I strongly urge you to take control of your health by radically changing your diet and life immediately before rushing into conventional therapies.

That’s the advice of one cancer survivor for anyone who has cancer. And it’s exactly the reason I’m against a lot of these pseudo-holistic websites. If I hadn’t rushed into conventional therapy, then there’s no doubt in my mind that I would’ve died.

My particular cancer is common enough, particularly among men, and yet, it remains one of the hardest to detect or treat. This is because it grows slowly with no symptoms, often over a number of years. Once it spreads though, it becomes incredibly aggressive, making it one of the deadliest cancers you can have.

I didn’t know at the time just how close to death I actually came. My cancer was initially misdiagnosed, which meant that I was given the wrong treatment. The fact that I’m still alive is probably no small wonder (and likely only because one of the drugs I was given is also sometimes used to treat oesophageal cancer).

Make no mistake, hearing that I was going to die of cancer was the worst moment of my life. I didn’t want to die then anymore than I want to die now. I have a beautiful family, and my life is full of love and happiness. That’s why I found it so hard to accept that there wasn’t a cure.

I’d also be lying if I said that the idea of having chemo filled me with joy. I’d read enough about it to know that it could be unpleasant (it was worse). Not only that, but the aim of this horrible treatment wasn’t to cure my cancer. It was palliative, and I was convinced that there had to be something out there that could. I just needed to live long enough to find it.

There’s no real way to process the news that you might die in as little as 2 months but I simply wasn’t prepared to bet my life on the belief that any diet was going to keep me alive beyond that. Those would have to wait, and besides, the first thing that this particular cancer survivor did was to have surgery to remove the tumour!

Indeed, when you read the ‘natural’ survivor stories he highlights, it soon becomes apparent that quite a few others also had surgery or another conventional treatment prior to turning to natural healing. Also, many of these people (not all) had cured stage I or stage II cancers or cancers already known to have the highest cure rates.

Reprogram your body

To be clear, I’m not saying that this isn’t amazing or that you can’t use diet and nutrients to fight cancer. What I am saying is that there’s no real evidence that these work, especially if the cancer is already advanced. I think that there’s probably a reason why we now have over 100 different chemo drugs, plus targeted drugs, radio- therapy, immunotherapy…). Not all cancers are the same.

Natural healing uses the body’s immune systems to kill cancer cells and, although there’s no doubt that chemo destroys our immune systems, some cancers too can also directly stop it from working (at the very least they can weaken or disrupt it) while others develop mechanisms to avoid detection or attack. Eating all the whole foods on the earth isn’t going to change that. 

That doesn’t mean these things don’t have an important role to play. Indeed, since those harrowing days, I have certainly taken control of my health and radically changed my diet, so I wouldn’t want you to take this out of context. I just find that this kind of advice has the potential to be really dangerous when it’s a person’s life at stake.

I say this because there was some resistance to my last post, and I even lost some followers. That’s okay, understandable even, but I wish we could have had an open discussion about it because I felt as though my point was missed. Again, when emotions are involved, this is understandable. Still, it was a valuable experience for me (one woman did contact me later to apologise after reading it again).

I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m just a fairly unremarkable guy living with a terminal illness.

It’s just that I prefer to be honest about the things in my life, and I accept that this approach isn’t for everyone. Some people will find these things uncomfortable, and a lot will depend on what stage they are at on their own journeys. 

I try to write in a way that remains respectful of everything I’ve been through because it hasn’t been easy. None of this is easy, but I’m of the opinion that it’s no good pretending these things aren’t happening. Certainly, I think we can cope much better when we talk about things, but it’s never my intention to offend anyone in the process.

Life is like riding a bicycle

I’ve always tried to adopt a more balanced view in life, and this has been really important to me since my diagnosis. For example, I know that what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another, and so I never put all of my faith into any one thing. For a start, I find that kind of thinking too restrictive, but I’ve taken something from almost all of my experiences.

It isn’t my place to tell you what to do. That isn’t what this blog is about – only you know what you should do. Some people prefer to be told what is best for them but, in my experience, if you want to feel truly in control of your own life and health, my advice would be to do your research and make the right decisions for you.

If you think that conventional treatment could be unpleasant, unsafe or that it won’t work, then talk to people about these things and, when you started looking for the answers online (as I have done many times), make sure that you consider arguments both for and against something because that’s the only way you can form a well-balanced judgment.

The Internet is full of natural survivor stories, so if that’s all you look for, then of course, it’s going to look like a really attractive option. However, it’s also full of stories of people who refused conventional treatment, many at a time when their cancer could have been cured. These people often suffered horribly and, sadly, many of them died when it didn’t work. 

So no, I don’t think that you should necessarily rush into conventional therapy, but for me and countless others, it was undoubtedly the right thing to do, and I would never refuse this treatment. What’s important here is that you feel comfortable with your own decision and get the help you need at the time you need it.