Belle Gibson to be Prosecuted for Cancer Lies

Wow.  It has been a long time.  I sort of doubt at this point that anyone reads the blog what with my long absence and all, but for anyone who stumbles across it again, you get a fresh post!  First, let me apologize for not writing a post sooner.  A project I started working on back in November that was to "last three weeks" has now turned into months.  The promise of only having to "work 40 hours a week" was brutally and swiftly canned and replaced with nights, weekends and all remaining free time I once foolishly took for granted (or "granite" as we say here in Texas).   This past week, we finally stamped out the fire closest to us and for the first time in months the nearest fire is being tended by a lone cowboy far, far out on the range.  But anyway, back to the subject matter of this blog.

So there has finally been some good news in the world of cancer scams: Belle Gibson may be prosecuted in connection with her fraud.  I cannot begin to express my joy with this development.  For over a year it looked as though Belle would get away with scamming people out of their hard-earned money, and worst of all, convincing people with cancer that there was a natural cure out there for them that could work miracles.  Sadly, the latter part is not what is considered the crime here, but a prosecution for breaking consumer laws is at least a start.  My hope is that the fear of prosecution might just stop the next scammer (and oh how we know how many are out there).

The other really good news is that Penguin Books got a $30,000 fine for not fact-checking and publishing Belle's (very obvious) lies about curing her cancer naturally.  To me, this is a very important step in protecting people with cancer.  By publishing those claims, Penguin Books gave a lot of legitimacy to Belle's scam.  Penguin is a publishing house with a good reputation, and that reputation naturally validates lies that might otherwise be met with skepticism.  Indeed, I do not think that the fine of $30,000 was high enough.  It should be ten times that.  It ought to be punitive.  At any rate, I see all this as a remarkable first step towards finally holding all these people accountable for their actions.  No doubt every publishing house in the world got a memo from legal on this.

I cannot help but think that everyone who came here and supported the blog and demanded the truth from Belle played an important role in all this.  We refused to back down even when Belle played her "poor me" game.  As we have seen subsequently, when truly cornered, no one who makes these "remarkable" claims ever offers any proof whatsoever that what they are saying is true.  All Penguin, Cosmopolitan, numerous Australian newspapers, and Apple had to do was ask for Belle to prove her claims.  I hope now that these entities can see how dangerous it is for them to loan their reputations and legitimacy to someone like Belle.  It is incredibly harmful to the health of cancer patients and to the pocketbooks of everyone else.  The next time you see one of these stories in a publication with a solid reputation, write to them and demand to see the proof.  Belle only got as far as she did because she had a lot of enablers who should have known better.  

Changes to Commenting

I had to change the settings so that every comment now requires a word verification.  I know it's annoying, but this blog gets a lot of spam from woo-peddlers.

Even If Gerson Works The Way They Say It Works, It Still Doesn't Work

How many times have we seen the Gerson people claim that the reason Gerson failed was because the patient did something wrong?  It's a running theme with them.  If a cancer patient dies after doing Gerson it is because they most certainly did something wrong somewhere along the line.  Well how could they not?  How could they not miss one of 3,650 totally pleasant coffee enemas (five a day for two years)?   Did the patient once sleep in and not do their morning enema?  Of course.  Did the patient once cave after day after day of juice and salt-free boiled potatoes and grab a cheeseburger?  Yup.  Every single person doing the Gerson protocol will mess up at least once in two years, and they probably "fail" way more than once, and that is what the Gerson people count on.  They have developed a protocol that is essentially impossible for people who are living their lives in the real world to follow, and then they use that fact to weasel out of ever being responsible for the failure themselves.  Thus, I submit that even if Gerson therapy actually did work, it would only ever be purely theoretical, because human beings simply cannot follow such a rigid regime for two years.  I am looking forward to seeing the film The Food Cure simply because I highly suspect there will be lots of fantastic quotes where Gerson staffers go on and on about how you have to follow the regime perfectly or else it won't work and you will die from cancer and it will be all your fault (because hey, you're lazy and you have low character and not enough motivation and perseverance to save your own life).  

Belle Gibson Catch-Up

Well, I have finally been able to catch up a bit on the Belle Gibson saga.  The 60 Minutes interview was naturally incredibly awkward, but I was pleased to see that the journalist conducting the interview asked her some straight-forward questions and refused to accept b.s. answers. This is what all journalists should have done right from the start, and I hope that this is learning lesson for all those in the media about credulous reporting of miracle cancer cures. Naturally, Belle Gibson is still lying and I am convinced she simply does not have the character to be a truthful and honest person. I am also pleased to see that Belle Gibson will finally face some real consequences of her lies in the Australian courts.

One final thought: to all the journalists out there who still might believe that Belle was simply misled by some quack doctors, go and see if there is a correlation between Belle's announcement of her cancer spreading to her kidneys, spleen and uterus and app sales in the following days.  I bet you will find a big one.

What's the Deal with Louise Hay?

Does anyone have much insight into this woman?  She is the guru of the lie that positive thinking cures cancer, yet I can find no proof that she ever even had cancer. I follow a few people who blog about their natural cancer cures and it is apparent to me that most of them are heavily influenced by this woman's message.  Jessica Ainscough was clearly among them. It is absolutely heartbreaking to watch these poor people harp on about how they just need to be more positive and then their cancer will go away.

My idea is to compile as much as we can about the holes in her story and then publicly take her to task.  She has gotten quite rich off the suffering of others, and it is about time she proved her claim that she actually had cancer which she cured with the power of the mind.

A Quick Update

Hey All!

Just a quick update over here.  I will be working on the weekdays from 8 to 8 and on the weekends from 8 to 6 for the next couple of months.  I have not left you, but I am not sure if I will have any new content for a while (though I will try).  I like that people can come here and discuss many of these issues, so if anyone wants to write a guest post, I would be glad to have it!  You can email it to me at violetrealitybased@gmail.com.  It does not have to be some profound piece of journalism or anything; it just needs to be something to get the conversation going.

Thanks,

Violet

Very Disturbing Gerson Clinic FAQ

I came across this in the FAQ section of the Northern Baja Healing Center, which offers Gerson protocol though it is not the Gerson center in Mexico.  Well, I think that this speaks for itself so I do not have much to say, but I want to correct one or two things here.  Children are not an "entity of the state".  They can sometimes be made wards of the court if they are being neglected, and medical neglect would fall under this.  Also, it is not "illegal" to treat cancer with nothing but chemo, radiation, and surgery.  What is illegal is having a person who is not a real doctor offering non-evidence-based quackery as "the cure" for cancer.  That is what is illegal.  Think about the message this man is sending for a minute. A child diagnosed with leukemia who gets conventional treatment has an incredibly high chance of being cured of their cancer and living a normal lifespan.  A child with this same illness who goes to one of these clinics instead will die of their cancer.   Naturally there are quite a lot of people out there who are desperate to protect a child from this fate, and it is incredibly disturbing to me that this man offers advice on how to circumvent this.  A child has no ability to make decisions about his or her medical care because most of it is outside their understanding.  A child often has a limited concept of the permanence of death.   A child has a difficult time understanding that going through something incredibly unpleasant now will reap great rewards for the future.  It is for all these reasons that adults must make medical decisions of the child's behalf.  If a child with a treatable cancer gets taken to this place, he or she is going to die of their cancer.  This isn't "another option" or an "alternative"; it's a death sentence.