JENNI MURRAY: Don’t mess with cancer. Elle Macpherson’s choice was unwise and unsafe

I’m not at all surprised the stunningly beautiful Australian model, Elle Macpherson, kept her diagnosis of breast cancer a secret for seven years.

But I wish she hadn’t decided to come out about it now, or at all, because the story of how she treated an HER2-positive oestrogen receptor intraductal carcinoma is unwise and unsafe in my view – and in my experience of going through breast cancer.

I’m deeply concerned that other women may be influenced by her decision to reject medical treatment and heal herself.

She did trust a surgeon to give her a lumpectomy and test the lump he’d removed for cancer.

She says she was terribly shocked, as indeed we all are when we’re given the diagnosis. Instead of taking her doctor’s advice to have a mastectomy with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, plus reconstruction of her breast, she said no.

She would cure herself with a “holistic approach”.

In an interview to promote her forthcoming book Elle: Life, Lessons And Learning To Trust Yourself, the 60-year-old model, famed as ‘The Body’, says she’s now in clinical remission “but I would say I’m in utter wellness... from every perspective”.

I hope she’s right and she has found a calm and peaceful way to make herself well.

Her decision to reject chemotherapy was made after consulting “32 doctors and experts”, she says.

Presumably the vast majority advised an orthodox approach, but instead she followed the guidance of her “primary doctor”, who specialises in “integrative” medicine, which uses a combination of holistic therapies and lifestyle changes.

I wonder if she also sought the counsel of Andrew Wakefield, with whom she had started a two-year relationship around the same time.

Wakefield, you may remember, was the doctor who caused much anxiety and indeed danger by arguing the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine given to small children was a cause of autism.

He became an ardent antivaxxer, but his theory was proven to be nonsense. He was struck off the UK medical register and is no longer allowed to practise conventional medicine.

He could well have been a powerful influence to a lover dealing with the nightmare of a cancer diagnosis.

I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

I genuinely do hope Elle’s theory that her body has healed itself is correct.

But no-one should forget that cancer has a very bad habit of showing up, reappearing and going walkabout around the body.

It may have started in the breast and been removed, but it’s a determined disease. It can appear at any time with murder on its mind.

It can be found in the spine, the lungs, the liver and then it tends to kill you.

This is what happened to a dear friend of mine whose funeral I shall attend next week.

No-one should be encouraged to mess around with this disease.

Very few of us would have the time and money to take ourselves off to Phoenix, Arizona, as Elle did, and spend eight months alone under an alternative doctor’s care “focusing and devoting every single minute to healing myself”.

I don’t wish to demonise alternative medicine. I’m sure cancer patients benefit greatly from massage, relaxation and the chance to talk to experienced and sympathetic people.

The charity Maggie’s, which gives practical and emotional support after a diagnosis, provides ample back-up to conventional treatment.

But, let me emphasise, it’s back-up.

I did not keep my cancer a secret back in 2006. I found the problem as a result of an inverted nipple in the right breast.

As the Woman’s Hour presenter, I’d learned a lot about the cancer. The nipple was a classic sign.

Investigations concluded I was at stage 2 with a 3cm oestrogen receptor tumour. It would have been much smaller if I’d taken up the mammogram I’d been offered some months earlier rather than dismissing it because I was busy.

After the diagnosis, I immediately went into project mode in a mood of icy calm.

I had a thing which needed to be researched thoroughly and I needed to find the best possible person to deal with it in the hope of saving my life.

I was not going to dismiss advice from qualified oncologists.

Breast cancer is the most well-researched cancer in the world, largely thanks to fundraising and demands from women.

I knew I had nothing to be afraid of if I put my trust in a first-rate, highly regarded consultant.

I found Professor Nigel Bundred on the NHS at the Christie Cancer Hospital in Manchester.

I’d heard from several of the cancer charities I’d worked with that he had a terrible bedside manner but I didn’t care.

My only concern was his understanding of the disease and his skill with a scalpel.

His reputation was false. He could not have been more kind or sympathetic.

I never doubted that his advice was in my best interests – a mastectomy, a check of the main lymph nodes in the armpit, and chemotherapy.

Radiotherapy, he said, would not be necessary.

The surgery went brilliantly, but the sight of a mutilated breast is a horror story. I’d chosen not to have reconstruction.

The chemotherapy was indescribably horrid. It seems completely against nature to be sitting in a chair with a needle in your hand and a tube transporting poison into your body.

It makes you sick, it makes you exhausted, it destroys your hair.

But, as Professor Bundred explained, the hair will grow back and the chemotherapy will travel around your body sweeping up any travelling cancer cells.

Nearly 20 years on, I’m still here.

The breast, or former breast, is still a bit of a horror story.

The hair did grow back. The chemo caused avascular necrosis in the hip joints, which were replaced.

I never sat around thinking about it or seeking magic in holistic treatments. I trusted science and the skill of a specialist.

Good luck to Elle and her beautiful body. My priority was my life and so far, at 74, it seems to have worked.