“Two roads diverged in the wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”  

(Robert Frost)

It is undoubtedly true that knowledge is power, but the decision to access that power can sometimes require immense courage. Today, information on strategies for complete recovery from disease is readily available, including effective treatment for even the worst cancers.

The Buddha taught that ignorance is the source of all suffering and developed a system designed to help people learn how to dispel ignorance and train their courage to think for themselves.  Courage is not something anybody is born with, like blue eyes or black hair. Courage is acquired by training and only then becomes a habit. That training requires acting in spite and regardless of one’s fear.

The first and most important step is always the decision to inquire, doubt all conventional wisdom, and seek the fellowship of those who also struck out on their own to get answers based on real experience. That’s what the upcoming Whole Life Expo (Nov. 14 - 16) is all about. For over two decades it has offered us the opportunity to nourish doubt, look for evidence of what works, and follow up tantalizing leads. Entertaining as each Expo invariably is, underneath all that fun is the very serious invitation to take charge of our own health.

One reason this year’s Expo is a don’t-miss event is the opportunity to meet a woman who cured herself of cancer. Susan Manion MacDonald, author of Balance: Nature’s Way to Heal Your Body, was diagnosed with untreatable, end-stage lymphatic cancer (non-Hodgkins lymphoma) in 2002, and was told by her oncologist that she was going to die. But against his advice, Susan started to do her own research on alternative medicine therapies, and subsequently cured herself of cancer. Now she helps others to do likewise.

The new documentary movie, Foodmatters, has footage showing a patient with this very same cancer; its tumours are so powerful they dislocate neck and shoulder joints, causing horrible pain. The film also documents the disappearance of the tumours solely due to the Gerson nutritional and detox regime, a variation of which Susan explored and developed for herself and describes with systematic rigour in her excellent book.

The courage involved in thinking for oneself is well stated in Susan’s book: “…a) identify the problem; b) take ownership; c) keep cool; d) look for alternative solutions; e) resolve the problem, being accountable for both the problem and the solution; f) evaluate the outcome and the solution used to the resolve the problem.”

The following comment, made at the end of her terrible journey, is a stunner: “In retrospect, and especially since I have attained balance in my life, both physically and emotionally, I consider the cancer to have been a gift.”

Amen. I have been there, not with cancer, but a debilitating neurological disease, and I too kissed the neurologists and their drugs and surgical “solutions” good-bye, and regained my health.

In her book, Susan (who was a factory worker for twenty years) identifies one of the greatest mental barriers to striking out on one’s own, namely what I call the “genetic fallacy”, really the current version of resignation to ‘god’s will’: “Do not use your genetic heritage as an excuse for being unhealthy. Poor genes may account for the weaker parts of the body. But only if toxins, improper nutrition, and/or poor quality water make up a major portion of what the body ingests will genetics become a self-fulfilling prophesy.” With that feisty attitude Susan explored the world of carcinogens and their presence in her food and water, as well as the deadly treatments for her already admittedly untreatable cancer. 

I wonder if it was easier or more difficult for her to question the experts as she did, than it was for the Japanese professor of medicine featured in the Gerson documentary Dying to Have Known. He was, after all, fully indoctrinated by his immense medical education at the point when he was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer. When his cancer grew due to the carcinogenic chemotherapy treatments prescribed, he decided to make the leap out of that indoctrination and treat himself, without any help from anybody, using the Gerson therapy. He then carefully documented his recovery, and published it in Japanese medical journals. You can watch him tell his story in Gerson’s 2007 documentary film.

Susan MacDonald observes, “terminal illness is about as far as one can travel, and it is the longest road back.” The factory worker and the professor both chose the road less traveled and, as Frost’s poem tells us, “that made all the difference.” On that road out of ignorance we do not only find people like Susan and the Japanese professor; more and more people from mainstream medicine are becoming fellow travelers. Almost every day I come across new research that grew out of doubting established wisdom and anger at the cancer industry’s callous exploitation of patients; mainstream medicine, too, is increasingly facing the truth that cancer is a wholly preventable product of human error.

CAUSES OF CANCER – FROM HAIR DYE TO DRINKING WATER

In 1997, I attended the annual conference of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, where I had my first crash course in carcinogens. Dr. Sherry Rogers showed a series of slides of a recovering cancer patient on whom the oncologists had given up, predicting that she had only a few weeks of life at best. Dr. Rogers placed the patient on a nutritional and detox regime and soon black goop started to ooze out from around the flank kidney areas. Upon closer examination this turned out to be dark hair dye. The patient was a hairdresser. She went on to completely recover from her advanced, metastasized cancer.

This excretion of carcinogens is called chromhydrosis (coloured sweat) and has been reported also by operating room nurses excreting yellow sterilization liquid as they recovered from cancer. In another example, various colours of sweat in other cancer patients turned out to contain the nail polish they had applied over the years.

As reported on May 8 in the Daily News, some eighty 9/11 firefighters who have so far died of cancer developed it from exposure to the toxic building materials of the burning World Trade Centre, including benzene (also in most perfumes), dioxin and asbestos. Another 600 of those firefighters currently have cancer.

Now that we are becoming acutely aware of the importance of water quality, we will soon find cancer drugs themselves as the causative agents of cancer in patients – water testing has found these drugs to be present at alarming levels in tap water, as reported by the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate (London Telegraph, January 13, 2008). Because old fashioned water treatment facilities are unable to filter out the myriad drugs that find their way into our water supply, Canadians are exposed on a daily basis to minute amounts of drugs for everything from birth control to hypertension to cancer. As one can imagine, the cumulative effect of these minute exposures on healthy people can cause disease in itself.

Cancer drugs are by design themselves carcinogens, intended to destroy cells – they are cytotoxic. A staff writer in Scientific American (April 2007) laments: “Today’s chemotherapy consists of little more than a dismal array of toxic drugs that kill healthy cells along with cancerous ones. Physicians must often play a deadly game of trial and error…” Even if the targeted tumour stays shrunk for a while (usually 5 years if the patient is lucky), the immediate and irreversible damage to the brain caused by chemo is for many as bad as the cancer itself (Journal of Biology, April 22, 2008). The Society of Australian Oncologists went so far as to observe in a 2004 article in Clinical Oncology that cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs are basically useless, except in very few and rare cancers for short periods of time, and even then they are questionable.

ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF CANCER DENIED BY BUSINESS AND POLITICS

Research now shows that cancer not only carries the signature of a victim’s occupation, but also of their social class. The UK government examined 300,000 cancer patients from 1998 to 2003 and found that the wealthy tend towards melanoma and breast cancer, while cervical and lung cancers are found mostly among the poor. This observation reflects the greater use of pesticides, dry-cleaned clothes, and cosmetics, as compared to poor sanitation, bad air quality, and the likelihood of smoking among the poor. Cancer is indeed a lifestyle issue. But only some are chosen, and most cancers are (unknowingly) caused by what Sandra Steingraber calls “chemical trespass”, and all are caused by ignorance – also a preventable condition.

Over the past twenty years, fostering public ignorance became political policy because ignorance tends to make more money for big business. In an insightful article in the UK Times (timesonline.co.uk January 30, 2008), cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber discusses the astounding revelations delivered by environmental oncologist Devra Lee Davis, author of The Secret War on Cancer. Davis, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, chronicles the deliberate suppression of knowledge of environmental carcinogens, starting with the Reagan administration which systematically suppressed research into carcinogens and the epidemiology of cancer clusters in order to favour the profits of cancer-causing industries. In her book, Davis shows how the so-called “war on cancer was not a war at all, but a cunning re-enactment.” And so, some “1.5 million people, conservatively estimated, developed cancer needlessly” because the neo-con agenda of Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. “did not act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer.”

Davis, a research scientist herself, places most of the blame on “the cowardice of scientists”. While she undoubtedly has put her finger on one of the sorest spots, the fact remains, as Dr. Andrew Saul puts it in the film Foodmatters, “Good health makes a lot of sense. Good health does not make a lot of dollars.” The corruption of cancer research is reported at an ever-increasing rate by mainstream science (Faguet’s book is the best of these). For example, the UK’s Independent reported on April 9, 2008, that good therapeutic results in cancer patients showing up in mainstream clinical trials (conducted by Big Pharma and universities) are more often than not simply stopped – because, God forbid, they might show a cure!

Occasionally, our fellow travelers in medical science make discoveries that may make one weep or laugh. The journal Nature reported on February 8, 2007, as follows: since almost all cancers occur because the tumor-suppressor gene p53, known as the “guardian of the genome”, is inactivated by carcinogens in the environment, a drug should be developed that re-activates the guardian – which is much better able to distinguish between cancer cells and healthy ones than any chemo drug. In fact a company called Introgen Therapeutics has already started on a drug that might reactivate (at great expense and sexy profits) our p53 guardian. The drug is called Advexin; let us hope it doesn’t have any nasty side-effects (announcement at the American Society of Gene Therapy, May 28, 2008).

How exciting! Trouble is, we already know what reactivates p53: carrot juice, or live beta carotene, and potassium are chief among them – as used daily by patients recovering from cancer at the Gerson Institute, and by people like Susan. (The scientific literature on the beta carotene / potassium dependence of p53 is too large to cite here; see the technical textbook, Apoptosis, by C. Potten and J. Wilson, Cambridge, 2004.)

The food connection to cancer is re-emerging, and maybe sometime soon the road less traveled will become a highway. The Journal of Clinical Oncology (May 1, 2008) published a study which had investigated the nutritional status of 9,000 cancer patients and found that only about 15% were eating properly – the rest, while undergoing chemotherapy, were eating junk food at the same time without any idea of what they were doing to themselves. Similarly, the British Medical Journal published research on September 12, 2008, showing that the so-called Mediterranean Diet really does support health and healing from chronic illness. Susan MacDonald tells you all about it in her book: she tried it and so can you.

Article Tags: success story, alternative cancer treatment, cancer causes

About the Author

More Articles by Helke Ferrie

User Comments