The Five Faces of a Medical Misinformation

The Victim, the Radicaliser, the Blueprint, the Apostate, and the Institutional Enabler - And the Death Toll of Medical Misinformation

It's now come to the point where opening Twitter feels less like checking the news and more like getting smacked in the face with a brick of bullshit. Every second post - sometimes two out of three - gives me yet another microwaved conspiracy theory with a garnish of smug certainty. It's relentless, exhausting, and we're fast approaching critical mass on the nonsense front.

Climate change is a hoax. Vaccines cause autism. 5G towers control your thoughts. Each claim grows more deranged than the last, each shared with the misplaced bravado of someone who thinks they've decoded the Rosetta Stone of universal truth via a Telegram thread and a vibe.

Most of these posts deserve nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a muttered "sure, Peanut." But some have gone beyond being bad takes and well into the realm of lethality. Over the past week, a doctor lost his licence. A young woman's brothers told the BBC how their sister died. The United States announced it would defund Gavi. And I found myself - again - wondering just how the hell we got here.

As many of you know, I work in healthcare strategy - designing systems that keep people from getting sick in the first place. Prevention, early intervention, population health. But lately, it feels like none of my work matters when someone with a ring light and a monetised Instagram account can undo it all in a 90-second reel - because it takes a whole team of specialists to fix the damage caused by one wellness warrior with an unhealthy preoccupation with Ivermectin and a Twitter Premium subscription. That’s Brandolini’s Law in action: the bullshit takes ten seconds to spread and ten months to mop up - and by then, someone else is already selling apricot kernels and claiming they cured cancer with vibes.

Because this is where we are now. It’s gone beyond just a disagreement over medical advice - it's a full-blown campaign against the concept of expertise. Decades of progress in public health are being devoured with a few clicks and a ringlight by grifters in lab coats and influencers who decided they know better than oncology.

And here’s the part that keeps me up at night: it’s working. The fear sells. The lies go viral. And real people die.

Let me show you what that looks like - because behind every miracle juice cleanse, every “they don’t want you to know this” thread, and every overpriced wellness brand, there’s a real person. Someone who made a life-or-death decision based on a lie. And those consequences don’t disappear when the video gets deleted or the algorithm moves on.

These aren’t isolated stories - they’re archetypes. Patterns. Personas that keep showing up, no matter the platform or product.

• Paloma Shemirani was the victim - a young woman who trusted the wrong person at the worst possible time.

• Kate Shemirani, her mother, was the radicaliser - a former nurse whose paranoia now masquerades as care.

• Belle Gibson was the blueprint - the influencer who proved you could monetise hope, aesthetics, and absolute bollocks, and still get a Netflix deal.

• Dr. David Cartland became the apostate - a trained professional who abandoned evidence for ego and found his second career peddling disinformation to the desperate.

• And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? He's the institutional enabler - proof that the most fringe conspiracies can waltz into the corridors of power wearing a familiar name and speaking with enough conviction to fool the masses.

These aren’t just caricatures - they’re recurring figures in a pattern we’ve seen before. Each one playing their part in a cycle that ends in silence, grief, or worse.

The Victim: Paloma Shemirani and the Price of Misinformation

Paloma Shemirani should still be alive.

Paloma Shemirani. Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA via Belfast Telegraph

She was 23, a Cambridge graduate, smart enough to navigate one of the most intellectually punishing institutions on earth. In December 2023, doctors told her she had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was serious, but treatable. With chemotherapy, her chances of survival sat around 80%. Without it? Well - there was no “without it.”

Seven months later, she was dead.

Now, strictly speaking, Paloma died of cancer. But that would be like saying someone died of a house fire without mentioning the petrol and the lit match. What really killed her were conspiracy theories, dressed up as maternal care.

When doctors delivered Paloma’s diagnosis, her mother sprang into action - not with support or comfort, but with a command in all caps: “TELL PALOMA NOT TO SIGN [OR] VERBALLY CONSENT TO CHEMO OR ANY TREATMENT.” Hospital staff spotted the toxic dynamic immediately and noted “a concern regarding parental influence.” But Paloma was 23. Legally, she could make her own decisions.

Image: BBC News – Kate Shemirani’s messages as shown in BBC reporting

Nobody makes decisions in a vacuum, though - especially not when the person looming over you used to wear a nurse’s uniform and still calls herself “clinically trained.” Strip someone of their licence and they’ll still wear that authority like a second skin. Especially when their child wants so desperately to believe in them.

So Paloma didn’t have chemotherapy. She tried Gerson therapy instead - an old, debunked treatment that involves aggressive juicing, dietary restrictions, and endless coffee enemas. (There’s always an enema, isn’t there?) Her friends watched her waste away on video calls. New lumps appeared. Her mother told her these were signs the cancer was “leaving her body.”

It wasn’t. It was winning.

By March, Paloma had ended her relationship and her social circle had shrunk. Her twin brother Gabriel and older brother Sebastian tried everything - legal channels, appeals - to get her reassessed, but by then she was too far gone.

In July, she suffered a cardiac arrest triggered by her untreated tumour. She was placed on life support, but the damage was irreversible. Days later, she died.

The two brothers have been justifiably vocal and direct: they blame their mother’s beliefs for their sister’s death. Sebastian put it plainly - ”My sister died as a direct consequence of my mum’s actions and beliefs.”

They didn’t go to the media for vengeance. They did it because they don’t want anyone else to go through what they did. This isn’t about abstract freedom of thought or the quaint indulgence of “alternative perspectives.” It’s about a clever, kind young woman who needed medical help and got a wellness sermon instead. And it killed her.

That’s what medical misinformation looks like when it stops being a hashtag and becomes reality. It looks like an empty chair at dinner. A funeral that didn’t need to happen. And a family trying to live with the aftermath.

But Paloma didn’t die in isolation. She died because someone convinced her that medicine was the enemy. Someone who should have known better. Someone who used to take an oath to do no harm.

The Radicaliser: Kate Shemirani and the Performance of Paranoia

Kate Shemirani didn't just fall down a rabbit hole - she moved in, installed central heating, and hung up curtains.

Image credit: Guy Bell/Alamy via Nursing Times

A former nurse struck off in 2021 for spreading Covid misinformation, she's since rebranded as "The Natural Nurse," offering consultations with cancer patients, hawking apricot kernels (banned in multiple countries), and selling herself as the brave truth-teller in a system packed with villains. Her pitch? She cured her own breast cancer with juices, enemas, and positive thinking. She conveniently forgets to mention the surgery that actually removed the tumour. Funny, that.

You might remember her from Trafalgar Square, where she compared NHS workers to Nazi doctors and demanded "Nuremberg-style trials" for anyone administering vaccines. She's hardly subtle - but she doesn't need to be. Outrage is the brand now. And paranoia pays.

Her influence didn't stop at Twitter. It reached her daughter. That's what makes her story more dangerous than your typical wellness grift. Most misinformation peddlers harm strangers. Kate Shemirani convinced her own child to refuse life-saving treatment. She built a platform on performative compassion, then used it to persuade the person closest to her that real medicine was poison.

The cruelty is mindblowing, but the tactics are chillingly familiar. Medical language twisted into fear. Care reframed as control. Expertise gutted and replaced with charisma and conspiracy.

If Kate Shemirani had stopped after losing her licence, Paloma might still be alive.

But she didn't stop. And this isn't just one family's tragedy - it's a warning. If someone with nursing credentials and a social media platform can lead their own daughter to her death, imagine what they can do to someone else's child.

Kate Shemirani didn't invent this playbook. She picked it up from a generation of wellness influencers who discovered serious money in selling hope wrapped in conspiracy theories. And the woman who perfected that formula? She has her own Netflix series.

The Blueprint: Belle Gibson and the Business of Selling Bullshit Beautifully

Image credit: Netflix

In February this year, Netflix released Apple Cider Vinegar, a glossy six-part series about the Australian wellness influencer who built a multimillion-dollar empire on a lie so brazen, it almost feels quaint now. A simpler time, when wellness frauds had the courtesy to pretend they were curing cancer with kale, rather than weaponising entire public health campaigns.

Gibson, of course, never had cancer. But in the early 2010s, she convinced hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers that she'd healed her terminal brain tumour using nothing but vegetables, meditation, and an unwavering belief in her own branding. She launched a recipe app called The Whole Pantry, landed a book deal with Penguin, and claimed she was donating huge chunks of her income to charity, which she really, really wasn't, which is what would technically be called fraud.

When journalists finally challenged her in 2015, she admitted with startling casualness: "No, none of it's true." The Federal Court of Australia eventually fined her $410,000 for misleading and deceptive conduct - a fine she still hasn't paid.

What makes the Gibson case linger isn't just the criminal nature of it - it's how perfectly it predicted the economics of influencer-era health misinformation. She wasn't selling cookbooks. She was selling hope. Clean, aesthetically pleasing hope, wrapped in muted colour palettes and inspirational captions. The pitch wasn't "Get well," it was "Get well better - without all that icky, unphotogenic science."

Gibson's blueprint has been copied endlessly, from basement supplement pushers to A-list celebrities flogging jade eggs. The lighting’s better now, the recipes come with affiliate links, but the core lie hasn’t changed: you don’t need doctors, just discipline. Not medicine, but mindset. Not science, but a soothing shade of pastel jade.

Netflix bills the series as "true-ish" - probably more honest than half the wellness industry. Because that's the game: sell just enough truth to make the fiction believable.

Whether it's Belle Gibson or Gwyneth Paltrow, there's serious money in selling fantasy dressed up as empowerment. "You're in control of your own health." "Don't let Big Pharma tell you otherwise." But real empowerment means knowing when to ask for help - and this stuff turns mistrust into profit.

The cruelest part? It targets people when they're most vulnerable. When they're sick, scared, and desperate for hope. That's when the algorithm serves up a smiling influencer promising that medicine is optional and you can cure cancer with celery juice and willpower.

Belle Gibson should've been a cautionary tale. Instead, she became a business model. And business is booming.

The troubling thing about Gibson is that she was always an outsider - someone who built her authority from scratch through sheer audacity and good lighting. But what happens when the wellness grift doesn't come from the fringes? What happens when it emerges from inside the system itself?

The Apostate: Dr David Cartland and the Fall of a Credentialed Conspiracist

At least Belle Gibson was always a fraud. There's a strange sort of honesty in that. She never had medical qualifications to abuse - just a MacBook, a blender, and the unshakeable confidence of someone who thinks pretending you have cancer is a nice little side hustle.

Image credit: Netvol

Dr. David Cartland is something far more unsettling: a real doctor who chose to become a fake one. Cartland was a Cornwall-based GP who built a following of nearly 300,000 by styling himself as a brave truth-teller - one of those "just asking questions" types who mysteriously always land on the same answers as every other anti-vax influencer out there.

This week, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service struck him off for good, finding him guilty on all 17 counts of professional misconduct. Not fringe opinions. Actual misconduct.

He harassed fellow doctors, doxxed them to his followers, created fake Twitter accounts to impersonate colleagues, and handed out dodgy vaccine exemptions like sweets at a conspiracy fair. One target? A doctor who’d rejected his job application. His response? Send in the mob like it was Black Friday at Greggs.

The tribunal didn’t buy his defence that this all took place in the “Twitter zone” - as if social media were some Bermuda Triangle for professional standards. Narnia for narcissists. They called it “a deliberate and sustained abuse of his professional status,” citing his total lack of insight and zero remorse. Textbook symptoms of someone who’s drunk so much of their own Kool-Aid they’ve started bottling it for sale.

What’s worth noting is how seamless the transition was. From practising GP to full-time conspiracist. He now offers online “consultations,” maintains a loyal online following, and positions himself as a martyr of medical truth-telling. This wasn’t the end of a career - it was a rebrand. A pivot into a profitable niche.

This wasn't some influencer with a shaky grasp of GCSE biology. This was a man who trained in the NHS, learned from our public system, benefited from it. And now he stands on top of that training, pointing people away from the very structures designed to keep them safe.

To be clear, I have zero sympathy. He was warned. But if someone like him - with clinical training and years of experience - can tumble down the rabbit hole and set up shop, what hope does your nan have when Facebook serves up "natural cancer cures" between videos of toddlers falling off swings?

Cartland wasn't an outlier. He's a symptom of our times. A cautionary tale that landed a brand deal.

Individual bad actors are one thing, though. What happens when conspiracy theories stop lurking in the margins and march straight into the corridors of power? What happens when the grift becomes institutional?

The Enabler: RFK Jr and the Institutionalisation of Anti-Science Rhetoric

Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr - the man who's built his public career promoting the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism - now serving as the actual United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. Because 2025 refuses to let parody keep up.

Image Credit: Maxlovestoswim

This week, he announced the US would pull funding from Gavi, the global vaccine alliance that's helped immunise over a billion children since 2000. His defence? He's not anti-vaccine, just pro-making-it-functionally-impossible-to-deliver-one.

The consequences are already here. The US has recorded over 1,200 confirmed measles cases this year - the worst outbreak in over a decade. Three people have died, including two children. These mark the first measles deaths since 2015. All victims were unvaccinated.

As Dr Peter Marks, former head of vaccines at the FDA, put it: "These are needless deaths. Vaccine misinformation will lead to more deaths from measles outbreaks unless the US government shifts its rhetoric."

Instead of shifting, though, the rhetoric's being hardwired into policy.

And it's not just RFK. Social media platforms aren't simply failing to tackle medical misinformation - they're actively amplifying it. BBC Panorama found that conspiracy content about vaccines and cancer treatments gets algorithmically recommended to users, with Kate Shemirani's content alone getting viewed 4.5 million times in the space of a few months.

These platforms will instantly ban a nipple or a copyrighted clip of Glee, but somehow let medical misinformation spread like, well, measles.

It's not an oversight. It's by design. Outrage drives engagement, engagement drives revenue. A calm explainer on vaccine efficacy gets buried beneath cooking reels. Someone screaming about microchips in syringes gets millions of views and a supplement discount code.

We don't just have an information problem - we have a belief economy. The most unhinged voices rise to the top because they're louder, more lucrative, and less constrained by facts. Our platforms don't just tolerate this - they reward it.

Public health is supposed to be boring. Invisible. It's meant to keep you alive quietly while you get on with your life. But in the age of engagement, boring truth gets drowned out by weaponised nonsense.

The cost?

• Paediatric ICU wards filling up.

• Funerals that didn't need to happen.

• Systems buckling under the weight of problems we thought we'd solved decades ago.

We didn't beat measles so it could stage a comeback as a political statement.

Deplatforming the Apostates, Dismantling the Enablers

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think we’re going to fact-check our way out of this.

The people spreading this nonsense aren’t doing it because they’re misinformed. They’re doing it because it brings them followers, influence, and income - from affiliate codes, ad revenue, and overpriced supplements. And the people believing it? It’s rarely because they lack access to better information. It’s because the lies feel better. They offer control. Certainty. A villain to blame and a miracle to buy.

But we’re not helpless, and the archetypes we’ve met aren’t just warnings - they’re roadmaps for the work ahead.

We honour the victims - like Paloma, and the children lost to measles - not with platitudes, but with prevention. That means treating public health communication as seriously as we treat public health delivery. Rebuilding trust in medicine isn’t just a clinical task - it’s a cultural one.

We expose the radicalisers - like Kate Shemirani - by stripping away their borrowed authority. If you lose your licence, you lose your platform. Former nurses who peddle pseudoscience shouldn’t get to launder their credibility through social media bios and PayPal links.

We dismantle the blueprint - the Belle Gibsons of the world - by cutting off the business model. That means regulation. It means platform liability. It means recognising that health fraud isn’t just unethical - it’s lethal.

We deplatform the apostates - doctors like David Cartland - who use their credentials as camouflage for harm. Professional bodies need teeth. Consequences must be swift, public, and absolute. No one should get to trade clinical training for conspiracy fame without losing both.

And we hold the enablers to account - because when figures like RFK Jr sit in power, the problem isn’t fringe anymore. It’s institutional. The fight becomes political. We don’t just need better policy - we need better politics. Politics that doesn’t treat health as a battleground for culture wars and personal brands.

And through it all, we need:

Better media literacy - in schools, in workplaces, and yes, even on the bloody school run. Not just teaching people to spot fake news, but helping them understand why the lies feel so compelling. Why the algorithm feeds them rage. Why hope in a smoothie glass feels easier to swallow than statistics from a stranger.

Platform accountability - because the systems we use to connect are being weaponised to mislead. When someone like Kate Shemirani racks up millions of views promoting cancer misinformation, that’s not a glitch. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

Cultural consequences - because this can’t just be about regulation. It has to be about reputation. About dragging this rot into the daylight and calling it what it is: exploitation dressed up as empowerment. We need to make grift embarrassing again.

Because this isn’t a debate. It’s not “both sides.” This is paediatric ICU wards. This is funerals. This is young people dying in 2025 of things we thought we beat in the 1950s.

Paloma should still be here. So should the children who died of measles this year. These aren’t just stories - they’re red flags screaming at us to pay attention.

And if we don’t start treating them like that, we’ll be back here again soon - writing eulogies with one hand while the algorithm queues up the next conspiracy with the other.

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