Dead wrong

It was in the Sydney Morning Herald, so sensible people either didn’t see it or, if they stumbled across Life & Style reporter Sarah Berry‘s account of the success a young woman was enjoying with her quack cancer remedy, dismissed it as yet another symptom of a once-decent news organisation laid low by editors who don’t edit.

Below, for those missed it, is what Ms Berry had to say on January 29, 2014, under the headline “The Way of the Wellness Warrior” (emphasis added):

… [Jessica Ainscough] found out the cancer had returned. Again, the doctors advised her to have the arm amputated.

Jess refused.

She had been reading up and was now “more confident I was able to heal myself”.

The doctors were unimpressed. “It was foreign to them,” Jess says of the alternative treatments she was adopting. “They didn’t want me to do something silly.”

But amputation didn’t sound like a “very attractive option” particularly given the doctors couldn’t guarantee that, if she had it, she would be healed.

For this reason, taking an alternative approach “was a gamble I was willing to take”, Jess says.

It paid off.

Now 28, Jess has been in “recovery mode” from cancer for almost six years and, to track her recovery process and journey to wellbeing, she began writing a blog, The Wellness Warrior, four years ago.

Last week, the SMH updated readers on the latest milestone in that “journey to wellbeing”:

“A public memorial will be held on Friday to farewell Jessica Ainscough, a young woman who forged a career during her short life promoting alternative therapies for cancer.”

At the link below, a blogging surgeon, who goes by the pen name Orac, has some thoughts on the “credulous reporting” of quack “cures”.

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