Can you earn money from severe diseases? A blogger from Australia proved that it is. Until it was revealed that her cancer was a hoax.
Belle Gibson, a popular Australian blogger, and promoter of a healthy lifestyle announced to the world that she had developed cancer that she managed to cure with a healthy diet. Years later it turned out Belle is a fraud and there has never been any cancer. She will pay dearly for the lies.
It's amazing how easy it is in the 21st century to trick people and make a real fortune on it. It would seem that the times of all kinds of charlatans and discoverers of unknown lands are over a hundred years ago. In fact, the story of Belle Gibson is no different from the uncreated stories that all sorts of sailors had to make up about reaching El Dorado for the king to graciously sprinkle gold on their next voyage. Imagine that a guy appears out of nowhere who claims that he came to Warsaw straight from Atlantis, but has no cash for a return ticket and asks for some change.
An online entry by a sick girl - not the only one nowadays who openly admits to the drama and starts running a kind of treatment diary on Facebook or Instagram - would probably have passed without international publicity. But Belle was admired right from the start: “The 16 weeks that were left to me were spent on chemotherapy and radiotherapy, trying in vain to shrink the tumor. But listen, diet works wonders! I stopped eating meat, gluten, dairy, and sugar gave up GMO foods and started meditating and benefiting from oxygen therapy, colon lavage, and Ayurveda. "
Her blog, where she described her victory over cancer, is called "The Whole Pantry", which translates to a full pantry. It filled it to the brim with content that was picked up by many adherents of the philosophy of wellness, opposing classical medicine. Seeing the interest in her blog, she quickly created an application with instructions on a healthy lifestyle, published a cookbook, and became a celebrity in Australia, whose colorful magazines not only devoted spreads but also awarded the honorable title: Most Inspirational Woman of the Year ("Elle"), Fearless Woman ("Cosmopolitan").
In the first month of the establishment of "The Whole Pantry" the application was downloaded by 200 thousand. users (in the Apple store it was available for $ 3.79). As it quickly made a huge profit as one of the best-selling offerings in the healthy lifestyle segment, Belle Gibson was invited to lecture in Silicon Valley. Her fame also reached Poland. “Puls Medycyny”, an industry magazine for doctors, described the Australian's success exactly two years ago: “When she heard that she had little life left, she decided to find the determination to help people with similar problems. In addition to dietary advice, the app also includes tips on how to fight stress, change your mind to be positive, or challenge yourself on a daily basis. Belle Gibson, the first in the world, closed the modern philosophy of healthy living in a cell. "
Her recipe book for gluten-free, low-fat, and sugar-free recipes quickly became a bestseller. It was in healthy eating that Belle saw the defeat of the disease, which - as she reported on the blog - disappeared in the brain, but began to attack other organs: the liver, kidneys, uterus, and spine. Somehow, it did not bother anyone that it was not a doctor who recognized them, but a mysterious German specialist in magnetotherapy. It wasn't really important, since every cluster of cancer cells was disappearing from her body thanks to diet and meditation. Undaunted, the author repeatedly served her fans on the blog, Facebook, and Instagram with touching confessions: “My four-year-old son Olivier sees me when I can't get out of bed. The only thing that can beat me is the thought of not seeing me grow up. "
300 thousand holes. she promised to donate to a charity related to helping cancer patients. When it was discovered last year that the money did not go to any organization, there were speculations that the blogger was not a fraud, who unfortunately decided to earn good money to raise funds for insurance and raising a child. The truth turned out to be more brutal: it was her cancer that turned out to be a hoax. Gibson admitted lying: “None of this is true. I'm still jumping between reality and what I come up with. "
Here is a stylish life blogger, in several interviews, she began to say that at the age of 20 she developed cancer. In addition, it was not ordinary cancer, if you can say that about cancer at all, but some cosmic variety that, apart from the brain, spread to all possible organs. I think even Belle herself was lost in all the diseases that affected her. However, she was not mistaken in one thing - she claimed that she had cured all her cancer ailments by following a special diet. This, combined with Ayurvedic techniques, appropriate exercises, willpower, and the mysterious power of fruits and vegetables worked wonders. In a word - everything but conventional medicine. Holy Grail of anti-vaccines. This remarkable mixture resulted in a miraculous recovery.
She transformed her media presence into an extremely profitable empire. It included The Whole Pantry app, a cookbook, and lucrative contracts with the major publishing houses that issued her book. She described her fight against cancer on a blog that has become a mine of huge money. Belle Gibson herself has become such an internet guru of a "healthy" lifestyle. By healthy I mean alternatively healthy. She promoted every possible nonsense, and the only condition was that she should not be considered conventional medicine. You know - anti-vaccine cartoons, unpasteurized milk (which is illegal to sell in Australia), quack therapies. I suspect that she would be a great advocate for the parents of a child from a hospital in Białogard.
It is true that from time to time there were critical voices about her alleged healing, but the subject herself quickly changed the subject. It was enough to promise generous transfers to the accounts of charity organizations to lull the Internet users' vigilance. Belle especially promised to donate the weekly profits of selling her app to a specific boy who suffered from a (most real) brain tumor.
The blogger still had to maintain interest in her person in order to generate further profits from the sale of her products. To this end, she claimed that she had undergone heart surgery (even though she did not have the slightest sign of scarring), during which she was supposed to literally die on the operating table, had a stroke, and her body was supposed to be just one big cancer. Journalists stepped in and came to the conclusion that Belle took her stories from outer space, and that she did not donate a dollar to charity, contrary to her claims. In the end, the media hype could not be suppressed, and Belle Gibson admitted in an interview that it was all one big lie that was nothing but marketing.
The judge dealing with her case had no mercy on her and ordered the woman to pay a total of 410,000 Australian dollars in fines for misleading the public. However, she admitted that Belle Gibson's behavior was an obsession with herself and she did not rule out that she made herself believe in all the diseases she allegedly suffered from. After all, there is no way to prove that the woman did not think she had cancer.
Looking at this story, it's hard to believe that it's so easy to make others believe something that never happened. Neither could it happen, because brain cancer - and several other cancers that the creator of the "Whole Pantry" empire confessed - does not disappear just like that, when meat and dairy products are excluded from the diet.
Increasingly, however, the naiveté of Internet users is preyed on by people - sick and healthy - who, using our weaknesses and trust, dress themselves up in the feathers of authorities. Just as Gibson became the cyberspace leading cancer specialist who was cured by natural methods, new apostles of pseudo-medical treatments appear on the web, again and again, repeating the nonsense that millions of people listen to.
The popularity of Jerzy Zięba is our Polish example. He presents himself as a certified clinical hypnotherapist from Australia and the USA, challenges scientific knowledge, and spreads false information about the prevention and treatment of many diseases. His theories can be fooled even by university chancellors who provide miracle workers with academic halls for him to conduct his talks there. Anti-vaccination movements are also based on content distributed online, which turns out to be untrue only after verification. People naively believe nonsense stories about these or other treatments, and no one thinks about checking the sources of the information given (or rather, finger-tipped nonsense).
In an interview with Australian Women's Weekly, when she was pushed back to the wall, she finally confessed to cheating, Belle announced that she did not feel guilty about anything - she is passionate about healthy eating but does not even know what cancer is all about. So why were her breakfast journalists "Elle" and "Cosmopolitan" who wrote her story so readily believed? They now sprinkle ashes on their heads, explaining to readers that they have never encountered a situation before, for someone to deliberately persuade others that they have a disease as severe as cancer. Also, the publisher of her cookbook, the well-known company Penguin Australia, did not feel that recipes for healthy dishes to cure cancer might not have any real application. After all, it was not an ordinary culinary book. In the foreword, Gibson recalled in detail her battle against cancer, citing the imaginary Dr. Phil, who allegedly supported her during the natural treatment - but the editors never thought to seek out a doctor and ask him for a comment. After the disclosure of the scandal, the Penguin publishing house paid the sum of 22 thousand. hole. to the account of the consumer protection office, admitting that readers were misled.
Can the author and the heroine of the scandal be counted on similar repentance? Prof. Krzysztof Owczarek cannot say unequivocally whether the girl should now be crawled through the courts for failing to fulfill the promise of financial support for cancer patients. Since this is the case of Münchhausen's team, the guilty ones are rather those who believed in her stories and, unconstrained, multiplied her fortune. Belle Gibson is fine so far. In mid-July, instead of in a courtroom, someone snapped a photo of her hidden away while drinking drinks at an ice bar in Melbourne. Was she going to be an advocate for cryotherapy?
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