Young woman with cancer is killing herself via alternative treatment
From Respectful Insolence, of course.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/07/28/another-unnecessary-death-in-the-making-thanks-to-cancer-quackery/
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I hate stories like this, but what I hate even more is the way stories like this are all too commonly reported. Readers have been sending me links to stories about a woman named Alex Wynn that have been published over the last few days, in particular this story about her in the Daily Mail (better known as the Daily Fail when it comes to medical stories). As is the Fail’s wont, the headline blares Newlywed shuns chemotherapy for CARROTS as she vows to beat cancer with alternative therapies while trying for a baby – even though doctors warn there’s ‘no evidence’ they work, with a picture of an attractive young woman proudly smiling next to a juicer sitting on a kitchen counter loaded with broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, bananas, cucumbers, oranges, apples, limes, and…you get the idea, with the caption “Alex Wynn has shunned traditional cancer cures of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy in favour of a strict diet, Vitamin C drip and sessions of pure oxygen.”
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Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking at its worst. There are the requisite doctors quoted saying that diet like this can’t cure cancer and that Wynn should receive conventional therapy, but the overall tone of the article makes Wynn seem like an appealing, brave woman, rather than a woman making a tragically misguided choice that could well result in her death if she doesn’t change course soon enough.
Much of what Wynn is doing is cancer quackery I’ve discussed before, such as high dose vitamin C, various “food as medicine” cancer “cures,” alkaline diet quackery, and the like. For instance, my first introduction to cancer quackery occurred when I was a general surgery resident. Twenty years ago at the beginning of my chief resident year when I was rotating on the chairman’s service, one of the senior surgeons admitted a patient for an abdominoperineal resection (APR). This is a nasty operation that, with the advent of chemoradiation regimens that shrink tumors effectively before surgery is thankfully rarely done any more. Basically, an APR involves removing the rectum and anus, sewing the hole shut, and leaving the patient with a permanent colostomy. The reason was because he had a large rectal cancer that could not be removed without removing his anal sphincter.
The patient’s rectal cancer had gotten so large because he had refused conventional treatment when his tumor had been diagnosed at a much smaller size. Instead, for more than a year he had pursued a carrot-heavy juicing regimen of some sort, very likely similar to the one that Wynn has started, plus coffee enemas. I had never heard of such things at the time, but now I know in retrospect that he was probably doing some version of the Gerson protocol. Whatever the specific regimen he had pursued, besides his needing an APR, another result had been that the man’s skin was the most amazing shade of orange, which inspired me when I wrote about his case ten years ago to call my post The Orange Man. As I put it that post, early on in my blogging “career,” the Orange Man was the first to teach me that alternative medicine that is ineffective is not harmless. That was 20 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
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I really hope this woman comes to her senses before we have to read her obituary.
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None of those Big Pharma toxic substances for her. 
