Cancer: A Cautionary Tale
Campaign For Truth In Medicine’s
Phillip Day looks at the latest news and why no-one wants to hear it

I have studied cancer for 25 years. I’ve given countless lectures on the subject, written books, made films, spoken to some of the most successful cancer doctors in the business, and actually there really is some good news about cancer, though you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise with all the tall tales appearing in the press recently.

The bad news we all know about. Britain leads the industrialised world in its failure to halt the disease. The General Medical Council likes to attack doctors using safe, alternative means to cure the problem. More people will die of cancer next year than in previous years – more people will contract it too. The UK has the worst cancer survival rates of any western industrialised nation – frankly not surprising in a country whose citizens have taken to yanking out their own teeth with pliers brought at Homebase because they can’t afford the dentist. Into this woeful mix you can toss all those upbeat charity reports: ‘The war on cancer is being won, just give us another £170 million’, when the war on cancer is being deliberately lost. Oh, and those 80% of women surviving breast cancer? They really aren’t. In desperation to maintain credibility and show progress for the big bucks spent, Big Cancer has redefined the word ‘survive’ to mean only five years after initial treatment.

In the real world and not Bubbleland, ‘surviving cancer’ is not living another five years pumped full of chemical warfare agents, it’s dying in your own bed at the grand old age of 91 from something other than cancer – yanking your own teeth out with pliers bought at Homebase, for instance. And in the real world and not Bubbleland, the simple fact is this; cancer is still killing your family and mine and all the ‘experts’, pink ribbons and ££billions in the world don’t seem to be making a hoot’s worth of difference. And why exactly is that?

Because wars are only profitable while you are fighting them, not when you’ve won them.
That’s right. Welcome to the not-so-enchanted forest of baleful scientific endeavour. Cancer is a $200 billion-a-year industry. There are more people today making a living out of cancer than are dying from it. ‘From an economic point of view alone,’ one professor confided, ‘why would anyone ever wish to cure cancer? Millions would have to re-train.’ Hard to believe, but just as countless millions are wasted digging up the same old piece of road year after year, pointless cancer grants are renewed so researchers can continue to follow the wrong course with the maximum of precision. We’ve seen the same template used with Health and Safety, ‘Climate Change’, Foot and Mouth, the HIV epidemic that wasn’t, the annual flu pandemic which never turns up, SARS, CJD, bird flu, and that other shining beacon of medical idiocy, psychiatry. In Britain, it’s business as usual with the National Horror Service and ‘independent’ cancer charities all vying to scare the pants off you so you’ll cough up more dough. In the US, the American Cancer Society remains the world’s wealthiest non-profit organisation which even makes political contributions! All very bleak and unsettling but, let’s face it, everything we’ve come to expect from a medical ‘industry’ which lies its hat off and can’t even keep its patients from dying of diseases not even our livestock die from.

WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T
After decades of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, it’s quite clear even to the terminally blinkered these treatments don’t ‘cure’ cancer, perhaps for the very reason the patient got cancer in the first place. Dr Alexander Berglas explains:
“Civilization is, in terms of cancer, a juggernaut that cannot be stopped.... It is the nature and essence of industrial civilization to be toxic in every sense.... We are faced with the grim prospect that the advance of cancer and of civilization parallel each other.”

In other words, what if cancer never was something a drug could cure you of but a civilization wake-up call instead? What if all the billions spent chasing a cure have been hopelessly aimed in the wrong direction? Witness King Hussein of Jordan and many like him treated with the best cancer medicine money could buy and they still died. Then witness, as I have, the poorest victims of the disease doing the basics, changing their diets, exercising, boosting their health, turning their emotional lives around and clearing the problem. ‘But if it were that simple, everyone would be doing it!’ people cry. No, they wouldn’t. Do you have any idea how hard it is to change people’s habits, let alone your own? I spend three hours a day on the phones talking to people about such issues and trust me, they want to negotiate.

Doctors are caught in the middle, bristling at the merest inference they are withholding a cancer cure. ‘If food really did it,’ they e-mail me frostily, ‘we’d have been told about it,’ Wrong again. You weren’t trained in even the basics of nutrition, mate, let alone lifestyle and attitude. You have swallowed the enormous paradox that food is good enough to keep you alive but not good enough to fix you when you’re sick. Witness the muck they serve you in the hospital canteens at lunchtime, let alone to your patient. From day one of medical school, they taught you to stop thinking. And you’re still not thinking.

Witness the 1st November Daily Mail headline, ‘So What Is Safe to Eat?’ decrying a recent £4.5 million effort by 21 international experts to discover what’s really causing cancer. The honest assessment resulted in the public being told to curb alcohol, processed meats including pork (yes, that’s ham, bacon and sausages, Kevin), and steer clear of red meat and table salt if you don’t want to get cancer – advice, as Paul Hogan might say, which has proved about as popular as a rattlesnake in a Lucky Dip. Britain’s ‘top’ cancer specialist Professor Karol Sikora indignantly remonstrates, ‘Alcohol, red meat and bacon in moderation will do us no harm and to suggest they will is wrong!’ And Sikora should know, presiding as he does over the worst cancer survival disaster of any western industrialised nation. By the way, what does one have to do to be a ‘top’ cancer specialist under such circumstances?

Look, for a £20 donation, the World Cancer Research Fund will send you a 650-page tome stuffed with literally thousands of nutritional annotations for cancer which are routinely ignored because the answers don’t pay. Things like, if you’re fat you’re more likely to get cancer. If you smoke, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you take drugs and medications, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you’re stressed, depressed, grieving, bankrupt, jilted, divorced or just plain lazy, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you lack vitamins B, A, C, E and D, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you care, you’re more likely to get cancer. See? Nothing there to make Porsche payments with, and who likes their lifestyles judged anyway in this liberal, risk-averse society where we’re told that anything goes but don’t even think of expressing an opinion about it?

Doctors will continue to fail with cancer until they buck the training and accept that a patient is not some collection of malfunctioning cells but a human out of homeostasis. We have cultures alive today who don’t get cancer. No stress, no speed cameras, no mobile phones, no Iraq War. Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe 21st civilisation has much to commend it but there are the downsides. As Berglas says, we’re a toxic society and that includes the medicines. If cancer is striking 1 in 3 of us, that means something is going fundamentally wrong and we’re either going to be honest about it or continue canoeing down that long river in Egypt called De-Nial, splurfing down the rat-burgers until the meat-wagon comes to collect us.

Science tells us that cancer is the judgment-bar of lifestyle. It’s a call to repentance with no naughties to evade Matron’s attention. Dr Ted Morter has the right idea. ‘Your body doesn’t care if you are sick or healthy. It doesn’t plan for the future. Your body doesn’t think and it doesn’t judge. It doesn’t care if you are hurting or if you are happy. All it does is respond to survive. Your body makes thousands of perfect survival responses every instant of your life. You may like the results of these responses and call it ‘health’. Or you may not like the results and call it ‘ill-health’.’

In other words, your body is an amazing piece of kit. During my decades of public research, the overwhelming impression I got was how little the citizen was being taught about what they could do for themselves. Thus they were forced to rely on the ’experts’. Thankfully this is changing. Jamie Oliver and Gillian McKeith are but two of the personalities these days hosting programs in an effort to change our behaviour. Government, so quick to sticky-beak into every nook and cranny of our lives, seems not to be bothered. ‘Healthcare’ costs rocket as doctors continue their ignorance of diet and lifestyle. Cancer remains the corporate preserve of vested interests, these days spearheading legislation in some countries that would make an SS Sturmbahnfuhrer blush. Parents arrested at gunpoint for refusing chemo for their children. Kiddies whisked away to be forcefully medicated to preserve their ‘human rights’. Mums on the run to avoid toxic AIDS drugs for their children. Refusing vaccinations for little Annabelle in Maryland USA can these days bring a SWAT team to your door.

They say that corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned, though I do wonder how these New World Order minions sleep at night. Let’s leave that for another time. For all the rest —for all those willing to take charge of their lives and make a change for the better, the good news is, science has done what science was supposed to do. And science says cancer today need not be the Terminator even for those considered beyond hope. I agree. I’ve seen the dead get up and walk. I do not accept the bias of the word ‘terminal’. In the Oxford English Dictionary it’s where a bus ends up. If it ever had any medical relevance whatsoever, perhaps all it described was a doctor who ran out of ideas, and a patient who ran out of hope.