Cancer is not just bad luck

I am a 'cancer survivor'. I achieved this not by surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, but by starving the cancer of the toxins I had been feeding it until it shrivelled up and died.

Over ten years ago, I was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. According to my surgeon, this was just my 'bad luck' – a random event. Apparently one in six women in my street will also experience the same bad luck. And across both genders, one in three people will get some type of cancer diagnosis during their lifetime. The doctors will tell them it is just 'bad luck'. But is it?

I'm a physiotherapist and I've studied natural medicine. I have a huge interest in the well being of the human body. With this background, I strongly believed that my cancer was not caused by 'bad luck' but by something else.

At the time of my diagnosis, I decided I needed to know exactly why I had cancer, so I did a detailed self-analysis of my own life and lifestyle. I charted details of where I had grown up and lived, my diet over the years, products that I used on my body and in my house, my dental hygiene, my stress levels, my medical history, and other factors. I placed many of the items identified in this analysis in a 'toxic' column and determined they were to be avoided at all costs. With professional guidance from a natural cancer specialist based in South Africa, I established a strict avoidance regime, practised those specialised healing protocols based on the most up-to-date scientific research and significantly improved my diet and lifestyle. There are a number of medically run alternative cancer clinics around the world and these are helping many cancer sufferers on the road to recovery. This doesn't seem to be common knowledge.

On the night before I was due for surgery and much to the shock of many, I decided to forgo medical treatment and make myself a human guinea pig for the environmental toxin paradigm. It took a while, but the tumour progressively disintegrated. Today, it's gone.

How did I do this? First I changed my diet, sourcing as much of my diet from organic food as I could. I juiced organic products 4 times daily for the first 2 years. My diet was almost entirely plant-based for the first 2 year as well. I was using the China Study as my solid reference point.

I also used Ayurvedic, Chinese and Western medicinal herbs, removed dental amalgams, used botanical products as toxin removers, and only organic body products and cleaning products.

To this I added mild daily exercise and a positive mindset, plus short sessions of full body sun exposure on every sunny day to optimise my Vitamin D levels. No sunscreen was allowed. This has been backed up by recent solid data stating the importance of vitamin D in cancer prevention/management and the ugly side of sunscreens.

I fully recovered from an aggressive cancer by repudiating an unquestioning acceptance of surgical and medical treatment and using common sense, with expert help, to isolate the cause of the cancer and remove it. I stopped feeding the beast and it went away! It is the toxic elements of our specific environments that cause cancers. These toxins are ubiquitous, yet still mostly controllable. We simply have to know which toxins to avoid.

I want to make it very clear that I'm not denouncing the medical profession. Without medical research, we would be denied the advances in the quality of life, good health and longevity we enjoy today and the improvements of the future. As a doctor friend said recently, modern medicine has still not unraveled the 'why' of many health conditions and remains very much in the dark, especially with cancer.

The Industrial Age has seen the public become unwittingly doused by a myriad of industrial chemicals approved as 'safe'. Many of these chemicals have since been found to be carcinogenic. Exposure to just small amounts of the growing multitude of chemicals is ultimately lethal.

The May 2013 edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health (USA) reported, under the heading Exposure to Chemicals and Radiation During Childhood and Risk for Cancer Later in Life:

â— Although chemicals have improved quality of life over more than a century, few have been adequately tested to determine whether they pose health risks to humans.

â— More than 80,000 industrial chemicals are registered for commercial use with the USEPA and more are used in cosmetics, food additives, pharmaceuticals and pesticides.

â— Many home furnishings are now made of synthetics and petroleum products, and we are further treated with chemical flame retardants, water repellents and agents that have estrogenic activity.

â— The USEPA has required extensive testing of fewer than 200 chemicals, leaving manufacturers to determine any possible risk of the rest.

â— Further study will likely reveal that many are persistent, bio-accumulative and/or toxic.

In the decade since this article was published the number of toxins we're exposed to continues to grow with no apparent concern for their effect on our health. People have been protesting about this for over a decade, but the response from governments, worldwide, has been nought. Should we be worried?

A study published in the journal Nature in December 2015 reported that up to 90% of breast cancers are triggered by environmental factors, challenging the claim that most cancers are down to 'bad luck'. Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York established that intrinsic factors (those that result in mutations due to random errors in DNA replication) - referred to 'bad luck' - contribute only modestly (10 to 30%) to cancer development.

Important research-based knowledge into cancer causation, like that described above, is not shared with patients. Interestingly, in the veterinary world, research into the toxicology of cancer-positive animals has always displayed high concentrations of toxic compounds. Surprise, surprise!

With this latest knowledge now available to us, it is inexplicable there is still no toxicology being performed on those human subjects diagnosed with cancer. There is no public health policy requiring toxicology to be performed, even on the resected tumour. According to the Australian Royal College of Pathologists, this diseased tissue is only assessed for 'clear margins' (the edge or border of the tissue removed in cancer surgery) and cancer type. That's it! Nothing else! And then the tissue is binned. To further add to what must be seen as an abdication of professional responsibility, there are not any surveys undertaken on lifestyle, occupation, diet or other potential sources of toxin.

Without this basic information, how can governments or the medical profession even start to develop an adequate response to the increasing number of cancer diagnoses?

The tumour, the patient's body, history and lifestyle, all hold the clues to the cause of the cancer, but they're ignored. Combined, they present an open book – call it "Answers to the causes of cancer" - waiting to be read but, it seems, no one is reading it.

Consider this: it has already been accepted that primary human lung cancer is caused by chronic inhalation of toxic substances, such as cigarette smoke and asbestos particles. Veterinarians have also shown this to be true in dogs whose owners smoke cigarettes, and where house renovations involving asbestos have been carried out. How is it that lung cancer definitively has a toxic cause, but all the other cancers are down to 'bad luck'?

The establishment of a national database for known carcinogenic compounds is long overdue. All cancer-positive patients must be tested for these compounds immediately after diagnosis. Surveys are also needed to better understand and document potential environmental exposures. These are vital first steps that we must take if we are to effectively win the war on this horrible disease.

Binning and ignoring the history of thousands of 'bad luck' cancer cases is just reckless and a blight on medical science. Where is the thirst for knowledge? Why isn't the obvious being researched? This sort of dereliction borders on deceit. We have the tools to make massive inroads into this disease; let's use them.

Greater publicity should be given to the way in which the large sums spent on cancer research are being applied. How much is being directed to answering the key cancer question - 'Why'.

At the very least, we should be thinking of our children. Society should demand the removal of medical blinkers regarding environmental triggers for cancer. Kids are obviously in the firing line and far more vulnerable. If we follow the unconstrained – as opposed to the currently targeted - science, we will get those answers that will give us a huge leap forward in our journey towards that clinical utopia.