Elle Macpherson’s gratitude journal must have written itself last week. Most days, any leader in the wellness industry is right to feel gratitude for the gigantic profits to be made seemingly out of human gullibility: the welcome for her latest venture suggests that the market for experimental self-care may have been wildly underestimated.
Since the exclusive revelation of Macpherson’s “cancer journey” in the Australian Women’s Weekly, there can hardly have been enough time in the day, without contracting the work out to a gratitude assistant, to record the amount of joy experienced by a model turned entrepreneur when her apparent rejection of evidence-based medicine is widely presented – with only limited space for objections – as a tale of fully vindicated heroism.
Top of the gratitude list are headlines such as the Daily Telegraph’s “I relied on my inner sense, not chemotherapy to beat breast cancer”; Sky News’s “Elle Macpherson says she is now ‘in utter wellness’ seven years after finding out she had breast cancer”; and the LA
Times: “Elle Macpherson explains why a holistic approach to breast cancer treatment worked for her”. You appear to gather that, when holistically vanquished, cancer never returns like the conventionally treated kind did with one of my dearest friends, and kills you.
Next on the list: the numerous reports in which Macpherson’s previous connection with Andrew Wakefield features barely, if at all. Crucially, the disgraced doctor’s name was missing from the first, long account of her recovery, which was however generous with mentions of her........