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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.
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.
Still nothing really good on cancer, took half a century with AIDS and still no real treatment
I'll challenge you on the AIDS claim. Modern medicine has done an incredible job at turning what was one a short term death sentence into what is now a manageable chronic condition. We have become so good at it that the hospital here in Vancouver, which was once at the heart of one of the worst outbreaks in the developed world, choose to shut down their AIDS ward because they hadn't had a patient in over a year. This was a few years ago.
Given how the mechanism behind the disease, this is truly remarkable and a triumph of modern medicine.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.