Th£ canc£r indu$try
Those Cancer Research adverts with the little girl clinging to her morphine drip make me want to puke. I get so angry. I know from first hand experience that having someone in the family with cancer is not great. When you’re purely being treated with orthodox medicine that is.
Round after round of chemotherapy, which takes a great toll on your healthy cells as well as the cancer cells (which, by the way, a lot of doctors wouldn’t have themselves because they know how damaging it is to the body), there’s the equally ‘effective’ but destructive radiotherapy, then there’s ‘remission’ to look forward to. Batches of tests, needles, men in white coats deciding your health.
Yep - watched my parents go through all of that. Yes, both of them. Mama started first with ovarian cancer when I was 14-15. When she went into remission, my dad got bowel cancer when I was 17. His was a pretty clean cut case. Mama’s wasn’t.
I remember as a teenager watching my mother perched on a chair near the living room door, day in, day out, rushing to the toilet EVERY 10 minutes - and I MEAN, every 10 minutes - to dry retch into the toilet bowl while the therapy took its toll on her body. The sounds she made while her stomach was trying to empty were excruciating to my ears, and goodness knows how she felt. It was awful to watch and live with. Fear became a familiar emotion to me. Watching a pillar of your family falling apart at an early age is NOT pleasant, and kinda rocks your foundations.
This was part and parcel of the chemotherapy she was having for ovarian cancer - which, by the way, the doctors had failed to call her back for treatment for. She’d had a hysterectomy 18 months previously and when she enquired whether she needed to come back for treatment, this is how the conversation went:
Doctor: “Well, how do you feel?”
Mama: “I feel alright.”
Doctor: “Great.”
Guess that doctor must’ve missed the class in medical school where they teach you that if you cut a tumour out, you need to treat the remaining cancer cells in the body.
She didn’t receive follow-up treatment. 18 months later, she went in and out of hospital with crippling pains in her lower abdomen. The doctors thought she was making it up. When they finally opened her up, they found the remaining ovarian cancer cells had multiplied and attached to the next nearest thing - her bowels. The doctor who had expressed some scepticism for her illness couldn’t look her in the eye when they came to tell her what they had found. He actually died of cancer a few years later. Funny old world, eh?
If you’re interested, yes, we sued and won monies for medical neglience.
From 1993 - 2004, I spent a lot of time visiting my mother in various hospitals in the Midlands - and my dad too when he was undergoing treatment. I have walked into uncountable hospital wards to see a sickly parent of mine lying in a hospital bed, listening to the doctors and struggling to get better so that their youngest child can feel the love of both parents. I could so easily have lost my mother at the age of 14. It is thanks to her sheer bloodymindedness to survive that I got to have a mother for an extra ten years.
Dymphna Teresa Sweeney died at the age of 62, in a hospice from stage 4 ovarian cancer. We planned a little birthday party for when she was in there, as she was due to celebrate her 62nd birthday. When we got to the hospice on her birthday, she had fallen unconscious. She never stirred again - apart from 10 seconds a few days later - when I told her I had managed to get the medicine for her. What medicine? I had managed to finally obtain some alternative treatment from the Bristol Cancer Centre called Carctol, which makes the body more alkaline. Cancer cells love an acidic environment. Please note here that the typical Western diet makes the body very acidic.
My mother died at 11am on Monday 15th November 2004, a week after her 62nd birthday. The Carcol pills are still lying under my bed at home. She never regained consciousness to be able to take them.
It was too late anyway. Treatment should have happened years ago. Unfortunately, she came from an older generation - a generation that had learnt to trust their doctor and do exactly what they say. Whether they ever gave her any advice on nutrition (1/3 of cancers can be improved, some would say cured, through diet) I don’t know. Maybe. But I know that if they knew nutrition had been a key part of fighting cancer and had wanted to get people better, the hospitals wouldn’t have fed her SO MUCH sloppy, unpalatable food.
2004 was a REALLY horrible year for me. I finished my postgraduate studies - which hadn’t exactly been the happiest - and then moved home to nurse my dying mother. I took temporary office work as I really didn’t need the stress of a journalism job while I was watching my mother fade away. I don’t regret putting the career on hold at all - you can always get back to a career, but you only have one mother per lifetime.
The latter half of the year was a different path of learning. In July, when my mother broke the news to my father and me that the doctors had told her to go home and die, I started researching on the internet about alternative treatments for cancer, learning how cancer works, and gradually reaching the nightmarish conclusion that cancer is preventable and curable through other means that don’t line the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry.
Intravenous vitamin C cures a lot of cancers. Don’t hear that on the cancer charity propaganda, huh? See the article I’ve posted at the end of my blog to find out more.
A gentleman by the name of Otto Warburg won two Nobel Prizes for his work on cancer. He discovered that cancer cells love a low oxygen environment. Every time Otto Warburg lowered the oxygen level by 35% in a healthy cell, it became cancerous.
Cancer cells feed on sugar. Cells usually produce energy aerobically - using oxygen. When oxygen levels are low, cells can also produce energy anaerobically.
Cells must switch to producing energy anaerobically because low oxygen levels have lead to the death of the respiratory enzymes needed to produce energy aerobically. When this happens, the cells cannot produce enough energy to maintain their ability to function properly. So they lose their ability to do whatever they need to do in the body.
Fermentation allows these cells to survive, but they can no longer perform any functions in the body or communicate effectively with the body. Consequently, these cells can only multiply and grow. And may become cancerous. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, they change into cancer cells. Bet you’ve never heard that before, either.
There are numerous theories on what causes cancer, and in 2004, I read pretty much all of them. Some of them made more sense than others. Otto Warburg’s theory makes A LOT OF SENSE to me. It ties in with the acid/alkaline argument, which says that cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment. I remember reading a quote on a website: “The body is alkaline by design, and acid by function” - referring to the fact that people gradually toxify their body by eating too little of the good foods, and too many of the bad foods.
As it says in the article below that I’ve posted, cancer is the response to “a complex series of inter-actions, including diet, lifestyle, and emotional well-being.” The sooner people wake up and realise that you have to take care of your physical health, mental health, emotional health, and spiritual health, the better.
So - when you see me eating a vegan diet to get good nutrition, when you see me trying to do exercise to keep my body in shape, when you see me trying to let bygones be bygones so that they don’t sit like an emotional toxin in my body (your biography IS your biology), it’s because I’ve learnt the hard way that you can’t just rely on a batch of chemo and a quick operation to cure cancer if you get it.
Your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health are to be cared for 24/7. It’s a case of taking responsibility for yourself. And it needn’t be hard. I still manage to have fun. And - who knows, I may still get cancer, hell, I’ve got double the chances. I have reduced those chances already by not eating meat and dairy - red meat is linked to bowel cancer, and dairy has links to ovarian cancer.
I don’t want to keep cancer in the family. It lived with us for 11 years, and that was more than enough for me. I don’t want to be a victim like my mother was. I want to be the generation that learns from the mistakes of the past. I don’t want to live forever, I just want to live a happy, disease-free life and pop my clogs at a ripe old age.
So, why have I written such a long blog today? Because I was checking my email and I saw this article on a newsletter I get from wddty.com - an alternative health website. It reminded me that I’ve never really spoken in much detail about what happened in my family and how it had such an impact on me. People are the end result of their experiences, and I am very much a case in point.
I hope this sheds a little light on why I get so angry when I see those cancer charity adverts, when I see people dumping rubbish food into their bodies, when I see people not taking care of themselves.
And I know that not everyone gets cancer. Some people live a hedonistic life and live long lives. That’s fine. But with my family history, it may not be the same for me if I were to do that. And I sure as hell don’t want to go through even a hundredth of the hell that my parents went through. I watched it happen to them, and THAT was enough for me.
Read the article below to find out about how intravenous vitamin C saved one person’s life. I wish this story was about MY mother. But it’s not. And I have to live with that.
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From wddty.com’s e-newsletter
My mother beat end-stage breast cancer with vitamin C
Now the American cancer industry wants to control the supplements cancer victims take
“My mother, Edith, was 76 when she was diagnosed with end-stage breast cancer. She’d nursed the disease for more than two years without telling a soul. By the time she finally went to the doctor, he gave her the grimmest prognosis: she had just three months to live.
Edith was too late for chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery or drugs; instead, he put her on morphine and told us we should get her affairs in order and wait for her to die.
Suddenly our own research could help us
After helping thousands of others with the research we’d gathered in preparing our health journal What Doctors Don’t Tell You, we suddenly found we needed it for our own family.
We knew that cancer isn’t always a death sentence, even when the person has reached the so-called end stage. We also knew that cancer was the response to a complex series of inter-actions, including diet, lifestyle, and emotional well-being.
But the key to Edith’s treatment was the knowledge that the cancer industry had got it wrong about vitamin C. Study after study had shown that the vitamin didn’t help kill cancer, but every one of them had tested the vitamin as an oral supplement and we knew it was effective only when given intravenously. Best of all, we knew someone who could administer the vitamin, and at very high doses.
The practitioner who has since retired also changed my mother’s diet, and put her on nutritional supplements.
The ghost who was very much alive
Within six months, the tumours on Edith’s breast had cleared up. The family doctor who had forecast her death spotted her in the street a year later and was sure he’d seen a ghost! He whisked her back to the surgery, carried out x-rays on her breast much against our wishes and confirmed that, indeed, the cancer had completely disappeared.
Looking back, I suppose my mother was fortunate to have us around with the knowledge we’d gathered while working on What Doctors Don’t Tell You. She was certainly of a generation that was prepared to take the doctor’s word as final and, until she was diagnosed, hadn’t touched a vitamin supplement in her life.
The cancer industry wants to stop us all taking vitamins
This week we have heard that the cancer industry would like to stop every cancer patient taking vitamins.
Researchers funded by the National Cancer Institute have discovered that around 81 per cent of cancer patients are taking a vitamin. Around a third of these just started taking vitamins after hearing they had cancer after all, what could be a more normal response?
But the researchers are worried because most doctors treating them don’t know their patients are taking vitamins and the National Cancer Institute is concerned that the supplements might be interfering with the treatment they’re receiving.
In other words, cancer patients should be getting only chemo or surgery - not nutrition.”