Categories
Clinical trials Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture

Crowdfunding to pay to be a research subject in a clinical trial: The case of Lily Wythe [UPDATED 1/23/2020—see addendum]

Lily Wythe is a teenaged girl with a deadly brainstem cancer whose case has made international news because of her family’s crowdfunding to get her into a clinical trial. Should investigators be allowed to fund trials this way?

Categories
Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

GoFundMe and the problem of crowdfunding for quackery

GoFundMe is frequently used by patients to pay for quackery. How can its policies be changed to make misuse of the platform more difficult?

Categories
Cancer Medicine Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Annabelle Potts tragically dies. The quacks at Clínica 0-19 didn’t save her.

Annabelle Potts was a girl with the deadly brain cancer known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) whose family was victimized by quacks. Unfortunately, that’s not how the media is reporting it. As is frequently the case, Annabelle’s story is being presented as one of triumph, and the quacks who treated her as legitimate experimental therapy.

Categories
Cancer Computers and social media Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

How online crowdfunding supports cancer quacks (part 2)

A new study by Jeremy Snyder and Tim Caulfield shows how much money is raised by GoFundMe and other crowdfunding sources to support quackery. It’s a lot of money, which is unsurprising to Orac, given that he’s been writing about how crowdfunding is “baked into” the business model of cancer quacks since he discovered Stanislaw Burzynski a decade ago.

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science

Crowdfunding for unproven stem cell treatments: Taking advantage of the generosity of strangers to pay for quackery

With the rise of quack stem cell clinics, there has been a rise of crowdfunding campaigns to assist patients in paying for expensive stem cell treatments of unproven efficacy. Unfortunately, as a recent study shows, these crowdfunding campaigns nearly always oversell efficacy and ignore potential risks of the treatments, while making powerful emotional appeals.