Alternatives – helpful or harmful?

She was the poster girl for alternative medicine who claimed to have been cured of brain cancer despite being given four months to live.

Belle Gibson’s sensational story of how she had healed herself with nutrition and holistic medicine, including colonics, vitamin and Ayurvedic treatments, soon blew up on social media. At 21, the Australian had the world’s number one food and drink app after she launched The Whole Pantry in 2013 – an app that shared her recipes for curing cancer.

Lucrative book deals followed in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, earning her more than $500,000 within 24 months.

Many vulnerable cancer sufferers clung on to her every word, believing Gibson had found the elixir of life.

Except none of it was true. Gibson did not have cancer and eventually faced jail time for her brazen fraud.

Once diagnosed, many cancer sufferers – like Jo McKenzie-McLean, co-host of Stuff podcast Jo vs Cancer – face a plethora of information around complementary, traditional and alternative treatments, and can find it hard to know what to believe.

The Cancer Society of New Zealand makes it clear such treatments will not cure cancer but says some can help manage symptoms and side-effects.

However, patients are advised to discuss them with their treatment team before starting them because they can affect how cancer medicines work.

For Auckland medical oncologist George Laking, of Te Whakatō hea, the key word in complementary, traditional and alternative treatments is healing, rather than curing.

And that is something Laking, comedical director of the Cancer Society, believes biomedicine practitioners still have much to learn about.

People like him concentrate on stopping cancer, whereas complementary, traditional and alternative treatments help to put a person back together again.

‘‘My own view is that we should make use of as many options as possible,’’ he says. ‘‘There is a difference between treating a disease and healing. Those are not identical things.’’

Laking feels most nonplussed about intravenous vitamin C injections as a cancer therapy. The controversial practice of utilising high doses of vitamin C was first championed by Canadian physician William McCormick more than 50 years ago.

McCormick found many cancer patients presented with severely low levels of the vitamin in their blood and theorised the vitamin might protect against cancer.

Eventually, a study by renowned US cancer research centre the Mayo Clinic would show there were no positive sideeffects, leaving Laking unhappy about the amount of money patients are paying to have the injections.

Other treatments have been proven to be nothing more than trickery, he says, including the infamous Milan Brych apricot kernel theory of the 1970s.

Brych claimed cancer could be cured by laetrile extracted from the kernels – something that has never been proven and instead could make a cancer patient sick through life-threatening toxicity: the kernels contain cyanide. Eventually Brych was found to be a fraud.

Regardless of the scams, Laking believes there is real value in offering healing treatments, saying the practice has come a long way in recent decades.

‘‘To be good at our job we are doing our best to be healers as well.’’

More information on complementary, traditional and alternative treatments is available from the Cancer Society of New Zealand. Jo McKenzie-McLean discusses them with co-host Colleen O’Hanlon in episode four of Stuff podcast Jo vs Cancer, which also covers Jo’s experiences with chemotherapy. The full series is available now at stuff.co.nz/jovscancer, or wherever you get your podcasts.