At the Hippocrates Wellness Resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, sick people spend small fortunes on a suite of exotic treatments: revitalizing lasers, crystal sound baths, hand-pressed wheatgrass shots, even something called colon hydrotherapy, “a natural method of removing waste from the large intestine without the use of drugs.” The on-site store provides a range of health-related amenities, such as juicing equipment and EMF protection. In the resort’s Wigmore Hall — named for Ann Wigmore, the Lithuanian raw food enthusiast who inspired the Hippocrates approach — I listened to cancer patients excoriate mainstream doctors while they ate enzyme-rich vegan meals and drank alkalizing organic green juice.
Were they under a spell? Could I break it with some straight talk? Taking a dump is a natural, drug-free way to remove waste from the colon! I would shout, a vicious sweep of my arm sending wheatgrass shots flying. You’re being swindled!
I visited Hippocrates Wellness because, in 2015, an 11-year-old Canadian girl and her family opted to trust Brian Clement, the founder, over their oncologists. Makayla Sault had treatable leukemia, but she went with natural therapies instead, and she died. A few years later, I began researching the appeal of naturalness, and the tragedy of trusting Clement and Hippocrates seemed like a perfect case study of how that appeal can lead us horrifically astray.
Death at the hands of charlatans is not an inspiring storyline, which means publishers and film studios studiously avoid it. We tend to prefer mavericks and gurus, the ones who ignore arrogant physicians and cure cancer naturally — inspiration pornography that offers simple, empowering answers to horrifically complicated questions. In reality, these answers empty bank accounts and occasionally kill people, but they sure do sell.
Now, finally, there’s an antidote to this poisonous narrative: Apple Cider Vinegar, a new Netflix miniseries that inverts the traditional tropes with empathy and honesty.
How did the series get made? One key ingredient was a villain so irredeemable that anyone, even natural medicine enthusiasts, would side against her. Belle Gibson was an Instagram-beautiful Australian health entrepreneur who built a social media empire around her tragic terminal brain cancer diagnosis, one which she reversed entirely with natural remedies.
Except, as it turned out, she never had brain cancer.
Apple Cider Vinegar is the loosely fictionalized story of Gibson’s rise and fall. It’s hard to imagine someone more loathsome than Gibson, although she is written and played with great nuance, a sociopathic attention seeker who can’t kick the habit of using illness to secure love, sympathy, and admiration. More importantly, we know she is a charlatan. Unlike Clement and all the other natural health gurus, Gibson is a certified liar.
Once the audience understands that Gibson is a predator, the natural lifestyle she’s peddling looks more like exploitation than manipulation. She’s a dishonest pornographer, not a truth-seeking maverick, keenly attuned to our primal appetite for simplicity and hope, especially when we and our loved ones are desperate, scared, and sick. Natural healing is what we want to hear — it’s what sells, not what works.
Enter Milla, the other influencer whose story is told alongside Gibson’s, based on the true story of Jess Ainscough. Unlike Gibson, Milla really has cancer. Confronted with the prospect of losing her arm, she abandons her oncology team and undertakes a grueling natural “protocol” of organic juice and coffee enemas — ten drinks and three enemas per day, for months on end — recommended by a clinic that bears remarkable similarities to the one that killed Sault.
I won’t spoil the show, but the ending is largely irrelevant to the moral: The real danger isn’t Gibson or Hippocrates Wellness. The danger isn’t liars and charlatans. After all, Milla is a true believer who goes tragically wrong, not a sociopathic manipulator. No, the danger is what those charlatans exploit, namely our vulnerability to the narrative of natural healing, the irresistible allure of conquering cancer with a simple, intuitive approach that lies entirely within our power, no chemo or surgery required.
Watching Apple Cider Vinegar, it is impossible to write off the victims of this narrative as ignorant or naive. The community of cancer sufferers who believe Gibson’s story and follow her recommendations, Milla and the true believers giving themselves coffee enemas — but for the grace of God or tumorigenesis, they could be you or me.
And that is what I failed to understand when I visited Hippocrates Wellness, sneering at the wheatgrass shots and colon hydrotherapy. I thought I knew better than the people tragically wasting their money. I believed I had some kind of mental architecture those people lacked. If my daughter were diagnosed with cancer, I would never make the mistake the Saults made. If my wife wanted to pursue natural therapy, I’d talk her out of it, no problem. That’s what I believed. In a way, deep down, that’s what I still believe.
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However, after Apple Cider Vinegar, I believe it a little less. Who am I to say what I would do in the face of a cancer diagnosis? We are all human. In the face of death, we will all grasp for any shred of hope, which makes us vulnerable to the promise of salvation through natural healing.
As individuals, we are weak. However, collectively, we can reject the Instagram-friendly inspiration pornography of natural healing. Without blaming the advocates or the victims, we can insist on different stories, which may not sell as well but have the virtue of being truthful.
Apple Cider Vinegar is one of those different stories. May there be many more.
Alan Levinovitz is a professor at James Madison University who specializes in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science. His most recent book is Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
