Blasphemous Tumours.

Just over two years ago, one of my oldest and closest friends, Bugsy, died. Of cancer. He wasn't the first person I know to succumb to this disease and I seriously doubt he'll be the last. But it was a painful time for him, his girlfriend, his son, his family, and his friends. Made bearable by the love and support everyone provided for each other and for the humour and kindness Bugsy demonstrated from his hospital bed. 

I can only hope the lame Depeche Mode pun I've made to use as a title for this blog would find favour with him but I expect he'd have suggested something much darker and funnier. I imagine that a lot of people who have lost somebody close to them to cancer would not want to spend an evening listening to a talk on the subject but, for me, the talk was more pertinent than ever. It can't save Bugsy, nothing can, but I truly believe that it is important for even lay people like myself to take an interest in medical developments and Skeptics in the Pub - Online, among many other things, provide quite a handy service for this.

Speaker Dr Alice Howarth (a researcher who has worked in the Institute of Translational Medicine at the University of Liverpool) was an ideal speaker for Skeptics. Despite some very confusing graphics, she was knowledgeable, articulate, and enthusiastic and, at all times, kept in mind that this was not an academic audience but one, for the most part, consisting of keen hobbyists as well as, just possibly, people who are close to those suffering with cancer.

Cancer Cures - Are We Nearly There Yet? was, however, a bit of a misnomer for the talk as it didn't, and couldn't, really answer that question. Dr Howarth has spent years working in, and putting a Phd together about, cancer research and she said that whenever she told someone, taxi drivers, people at parties, what she did for a living the first question was pretty much always "do we nearly have a cure"?

It's not, you won't be surprised to read, that easy a question to answer. Cancer is a very very complicated disease and Dr Howarth thought it would be instructive, and indeed it was, to give us a dummies guide as to what cancer actually is. I for one would find it hard to explain precisely so I was very grateful for this. As one in two people born after 1960 will contract cancer at one point in their life (higher probability for males and a statistic that has continued to rise over the last century) it seems it would be a good idea to understand more about this dreadful disease.

Humans are made of organs and organs are made of cells. Lung cells, liver cells, muscle cells, skin cells etc; etc; Each of us has about 37.2 trillion cells in our body (to give you an idea of how ludicrously large that number is here it is written in full - 37,200,000,000,000, that's five thousand times higher a number than there are people on planet Earth). I say 'about' because elsewhere the figure is given as fifteen billion and forty seven billion. 

Either way, there's A LOT of cells in our bodies and each cell, typically - there are a few exceptions, has a membrane on the outside, a nucleus in the middle where the DNA lives, as well as other parts with names like lysosome and mitochondria that do various jobs. These cells need to communicate with each other and tell each other where they are so that they can work and so that our bodies can work.

They also need to know how to die and when to die. If they did not we would develop, among other things, webbed fingers and webbed feet. The communication the cells use is encoded in genes from our DNA (the human genome code) and, for most of us - most of the time, these cells work together and do their job with minimum fuss.

Cancer, put as simply as possible, is what happens when cells start misbehaving. When they get out of control, grow too big, start to appear where they are not supposed to, or refuse to die when they should. Cancer cells are, essentially - without treatment, immortal. 

Because we have so many cells - we have so many cancers. Admittedly that number is not in the trillions but it is above one hundred and much of the confusion about cancer comes from lumping them all in together. Different cancers have wildly different survival rates. Rates that cover almost the entire spectrum. With some cancers there is a 98% chance you will survive it (testicular cancer, apparently, has a good survival rate as it's relatively easy, though hardly pleasant, to lop a bollock off) and with others the survival rate is as low as just 1%.

Depressingly low. On average, and leaving specifics aside, if you get a cancer diagnosis in the UK there is about a fifty per cent chance you will survive for at least ten years. That is good - but nowhere near good enough - and it certainly wasn't good enough for my friend Bugsy or, before him, other friends like Kelly and Warren.

The section on how we treat cancer did involve some quite complicated science stuff that I must admit I didn't fully understand but generally the treatment can be split into two categories. There is general anti-cancer treatment (using drugs, surgery, and radiation to kill everything that looks like cancer - blunt, painful but sometimes effective) and there are specific anti-cancer treatments like immunotherapy, as well as other drugs, that are more fine tuned to specific mutations.

There are also, at the moment, interesting and ongoing developments that are looking in to how the Zika virus might be able to be used to kill cancer cells. Of course, the danger with this is making sure that the Zika virus can be introduced to human bodies without causing any harm in the first place.

 

Watch this space. While the talk necessarily failed to come up with a cure for cancer, you would have heard about it if that had happened - I feel fairly confident, it was perhaps at its best when Dr Howarth donned her Skeptical cap and launched into some of the dangerous pseudoscience that surrounds cancer. 

When it comes to diet it IS good to eat brown bread, brown rice, rolled oats, beans, lentils, and chickpeas and it is inadvisable to consume too much red or processed meat or drink too many sugary drinks but the reporting of this as a factor in people contracting cancer has been widely exaggerated and mostly inaccurate.

Bad diet can be a factor in contracting cancer but smoking is still far far worse. Comparisons are not even close. Stopping smoking and improving your diet can help (help - there are, sadly, no guarantees with cancer) prevent cancer but those actions can't cure it. Another thing that most definitely cannot cure cancer is Gerson therapy.

Named for the German born American physician Max Gerson, this quack remedy proposes that those with cancer should, every hour on the hour, consume raw juice and have five coffee enemas per day. It's ineffective, it's dangerous, and it's very expensive. A two week stay in a Gerson clinic will set you back £7,000, you are expected to buy a Gerson approved juicer for £1,600 as well as spend over £650 on supplements and £700 per month on organic food for a period of at least two and a half, and often a lot longer, years.

There are other expenses too. Which is very nice for those who make money out of this stuff but not so good for people being fleeced and subjecting themselves to multiple coffee enemas which can cause constipation, infections, and, in some cases, can kill you.

Patrick Vickers from the Northern Baja Gerson Center in Mexico, and just forty minutes from San Diego, is a chiropractor and thus is not qualified to provide cancer treatment. But that doesn't stop him. He claims that not only can signing up for Gerson cure cancer but that it can cure 'virtually' every other disease known to man too.

How convenient! He claims the science is "perfect" and "indisputable" and he has encouraged people, let's not call them patients when dupes or gulls are more fitting words, who seek his help to distrust advice from their family, friends, and from medical professionals. When Dr Howarth went to see him speak in Liverpool she witnessed him telling people with cancer, directly, to stop all conventional treatment.

According to Vickers, and those involved in Gerson, those that do die of cancer when undergoing this 'therapy' have failed. It is not, it never is - is it?, the fault of the quacks or their supposed therapy but the fault of the sick people they are supposed to be helping because they have not, or have been unable to, meet the hourly raw juice and five coffee enemas per day target.

Admirably, when Patrick Vickers booked future lectures in the UK, Dr Howarth and others raised the alarm and had them cancelled. She believes it is too late for the people she saw in Liverpool, some she is certain will already have died because of this dangerous advice, but this is why it is important to raise the alarm when we see people falling for, and into, quackery.

We should have learned that during the pandemic but it seems we have not. All of this is, devastatingly, too late to save my friend but people like Dr Alice Howarth and the good work they do will, undoubtedly, go on to save many lives as surely as Patrick Vickers makes money ending and destroying lives.

I could never have logged on to this talk and expect to come away feeling good about cancer. That's not possible. But I did come away feeling good, as so often, about Skeptics in the Pub - Online and about people like Dr Alice Howarth who are out there trying to make the world a better, and safer, place for everyone. I also truly believe there are more people like her out there than we sometimes like to imagine. The world is not such a bad place. That's why we want to stay alive and that's why we want our friends and family to stay alive.