Our sister died because of our mum’s cancer conspiracy theories, say brothers – BBC News

Horrifying article.

**”On one video call, Chantelle says, Paloma said she had a new lump in her armpit, and her mother had told her it meant that the cancer was going out of her body. “**

This woman straight up killed her own daughter. I wonder how she looks in the mirror every day.

I think this is only going to become more common.

In the past these nutjobs were isolated but with the Internet they’ve congregated and are now causing real damage.

Anti vaxxers, anti maskers, flat earthers, moon landing denialists, paranoid about 5g.

Every single one of them will vote Reform as well.

This is just awful, she committed the ultimate betrayal, her daughter is dead because of her. The first responsibility of a parent is caring for their children and she broke that trust.

Unsurprising that the daughter believed her mother’s insanities since she and her siblings had been indoctrinated since childhood. Standard narcissist parent.

Hard to see how this issue resolves itself.

Crackpot/Griffter supplies an opinion on social media platforms especially X. Almost certainly that challenges a modern established view on medicine or disease.

It will revolve around government/WHO/Bill Gates/George Soros and “Big Pharma” ignoring natural cures to make money/kill or control the population.

Anyone who disagrees or challenges back “needs to do their research, or is a shill”. When you question theories with actual evidence they block or they double down on you being a shill.

The absence of challenge and the benefit of social media means the truth or even rational debate cease to exist or is in such minority it is dwarfed. The lies become so entrenched the general public begin to believe. It goes from social media to real world chatter “I aint getting my kid MMR because Measles never killed anyone. Vaccines are just made to make pharmaceuticals companies money”

Stupid women like this make terrible real world decisions because they trust the internet grifters more than doctors.

This shit makes me so fucking angry.

The anti-science, anti-vaxx, etc, crap is absolutely destroying lives in such a callous and needless fashion and those waist deep in it just cannot see the damage they’re doing.

This sort of stuff needs to be crushed under foot, stamped out with zero tolerance.

I had to dig my own mother out of that prick Dr Wolff or whatever he was called on Facebook because she was going to attempt alternate medicine for her disintegrated hips instead of just getting the replacements.

This is a disease, fuck the freedom of expression, speech, whatever idiotic defense surrounds this stuff. It does not deserve a platform, it deserves jail time.

Never heard of her before but just checked her twitter, she’s an absolute moron… funny she doesn’t like medical intervention with all that work she’s had trying to make herself look human.

She should be locked up, it should be criminal to use a position of authority to purposely mislead someone, especially causing death and as she used to be a nurse she used that position to manipulate her own daughter, that and the abuse she gave her.

Also she’s still yapping on twitter, again showing just how much of a hole that place has become, it’s full of gobshites with say anything for a sip of that Elon spunk they get from buying that tick.

If I believed in these nonsensical conspiracy theories I would take the holistic remedies on the side of taking the stuff the NHS want to put into you. How anyone unqualified can think they know more than doctors in beyond me.

I will always be eternally grateful that even though my grandparents were illiterate anatolian hicks, who lived most of their lives in turkey pre universal healthcare, and my grandma’s dad was actually a spiritual healer, they fundamentally always bought into science. Lots of people in my family have had cancer bc smoking and asbestos, and unfortunately my grandpa and two of my uncles died from it, but there was never any question about what they were gonna do about it, they took their chemo and had their surgeries. My youngest uncle had throat cancer, and is thankfully alive, healthy, and in remission, sans voice box. There’s also zero stigma about mental illness in my family, which is slightly odd for old timey Asians, but I am so grateful. Its baffling to me how people who have some of the best healthcare in the world buy into this bullshit. I think what happened with my grandparents is that they were desperate to give their kids a better life, and they also lost their oldest daughter from what we now think was meningitis in the 1950s bc she became ill rapidly and was beyond saving when they got her to hospital.

I think Covid completely normalised a lot of conspiracy theories. I think it was a mixture of things.

There was so much mixed messaging, especially on things like masks and distancing, and when that happens, some people look for some hidden meaning. The government didn’t follow the rules that they themselves invented. People put two and two together and made five or six. Some of the rules made absolutely zero sense (my eldest could go to school with hundreds of other kids at one point but couldn’t play in the park with just two or three of those same kids), some of them were unnecessarily strict (the gate to our local playground was actually chained up for the first few weeks of lockdown), and yet some of them were possibly too lax (Eat Out to Help Out may have in fact caused a surge in the virus). Dodgy politicians gave contracts to their dodgy mates who made and supplied dodgy materials. Again, when everything is so confused and shambolic, a lot of people look for a ‘real’ reason behind it all. It’s like the superstitious pigeons experiment. [https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001)

The Astra Zeneca vaccine actually did cause a rare response called VITT, an unusual kind of blood clot. NHS link: [https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/documents/vaccine-induced-thrombocytopenia-and-thrombosis-vitt-support-for-patients-family-members/](https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/documents/vaccine-induced-thrombocytopenia-and-thrombosis-vitt-support-for-patients-family-members/)

I followed the story around this because it was unfolding at exactly the same time I started getting unusual headaches following the first vaccine, and had to have some tests for VITT (luckily it wasn’t that, but it was a scary time while I waited for the results!) – VITT was dismissed at first as unrelated, and only later did it turn out to be a rare side effect. Some people died who would likely have not died from covid, who would likely still be alive if they hadn’t had that AZ vaccine. This side effect was so rare that it didn’t originally show in the trials as the numbers weren’t large enough (so, if 30k people had the vaccine, as per the trials, VITT might not have effected one of them. But if 300k people did, one or two people would have had VITT, and obviously the vaccine was rolled out in very great numbers). Now vaccines obviously DO have rare side effects from time to time, and this kind of thing, though obviously truly tragic for the small numbers of those went through it (some died, some were left permanently disabled), wasn’t to be completely unexpected. But the initial response to this was very dismissive, and it played right into the hands of anti-vaxxers.

I mean there was so much more, but covid was deffo the place where conspiracy became mainstream IMO. Because covid conspiracies were everywhere, other conspiracies started becoming mainstream, too. I know so many people now, in the wake of covid, people who otherwise seem relatively normal and intelligent, who absolutely believe in chemtrails, for example, or that essential oils really are better for you than antibiotics.

This poor young woman. I fear we will see a lot of this. Getting people out of conspiracy thinking is hard, too, and people’s impulse to laugh at them or call them thick just entrenches their position. It needs a great deal of care and takes time – it’s like deradicalisation or ’deprogramming’ from a cult. :/

I know this sounds like quite an extreme take but I think it’s time as a society for us to debate if social media has a net positive or negative impact. At least with the lax regulations we currently have.  Would we be in this situation without virtually unregulated and unmoderated social media? Culturally, politically? I doubt it  

Thing is, under the Cancer Act 1939, it is already illegal to peddle anything that is unproven as a cure for cancer:

> (1)No person shall take any part in the publication of any advertisement—
>
> (a)containing an offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof
>
> (2)If any person contravenes any of the provisions of the foregoing subsection, he shall be liable on summary conviction, in the case of a first conviction, to a fine not exceeding [F4level 3 on the standard scale], and, in the case of a subsequent conviction, to a fine not exceeding [F4level 3 on the standard scale] or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months, or to both such a fine and such imprisonment.

Idk what the punishments are. But I think the law needs to be updated to reflect how quickly this follows online.

Anyone selling anything as a cure for something without it being proven effective should be criminally liable of at least manslaughter if their disease progresses to become terminal, if it is determined that actual effective treatment would’ve saved their life. I think all drugs / supplements making spurious health claims should have criminal liability.

You are doing active harm to someone, with disregard for their safety, just to make money.

> She and her ex-husband, Paloma’s father Faramarz Shemirani, wrote to us saying they have evidence “Paloma died as a result of medical interventions given without confirmed diagnosis or lawful consent”. The BBC has seen no evidence to substantiate these claims.

If they had evidence, it would be in medical negligence lawsuit by now. So where is it?

There are so many people out there who lack any kind of critical thinking skills, pair this with low levels of education and you get people who will believe anything just to feel part of something.

Article is wild lol.

>The children absorbed outlandish ideas, including that the Royal Family were shape-shifting lizards, says Gabriel. “As a young child, you trust your parents. So you see that as a truth,” he says.

>According to her sons, Kate Shemirani’s anti-medicine views were accelerated in 2012, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Even though she had the tumour removed through surgery, she credits alternative therapies for her recovery. On social media, she uses the words “cancer-free” rather than “cured” – and says how she used juices and *coffee enemas*.

What? 😂

Really though, she was 23 at the end of the day, more than old enough to realise doctors know more about cancer than her crazy mum.