Adverse Reactions The inconvenient truth A small group of people tried to prevent you from reading this issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. They pressurized shops to stop selling our magazine and they were prepared to go to almost any lengths to achieve their aims, including the stage-managing of an ‘independent’ news article in a major newspaper that contained malicious falsehoods about us and our work. Why? Perhaps because we’d announced the next issue as a ‘cancer special’ that would include interesting new research about homeopathy. Although not given any opportunity for right of reply, we have published the facts about those allegations on our websites and Facebook pages, our supporters have offered overwhelming support, and the story has gone wildly viral across the internet as something of a cause célèbre. But aside from the issues of censorship and press freedom, this subject has great personal meaning to us. About 20 years ago, we had our own experience of looking for answers to cancer when Edie, Bryan’s mother, then 78, was suddenly diagnosed with end-stage breast cancer. She’d privately nursed the cancer for several years without telling anyone, let alone seeing a medical professional. When we finally learned of it and insisted she see her GP, he was shocked when examining her—her breast looked, as he put it, “like raw meat”. So advanced was the cancer that it was too late to try chemotherapy or any other intervention other than powerful painkillers. Edie had three months to live at the very outside, the GP said to us privately. “And if I were you, I’d get her affairs in order.” To be honest, we were frightened and far from certain we had any answers. Fortunately, because of our work, we were able to contact WDDTY columnist Dr Patrick Kingsley, a medical pioneer in Leicestershire who has helped people with a variety of conditions, including cancer. We didn’t know how successful he’d be with a case of terminal cancer, but we were encouraged to hear that he ran a local cancer group consisting of many other no-hopers who were apparently outliving the odds. His therapy included high-dose intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide administered twice a week, and a modified healthy diet free of foods like dairy, wheat and sugar, plus a vitamin supplement programme tailored to the purse and tastes of someone reared on standard British fare. We took Edie for treatment twice a week and, within a month, her breast started to heal. Several months later, Edie’s GP, the one who’d delivered the death sentence on her in the first place, came to examine her and was astonished to see her walking around at all. He took several tests and was rendered speechless. The cancer which had ravaged her breast, which he’d been so sure was beyond hope or treatment, had completely disappeared. Edie lived on for many more years until her husband died and she, divested of any further purpose, died six months after him. Worthy alternatives What’s the point of the story? It is emphatically not that we believe that everyone with cancer should take vitamin C. A good number of people have had their cancer successfully treated with one of the three standard treatments on offer: chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery. These do sometimes work, especially if the cancer is caught early enough. Neither are we suggesting that people follow any particular course, whether conventional, complementary or alternative. Our job in these pages is not prescriptive but investigative—to dig out the best research we can about the ‘other side of the story’ on both conventional and alternative healthcare to allow our intelligent readers to make their own informed choices and decisions. The point about Edie’s story is that there are non-conventional therapies out there that work. Although the proof of their efficacy may still be ‘clinical’ or ‘anecdotal’—meaning they haven’t been thoroughly tested in a rigorous double-blind trial—that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of further investigation. And some alternative therapies are supported by a good deal of published evidence of success. Many thousands of people have personal experience of such anecdotes of complete recovery by taking a treatment path other than the conventional alone. Journalist and author Laura Bond’s mother Gemma—whose story is featured in this issue (page 26 of November issue of WDDTY)—refused to undergo any conventional treatment for her ovarian cancer. Instead, she tried a smorgasbord of alternatives, from vitamin C and enemas to hyperthermia and ozone therapy, and she’s alive and well today and completely clear of her cancer. Laura has researched the kind of personality traits that make for a cancer survivor (page 27 of Nov issue) and also the roles of ozone therapy (page 29) and eliminating dairy products (page 34) in successful cancer treatment. Even homeopathy—that most unlikely alternative therapy which sceptics argue is just so much water and wishful thinking—has shown such considerable promise in its use in India and in US laboratory studies that America’s National Cancer Institute wants to carry out further trials of its own (page 68). Are we saying homeopathy can cure cancer? No. We’re saying that it’s worthy of further investigation. In fact, investigating alternatives is now an imperative. For despite all the grandstanding, the pink ribbons and the attempts to cloak cancer treatment in the weighty mantle of science, the fact remains that the vast majority of modern medicine’s arsenal against cancer doesn’t work. As responsible journalists it’s also our duty not to censor, which includes not censoring that the overall success rate of conventional cancer treatments is just 12 per cent. From the orthodox perspective, the War on Cancer is decisively being lost. Advertising mogul Lord Maurice Saatchi arrived at a similar view to ours after watching his wife die from her chemotherapy as much as from her cancer. He is trying to gain support for a bill that would allow oncologists to try different approaches. Right now they are struck off for straying from the conventional cutting–irradiating–poisoning treatment. The Cancer Act has a similar stranglehold over the marketing of cancer therapies. No one can talk about or publish any product or service that features cancer therapy of any description without falling foul of trading standards. Read all about it And so we come to the suppression of WDDTY. Although we have been in print since 1989, we only got everyone’s attention last year when we appeared on the newsstands. As soon as our first issue was published in September 2012, the ‘charity’ Sense About Science, the self-proclaimed ‘guardian’ of all things ‘scientific’—partly sponsored by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the official trade body for the UK’s drug companies, among other Big Pharma organizations—tried to have us removed from the shelves. Their spokesperson Simon Singh contacted our distributors, urging them to stop supplying our magazine. Singh then contacted all our outlets (like WH Smith and supermarkets) and tried to persuade them to stop carrying us. When they refused, Singh and a small cluster of his Sense About Science associates began a mass email campaign, bombarding every supermarket and retail group with emails and a hate campaign of trolls on our Facebook pages. When we alerted our supporters to this, thousands of them sent emails of their own—one of the largest waves of support the supermarkets said they’d ever seen.Singh’s campaign didn’t end there. He then relentlessly pestered the Advertising Standards Association with complaints about our advertisers in attempts to scare them away. This skirmish recently flared up again when we announced that this November issue would be a cancer special. The Times newspaper ran an article on 1 October, alleging that a group of “experts”, including “scientists, doctors and patients” were “condemning” shops for carrying our magazine and wanted us banned because of a ‘health scare’. The only “experts” quoted were Singh, and two other Sense About Science members. The article also said we’d claimed that vitamin C “cures” HIV, that homeopathy could treat cancer, that we’d wrongly implied the cervical cancer vaccine has killed “hundreds” of girls and that we’d told parents in our latest (October 2013) issue not to immunize their children with the MMR vaccine. The Times didn’t bother to get hold of us to see if anything they’d written was in fact fair and accurate. It’s also apparent from the information reported in The Times article that not one journalist or broadcaster had read much of what we’d written, particularly on the homeopathy story, and for a very good reason: the article and issue containing it has not yet been published. All we’d published were two sentences announcing our intention to publish a story with some promising research in this current issue. Despite The Times article’s gross inaccuracies and misrepresentations, it was suddenly open season on WDDTY, with other media simply parroting the story. The Wright Stuff show on Channel 5 quickly followed suit with a TV debate, flashing up a photo of Lynne, while the BBC’s Five Live had a radio debate on our magazine. By Thursday, when the Press Gazette got onto it, the headlines had escalated that our health advice “could prove fatal” (a headline now withdrawn). In all the furore, not one newspaper, radio show or TV station bothered to get hold of us, not even to solicit a comment—which is basic journalism when you intend to run a story on someone, particularly one so negative. (The Press Gazette has since changed its story, as has the BBC.)
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 18:38:59 +0000
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