Wormhole, p.1
Wormhole, page 1
PRAISE FOR WORMHOLE
‘McElhinney turns detective in this page turning, true-life thriller that hits with a punch. Utterly essential reading in this era of new-age healthcare wormholes.’
JACINTA PARSONS
‘Wormhole is a forensic account of a family tragedy where the limits of medicine drove a woman to the dark corners of social media, with fatal consequence. Written with sharp wit, rare insight and heart-wrenching pathos, this book is not just about the author’s search for answers but how we all navigate the world as it is today and will increasingly become. I couldn’t put it down.’
DR NICK COATSWORTH
‘What a read! Hannah McElhinney has written a gripping page-turner about health misinformation, the wellness industry and Western medicine’s strengths and weaknesses. With compassion, McElhinney traces her cousin’s fatal descent down the health conspiracy wormhole that led to a deadly and unneeded treatment in Malaysia. The book sensitively addresses the suffering of those with undiagnosed symptoms while confronting the dangerous rise of health conspiracy theories. McElhinney poses urgent questions about how society should respond to health misinformation while acknowledging medicine’s shortcomings in the way it treats patients with complex chronic diseases. I highly recommend this excellent read.’
GABRIELLE JACKSON, deputy editor of The Guardian
‘I loved this book – a forensic exploration of alternative medicine, the dangers of health misinformation and those who weaponise it, and the human side of loving someone who was vulnerable to the trap. Wormhole is a great read, and has never been more crucial than this political moment.’
HANNAH FERGUSON
‘Wormhole is a propulsive journey through the darker recesses of the wellness industry, and a compelling examination of the systemic and structural injustices that leave chronically unwell people vulnerable to misinformation and exploitation. Hannah McElhinney’s compassionate and moving telling of her cousin’s search for recognition, treatment and cure, and the loss of her life to an invasive alternative procedure, reveals the devastating cost of the medical establishment’s tendency to dismiss symptoms of chronic illness, especially when experienced by people inhabiting female bodies. An urgent and courageous book.’
ELINOR CLEGHORN
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In memory of Lauren Hackwell
1985–2022
Author’s Note
This story is entirely true. I have, however, needed to change some names and locations for legal reasons. I have not changed any other details about the story; it is told exactly as it happened to my family. Some interviews have been edited for clarity.
None of the treatments discussed in this book are recommended by me. I am not a medical professional, and this book is not intended to suggest or encourage any particular treatment, orthodox or otherwise. I acknowledge that there may be readers who have undergone certain treatments mentioned in this book and have found them to be beneficial. I respect their experiences. However, many of the treatments discussed in this book are dangerous and unproven, so I implore any reader considering them to immediately speak to a qualified doctor.
PART 1 2022
Chapter 1 Johor Bahru
When Dad called to tell us they were going to remove intubation, I needed to look up what that meant. It sounded like a positive thing, like she was getting better.
It is more neutral than saying the doctors were going to take my cousin off life support. That language is alarmist and emotional, even if the circumstances were both alarming and emotional. I realise now that language like this helps slow time, which is a gift to families still reeling from the events that led them to this particular point. Each specific medical detail is like a rung on the ladder, helping the family navigate their way to comprehension, but the reality was quite simple. Lauren was dead before she arrived.
* * *
Two days prior, my dad called me around 6.30 in the evening. As far as Melbourne’s famously frustrating weather goes, it was a fine Wednesday evening in October. My skin was slick with oil from a facial I’d had that afternoon, and two friends from Sydney were in town and coming for dinner. My partner, also named Hannah, had been making pho all afternoon and I was taking the rubbish to the bins out the front of our apartment block. As I wrestled both the rubbish bag and the recycling down three flights of stairs to the footpath, my thoughts meandered freely and I could pause to watch the sun hit the red-brick warehouses that lined my street and turn them blazing orange. It was almost time to turn the clocks back for daylight saving.
My phone buzzed and I saw it was Dad calling.
‘Hannah, hello. How are you going?’
It doesn’t matter how serious or terrible the reason for his call is, Dad always asks me how I am first. I was telling him about my facial and dinner plans when he made a rather abrupt segue to tell me some news about my cousin. Dad took a beat to work out how to start, trying a few different sentences before aborting them, and finally settled on: ‘So Susan hadn’t heard from Lauren for a few days and she hasn’t been picking up her phone.’ Dad said this was unusual as they spoke almost daily, unless Lauren was particularly mad at her, but as far as my auntie Susan knew, she was not.
Earlier that morning, Lauren’s sister, my other cousin Brianna, had received a message on Facebook from a man named Smith. His account was private, and his profile picture didn’t show a person – just a low-quality photo of some scenery. Smith told Brianna that Lauren had gone to Malaysia for a medical procedure and there had been complications. She was unable to be brought out of the anaesthetic and remained unconscious.
As Dad explained the situation, I listened mostly in silence while pacing up and down in front of my apartment and pulling pieces of bark off a nearby tree. Who the hell was Smith? How did he know where Lauren was? Why a Facebook message and not a call? Was this an actual person or a scammer? I tried to squash the urge to interrupt.
Dad believed Smith was an old schoolfriend of Lauren’s who’d been named as her emergency contact. He was the only person who knew about her travel plans, likely because other friends and family would have intervened. Her family knew immediately that Lauren wasn’t in Malaysia having teeth whitening, laser eye surgery or any other standard medical tourism fare.
For a long time, Lauren had desperately wanted to travel to Cyprus to access a procedure known as ozone therapy: an alternative medical treatment in which her blood would be extracted and exposed to ozone gas, a toxic form of oxygen, before being reinjected into her veins.
I asked Dad whether she’d gone to have her blood boiled in Malaysia – a shorthand term we made up for ozone therapy – but Dad said he didn’t believe so. Later, he confessed he regretted using that terminology.
‘Is it that doctor? The one that’s been giving her those weird treatments?’ I asked. ‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know his name. I don’t know anything about him. He probably referred her, but the doctor that she saw in Malaysia is called Dr Radzi or something,’ Dad said.
Shifting our conversation away from speculation, he told me the reason for his call was a practical one. He was going to fly to Singapore with my two aunts and Brianna, then drive the hour over the border to Malaysia to see Lauren, who was in a major public hospital in the port city of Johor Bahru. Like he’d done in the chat at the beginning of the call, Dad managed to soften the shock of the situation by framing the conversation in terms of logistics. He might be difficult to reach for the next few days.
‘Susan wants to wait until next week, when she’ll be awake and on the ward, but I’m trying to convince her to leave tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and I’m not convinced that won’t be too late.’
Dad is far from an optimist, but he’s certainly not prone to catastrophising. The fact that he was going to board an international flight told me all I needed to know about the severity of the situation. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, knowing there wouldn’t be, and when Dad confirmed this, I made him promise to create a WhatsApp group to keep my sister Emily, Mum and me updated. He agreed and we said goodbye.
I returned upstairs to tell Hannah what had happened. Halfway through, our dinner guests arrived. I told the story again over the meal, feeling like I was explaining the plot of a television series rather than a story from my own life. My friends kept saying how sorry they were, which confused me because I hadn’t yet processed the idea that the situation was severe enough for my friends to offer condolences. After they left, Hannah and I scraped the bowls into the bin along with a clutch of excess noodles I pulled from the sink. I slid my feet into my old Crocs, picked up the rubbish bag and went for a second trip to the bins. The night now had a chill to it, so I flung the bag into the bin and ran back upstairs, and as I got ready for bed, my mind was already in an imagined Malaysia.
* * *
The first WhatsApp message came through the next morning, while my family was in the air. They managed to get a 7.30am flight, and I briefly calculated when my two aunts and cousin needed to wake up to make it from the Mornington Peninsula. I settled on 3.30am, but it was unlikely they’d had much sleep anyway. Smith was relaying updates about Laure n’s condition to Auntie Susan, and Dad was forwarding them to us. The first piece of information we received was that Lauren had sepsis and remained in a coma.
Her kidneys had shut down; she was on dialysis.
‘Can kidneys recover?’ Mum asked.
‘You can get them replaced, I think,’ I replied.
‘Don’t know,’ wrote Dad.
A CT scan also showed signs of stroke, which could explain her unconscious state; however, her pupils were responsive to light, which was promising. In the group message, I echoed that it was indeed promising about her pupils, but I didn’t mean it. Would we call a stroke promising? Maybe compared with death, but even of that I wasn’t sure.
On Thursday evening, around 7.45pm Melbourne time, my aunts, cousin and Dad arrived in Johor Bahru, probably looking like a very lost family-reunion tour group. After checking in to their hotel, they made their way to the hospital to see Lauren. When they got there, nothing was promising.
It never had been.
* * *
The next morning, Dad called Mum from the hospital to tell her they were going to remove Lauren’s intubation. Later that day, she passed the message on to me. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but it sounded positive. A sign she was breathing on her own.
I spent the day trying to work, but my thoughts kept reverting to the hospital scene I’d constructed in my head. I could hear the beeping of machinery in the background. I could see wires and tubes, all constructed from scenes I’d seen in film and television.
Could she hear her family there, or had she already died two days earlier when she was put under anaesthetic? Where was the line separating life from death? Was life about lungs? Or heart? Or brain? Were you alive if any of those three were being operated by machinery?
At 8.45pm, Melbourne time, Dad sent a short message: ‘They are removing life support.’
I understood everything I didn’t before.
‘Do you know how long?’ I asked.
‘After removal, it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two days,’ Dad wrote.
At 10.16pm, Dad sent another message.
‘She’s gone.’
Chapter 2 A Symptom of a System
For more than half her life, Lauren had been unwell. She was plagued by a set of shifting, mysterious symptoms that sent her hopping from specialist to specialist looking for a diagnosis or answers. Even in my earliest memories of Lauren, she was sleepy. She slept in until 11am on weekends. When I was a curious eight- or nine-year-old I asked why Lauren slept so much, and I was told teenagers like to sleep in. Eager to be a teenager myself, I took a mental note of this. It made an impression, because now, at the age of 35, I still think of teenagers as sleepy, despite having passed through my own teenage years reasonably awake.
Fatigue, pain and gut problems sapped Lauren’s energy, and she grew to believe that mainstream medicine had nothing to offer her, so she went looking elsewhere.
The health and wellness treatments Lauren perused grew increasingly extreme over the years. Some were ineffective but benign, while others were downright dangerous and came at a blistering expense. The cost was what prevented Lauren from accessing the ozone therapy she sought. While you would never wish a loved one to be strapped for cash, in our eyes, Lauren’s limited means were keeping her safe. For the time being.
The complementary and alternative medicine industry is projected to be worth US$1282.70 billion by 2034, up from US$193.36 billion in 2025.1 It’s a rapidly growing industry that covers a vast range of disparate therapies outside conventional biomedicine. There’s no officially defined list of therapies that sit underneath the umbrella of complementary and alternative medicine, but natural therapies like homeopathy, naturopathy, herbal medicine and supplements are typically pointed to, as well as osteopathy, chiropractic, reiki and non-Western medicine like traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, Ayurveda and Indigenous healing systems. These are well documented and often considered ‘natural’, but there are also many synthetic ‘chemical cures’ and fringe therapies that qualify by way of lacking peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support their efficacy and safety. This is where things get dicey, because under the banner of complementary and alternative medicine, you may find the ancient and highly researched tradition of acupuncture, but also chemicals you commonly find under the kitchen sink, packaged up and sold as miracle cures.
When I first looked into ozone therapy, I was aghast. Taking your blood out and mixing it with toxic gas and then returning it to your body couldn’t be remotely good for you. And it’s not. Ozone therapy has been debunked by medical experts as pure quackery, with potentially fatal consequences, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said ‘ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy’.2 It sounded too simplistic to be legitimate, like a science experiment. But, I reasoned, the idea of sewing a deep cut back together with a needle and thread also sounds too naive for modern medicine, and what is that other than a long tradition of science experiments? Controlled trials, placebos, testing, peer-review processes and regulatory approvals add rigour, but for most of history, medicine itself has been on the fringe. Illness and healing were God’s domain.
In ancient Western medicine, illness was believed to involve an imbalance of the four humours, or fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.3 Humoral medicine often involved purging bodily fluids to restore balance: bloodletting using leeches, ingesting mercury to induce salivation, enemas for inducing diarrhoea, fasting or using heat to force sweating were all techniques thought to be therapeutic, and they were often mixed with prayer and moral reform. Many of these therapies were dangerous and had fatal consequences. But, despite limited understanding of human anatomy, early medicine was holistic and incorporated the mind, body and spirit. We have the word humour to show for it. A word that once referred to bodily fluid has shifted over time to refer to a person’s overall mood.
It was only in the 1800s, when germ theory and bacteriology emerged, that the paradigm shifted away from humoral medicine. But when germ theory was first proposed, the idea of microorganisms making people unwell was radical and fringe. In 1847, Austrian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was ridiculed for requiring anyone attending childbirth to wash their hands, but it didn’t take long for this to become standard practice after maternal deaths dropped dramatically. Antiseptics, vaccines and antibiotics were soon discovered, saving countless lives and laying the foundation for modern biomedicine, which placed the human body under the microscope – both literally and figuratively. The mind and spirit elements of humoral medicine were sidelined, and disciplines like psychiatry were brought in to examine the mind through a physiological lens.
Medicine and pharmacology enjoyed a meteoric rise throughout the early to mid-20th century, and diseases previously thought to be plagues sent by angry deities became mostly extinct or entirely curable. However, towards the end of the century, a renewed interest in outside modern medicine took hold.
The countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, combined with more accessible international travel, led to a renewed interest in non-Western medicine like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and other Indigenous practices.4 Many of these therapies revolve around philosophies of balance (yin and yang in traditional Chinese medicine and the doshas in Ayurveda) and have many parallels with humoral medicine. Today, alternative medicine and wellness practices echo their humoral origins, involving purges, detoxes and herbs to rebalance the mind and body. Lauren had tried them all, and for a period of time, I rode shotgun with her as she embarked on these various treatments, eager to learn more about what she was trying and if it was working.
As unconventional as the places she went were, I understood what she was looking for.
During my twenties, I suffered severe irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Epstein–Barr virus, which coalesced into a kind of mind–body storm that impacted me daily and occasionally still does. During this period, I tried so many different, fruitless treatments. Some were ineffective but harmless; others were harmful, like following different diet protocols so religiously that they morphed into disordered eating. I stopped eating gluten, dairy, FODMAPs, meat, processed foods and sugar, and spent exorbitant amounts on supplement bundles that promised the world. Desperation and uncertainty are a dangerous yet familiar combination. I know the experience of feeling like something ‘isn’t right’ yet leaving doctors’ offices in tears after spending another few hundred dollars on tests without answers.
