What Apple Cider Vinegar misses

Why women flock to alternative medicine

This article takes a deep dive into women’s experience of the Western medical system. In the coming weeks, I’ll share techniques for overcoming some of the visibility issues raised in this article. If you find this helpful, click the ‘like’ button and share it with someone who might benefit. 🙏

If you missed Belle Gibson's rise or haven't yet watched the beautifully produced and extremely compelling Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar, Belle Gibson was a young Australian woman who, in the early 2010s, built a health and wellness empire off the back of claiming she had been diagnosed with brain cancer. She alleged that after being given four months to live and trying conventional treatments, she turned to natural remedies and juiced her way to health.

This was not true.

While much media attention has focused on unravelling her web of lies, of which there were many, a critical aspect often overlooked is why so many women are drawn to alternative medicines in the first place.

Illness is exhausting - in so many ways

A few years before Belle's ascent, I was grappling with a debilitating case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (chronic fatigue), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. I had contracted glandular fever, caused by the Epstein-Barr virus or ‘Mono’, which led to chronic fatigue.

Chronic fatigue has historically been under-researched and poorly understood by the medical profession. Many patients - including myself - were told to ‘increase activity’ slowly, despite growing evidence that this approach doesn't work for post-viral illnesses like mine.

One doctor explained chronic fatigue to me this way: ‘Most people's batteries are at, say, 70%. When they're exhausted, it might drop to 50%, but that's still 50% to work with, and with rest, they’ll return to 70% or more. You're at 0%. You have nothing to build on.’

Hearing this, I realised that the ‘just start with a few hours a day’ approach (also known as graded exercise therapy) was futile and potentially harmful. Later I discovered that some patients have found that their symptoms have permanently worsened as a result of graded exercise therapy.

In the absence of any other advice from the medical profession, I decided to search for practitioners who could help rebuild my system from the ground up. I sought out holistic systems that considered the whole person, exploring the connections between mind and body, delving deeper than the approach I encountered in Western medicine.

The thing I found about ‘whole person treatments’ was that, even though the chronic fatigue persisted (ultimately it took four years to see radical improvement), I always felt better in some way. Every alternative therapy I tried provided some kind of benefit - whether it was feeling emotionally lighter or stronger in myself, having a less reactive nervous system, or experiencing rest that actually felt restorative. (One of the worst aspects of chronic fatigue is that you're constantly ‘resting’, yet you never feel restored. Hence the battery analogy.)

Now I see that this is what it takes to rebuild a person’s system.

I was still hoping for a quick fix to chronic fatigue, but what I was receiving through these treatments, was slow and steady restoration.

I did keep consulting medical doctors through my illness, although more times than not, I cried in their offices when they recommended the same graded exercise approach I’d heard 100 times. Unlike the alternative therapies, I always left their surgeries feeling worse; defeated, hopeless, despairing.

It’s not you, it’s the system

At some point, I realised this wasn’t personal. I was encountering a significant structural issue with the Western medical system. With its focus on pharmaceutical and procedural interventions, it overlooked complementary therapies that might support healing. Instead of guiding patients through a mix of evidence-based therapies, the system was leaving me - and many others - to figure it out alone.

The medical profession tends to reward certainty over curiosity, meaning many doctors dismiss patient-reported experiences rather than exploring integrative solutions. Instead of being open to discussing the range of treatments that might support recovery, I was treated with scepticism every time I brought up complementary therapies.

It’s this systemic failure that opens the door for individuals like Belle Gibson. When traditional medicine dismisses or inadequately addresses chronic conditions, especially those predominantly affecting women, patients are left vulnerable to alternative solutions that promise understanding and healing.

Hello the internet!

Faced with a vacuum of information or ineffective medical advice, people naturally look elsewhere, turning to online communities, peers, and alternative practitioners in search of answers.

In the early part of the 21st century, the internet amplified this search like never before, creating ideal conditions for people like Belle Gibson to fill the gap left by the medical system.

Women were particularly vulnerable to this because of the way Western medicine has long dismissed or ignored women’s health.

Women turning to alternative medicine is not a modern phenomenon - it’s the result of centuries of exclusion, dismissal, and systemic failures in healthcare.

Historically, women were healers in many European and Western communities, using herbal remedies and passing down midwifery knowledge through generations. However, during the European witch hunts, women were persecuted for their wisdom and other expressions of power. This paved the way for female healers to be systematically discredited as the medical profession became more formalised and male-dominated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Even when women were eventually allowed into medical schools, their perspectives remained marginalised, particularly in fields concerning their own health.

The consequences of this exclusion persist today.

• Women’s pain and illnesses have long been dismissed as ‘hysteria’ or stress-related rather than recognised as legitimate medical conditions.

• Chronic illnesses that predominantly affect women - endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and autoimmune diseases - remain underfunded and under-researched.

• Medical research continues to be disproportionately centred on male bodies, with women’s health often treated as an afterthought.

• Drugs are still predominantly tested on men, even when prescribed to women, and diagnostic delays are common - women frequently wait longer for diagnoses of conditions like heart disease and autoimmune disorders.

Compounding these issues is the medical profession’s paternalistic culture, which often treats women as unreliable narrators of their own symptoms. Dismissed and disbelieved, many women turn to wellness communities that offer validation, understanding, and a sense of control over their own healing.¹

Cultural arrogance

Built on a reductionist philosophy,² Western medicine increasingly prioritised measurable, scientific evidence from the 17th century onward. This shift became deeply entrenched in medical practice during the 18th and 19th centuries and systematically excluded wisdom from Eastern medicine, Indigenous healing traditions, and other holistic practices that have sustained communities for centuries.

This approach was not just reflective of a medical framework, it was an assertion of a specific worldview, one shaped by cultural arrogance.

This cultural arrogance is reflected in Apple Cider Vinegar, which includes a jarring and culturally insensitive scene where a cancer patient travels to South America to seek traditional medical treatment. She has a profoundly life-altering experience and chooses to stay for further care. Yet, in a moment that frames Indigenous medicine as transactional and exploitative, the scene closes with the healer presenting the Australian patient with an EFTPOS machine.

I found this disturbing given the often exorbitant cost of treatments within the Western medical system. The show does acknowledge these expenses, yet the contrast in how the two systems are portrayed is stark: Western medicine is presented as a legitimate, albeit costly, necessity, while Indigenous medicine is reduced to a grift. The implication that Indigenous healers are wrong to charge for their expertise while Western doctors are not, reinforces a colonial mindset and perpetuates the cultural arrogance that has long dismissed non-Western ways of healing.

Rather than asking what can be learned from these traditions, Western medicine has historically rejected them outright or attempted to extract and repackage elements that fit within its framework, stripping them of their original cultural and philosophical contexts.

This approach to healing not only alienates patients who seek more integrated approaches to health but also limits the potential for a truly comprehensive medical system - one that respects scientific advancements, women’s wisdom, and the knowledge that exists within long-standing healing traditions.

If we want to stop this cycle, the answer is not to debunk alternative medicine as ‘all quackery’, it’s to fix the medical system, by dismantling cultural arrogance and gendered biases.

By retaining the precision of Western medicine’s reductionist approach, while also creating pathways for knowledge to flow between different healing traditions, we can build a system that truly serves patients. Since much of the wisdom excluded from Western medicine is preventative in nature, integrating it could even help reduce costs and alleviate pressure on the healthcare system.

Women’s voices are critical

Eliminating medical gaslighting is a crucial part of this process. Doctors must take women’s symptoms seriously and address gender bias in diagnosis and treatment. Women’s health must be properly funded.

At the same time, more research must be directed toward complementary therapies to better understand their mechanisms and effectiveness. This would allow practitioners to communicate their benefits more clearly - especially to medical and scientific communities that prioritise evidence-based, cause-and-effect explanations.

The goal should not be to force women into a rigid medical system that does not serve them, but to create an integrated, patient-centred approach that acknowledges the full complexity of women’s health and experiences.³

The intersection of medical bias, and systemic dismissal of patient experiences, particularly those of women, creates a landscape where misinformation about alternative approaches can thrive. I wish Apple Cider Vinegar had focused more on why so many women were drawn to Belle in the first place. The series offers glimpses of this, but if we truly want to protect ourselves from future grifters, we need to address the full picture - not just recycle the trope of the manipulative, evil woman.

Samantha x

Smash the Patriarchal Mindset is our short course for women who want to use their voices and share their ideas.

Every student that enrols between now and 9 March 2025 will receive a digital set of Flip the Script cards.

Flip the Script digital cards will help you conduct a patriarchal belief audit. You'll uncover and challenge any patriarchal beliefs you've internalised, often without realising it. As you use the cards, you'll gain clarity, a stronger sense of agency, and a mindset that supports you to speak up.

1. Elinor Cleghorn’s ‘Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World’ offers an excellent investigation of these issues.

2. A reductionist philosophy breaks the body down into individual parts and symptoms, focusing on isolated mechanisms rather than the interconnected whole.

3. In researching this article, I was pleased to come across this article - about the need to understand the link between social pain and physical pain - which gives me hope that shifts are afoot, albeit in small ways.