Lessons from lies and links: Medicine and the Internet

Sometimes the Internet can have a little too much to say about health care.

Editorial. June 25, 2001.

Two medicine-related reality checks on the subject of the Internet surfaced last month.

One was when Kaycee Nicole Swenson's lengthy Web-chronicled fight for life came to an abrupt end. Kaycee was a 19-year-old leukemia patient, star high school basketball player and inspirational writer ("I'll fight to the finish!") with a readership in the thousands. And, as it turned out, a total hoax.

There is no Kaycee. There was no case of leukemia, no harrowing hospital stays, no last-minute saves from blood clots or other complications. The pictures of Kaycee posted on the Web were of an unwitting former neighbor of the 40-year-old Kansas woman who perpetrated the hoax. Kaycee was killed off -- via a convenient aneurysm -- just as one of her biggest fans was making plans for a fly-in visit that would have revealed the lie.

It was a mostly harmless hoax, even though it's hard not to cringe when reading the encouraging messages that the Kaycee faithful wrote to her. However, gifts weren't solicited, and those that were sent amounted to less than the FBI's threshold to warrant a criminal fraud investigation.

Meanwhile, quack cure sites, perhaps in the thousands, have found a happy home on the Internet. If there's any tragedy here it's that some of the energy spent to unravel the Kaycee hoax -- her former fans turned detective when their suspicions were aroused -- can't be directed at the quack sites.

For the curious, Kaycee's messages are now no longer posted. A recap still on the Web sketches a convoluted tale of dramatic setbacks and upturns. There was even a medical ethics subplot: A resident treating Kaycee became smitten with her. Given that gullibility isn't a medical condition, there is little new to be learned, except to add a footnote to an earlier recognized subgenre of Munchausen syndrome -- those who pretend to be seriously ill to take part in support group chat rooms on the Internet. [...]