Malignant medicine

>> >> Faith in holistic cancer treatments nearly cost a Montreal woman her life

by NOEMI LOPINTO

When I first met Francyne Caluori in the summer of 1999, the tumour on her breast was the size of an egg. Seven months later, when it fell out of her chest into a nurse's hands, it weighed two pounds. She was anemic, had lost half her blood and was in critical condition. Francyne had decided to treat her cancer with alternative therapies, foregoing the traditional route of scalpel, chemotherapy and radiation. Now she's lucky to be alive.

When Francyne, who is 45, was diagnosed with breast cancer just over a year ago, the doctor recommended immediate surgery to remove the then pea-sized lump.

Frightened, she immediately quit her job as an animator--and also dropped the doctor.

"I didn't like the idea of an operation. I had seen my mother," she says. Her mother had fought and lost a 10-year-long battle with breast cancer, and Francyne had cared for her during her last three years. The horror of her mother's experience--heavy chemotherapy and numerous operations--led Francyne to make the radical decision to treat herself with alternative medicine.

"I never doubted for a moment that it would work. I was very close-minded and didn't trust anyone in traditional medicine," she says.

So she began the search for alternatives--even though she says, "I never met anyone who told me they had gotten better using the natural method."

Snake oil for sale

But she had no trouble finding peddlers of "natural cures" for the killer disease. Over the year that she lived with her tumour, she saw the whole gamut of holistic healers who offered her hope--for a price. She went to a naturopath, a homeopath, a shaman, a psychotherapist and a psychic. She even moved into the country and began therapy sessions, and experimented with diets and fasting. And she faithfully cleaned the tumour--which stuck out of her chest like a deformed third breast--with special balms and clay. All to no avail.

"I had read that it could take a couple of months for the alternative treatments to work, but I found it was taking a long time. I was starting to decline when I read an article on shark cartilage."

The vials of liquid shark cartilage preparation--often touted as a miracle cure for cancer on Web sites--were $10 each, and Francyne took one per day. Despite an obsessive routine of cleansing, fasting, praying and vials of shark cartilage, the tumour continued to grow and soon she began to have pain in her left arm and hip.

Nine months after diagnosis, the skin at her breastbone began to blacken. The tumour had become huge, breaking right through the skin and was bleeding and emitting pus.

Three months later she finally gave up. "I kept going a long time," says Francyne, "but I was getting worse. I couldn't live with the tumour anymore, it was so big."

Last January--over a year after diagnosis--she finally went to Hotel-Dieu hospital. The news was bad. She was told that she was in the fourth (and often final) stage of cancer, and that there was little chance of a cure.

A word to the wise

But Francyne finally got some luck. After surgery and chemotherapy, her cancer is currently in remission.

And she's been totally cured of her faith in alternative medicine as a frontline response to cancer. Says Francyne: "What I realized is that natural medicine is really best suited to prevention, and the practitioners of it have little experience when it comes to illnesses as serious as mine. I had done everything, I had really tried hard, but in the end I needed help. I do not recommend that anyone do what I did."

Dino Halikas, a naturopath who works for Laboratoire Robert & fils, where Francyne bought her vials of shark cartilage, did not express any sense of responsibility for Francyne's suffering in an interview with the Mirror.

"There is no doubt in my mind that natural products could easily be used to treat cancer," he says. "If you believe, through your own research, that shark cartilage will help you then you will buy our products. It doesn't mean I've promised you that I will cure your cancer. You have decided to take it, no different than buying Avon anti-wrinkle cream."

But Hotel-Dieu oncologist Jacques Cantin, who removed the malignant tumours from Francyne's hip, neck and sternum, says, "This is not the first person I have seen who has tried these products--and with consistently catastrophic results. The products she used had an enormous effect on her wallet and nothing more. She was lucky that traditional medicine stepped in when it did. People who sell this stuff to desperately ill people for enormous profit are criminals." :

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