Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Apple Cider Vinegar & Wellness Frauds

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

We’re back and midweek episodes have never sounded so good! After two amazing author interviews, we’re returning to your ears with our take on the Belle Gibson fake cancer story and its recent Netflix adaptation, Apple Cider Vinegar. We discuss what we thought of the series and ask whether certain digital wellness spaces nurture and encourage these kind of unscrupulous profiteers and how we can fight against dangerous health misinformation.Thank you so much to everyone who sent us their takes on this one- we love hearing from you! If you want to take part in any future conversations just follow us on IG @everythingiscontentpod and watch out for our stories.See you Friday!O, R, B xIn Production Partnership with Cue Podcasts NETFLIX – Apple Cider Vinegar BBC – Bad Influencer: The Great Insta Con Scribe - The Woman Who Fooled the World by Beau Donelly & Nick Toscano Sky News - Vegan Influencer dies of 'starvation' Rotten Tomatoes - Sick of Myself Apple Podcasts - Offline with Jon Favreau / Can Democracy Survive the Attention Wars? YouTube - Unmasking Belle Gibson / 60 Minutes Australia Scribe - The Doctor Who Fooled the World by Brian DeerLiverpool Echo - Mum of popular Liverpool musician slams alternative cancer clinic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth I'm Richira and I'm Anoni and this is everything in conversation where a dash of chia seeds are donning your instagrammable acai bowl we'll update you on the biggest pop culture stories from the week before diving into a bigger topic with you remember if you want to take part in these extra episodes, just follow us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod. That's where we decide topics and ask for your opinions. This week, we're diving into wellness scammer Belle Gibson and the new Netflix series about her apple cider vinegar. But first, the headlines from the EIC newsroom. Katy Perry has signed up for the next Blue Origin spaceflight,

the first all-female trip to space in 62 years. Accompanying the singer will be journalist and friend of Oprah, Gayle King, NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerri-Ann Flynn, and Lauren Sanchez, the fiancée of Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder of Blue Origin. The trip is due to take place sometime this spring. Reality TV star Georgia Toffolo and BrewDog CEO James Watt eloped on Saturday 1st March in Scotland.

To our family and friends who aren't with us, we will celebrate with you soonest, they said, after also revealing that their ring bearer was a dog. Anora, dubbed the Strip Club Cinderella Story, swept the Oscars, winning five awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. The small budget indie flick is about a young sex worker from New York who gets caught up with a Russian billionaire. The film, however, has received some criticism for its failing to use an intimacy coordinator and for being surface level in its depiction of sex work. Some others also suggested that Demi Moore losing out to Mikey Madison

is kind of the plot of The Substance. King of the Jungle and McFly alumni Danny Jones was reportedly seen drunkenly kissing Maura Higgins at the Brit Awards afterparty on Saturday night. Danny is married and he met Maura on I'm a Celeb. Neither have commented at the time of record. Dreamworks have announced that Shrek 5 is in the works. Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz will reprise their roles, with Zendaya joining them in the role of one of Shrek and Fiona's triplets. After the trailer was released, however, some fans were quick to express their concerns about the animation of the beloved characters. Did they get Botox? Why are they like that? One ex-useruser asked the film is expected to be released in late 2026

charlie xex was the queen of the brits winning five awards and she also said in reference to itv's alleged disdain of her gorgeous see-through outfit that we are in the era of free the nipple so ladies take off your bras dolly parton has announced the death of her beloved husband carl dean who passed away at age 82. Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can't do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years, she said. After the success of his former fiancé, Molly Mae Haig's documentary series, boxer and TV personality Tommy Fury has announced that his own show is coming to the BBC. The show, called Tommy, The Good, The Bad, The Fury, will reveal more of his personal and professional life behind the scenes and will air sometime this year.

Peppa Pig's mother, Mummy Pig, is pregnant with her third child and the announcement has caused something of a stir on the internet. One ex-user wrote, UK is the most unserious country ever because why was Good Morning Britain showing Mummy Pig announcing a pregnancy at like 8am on a Thursday? From all of us here at Everything Is Content, congrats to the Pig family. The 2025 Razzie Awards took place on the 28th of February, and the big winner was Madame Webb, collecting three awards for worst picture, worst actress and worst screenplay. When asked for comment on seeing his brother-in-law's nude scene in White Lotus, Chris Pratt joked of Patrick Schwarzenegger,

I know where my eyes went. I'm not blood related to him. I was looking at that dick, bro. Weren't we all, Chris? And lastly, everyone's favourite chaotic Ben has sent the rumour mill spinning once again. That's right, Ben and Jen might be back on. Although which Jen, you ask? It's Jennifer Garner this time.

Or maybe not. Either way, we imagine that Dunkin' Garner this time. Or maybe not. Either way, we imagine that Dunkin' Donuts will be seeing Ben very soon. And that's all from the headlines this week. Belle Gibson is the wellness scammer who conned thousands of people into thinking she'd cured her terminal brain cancer through healthy eating. Netflix's new series, Apple Cider Vinegar, tracks her extraordinary story and downfall. Belle rose to fame in 2013, three years into Instagram's existence, and thanks to her wellness app, The Whole Pantry. On it, you'd find

healthy recipes and guides to well-being and positive thinking, and in its first month, it got 200,000 downloads. In the process, she amassed thousands of followers. She eventually got a book deal with Penguin and released it in 2014. That same year, it was announced her app would automatically feature on the soon-to-launch Apple smartwatches. She also claimed to have donated more than £150,000 to charities, but in reality, it was more like £5,000. In 2015, journalists Bo Donnelly and Nick Toscano began looking into

Gibson's medical history and charitable donations and they exposed her in the Melbourne-based daily The Age. The Netflix series is based on their 2017 book The Woman Who Fooled the World. In the Netflix series we're essentially given three women's storylines including Bell's. We've also got Miller who seems to have been heavily inspired by Jessica Ainscough, an Australian teen magazine editor who became a writer and wellness entrepreneur after turning her back on traditional medicine when she got diagnosed with a rare form of cancer when she was aged 22. Crucially the difference between Miller and Belle is that Miller actually has cancer both in the series and Jessica in real life and believes that her healthy eating and coffee enemas will cure her. Both she in the series and Jessica in real life and believes that her healthy eating

and coffee enemas will cure her. Both she and the real life Jessica eventually died. The final story comes through Lucy, a cancer patient who's desperately drawn in by Belle's lies. So I really wanted to talk both about the show and Belle and Jessica but I also want to talk about the internet and wellness and a time back on the internet when wellness was so mainstream that figures like Belle could become idols for lots of us or lots of people around us. Did either of you know of Belle Gibson before the series? I think I didn't know about her as in depth. I'm quite shocked at how little I knew but peripherally I was aware that there had been people online who had claimed to have cured their cancer through

very spurious means and had been scamming people but I actually am really shocked that I wasn't super aware like I didn't know her name I wasn't aware of the full story what about you Beth? I was quite aware of it and I not until 2021 and I remember it really vividly I was in a hotel for work and I was like I'll stick this on the BBC there was a little documentary and I was like I'll stick this on this looks interesting and I had never heard of her before and it's only about I think it's an hour 45 minutes so nothing like what we get in the Netflix series but I honestly it blew my mind so for the last kind of three years I have known about her but because it happened such a long time ago like 2015 10 years ago now it feels like

another life we would have been in our early 20s I guess and only you would have been on the Instagram scene in the early days but I just don't think things filtered through the same way if you weren't maybe in Australia or already in those spaces so I did know I didn't quite have the full picture that I think you get from the book what about you Richa? So I weirdly did know of her. I didn't know about her when she was coming up or when she was at peak fame. I just knew about her, I think, I want to say 2018, 2019. So definitely after her downfall, but it was all the kind of news pieces that were coming out about her essentially just having been found out and the amount of money that she was being asked to pay and just the multiple occasions on which she failed to pay

them. And she had just made it 10 times worse and the more stories that would come out about people impacted by her but I also was kind of lurking those wellness spaces and we'll come on to this I'm sure in a bit but I was really taken in by bits and pieces of really damaging wellness clean eating all of that stuff so it really kind of coalesces I think around that time some of the power of these figures on Instagram and the impacts that they had on people like me people who I guess were kind of vulnerable to falling into traps of problematic eating habits as part of that I guess I had a bit of a tab on various individuals and she fell into that orbit as well do you know what's so funny so at at that time, I was really in the fitness, like into the bodybuilding side of things,

which is a completely different world from wellness. So I actually very rarely saw the like deliciously Ella Cacau nut kind of stuff, even though there was a part of that. Those worlds were actually really separate. There was kind of like the holistic wellness, paleo banana girl stuff. Then there was what I was following,

which actually in hindsight is so funny because my dream body, sometimes these women pop up in my feed they I mean it's incredible they're like adonises but they're so muscular but I had so zoned in on that universe that I had like completely warped my understanding of what people looked like as much as I was in the larger space of fitness mine was actually very specifically like bodybuilding which didn't really bleed into I mean that both industries completely unhealthy at that time but mine was just unhealthy in a completely different way mine was all about like whey protein that's really interesting because I can see the complete almost

like they're two different sides of a coin or just looking at it from completely different directions because I was your traditional following deliciously Ella clean eating Alice before she rebranded and you know has become a lot more i guess traditional health in that way and she's spoken out about having a lot of regret about branding herself as clean eating alice she definitely does not post content like that anymore but i was hook line sink in all of that and even just got into some really dark places i don't know if either of you heard of a woman called freely the banana girl do you know her did she die i believe she's still alive

but she's gone off grid because there's another one that was similar that was extremely doing like an extreme raw vegan diet she did and she eventually died yeah i was i was following all of them i'd watch all of their videos all the time i was like i didn't follow their diets but i was definitely falling a bit mentally into the side of putting controls and boundaries around what i started to eat and I wouldn't call it a relapse but I would definitely say I was getting sucked in caught myself and thought okay no I really need to stop this before it gets too far or like goes into a bad direction and then I started watching them almost in the way that people possibly I imagine

watch a lot of manosphere stuff out of this almost like morbid curiosity and it stopped impacting me on a personal level but I just couldn't look away so I guess that's my relationship to wellness and online wellness during that time I'd say around 2015 to 2018 and after that their power seemed to drop off as well she was so early then because by 2015 she I mean she did this all so fast by 2015 she was already exposed and like kind of on her way out of public consciousness like that is absolutely bonkers to think about and obviously there's discussions about how old she is she doesn't seem to know how old she is different like the timelines don't totally add up but if she's 33 now which blows my mind all of this went down when she was 23

I just I cannot imagine all of that happening at any age but when you're in your early 20s to have both achieved so much and also to be watching it all like fall away and to be so deep in these faces absolutely blows my mind what's interesting about the documentary because they show that they show that there's the advent of Instagram at the time that she's kind of coming up not in the documentary sorry in the the dramatized biopic I guess of her career but I wonder if it was something to do with her age. I mean, obviously there have been people that have come forward like friends

or people that knew her at school who called her like a pathological liar and that she was always making stuff up. But I wonder if her youth also was part of her tenacity with just like spreading these stories. And it's even a good fable of whether or not we get into her psyche and what caused her to do this. It's an interesting lesson in how much things can spread and how things can get carried away and I think when you're younger

maybe you're perhaps more likely to just say things online and then not be aware of the consequences but what I found interesting watching this is this all kind of went away I think for a few years about maybe the last like five years has been less of this content in the last couple of years I've seen a rise in raw diets people eating literally like raw meat raw milk people doing these really extreme vegan diets and actually that same morbid curiosity you mentioned Ratera there's a few women that come off of my explore feed and I can't help but look and they're often mothers they're often extremely extremely thin and lean and they're like this is what I eat in a day and it's really reminds me of that era and I think it's coming back with the

rise of like heroin chic and stuff but also it feels like people are once again getting sucked into that, which it just proves that we're old enough now to watch the cycles come back. Because when it happens the first time you're like, and now I'm like, oh, we've seen this before. So I wouldn't actually be that surprised if we got another Belle Gibson adjacent in the coming years. That is absolutely terrifying. That is, yeah, that is shocking. In my mind, I'm not on those corners anymore, firstly, but secondly, I just thought that the internet has changed so much that in my mind, that's just not possible in the same way. Because this is something that I really wanted to get onto as well. I feel like

with the beginning of Instagram, the fact that we weren't used to people being so successful aestheticizing their life somebody like a Belle Gibson who was really good at it and they talk about it in the fictionalized series as well even the team around her who are not getting paid and should be really pissed off years later the characters are shown saying well she just had a really good eye for things so it was kind of impactful being in a team where somebody was really good at that stuff and you know putting out images of her life images of food and making it look beautiful so I think because she was so talented at that people didn't really ask questions it felt like she looks really healthy

she looks really beautiful she talks about her life in this emotive engaging alluring way so why wouldn't I follow her why wouldn't I support what she does and also we will go on to this but the fact that so much of her audience was super vulnerable that would be a huge part of it too but everyone's good at doing that now everyone is really good at serializing their life everyone's really good at posting making things look beautiful so I wonder what it takes now for somebody to succeed in those environments especially when we are more cynical we are hopefully smarter more discerning with our information and there is a lot more fact checking going on that I don't believe happened back then and I'd hope the

media wouldn't prop up somebody like they did in the way Belle Gibson was shoved dressed up put on in these beautiful clothes on you know morning show breakfast shows and just allowed to spew out all of this nonsense I would hope that environment has changed but you saying that makes me scared it hasn't enough I do think that now everyone trades on their sob stories is a cruel way to put it but everyone trades on their personal information online in not again I can't quite find the words in a sort of cheaper way it doesn't weigh as much it's not as valuable you can't take it as far people will open their front camera and just say the most traumatic things that have happened people will talk through their breakups like hours post to a few hundred followers maybe go viral so I think it is a different landscape people are more invested now in the downfall

like we will all turn and watch a bell gibson style crash out but I don't think we have the attention span to follow just a singular creator because it's such a big pool and yeah it's just a completely different landscape and I assume what happened with her was that there weren't the same kind of rigors of testing because no one really cared to like publishing houses news programs were just seeing Australian dollar signs and she was making what looks like a tidy sum of money it's it's quite nowadays. But I think at the time, she was one of the, as I understand it, one of the first influencers. So there really wasn't a code of how influencers should be treated, maybe not deified, maybe treated as like proper employees,

vetted and verified. Maybe we do have that slightly more now because whole other industries have sprung up around them but can't guarantee it because again I think people are just ruled by their bottom line and you know what money can be made by whatever means the thing is though also I think the reason that no one checked is it's absolute madness to lie about having had cancer and I think most people will operate on the basis that if you're saying that I was diagnosed with a terminal malignant brain cancer, that you are telling the truth. I think that is, I can't imagine someone saying that to me and me ever feeling a need to check it out. So I think that that is like human instinct. I think the

difference now is that people on the internet do not need to rely on traditional media platforms in order to bolster their credibility, because you can be a free agent as a content creator you can sell guides online if anything influencers and digital content creators have much more power than traditional media print and broadcasting do because even though you might reach more people in terms of like a bigger variety of people if you're on traditional media actually you could have a million followers on instagram loads of people not know who you are if you're selling your health eating guide to even one percent of your following, you can make huge amounts of money. So there isn't a need to be vetted. You don't even need to be believed. People might even not

know you exist. There are so many creators out there with millions of followers that we will have no idea who they are. And as much as you say, Ruchira, hopefully we're smarter, hopefully we are more educated. I think that that's just unfortunately not true because as you said as well like people that are vulnerable people that are desperate especially again with this rise of kind of like skinny bodies a lot of the content creators that I see that are purporting basically kind of glorified eating disorders to their followers are selling this image to people who are maybe struggling with their weight struggling with their health they're desperate we live in a society where access to health care across the, across most nations is very difficult to achieve. Internet access is for most people something they

have access to. And so desperate measures call for desperate people to look in directions. And if you have beautifully tanned, skinny people with luxurious long hair swanning about big villas telling you that if you eat a date with peanut butter and nothing else all day, you're going to cure your endometriosis, then think that unfortunately there will always be a market of people who are willing to believe that even if we see that as like oh we've been there done that before and there is a lot of when I look in the comments of these videos there are a lot of people that are saying this is unhealthy you shouldn't be posting this but then also there are the hundreds thousands of people following following them silently who are making notes. Oh God, it's so depressing. Just as you were

talking, I was thinking about a film called Sick of Myself. Have either of you watched this? No. So when you were talking about how absurd and how outrageous it would be to lie about having a diagnosis, but also Beth, the point you made about how the internet and the way short form video has dominated internet culture has meant that you have to a sell people in the first three seconds of a video and a big part of that is just kind of making your trauma bite size and digestible in this bullet point way so people stick on the video with you it was just making me think of this film it's a Norwegian film and in it the main character has what I would say is undisputable narcissism and she just has munch

housings as well and she just needs the attention she's dating a famous artist boyfriend who was doing really well and she hates it every time he gets more and more attention he gets more famous you can see her recoil resent and just grow into this like hateful figure until she starts she starts I think ingesting something to make herself ill, because she sees it on the news that lots of people are getting sick from taking this thing, drinking this drink, or whatever it is. So she starts doing it to herself until she starts getting attention, and then starts engaging with the media, and basically just becoming a bit of a celebrity from the fact that she's making herself unwell. And it sounds really dark, but it's actually a dark comedy, and the whole thing

is just so disgusting, so repellent, but but so darkly funny because it does feel like it touches something in the culture in this light guys where you can imagine those people not to the extreme degree of her but they are rewarded in modern culture so I think it is yeah it does touch on something this idea that we have kind of created an environment where if you are shameless and you are unwell enough to do something like that you you could get rewarded why not the internet's there for you I listened to a recent episode of offline with Jon Favreau which I really enjoyed and actually I want to write about because it was so good but it was about it was I think it was called can democracy survive the attention wars and one of the things they talk about is this concept of attention in the digital age and how the best way to be successful now isn't about being the most clever the most honest the most insightful the most

innovative it's literally about getting the most attention and the people they didn't say this but I'm inferring this like the people that are able to get the most attention the people that are more narcissistic and that do care less about being honest and truthful and honorable because any attention is good and in fact bad attention is even better than good attention and they were talking about that in relation to sort of like politics on the left and on the right and how the right are much more open to having people disagree with them and being outrageous and this creates more clicks and if anything it just gives them more power whereas the left maybe has a bit more of a tendency to lean towards wanting to get things

right and wanting to people to agree with them And this is kind of what happens online as well. If you're willing to deal with people getting angry at you and disagreeing with you, actually you win in the end. You do do the best. It doesn't really matter what you're doing. It matters how you're doing it and how you're saying it

and how many people are engaging. Attention is attention is attention. And that's the final underscoring point, which means that it's interesting because Belle Gibson is such a pioneer in this and such a forerunner of that but that kind of system is what she i guess foreshadowed was about to happen and so there is always space and room for that and because it is so uncontrolled and unregulated there will be so many things happening that that we don't know about and I don't really know how you put the worms back in the can it must have also been so kind of personally rewarding almost to the point maybe she felt like she was doing the wrong thing you know when something just feels right and

you think you can almost forget the circumstances by you know which you if you lie to get in the room and then you feel at home in the room it almost like that didn't happen and in the documentary I watched and I think they do recreate this in the Netflix series, her publisher have filmed her getting media training. So she's there sort of eating a salad and they're saying, you're going to get some of these questions, they're going to be tough, but it's just us, we're going to figure out how you're going to get through them when they're asked. Because, you know, I think that's when scrutiny was building up. And they ask a question, I can't remember what it is. I think they're like, what, you know, why are you here? And she's like, and she says that someone asked her from Apple I think when she was over for their

Apple Watch launch what story do you want to be and I think that is what what this was it was like she wanted to live in a story where she was loved where she was physically extraordinary e.g. overcoming the most incredible odds where things are going to be okay because she knows the ending she knows that she hasn't got or she suspects at this point she hasn't got terminal cancer where she's always on the receiving end of like love and adoration and care and she's kind of living in the extreme of that story my take on her i guess is a bit harsher but i think it's only because she really terrifies me there's this very strange i don't know this impenetrable wall on her face that there's an interview that's been recirculating in light of the series where an interviewer is is asking her directly how old she is and she just can't answer it and she it's

not that she gets flustered she doesn't get flustered she just seems so shamelessly unable to give a straight answer constantly and I remember over the last few years those kind of videos circulating and my main impression was just who is this person what is this person I do not understand I don't I don't I cannot understand who they are there doesn't seem to be an ounce of humanity or relatability in their behavior it's just so disorientating and jarring so even though the series presents her as a person with all of these experiences which are very harrowing I think I find it very hard to put any of myself into her which I think is a good thing about the documentary it doesn't try too hard to humanize her which could be something that would I think do a disservice to

all the people who were taken in by her and the impact she had. I think it just steps on the line of presenting her as somebody who probably did have a lot of things going on but they don't try and guess what those things are. They do show the experiences that she's had with having a miscarriage with having a parent who's very problematic with her but it didn't make me feel particularly sorry for her I think the fact they had Miller at the same time they had that other woman who was a follower of Belle Gibson's and who actually had cancer was going through chemotherapy and was drawn in by her lies i think constantly reminds you of the real impact of somebody like her it isn't like an anna delvey type story where you're rooting for her at all have you watched the full 60 minute interview which is the one that you recognize where she's

got this big pink roll neck on and she's talking like it's honestly insane to see she's like i believed i was that age etc etc have you watched because I watched most of it through last night and I've got thought no I've watched a bits and pieces I've definitely watched the edits and the cuts so please tell me what your actual opinion of the whole thing is because I don't have that I think you're spot on in the way that she comes across and I think you watch the whole thing you just see more examples of it so I don't think it would necessarily change your mind because there's something very uncanny about it because she can't answer a simple question like how old are you she's like well I believed I was this age and I behaved as though I was this age and you go just and the interviewer is so done with it she's like truth bell she keeps having to repeat true or false

tell the truth and she gets very cross with her but essentially I didn't know this her narrative bell's narrative is that she believed she had brain cancer because a doctor an alternative doctor told, told her she did. And the point was, people were like, you said in your book, you were told at a doctor's office, if this man even exists, we can't find evidence. He told you it's house. You never had any scans because he didn't work in that kind of medicine. What he gave you wasn't chemotherapy. And she's like, I thought I was having chemotherapy. So what you get is actually this very, very sad and slightly more convoluted picture of someone who, and again, it's like, if you believe her, that there was even a doctor who had bought so fully into alternative medicine herself, that some guy, and he's portrayed in the Netflix series, it's like this obvious quack, working out of a warehouse, walking around with no shoes,

using these like strange German pieces of technology. She believed that man was a legitimate doctor who, when he said she'd got cancer, believed that she had cancer. So it's just a bigger and sadder story. It makes actually nothing clearer. But I do think it is worse, because it's the only time I've seen her get a real grilling on it. And I think if that interviewer couldn't get a straight answer, absolutely no one else could have done. I think I agree with you, both of you on in terms of how you view her, Beth, in terms of seeing her as someone vulnerable who probably should never have had as much access to so much power and then the same as you Ruchira as someone that actually caused so much harm and is really dangerous I

think it points the question of how do we stop this like what protection do we need around terms whether that's people talking about food nutrition nutritionist is not a protected term kind of anyone can call themselves a nutritionist there's so many things with that within like kind of medical adjacent industries where actually you can do a two hour course online and call yourself certain things. So I think that's one aspect of it. And also just this alternative medicine thing, it's making me think of kind of like the rise in trad wife content, the rise of people turning their back on traditional contraceptive methods. and actually that being also very much linked into this kind of ever so slightly shifting towards quite old fashion ideology and that does leak into medicine as well and with some of the Trabwife content they

also do have things like home remedies and warm milk which people are always saying you know that's not actually very good for you to be drinking warm milk that kind of thing and so I actually think it's a really prescient time for this to come out because I do really see inklings of this on the internet still or it coming back a bit but again it's like I don't really necessarily know how you stop it because I do think if someone came out today and said I cured myself of incurable cancer we might feel quite questioning but I think there'll be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who would go this is amazing and maybe they would end up on NBC people did ivermectin because one podcast host told them to do during COVID I think it's not at all I think you're bang on the money I think people would absolutely fall over themselves if it was their favorite personality I agree I agree I think although I was more hopeful before

it's just making I also was started to think of COVID and I even even before COVID in 2018, I was talking about how vaccine rates have gone down across the UK when it comes to the MMR jab. So that's one for measles, mumps and rubella. It's the one that for like the last 10 years, there has been some divisiveness over it because of a very disputed, very bad paper by Andrew Wakefield, who claimed that it was dangerous and had links to autism. It does not. It's been debunked so many times at this point. It is just completely false information. And you'd think that maybe it was that that was leading to all of that kind of decline in people using the jab. But the reality is, it was actually because of cuts to a position called a health advisor, who is somebody who is a community health practitioner in the first year, the first few

years of baby's life would drive out to the community and just talk to new mums, new parents and basically just talk to you about the health of your baby and if you have any questions they would answer them and they would be the first port of call. Because of cuts to the NHS and specifically cuts to that position the numbers had declined in the people who could do that job and there was a big paper on how that has been a huge reason why vaccination rates have dropped across the country it's not even just a direct will for people to not use them it's just because if somebody has questions it's that bit harder that's slightly bit harder to access somebody from the nhs to talk to

and i guess in the wake of that it is much easier to maybe not have the time to get vaccination, perhaps read questionable, dubious things online, or just not get around to doing it. And in the wake of that, obviously, it has real life impacts. So I think you're right, both of you, in the fact that alternative medicine, questionable claims has a place to flourish. But I also think the internet is a part of that. The other part is just what we're seeing across the board with the economy and in the UK specifically I guess additional difficulty in being able to chat to your local doctor your GP that is also part of the picture it's a slice of the pie I guess. It's so interesting how often in recent episodes we've spoken about those two things happening in tandem which is

a lack of access to public funding for services and then also a rise in reliance on internet information, which is ostensibly free. We spoke about it even when we were talking about the surveillance episode and, you know, lack of policing and people filling in the gaps. It very much feels like this is what's happening because everyone has access to the internet. Everything is becoming slightly lawless. That is also happening as well as people like Russell Brand

and this whole kind of mainstream media inverted commas concept of like the media is actually this illuminati style figure who is trying to trick us and who we shouldn't trust and we shouldn't trust our governments and we shouldn't trust and so it's all this kind of like conspiracy theorism and I don't know what came first the chicken or the egg whether it was the internet or whether it was the lack of funding but those two things in tandem definitely seem to be stirring up quite a messy pot, especially as the economy and austerity gets worse. That is definitely ever growing. So we had in our DMs, Natasha said, I believe in functional holistic medicine and food as medicine

to an extent, but there's so much chatter from non-professionals, it's almost impossible to wade through. There is some really silly stuff out there and a lot of it is a money ploy good old-fashioned herbalism works though you know like garlic and honey for a sore throat we mustn't let the narrative go the other way and people forget we are nature too and this she says this is from someone who takes prescription medicine and supplements antibiotics save my life i also think they ruin my gut which strikes me as just a very balanced take it's sort of open to everything it isn't that modern medicine denialism but nor is it that body denialism and that kind of i mean for want of a better word that kind of like folk medicine human understanding like as honed through hundreds of

years i had a toothache i put clover oil on it i never look back and i think that is what we're losing because people become so so suspicious of the other side it's almost like a tribalism and it's like like you said, Noni, like whichever side is less scrupulous, whichever side is louder, kind of becomes the side that people turn to at the expense of the other side. You can even see it in the series

when Miller is facing the, I guess the reluctance from her dad is the right word, or just even the doubts. And it almost feels, and the doctors around her as well, when they're suggesting that she should have her arm amputated and it is the next port of call it's the only port of call she at first loses her footing but then she doubles down triples down into this idea that nobody understands my body nobody's listening to me and I think you're

completely right I think this idea that either side is feeling cancelled out not listened to denied by the other side is just deepening that wedge and it is really frustrating because if you are on the side of science it feels impossible not to think well why won't you just listen to facts facts are facts medicine saves lives but i think this message does a really good job of pointing out you can't you can't deny the fact that people know their bodies you have to listen to people too that's where we've got to so many people feel not listened to not respected about their medical decisions it is just a gateway into all of this really dangerous content and I'm not saying that's the case for everyone but that's definitely a big reason of why I see for example like crunchy mums this concept

of mums who would rather do natural remedies for their children than have medicine, it feels like a lot of that is born from this idea that medicine doesn't understand their unique position as mums and their unique protective nature for their children. So we need to address that from the stem. One of the things that I found so stressful about the documentary, I'm sorry, I keep calling it a documentary, so stressful about the Netflix show with Willa's character, Miller, sorry, which was based on Jessica Ainscough, who again, like Belle Gibson, was a real life kind of the one who had cancer. But her mum also in real life

and in the show got cancer, followed in her footsteps with this traditional medicine and then died of cancer as well. But then I was thinking about what you were saying as well about, you know, believe in the science, believe in the medicine.

The other problem we have is that you do have outlets like the daily mail who love publishing stuff like doctors get it wrong now there's thinking about you know there's the lucy letby case at the minute there are obviously so many instances where there is problems within modern medicine there is issues with doctors being corrupt you do also get doctors who become like doctors for pay where they leave traditional medicine to go and kind of like get paid millions of pounds to back up claims for products and brands they obviously then can't really go back and practice medicine but that company whatever there is loads of corruption

within any industry but that also is something that gets really sensationalized by the media most people working in healthcare industries do genuinely care they work really really hard they are overworked and underpaid and really care about your health and yes the systems are failing but modern medicine is miraculous but there is a lot of focus because of this attention thing again there's so many people to blame in this as well as anyone that wants to cause outrage latching onto those stories and that's what really causes fear-mongering and like you said Richira there are so little face-to-face conversations now like people find it very hard to get GP appointments whereas that used to be a really normal thing if you had a bit of a worry you could pop to your gp now it's like even if i want to go to the gp i think oh well i guess like when

can i go because it's going to be in three weeks i probably just don't even bother booking an appointment because it just feels like such a hard thing to do so we've lost that face-to-face access with doctors we've lost that community care when you were pregnant you used to also get like people come into your house and midwives a lot of that has dropped off so the information we have access to is often quite misleading and more outrageous than the truth which generally sits somewhere more in the middle but that is as with being in the digital age that unfortunately is something we have to really try and fight against but a lot of people aren't armed with the tools of you know media training and knowing how to pick through what's truthful and what is just a really good headline.

My enemy number one with this entire scenario with Bell Gibson, with problematic health claims, gaining virality, all of that kind of stuff, is journalism. Really shit journalism. And I think we can say platforms need to do better moderation. Yes. We can say that people shouldn't lie about having cancer. Yes. to do better moderation, yes. We can say that people shouldn't lie about having cancer, yes. But when I was watching the series, my blood was boiling for the amount of times that she was platformed on TV,

the amount that articles claiming that she was wellness woman of the year. Many magazines, female magazines, when I was doing research for this, have copped to the fact that they gave her awards, things like that. It is just, it's infuriating. Journalism is the means to which people

get verified information the amount of shit the daily mail the sun put out they have to take responsibility for it people like this are allowed to flourish and they're encouraged and they're also rewarded their platform to millions more people because of newspapers verifying them as trustworthy to most people and i think they're enemy number one for me in this entire issue. We had a message from Lucy who first sent a reminder of the young Liverpool musician Sean Walsh who passed away at a very young age she says as a result of alternative cancer therapy lies and she says I wonder if young people like him and the Miller character are more susceptible to this kind of manipulative

wellness propaganda because it's their first time their body has ever malfunctioned because if it is the first time their body has ever malfunctioned? Because if it is the first time their body has ever malfunctioned, it is really serious. How would they have the experience to treat it thoroughly? I think it's a really good point, especially as flooded as these wellness spaces are with thoroughly healthy looking people, because typically they're quite rich people. And we see it in the series, actually. There's something like the fictional Hirsch Institute, which is based in Mexico, fronted by a white European woman who is very good at separating people from their cash. I mean, it's based on a lot of very real retreats and kind of holistic approaches. There's another part of the series where Lucy, who is very unwell with cancer

and pursuing alternatives to chemotherapy, takes ayahuasca and she's there for a week. Very easy for her to be persuaded to stay longer. And I do think that Lucy makes a very good point. When a young person's body or when a well person's body quote-unquote malfunctions eg becomes sick which can and will happen to all of us i think you're going to believe that you are able to fight it of will alone that you will try all these other things that you will not conversely make it sicker with chemotherapy which i know is what it feels like for a lot of people like it is very very very full-on it's very very painful and it perhaps you you feel quite faceless in it whereas I think the lure of alternative medicine is you feel extraordinary and I think it just preys on that but that was a really good

message from from Lucy yeah if you are going on feeling alone so many medicines they are an unnatural intervention they have to be because the body gets sick we need humans human findings human science-backed things to help us they are by the virtue of them this amazing kind of preventative godsend measure that we have created for other humans so in the short term a lot of things would feel like they're hurting us making us feel bad i don't know it is it is difficult because on the one hand you obviously want people to listen to their bodies but at the same time you want them to appreciate our bodies make us sick we are given these extra lifelines and a lot a lot of these things do inevitably make us feel unwell in the short term but they also give us a second chance we actually did have a message from an arm that

said any wellness influencer who doesn't open every statement with go and see a doctor is a fraud in my opinion and i think that level of cynicism is really important to keep hold of and I think it's important to remember how how rigorously medicine modern medicine is tested and I think it takes something like even like seven years of like information from the point of like discovering something before they can even like publish an article on it and what we have to remember is that regulation is really thorough and obviously there will be people who will react negatively, there are side effects to medicine, but those side effects ideally will be much more minimal compared to the long term side effects of whatever illness, disease or sickness you're

suffering from. And I think we do have to trust in medicine and also do have to understand that yes, sometimes things aren't going to work perfectly. But this is done by some of the brightest, most intellectual minds. It's really rigorously tested tested it has gone through so many hoops and jumps to get to the point of being available and accessible to us and it's interesting how because of the way that it's shrouded in certain language and because of the fact that actually they say you know these are the side effects that sometimes we feel more willing to trust someone who is presenting us with something that they've literally just come up with in their garage because they're going, this is amazing. It's a miracle cure. And we're

led to believe that kind of advertising language, the language of medicine and medication is often quite unsexy. It often does say this antibiotics might give you thrush. It might make you feel nauseous. It might feel whatever. Whereas these people that are just eating bananas all day are saying, I feel amazing. My skin is, and they're showing you very misleading information. We have to remember to try and look past the beautiful imagery and be like, actually, what qualifications does this person have? Thank you so much for listening and for all of your opinions and takes on this topic.

We love being in conversation with all three of you jokes with you all remember to go give us a follow on instagram at everything is content pod and please please please give us a review wherever you listen if you haven't already we'll see you as always on friday bye