Would You Pay Someone to Commit Suicide? 13000 People did. Really.

According to a recently published paper, 13000 people paid over 1.4 million dollars to help 200 people commit suicide. Except they thought they were paying for zero-evidence treatment for desperate cancer patients. In other words, these so-called do-gooders paid scammer quacks to help sick people commit suicide by paying huge amounts of money for water... i.e. homeopathic cancer treatments.

That's 1.4 million bucks raised to pay for some VERY expensive water proven to do nothing, that could have been used for palliative care or other purposes that may have made final moments of life more bearable. 1.4 million bucks could have paid for a lot of weed or even more powerful opioids or whatever the cancer patients needed to spend the final days in peace, and leave some for their family to cover other expenses.

Instead, the money is going to cancer quacks, doing NOTHING for the actual patients, who have to live their final days with treatment proven to do NOTHING, see their hopes dashed and pain unmanaged.

Basically, the 1.4 million bucks paid for suicide by water and pain.



Crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe (but also YouCaring, CrowdRise, and FundRazr) are the go-to place for desperate people to solicit money to try these quack medicine. So much so, it's now a BILLION dollar industry.  And these platforms, claiming neutrality, will NOT restrict funds raised by their platforms to be used for legitimate medicine. One does wonder whether the fees they collect are the primary reason for the claims of neutrality.

But that's only the beginning. Bogus and unproven treatments are advertising themselves online, and telling potential patients/victims they should crowdfund their care. Examples include oxygen hyperbaric treatment for brain injury, stem cell for brain and spinal cord injury, long-term antibiotic therapy for "chronic Lyme", and more. And they are raising millions that are going into pockets of people providing these questionable and sometimes, outright dangerous therapies.

The donors are basically helping patients commit suicide while enriching people deceiving the patients with false hopes.

You wouldn't pay for someone committing suicide. But if you paid for someone's "alternative medicine" crowdfunding treatment, you've done exactly that.