CANCER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22790, 27 January 1936, Page 10

CANCER

TO TUE EDITOR Sib, —I have been hoping that others of your readers would have commented upon Dr Ulric Williams’s letter in your issue of the 23rd inst., relative to the causes of disease in general and cancer in particular. The fact that no one has troubled

to write a line concerning the doctor’s statements, either of criticism or support, is depressing. It suggests, not indifference, but ignorance and consequent incredulity. No sane person could be indifferent to the stealthy increase in the cancer statistics. This la.ck of comment

also indicates a blind, entirely unjustified, faith in “orthodox medical” methods of treating disease, in spite of the failure of these methods. Unfortunately for themselves and the community, the great majority of people still have more faith in their doctor than they have in their God. Yet Nature’s methods of curing disease only fail when operations and other “ orthodox ” methods have so affected the human system that return to health is practically impossible. Even in these casj;s my personal experiences, spread over a period of about 10 years, suggest that truer words were never written than “ While there is life there is hone.” Some of your readers are probably unaware that the writer of the letter iii the Daily Times of the 23rd instant is a

registered medical practitioner. On the other hand, some of those who recognise him probably dismiss the subject bv ejaculating. “ Oh! a crank! ” To, the latter it will be news that Dr Ulric,Williams is not the only member of the B.M.A, whose studies and experience have forced him to recognise that disease is not sent by God as “a punishment for our sins,” that it is not caused by germs against which we are ( helpless. Dr Williams is by no means “ a voice crying in the wilderness,” but one of a steadily increasing band of doctors, chemists, dentists and scientists doing their best to teach us that disease is caused by errors in feeding and personal hygiene, and can be cured or prevented by right feeding and right habits. If we ignore this teaching, we have no claim to sympathy or pity when we fall into disease and become a nuisance to our friends and a charge upon the community. It is nearly 12 years since a Dunedin doctor stated his conviction that "if preventive medicine were to concentrate on the question of diet, the character of medical practice would change and surgery fade into insignificance.” The circumstances under which this belief was proclaimed increase immensely their significance. The speaker was a doctor lecturing to an audience composed entirely of medical practitioners, and the statement was not challenged. These two facts, if given the slenderest possible consideration by any moderately intelligent person, should surely impress him. Only the hopelessly dense and ignorant could remain unmoved. Restricting my remarks to the matter of cancer, I would mention a few of the well-known doctors who have declared repeatedly and emphatically that wrong feeding is the chief cause of all disease. The New Health Society, established in London nearly ten years ago, has a large number of medical men on its committee, and its president. Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, in an article in the Sunday Express, said it is absolutely certain that all the diseases of civilisation, from pyorrhoea to cancer, are due to errors in diet. The late Dr Robert Bell and Dr W. Brown Thomson both held, for fairly long periods, the position of physician in charge of the Cancer Re- I

search Department of the Battersea Hospital in London. The former, after affirming his belief that “ cancer is not only an easily preventable disease, but is also curable without operation,” continued: “ So much importance do I attach to dietetics in the treatment of cancer that I am quite convinced regulation of diet may be the only treatment really necessary, always, however, conjoined with approved sanitary and hygienic conditions.” Dr Brown Thomson, in his book “Cancer: Ig It Preventable?” published in 1932, writes: “A diet wisely selected is always the best defence against a transmitted, hereditary taint. Food can either increase one’s resistance to disease or it may be the means of making one more susceptible to it by interfering with metabolism and causing dysfunction of the organs. Of only a small proportion of the population can it be said that the diet is chosen with an eye on the health barometer. The majority consider that to ‘ feed up ’ is to feed wisely, but for many 1 of these there will one day be the writing on the wall.” Surely none but the most obtuse person ever born into this world would scoff at tnese men as " cranks.” Dr Robert Bell aepiored the waste of money spent on trying to isolate the cancer bacillus. Sir Bruce Bruee-Porter, another physician who has risen to the top of his profession and been knighted for his work, wrote thus in an article published last January;—“A fraction of the money which has been and is being spent in chasing the elusive cancer organism would, if spent in a real investigation of the food problem of our people, do more to check the spread of cancer than anything else. It is many years since the tubercle bacillus was isolated and grown in captivity, but the fall in the incidence of tubercular diseases, up to the present, has been brought about almost entirely by improvement in the diet and general hygienic conditions of those who formerly provided the bulk of the victims, and not by specific treatment by drugs or vaccines.” I could quote columns of similar testimony by enlightened medical men, but the foregoing should be more than sufficient to impress your intelligent readers. The others would be unshaken “though one rose from the dead.” —I am, etc., January 25. H. W. L.