This has been the week of the Facebook cancer hoax for me. Since last Saturday I’ve seen four people share the information, supposedly from the renowned John Hopkins medical university in Baltimore, that suggests certain diet changes and avoiding other specific things is more effective at preventing cancer recurring than chemotherapy. It was interesting reading all the way through until I saw the fateful final line, ‘PLEASE SHARE IT TO PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT’. This pretty much always indicates a fake, so I opened up another tab, typed in ‘John Hopkins cancer’ and the first thing that came up on the Google list was the hoax slayer site from 2008 debunking this mythical email that was not related to them at all. In fact, they have issued a statement to that effect in an attempt to warn people, but unfortunately, those retractions don’t get nearly enough shares.

Then there is the ‘lemons are 10,000 times more powerful than chemotherapy’ one which arrived in my inbox today. Again, interesting read, right up to the last line: ‘SEND TO EVERYONE… PLEASE!!!!’ Although to be fair, I was already sceptical as the claim about lemons being 10,000 times more powerful than chemo was being made but was not being supported in any way. Again, a few key words in Google and hoax slayer was number one on the list. While lemons have been shown to have cancer killing qualities, and have killed breast cancer cells in the laboratory, there is nothing supporting the 10,000 times more powerful claim, and research is in its infancy. Not that I’m going to avoid lemons. In fact I have been craving them, along with pink grapefruit, and both of these have turned in pretty strong results in different studies to suggest they can help in the fight. 

But the trouble with these hoaxes is that they are more interested in the spread than the information. Both of them started out as email hoaxes (remember about five or six years ago when people would forward these things to everyone in their contacts list? So much easier now you can just click ‘share’) and have been transferred on to social media to continue their infestation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame the people sharing them. They are reading something that makes them think ‘Wow, that’s awesome, I  want everyone to know this!’ but that is what these hoaxes are designed to do. If there isn’t already, there will soon be studies into the psychology of hoaxes like these and the people behind them. Duping the innocent must be one factor, so too I would imagine is the satisfaction of seeing your creation go global and even occasionally make it into mainstream media via weak journalists with scant research skills.

And this is where the real problems arise. As I have mentioned before, researching cancer is like wading through the Everglades for 14 hours straight in a bikini. It might feel nice at first, but fairly quickly it becomes monotonous, hazardous and really hard work. For every decent site you find there are three others that are akin to getting your leg tangled in reeds. And every now and again you come across a gator. A sneaky, low lying, predator who is attempting to deliberately mislead others into buying their book ‘I Survived Cancer Three Times By Eating Aubergines And Gravel And You Can Too!’ for  just $15.95!

In the past few weeks I have read countless medical research papers, drug company reports, holistic trial results and alternative therapy research and I am still pretty much uneducated in comparison with the wealth of information that is out there. I could read this shit every day for the rest of my life (assuming I live a cancer free life into my 90s) and still not crack the surface. I don’t trust the drug companies. They don’t have to publish the results of trials they conduct if they don’t want to, and that is shocking. MPs have to publish their expense claims, but as a general public and as medical patients, we have no right to read a report that may show that a certain type of chemotherapy drug is less effective than a previous positive trial claimed. I also don’t trust the charlatans, making bold statements about how eating 58 carrots a day will kill all cancer cells because carrot contains a certain vitamin that is proven to kill cancer. Here’s a tip: it’s usually only been tested in mice and that is because most of the funding for medical trials comes from the drug companies, and they are not going to support trials into carrot juice because they can’t make as much money on it. With chemotherapy they are literally making a killing. 

I made a decision about two weeks ago to embark on a healthy lifestyle not because I have read somewhere that juicing will definitely stop the cancer coming back, or that eating tofu will mean if if does come back it won’t be in my ovaries, but because that seems like a sensible thing to do when your immune system has just taken a battering. I will be eating a lot more lemons because they are bloody good for you, but I don’t expect them to kill cancer, just to help my immune system to fight it if it does come back. I will also carry on juicing carrots because when I followed someone’s recipe today for a morning zinger juice with carrots, apple, ginger and lemon it was bloody lovely and made me feel nice. (This was a vast improvement on my overzealous first attempt yesterday when I decided to juice everything I could lay my hands on in the fridge – carrots, ginger, beetroot, kale, cabbage, celery and broccoli – and ended up with half a pint of the most vile tasting liquid I have ever encountered. I couldn’t even sip it while holding my nose.) I will also continue not to drink alcohol partly because it’s not healthy every day, and partly because I can be a bit of a prick when I’m drunk. I will, however, drink on special occasions like weddings because I am not changing my entire personality and I still like to have a good time. Plus, every wedding needs a good fight or a wailing woman. I’m going to exercise because it’s good for you, not because yoga has been proven to destroy brain cancer cells, but because I’ve been meaning to do it for bloody ages and I just haven’t had time.

And therein lies the benefit of breast cancer: having to stop the 70 hour week, stand still, reassess and make life changing decisions. While the last couple of months haven’t been a lazy day at the beach reading a trash novel on a sunlounger, I have nevertheless been able to spend more time with my children than at any point in the last two and half years and they have annoyed me a lot less (apart from Holly continually using my Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream but I have stolen her fingerless gloves in retaliation). I’ve been writing, both this blog and a sit com with Al. The blog is therapeutic and the sit com is slow going, mostly because getting Al out of bed before 4pm is more miraculous than the guy in California who cured himself of cancer by eating raisins. But it’s just nice to have the time and the head space to even pretend we might write an actual episode one day soon (we are now almost at that point, honest). 

I do not want to spend the next five months having chemo and ‘having cancer’ I want to spend them eating lemons, doing the tree pose and having a baby. If it comes back it comes back, who’s to say it wouldn’t have done so anyway? If it does, I will be healthier than I have been in years and ready to fight it. If it doesn’t, I made the right choice and didn’t put my children, Nate, my parents and my friends through the hell of chemotherapy ‘just in case’. This was not a decision I made lightly, and nor was it one I made as a result of reading an internet hoax. Unfortunately other people will make a decision based on those myths, and that could be potentially tragic for them. I never blame the person who shares, I’m fairly certain they do it with good intentions, but please: always Google it first – especially if it’s urging you to pass it on! 

Meanwhile, if you want something worthwhile to share, look up ‘Christian Around Britain’ on Facebook and read updates from a man who is walking the entire coast line of the Britain, Wales and Scotland from Blackpool and back to Blackpool anti-clockwise, and living homeless while he does it in order to raise awareness for the British ex-servicemen and women who end up on the streets. He is humble and entirely unprepared for the media storm he is beginning to generate. If only more things like that were shared…