Elle Macpherson’s wellness nonsense is simply sickening

Elle Macpherson is entitled to make any choice she likes when it comes to her body. But what makes her foray into the media so vulgar is that her revelations are about making money – and putting lives at risk.

Elle Macpherson on 60 Minutes promoting her memoir.

If one is to follow a piece of crackpot advice from the celebrity “wellness” industry, then let it be from Gwyneth Paltrow, not Elle Macpherson.

Not because placing a jade egg inside your vagina will balance your hormones, as Paltrow’s Goop wellness and lifestyle blog once claimed. This wellness guff won’t hurt you, except by setting you back thousands of dollars for the Goop-branded stone. On the other hand, following the lead of Macpherson when it comes to cancer treatments is dangerous.

A girlfriend compared her to a 21st century snake oil saleswoman. That’s terribly unfair – to snake oil salesmen. At least the original sellers of snake oil in 18th and 19th century America, often Chinese ­labourers, were on to something. The Pharmaceutical Journal, published by Britain’s Royal Pharmaceutical Society, says that the high concentration of omega-3 fatty acids in snake oil helps reduce inflammation.

Author Elle Macpherson in Sydney for a book signing last month. Picture: Matrix

To be clear, Macpherson is not flogging alternative treatments for cancer to the public. But she is flogging her book, Elle, and her “ingestible wellness” company WelleCo. She’s smart enough to know about the power of celebrity endorsements – it’s the core of her business. In this respect, the former model’s health claims that she “healed through breast cancer” using holistic treatments that included dentistry, osteopathy, chiropractors and a lot of spiritual work is modern-day quackery.

Macpherson is entitled to make any choice she likes when it comes to her body. Private life, private choice. What makes her foray into the media so vulgar – she’s been on the Today Show, in Women’s Weekly, on 60 Minutes and more – is that her revelations are about making money.

Speaking about her history of addiction, Macpherson told Tracy Grimshaw on 60 Minutes last Sunday that she learned early in her career the importance of discretion in your private life. “But this book is very different in the sense that it is with great purpose that I share those things.”

She should have stopped at her addiction. Her talk of woo-woo cancer treatments is abhorrent and irresponsible. While Macpherson has taken great offence at how the media has focused on her alter­native treatment claims, she won’t mind the publicity for her book and business interests. And remember, Macpherson has chosen to focus more on her alternative treatments than the two lumpectomies she underwent.

A review a few years ago of Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights, included this memorable line: “It was spinelessly cruel of the editor to allow the author to publish his own poetry.”

It was spinelessly irresponsible of Penguin to publish Macpherson’s unscientific ramblings. Picture: The Sunday Times

Deficient poetry is one thing. It was spinelessly irresponsible of Penguin to publish Macpherson’s unscientific ramblings about herbal, dental and spiritual treatments to fight cancer. If ABC News in America can fact-check Donald Trump during an election debate, then an Australian publisher of Penguin’s repute should have thrown in a few notes for readers about cancer and treatment of the disease. To her credit, Grimshaw included a caveat from an Australian oncologist who expressed very grave concerns about Macpherson rejecting proven medical treatments in favour of her alternative sessions in Arizona to fight cancer.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation responded to Macpherson’s claims, too, with facts about the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer (one in seven women over their lifetime, and about 21,000 people diagnosed each year) and rising survival rates due to “early detection and improvements in evidence-based treatments that are the result of rigorous scientific research.

“There is currently no scientific evidence proving that alternative medicines can effectively treat breast cancer,” the foundation said in response to her intravenous drips containing natural medications and the dentistry and prayer work.

Elle was dubbed The Body for a good reason. She still looks great. Maybe she hasn’t eschewed all ­intrusive medical intervention? Again, that is no one’s business except hers – except when she wades into the media with nutty remedies that endanger and enrage women.

This week, The Australian’s brilliant young videographer Bianca Farmakis recounts life as a teenager when her mum was diagnosed with HERT 2, the same kind of breast cancer as Macpherson.

Bianca’s mum is in remission, after going through horrendous chemotherapy. As Farmakis writes, the release this week of the Princess of Wales’s humbling three-minute video about her cancer treatment was the perfect antidote to Macpherson’s nonsense claims.

Chemotherapy is invasive, exhausting, soul-destroying – and it has allowed millions of people with cancer to go into remission, to live long lives. Anyone who has been through this, or watched someone they love endure chemotherapy, should be revolted by Macpherson’s self-delusion.

I refuse to read Macpherson’s memoir. Even if life weren’t precious and short, I’d rather read McConaughey’s poetry. Watching Grimshaw’s 60 Minutes interview with Macpherson this week for ­research purposes was more than enough to get the gist.

So indulge me as I rely on others who have read the book. In her cancer chapter, Macpherson says she wanted to get to the “root cause” of her cancer. She says the disease “manifested” in her body because of her “emotional and spiritual state”. This guided her choices about treatment: “It would be unwise to try and solve a largely emotional or spiritual problem in a purely physical way.”

Am I alone in being cynical about celebrity marketing psychobabble about living “a life of ­authenticity?”

I reckon if I said to anyone that I’m living an authentic life, they’d have a good laugh. And so would I. When someone talks like that, chances are they might be trying to sell something – like a book.

Cancer is not a laughing matter. I don’t want to believe that a single woman diagnosed with cancer would choose the alternative cancer treatment of a former swimsuit model known over the advice of an oncologist or two, and their big brains.

But then, I look at the wellness industry – and despair. This industry is squarely aimed at women, many of whom are, at one point or another, vulnerable.

When global consulting firm McKinsey publishes a regular survey of the Future of Wellness, you know it’s a serious money-maker. The firm’s 2024 survey estimates that wellness is a $US1.8 trillion ($2.7 trillion) global business, is growing between 5 to 10 per cent a year, and is especially attractive to Gen Z and millennials “who are now purchasing more wellness products and services than older generations, across health, sleep, nutrition, fitness, appearance, and mindfulness”.

The McKinsey report says wellness consumers aren’t doling out money on fads and hoping for the best. Instead, they’re asking: “What does the science say?”

Not everything about the wellness industry is suspect – but lots of it is. Parts of it prey on women, especially insecure women, at every stage of their life. And there is a sizable proportion of people asking “what does a celebrity say?”

An analysis in the British Medical Journal a few years ago found “celebrity endorsements act as signals of credibility that differentiate products or ideas from competitors and can catalyse herd behaviour”.

In small mercies, so far at least, Meghan Markle is only selling jam and other kitchen treasures under her lifestyle brand launched this year.

There aren’t enough cancer doctors in the world to hold the rising tide of celebrity quackery to account. In any case, oncologists are busy caring for people with cancer using evidence-based treatments and doing serious research to advance treatments to fight the killer disease.

I’m no fan of the Albanese government’s obsession with setting up a new arm of Big Brother to decide what is misinformation and disinformation.

The government says the bill, introduced into parliament on Thursday, granting the Australian Communications and Media Authority heightened powers to fine social media giants for hosting false information and content, is drafted to target only the really dangerous stuff.

If so, they should target the dodgy online “wellness” industry too. The Body’s claims that she “healed through breast cancer” with holistic, alternative treatments sounds like very dangerous disinformation to me.