Recently in Australia, a young woman named Jess Ainscough passed away from cancer. Ainscough, known to the media as The Wellness Warrior, had rejected conventional cancer treatment for a sarcoma in her arm, namely an amputation with chemotherapy. Instead she chose Gerson Therapy, aka enemas. The treatment is described here, in The Guardian:
Gerson therapy is promoted as “the natural treatment that activates the body’s extraordinary ability to heal itself”. The Cancer Research UK website explains that it requires an individual to consume nine (yes, nine) kilos of fruit and vegetables and use three or four coffee enemas every day. There is a discreet mention that “in certain situations Gerson therapy could be very harmful to health”.
My Gut Reaction: I wonder whether the people who administered Gerson Therapy to her stayed around to provide palliative care while she died?
Analysis below the fold:
On one hand, Jess Ainscough was responsible for her own choices. Nobody forced her to pursue Gerson Therapy over conventional treatment. She appeared to have been talked into choosing alternative "therapy" by her mother after an early attempt to operate on the sarcoma failed and amputation was required. (Incidentally, her mother, Sharyn Ainscough, also died from cancer after trying to treat it with Gerson Therapy.) Furthermore, it is worth remembering that conventional treatment would not have given her a hundred percent chance of a cure.
Nevertheless, she would have had a chance with regular treatment, as would so many other people who rejected regular cancer treatment for alternative "medicine." The consequences of failing to treat cancer with science based medicine can be catastrophic. As Ranjana Srivastava described in The Guardian article linked above, alt med ruins lives and families:
In 10 years of being an oncologist I have witnessed some devastating consequences when practitioners recommend “alternative” therapies.
The emaciated breast cancer patient who was told to present to emergency because there was nothing else her alternative provider could do to help her walk. Neither could we. She died of spinal cord compression after vigorous manipulation of her back.
The man whose finances and prostate cancer had both spiralled out of control by the time he forked out $50,000 dollars on vitamin infusions. He regretted forgoing the proven benefit of chemotherapy.
There was the man whose wife discovered the extent of his natural therapy debt only after he died and was forced to sell the house.
There were the children who quit studying to help pay for their father’s imported exotic herbs sourced from the wild.
Even more horrific are the physical effects of these untreated cancers. Untreated breast cancer, for instance, can develop in such a fashion that it becomes en cuirasse and breaks through the skin, causing horrific suffering to the victim. The husband of one German woman who died this way after turning to "German New Medicine," Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert, published
photos showing the progress of her disease in order to warn others away from alternative medicine.
(Warning: Photos are graphic)
What's striking about these deaths from alternative medicine, as Srivastava pointed out, is that the practitioners of alt med all seem to vanish when their patients die. Jakubczyk-Eckert was quietly shipped off to a hospice by her practitioners of "German New Medicine" when she was about to die. Similarly, the Gerson Institute tweeted that they had stopped treating Ainscough several years before, trying to imply she had given up on their treatment when in reality she had fulfilled their recommended course of treatment.