Spirit in Action
Cancer: The Complete Recovery Guide by Jonathan Chamberlain
Jonathan Chamberlain is the author of a powerful and informative critique of cancer cures, orthodox and alternative. Dispassionate and rigorous, he exposes the facts about an ineffectual system and offers great hope for our health, both curative and preventative.
- Broadcast on:
- 16 May 2010
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- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Joining us for today's Spirit in Action will be Jonathan Chamberlain. He's author of a number of books, but today we're focusing on his latest, Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide. Jonathan takes the big picture about cancer. He ranges widely and with powerful intellectual focus. He provides a stunning critique of the Orthodox methods used to combat cancer, and he provides a survey of a large number of alternative or complementary approaches. Typically low-cost, non-toxic and easily available approaches with promising potential and even proven track records of success in curing cancer. In any case, Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide is an excellent book to read now, even if you don't have cancer. It provides information that could not only cure you, but it could very well help you avoid getting cancer. And reading the book now will mean that you and your friends will have valuable information on hand should cancer rear its head in your vicinity. Let's go to the phone now to join Jonathan Chamberlain at his home in Bristol in the south of England. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for inviting me. I want to get very quickly to your book, Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide, but first I want to get some idea of you and your history because you didn't come to this concern about cancer by going to medical school or anything. So could you start us off where in your life where you lived and how you came to this concern that led to the two books you've produced providing information about cancer? Well, it's a very long story. At that time, I was living in Hong Kong. In fact, I grew up in Hong Kong and Hong Kong was my home for many, many years. I lived on a small island about ten miles outside Hong Kong harbor and I'd commute to work on a ferry. It was a very idyllic existence and I lived there with my wife. She was a local Chinese Hong Kong person and we had a daughter. My daughter Stevie was born and she was born with Down syndrome. That changed my life completely because I was no longer able to just live my own private personal life separate from everybody else. I was thrown into, I suppose, the turmoil of dealing with a child who has very, very special needs and also realizing that I had access to resources that most of the people in Hong Kong who, because they're Chinese speaking, simply didn't have access to these resources and I had the translator, my wife, who was able to do the translating and so we could get this message across. Because of that, I got involved with some other parents and we founded an association called the Hong Kong Down syndrome Association and that's now an extremely successful organization. It's 21 years old. I suppose that experience made me realize that you're not just giving, you're receiving, you're getting back immensely more than you give in fact and that was certainly my experience. So, roll on eight years and suddenly Bernadette was diagnosed with cancer. I felt I needed to attack that in the same way. I knew absolutely nothing about cancer. That was the one thing I knew. Fortunately, there were some resource centers in Hong Kong and they had books that we could borrow and so I started reading these books. Unfortunately, I was not able to learn enough about cancer to interrupt, I suppose, the natural progress which was that we did what the doctor suggested in terms of surgery and then radiation and chemotherapy. Bernadette died 15 months from the moment she was diagnosed and I believe that she died to a very large extent from the side effects, the impacts of her treatments as much as from the cancer itself. I was lost. I still didn't know the answer. I just knew that we haven't found the answer and that if I didn't do something, if I didn't continue my search, I was likely to be another victim because what I had learnt very, very clearly was that you and I have approximately a 50% lifetime probability of getting cancer and 50% seems to me very high and I would like to know what I should do if that happened to me. That's why I continued my research. That's why I wrote my first book, which at that time I called Fighting Cancer Survival Guide. Recently, we've upgraded it and republished it. In fact, it's a great deal, much more information in it now and we call it cancer the Complete Recovery Guide because first of all, I do think it's fairly complete as a book in terms of coverage of all the options but also I do believe that it could lead to complete recovery. I'm going to ask you a lot about the details within this book but one of the things that I want to establish is you're not a doctor, you're not a physician. In fact, I think your degree is in social anthropology. That's correct, yes. I've got no medical background at all. But you've got a functioning mind and so I read all 350 pages of the book. There is an immense amount of information in there so let me just clarify this. Are you on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory? Are you a J type personality? Are you an organized person? It seems it must take an incredible amount of gifts in organization to be able to cogently prepare and organize this kind of information. You see my desk? Yes, I am quite organized. I'm a simplifier and I'm an arranger. It appears to me that you must combine that gift of organization with some really deep motivation. As I go through the book, the number of realms of science and things that are normally considered beyond science that you've included in the book, how many years have gone into the complete recovery guide? We're talking 15 years now from the very start of my journey. I think it is as a journey and certainly putting that information together would certainly take several years. In fact, I have information in my book that you can't find even on the internet because it comes from people that I've met. I've met some extremely damaged people who suffered radiation damage. They were able to inform me about the effects that can happen when radiation therapy goes wrong. I'm not suggesting it goes wrong all the time or anything of that sort, but certainly there are enormous dangers involved with radiation, and you've got to think very carefully before taking that route. Most people don't have access to that information. I didn't have access to that information. I do believe that the book is, well, I hope very readable. I wouldn't want people to be put off by the sense that it was encyclopedic, but I am a communicator, and I hope that not only have I covered a great deal of ground, but that I've covered it in an easy-to-access way. One of the nice things about the book is you start out with a few sections, laying ground definitions, ideas, concepts. You put a little bit of that on it before you dive into great detail. For our listeners, can you say, Jonathan, what your best understanding, and of course, derived from all the sources, is of what cancer really is? Okay, no, it is a big question. There are essentially two issues that people need to have in mind if they get cancer. First of all, what is cancer? And the second is, what does having a cure mean? Now, let's look at the first question, cancer. Most of us, I think in our ignorance, but also because we're taking the lead from the medical profession, tend to focus on the tumor. Let's just deal with solid tumors. We think of it as like a virus or a bacteria that the tumor is the enemy, but there is another way of looking at cancer and to say that actually the tumor is not the enemy. The tumor is a message, and the message is that there is something generalized wrong in the body that manifests itself as a tumor. So just eliminating the tumor isn't solving the problem. That's the first thing that people need to get their head around. Once we understand that cancer is not the tumor, cancer is a generalized disease of the body, then we realize that getting rid of the tumor and attacking the tumor with chemotherapy and radiation doesn't make sense. We need to approach the problem from a different angle. And one of the things that you commented in the book that made it clear to me, and I think a lot of people still have trouble not thinking of cancer as the tumor itself, you said if someone had measles and we removed all of the little red dots on people's skin, we wouldn't necessarily be curing them. They're symptoms, they're evidence that you have measles, but they're not the measles. Yeah, I mean, that was my image. You can cut all these itchy red spots off, but you're not curing measles by doing that. And the same arguably is true about tumors. You can cut out these tumors, but it doesn't deal with the problem. I'm not saying that you shouldn't attack the tumor. Let's be clear about this. I think there are ways of attacking the tumor, but I don't think that should be your only strategy. That's the key. I think that anybody who does have cancer should use a multi-strategy approach. I guess the question that I need to ask you is, why did you write this book? You're not a doctor, so you're not saying, here's the prescription. Why did you write the book? Yeah, I wrote the book to get the answer for myself. I mean, I feel that a book is, shall we say, a way of collating the material. The problem that I faced when I was doing my research was we didn't have the internet at that time. There were a lot of books, but a lot of these books were selling single cures. They were saying, "This works. This is it." Then there were the people who were saying, "Look, here's a whole range of alternative approaches or complementary approaches." But they didn't give any rationale for saying there are good reasons for choosing the alternative cures as opposed to the mainstream cures. They didn't argue that case. They just said, "Here are some alternative things you can do." I just balked at that. I felt, "No, you need to argue. You have to say, why is that a good direction to take?" Then, of course, there were other people who said, "Look, don't be an idiot. Just do surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. That's the scientific approach. Everything else is crazy." For a long time, I shuffled between these different arguments, trying to find my way through them. Until I realized that when the mainstream doctors were attacking the alternative cures, their logic went up the window. That worried me. That was a real concern. They were using, shall we say, rhetorical, propagandistic approaches to attack, but they were not attacking with good arguments. That, shall we say, was the button for me, that maybe I needed to look more carefully at what the truth was about surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Were they effective or not? I found that, yes, surgery, there are, shall we say, good arguments for surgery. There are also bad arguments for surgery. But radiation and chemotherapy, I think, are problematic, and anybody who's wise will look very carefully at the alternative approaches. That's why I set them out in my book so that people can make up their own mind. It's not for me to say, "Do this, do that, do the other thing." No, there are dozens of ways of curing cancer. That's one message I would like to make loud and clear. There are dozens of ways of curing cancer, but none of them is 100% effective for everybody, for every cancer. So we have to decide for ourselves which is the one that we feel comfortable with. Which are the ones that we can incorporate into our lives? Which are the ones that, well, I wouldn't say for, because actually most of them are very, very cheap, and certainly much cheaper than the mainstream approaches. My sense is that there could be considerably greater hope when dealing with cancer than what we usually experience in society. I think most people, they hear they have cancer, and right away it's dread, and this is hopeless, and at the best, it's going to be extremely painful, extremely expensive. We're going to be bankrupted, I'll be bedridden for years, and it'll always be hanging over my head. Absolutely. I mean, that is the horrible message, and of course, to a certain extent it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the problems is the doctor will say to you, "I'm sorry, the tests have come in and they're positive, you have cancer." Immediately your blood pressure is going up, your stress, your adrenaline is rushing, and you are stressed. Now the problem with stress, part of the biochemistry of stress, is that exacerbates cancer, it makes it more aggressive. So one strategy that people need to be aware of is that they should be calm, and I would like people to read my book, not when they've got cancer, but before they've got cancer, so they are in control of the situation. Let's say to, we've got a 50% chance of getting cancer, all of us. I feel quite comfortable now with the possibility that I might be diagnosed with cancer, because I know how I would deal with that. I mean, I imagine the reality would be a little bit different from what I'm saying now, but in truth, after a day or two of IHs, I would say, "Come on Jonathan, you know exactly what you're going to do, just do it, and I would go and do it." Now most people, first of all, it's such a horror on the horizon that they can't even face it. I have tried to give my book sometimes to people, largely smokers, and they really don't want even to accept my book. They don't want to deal with the reality that's there, and they won't deal with it until they are diagnosed. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit and Action on your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and we're speaking with Jonathan Chamberlain, and he's over in Brighton, over in the United Kingdom. And he's written a book, actually two books, and actually he's written six books or something like that. He's a social anthropologist, but by a couple avenues, he's become involved with sharing information about cancer. And so what we're talking about today is his book, "Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide." He also has a shorter book for those with shorter attention spans called, "Cancer Recovery Guide, 15 Alternative and Complementary Strategies for Restoring Health." And you notice the emphasis there, as Jonathan was just speaking about, is about health, as opposed to illness. And it's a very different point of view than what we get from most orthodox practitioners of medicine. So, Jonathan, they can get these books. Can they get them just anywhere? Should they get them from your website? Where should they be going to find out the information beyond what we're going to have on this hour? The books are available on all internet book shops. The big book I've self-published, it's a print-on demand, so every time you order it, they'll print a copy, especially for you. The small book is published by a publishing house, a small British publishing house. I realized that the big book is good for people to read when they don't have deadlines. But for people to feel that they need to make quick decisions, I felt that they needed a quick orientation. So, the big book, I'm very dispassionate. The small book I'm not, I'm saying, "Look, these are the facts that you need to know." So, that's where these two books come from. And you can find a link to his books via my site. I'm on northernspiritradio.org, but his site is fightingcancer.com. What do you try and maintain on your website? Is it up-to-date information? Is it the most current, or is it -- are you just trying to get people directed to the books? The purpose of the website is two things. First is to say who I am. This is a personal statement. It's a personal website, and it does focus on presenting my books. But it's also, just because I finished writing the book and published it, doesn't mean that new information doesn't keep coming to me. What I've done is to set up a blog, and I use that blog as an archive. Most people use the blog as the narrative of their lives. But I'm using the blog as a way of just putting in information that I come across that I feel is potentially interesting and useful. So, if people come to my website, they just scroll down to the bottom of the first page, and we'll see a link to the blog. I want to talk about some of the backgrounds, some of the progression that happens in your full book, The Complete Recovery Guide. You have some definitions and background information at the beginning, and then you deal with what's called orthodox medicine, the surgery, the radiation chemotherapy. You just summarized earlier, you said surgery, sometimes positive, sometimes not so positive, chemo and radiation, considerably less good evidence for either of those who's having a real positive outcome. People have a hard time believing that because all of the doctors are prescribing it. There seems to be a vast disjuncture between the way that we think must make sense and what the medical establishment is doing. Am I overstating that or am I understating it? You're absolutely not overstating it. That is exactly the situation. If I can expand on that a little bit, let's take chemotherapy because that's the one that I think is the real horror. From my researchers, it's clear that only 6% of cancers are amenable to being treated by chemotherapy, and of those 6% of cancers, 50% of the people with those cancers are likely to benefit. We get a cure rate, if you like. If you gave chemotherapy to 100% of all cancer patients, you get a cure rate of 3%, but we actually know which 6% are likely to benefit. There is no good reason for giving chemotherapy to 94% of cancer patients, but I believe the situation in the states is that 75% of cancer patients are recommended to take chemotherapy. Clearly, there is a problem. One of the problems is that chemotherapy apparently does have an effect. What happens is that you give chemotherapy, and the tumor, again, focusing on the tumor, the tumor shrinks. Now, the problem is it doesn't shrink enough, it doesn't die. When you cease giving the chemotherapy, or even while chemotherapy is still being given, the tumor, which has now been made more aggressive, starts growing back much more quickly. It takes over the body more quickly. By taking chemotherapy, you are likely shortening your lifespan, or it may make no difference whatsoever, because although you shrunk it, it has come back more aggressively. In my own wise case, a tumor went from being invisible to the scanner to being 5 inches long within 3 months. The tumor terms are a very, very big increase in size, and she died another 3 months later. I find it frankly incomprehensible why doctors are still giving chemotherapy for the vast majority of cancer. But you are allowing a caveat there that some cancers might be appropriated. It could be. Yes, indeed. There are cancers. Leukemia, lymphomas, the testicular penile cancers are very amenable to chemotherapy. So, I think in those cases, you have a strong argument for following that route. There is also nevertheless a counter-argument in that the people who have been through this treatment, 10 years down the line, are very often in a very bad state for various reasons. But nevertheless, there is a good argument for taking chemotherapy for this small group of around about 12 cancers. If there was a cancer to have that, we could say, "I'm glad I've got this cancer," and certainly nothing else. Is there a cancer that is the good cancer to get? Well, there is a whole bunch of skin cancers which are generally speaking, not fatal, not terminal in any way, and they tend to be excluded from the statistics as far as I understand. I mean, sometimes it's difficult to know whether they've been included or excluded, and in fact, they're the largest group of cancers. The male cancer, prostate cancer, well, most men get prostate cancer, and most men do not die of prostate cancer. So, I guess there is another cancer, if you're going to have a cancer, as long as you don't treat it, because the treatments are problematic. But generally speaking, it's really much better to not have cancer. And I hope that people would look at, you see, some of the ways in which we can recover from cancer will, if you incorporate that into your life before you have cancer, would presumably be preventive of cancer. And these are dietary, they're very easy, very cheap ways of behaving that will, I would say, give you a strong protection against cancer. So, I mean, that would be an additional reason for reading either of my books. Your entire Section 3 of the Complete Recovery Guide includes all kinds of alternatives. I want to talk about some of these in specific and see if they're really very promising, especially compared to Orthodox treatments. So, you talk about alternative testing, detoxification, dietary approaches, vitamins, supplements, herbs, botanicals. Talk about that area a little bit. Is it very promising? Is it extremely hopeful? Oh, yes, indeed. I mean, I think that you could give yourself a 90% plus likelihood of surviving cancer by following a good strategy. And there are many people who have done that. There are people who have gone on a diet, taken a herb, and are alive today. They are cancer-free. A month or so ago, I met one called Beatha Bishop. She's an author. She's written her story. I actually interviewed her on TV. And if you go to my blog, there's a little section called TV Interviews. I interviewed her. This is 25 years along from her being diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Now, you asked me just now what cancers would you like to have? Well, what cancers would you not like to have? And pancreatic cancer probably comes in number one, and malignant melanoma comes in number two. I know someone who recovered from terminal pancreatic cancer using lateral therapy. And they had to recover from malignant melanoma following the Gerson diet. Again, a well-known anti-cancer diet. They're alive today. They are cancer-free. So are you saying, can you be optimistic? You can be very optimistic. And in fact, the great benefits of these approaches is that they are pain-free, damage-free. I think part of the problem for people is they, "Oh, God, I've got cancer." It's like a pollution in the body. Take it out. Get rid of it. That's all they want. It's a very emotional reaction. One of the problems with, let's say, colon cancer. The surgeon goes in there, cuts it out, is that you have a very shortened colon, which means that you can't absorb nutrients so easily, so well, which means that your long-term health is compromised. Those are the kinds of issues that, if you could get rid of cancer without a surgeon going in there, some of these approaches promise cures within six weeks. So why not give them a try? That's what I would say to people. There are dietary approaches. There are supplements that are very definitely curative, very strong anecdotal supports. People said, "Well, I did that, and I'm three years on, and I feel fine, and I'm cancer-free." We don't have the kind of scientific support that some of the chemotherapies attempt to get, for example, these large-scale research studies. But there is evidence for most of the approaches that I mentioned. It's just not strong evidence. It's scientific, but it hasn't, shall we say, been absolutely proven. But that whole area of proof, of research, of getting evidence is a minefield. And again, I do look at that, and people reading my book will get a sense of what the floors are with the whole cancer research industry. Is it safe to say, Jonathan, that you would hold the orthodox approach to treatment cancer to the same standards that you would use for alternative or complementary? Would you use the same scientific method? I would indeed. And if we look at the orthodox methods, using a scientific analysis, we find something very interesting. There is no proof that surgery works. Why? Because it has never been rigorously assessed according to double-blind clinical studies. Chemotherapy, by that standard, has been largely disproven. By any standard, it doesn't work, except for this small group of cancers, for which it does clearly have an effect. And radiation, again, has never been judged by the standard of blind control studies. So doctors who say, well, we've got, we use scientifically proven methods are talking through the hat. They're not. They're using traditional methods that the system likes, for whatever reason. And why is it that the system likes these orthodox methods, Jonathan? Why is that? I think there's a multiplicity of reasons. I think there are, first of all, there are enormous financial benefits for private medical practice for following the orthodox procedures. You get a lot of money from giving chemotherapy. The insurance companies pay up for chemotherapy, but they don't pay up for herbs. So that's one reason. Another reason is medicine is a very authoritarian system. It's a top-down communication system. And it's also that peer review is a very touted procedure. That means when you have an idea, you have to argue and convince your peers that that's the way to go. Peer review, of course, is extremely conservative. It's very difficult to change people's minds. So essentially, it's a very conservative profession. And there are these financial pressures, which are so huge that, in fact, there's been a slew of books recently written by editors of the major medical journals. And these books, if I can just give you the title for these books, they give you an idea of, you know, where they're coming from. One is Jerome Castira's book, On the Take. How medicine's complicity with big business can endanger your health. I mean, that's published by Oxford University Press. Jerome Castira is a major professor in Harvard. Another book is by Marcia Angel. The truth about the drug companies, how they deceive us and what to do about it. These are people on the inside of the medical profession, and they feel that they have to come out and write these books. There is a broad range of people with a great deal of inside knowledge of the industry, and they are not all on the side of the medical profession at all. But we are in the middle, I would say, of a war of ideas. And in 50 years' time, people will look back and say, "Why on earth did people give chemotherapy for cancer?" But, you know, we're not there yet. We're going to look at it like we do using leeches to bleed people. Why in heaven's name would we do that kind of treatment when it wasn't effective at all? You mentioned earlier, Jonathan, that maybe 90% of cancers, I mean, there could be a 90% cure using alternative methods. Are there specific studies, reputable studies, of a large enough number of people to justify that kind of estimation? I'm afraid I can't sort of grab a big study. Part of the reason is that I'm probably doubtful that such studies exist. Part of the reason for that being, a study is expensive. Someone has to pay for that study to occur. There needs to be some sort of financial benefit to the person who's paying. And by and large, if you haven't patented a drug that's being tested, there's no possibility of getting that financial return back. So, that is the reason why vitamins and herbs do not get the research attention that they should ideally get. I have to say that we are ruled in, shall we say, a money nexus, not a truth nexus. There are many benefits to that, but they're also disadvantaged. And one disadvantage is that, shall we say, truth and science is controlled as to where it looks and what it looks at and how it looks at them. Another problem for research is that the way a scientist looks at things, for example, if we take a leaf and the medicine man in South America says, you take this leaf and that will kill you if you're cancer. Take it in a tea, for example. The scientist will say, okay, there is in that leaf, there is a chemical substance that is the active ingredient. So what we need to do is to extract, we need to find out what that active ingredient is, and then we can manufacture it industrially and give it to everybody. And we can test that active ingredient and see if it really does work. Now, what we find, interestingly, is that there is a difference of effects between the leaf and the active ingredient. Take an example of nicotine, for example, might be defined as the active ingredient of the tobacco leaf, but if you drop one drop of nicotine on your hand, you will be dead in five minutes. It takes 20 or 30 years for tobacco leaf to kill you. So we see that there is an enormous difference in effect between the so-called active ingredient. So the question is, is that concept of reducing things to purified chemicals the right way of approaching something? For example, if someone comes up and says, look, I've got a mixture of four herbs, and this mixture of four herbs cures your cancer. Well, the scientists can't test that because they want to know what the active ingredient is, and there are so many possible convolutions of chemical in four herbs being mixed together that they can't deal with it in the way they like to deal with it. But if there is a herbal compound of four or more herbs, and it's called SCAC, and many people say very, very nice things about it in terms of its ability to cure cancer. So are we going to wait until science comes up with some way of confirming or saying, no, it can't work or it doesn't work or confirming that it does work? Or are we just going to try it out on ourselves because we've got the cancer? And that's really what it is. Every patient needs to decide that they are their own guinea pig and to decide which approaches have credibility and to follow those approaches. And you will do something different from me. Your wife will do something different again. We are all different. We are different in our attitudes. We are different in the logics we apply and so on. And it's not for me to impose my answer on you. I think it's much better for you to, say, explore the area, come up with your own answer and decide that that's what you're going to do. If you just tuned in, we're speaking with Jonathan Chamberlain. He is speaking to us today from Brighton over in the UK. And this is Spirit and Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio. You can find links to Jonathan Chamberlain's site, FindingCancer.com via my website. It's always a good place to go. And we especially like it if you drop us comments when you come and visit our site, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. And we're speaking with Jonathan about two books he's written. He's written several others. But the one that we're mainly dealing with today is called Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide. And he has a smaller alternative version for those maybe staring cancer in the face called Cancer Recovery Guide, 15 alternative and complementary strategies for restoring health. And I want to mention we've talked about some of the Orthodox medicine. We've talked a bit about the dietary approaches to dealing with cancer. But that isn't the end of the list. The list is actually quite long biological therapies. For instance, giving you a fever. That's one that's a lot of people, you know, they always want to fight having a fever. But in fact, a fever can be curative. That's one of the things that you researched a little bit about, Jonathan. That's right. There are two ways of approaching a symptom. For example, if you suddenly start feeling feverish, you can attack the fever and try and cool the patients. And that's the approach that modern medicine tends to approach things by. It attacks what we might call the symptoms. But the older tradition is that the fever is the body's reaction to the problem. And since the body is trying to cure itself, then the fever must be doing something good. And so you encourage the fever. You make the patient hotter. That is certainly an approach that some people say the cancers cannot land such high temperatures as normal cells. And so there are ways, there are machines that attempt to raise the internal temperatures in the area where the cancer is, the cancer tumors, to higher levels so that the cancer cells are killed off. That is an approach that actually is shared both by mainstream and alternative clinics. And I believe it's quite commonly used in German clinics where it's been developed over the last century. And it works? Yes, the problem is that obviously it doesn't work all the time. Otherwise, there would be the cure. It certainly does work in a number of cases. One of the threads that comes back repeatedly through the book, Jonathan, is how these alternatives could not have been adopted. Some of them have extremely high success rates at extremely low cost in both in terms of money or pain or difficulty. So why weren't they adopted? You tell the story of a couple hundred years ago when the cure for scurvy was found and how long it took for that to be adopted. Could you relate that so that people have some idea of how something that seems so obvious cannot be adopted? Yes, the story of how vitamin C was established or shown, demonstrated to be a cure for scurvy, was in the mid-1700s. It was a naval doctor, took eight patients, I believe, and he divided them into pairs so that there were four pairs. And each pair he gave something different. One he gave oranges, one vinegar, one something else. And at the end of a week, only one of those pairs had recovered. That was the pair that was given oranges or limes. So as early as the mid-1700s, it was established. But it was not for another 40 years before the military navy took it on as an established way of dealing with scurvy. So for 40 years, it still wasn't being used, even though it was pretty well established as to how to cure the disease. Partly, the reason was that it was expensive. Giving all the sailors oranges every day in those days was an extremely expensive business. So there were, shall we say, financial pressures against doing it. And we can see that it was financial pressures because it took another, I think, over 100 years from that original study before the general marine, the board of trade, private navy, issued instructions that every ship would have to give its crew these oranges and lemons. I think there's the answer, really, it's financial pressures. A lot of things to be examined. And the book is immense. The feeling I had when I finished it. I did have hope, but I also had confusion. There are so many studies. And sometimes, you know, it's a study of 70 people, and they received this alternative treatment diet. They were treated with energy exposed to a certain kind of light or temperature, or perhaps they took a mineral. There's so many different alternatives, and some of them are contradictory. You know, it's like one case, take your antioxidants, the other case, you better not take them because it'll block the effect of the treatment. I end up feeling like I only wish a doctor could have read this, gathered the information, and then give me some advice. Is there someone that I could actually talk to if I end up with the questions? You know, I've got the cancer, I've got a melanoma, I've got a cytoma, I've got a, I don't know, whatever. And I need to know some information to make my decision because there is a wealth in information in this book. Yes, I mean, you're looking for God, really. You're looking for the truth. You're looking for someone who knows the truth. Can you say a little bit about one of the last sections that you have in this book? In the big book, The Complete Recovery Guide, you talk about cancer, the mind, and the emotions. There's a little section in there about, maybe right before that, about prayer, about various approaches to it that are going to seem pretty outlandish to some of the mainstream. But can you say a little bit about how correlated these procedures are and cures that come from that area? Yes, there is a very strong, I think, mental and emotional aspect to cancer and perhaps other diseases as well. For example, that there is a strong tradition that psychological trauma can be a cause for cancer. Is that true? I don't know. No one knows. They can say, "Yes, I think the evidence seems to suggest that." Well, no, I don't think the evidence is strong enough. Laughter, for example, is an enormously helpful activity. It's not something that we just do. It's something that involves our mind and our body simultaneously. It's really a whole body, whole psyche, action, activity. There is a very strong argument for saying that mind and body are one, that if you can engage the mind in the war against your own cancer, then you're a long way towards curing yourself. I know people who simply died because they didn't want to, shall we say, fight. Obviously, if you have no hope, you're not going to try out these things. Some other people, and you talked earlier about psychological profiles, I think people have very different psychological profiles. And there are psychologists who believe that feeling lost, feeling negated in some way, that these are possibly fertile ground in which cancer can develop. Now, why that should be the case? I don't know. Someone would have to do more research. But there are techniques, for example, visualization, meditation, which are known to be very, very beneficial for people who have cancer in terms of gearing them up to fighting cancer. Some people visualize the cancer tumor being attacked. Speaking of visualization and cure of cancer, here's a song by Peter Aussop on that very topic. The song is "Samet and the Dragon." Get ready for an amazing song journey. Every evening, just a bedtime, Samet puts his armor on, jumps upon his great white-style young, grabs his sword, and then he's gone. Riding faster than the wind, he races through the countryside, moonlight streaming down on him. He's armed to fight the dragon that's been burning him inside. Soon he sees the giant body of a little boy asleep. He rides up to the giant ear and listens to the giant breathe. He knows the giant's really him, and he must go inside it seems. He's bigger than a mountain range, and Samet knows the dragon's waiting in the land of halls. And Samet yells his battle cry, "Habari-halu-alay" The style of beers and charges in it, Samet knows they're both afraid. Through the twisting turning tunnels, he'll be found the passageways. He'll come on the floody, steaming rivers within the giant's neck, brave Samet gallops through the face. Through the viny sin, you forest, under tendon trees and bone. They can feel the dragon roaring. Soon he'll reach the dragon's home. And through the smoke of burning, flesh the dragon's laughter cuts the air. He throws his hot hand, stinking breath, the stallion trips brave, Samet falls into the dragon's lair. And Samet sees the dragon's eye. He sees the hint of fear within. Could it be Haru Harai? The dragon is afraid of him. The power runs with Samet's arms. It feels the rainbow light inside. It draws his mighty healing sword and strikes the fire breathing monster right between the eyes. The dragon knows his days are numbered, his fire's gone, he turns to run. He's going smaller, growing wicker, and Samet knows the time has come. He raises up his healing sore knees, stronger than the foul disease. The dragon screams at his soft ears and mouth. The giant body of this boy can heal him, please. He whistles for his stallion who comes, running to his master's side. And Samet leaps up on his back and off again for home. They ride, off again for home and ride. Every evening just that bedtime, Samet puts his armor on, jumps up on his great white stallion, grabs his sword, and then he's gone. That was Samet and the Dragon by Peter Alsop, one of my favorite musicians, about using imagery and visualization to cure cancer. It's on an album that Peter Alsop did with Bill Harley called "In the Hospital." We're visiting with Jonathan Chamberlain about his book, "Cancer, the Complete Recovery Guide," for today's spirit in action. And Jonathan, you were just talking about the use of visualization as a cure for medical problems. Do we have examples of cures by visualization? It's well known that people who have warts that these can be made to disappear through psychological tactics. There was a famous case of a man who had a black box that was the "wort killing machine" and you put your hand into this "wort killing machine" and then he said, "Well, just go away and wait ten days and it will be gone." And in a large number of cases it works. There was absolutely nothing in this machine at all. So it simply should say the placebo effect. And the placebo effect, if I can focus on that for a minute, is something that doctors don't like, that they are very nervous about the placebo effect. And they try and minimize it, but the placebo effect is, in fact, very, very powerful. We're talking about 30 or 40% of people being given a placebo being cured of something. You know, it's not a small effect. It's a very large effect. And it seems to me very, very sensible to, shall we say, go with the placebo effect rather than attempt to deny it. I would say to the doctor, in my own case, for example, I would say, "Give me lots of vitamin C because I believe it's going to work." Whether or not it really does work, it may work simply as a placebo. So give it to me. I think that's another reason why each person should, shall we say, make their own decision about whatever treatment it is that they, or shall we say, series or multiples of strategies that they take on board. That they make the choices themselves because then they are potentially activating the placebo effect. And I think that's very, very powerful and very important. It certainly is. And again, even though you're not giving me examples of studies with thousands of people involved in how these techniques have worked, these large-scale studies, there are, throughout the book, many dozens of studies on smaller groups, maybe 100 or maybe over the course of a number of years, which indicate really remarkable, curative processes happening. And we're talking very frequently in the book, you're referring to people who've exhausted the Orthodox treatments, and they go on to alternative treatments, and within very short time or with very little pain or very little expense, they find cure that keeps them alive when the doctor said, "You've got three weeks." It's really very impressive, the number of cases. And you tend to be very careful about your documentation. My sense is, Jonathan, is that you don't like to speak with hyperbole. It's like, "Oh, everybody can be cured." That's not your way of approaching things at all, is it? I don't like that. No, and I certainly don't like the kind of vague anecdotal report, a friend of a friend did this, or there was a guy who did that. You have to treat that kind of report with tremendous skepticism. But when I am exchanging emails with someone who tells me that they rubbed a particular herb on their breast, and it was extremely painful, but within a month they had eliminated a lot of cancerous material, I believe them. I've got a name, I'm dealing with somebody. To me, that personal anecdote, although it has, shall we say, very limited scientific strength, has tremendous power for me in terms of convincing me that, okay, that herb does work in the way that people say it works. And I think that personal testimony is very powerful. I also wanted to focus a little bit, Jonathan, on, I guess, your worldview. And since this is spirit in action that people are listening to, I want to talk about the spiritual component of your worldview. Could you give me a little bit of your background? I mean, you grew up basically in Hong Kong, you're living in the UK now, your religious, spiritual outlook. You were married to a woman who was Chinese from there. You're a social anthropologist. What is the worldview that you are bringing to both disease, treatment of disease, and how to gather information in the world? I'm very confused. My background is quite odd. My father was from a Northern Irish Protestant background. My mother was from a Southern Irish Catholic background. So I was never baptized as a youngster. They were neither of them strong in their own face, and they felt that I might choose as and when I wish to choose. So technically, I suppose I'm not a Christian, but of course, I did go to schools that were essentially Protestant in their point of view, and I grew up in that culture, in that tradition, and I read the Bible, and indeed I went to church. I don't have faith in the personal God of Christians. And in fact, one of my other books that I've written is about Chinese gods, the gods of the Chinese pantheon, the folk pantheon. I'm fascinated by, shall we say, the religious life and spiritual needs, and I can tell you that there was a time in my life when I was, shall we say, on the brink of a nervous, emotional collapse. And I went along to a Quaker meeting house in Hampstead, London. I sat for the hour of the meeting, and I came out feeling strengthened. I didn't know what had strengthened me, but every week I went along to that meeting and came away able to cope with the following week. And this went on for several months, at the end of which I felt I'd got through the crisis. So I am immensely grateful to the Quakers, and in fact, I would be a Quaker myself, if only I believed in God that I don't. So that's really where I am. Did you have any experience with alternate ways of seeing things? You talk in the book in several sections about chi or prana, that kind of eastern conceptions of, I don't know, it's something connected to our divine source. I don't want to put it into words to explicitly for you. Do you have some sense of holding part of those beliefs yourself? Yes, yes I do, I suppose. I have a very strong belief in flow in being, shall we say, part of the energy movement. And there are times when I am in that flow, and things happen. And there are times when I'm clearly not in that flow, and things clearly don't happen. So I do have that sense. And when I look at my life, I see that it is almost as if it had been planned by another agency. I will return to my daughter, who was born with Down syndrome, who had to have a heart operation at the age of six months. Something went wrong with that heart operation, and she was left epileptic, profoundly handicapped, she couldn't move, blind. And you know, this is a tragedy for her. But it wasn't a tragedy for me. In fact, it was possibly the best thing that could have happened, because it was a real jolt, a real kick in the heart. And I don't think that I truly felt, certainly I didn't feel love, until that moment when I saw her first in the hospital. And I had a very, very powerful sense of bonding with her, which, in terms of physical energy exchange, really that experience has been my guide. To say it's been my guide suggests it's external to me, and it's not external to me, it's simply my drive. It's who I am. So I am very, very grateful to my daughter Stevie for helping me become who I am. It is amazing the gift we get from relationships. I want to thank you so much, Jonathan, for joining me today. And for the great work you're doing through sharing knowledge, giving people hope. Of course, in the U.S. here, we're just finished with a electoral campaign, which is all about hope. And I think you're just hitting it from a different angle. So thank you so much, Jonathan. Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me on your show. We've been speaking today with Jonathan Chamberlain. He's author of a book, actually a couple of them, "Cancer the Complete Recovery Guide" and a shorter alternative version called "Cancer Recovery Guide - 15 Alternative and Complementary Strategies for Restoring Health." You can reach him via his website, fightingcancer.com. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. Today you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.