Avoiding cancer is a doddle!

So declareth the esteemed oncologist, George Dryden, on her authoritative medical blog, ‘it shouldn’t happen to a vegan™’. Sorry, wait, strike that; so pontificateth, the Brian Clement-beguiled, Hippocrates Health Institute-certified ‘Health Educator’, George Dryden, on her egregious generator of wind for blowing up her guru’s freshly-flushed jacksy.

I don’t know George Dryden, so can only base my opinion on what she writes; thereupon, I’ve only one positive thing to write about her – that she hasn’t (yet) blocked me from her Twitter feed. However, any reply/re-tweet of mine to her material, or attempts to comment on her blog posts are kept hidden and/or ignored. As is her right, and so what? Well, based on her continued public pronouncements, I have come to consider her a potential health hazard.

Like many a quack(ery advocator), she writes in that all-things-to-all-people type way that would have you believe she is your friend, only too happy to put you right on where you are going wrong with your (dietary) lifestyle. And now she also attempts to convince she is doing you yet another great favour with her latest blog eructation, How to go alkaline and avoid cancer.

Because – following a quick re-plug for enzymes, a body’s lack of which she ‘stubbornly maintain(s)… is one of the biggest causes of cancer’ (previously facilitating some marketing of Clement’s products) – she assures that ‘following closely behind this, is the level of acidity in the body.’ At least I think that’s what she’s saying; you see, she gets herself in a bit of a muddle very early on in citing the 1931 (not ’36) Nobel Prize winner, Otto Warburg: is it low oxygen that causes acidity, or the acidic food we eat? I’m really not sure what she’s saying here. But then, clearly, neither is she. Particularly when she does her favoured punchy bulleting of what she considers to be ‘FACTs’:

‘FACT #1: All animal-based foods are acidic. No exceptions.

FACT #2: As reported in The Lancet in 1972, 90% of leukaemia patients put on a low protein, alkaline diet in a study fully recovered. But the leukaemia returned in those who reverted to their original diet.

FACT #3: Cancer CANNOT survive in an oxygen-rich, alkaline environment.’

My respective immediate responses:

1. Really? So?
2. (Frown)
3. So, what can?

(Leaving aside the rank hypocrisy that wilfully ignores all the scientific evidence contradicting her standpoint, and cherry-picks that which can be (mis)appropriated), it apparently does not concern her that, in citing Warburg’s research of nearly a century ago, and a single 40+ year-old Lancet paper, she might be, what, a tad out of date? Rather, she is happy to take her ‘Facts’ wherever she lazily finds them – likely, it is not unreasonable to presume, amongst her nine weeks’ worth of HHI ‘Health Educator’ notes.

Dryden, like many others, has seemingly been brain-washed into the nutritionist/alternative/naturopathic way of assimilation. Electing to close their minds to readily-available information based on voluminous scientific research, these supposedly ‘open-minded’ people, though they posture as ‘experts’ on what you should and shouldn’t eat, are easily exposed for their ostrich attitude to evidence and their scant understanding of nutrition and physiology and biochemistry. There is little to be gained through effort to reach her – and like ‘minds’ – with re-iterating bona fide information already out there and easy to find with little effort. She will pay no heed. Because to her, Brian Clement speaks the truth; and calling him out merely serves to accentuate his maverick radiance. And cement the obtuse attitude that those who have actually taken the years of time and effort to study and practice medicine have all sold their souls to the ‘Big Pharma’ devil, subverting their Hippocratic Oath by actually conspiring to make and keep you ill. Think I’m being harsh? Then check out some of the statement offerings here, where she skips over pertinent detail in her fawning endorsement of Clement’s quackery utopia:

‘Hippocrates Health Institute, Florida, is the first and only place I would recommend to someone I loved who had ANY form of serious disease.’

She has neither displayed my comment, nor responded to my tweets challenging this outrageously irresponsible statement and her support for someone who is, in my opinion (based on many available accounts), untrustworthy:

Nah, George is well and truly beyond reach. But, if it prevents just one potentially susceptible individual from being taken in by her, it is worth drawing attention to her pseudo credentials and faux medicalising. She likes to talk about bodily functions, as though she believes discussing her colon cleanses and urine testing somehow makes her more endearing. Yet all these reveal is that she’s an idiot! And by having you believing them to be worthwhile activities and encouraging you to do likewise, she wants you to be an idiot, too: whether it be doubting your livers redoubtable capability for detoxification; or not trusting your lungs, gut, blood-buffering and kidneys with their collective capacity to keep your blood acidity within homeostatic range. Because it is the pH of the blood that is important here – and if that changes, you’ll know about it, because you will feel very ill. All that testing the pH of your urine will tell you is the pH of the metabolic waste that is urine.

Even when she approaches reality, concerning calcium being resorbed from bones to contribute to neutralising excess acidity in the blood (not the urine), she veers off again, disregarding the simple fact that a balanced diet will provide sufficient calcium to maintain bone strength (boosted with simple supplementation as necessary to those vulnerable to osteoporosis). Instead, she engineers herself opportunity to plug all manner of HHI-mandated dietary nonsense, including HHI’s own brand ‘Systemic Enzymes’ capsules, which – surprise, surprise! – are available to buy, along with many other HHI products.

If you’ve landed here via an inquisitive search for ‘acidic diet and cancer’ then might I suggest a look at what Cancer Research UK has to say on the subject? Why does George disregard this? Well, her opinion of cancer charities accords with her attitude to pharmaceutical companies:

‘… I also put it to you that all the big cancer research charities in the west know EXACTLY what causes cancer. And, equally, what helps to prevent it. But imagine how many jobs and fancy salaries would go down the pan if someone actually voiced what Hippocrates Health Institute has known and has been proving for decades.’

Lovely! And just to reassure that George really does have your best interests at heart:

‘Personally, I refuse to give to any such research charity for those very reasons.’

Instead, she is apparently adamant that money is better spent on an ignorance-rich, nine-week indoctrination course at a reputed quack resort, whose director was last weekend in the UK, as part of a European speaking tour. (Though prior dates in Ireland were cancelled after the scheduled host hotels got wise, he was still afforded platform by Regents University and Birmingham Buddhist Centre – at least I think he was; they’ve not responded to repeat attempts at contact on the matter – and also by something terming itself the ‘College of Naturopathic Medicine’ – which, though it hosted Brian Clement on 22^nd June, informs me it does not have available a transcript or details of his talk). Indeed, at the end of her anti-science, Big Pharma conspiracy-laden, Hippocrates-promoting diatribe, she defends Clement’s integrity:

‘No matter what you think to the views in this post, if you’re sane, you really do need to ask yourself who, in all of this, is being less than honest.

And I am willing to stake my life on the fact that it’s certainly not Dr Brian Clement.’ [sic]

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, George.