'Natural' cancer treatment?

There has been much publicity surrounding the disappearance of a woman with her seven-year-old son, who was recently operated on a brain tumour, this week. She had supposedly taken off because doctors had recommended the surgery be followed by radiotherapy (the standard recommended treatment for his particular form of cancer, and one supported by the boy's father) while she wanted him to only take 'natural' treatments in the wake of the surgery.

Happily, both mother and son were located yesterday; the woman reportedly claimed she didn't run, but had simply taken her son to London for treatment in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. The logic behind treating possible remnants of cancer with oxygen escapes me, but there you go...

Anyway, the Daily Express today thought it necessary to publish a two-page spread questioning whether alternative treatment for cancer could work - and I use the word 'questioning' in a very loose sense here... After a brief introduction of the case, the first treatment-related comment in the article is 'There are dangers associated with radiotherapy in such a young child' - I would argue that this obviously starts the article of with bias, but I suppose there was probably going to be little hope of a fair and balanced article after the headline 'Do cancer alternatives really work?' anyway.

Then, it turns out, follows an entire article, explaining various alternative treatments, based on the opinions of one Dr Alyssa Burns-Hill PhD. After the first introduction, she is simply referenced as either 'Dr Burns-Hill' or 'our expert'. Her suggestions include an improved diet ('if we eat a lot of sugary treats we are in essence feeding any cancer cells'), complementary therapies, the Gerson treatment and homeopathy ('this is often disregarded because it works in a different way to conventional medicine'). To her credit, she does say patients should always speak to their doctors first if they have concerns about their prescribed treatments, but she goes on to recommend supplements of vitamin D3 and resveratrol, neither of which have to the best of my knowledge been convincingly linked to a reduced cancer risk (Incidentally, a resveratrol study was reported on earlier in the week, but - although I haven't had a chance yet to see the original report - it sounded like another media overreaction). While some of the suggestions are obviously harmless - of course advising people to eat lots of fruit and vegetables is a sensible suggestion - others simply cause people to become distrustful of the only cancer treatments that have actually been found to work: surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy!

Anyway, back to Dr Burns-Hill. Although they add the 'PhD' to her name on first introduction, it is not made very clear anywhere in the article she is NOT a medical doctor. For that matter, while she's apparently a member of a whole shopping list of professional organisations, has worked for major corporations and claims to be an accomplished public speaker, nowhere on her website does she reveal which institutions awarded her the MSc and PhD she puts behind her name. I've emailed her asking, hopefully she'll reply. They may have come from perfectly legitimate institutions of course, but generally, if that's the case, people seem to mention them on their websites... So I keenly await her response.

It's constant stories like this one in the tabloids, especially the Daily Express and the Mail, that feed people's suspicions about perfectly legitimate treatments and keep quacks selling sugar pills in business. A look at the comment section under the above story on the Daily Mail website makes it clear how many of that paper's readers seem to believe chemotherapy is just a big conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry to make us even sicker... Now I'm fully behind the idea that the pharmaceutical industry is evil, but people, that doesn't mean they don't make loads of treatments that work!