much save your oncologist a lot of time, and your retirement insurance a lot of money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.