‘The Natural Cancer Handbook’: a depressingly typical example how vulnerable patients are being misled

A new book is currently being promoted. It specifically targets cancer patients and misleads them into thinking that alternative therapies offer hope for this vulnerable group of patients. Here is what the press release says:

Endeavoring to provide the 1.2 million Americans diagnosed with cancer annually with alternative treatments co-authors Johanna C. Schipper and Frank J. Vanderlugt announce the launch of “The Natural Cancer Handbook”. The useful book explores how more than fifty alternative treatments work, their price, and where they can be obtained…. Contributing to the war on cancer with a bevy of scientific and anecdotal evidence to support the effectiveness of the treatments the handbook is a respite from the mixed messages patients often endure.

With more than fifty of the most effective alternative cancer treatments listed The Natural Cancer Handbook is the work of two years of research. Used successfully over the last century, the remedies found in the handbook are significantly cheaper than standard cancer treatments and in most cases can be used alongside them.

…The handbook discusses the successful alternative treatments Budwig Diet, Beta 1, 3D Glucan, and the readily available green food supplements such as barley grass, chlorella and spirulina. The Natural Cancer Handbook also explores the benefits of Melatonin, Noni, Resveratrol and the Canadian Resonant Light and the Hulda Clark generators.

…Vanderlugt is a Chartered Accountant with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Schipper has researched cancer extensively and has five years training in medicine.

Let’s just take the first treatment mentioned above; this is what a reliable source like CANCER RESEARCH UK have to say about it:

The Budwig diet was developed by a German biochemist called Johanna Budwig in the 1950s. It involves eating flaxseed mixed with cottage cheese or milk. Flax is a plant grown in many parts of the world. Pressing its seeds produces linseed oil to use in cooking or as a food supplement. The seeds contain high levels of fibre and many vitamins and minerals. You grind the flaxseed, usually in a coffee grinder. As well as flaxseed and cottage cheese, the Budwig diet is rich in fruit, vegetables and fibre. You also have to avoid sugar, meat, and fats such as butter, margarine and salad oil.

There is no reliable scientific evidence to show that the Budwig diet (or any highly specific diet) helps people with cancer. It is important to make sure that you have a well balanced diet when you are ill, especially if you are undernourished. We know from research that a healthy, well balanced diet can reduce the risk of cancer. You can find information about diet, healthy eating and cancer on our News and Resources website.

This is a polite way of telling us that diets such as this one is not balanced and not what cancer patients need; in fact, such diets are not just ineffective, they can be dangerous to cancer patients.

Texts like the Natural Cancer Handbook tend to make me quite angry. I find it deeply immoral to mislead cancer patients in this way, simply to make a profit. The truth could not be simpler: There is and never will be such a thing as an alternative cancer ‘cure’.

The concept assumes that there exists an effective cure which is being suppressed only because it originates from alternative medicine circles. But this assumption is idiotic. As soon as a treatment shows promise, it will be picked up by the scientific and oncologic communities and researched until its therapeutic value is known. At the end of this process, we might have a new option to treat cancer effectively. Many examples exist where a new drug was developed from a plant; taxol is but one of many examples.

Those who deny these simple facts in order to make a fast buck from the desperation of some of the most vulnerable patients are, in my view, charlatans of the worst kind.