$1.4 Million Raised on GoFundMe For 'Garbage' Homeopathy Cancer Treatment Scams

'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.'

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