The Laetrile Information Page

my story

At the age of 53 I was diagnosed with cancer.

I was a lawyer working in a government job and life was fairly comfortable. All I had to do was wait for a few years and collect a reasonable pension. I had been divorced some years before but the dust had settled and everyone was on fairly good terms.

All my adult life I had been healthy and had always seen myself as a healthy person. On one hand I admit I smoked cigarettes and didn’t have any awareness about eating nutritious food but on the other hand I exercised regularly and was involved in sport.

Nothing major had gone wrong until 1999 when I had a heart scare. Through one of the marvels of modern medicine a stent was fitted and I was out of hospital in a few days. This is a small piece of hardware inserted into an artery forcing it to stay open, like reinforcement in an underground tunnel.

When I discovered I had cancer a few years later it was the emotional equivalent of being hit by a train.

I had stage 3 non Hodgkins lymphoma which meant that the cancer had spread to several groups of lymph nodes. Conventional medicine regards this as incurable.

If I had ever thought about cancer at all it was a bit like lightning, I knew it was serious where it struck but that was always somewhere else and it didn’t have anything to do with me.

You often hear the cliché, I didn’t think it could happen to me, applied to a range of things like car accidents or having your house broken into but the cliché takes on a whole different meaning when suddenly it becomes true.

Everybody reacts to a crisis in a different way and everyone has his or her own method of coping. With me I was in a state of shock for a few months but this gradually began to give way to a desire or an obsession to find out as much information as I could.

So as I began to gather information this led to what many people regard as the second shock of having cancer.

At no stage in the process did anyone inform me that the success rates for conventional treatment, that is chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery, are not all that good and in fact are quite poor. Secondly, after all the medical professionals I consulted during my testing, not one of them even mentioned that there are alternative treatment methods.

It is true to say that medicine has accomplished marvelous things, particularly over the past 100 years or so. Scourges like polio and other diseases have all but been eradicated. The advances in trauma medicine are spectacular. From first hand experience I was extremely impressed at how my heart scare had been managed.

However when it came to cancer I was very much left with the feeling that I had been deceived. I felt like I had been treated like a number and kept in the dark and the poor success rates for the chemotherapy I was being offered were kept from me. It was only when I took the trouble to find out the facts myself that the real picture began to emerge.

So the second shock of having cancer is the realization that you really are on your own.

Broadly speaking there are two radically different ways of considering cancer.

At the risk of oversimplifying, conventional medicine sees cancer as a localized malignancy. Consequently the response is to attack the malignancy by drugs which target the rapidly dividing cells and which unfortunately cannot distinguish between healthy and unhealthy cells. Radiation attempts to burn away the tumor and surgery aims to cut it out.

Alternative medicine sees the whole body operating as a system and a tumor as a sign that something has gone wrong with that system. Supporters see the person as the total of body, mind, emotions and the spiritual dimension. Treatment is aimed at the whole person, in other words the approach is a ‘holistic’ one.

The two groups do not communicate with each other and the exchanges between them are often hostile.

So with these two groups at odds with each other this left me, the cancer patient, in the middle. The end result was the sad realization that I was going to have to think for myself.

I believe it’s a fair statement to make that great advances in medicine often come from persons outside the establishment who frequently face criticism and ridicule in the initial stages of their discoveries.

So the negative way in which the supporters of conventional medicine describe and portray alternative medicine does not bother me in the least. What matters is, does it work, irrespective of what it looks like.

I feel very uncomfortable with the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is a multi billion dollar enterprise. This does not automatically discount it but it does mean that a lot of people have a big stake in the status quo. And it does lead automatically to the question, how much impartiality is there in conventional medicine’s often fierce opposition to alternatives?

I’ve read how some practitioners of alternative methods, not only of laetrile but of other methods as well, have been hounded and sometimes prosecuted until they are forced out of business. As a person who wants to see a general improvement and new discoveries in the treatment of cancer I find this terribly disappointing.

On one hand it is true there are probably people trying to ‘make a quick buck’ out of cancer patients.

However by standing back and reading the literature that opposes alternative medicine the impression conveyed to me is very much of a closed minded approach. The literature seems to start with the assumption that anything ‘off the beaten track’ of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery must be worthless. To me, this seems unscientific.

It is also disappointing how rarely members of the establishment acknowledge how poor the results of conventional medicine have been. The reader is referred to the bibliography, particularly the books by Faguet, Moss and the article by Morgan and others and one of the pages on this site.

So if I was going to have to think for myself, how to go about this? I decided on a few simple rules.

One, continue to read as widely as possible, get many different points of view and accept that there’s a lot of debate and disagreement. There is no common ground between mainstream and alternative medicine and there’s not likely to be any time soon.

Two, a theory or a concept must make common sense. I’ve always believed that in most fields, whether it’s law, science, architecture or whatever, a theory or a concept should be able to be expressed simply so that a reasonably intelligent person outside that field can understand it. Otherwise the theory or concept is likely to be bunkum.

Three, there must be reasonably qualified or reasonably credible proponents or supporters of the theory.

Four, I must have an intuitive feeling that I’m on the right track.

That was in the first weeks of 2005 and since then I have basically followed two treatment programs, the ones described in this website.

I’ve talked to a number of cancer patients following both conventional and alternative programs. A major and striking difference is that people following an alternative program have the feeling of a much greater degree of control over their own fate. It’s a great feeling and not one I would give up easily.

I’ve been following these treatments for three years now, I’m basically in good health, I work full time and the tumors are gradually getting smaller. The blood tests I’ve had over the past three years have said the cancer is not spreading.

I have not had any conventional treatment and have no intention of doing so.

There has not been one week where I have felt despair over my future. Having gone from despair to an overwhelming sense of relief I also have a strong feeling that I should not keep this to myself. If I can help someone else then that would be a worthwhile thing to do.

This website attempts to explain the two theories I have followed allowing for the fact that I am not a doctor, scientist or nutritionist. I’ve included references to books that I have found particularly helpful and I’ve tried to describe different ways in which treatment is undertaken.

I do not claim that my coverage of the subject in this website is comprehensive, instead I’ve tried to display a representative picture. This is not meant to be advice on treatment, it is an information source only.

Laetrile and the trophoblast approach are by no means the only alternative methods of treating cancer, they are simply the ones I have followed.

If I contribute in any way to the discussion then the exercise will have been worthwhile.