Edzard Ernst - So-Called Alternative Medicine (SCAM) for Cancer

Thumbs symbols used in tables: ii-graphics / stock.adobe.com

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In the doldrums between Christmas and New Years Eve 2020, I was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital (RFH) in north-west London, following a heart attack. This was at the apogee of the worst pandemic in our living memory. I felt safe entering this hotbed of COVID-19, thanks to the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine two weeks before the event. Although I had once been Professor of Surgery at the RFH, I did not expect, nor was I offered, preferential treatment. I simply placed my life in the hands of our wonderful National Health Service (NHS) and went with the flow.

I was awake but sedated as they carried out my angiogram, threading a cannula up my left radial artery. The cardiologist swiftly identified the stenosis and dilated it up and cleaned out the clot. This was all done so competently, with speed and fluency, so as to minimise the damage to my myocardium (heart muscle). I marvelled at the way a cannula was navigated up my radial artery and manoeuvred into the coronary arteries on a big screen of magnified digital images. Before this intervention, my life was hanging on the threads of collateral vessels, but once unblocked, the beautiful fractal geometry of my coronary arterial system was displayed in front of my eyes and my fear was expunged. The external and internal structures of the human body are sublime, and the role of scientific medicine, aided by biotechnology of near-magical proportions, restores our bodies to functional perfection that has emerged over millions of years, through the process of evolution.

Whilst under sedation, I was in an almost transcendental state so that in my imagination I saw a long line of scientists from William Harvey who described the circulation of the blood in seventeenth century; Edward Jenner who carried the first vaccination; Louis Pasteur, without whose discoveries we would not enjoy aseptic surgery; Claude Bernard in nineteenth century who perfected out knowledge of the physiology of the cardio-vascular system; Marie Curie who won the Nobel Prize for discovering radiation at the turn of the twentieth century; Cournand, Forssmann, and Richards who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956; and finally the scientists Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci who developed and trialled the first vaccine for the COVID-19 in record time, smiling down on me. These are just a few names of those who made the discoveries over the last 300 years that on aggregate saved my life. No thanks whatsoever to the proponents of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM), you might even go so far as to suggest that all these advances were in spite of the efforts of SCAM. We witness the worst examples of those who live in the parallel universe of the SCAMERS who spread conspiracy theories about vaccination not only for the MMR but amongst the refuseniks of the anti-COVID-19 vaccines.

This book of course is about cancer not heart disease, but my personal experience of what the NHS can achieve via evidence-based medicine (EBM), by the underlying principles, remains the same as those expressed in my personal anecdote.

I spent most of my professional life as a surgical oncologist with a specialist interest in the research and treatment of breast cancer. My interest in SCAM began in unusual circumstances nearly 40 years ago. I had recently been appointed as Professor of Surgery at Kings College London, and one of my first achievements was to raise the funds to establish a clinical trials centre for testing cancer treatments in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) throughout our Kingdom and later on to include Europe, the Commonwealth and Europe. One evening, I was invited to join in a late-night chat programme in a debate with a homeopathic doctor. At that time, I had only the vaguest ideas of what homeopathy was. Like most of my friends, I thought it was something like herbal remedies. I spoke about the progress with breast-conserving surgery and adjuvant tamoxifen that improves 10-year survival by >30% in return the homeopath lauded the success of viscum album also known as Iscador. I had no idea what that was, so he explained to me in a patronising way that it was an extract of mistletoe. When I asked how it worked in curing breast cancer, he explained to as if I was a child that mistletoe grows on oak trees like cancer grows on women; ergo, a dilute extract of Iscador must be good for breast cancer and that he had many anecdotes to prove this.

I could not believe my ears and made a promise to myself to research this area of ignorance. I started reading around the subject and could barely believe the nonsense in front of my eyes. By a dilute extract , he was describing infinitesimal dilutions wherein there was not a singular molecule of the mother tincture left. The choice of the mother tincture was based on the principle of like cures like. The simplest example might be a cure for the common cold using a very dilute extract of onion on the premise that onions make your eyes and nose run with tears and snot.

To my dismay, I learnt that there was a hospital specialising in homeopathy in London with a royal seal of approval. Royal London Homeopathic Hospital was established in 1849. It moved to its present site in Great Ormond Street in 1859. The hospital joined the NHS as a teaching hospital becoming the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital by permission of King George VI in 1948. It stopped providing NHS-funded homeopathic remedies as recently as April 2018.