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The 47-year-old mother from Tennessee had chosen to forgo traditional cancer treatments for her late stage breast cancer and rely on natural therapies instead.

“I am a cancer patient, NOT a chemo patient,” she posted on the online fundraising site GoFundMe. “Chemo is a serious poison” that destroys bones, kidneys and livers, and “decimates” the immune system, she said. So she is trying to raise money for homeopathic and other natural therapies, including juicing organic carrots.

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It’s an example of the rapidly growing practice of people using crowdfunding for alternative cancer treatments — a phenomenon that’s helping finance and promote scientifically baseless therapies while raising false hopes for desperate people, according to the authors of a study appearing in this week’s issue of The Lancet Oncology.

Bioethicist Jeremy Snyder of Simon Fraser University and the University of Alberta’s Timothy Caulfield searched GoFundMe for medical crowdfunding campaigns that included the words “cancer” and various versions of “homeopathy.” As of June 2018, they identified 220 campaigns, the bulk of them in the U.S., but also 23 in Canada.