20 Saturday June 11 2022 | the times
News
A disgraced wellness coach banned
from practising in Australia after giving
potentially fatal advice to vulnerable
clients is to run a £1,400-a-head course
in Britain.
Barbara O’Neill, 68, will lead a seven-
day residential programme to “restore
health” at a Christian retreat in
Staffordshire later this month. She is
described as an “international health
lecturer” on the advertisement for the
course at Manna House, a retreat near
Stoke-on-Trent offering Bible-based
wellness programmes. It does not
reveal that an investigation by an Aus-
tralian health watchdog found O’Neill’s
“approach to be danger-
ous and a significant
risk to public health
and safety”.
She was barred
from practising in her
homeland after com-
plaints about her out-
landish claims that
cancer was a fungus
that could be cured by
bicarbonate of soda.
She also discour-
aged cancer patients
from having chemo-
therapy and advised
mothers to feed their
babies raw goats’ milk
as an alternative to
breast milk, even Smile for the camera A young farmer shows off her cattle yesterday at the South
Banned wellness lecturer
offers £1,400 course in UK
though raw milk may contain harmful
bacteria that could be dangerous for
infants.
The investigation by the New South
Wales healthcare complaints commis-
sion in 2019 found that she had also
given potentially dangerous health
advice regarding antibiotics and vacci-
nations in lectures, online seminars
and articles published on her website.
In one lecture, entitled Child Nutri-
tion, O’Neill claimed “the human body
was designed to heal itself and does not
need to be vaccinated” and that “if you
stop taking the flu shot it will prevent
you from getting Alzheimer’s disease”.
Barring her from practising for life,
the Australian watchdog said it was
“concerned that Mrs
O’Neill does not
recognise that she is
misleading vulnerable
people, including
mothers and cancer
sufferers. The misin-
formation has huge
potential to have a
detrimental effect”.
O’Neill is a
member of the Sev-
enth-day Adventist
Church, and worked
as a lecturer at a
wellness retreat run
by her husband,
Michael O’Neill, in
New South Wales.
She was a traineenurse in a psychiatric hospital in the
1970s but did not qualify as a registered
nurse and has never belonged to any
accredited health profession organisa-
tion. On her website, she describes
herself as an “author, educator, and an
international speaker at large on natu-
ral self-healing [who] has raised eight
children and loves to help mothers with
their children’s health”.
The advertisement for her British
programme says she will be offering
lectures, consultations and demonstra-
tions to those who pay the £1,395 fee,
but does not include any further details.
If she repeats her debunked claims on
curing cancer, she risks breaching UK
law. The Cancer Act bans advertising
cancer treatments to the general public.
Michael Marshall, project director of
the Good Thinking Society, a charity
that promotes rational scepticism and
evidence-based thinking said: “We are
deeply concerned by Mrs O’Neill’s
history of making unfounded and
misleading health claims.”
Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of
complementary medicine at the
University of Exeter, said: “Alternative
practitioners are often seen as essen-
tially harmless. Barbara O’Neill is an
excellent example to show how wrong
this assumption is. She is a danger to
public health and must be stopped.”
A representative from Manna House
declined to respond to questions about
the course. O’Neill could not be
reached for comment.Lucy Bannerman, Tom Whipple
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