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A bioethics study published on December 8th calls on crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to ditch campaigns for unproven and unsafe medical procedures.
People turn to GoFundMe for help paying for all sorts of medical interventions. These campaigns have brought in over $650 million since 2010. But a subset of the money raised is spent on unproven and even illegal operations. Unregulated “stem cell therapies,” for example, attract harsh condemnation from the Food and Drug Administration, and Google even banned ads for the procedures. But the public fundraisers still appear on GoFundMe.
In the new paper, published in the peer-reviewed bioethics journal The Hastings Center Report, the authors argue that GoFundMe enables misinformation that…