I THINK I’m going to have to switch to Radio 3 for my bedtime music: I hear it’s not so intimidatingly avant-garde nowadays, and it’s mercifully advert-free. Adverts, in the old days, were just about bearable. They were aptly called ‘commercials’, and we knew that what they were about was making money, as they competitively extolled different brands of cigarettes or washing powder or margarine. Today, more and more ads are either government ‘nudges’, or promote big health charities whose profit motives lurk beneath the surface and whose selling point is fear: not something I wish to go to sleep or wake up to.

Take the cancer ads, for instance.

One in two people in the UK will get cancer in their lifetime, they state authoritatively. What is more, cancer is hereditary, so take note, you who have lost relatives to the disease. However (now that you are anxiously weighing up your personal odds or wondering about the chances for someone close to you) fear not! Just send us a donation or leave us a bequest in your will and all will be well. If enough of you give your bit towards research, ‘We will beat cancer!’ 

And, to propitiate the gods, we give.

Yet something is not quite right here. Why, as the money-raising bandwagon rolls on, lavishly funding the pharmaceutical companies, are more and more, rather than fewer and fewer, people succumbing to the disease? True, a greater number of this greater number are now surviving their diagnosis by five years or more: but why, after all those years of costly research, are they merely in a state of remission? Why are they not cured? Again, what quality of life can those undergoing constant check-ups and medication expect as they ‘live with cancer’? Why are the treatments offered by the NHS still limited to the knife, radiation or various cocktails of eye-wateringly expensive drugs? And can the accelerating frequency of cases possibly be related to the equally accelerating frequency of testing for the disease, in all its dizzying variety of manifestations? 

My mother belonged to a generation to whom the NHS was introduced as a novelty in their middle years. She died just short of her 97^th birthday, having steered well clear of doctors for almost her entire life. Doctors, she maintained, ‘set things off’. I used to laugh at her distrust of the medical profession. Today, I suspect that, as in so many areas where I thought her quaintly old-fashioned, it was she who was right.

Experience suggests that a healthy and well-cared-for body, if left alone, is a miraculously self-righting organism. Wounds heal; headaches melt away; coughs and colds pass without degenerating into something worse. Likewise, cancer cells, we are told, are continuously being detected and eliminated by the body’s own defence mechanisms; so why the constant pre-emptive testing, disturbing these innate processes and perhaps discovering ‘pre-cancerous cells’ which might well have been disposed of naturally, and without instilling fear into the prospective patient’s heart, had they been left alone?

As for the treatments on offer, once actual tumours have been located, beware the side effects! You will be warned of these in gruelling detail before any consent forms are signed, but the fact is that no oncologist can predict their severity in a particular case. For most patients, maybe, any side effects are a tolerable price to pay for survival: but it is a lottery, and those whose natural bodily defences are the most robust may perhaps react with the greatest violence to the forcible intrusion of alien substances. For my part, I fear the treatments more than the disease itself: as would anyone who has seen a comparatively strong and vigorous man reduced to a frail shadow of himself a mere two weeks after his initial dose of immunotherapy.

Surely, by now, the billions poured into cancer research should have come up with treatments which don’t make the body whisper, let alone scream out, ‘Please stop what you are doing to me!’

There are such treatments. The word is that thousands of people have survived even stage four cancers for years without the help of orthodox medicine, and without any side effects from the natural therapies to which they resorted after, in many cases, being told to go home and die. These therapies are dismissed as mere quackery by the medical establishment, because they have not been subjected to testing in the laboratory. All they have to vouch for them is the word of the poor, deluded creatures who swear that, without them, they would be dead.

Most of these benign therapies involve either the use of herbs or a drastic change of diet (as advised by Hippocrates, when he urged, ‘Let food be thy medicine!’). Some were devised by doctors who rejected orthodox methods, some by individuals passing on traditional folk treatments. None of them will ever be tested, because testing is a multi-million-dollar process which requires the payback of even greater sums once a new drug is released onto the market. Dietary cures and those involving natural materials are simply not a good business proposition. They cannot be patented and, should they become widely accepted, would challenge not only one of Big Pharma’s most lucrative income streams but the charities which contribute to its coffers.

As we saw during covid, even the bona fide research of qualified scientists counts for nothing, if it goes against ‘the narrative’. The money-spinning narrative, at present, is that cancer is a genetic disease, and it is in this direction that the millions donated to official cancer charities will flow, to focus on the production of yet more ‘miracle’ drugs: drugs that attack both rogue cells and the body in general in a hit-and-miss onslaught which requires yet more drugs to alleviate unpredictable side effects.

Meanwhile, promising low-cost treatments such as GcMAF are swept under the carpet, and privately funded research by Dr Thomas N Seyfried and others into the metabolic theory of cancer and the apparent inability of any cancer cell to live without fermentation, proceeds apace, unbeknown to the specialists in our hospitals.

According to the UK’s National Audit Office, ‘cancer services cost the NHS approximately £6.7billionn per annum in 2012/13’, and were expected to grow by 9 per cent each year, ‘implying a total of £13bn by 2020/21’. Given the explosion of cancer cases since covid, this sum will by now have been vastly exceeded

Can we look forward to a day when cancer specialists are trained in the whole range of successful treatments, including those which do not involve either expensive pharmaceuticals or debilitating side effects? This would no doubt provoke howls of outrage from the pharmaceutical industry. It would, however, not only be welcomed by those cancer patients who fear, or have no faith in, the current treatments on offer, but could significantly improve the finances of our cash-strapped NHS.

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