My earliest memory of my little sister Alison is of summer holidays at the beach, running along sandy beaches, eating ice cream and splashing in the sea.
The last time I saw her, she was lying in a hospice bed, aged 46, breathing with the aid of oxygen tanks, weak and frail.
For over three years, a breast cancer that should have been treatable ravaged her body and Alison died too soon.
This is not a case of medical failure or misdiagnosis. Like supermodel Elle Macpherson (who last week said she had ignored the advice of 32 doctors when she was diagnosed with breast cancer), Alison also rejected conventional medicine in favour of a natural approach.
Except for my sister, that was a death sentence.
Deborah and her sister Alison, left, who rejected conventional medicine in favour of a natural approach when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 32.
Elle admitted to refusing a mastectomy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and Alison followed a similar path, refusing chemotherapy or taking the hormone-suppressing drugs recommended by oncologists.
Instead, he thought he could cure himself with alternative therapies and spent £50,000 on everything from a carrot juice retreat in Gozo to clay baths.
Because of Alison’s experience, when I was told I had breast cancer in December 2020, I wanted to undergo all the conventional medical procedures.
We were born three years apart, so Alison and I were always different. While I was a student, she was a sportswoman, which meant we weren’t very close during our childhood. But once we finished school, we told each other everything in confidence.
While I pursued a career in government, Alison became a personal trainer, and neither of us ever got married or had children.
He was incredibly fit and rarely fell ill, but he always preferred to avoid conventional drugs such as antibiotics and took paracetamol only as a last resort – ironically, I think it was all part of his desire to ensure his body was in the best shape possible.
Unfortunately, he took that approach to a new level when he was diagnosed with cancer.
Alison always had a great sense of humour and joked that it hadn’t taken much effort to find the lump in her right breast as she was only an AA cup.
But things soon got serious. Tests revealed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she was advised to undergo a lumpectomy to remove the affected lymph nodes, followed by chemotherapy. She would also have to take tamoxifen, a hormone-suppressing drug, for several years to help prevent a recurrence.
But while undergoing surgery, she refused any further treatment.
Would it have made any difference if someone had accompanied her to appointments and tried to persuade her to listen to her doctor? We will never know, because she was headstrong and incredibly independent, so she insisted on going alone.
After being diagnosed with the disease, Elle Macpherson said she retreated to Arizona and spent eight months “focusing and spending every minute on healing.” While Alison didn’t have the budget of a multimillionaire, her approach had similarities.
Elle Macpherson’s public enthusiasm for alternative therapies offers dangerous hope to extremely vulnerable cancer patients, writes Deborah Tidy
She compared her cancer to a common cold, which would “go away in no time,” as if healthy living could cure her.
She studied stories online about cancer patients who attributed their survival to alternative therapies or dietary and lifestyle changes, and believed that chemotherapy was a money-making conspiracy hatched by big pharmaceutical companies. Not even the discovery of a second lump, this time in her left breast, six weeks after her initial diagnosis, was enough to convince her to reconsider her decision.
In fact, she even refused surgery this time, convinced that the original lumpectomy had caused cancer cells to spread.
I was distraught. I tried my best to dissuade her, but she wouldn’t budge. Our mother, who died of a stroke while Alison was ill, was also very sad, but my sister remained determined to beat the cancer without medical intervention. It was incredibly distressing and I felt helpless.
Within weeks of receiving her diagnosis, Alison put her house up for sale and moved in with a close friend. Using the proceeds from the sale, she spent over £50,000 on holistic medicine over three years. The first alternative therapy Alison tried was a series of expensive blood tests with a “doctor” who claimed they could find out which toxins in her body had caused the cancer.
She ate every word when she was told she had been poisoned by artificial tanning, by sleeping under a synthetic-filled duvet and by her mercury dental fillings.
So instead of undergoing another operation and chemotherapy, she ditched fake tanning, bought a down duvet and spent hundreds of pounds replacing her fillings with porcelain ones.
On the advice of one supposed expert, at great cost, he drank his own urine; on the advice of another, he adopted a vegan diet. Then he spent thousands of pounds spending months on a retreat on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, where he lived on nothing but carrot juice – a regime so extreme that even his resolve broke and he had to fly home.
Back in the UK, he indulged in magnetic clay baths at one clinic and liver “cleanses” prescribed at another, surviving primarily on raw vegetable juice and potassium-rich foods. He took all sorts of vitamins and invested in a grounding blanket, which supposedly reconnected the body to the earth’s healing electrons.
Alison was adamant that she was getting better, even though every time I found her for lunch she would constantly rock back and forth because she was in so much pain. It was torture to see her like that.
Alison also travelled to a Sussex clinic run by a Harley Street cardiologist, drawn by the idea that high doses of intravenous vitamin C would kill cancer cells. How embarrassing!
Her last trip there was just a month before she died and she became so ill that our local hospital in Yorkshire had to send an ambulance to collect her, admitting her straight to the hospice for end-of-life care.
Deep down, I suspect she knew by then that if she had had surgery, chemotherapy and tamoxifen, the outcome would have been different. But to the end she insisted that she would leave the hospice well enough to buy a little house with a garden and some chickens.
His death, when it came, was both a tragedy and a relief because of the immense pain he was in (he had even refused morphine).
Three years after Alison died, I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer (the deadliest form of breast cancer, which is usually genetic). Further tests revealed that I had 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 dramatically increases the risk of ovarian cancer), and received 12 rounds of chemotherapy.
Yes, it made me incredibly sick and I still have side effects like dry mouth and joint pain, but I finished my 14 months of treatment in August 2021 and I am still cancer free, and that is due to medical treatment.
It seems to me that Elle Macpherson took a risk and got lucky, but her public enthusiasm for alternative therapies offers dangerous hope to extremely vulnerable cancer patients.
Ironically, given Alison’s views on Big Pharma, there is a lot of money to be made from alternative cures, but they are costing many people their lives, and in my case, a much loved sister.
If I can warn people about these charlatans and save one person from going down the same path, then I will feel that at least Alison’s death will not have been entirely in vain.
As told to Sadie Nicholas.
