Candice on Cancer, Part IV

[Written by reader Ella as a guest post].

This is the penultimate installment of our transcript of Candice’s interview on “The Statera Podcast.” After relating Candice’s poor grasp of chemo and radiation, I posed a few questions that some astute readers have clarified in the comments, so please do scroll down and have a look at those. Auma explains that the “level thirteen” Candice mentions probably refers to the “thyroglobulin marker,” Ann explains how “surgery can indeed spread the cancer,” and that “chemo does not truly ‘destroy’ cancer,” and Jared explains some aspects of the diagnostic process in some detail.

Today’s message is brought to you by Ayahuasca! If you don’t know what that is or how to pronounce it, keep reading. This post has everything. It’s got Nazis, it’s got imaginary babies, it’s got psychics, spiralling flowers, dancing on tables, third eyes, Ibiza, bodybuilding, and reincarnation. It’s a cornucopia of weirdness! Enjoy!

Candice on Cancer, Part 4: You can’t spell “pineapple” without “pineal!”

When we left off yesterday, Candice had just said, “opening somebody up, cutting 'em, giving oxygen to the cancer and spreading it, it's not the way…it's barbaric...it's not right. And I really wanna do as much as I can with the time that I have left to change it.” She continues:

CANDICE: “Which is why, you know, I want to do the bodybuilding with Michelle Nazaroff. Because people are visually orientated, you know? […] And obviously because people are visually orientated, I wanna have those pictures of me, you know, looking super-super-fit, and in a bikini [...]. Because all these people are like ‘you need meat...you need protein,’ […] I want to be able to say ‘you don't.’”

As I’ve stated before, I'm not a certified nutritionist. But I'm pretty sure you do need protein.

CANDICE: “...just to have a lean body, and be fit inside from real nutrition, and not, you know, dead, low-vibration food.”

Guys, my food doesn’t appear to vibrate much at all. Am I doing it wrong?

CANDICE: “I just wanna spread my message, like, with the world. So I want to get as fit as I possibly can and healthy as I possibly can - mind, body, spirit, everything...”

SNARY: “To show that you can go through something like this and then come out...and be, like, at the optimal. Like, be an improved human temple.”

CANDICE: “Yeah, exactly…Everyone's different kinda learners. So I want to be able to speak it, so that why I've done loads of speaking courses, I wanna be able to get my message across to every kind of learner. The kinesthetics, the auditory, you know, visual...all of that. I want to cover every base, so I'm not missing people just through, you know, their learning skills […].
I've just started a business, Dreamcatchers International, and myself and Kim Barrett – he's a NLP practitioner – we go 'round and we kinda like train people and help people into optimal health through alkalising and whatnot.”

NLP stands for “Neuro-Linguistic Programming,” a self-help methodology that claims to be able to cure the common cold, amongst other things. It has been dubbed a “form of folk magic” by medical anthropologists and a “psycho-religion” or a “quasi-religion belonging to the New Age and/or Human Potential Movements” by sociologists and anthropologists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Scientific_criticism].

Dreamcatchers International doesn’t have a website yet, but its Facebook page can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/DreamCatchersInternational

SNARY: “So, preventative measures. Which is really I think the key with all this.

CANDICE: “Preventative, yeah. It’s the key, it is the key, yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Prevention is better than cure,’ the saying [goes]. We're actually going over to Ibiza to do a health retreat [in] October...I do end-of-season, so I detox the ravers.”

If prevention is better than detox, wouldn't it be better to go in September and stop the ravers from “toxing” in the first place?

CANDICE: “This year is gonna be the first kick-off year. We're eventually gonna get it on TV, kinda like, you know, like a sit-com-y kind of show where...because there's some celebrities over there, because it's Ocean Beach Club [a club in Ibiza], so it's very celebrity-orientated, so it's gonna be quite...people are gonna want to see it, but it's gonna get the message out there to people that wouldn't necessarily usually think ‘oh,’ you know, like ‘you can cure cancer?’ or ‘you can cure it, like, naturally?’”

Okay, this a little confusing, so let me clear it up for you. Candice and her folk magician colleague are going to make a sit-com style television program in Ibiza which will disseminate the message that you can cure cancer with fantasy-based medicine. And people are “going to want to see it.” I have to confess, a part of me does want to see it. My review would make such a great blog post.

CANDICE: “I must say, I, like you said, I don't want people to totally write off the medical world. Because obviously they've got their benefits, you know?”

I’d really like her to detail what those benefits are, considering her wild claims about the dangers of modern medicine in the first half of the podcast.

CANDICE: “But there are other alternatives, you know, you can get a live blood analysis...as opposed to a normal blood [analysis]. You can see how your blood is, and it's like a whole galaxy...you can see what is going on with your living blood […].”

Candice and Snary talk about this for a while from around the 48 minute mark. I won’t burden you with it. Quackwatch adeptly debunks that particular brand of woo here: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/livecell.html

CANDICE: “And now, because I've...cleansed my pineal gland, to the point where it's...really cleansed...it's so decalcified...I started getting really bad headaches, so...when I had the surgery, and I started...juicing and cleansing, I started getting like ‘ZZZZZT!’ [makes zapping noises and gestures at head]. Like seriously, my whole skull would shake. So much so that I went back to the hospital and got a scan to see if I had a brain tumour. Like I seriously...every single night, it was like ‘RRRRRR!’ [makes ringing noises and gestures at head] in my head.”

See? Dysfunctional alarm bells!

CANDICE: “And now, with all the research and what I've known, it was literally my pineal gland activating.”

Now, this is where ‘very weird’ becomes ‘really very weird.’ The whole concept of “cleansing” or “decalcifying” the pineal gland is New Age claptrap. It's based on the idea that the pineal gland is - wait for it - the “third eye.” An anonymous but fiercely rational girl who isn’t Violet and probably isn’t a highly-trained secret agent debunks the myths here: http://biologyweeps.tumblr.com/post/71232361448/on-quacks-and-the-pineal-gland).

Candice is claiming that her headaches were due to the fact that her “juicing and cleansing” had “activated” her third eye, the much-mythologised mechanism of spiritual perception that supposedly regulates the biological processes of the body and allows you to develop supernatural powers. She goes on to relate the psychic abilities resulting from this activation. I’ll forgive you if you don’t want to read it. I’m including it because it plays into her future plans for a business, a business based largely on her spurious cancer story.

CANDICE: “Now I can see the energies, and I can make...little energy balls and pull it apart. And I was working with my energy healer, Rishi [presumably "Rishi Awakeanand," a Perth-based Hindu psychic]; incredible man. Like, as soon as I met him, he knew stuff about me that it just wasn't possible…”

SNARY: “…for him to know.”

Okay, how did Snary know that’s what Candice was about to say. SPOOKY.

CANDICE: “Like, I'm so sceptical about stuff, like ‘yeah, whatever, no s***.’ But he just knew, he knew so much. 
So then I just kept going back...I go to him once a month now. And now we don't even talk...literally, we do energy stuff, and he just will say a few words, he'll be like, ‘okay, focus on this point, focus on this point,’ and ‘I'll...open some channels and stuff.’ And he'll tell me to focus in on a certain...on my third eye, and then focus in on another part of my body, and just work the energy, keep the energy flowing and stuff, and then after a while I start seeing, like, a flower [makes a spirally motion with her finger] like, petalling [sic]. My eyes are shut, and I can see like a flower. 
And then basically he'll tell me just to keep delving down, like, the wormhole. And my first little psychic vision was...the other day with him, I saw, like, a baby...you know, like a…is it like a ‘fetus?’ And I said to him, ‘Oh my god, I can see, like, a baby. I think it's a brand new, like, literally just conceived kind of baby.’
And he was just like, ‘Okay, whose baby is it? Whose baby is it? Think about it. It's not yours, but whose is it?’ 
And I just couldn't...get that. But he's fully psychic. And he knows that I have got that too. We all have that, but we've just over the years been dumbed down, and the fluoride in the water...and the vibration's gone.”

Yeah, I forgot to mention that fluoridation of water is apparently what causes calcification of the third eye.

So, to recap, Candice’s first “psychic vision” was a mental image of an unborn baby that wasn’t her baby, and she doesn’t know whose baby it was. Do any of you out there have a baby, expect a baby, want a baby, know a baby, or know someone who has had or is having a baby? Because, guys: this could be that baby.

On the other hand, the baby could simply symbolise something else, which throws it WIDE open.

CANDICE: “But we are all psychic. And you would never have caught me saying this five years ago...[but] now I'm seeing stuff. Like, I'll just be...sitting down, and then...I'll see the wall start to vibrate. And I'll just be like ‘oh my god.’ And then my third eye will just start, like...I can feel it now, even talking about it.”

SNARY: “Yeah, I’ve had that before, too.”

CANDICE: “It just starts activating. And I’m at the beginning of this journey. So the cancer journey for me is done, I've got no more cancer. It's now nought-point-two [0.2]. And I just keep going and getting regular checks, like seeing my naturopath, and just keep getting checks, like, my way – not, you know, being scared into another way. And now I'm just opening the door to this psychic ability. Like, it’s...I never thought it…even saying it now, I’m like, ‘f****** weird.’ You know what I mean?”

Yeah.

CANDICE: “But it's there! Like, I can see it, I can play with the energy, you know? I can do it, I'm actually seeing it, I'm not making it up. And then, when I'm meditating now, I'm seeing...images flash past me, and it feels like it's a past life, because it's like...for instance last night when I was meditating, like hundreds and hundreds of...it looked like Nazi soldiers marching past me. And I don't know if I'm one of them, or if I'm just a bystander…”

Candice-Marie Fox has just revealed that she thinks she was somewhere in the Third Reich in a past life, and she’s not sure whether she whether she was a Nazi or a “bystander.” As offensive and ridiculous as this is, I’m actually relieved that she knows something factual about world history.

CANDICE: “…but they are marching past me. Like, I can see it all. But it's more like it's loads of shapes, and then they turn into this image, and then it will go. And then it will turn into another image. And I'm so new to it, I'm not sure what's what. I'll get a projection, it'll look like it's projecting out, and there'll be images there.”

SNARY: “Yeah, you’ve just got to stay witness to it, Candice. Don’t try and over-analyse it or try and understand it, just be a witness to it all. And then you’ll come to a point where you’ll be like, ‘Ah, okay, I get it a bit more now.’ But don’t, like, don’t put too much energy into…”

CANDICE: “Yeah, okay. Yeah. I know. It’s because I kinda like, I want to know.”

SNARY: “Yeah, but just don’t. Just witness it.”

This attitude is precisely why Candice and her supporters are so incensed by attempts to authenticate her cancer story. Alternative medicine is a nebulous, intuitive, unquantifiable, unfalsifiable, inscrutable entity that relies on absolute trust. Its effects are subjective, analysis is discouraged, and dissent is dismissed as “toxic.”

CANDICE: “My energy healer, he's brilliant. Like every time I go and see him, I just get something else out of him...he came up to me, and he put his hands there [holding her hands up, palms out] and he said ‘put your hands on mine.’ Instantly, I could feel his energy, and he said ‘can you feel that?’ and I said ‘yeah.’ I shut my eyes, and when I opened my eyes I could see all the energy around him, and he said ‘you can see that?’ and I said ‘I can see that.’ And that's how he gets his readings and stuff. So eventually, I'm gonna be able to do that, and I'm gonna be able to help people like he's helping me.”

This is why it’s legitimate for us to pose reasonable questions about what would otherwise just be an oddball girl with a dubious personal story – because Candice plans to use her personal story and her “abilities” to “help” other people, presumably for a fee, through her businesses www.healthycandy.me and DreamCatchers International.

Adrian jumps in to elucidate the global “awakening” that is leading people more enlightened than you or I to activate their pineal glands:

SNARY: “What's happening at the moment is that there are literally people waking up all over the world…There is a major shift, and people's abilities are starting to get to a stage where, again, like even twelve months ago, I would have thought ‘hang on, no no no no no no.’  But it’s happening, it is happening. And, like [turning to the camera], everyone, anyone out there who's listening to this and thinking ‘what the f*** are those [sic] talking about,’ I was one of you. Believe me, I was.”

CANDICE: “Same! Trust me, I was, like, from London, I used to, like, stand on tables and dance and s***, like, you know? Like…not like *that* [laughs].”

SNARY: “Sure. But this side of life is something you never would have thought of before, and I guess that’s the gift that cancer’s given you, that it’s shown you a more authentic way to live life, and a way to live life that humans lived for thousands and thousands of years. It's only really been recently, you could even say since the Industrial…or, say, maybe since agriculture and the Industrial Revolution where we started really...and consumerism, when that came out in the early twentieth century, where we just started eating s***** foods and processed foods and all these sugars...”

CANDICE: “It’s in the past fifty years, it’s like – there’s a correlation…”

SNARY: “…it hasn’t been long at all. And the diabetes, that has stepped up from there; autism, things like that.”

I’m pretty sure agriculture is thousands of years older than the Industrial Revolution, and cancer is as old as the human race. But this idea that cancer is a modern phenomenon, and that our ancestors were privy to some ancient wisdom that staved off disease, is central to the wacky “wellness” paradigm.

CANDICE: “There’s a correlation. I’ve watched so many documentaries, like ‘Fat Sick and Nearly Dead,’ like ‘Food Matters.’ there’s just so much out there, like ‘Food, Inc.,’ that just all spells it out for us. Like, in the fifty years that fast food and the whole food industry has been predominantly dominated by these fast food industries, like, the whole meat industry now is controlled because of…”

SNARY: “…fast food, yeah.”

CANDICE: “Yeah! So it’s like, since then, it’s like, cancer has risen and risen and risen. Like ‘The China Study’ [a book advocating a vegan diet by Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry T. Colin Campbell and his son Thomas M. Campbell, a medical doctor]. You know? It’s just a correlation of where these bad, like, Western kind of foods are in China, compared to how much cancer there is, and, you know, lo and behold, it showed it! It’s just like…there’s a correlation between food and cancer, there’s a…food is amazing, it can either feed cancer or kill cancer…diseases in general.”

SNARY: “Yeah, exactly. Or prevent it.”

She keeps using the word “correlation,” but I’m not convinced she totally understands what it means. She conflates it with causation, which is a major flaw in the alternative medicine paradigm. For example, Don Tolman (the muesli cowboy I referred to in yesterday’s post) alleges that because governments are funding more cancer research than ever before, and because cancer cases have increased in the past century, the government must be causing cancer.  This logical fallacy is summed up in the Latin phrase, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc,” or “after this, therefore because of this.”

CANDICE: “Yeah! Basically whatever you put in your mouth, your voting for what you want to do. Do you want to breed disease, or, like, prevent it?”

SNARY: “But that’s the thing…I mean I’ve got someone very close to me who’s battling depression…and her comfort, or her medicine, is sugar.”

CANDICE: “Because it’s more addictive than cocaine.”

SNARY: “It’s more addictive, and it’s easier as well […]. It’s like a loop, and it’s like a cycle. And it’s very, very hard to break out of. So, it can be broken out of, like, either something will happen like yourself, where you’ll develop cancer or – not to say that’s what caused yours, but – or diabetes, or…”

CANDICE: “Mine was everything, yeah. I was very toxic.”

SNARY: “It was probably a mixture of things, yeah. Just different toxins that you build up in this life.”

CANDICE: “Yeah, well even, like, shampoos and such, like you know, like, life in general.”

SNARY: “Oh yeah. There’s just so much out there that can really feed on it. But the preferable thing to do is just to lead a lifestyle where it’s prevented in the first place.”

CANDICE: “That’s the best way.”

SNARY: “And that’s where we need to start educating and showing people, ‘this is what you need to look at doing.’ Like, ‘if you can do this…’ [trails off].”

At this point, Snary launches into a wordy endorsement of Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, pronounced “eye-uh-WAH-ska,” is a hallucinogenic plant drunk as a brew by natives of Peru, and also by Adrian Snary. I did transcribe all that, but it’s pretty dull. Even Candice gets bored when Adrian talks, gazing absently into middle-distance, slurping from a bucket-sized bottle of murky green juice and compulsively ruffling her hair. She sparks up a bit when he starts talking about the pineal gland.

Snary turns to the camera and explains the pineal gland at length, which he believes to be the mystical “third eye.” Candice agrees that it is “the gateway” to what Snary calls the “other realms and other parts of this universe” that “we’re always, like, in.” I’m editing that out, for the sake of brevity and sanity, but Candice does exclaim at the end of it, “Oh, definitely. Like, everyone needs theirs activated.”

All of this is rather silly, but it’s not unethical, and it’s not fraudulent – until it all starts to influence Candice’s understanding of her cancer, and the dodgy personal story she’s marketing to the world. If you’ve been sleeping, now’s the time to wake up, because this is the excerpt the Daily Mail included with its feature on Candice, and she discusses her cancer again, at length:

SNARY: “So Candice you had a [it sounds like he says “sedent” (sic)] lifestyle, you were then diagnosed with…”

CANDICE: “Thyroid cancer.”

SNARY: “Thyroid cancer, and then – I was going to say pituitary then, but yeah, thyroid cancer – you went into…did the surgery thing, the Western mindset scientific way and it didn't quite work, then you just took matters into your own hands, looked at it from the more holistic and natural way, to get to a point where you are now. How would you say...how would you describe yourself now, and the person you are now, compared to who you were in the days, months, before you found out about your cancer?”

CANDICE: “Well I believe that, you know, we mirror people that are around us. And I was attracting, you know, whatever I was. And everything was toxic, you know?  So yeah, I was toxic with, like, chemicals, and you know, I was using, like, your normal shampoos, conditioners and all that. Like, I wasn't doing drugs or anything like before; that was like my younger days back in England, but I was in Australia after that. So yeah, the drug thing had stopped. We were drinking, but we were drinking at weekends, you know it wasn't crazy. I'd done all my damage in my younger days. 
And so I was just very toxic, everything was toxic, the – you know – everyone I was kinda hanging 'round with was...they just weren't me. And I knew that, so there was this deep kind of like, I just felt like I was trapped, and I wasn't like...it's funny, because, you know, it's my thyroid, it's like, you know, the throat chakra which is your communication, and I wasn't communicating my truth, you know? So it's so funny, like the whole...”

SNARY: “It was a kick up the ass.”

CANDICE: “It was a massive kick up the ass! And now I look at everything from the energetical [sic], kind of like spiritual sense. It's like, ‘oh my god,’ you know, no wonder it was thyroid. I was constantly hiding the truth from me. I was just like, I was so unhappy, but I was in such bad situations, like that I just knew that weren't me, and I just allowed them to go on for, you know, various reasons.”

SNARY: “And that’s definitely something I've heard of before; how, like, keeping things in emotionally, depending on what it is, actually has, like, a part of your body...”

CANDICE: “Emotions are so important, emotions...it's energy, so if there's a block somewhere, you're gonna get that on a disease kinda level. You really are, because it's the weak spot, you know? So it's the same with like the acid/alkaline balance, like…you're just gonna get cancer wherever the acid can go to, so it's just wherever your weakness is. It's the same as all energy and stuff like that.
So compared to then, now I love me. Like, I couldn't have loved me, because I wasn't nice to myself. Like, I was in relationships I knew weren't right for me, I was drinking with people I knew weren't right for me, you know I was just doing things against my natural intuition. I was literally getting signs and being told – my true self was telling me – and I was just like, ‘f*** you, I'm gonna do that!’ And I don't know why, but I was just going against what I knew was right.
But it had to happen, and now, yeah, I'm glad it all happened. Everything happens for a reason. And I love every single person that, like, I feel wasn’t right for me. They were right for me, in a way, you know? So like I still love every single person, because now it’s just, like, I’m attracting such amazing people. Like, I have had the sh******t relationships going. Like, seriously, I could write a book on relationships alone. About how bad I have had it…and it’s just because I’ve attracted that person, and we’ve…”

SNARY: “Yeah. That was part of you, that’s who you were.”

CANDICE: “Yeah! And we’ve not been right for each other. Whereas now, like I’ve attracted an amazing bloke […] and it’s because I’ve attracted that, because I’m a mirror of him, and vice versa. Whereas back in the day, what I was attracting was me, so […].

Note to self: if I ever get married, “I’ve attracted an amazing bloke” is going on the front of our wedding invitations.

CANDICE: “I used to smoke…like, I couldn’t do without a cigarette. I’d even…go out in the pouring rain to the shops to get a cigarette and have half of a cigarette and then be like, ‘ugh, don’t even like it,’ you know? But, like, I was in that mindset.”

It’s pretty telling that Candice thinks the “mindset” is more “toxic” than the actual cigarettes. Here’s a question for some of our expert readers: could the smoking in fact be what caused the “pre-cancerous cells” that Candice says were identified in her right lung?

CANDICE: “And then as soon as I got the cancer – because I wasn’t really smoking before the cancer, but I would have a drink and have a cheeky cigarette – soon as I got the cancer, I was just like, ‘I don’t want that.’ Like it was just switched off. I didn’t have to think about it or anything. I didn’t drink, I didn’t…smoke, I didn’t eat crap, it was just so easy [clicks fingers]. Whereas before it was so hard to go on diets, it was so hard, do you know what I mean? Because I would just constant [sic] battle in my mind. But once I was so sure, well, I was gonna die if I didn’t, it was like there was no other choice, and I think…I’m glad I was given that wake-up call, because I probably would never have quit any of it, you know? I’d probably still be in that marriage, and just…not be happy, and him not be happy, you know? Like just be, it’s just…”

SNARY: “Yeah. But instead, you’ve got this life now!”

This is the second time Candice has referred to her smoking habit as “a cheeky cigarette.” The implication, I assume, is that she wasn’t actually a smoker, she just, you know…smoked.

Smoking doesn’t cause thyroid cancer. But I do think it’s interesting that she minimises these unhealthy habits, while overstating others. This pattern is critical to her narrative – that her cancer was not a mere physical problem per se, but a gift, a sign, a miraculous wake-up call from the universe to detoxify her life, paving the way for an equally miraculous healing. While she happily mines her past experiences for signs that “everything was toxic,” she’s more interested in her “toxic” marriage, her “toxic” relationships, and her vaguely “toxic” lifestyle than actual cigarettes, drugs or alcohol.

Again, there’s no evidence that any of these are to blame for her thyroid cancer. Candice is looking for a pattern that isn’t really there. When she was first diagnosed, she relates a sense of guilt, ie. “what have I done to cause this?” The fact is, illness isn’t always deserved, and it can’t always be cured. Sometimes bad things just happen, even to healthy, happy people.

And this is the great insult of alternative medicine. While Candice’s oncologist almost certainly would have told her that nothing she did or didn’t do caused her to get a papillary thyroid carcinoma, the alternative therapists she fled to told her it was a gift from the universe, here to teach her a lesson she desperately needed to learn. This suited Candice. It imbued an apparently meaningless experience with some sense of meaning. Then, when Candice recovered (mostly by virtue of her own efforts, she insists)  it confirmed her own power over the circumstances of her life.

I can understand why this is appealing. Unfortunately, alternative medicine rewards the well, but penalises the sick. What is empowering for Candice is devastating for someone who is chronically or terminally ill. When a four-year-old child contracts a fatal disease, it’s not because she has toxic relationships. When an infant in a developing country dies of cholera, it’s not because the universe is trying to teach him a valuable lesson. When someone like Jess Ainscough eats all the right fruit, swallows all the right supplements, and thinks all the positive thoughts, and then realises she’s still dying, what goes through her mind? That she is a failure? That she is culpable?

What Candice fails to understand is that, for most people, alternative medicine is not “positive.” It’s costly, it’s exploitative, and it’s mercilessly punitive.