Thread by @DrKate_Miller

Because I love a good Twitter thread, I'm going to delve into why I think people fall for snake oil treatments, doing what I do best, drawing on personal experience. Because I haven't always been a doctor, I have been a really stupid teenager too. 1/

Another lifetime ago, I was an angry and disinterested teenager, with parents who had split up when I was 4. My Dad had moved overseas when I was 12, and then returned when I was 17 because he had metastatic melanoma and he'd used up all his money on American clinical trials.

I saw him on and off over the next year, at varying points of treatment. Well and playing the piano one time. Pale and crying in a bed in Box Hill hospital another. Well and playing the piano again (he was a musical genius).

And then one day at the age of 18, I went to see him in Tasmania where he was staying. He told me that he'd decided to stop chemotherapy, and that he'd been given a 10% chance of survival. Neither of these meant anything at all to me. I did not know what he was talking about.

In the same breath, he told me that he firmly believed in mind over matter, and that he was putting himself in that 10% of people who survived. And then he handed me a book about this magical cure for cancer, Essiac tea. Twitter friends, it had it all.

It had the fact that it was invented by a nurse in the 1920s. It had the multitudes of anecdotal reports of cancers falling away like "cottage cheese". It had the suggestion that it was being covered up by pharmaceutical companies and that this was *it*, THE cure for cancer.

That night, teenage me went to bed with a torch, and stayed up reading all about this marvelous secret being kept from the world. This tea that was going to help save my Dad. I had spent my whole life waiting for him to return, waiting to see him, waiting for him to call.

The next morning, I woke up and told him he was going to beat it. We went to a mountain and collected rainwater and made the tea. We were together again. I had absolute trust. Partly because he was my Dad, and partly, because he was a doctor.

Never mind that he was cachectic (severely underweight). Never mind that walking was getting more painful from his bony mets. Never mind that six months later he had a seizure. He kept drinking that tea and telling me he wasn't going to die.

People tried to tell me of course. Gently and not so gently. I got so angry at them. The more they tried to tell me, the angrier I became. It was my Dad and I against the world. The word 'denial' was used a lot in my presence.

And then, the final time I went to see him, I was told in a corridor by his oncologist that he had 48 hours left to live. I don't blame his oncologist, my Dad was in Brisbane this time, on a syringe driver (palliated, in a palliative hospital), trying to hide he was dying.

I don't think he knew we were coming. I just don't think he could face the person he'd convinced perhaps a little too well that he wasn't going to die. I don't think he could face of any us for that reason. He'd been in and out of our lives, and now he was really really going.

That whole year, I had spent hours on the Internet, reading reams of information about essiac tea, about the big pharma conspiracies, feeding myself everything I needed to hear to construct a world in which my Dad, who I adored, didn't die of cancer.

But he did. Four days after being told in that corridor, he died. I was 19. While he was dying he told me not to waste my life. That was regret talking. But what about my beliefs about the tea, the big pharma? They shattered. That mirage brutally shattered into pieces.

I truly believe that those deep in the grip of these stories that give them the reality they so deeply need, will not come out of it through shaming or attempts to reorient their reality. Direct experience will. I finally realised the false hope and the scam that it was.

Since then I have lost more family members to cancer. Since then I have learned of so many miracle cures. None of them have cured a thing. I have done palliative care terms and looked after patients with terminal cancers that might have been cured, up to their eyeballs in debt

Because between my Dad dying and now, the miracle cure industry has become big business. $50,000 for IV ozone therapy plus the cost of flights. IV vitamins. Coffee enemas. Essiac tea is still being sold to cure cancer. Loved ones still die, believers are still shattered.

If you're on the fence, believe the person who has to be held accountable to these claims. Believe the person who says "I don't have all the answers but this is the best we've got". No one goes in to health to hold back treatments from anyone. We're all here for good reason.

Sometimes I try, gently to reorient people away from whatever flavour of the month miracle cure is going around (FYI, ivermectin was doing the rounds long before covid), but mostly, talking about the reality of what we see at the frontline is our greatest power.

Don't shame, tell your stories of what you see. Don't refute with articles, you'll be met with more and more articles making wilder and bolder claims. Tell your stories. They're so powerful. I went into medicine later than most and I lived a life as someone else.

That someone else can't make heads or tails of a journal article. They can make sense of emotional claims and magical tales of cures. So tell them your stories. Of pandemics and polio and vaccinations. Of how to die comfortably, instead of in tears from these sad choices. 🙏