Doctors are debunking a social media post by chiropractor and health coach Dr. Melissa Sell, in which she claims tumors are “purposeful adaptations.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Magnolia Printz, an anesthesiologist, posted a TikTok with the tweet from Sell in the background. “Imagine writing this and not deleting it,” reads the text overlay in the TikTok.
Sell’s tweet reads: “An ovarian cyst is a functional gift from nature to make you more attractive and fertile after a traumatic loss. An enlarged prostate is a gift from nature to make you more potent after feeling degraded as a man. Tumors are not mistakes, they are purposeful adaptations.”
@balancedanesthesia That’s not how that works 😭😭
♬ الصوت الأصلي – فهد ابن الموصل
“That’s not how that works,” Dr. Printz wrote in the caption.
As of April 28, the TikTok has over 61,00 views.
Dr. Sell’s Twitter account is set on private, as of Thursday, and the post is not found on her Instagram page.
“Girl, no. There’s some fucked up things in medicine but telling people tumors are evolutionary is truly insane,” one Instagrammer wrote to Sell via direct messages, according to Sell’s Instagram stories on Thursday.
Dr. Jeff Williams, a Texas-based chiropractor at Creek Stone Integrated Medical, agrees with Printz and some of the Instagram critics. “She’s insane and saying something like [that] is not evidence-based and not based in reality,” he tells the Daily Dot in an email. “Giving advice on tumors as she is doing is likely far out of her scope of practice and could put her in a precarious position legally.”
Tumors are abnormal masses of tissue that occur when cells grow and divide when they shouldn’t. While benign tumors grow but don’t spread or invade the rest of the body, malignant tumors—which are considered cancerous—do.
According to Sell’s LinkedIn profile, she practices German New Medicine, which is “a revolutionary perspective of health and disease” discovered by Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer in the early 80s. German New Medicine focuses on physiological “natural healing” through spiritual and emotional work, or the idea that physical symptoms like acne are connected to feelings, like being “attacked by the words or criticism of others.” Sell and her husband teaches courses and coach people in this practice.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Sell via email and Printz via Instagram direct message.
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