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“I consider myself very fortunate,” says Jane. “It’s as though someone has given me the opportunity to look at everything I value and appreciate in life. I thought I was well prior to all this happening, but I wasn’t. Looking back from where I am now, I know that I hadn’t been well for years.” Jane’s story begins three years ago. She kept experiencing what doctors told her was reflux, a burning pain in her chest and was prescribed medication. "I took it for quite a long time,” says Jane. “I went back to the doctor several times and was eventually told I would have to stay on the medication for life. When my doctor changed and a locum came, I was told exactly the same thing.” Several more times Jane went back to her doctor, asking if something else might be wrong. “But they kept telling me that I was far too young and far too healthy for that.” After Jane - who was then making a dream come true by turning the Ambury Park Centre for Riding Therapy in Auckland, New Zealand into a fully fledged school – had been on medication for around 10 months, her friend James who had been finished off his nursing degree became persistent saying that she should have improved by now. “In the end I got really cross with him and said I’d make an appointment so he could hear what the doctors kept telling me.” With James’s encouragement, Jane insisted she have some testing. An initial result from a gastroscopy gave the all clear, but a week later the specialist rang and to say that cancer cells had been found at the base of Jane’s oesophagus. “I was sent to another specialist who assured me how lucky I was in that they had caught the problem so early. I was given a full body scan, dye injections, ultrasounds, blood tests, everything. "I came out of the tests and was again told how lucky I was that they had caught it so early.” Jane was scheduled for surgery to remove the bottom of her oesophagus and the top of her stomach and a suspicious lymph node. Jane: “After the operation the surgeon came into the room. He told me `Jane we took your stomach out and there was other cancer that we will deal with later’.” What Jane’s friends knew – part of the reason why they took rosters to be at her side during a horrendous week of recovery - was that the cancer was so extensive she was now terminally ill. Before Jane left hospital her surgeon said there was to be no chemotherapy, no radiotherapy, no more surgery and suggested that her daughter Kerry bring forward the wedding planned for a year’s time. “I remember when he told me. I was on my own and I stood looking out the window of Auckland Hospital over the domain. Only people who have been told such a thing would know how I felt. "I thought about the future and I thought about life without me in it … for my children and my friends. And then I remembered something my ex-husband had said to me a week before. We are really good friends and out of the blue he said what an extraordinary person he thought I was and how he believed there is one in 100 of most people, but there is only one in 10,000 of me. “Looking out over the domain that thought came into my head and I thought `Okay, let’s see if he’s right. Every single medical person along the line that had led me here had been wrong. Why should they be right now?’” Jane went home and began reading and phoning people. She had lost complete faith in the medical profession and was determined to find out what else was available. She heard about New Zealand naturopathic doctor, Liston Bateson. Reading the literature that Liston provided and watching a video on his work, she began to feel hopeful, a feeling strengthened during her visits. The key to the treatment was eating food completely free of all additives, chemicals, herbs, spices and processing: fresh, natural food “just like my mother used to make” says Jane. Jane now laughs with good humour at the hospital’s insistence that she visit the oncology and chemotherapy departments - only to be told they could not offer her any treatments and about the ice-cream and jelly, coffee or tea hospital diet, food she would never touch now. “I found something in me that I didn’t know was there,” says Jane. “All the doctors were nice people, but I’d never go to a doctor now for anything.” Jane overcame her initial reluctance of sharing her story because of her frustration over the many people she sees suffering from cancer. She wants people to know that complete healing and recovery are possible. The Bateson Diet (for breakout information box) Says Liston: “When I was at university in 1956 our professor said `Don’t worry chaps, we will have a cure for cancer within 10 years’. The medical fraternity are still saying that now and will continue to say that in 50 years time when they are confronted with even worse diseases because they are treating the symptoms and not the cause. “Our diet has changed radically since the fifties. If we drew a graph showing the increased incidence of cancer and the extra changes in our diet, especially with the addition of artificial food additives and sugar, the lines would run parallel. “We eat far more acid producing foods and there are also over 4000 new permitted food additives which have no nutritional value at all. Some are known to be carcinogenic; others have been banned for the same reason. “Experts have calculated that the equivalent of 45kg of additives are ingested per person per year. In 1950 it was less than a few grams. These are new substances which our livers have never had to detoxify at all in the 1950s or all the centuries earlier.” In the past fifty years we have also seen 50,000 new substances introduced to our environment mainly in the form of drugs. Allowed foods:
Disallowed foods:
Liston
quotes Thomas Edison: `The doctor of the future will give no medicine,
but will interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in
diet and in the cause and prevention of disease’. |
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