My earliest memories of my sister Allison are of summer holidays at the beach, running around in the sand, eating ice cream and paddling in the ocean.
The last time I saw her, she was 46 years old, lying in a hospice bed, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank, weak and frail.
After three years of treatable breast cancer ravaged her body, Allison passed away far too soon.
Her case wasn’t the result of medical malpractice or a missed diagnosis: like supermodel Elle Macpherson, who said last week that she went against the advice of 32 doctors when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Allison rejected conventional medicine in favor of a natural approach.
For my sister, though, it was a death sentence.
Deborah and her sister Allison (left) rejected conventional medicine and opted for natural treatments when they were diagnosed with breast cancer at age 32.
Elle has admitted to refusing a mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy, and Allison followed a similar path, refusing to undergo chemotherapy or take the hormone-suppressing medication recommended by her oncologist.
Instead, she thought she could cure herself with alternative therapies, spending £50,000 on everything from carrot juice treatments to clay baths in Gozo.
Alison’s experience meant that when I was told I had breast cancer in December 2020, I wanted every conventional medical procedure available.
Alison and I were born three years apart and we were always different. I was academic and she was a sportsman, so we weren’t very close as children. But after we left school we started confiding in each other about everything.
While I pursued a career in administration, Allison became a personal trainer, but neither of us married or had children.
Although she was incredibly healthy and rarely got sick, she always avoided mainstream medicines like antibiotics, only taking paracetamol as a last resort – ironically, I think it was all part of her desire to keep her body in the best possible condition.
Sadly, she took that approach to a new level when she was diagnosed with cancer.
Alison has always had a sense of humor and joked that since she’s only an AA cup, it didn’t take much effort to find the lump in her right breast.
But things quickly became serious: tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she was recommended to undergo a partial mastectomy and lymphadenectomy, followed by chemotherapy. She would also need to take the hormone-suppressing drug tamoxifen for several years to prevent the cancer coming back.
However, she refused any other treatment while undergoing surgery.
Would things have been different if someone had accompanied her to her appointment and persuaded her to listen to her doctor? We’ll never know, as she was stubborn and fiercely independent and insisted on going alone.
After Elle Macpherson was diagnosed, she holed herself up in Arizona and spent eight months “focused and dedicated every minute to my recovery.” Though Allison didn’t have a billionaire’s budget, there were similarities in her approach.
Elle Macpherson’s public enthusiasm for alternative therapies has given dangerous hope to extremely vulnerable cancer patients, writes Deborah Tidy.
She likened her cancer to the common cold, saying it would “get better quickly” as if it could be cured by living a healthy lifestyle.
She pored over online stories of cancer patients who had survived thanks to alternative therapies and diet and lifestyle changes, and believed chemotherapy was a money-making ploy concocted by Big Pharma. Even when she found a second lump, this time in her left breast, six weeks after her initial diagnosis, it wasn’t enough to convince her to reconsider.
In fact, she now refuses the surgery, convinced that the cancer cells had spread during the first mastectomy.
I was distraught. I tried desperately to reason with her but she wouldn’t budge. My mother, who had died of a stroke while Allison was ill, was also devastated, but my sister was determined to beat cancer without medical intervention. It was incredibly painful and I felt helpless.
Within weeks of her diagnosis, Alison put her house on the market and moved into a close friend’s house. Using the proceeds from the sale, she spent more than £50,000 over three years on holistic medicine. The first alternative therapy she tried was a series of expensive blood tests by “doctors” who claimed to be able to identify which toxins in the body were causing the cancer.
When she was told she was being poisoned by fake tan, sleeping under duvets with synthetic fillings and mercury-containing dental fillings, she didn’t utter a word.
So rather than undergo another operation and chemotherapy, she gave up the fake tan, bought a duvet and spent hundreds of pounds to replace her fillings with porcelain ones.
She drank her own urine on the expensive advice of one self-proclaimed expert, switched to a vegan diet on the advice of another, then spent thousands of pounds on a retreat on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, spending months on a diet of only carrot juice.It was so extreme that even her resolve crumbled and she returned home.
Back in the UK, she took regular magnetic clay baths at one clinic, spent a lot of money on prescribed liver cleanses at another, survived on raw vegetable juices and potassium-rich foods, took all sorts of vitamins, and bought an earthing blanket that was said to reconnect the body with the healing electrons of the earth.
Alison was adamant that she was getting better, even though every time I saw her for lunch she was constantly shaking in so much pain. It was painful to see her like this.
Alison was also attracted to the idea that high-dose vitamin C infusions could kill cancer cells, and visited a Sussex clinic run by a Harley Street cardiologist. Shame on you.
Her last visit there was just a month before she died: she was so unwell that her local hospital in Yorkshire sent an ambulance to accommodate her and quickly admitted her to a hospice for end-of-life care.
I think deep down she knew by then that the outcome would have been different if she had had the surgery, chemotherapy, and tamoxifen, but she insisted until the end that she would leave hospice well enough to buy a little house with a garden and a few chickens.
When she died it was both a tragedy and a kind of relief because of the immense pain she was in. She had even refused morphine.
Three years after Alison died, I was diagnosed with breast cancer too. I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, the most deadly type of breast cancer that is often hereditary. Further testing revealed that I carry the BRCA1 gene. I now suspect that Alison did too. Our father had also died of cancer.
I had a double mastectomy, had my ovaries removed (the BRCA1 gene greatly increases the risk of ovarian cancer), and underwent 12 rounds of chemotherapy.
Yes, I was extremely sick and still have side effects like dry mouth and painful joints, but I finished 14 months of treatment in August 2021 and am still cancer-free, and I owe that to the treatment.
I think Elle Macpherson was lucky to take the chance, but public enthusiasm for alternative therapies gives dangerous hope to extremely vulnerable cancer patients.
The irony is that, given Alison’s views on big pharma, alternative therapies have the potential to generate huge profits, but they are also destroying people’s lives, including mine – my beloved sister.
If I can warn people about these scammers and save just one person from going down the same path, then at least I’ll feel like Alison’s death was not completely in vain.
As told to Sadie Nicholas.
