Yeah I was wondering how she was doing. It's got to be so hard seeing your partner suffer like that, and when something, however shady, gives them hope, you must want so badly for them to feel...
Yeah I was wondering how she was doing. It's got to be so hard seeing your partner suffer like that, and when something, however shady, gives them hope, you must want so badly for them to feel better... but at the same time to be more able to see the truth that this is false hope. I can't imagine. I doubt that I would have the strength to break my wife's illusion if she held tightly to a fake source of light when enveloped in so much darkness and suffering. I feel that might be the right thing, to try and convince them of the truth, especially if the scam was siphoning resources which could actually help, but that would be a true ethical dilemma and a real test of will.
Counter: "I don't fully believe either, but if there's even 5% chance, how can you love me so little that you won't even want to try. Does a couple thousand really mean that much more to you?"...
Counter: "I don't fully believe either, but if there's even 5% chance, how can you love me so little that you won't even want to try. Does a couple thousand really mean that much more to you?"
Then a couple more thousand, then a couple more....
I witnessed something like this when a friend of mine had cancer and "The Secret" was in vogue. Fortunately, at least in that case, there wasn't much collateral damage since it's basically just...
I witnessed something like this when a friend of mine had cancer and "The Secret" was in vogue. Fortunately, at least in that case, there wasn't much collateral damage since it's basically just thinking positive thoughts -- total cost was the price of the book. On the other hand, I've heard stories of people who went down that route and thought they could "manifest" the cure without chemotherapy, with predictably terrible outcomes. I was a bit of a hardass about not supporting any of those kinds of ideas and focusing on actual evidence based treatment. Hard to say if that had any effect either way on the outcome, but I think it was the right thing to do. More of a clean cut situation than a spouse and the full blown conspiracy element though.
It's been a month since that story came out, I'd love to hear a follow-up of how much Michael has paid and how much he's feeling better. At one point, Michael believed in regular science. His back...
It's been a month since that story came out, I'd love to hear a follow-up of how much Michael has paid and how much he's feeling better.
At one point, Michael believed in regular science. His back is full of metal already and I know full well spine surgeons aren't miracle workers.
“The conventional route hasn’t done me any good,” he said on the channel. “When you’re desperate, you’ll try anything. This whole medbed thing has become personal for me.”
As much as I hate that he's letting himself be scammed, I also wonder what nonsense I would get myself into, when faced with chronic pain. My anger is mostly directed at the scam artists, and I try to be less upset with the folks throwing money at scams. Also, it's not a Jesus thing: hippie dippy crunchy granola moms were a thing more than a decade ago and they had their own range of secular whacky doodle nonsense. Church of Goop doesn't discriminate.
The woman's med bed spa site lists an address on the same lot as an actual hospital. Very clever. I also hate how they tell you it's a one session 45 minutes miracle on the sell, and then tell you it'll "take time" and you gotta "believe" after you've signed up.
My grandfather went through something like this when he was dying of cancer. When the conventional medical routes couldn't work any longer, he switched to alternative medicine. Unfortunately, one...
My grandfather went through something like this when he was dying of cancer. When the conventional medical routes couldn't work any longer, he switched to alternative medicine.
Unfortunately, one of his alternative medicine scammers put him on a high-Calorie fruit-based diet, and fruit juice in particular factored very heavily in this diet. It caused the tumor to grow dramatically in a very short space of time — way, way faster than it had grown at any point before or that it grew after he went off the diet — because he was effectively feeding the tumor. Even though he was only on this diet for a handful of months, we think it shaved off something like 50% of the time he had left.
Going into it, the rest of the family had no idea how dangerous alternative medical advice could be. We had no expectation that it would do any good, but we thought it would be good for my grandfather to have hope because he was so miserable about his impending death.
But in all honesty, his mental health actually improved pretty dramatically when he accepted he was going to die and stopped trying to fight it. When he ran out of things to try, he finally made up his mind to make the most of the little time he had left: he did a lot of traveling, he had deeper conversations with his family, he met up with all his friends he had drifted away from over the years, he celebrated holidays and birthdays hard, etc. In his last few weeks, he even planned out his own funeral service and set up several jokes and pranks (he was always a big prankster); he was practically giggling about it on his death bed.
Before all this, I had never believed in alternative medicine, but I considered it pretty harmless. Watching what happened to my grandfather has simultaneously made me much more adamantly opposed to alternative medicine and much more deeply sympathetic to its victims. These are scammers preying on the desperate and leaving them in an even worse state than they started.
That's a very costly lesson from your grandfather, but hopefully one that all the kids and grandkids can learn from. Did you all like the funeral pranks? He sounds like a fun man. At the very...
That's a very costly lesson from your grandfather, but hopefully one that all the kids and grandkids can learn from. Did you all like the funeral pranks? He sounds like a fun man.
At the very least, this kind of scam is robbing families of money that could be spent on the kids, and robbing them of precious time: there's a lot of sessions, a lot of travelling involved. And then the false hope could be robbing the person of time they need to really get their affairs in order....but procrastination is alas very understandable, and there's more an emphasis in current society in fighting or grasping at hope than acceptance.
Yes, we did, although it was a very surreal experience. It was a very large funeral (my grandfather was a social butterfly) and the whole crowd was laughing and crying at the same time. Every time...
Yes, we did, although it was a very surreal experience. It was a very large funeral (my grandfather was a social butterfly) and the whole crowd was laughing and crying at the same time. Every time we laughed, it actually just made us cry harder — in a good way — because there was so much of my grandfather's character in it.
It was a nice send-off and I think probably the best closure I've ever gotten out of a funeral.
Sounds like his wife is in an uncomfortable position. I’m not sure what I would do if my wife somehow became a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah I was wondering how she was doing. It's got to be so hard seeing your partner suffer like that, and when something, however shady, gives them hope, you must want so badly for them to feel better... but at the same time to be more able to see the truth that this is false hope. I can't imagine. I doubt that I would have the strength to break my wife's illusion if she held tightly to a fake source of light when enveloped in so much darkness and suffering. I feel that might be the right thing, to try and convince them of the truth, especially if the scam was siphoning resources which could actually help, but that would be a true ethical dilemma and a real test of will.
Counter: "I don't fully believe either, but if there's even 5% chance, how can you love me so little that you won't even want to try. Does a couple thousand really mean that much more to you?"
Then a couple more thousand, then a couple more....
I witnessed something like this when a friend of mine had cancer and "The Secret" was in vogue. Fortunately, at least in that case, there wasn't much collateral damage since it's basically just thinking positive thoughts -- total cost was the price of the book. On the other hand, I've heard stories of people who went down that route and thought they could "manifest" the cure without chemotherapy, with predictably terrible outcomes. I was a bit of a hardass about not supporting any of those kinds of ideas and focusing on actual evidence based treatment. Hard to say if that had any effect either way on the outcome, but I think it was the right thing to do. More of a clean cut situation than a spouse and the full blown conspiracy element though.
It's been a month since that story came out, I'd love to hear a follow-up of how much Michael has paid and how much he's feeling better.
At one point, Michael believed in regular science. His back is full of metal already and I know full well spine surgeons aren't miracle workers.
As much as I hate that he's letting himself be scammed, I also wonder what nonsense I would get myself into, when faced with chronic pain. My anger is mostly directed at the scam artists, and I try to be less upset with the folks throwing money at scams. Also, it's not a Jesus thing: hippie dippy crunchy granola moms were a thing more than a decade ago and they had their own range of secular whacky doodle nonsense. Church of Goop doesn't discriminate.
The woman's med bed spa site lists an address on the same lot as an actual hospital. Very clever. I also hate how they tell you it's a one session 45 minutes miracle on the sell, and then tell you it'll "take time" and you gotta "believe" after you've signed up.
My grandfather went through something like this when he was dying of cancer. When the conventional medical routes couldn't work any longer, he switched to alternative medicine.
Unfortunately, one of his alternative medicine scammers put him on a high-Calorie fruit-based diet, and fruit juice in particular factored very heavily in this diet. It caused the tumor to grow dramatically in a very short space of time — way, way faster than it had grown at any point before or that it grew after he went off the diet — because he was effectively feeding the tumor. Even though he was only on this diet for a handful of months, we think it shaved off something like 50% of the time he had left.
Going into it, the rest of the family had no idea how dangerous alternative medical advice could be. We had no expectation that it would do any good, but we thought it would be good for my grandfather to have hope because he was so miserable about his impending death.
But in all honesty, his mental health actually improved pretty dramatically when he accepted he was going to die and stopped trying to fight it. When he ran out of things to try, he finally made up his mind to make the most of the little time he had left: he did a lot of traveling, he had deeper conversations with his family, he met up with all his friends he had drifted away from over the years, he celebrated holidays and birthdays hard, etc. In his last few weeks, he even planned out his own funeral service and set up several jokes and pranks (he was always a big prankster); he was practically giggling about it on his death bed.
Before all this, I had never believed in alternative medicine, but I considered it pretty harmless. Watching what happened to my grandfather has simultaneously made me much more adamantly opposed to alternative medicine and much more deeply sympathetic to its victims. These are scammers preying on the desperate and leaving them in an even worse state than they started.
That's a very costly lesson from your grandfather, but hopefully one that all the kids and grandkids can learn from. Did you all like the funeral pranks? He sounds like a fun man.
At the very least, this kind of scam is robbing families of money that could be spent on the kids, and robbing them of precious time: there's a lot of sessions, a lot of travelling involved. And then the false hope could be robbing the person of time they need to really get their affairs in order....but procrastination is alas very understandable, and there's more an emphasis in current society in fighting or grasping at hope than acceptance.
Yes, we did, although it was a very surreal experience. It was a very large funeral (my grandfather was a social butterfly) and the whole crowd was laughing and crying at the same time. Every time we laughed, it actually just made us cry harder — in a good way — because there was so much of my grandfather's character in it.
It was a nice send-off and I think probably the best closure I've ever gotten out of a funeral.