MEET THE WELLNESS WARRIOR WHO FELL TO EARTH
The Woman Who Fooled The World Beau Donelly & Nick Toscano S cribe €21 ★★★★★
Three years ago, Belle Gibson was a superstar. The 23-year-old Australian mother had hundreds of thousands of Instagram and blog followers. She had a lucrative cookbook deal and her app, The Whole Pantry, had been downloaded more than 300,000 times worldwide.
Gibson’s story was, after all, sensational. Aged just 20, she told her devotees, she had been diagnosed with brain cancer and given four months to live. After unsuccessfully trying chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she decided to ‘cure’ herself.
Gibson (above) claimed her radiance was the result of rejecting conventional medicine in favour of various ‘superfoods’ and alternative therapies. People were entranced by the new and ultra-fashionable ‘wellness’ industry, which promised to rid us of all ailments through a combination of nutrition and outlandish rites.
Thousands of desperate cancer patients turned to Gibson’s (often expensive) concoctions, sometimes abandoning welltested therapies in the process.
But doubts began circulating about how someone so ill could look so healthy. Then an employee at Penguin Australia, which was excitedly launching Gibson’s book, contacted reporters Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, casting doubt on her story. They discovered that Gibson was a high-school drop-out and fantasist. There was no cancer and never had been.
The backlash was immediate. Gibson closed her social media accounts and went into hiding. The big companies, so eager to cash in on her popularity that they never questioned her pronouncements, disavowed her. Charities Gibson claimed were sharing her profits said they had never seen a penny. Last year, a civil court found her guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct and fined her A$410,000 (€268,000).
Most betrayed, however, were the terminally ill people given false hope by Gibson’s tale of her miraculous survival.
This book’s main lesson is how easy it is, in this age of social-media-driven ‘fake news’, to dupe the public. It’s also an excoriating attack on the charlatanism of ‘wellness warriors’. Doctors tell the authors that alternative therapies may alleviate symptoms but there is no evidence they can cure terminal diseases. ‘I wish there was magic. If there was… I’d be using it,’ says one oncologist.