Splitting hairs over cancer

By Mara Pattison-Sowden
THE GAWLER Foundation has hit back at claims their methods are harmful to cancer sufferers after a report claimed Ian Gawler never had secondary cancer.
Dr Gawler says the report has been published by one of his long-term critics. It claims it was more likely he had tuberculosis (TB), and therefore his healing only cured the TB and not cancer.
But the Yarra Junction foundation says the Gawler principles are based on integrative medicine, which includes traditional treatments such as chemotherapy alongside healthy eating, exercise and meditation.
When the Medical Journal of Australia refused to print the report without Dr Gawler’s permission, authors Professor Ian Haines and Professor Ray Lowenthal printed their report, The importance of a histological diagnosis when diagnosing and treating advanced cancer, in the Internal Medicine Journal.
It aims to underline the importance of a biopsy in cancer patients, a diagnostic procedure that wasn’t done at the diagnosis of Dr Gawler’s secondary cancer, and the importance of labeling diseases correctly, so that correct treatment is given and not what the authors call “non-traditional treatments providing ‘cures’”.
Although Dr Gawler is currently on a retreat, he has gone to great lengths to respond to the document on the foundation’s website.
He wrote that although his medical history was complex, the report did not consult the treating doctors or their medical records.
He had his right leg amputated in the 1970s because of bone cancer, and was told it had then spread to his lungs. This led him to a variety of alternative therapies alongside radiation therapy.
He said after Professor Haines had approached him in March last year for permission to print the article in the MJA, Dr Gawler reconfirmed his diagnoses with all of his original doctors who stand by him.
“In my view, their (the authors’) theoretical speculation is scientifically sloppy and mischievous,” he wrote.
“It attacks me personally, and they clearly aim to imply that if my case history was invalid then, my work is invalid.
“In my view, this makes their article dangerous, as it could lead vulnerable and needy cancer patients away from self-help measures that could improve their quality of life and their chances of survival.”
The Mail spoke to The Gawler Foundation CEO Karin Knoester last week, who said the foundation would never promise to cure a person, but its methods of lifestyle medicine were based on treating someone with cancer as a person, not a diagnosis.
She said although Dr Gawler’s personal story had been the basis for the foundation, his research, experiences and the thousands of people who had been through his programs in the past 30 years helped to shape the foundation as it was today.
“When people are diagnosed in their initial stages, they can be confronting fear, anxiety, and their own mortality and they need help to look at all the options available,” she said.
“There are numerous international reports that verify the approaches we take to help those with illness, and at the very least, nobody died from eating healthily.
“Ian stands as a beacon of hope to many people.”