Commentary
The Guardian recently sent an undercover reporter to investigate Barbara O’Neill, a 73-year-old Australian natural health educator. In 2019, Australian regulators prohibited her from providing health services, including unpaid health education, after determining that some of her advice posed risks.
What does O’Neill actually believe?
She believes that the body has an extraordinary capacity to heal itself when given the right conditions. She teaches that food, herbs, sleep, hydration, and lifestyle matter. She believes that the body’s acidic or alkaline environment influences disease and has promoted dietary changes and sodium bicarbonate as ways to address cancer.
Some of these ideas are widely accepted. Others are more fringe. But I don’t believe that the government should decide which ideas adults are permitted to hear.
I am a freedom-of-speech maximalist.
I don’t need O’Neill to be right about everything to defend her right to speak or my right to listen.
I want to hear from an oncologist, a homeopath, an herbalist, a nutritionist, and anyone else whose ideas I choose to consider. I want to examine their claims, challenge their evidence, and decide for myself.
I refuse to surrender authority over my body to any of them.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians who questioned prevailing medical policies faced investigations, disciplinary threats, and restrictions on social media. We watched medical disagreement become something that could threaten a person’s career.
The idea that ideas themselves are dangerous is dangerous.
How can informed consent exist without information?
The Guardian has every right to investigate O’Neill. But where is the same investigative urgency about overmedicalization and the suffering conventional treatments can cause?
Chemotherapy can cause organ damage, infections, infertility, and death. Radiation can damage healthy tissue. Surgery carries risks of complications, disability, and death. These aren’t theoretical possibilities. They are acknowledged risks of conventional treatment.
Yet when someone recommends an herb or a castor oil pack, we send undercover reporters.
I have lost two dear friends to breast cancer.
My best friend Mimi was running five miles a day when she discovered a tumor smaller than a date in her breast. She had no symptoms. She was raising her 5-year-old daughter, living an active life, and was told that her prognosis was excellent.
She underwent a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, repeated procedures, and biopsies.
Her suffering began with treatment.
I was there almost every day. I watched the edema, the terrible swelling, the Bell’s palsy, infections, vomiting, incontinence, and the wasting away of a woman who had been running five miles daily. She became so weak that her mother had to help her use the bathroom. There were seemingly endless emergency-room visits, pain, exhaustion, and moments when even good news was impossible to celebrate.
Her mother would weep and say, “We may be winning the battle, but we’re losing the war.”
At one point, Mimi was receiving treatment in Santa Monica. The drive across Los Angeles became unbearable, so she stayed at our friend Leia’s apartment nearby.
But she couldn’t manage the stairs.
One of the bussers from my restaurant and I would go over and physically carry her up and down those stairs so she could continue treatment. Sometimes she was suffering so much she barely acknowledged us.
I wish I could say I was the perfect friend. I wasn’t. Some days I couldn’t bear to witness what was happening. Some days she didn’t want me there to witness it. I would bring whatever she needed, kiss her forehead, and leave because neither of us could endure another moment.
Even writing this brings me to tears.
Mimi told me that eventually it seemed the doctors were throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. She had gone from feeling healthy to spending nearly three years terribly ill, much of that suffering caused by interventions intended to save her.
Eventually, the cancer took her life.
Near the end, she told me, “I wish I had done nothing.”
She wasn’t claiming that declining treatment would have cured her. She knew that cancer might eventually require palliative care. But she had already spent years needing extraordinary medical care.
Maybe she would have died in two years without treatment, she said. Maybe three, maybe five, maybe later. She would never know.
What she mourned was the time she might have spent making memories with her daughter instead of recovering from one intervention after another.
Mimi knew that alternatives existed. She chose treatment because she felt an overwhelming responsibility to do everything possible to survive for her child.
My friend Wendy’s story was painfully similar.
Wendy was my neighbor in California, the kind of person who decided that she would be your friend whether or not you had room in your schedule. After losing Mimi, I had pulled away from people. Wendy showed up anyway, sitting at my kitchen counter while I cooked or on my porch while I answered emails. I dry-farmed wheat on her land, and she baked bread from our harvest.
When I told Wendy that I was moving to Texas, she was heartbroken.
“Don’t start missing me already,” I told her. “We still have six months.”
I didn’t know how little time we had.
Like Mimi, Wendy discovered a small breast tumor. Like Mimi, she was a mother who desperately wanted to live for her children.
Initially, Wendy chose prayer, nourishment, and trusting God. Eventually, she underwent surgery and conventional treatment. She later told me that she felt she had failed God by changing course.
And like Mimi, she died approximately three years after diagnosis.
Weeks before her death, Wendy was texting me about bringing her family to Texas in a recreational vehicle. Days before she died, she told me, “I’ll see you soon.”
Her husband and children made that trip without her because it mattered so much to Wendy.
I miss them both.
Their stories aren’t clinical trials. I cannot know whether different decisions would have extended their lives. But I know what Mimi endured, when that suffering began, and what she told me that she regretted.
We talk about five-year cancer survival rates, but those statistics don’t always tell us whether treatment extended someone’s life. Earlier diagnosis can increase measured survival time without postponing death, a phenomenon called lead-time bias. Screening can also discover cancers that would never have caused symptoms, known as overdiagnosis.
These are recognized medical concepts, not fringe theories.
But even when treatment extends life, shouldn’t we ask what that life looks like?
The right to do nothing requires an understanding of what doing nothing might mean. But it also requires an honest understanding of the cost of doing something.
Not just the financial cost, but the physical cost, the suffering, the complications, the lost time, and the possibility that treatment itself may consume much of the life someone is desperately trying to preserve.
Doing nothing medically invasive may mean observation, nourishment, comfort, and time with family. It may also mean allowing a treatable disease to progress.
Both possibilities deserve an honest discussion.
I am not asking anyone to trust O’Neill instead of an oncologist. I’m asking why we should surrender our authority to either.
Let journalists investigate. Let doctors argue. Let herbalists speak. Let patients hear competing ideas, understand the risks, and make their own decisions.
Because informed consent without access to information is not informed consent. It is obedience.
Ideas are not dangerous.
The absence of them is.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
