By Phillip Day

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, or what’s left of it, 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. And don’t get me started on ‘Pink­ing It’ dur­ing Breast Can­cer Aware­ness Month (Octo­ber), spon­sored by — you guessed it — the can­cer drug industry.

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, 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 in me, ‘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, swine 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 to keep the money com­ing in, 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 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 and lifestyle, turn­ing their 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 prej­u­dices and 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 that 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 can­teen 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 1^st 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 Katie Price, no Afghan War. Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe 21^st 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 out there 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 pub­lic was being taught about what they could do for them­selves. Thus they were forced to rely on the ’experts’. Thank­fully this is chang­ing. More and more per­son­al­i­ties are host­ing pro­grams in an effort to get us to change our behav­iour. Gov­ern­ment, so quick to sticky-beak into every nook and cranny of our lives, seems as coy as a vir­gin over the big­ger pic­ture. Why should it? Because the big­ger the cri­sis, the big­ger the bud­gets and con­trol. Can­cer feeds Big Brother and ‘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? Did you know refus­ing vac­ci­na­tions for lit­tle Fifi in Mary­land USA will bring a SWAT team to your door these days?

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 not go there. For now — for all those will­ing to take charge of their lives and make a change for the bet­ter, the good news is, the cure for can­cer is the immune sys­tem. That’s right, stop sup­press­ing your immu­nity through diet, lifestyle and stress and employ mea­sures to boost it through the roof. 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.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Can­cer: Why We’re Still Dying to Know the Truth by Phillip Day (book)

Can­cer the Lat­est Break­throughs by Phillip Day (CD and down­load­able audio)

Can­cer – Phillip Day (FREE 25-minute online sum­mary film)