Living beautifully with science-based medicine (SBM)
Originally posted by attack_laurel at Living beautifully with science-based medicine (SBM)
Recently a young woman in Australia who called herself the "Wellness Warrior" has died. I find her death sad, but I find myself much more enraged, because she pushed a number of "cancer-curing" things that have nothing to do with curing cancer, such as coffee enemas, an expensive organic juiced vegetables diet, positive imaging, and meditation. She claimed that these things had healed/cured her, though by the end of her life she was not only obviously concealing her cancer, but she was claiming she never said the word "cured", as documented by A View From the Hills. (h/t to wosny.) Another woman, Belle Gibson, is being exposed as making a claim that she had an incurable brain tumor, and cured it herself, through diet. She parlayed this story and her app "The Whole Pantry", into a jet-setting lifestyle of $2000 handbags and charity fund-raising fraud. (Also h/t to wosny. You're on fire!)
Look, you can treat your body any way you want. It may kill you faster, but you have the absolute right to say what happens to your body (if you live in Canada, the US, Australia, and Britain - and as far as I know, probably a bunch of other countries, too). Where these people and I part ways, though, is when those people start encouraging other people to follow their example. And then, when your amazing cancer cure turns out to be not so amazing after all, lying about how ill you are (or, in the case of Belle Gibson, how ill you are not). The Wellness Warrior, also known as Jess Ainscough (whose fans have been trolling all the blogs and yelling about how mean anyone who pointed out her illness is) (bring it - frankly, I could use the hits. And yes, I moderate), worked very hard to conceal her cancer, a particularly cruel and difficult to treat cancer called epithelioid sarcoma in the last year of her life. Both she and Gibson worked very hard to not only conceal their reality, they both played up their attractive looks, which ends up being a very powerful tool in getting media and readers to love you, especially in the world of "wellness" blogs, notorious not only for their complete rejection of science, but their contempt for us fat lazy meat eaters who are ugly and sick just because we don't follow their orthorexia.
Being beautiful sells. And they sold it, just as "The Food Babe" makes use of it in her blog name. Pretty people going through terrible things are very appealing and sympathetic, and the "alternative therapy" people want to use that every way they can, since their profits treatments are not covered (mostly) by insurance companies. They need to pull you in and make you believe, and what better way than to show a beautiful, successful young woman being beautiful while telling everyone that the treatments they sell are the real deal? Ainscough, by all accounts a very nice young woman, did a lot to sell her "brand" (when you're making money, it's a brand, not a name or a blog) as beautiful and delicate, living a beautiful life by the sea, thinking only beautiful thoughts and doing only beautiful things (until you get to the coffee enemas, but she did them beautifully). Please understand, I'm not knocking on these women for using their beauty to make money. I'm knocking on them because they committed fraud.
Illness is often unattractive. Thyroid failure, for instance, makes your hair thin and brittle, and makes you gain weight, even if you're dieting. And exercising is almost impossible when you go back to bed an hour after you got up, because you're so tired you can't sit upright. My skin started going crazy, the seborrhea I thought I'd subdued coming back (i.e., I had super-bad dandruff and flaky skin around my nose and eyebrows. Appealing, no?), my rosacea getting worse, and my skin all over attempting to imitate an alligator in feel. The weight I thought I'd lost for good and kept off for almost 8 years packed itself back on my body, despite my eating only two meals a day. I could eat nothing and only drink tea, and I'd gain weight.
The "wellness" world is very unforgiving of failure, and being fat and unattractive is failure. Dying is an even bigger failure, and it's never the fault of alternative "therapy"; you didn't think enough positive thoughts, or you didn't follow the diet exactly, or you had "unconscious blocks" working against you. It's always your fault, never the ridiculous diet or the coffee enemas, or the millions of vitamins, or the vegan, gluten and casein-free, raw diet that was supposed to cure cancer and all your other ills. They will never say to you "this cancer has no cure", or "you can't control your body", or "there is no way to boost your immune system".
But doctors will. They'll sympathize with you, they'll try to tell you how to treat your illness, and they'll tell you that you can't control your immune system, and sometimes it just goes hog-wild on your thyroid. They want you to live as long as possible, with the best possible quality of life. They won't stop answering your e-mails or calls when you take a turn for the worse - they may refer you to a specialist, even. There isn't a single doctor out there who went into the medical profession thinking "I can't wait to hurt people". To claim otherwise is ridiculous.
Being ill sucks. Living with a condition that will require medication for the rest of your life sucks too, and many people have trouble adjusting to their new lifestyle. I know I did - it took me a long time to recognize when I've had enough and I need to stop. It was a long road finding the medications that allow me to be kind-of/sort/of pain controlled without hideous side-effects (Bob wants me to call them "chems", like in "The Bourne Legacy", and that makes me laugh). In the SCA and at Jamestown and with Gardiner's Company, it's really embarrassing to sit there and not help with the heavy lifting. People who don't know me can't tell there's anything wrong with me, because I'm not obviously sick. But there's a lot of us not-obviously-sick people out there, and the "wellness" industry wants to dazzle us with success stories and take our money. There's often an assumption that doctors in the US make tons of money, but they really don't. Compared to the superstars of the wellness racket (like Mike Adams, doctors make peanuts. And that big ol' awful Pharma keeps making drugs that will cure things and stop people getting sick. Sure, there are lots of drugs people don't need, and there are some greedy mofos in the pharmaceutical industry (mostly on the marketing side) who make up "syndromes" so they can peddle drugs, but (excuse me for yelling):
SO DOES THE ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE INDUSTRY. THEY MAKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PEDDLING "CURES" THAT DO. NOT. WORK.
*ahem*
It's really horrible that people are tricked into buying cures that do not work (CTDNT) (I'm tired of writing alternative ways of saying it), and they are preyed on at a very vulnerable time in their lives, when they're dealing with all sorts of terrifying decisions. It's even worse when a pretty person who has been tricked then turns around and tricks more people into trying CTDNT. Jess Ainscough was a beautiful young woman, faced with an extremely disfiguring treatment for a cancer that would otherwise kill her, and I would not have judged her in the least if she had simply decided that she would make the best of the life she had left. But she persuaded herself that CTDNT would cure her, and she persuaded her mother, who had breast cancer, that surgery and chemotherapy would not work, and that the coffee enemas and expensive juice would. Her mother might have lived a lot longer with proper treatment, but we'll never know, as she died last year. I think that's really horrible, too.
None of this news makes me happy. I hate that Ainscough and her mother died. I hate that it turns out that Belle Gibson is probably a fraud. I hate that Steve Jobs shortened his life by trying CTDNT before proven medical treatment. I hate that Mike Adams, the scum, wrote a horrible victim-blaming screed about both Jobs and Patrick Swayze, claiming that they could have been cured if they hadn't been "cut, burned, and poisoned". I hate that there are still millions of people out there who think that CTDNT actually do work, and are impervious to the logical reasoning that if someone came up with a cure for all cancers they would announce it to the world, then pick up their Nobel Prize, because EVERYONE has a family member who is living with, or has died from, cancer. I hate that the supporters of Jess Ainscough are vicious people who feel perfectly fine with telling bloggers to die, because they wrote truthfully about Ainscough's case. Where's that love and light and thinking positive thoughts?
But I love my doctors. And I love that science-based medicine (SBM) has made my life normal enough again that I could go out in the sun this afternoon and garden.
I'm living beautifully with SBM.
(picture copyright Jen Thies, 2014.)
ETA: This is a good summation of Ainscough's choices: http://realitybasedmedicine.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/jessica-ainscoughs-stolen-choice.html
Recently a young woman in Australia who called herself the "Wellness Warrior" has died. I find her death sad, but I find myself much more enraged, because she pushed a number of "cancer-curing" things that have nothing to do with curing cancer, such as coffee enemas, an expensive organic juiced vegetables diet, positive imaging, and meditation. She claimed that these things had healed/cured her, though by the end of her life she was not only obviously concealing her cancer, but she was claiming she never said the word "cured", as documented by A View From the Hills. (h/t to wosny.) Another woman, Belle Gibson, is being exposed as making a claim that she had an incurable brain tumor, and cured it herself, through diet. She parlayed this story and her app "The Whole Pantry", into a jet-setting lifestyle of $2000 handbags and charity fund-raising fraud. (Also h/t to wosny. You're on fire!)
Look, you can treat your body any way you want. It may kill you faster, but you have the absolute right to say what happens to your body (if you live in Canada, the US, Australia, and Britain - and as far as I know, probably a bunch of other countries, too). Where these people and I part ways, though, is when those people start encouraging other people to follow their example. And then, when your amazing cancer cure turns out to be not so amazing after all, lying about how ill you are (or, in the case of Belle Gibson, how ill you are not). The Wellness Warrior, also known as Jess Ainscough (whose fans have been trolling all the blogs and yelling about how mean anyone who pointed out her illness is) (bring it - frankly, I could use the hits. And yes, I moderate), worked very hard to conceal her cancer, a particularly cruel and difficult to treat cancer called epithelioid sarcoma in the last year of her life. Both she and Gibson worked very hard to not only conceal their reality, they both played up their attractive looks, which ends up being a very powerful tool in getting media and readers to love you, especially in the world of "wellness" blogs, notorious not only for their complete rejection of science, but their contempt for us fat lazy meat eaters who are ugly and sick just because we don't follow their orthorexia.
Being beautiful sells. And they sold it, just as "The Food Babe" makes use of it in her blog name. Pretty people going through terrible things are very appealing and sympathetic, and the "alternative therapy" people want to use that every way they can, since their profits treatments are not covered (mostly) by insurance companies. They need to pull you in and make you believe, and what better way than to show a beautiful, successful young woman being beautiful while telling everyone that the treatments they sell are the real deal? Ainscough, by all accounts a very nice young woman, did a lot to sell her "brand" (when you're making money, it's a brand, not a name or a blog) as beautiful and delicate, living a beautiful life by the sea, thinking only beautiful thoughts and doing only beautiful things (until you get to the coffee enemas, but she did them beautifully). Please understand, I'm not knocking on these women for using their beauty to make money. I'm knocking on them because they committed fraud.
Illness is often unattractive. Thyroid failure, for instance, makes your hair thin and brittle, and makes you gain weight, even if you're dieting. And exercising is almost impossible when you go back to bed an hour after you got up, because you're so tired you can't sit upright. My skin started going crazy, the seborrhea I thought I'd subdued coming back (i.e., I had super-bad dandruff and flaky skin around my nose and eyebrows. Appealing, no?), my rosacea getting worse, and my skin all over attempting to imitate an alligator in feel. The weight I thought I'd lost for good and kept off for almost 8 years packed itself back on my body, despite my eating only two meals a day. I could eat nothing and only drink tea, and I'd gain weight.
The "wellness" world is very unforgiving of failure, and being fat and unattractive is failure. Dying is an even bigger failure, and it's never the fault of alternative "therapy"; you didn't think enough positive thoughts, or you didn't follow the diet exactly, or you had "unconscious blocks" working against you. It's always your fault, never the ridiculous diet or the coffee enemas, or the millions of vitamins, or the vegan, gluten and casein-free, raw diet that was supposed to cure cancer and all your other ills. They will never say to you "this cancer has no cure", or "you can't control your body", or "there is no way to boost your immune system".
But doctors will. They'll sympathize with you, they'll try to tell you how to treat your illness, and they'll tell you that you can't control your immune system, and sometimes it just goes hog-wild on your thyroid. They want you to live as long as possible, with the best possible quality of life. They won't stop answering your e-mails or calls when you take a turn for the worse - they may refer you to a specialist, even. There isn't a single doctor out there who went into the medical profession thinking "I can't wait to hurt people". To claim otherwise is ridiculous.
Being ill sucks. Living with a condition that will require medication for the rest of your life sucks too, and many people have trouble adjusting to their new lifestyle. I know I did - it took me a long time to recognize when I've had enough and I need to stop. It was a long road finding the medications that allow me to be kind-of/sort/of pain controlled without hideous side-effects (Bob wants me to call them "chems", like in "The Bourne Legacy", and that makes me laugh). In the SCA and at Jamestown and with Gardiner's Company, it's really embarrassing to sit there and not help with the heavy lifting. People who don't know me can't tell there's anything wrong with me, because I'm not obviously sick. But there's a lot of us not-obviously-sick people out there, and the "wellness" industry wants to dazzle us with success stories and take our money. There's often an assumption that doctors in the US make tons of money, but they really don't. Compared to the superstars of the wellness racket (like Mike Adams, doctors make peanuts. And that big ol' awful Pharma keeps making drugs that will cure things and stop people getting sick. Sure, there are lots of drugs people don't need, and there are some greedy mofos in the pharmaceutical industry (mostly on the marketing side) who make up "syndromes" so they can peddle drugs, but (excuse me for yelling):
SO DOES THE ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE INDUSTRY. THEY MAKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PEDDLING "CURES" THAT DO. NOT. WORK.
*ahem*
It's really horrible that people are tricked into buying cures that do not work (CTDNT) (I'm tired of writing alternative ways of saying it), and they are preyed on at a very vulnerable time in their lives, when they're dealing with all sorts of terrifying decisions. It's even worse when a pretty person who has been tricked then turns around and tricks more people into trying CTDNT. Jess Ainscough was a beautiful young woman, faced with an extremely disfiguring treatment for a cancer that would otherwise kill her, and I would not have judged her in the least if she had simply decided that she would make the best of the life she had left. But she persuaded herself that CTDNT would cure her, and she persuaded her mother, who had breast cancer, that surgery and chemotherapy would not work, and that the coffee enemas and expensive juice would. Her mother might have lived a lot longer with proper treatment, but we'll never know, as she died last year. I think that's really horrible, too.
None of this news makes me happy. I hate that Ainscough and her mother died. I hate that it turns out that Belle Gibson is probably a fraud. I hate that Steve Jobs shortened his life by trying CTDNT before proven medical treatment. I hate that Mike Adams, the scum, wrote a horrible victim-blaming screed about both Jobs and Patrick Swayze, claiming that they could have been cured if they hadn't been "cut, burned, and poisoned". I hate that there are still millions of people out there who think that CTDNT actually do work, and are impervious to the logical reasoning that if someone came up with a cure for all cancers they would announce it to the world, then pick up their Nobel Prize, because EVERYONE has a family member who is living with, or has died from, cancer. I hate that the supporters of Jess Ainscough are vicious people who feel perfectly fine with telling bloggers to die, because they wrote truthfully about Ainscough's case. Where's that love and light and thinking positive thoughts?
But I love my doctors. And I love that science-based medicine (SBM) has made my life normal enough again that I could go out in the sun this afternoon and garden.
I'm living beautifully with SBM.
(picture copyright Jen Thies, 2014.)
ETA: This is a good summation of Ainscough's choices: http://realitybasedmedicine.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/jessica-ainscoughs-stolen-choice.html