"Rage, rage against the dying of the light" - Dylan Thomas

I had a desk job and I worked too much, I didn't exercise nearly enough and I didn't pay much attention to my diet or my alcohol intake. I was certainly under stress, both at work and in my family environment. But, hey, all that's pretty normal, so all was well.

Then I had my first colonoscopy right after I turned fifty, and bang!

Stage IIIc cancer, infected lymph nodes, only about half a millimetre of growth until the carcinoma would have broken through the outermost protective layers of the colon.

Now I'd just had my normal battery of periodic cancer screening tests and I'd been complaining of blood in my stool for more than a year, but my general practitioner felt all was fine. Never even hinted that colorectal cancer was a possibility. Understandably, by this time I had a really bad feeling about my doctor, so I did some reading myself.

I'm a civil engineer by training and a data specialist by profession, so I'm analytic and logical, I know enough about research and I have a healthy appreciation for statistical methods. This also helped me understand the method in which medicine classifies cancer patients into stages and the meaning of the survival rates that medicine quotes.

The thing about the medical industry (or profession, if you will) is that there is no guaranteed outcome. Very sad, but especially true in the case of cancer. Strange, really, after humanity has spent so very much time and money attacking the problem. In the case of this terrible disease, medicine can't really treat and cure many if not most cancers, even less so once advanced stage III or stage IV is reached.

A clearly thinking individual understands that it's a tough problem. Cancer begins when the DNA in one of your own cells mutates in such a way that its instruction becomes "multiply rapidly" with no off-switch. This cell then does exactly that, even protecting its own future by spreading offspring to remote organs or even hiding in places that are difficult to get to chemically. But it's still your own cell, as are all its descendants, and is tremendously difficult to distinguish from healthy cells. Killing such cancerous cells without damaging healthy cells is currently still impossible in most cases.

But, in reality, medicine does not know what causes cancer, does not have reliable tests to screen for almost all forms cancers and, once diagnosed, can't reliably cure you of cancer. As if that wasn't enough, curing a patient of one form of cancer does not diminish the chances of the patient getting another form of cancer, even after surgery.

OK, so it only took me a few days to realise that the situation was dire indeed.

I understood that modern medicine wasn't, by itself, able to cure me and keep me healthy. Even the very best specialists, surgeons and chemicals could only alleviate the situation to the point where I was able to fight the rest myself.

I found a lot of ifs in my reading, heard many maybes in my conversations.

Essentially, if I did nothing I was going to die painfully and soon, and if I submitted to radiation and chemotherapy I would probably postpone death, maybe even rid myself of the current cancer.

So I went for a holistic approach.

I don't use "holistic" here in the way that some people do, implying alternative, chemical-free or devoid of modern western medical treatment.

"Holistic" here means whole, complete, selecting from available aspects of human experience that which is uniquely appropriate. "Holistic" meant trusting the best specialists I could access at the Swiss Tumor Institute in Zurich (thank you Dr. Helbling, Dr. Gut and Prof. Dr. Schmidt), but complementing the treatment with lifestyle changes and nutrients that I could logically justify to myself.

Today I am completely cancer-free.

Here's what I did...