A Reality Check On Alternative Medicine
October 23rd, 2017
Three years ago my sister – four and a half years younger than myself – died of bowel cancer. There was no need for her to die. It was diagnosed at a very early stage and she was immediately offered an operation and radiotherapy.
She refused everything believing she could cure herself with alternative medicine.
The saddest irony of all this is that I have a shamanic gift. We’d been warned of her problem by a spirit literally knocking on the seat of her chair as she sat in a meeting about spiritual healing. The spirits and angels were looking after her and if she’d gone for the treatment she’d be here now.
We’d been very close as young children but had had times of difficulty, and I realised when she was ill that we had drifted apart. I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that she needed to go for the operation and radiotherapy. I knew it with my conscious mind, but I also knew it as a shaman. I begged and pleaded with her to have the operation, at least, but she refused point blank.
She wouldn’t answer the phone from me and she told me she deleted all my emails without reading them. She put herself on a strict diet, paid someone to make vegetable juices for her and kept off sugar altogether. She was already a vegetarian and a very healthy eater. She went for every alternative treatment there was.
She grew skeletal. It made me think of concentration camp victims when I looked at her and when she turned to smile at me I would see her skull beneath her skin. It was the most agonising, terrible thing that any human being can experience – watching a loved person suffer as she did. The tumour was on her sphincter muscle and she would scream as she tried to pass a stool. She could not stand and she could not sit but was bent forward and twisted lying in the only way that was comfortable to her. I have since heard alternative therapists claiming to heal cancer and my sister found people who claimed to heal everything. I don’t know what alternative therapists in England said to her, but one of the groups she got involved with was a far-right American group, operating from Bulgaria, prescribing sterilising fluid and pretending it was a herbal mixture. I’ve done some journalism, and am good at research, so I presented her with evidence about it, but she didn’t want to know. You could even tell what it was by the smell, but she had shut down on all levels.
I think she had gone crazy with fear. We had seen family members die quite horribly with cancer, and she was not interested in science, and didn’t follow new developments. I understand now that denial can be like madness and that you cannot argue with it, but I am glad that I tried so hard because I know I did all I could.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer the day before my sister’s funeral. I have, of course, worked on a shamanic level to treat it. For me it manifests as wasps in my spirit body and I have to work to take them out. This is not all that I have done, though. I have gone along with treatments the doctors prescribed: a mastectomy, oestrogen-blocking tablets, and an occasional session of radiotherapy, for the pain.
In spite of the fact that my cancer had metastasised the doctors now tell me that my response is excellent – in the top 5% of results they see.
If anybody tells you they can heal you of anything by alternative medicine alone, they are either very misguided or a fraud. The spiritual world works by resonance with this one and finding healing on a spiritual level will help to bring cures on a physical level.
I wish my sister had understood that the spiritual and physical pains are not separate and that you need to respond on all levels. I wish she had let me help her. It was not her time to die, but she made it her time.
I don’t think those who loved her will ever recover from those two terrible years, or from that unnecessary death. Three years later the wounds are still raw. She was killer, torturer and victim, and – most of all – she was the baby sister I used to piggyback down the road.
RIP, my love.
Many thanks to Biddy Samson for contributing this article. The Isbourne would like to acknowledge Biddy Samson's passing in 2020. Her words and her work will live on.
