The first time I cut a line, I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was in Las Vegas on vacation and had come across a book signing for Suzanne Somers’ Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones. I had a little bit of a connection to Somers. A few years before, in the early aughts, I was editor in chief of the American Breast Cancer Guide, and Somers gave us an exclusive cover story about how she’d treated her breast cancer with a mistletoe extract that was not FDA-approved, instead of chemotherapy.

Determined to meet her, I walked to the front of the line. “Hi—I have to say hello to Suzanne because I was the editor in chief of a magazine she was in. I’ll only take a minute.” The woman grimaced but…