And thank you for your kind words. Long time lurker here, rare for me to post, but this one just got my back up…
I just count myself lucky to have a pragmatic outlook on life, and even more lucky that my 16yr old son seems to share it. It hurt - oh my word did it hurt - but we had our eyes open and knew what was coming. Also my good lady was just amazing: when the oncologist came in with the prognosis (matter of weeks, turned out to be a couple of days), Linda looked at him and said “Oh, OK. We were just discussing what music to have at my funeral”. The guy’s jaw hit the floor, and I just gave her a big hug. Still love her to bits.
Even if we are to accept your fantasy that the ends justify the means, the placebo effect - as you seem to be aware - requires that the patient believes that the treatment works. Now that her customers know she’s a fraud any placebo effect they would have benefitted from is now gone. Also you can’t, as far as we know yet, nutrition your way out of cancer. The best tools we have are knives and radiation.
You’re on a thread with quite a few people who either are currently or have battled cancer, or have loved ones in that predicament. You are being incredibly rude at best, and an accessory to Ms. Gibson’s FRAUD at worst. Are you financially involved in the case?
If she really is mentally ill as theorized, why should she be?
Because there are only a few very severe types of mental illness that negate your ability to tell right from wrong, and nothing she’s been theorized as having qualifies, and if she did have an illness that did qualify under law you’d know (because those people don’t really function in normal society).
Not to mention that saying she should be prosecuted isn’t the same as saying she should go to prison. In a case like this, the penalty would far more likely be heavy fines based on the income of her book and app.
This is why sociopaths and sadists are able to operate with impunity - all they have to do is tell a heartwarming story and people will rush to circle the wagons around them. That initial emotional appeal is all that matters, and the hell with facts, logic, or evidence. Anyone that says things aren’t kosher (why does Jerry Sandusky shower with those little boys?) is a bad person, who must be punished.
Well, well, well. There are some people who go so far into amoral territory, that they seem more like explorers to me then bad people. I can’t approve, of course, but all the best conjuring tricks do the actual switcheroo before you think the trick has started. However, she can’t then tell us that there was something wrong with her mind that forced her to do these things. Catch me once, shame on you; catch me twice shame on me. Take some bran for it, dear.
No, we can’t just blame the person who found an easy way to get rich. We ought to also blame the other people who chose to pump her story rather than look at the details. May they each be pursued by nine demons in the form of Ben Goldacre until they are chased so far over the hills of perdition that the Good Lord cannot find them with a telescope. Or until they are sorry, whichever comes first.
You haven’t given a single reason not to hate Belle. In fact, you’ve given us reasons to not just dislike her, but also be disgusted with both Belle and you
It’s easy to denigrate anyone who took this piece of trash seriously, but bear in mind that—and this is the worst part—they probably WERE mostly cancer patients and their families.
In other words, absolutely terrified, desperate people.
People so scared that the relative prudence of dropping a couple of bucks on an app from an obvious fraud was probably the least of their concerns.
There’s a reason why this kind of rip-off is directed towards people with cancer and not people with colds: the latter are not frightened enough to fall for it.
Isn’t it “Typical” of liars of this caliber to then confess Only when being investigated? and Spin it to get attention and sympathy.
I say we ignore the sociopath.
Another notorious cancer quack (and fake doctor) is “Dr.” Leonard Coldwell, the ex-b.f.f. of now-imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau. Burzynski is one of his heroes, as is the convicted Italian doc Tullio Simoncini (“cancer is a fungus”).
But Coldwell’s biggest cancer hero is Coldwell himself. He claims to have the highest cancer cure rate in the world (92.3% or better). He claims to have cured 35,000 cancer patients (“many in a terminal state”). He claims to have single-handedly (with the help of God, of course) cured his own mother of terminal liver cancer, cirrhosis, and Hepatitis C more than 40 years ago, when he was a young boy. He is just full of extravagant claims.
And he has been cornered on these claims and questioned about them repeatedly; mostly he responds by ignoring the questions, blocking the questioner from his social media pages, threatening the questioner with all sorts of dire consequences, making up outrageous lies about the questioner or critic… and in some cases suing the questioner. I’m one of those who recently got sued. (Long before that, I was blocked, lied about, and threatened by him.)
He continues to get away with his nonsense, and I bet you won’t find him confessing any time soon that he is lying about anything or just plain "confused’ about reality. He has too much at stake to let the mythology he has created around himself be compromised with anything resembling honesty.
I think it’s pretty pathetic that Belle Gibson is (sort of) getting away with the “I’m so confused” spiel, and that some people are willing to cut her some slack and suggest that she just couldn’t help lying. I guess it helps that she’s young and pretty. But I also think there are other cancer quacks who do a lot more damage and continue to get away with it, despite the hard questions continually being thrown in their direction.
This issue of her motivation that keeps coming up (because of the story bringing it up) is one that I think is worth examining more deeply.
I think many quacks genuinely believe that the woo they are peddling is as good as medicine. I have a friend who believes she is a medical intuitive. She’s a really interesting person with a lot of training in all kinds of alternative health areas and articulate about what she does, too. However, she’s not a doctor. I find it truly scary that she will advise people to throw away medicine that’s been prescribed for them in exchange for an expensive container of dehydrated greens that supposedly will heal their “adrenal imbalance” AKA the root of all evil.
I think we need to stop allowing people who are doing harmful things with good motives to get a pass on what they are doing.
FUCK YOU Billie Love and fuck your, at the very least, sociopathic friend/false-hopemonger Belle Gibson. Do you think my close friend who died at the age of 40 from a brain tumour, leaving behind his wife and two daughters aged 1 and 4, just didn’t really, truly believe he could get well? That he just didn’t have quite enough hope?
Victim blaming is a rank act, a really cunty thing to do, you know that right?
I’m so enraged by you and her - particularly her vilely nauseating belief that she should still be treated with respect - right now that if I was capable of speech I’d be frothing at the mouth. As it is, I’m going to resort to personal abuse: fuck right off, you pieces of absolute shit. Just fuck off and die.
(No, I’ve not read - and will not ever read - the interview in which she claims to come clean. The bit about wanting to be treated with respect I saw on ABC tv’s the checkout the other night.)
Christ. Now I feel like an 11 year old having a tantrum. ‘Just fuck off and die’? Think I haven’t used that phrase for about 30 years! If I wasn’t so close to tears at these arseholes, I’d be laughing at my childish (if heartfelt) reaction.
Are you in a state with an effective Anti-SLAPP law? Those can be a real lifesaver when a fraudulent pile of excrement decides that the truth counts as libel or slander. They’ll sue because they have money and you don’t, so while they know they’ll lose in the end, they’ll still do it to financially ruin people.
Unfortunately, there’s a few states touting Anti-SLAPP laws that are neutered. For instance, Arizona’s Anti-SLAPP law pretty much only protects claims relating to the public interest and speech aimed at the government involving things like referendums and such. It doesn’t protect speech that is trivially demonstrable to be true, nor does it explicitly allow for a defendant to speedily trigger a judicial review to examine whether the plaintiff has standing or is suing frivolously.
