Rabbi Hawkins, who had become Wilmot’s religious guide and friend in those final months, remembered hearing about the cabbage juice. “If someone had bottled up rat poison and told him, ‘It will heal you,’ he would have drunk it,” Hawkins told BuzzFeed News. “That’s how desperate the man was.”

When Taylor came back to visit her father a few weeks later, she was shocked. “He was totally emaciated,” she said. “He was drinking so much of it, he was basically starving himself. It was all coming out as diarrhea.”

In mid-July, Wilmot’s friends found him unconscious on the floor of his apartment, and he was moved to a hospice facility. On July 20, about a month after he was diagnosed and began the juice purge, he died.

Facebook is under scrutiny for its outsized role in spreading political misinformation. But it’s also a platform where pseudoscience, snake oil remedies, and medical falsehoods multiply unchecked. Those have received far less attention, despite carrying the potential for immediate physical harm.

There are countless fake science gurus with large Facebook followings. But Epperly’s is particularly striking, according to Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Alberta, because she’s not a celebrity. “She isn’t associated with some well-packaged brand, so it’s interesting that she’s able to accumulate this much interest.”

Epperly is also notable for the stark absurdity of her theory. She says her cabbage concoction will reverse all forms of illness, arrest aging, and even turn gay people straight. These claims are “absolutely dangerous nonsense,” David Seres, director of medical nutrition at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, told BuzzFeed News. “I am almost speechless.”

Epperly has no background in medicine or science. She delivers elements of her theory in rambling videos beamed live from her home. They have an unvarnished reality-TV quality to them: Epperly is often in a T-shirt, hair up, walking through the house as she talks. She is also a prolific Facebook commenter, each missive a stream-of-consciousness word salad. And for $70 an hour, she told BuzzFeed News, she will provide personal phone consultations, talking people through her theory and how to make the recipe.

When asked why she presents wild theories with no evidence to back them up, Epperly likened her efforts to a religious conversion. She doesn’t worry, she said, about people who don’t believe.

“We’re using a different context in my world, and the manifestations from the salt and the accessing of the nutrients is gonna give you a different context of what the symptoms are,” Epperly said. “So essentially what it is, is we’re trying to turn an atheist into a Christian.”

More than a dozen people told BuzzFeed News that they complained to Facebook about Epperly and her group, to no avail. The company has fairly lax rules for dealing with pseudoscientific groups. “We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety,” according to its community standards.

For example, in January the platform removed videos promoting the Tide Pod Challenge after people began posting videos eating (or pretending to eat) laundry detergent.

But Epperly’s group did not violate Facebook’s rules, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, and so was not taken down. The company wants to encourage discussion among its users, the spokesperson added, and does not want to censor provocative ideas. Facebook refused to discuss Wilmot’s death with BuzzFeed News on the record.

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, Facebook’s relaxed policy means that people making wild health claims — like Joseph Mercola, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, or the makers of the “FasciaBlaster” who injured women with a device that promised to zap cellulite — can thrive. But in Epperly’s case, something unusual happened: Some Facebook users decided to take matters into their own hands.

Motivated in part by Wilmot’s death, about a dozen private satellite Facebook groups — the biggest has over 10,000 members — have emerged with the explicit purpose of taking her down. This countermovement has organized to contact journalists, law enforcement, and the Ohio Medical Board about Epperly’s dangerous ideas — and prompted a response from the Ohio Attorney General.

But whether their efforts will make any dent in Epperly’s business — or change Facebook’s stance on enabling fake science — is still very much an open question.