This study wouldn’t have happened without the donation of the requisite supplements by the companies that manufacture them and Oliver’s decision to offer his services free. The NHS will not currently fund natural remedies for advanced prostate or breast cancer. Nor will most health insurance companies. Those who decide to adopt the Pfeifer Protocol must pay, out of their own pockets, £500 a month for his supplements during the first phase of treatment until the PSA drops, on top of a £210 hourly consultation fee.
The NHS prefers to stick with the more expensive, and more uncomfortable, traditional option: chemotherapy. Tim Oliver is an exception to the rule. Most oncologists regard the Pfeifer Protocol, and other nutrition and diet therapies, as ineffectual if not fraudulent, particularly once the disease has spread.
The arguments don’t stop here. There are increasing misgivings about interventions by surgeons and chemotherapists too. In the same month that Pfeifer gave his talk, researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre reported on seven trials investigating screenings for breast cancer. They found that for every 2,000 women invited to have mammograms, in the event of a tumour being spotted, only one would have her life prolonged. Ten others would endure potentially unnecessary treatments for slow-developing forms of the disease that they were more likely to die with than they were to die from.
There is a new buzz word doing the rounds: “overdiagnosis”. Even though cases where cancers disappear without treatment are rare, and only 5% of patients who decline to follow doctors’ orders will survive as long as those who do, there is more distrust than ever in conventional treatments. In the battle against cancer, some of the most interesting fighting, it turns out, is taking place among those who are, ostensibly at least, on the same side.
I am reminded of this sharp divergence of medical opinion every month when I meet with my oncologist. Professor Jonathan Waxman is a leading authority on cancer of the prostate – my problem, still unsolved after a prostatectomy four years ago. He is also the founder and president of the Prostate Cancer Charity. After 30 years studying it and campaigning for greater awareness, he knows more than most about a disease that is still, as he often remarks, poorly understood.
In the early 1980s, Waxman helped to pioneer the testosterone-suppressing injections that are now routinely offered to men with advanced prostate cancer. Before these were available, eradication of the male hormone that feeds the tumour could only be achieved via castration – a medieval-sounding procedure that was, in fact, only introduced in 1941 by an American physician, a Dr Huggins, who won the 1966 Nobel prize for medicine as a consequence.
For all his interest in biochemical interventions, Waxman is convinced that diet plays a significant role in the prostate scenario. He has published a book in which he lays out research showing how countries where red meat and dairy products are eaten in ever greater quantities – the West, basically – have all witnessed a dramatic increase in the incidence of cancer of both the prostate and the breast.
That these remain rare in the Far East and Africa, Waxman puts down to the protective influence of local staples such as soya and yellow beans, and various steroids found in plants. A number of recent publications in medical journals, as well as one large-scale study, Cancer in Five Continents, have shown that vegans are 50% less likely to suffer from breast or prostate cancer than the rest of us. When the Dutch were forced to dramatically reduce their intake of dairy and meat products during the German occupation in the second world war, rates of both diseases plummeted. In a memorable phrase, Waxman once told me that he considered smoked meats – popular in areas of northern Europe, where prostate cancer is again rampant – to be “greased with carcinogens”.
As sure as he is that our eating habits are crucial in determining whether or not we get it in the first place, Waxman is equally certain that once it is there, a cancer could not care less what we eat. In a recent article in the British Medical Journal, he also spoke out against the diets and herbal remedies that an estimated four out of five cancer patients have tried.
At our first consultation in the Hammersmith hospital in 2003, he particularly urged me not to adopt any cranky diets. He told stories of patients who had starved themselves to no purpose, or blown large sums on vitamin supplements he regarded as a waste of money. He went out of his way to encourage me to carry on drinking as much wine as I liked, insisting cheerily that “Drink and pharmaceutical drugs do mix.”
On the one hand, this sounded good. I had for some time been nearly gagging every morning on capsules of lycopene, vitamins and antioxidants, at the suggestion of my other half, who is herself studying nutritional therapy. I had started avoiding my favourite cuts of red meat in favour of chewing fibrous stumps of vegetable matter with supposedly anti-cancerous properties. On the other hand, with the daily drumbeat of media reports relating the impact of such-and-such a diet, or food, in retarding the progress of various cancers – this week the saviour is chilli, last month it was vitamin D – the Waxman directive to eat, drink and be merry sounded too good to be true. There was one story that particularly troubled a person with a notoriously sweet tooth (me). Cancers love refined sugar, it stated; it helps them to grow. So surely it made sense to cut down on that? And what is alcohol but fermented sugar anyway?
I consulted a well-known nutritional therapist, Ian Marber, at his swish clinic in Holland Park, London. “A basic tenet of nutrition is that you don’t feed cancer with excessive glucose,” he told me. Marber then drew a diagram on a flip chart that showed how once a cancer has grown its own blood vessels, in the spooky, crab-like formation that prompted the Romans to name the disease after their word for the crab, it cleverly helps itself to what it needs directly from the bloodstream. (The medical term for this is angiogenesis.) “You’ve got to keep your glucose level low enough not to feed something that shouldn’t be there,” he said. To that end, Marber advised me to eat plenty of protein with my carbohydrates, to slow down the rate at which carbs are converted into sugars.()
