If I’d listened to Elle Macpherson’s cancer advice, I might not be here (2024)

Three years ago, I received the news every woman dreads. I had breast cancer.

Mine was terrifyingly aggressive with fast-growing tumours that had spread to my lymph nodes. ‘I bet you feel this has come out of nowhere,’ said my kindly oncologist as I sobbed helplessly.

It barely seemed real.

I was 58, fit and feeling fabulous. I had visited the GP a couple of weeks before after experiencing a pain in my left breast, and noticed that it changed shape when I raised my arm above my head. She immediately referred me to the hospital’s breast clinic.

My first thought was of my two children, then aged 16 and 19.

‘I can’t die,’ I wept. ‘They need me.’

I immediately told my doctors I would accept any treatment I was offered. ‘I am putting my life in your hands,’ I told them.

And so began months of chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy and then over a year of injections of targeted drugs aimed at my particular cancer type, which is called HER2-positive.

After eight cycles of chemo and targeted therapies, to my joy, my final scan showed that the tumours had vanished. It felt like a miracle.

While it’s not the best approach for everyone with breast cancer, one study showed chemotherapy can reduce the risk of death by 25% and the risk of the cancer spreading by 18%.

As one woman in seven will suffer the disease during her lifetime, and around 11,500 women and 85 men die from breast cancer in the UK every year, that’s a hell of a lot of lives saved.

And as someone who hopes to be one of those people, you can imagine my concern at reading this week that model-turned-wellness-influencer Elle Macpherson told Australia’s Women’s Weekly, that after being diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago, she’d turned down chemo she said had been recommended.

Then, after consulting with ’32 doctors and experts’ she decided in favour of a ‘an intuitive, heart-led, holistic approach’.

This seems to have largely entailed sitting on a beach in Arizona ‘focusing and devoting every single minute to healing’ with a team including an ‘holistic dentist’, a chiropractor, and a ‘doctor of naturopathy.’

Of course that may not have been the whole story, and we’d need to know more about the nature of her cancer and what further tests were done in order for doctors to give the advice she says they did to make a complete judgement on Macpherson’s behaviour.

But she has also previously praised a doctor who called chemo ‘poison’ and claimed to have cured her own cervical cancer with a vegan juice detox.

The privilege is jaw-dropping – and Macpherson’s comments would be almost comical if they weren’t so frightening.

And so is the message this conveys. As well as having gone through breast cancer, I am also a health journalist. Years of reading about medical treatments and innovation have unearthed some important facts.

Alternative or holistic therapies sound harmless, but the truth is that opting for them over proper medical care can increase the risk of dying sixfold within five years compared to traditional treatments.

Refusing treatment is such a crazy thing to do that there are few studies showing what happens, but one showed that only 4% of women survived for ten years.

What’s more, it may not actually be the case that Macpherson refused the correct medical care for her condition.

She was quoted by the magazine as saying she was diagnosed with ‘intraductal carcinoma’. This is also known as Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS) or stage 0 early breast cancer.

DCIS has an excellent prognosis, and in 50 to 80% of cases, will never progress to become invasive.

This means that any treatment is precautionary and I cannot see why chemo would actually be recommended.

So while I’m not sure which doctors suggested chemotherapy to the supermodel, I am sure it would have been a highly unusual treatment for the form of cancer she had.

Macpherson also told the magazine she’d had a type of surgery called lumpectomy, which leaves most of the breast untouched.

That might not have been a ‘holistic’ approach – but it does seem to be the correct one.

After that operation, patients have a 15-year survival rate of 98%.

Doctors can recommend radiotherapy as an addition to boost survival rates, and it does seem to be that treatment Macpherson opted to avoid.

But trust me, as someone who has been through both gruelling chemo and mastectomies, there would be no point in treating patients with Macpherson’s condition the same way that I was.

Macpherson told the magazine, ‘Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But saying no to my own inner sense would have been even harder.’

Yet surely ‘standard medical solutions’ in the form of surgery was exactly what she did opt for. It seems misleading for her to suggest her positive outcomes were as a result of alternative medicine.

Responding to the news of Elle Macpherson’s diagnosis, Jane Murphy, clinical nurse specialist at the charity Breast Cancer Now, said, ‘Each person’s breast cancer diagnosis is different, and as such the treatment they are recommended will be tailored to their individual situation by a team of experts. Specialists base this on robust clinical evidence. ’

In other words, trust your doctors.

My profound fear is that women who do not have DCIS like Elle, but instead have large, aggressive cancers like mine, will look at the former supermodel’s glowing skin, athletic frame and remission status, and decide that they too will say no to chemo.

They think they will be making a positive choice, rather than acting based on pseudoscience and potential misunderstandings.

And frankly, they may well die as a result.

And take it from me, there’s nothing ‘heart-led’ about that.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.

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