I'm sorry to hear that Toni Bark is I'll and hope that she beats the odds for this kind of cancer. I feel for her son. That being said, this meme shows a very unfortunate message that's very common in alternative medicine: Victim blaming. 1/ 
Notice how Bark's son emphasizes that her mother had lived "the most healthy lifestyle one can live " but got cancer anyway, and a nasty one at that. Correct. Unfortunately that happens. A lot. 2/
Also unfortunately, the message from so much alt med is that if you do the right things, easy the right foods, live the right lifestyle, take the right supplements, you'll be healthy, with the subtext that if you become ill you must not be living and eating right. 3/
Similarly, in alt med, disease is always caused by something external. Vaccines cause autism, not genes. Environment and lifestyle cause cancer, not genes and/or bad luck, and you can alter these external factors to prevent illness. 4/
In antivax circles, even in the case of diseases caused by pathogenic organisms, the belief is that a healthy diet and lifestyle will boost your immunity so that disease won't harm you, at least not long term, and, hey, "natural immunity" from the disease is better anyway. 5/
Remember the time that time years ago when @billmaher said he didn't need the flu vaccine because his immune system was so good because of his healthy lifestyle? 6/
The best thing was that in response, Bob Costas rolled his eyes and said, "Oh, come on, Superman!" 7/ sciencebasedmedicine.org/oh-come-on-sup…
In any event, it saddens me that Toni Bark's son so clearly buys into the mindset that healthy people living super healthy lifestyles don't get cancer and thus felt obligated to emphasize so much that it's an "unlucky case of a genetic/immunological fuckup." Well, yes it is. 8/
The problem is that so much alt med has a near-absolutist view regarding our ability to prevent disease and alt med's ability to cure it, such that if you get sick you think it's your fault and if your treatment doesn't work you think it's because you're not doing it right. 9/
It's the mindset. The message is that you have near total control over your health. The dark flip side of that message is that if you get sick you must have done something wrong. That dark side increases the suffering of cancer patients and those who love them. 10/
The point is, yes, healthy living and diet can definitely reduce your risk of getting sick, but not to anything near zero. They can also slow the deleterious effects of aging, but we all still eventually age and die anyway, no matter what. 11/
We have a lot of control over our overall health but nowhere near much as "wellness" gurus claim, and for some specific diseases none at all. Far more often than we'd like to admit,bad luck and genetics can easily trump healthy living. 12/
I hope that Toni Bark survives get cancer with minimal suffering. It's a nasty kind of cancer. I also hope that she learns from it that health and disease are far more complex than her "holistic health" beliefs. 13/
I also hope her son doesn't continue with his messaging like this and learns to accept that it's usually not your fault of you get cancer. 14/14
Eat the right foods. Damn, I thought I'd caught every typo.🤦♂️
I'm sorry to hear the Toni Bark is ill, not I'll...🤦♂️
