Simon: Radiotherapy can cause cancer and lead to heart problems years after the treatment. But you can reduce your cancer risk by not doing radiotherapy treatments. In this episode, you're going to first learn the history of radiotherapy, and then I'm going to explain how this cancer treatment works.

And finally, you will learn some common side effects of this treatment and why you should avoid radiotherapy.

Intro jingle: Welcome to the Cancer Wisdom podcast. This podcast teaches you how to treat cancer with natural remedies without using toxic treatments. Discover how to take charge of your health and not be a slave to Big Pharma medicine. Here's your host Simon Persson.

Simon: To really understand why radiotherapy is so toxic, we first need to go back in history. So we have to go back to 1895. At that time, Wilhelm Röntgen was a professor of physics in Würzburg, Germany. So one day in late 1895, he began experimenting with cathode rays.  

In his laboratory, he explored the path of electrical rays that passed through a glass tube. Röntgen covered that tube with black paper and made it pitch dark. But then he made an amazing discovery.

So he saw how the rays illuminated a screen, and Röntgen later realized that these rays could penetrate various objects. Then he got the idea to replace the screen with a photographic plate.

And then he started to capture pictures, and it was then he took the first x-ray. It was an image of his wife's left hand. So this picture showed her bones and her wedding ring.

Röntgen labeled his discovery x-rays, and later, he got the Nobel Prize for his invention. X-rays soon became an essential diagnostic tool in medicine. So for the first time, doctors could see inside the body.

X-rays were not only used as a diagnostic tool in medicine but also for other reasons, such as when you wanted to try a shoe size and then used x-rays as a way to see how well the shoe fit.

So scientists were quick to realize the benefits of x-rays. But they didn't know the harmful effects of radiation. But later, they found out that x-rays had disturbing side effects.

Soon there were reports of burns on the skin or other skin damage caused by x-rays. For example, in 1904, Thomas Edison's assistant  Clarence Daley, who worked with x-rays, died of skin cancer.

So it's believed that the first person to create radiotherapy as a treatment for cancer was Émil Grubbé. He was one of the first Americans to use x-rays to treat cancer. He often played with the latest electronic gadgets of the day.

And after Röntgen's discovery, he was curious and wanted to try out his invention. So he created his x-ray machine. In the beginning, Grubbé was his own Guinea pig. So for two weeks, he took numerous x-rays of his left hand.

At the time, he didn't understand how dangerous x-rays were. So he exposed his hand to too much radiation. And because of his frequent exposure to radiation, he started to get severe burns on the back of his hand.

And on January 27th, 1896, he talked to his colleagues that were medical professors at Hahnemann. Grubbé showed the physical damage caused by X-rays, and it amazed his colleagues.

And then Grubbé talked to his coworker, J.E Gilman. And he wondered if you could use x-rays as a way to treat cancer.

And then he tried to find a patient to treat, and finally, he found a woman called Rose Lee. She was a 55-year-old woman with breast cancer.

Grubbé started to treat her, and her tumor shrunk. But only a few months later after her treatment, she started to feel dizzy and nauseous.

And eventually, her cancer started to spread to her spine, brain, and liver. And only some months after her initial treatment, Rose Lee died.

But despite that Émil Grubbé did illegal experiments on cancer patients, this treatment later became a cancer treatment. 

Grubbé himself had ongoing exposure to radiation, which burned his skin, and he underwent more than 90 operations for multiple cancers.

Radiation therapy or radiotherapy uses radiation beams to kill cancer cells. Oncologists use it together with chemotherapy or surgery or use it alone.

When the cancer spreads to other areas of the body, then doctors usually use chemotherapy. So the primary purpose of radiotherapy is to shrink tumors before or after surgery. It's used to ease the symptoms of late-stage cancer.

There are two main radiotherapy methods. One is external beam radiation, which uses a machine that delivers radiation outside the body. Then we have internal radiation, which uses pallets or seeds that give of radiation beams inside the body.

Radiotherapy works by aiming a high dose of radiation towards a tumor, and then the radiation damages the DNA in the cancer cells. Normal cells also become damaged by radiation, but they are better at stitching together their DNA than cancer cells.

But any harm that you do to healthy tissues is a potential health risk, so therefore, doctors use radiotherapies in different sessions. So there are mainly side effects of radiotherapy. One side effect is fatigue. Another side effect is hair loss.

Some patients also report a loss of taste and feel nauseated and start to vomit. Or they can get diarrhea or tissue inflammation. Other people can experience hormone problems, but the worst side effect is cancer.

Why should you treat cancer with a method that causes more cancer? The reason why radiotherapy can cause cancer is because of ionizing radiation. So this type of radiation has enough energy to damage DNA and cause cancer.

Ionizing radiation includes radon, x-rays, gamma rays, and other high-energy radiation, such as atomic bomb survivors in Japan or the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Uranium minors can also get exposed to ionizing radiation.

So one way they can get exposed to radiation is through radon which is a radioactive gas given off by rocks and soil. It's formed when the radioactive element radon breaks down and increases the risk of lung cancer.

So one single source of radiation exposure is not likely to cause more cancer by itself. If you, for example, take one x-ray, you will not get skin cancer from one treatment. But if you get exposed to this ionizing radiation multiple times during your life, then that can increase your cancer risk.

It can increase when you do several rounds of radiotherapy, x-rays, or mammograms. When women want to screen for cancer, they usually do mammograms that expose them to ionizing radiation, which can increase their cancer risk when the whole idea of mammograms is to prevent breast cancer.

You can get serious damage from radiotherapy if you get a too large dose, such as when there's a computer error. So there have been cases where the patient got exposed to too much radiation, and it created a hole in the body.

So besides cancer, an overdose can also cause severe wounds to the skin, bone, organs and even cause death. One side effect that not many people talk about is cardiotoxicity. It's when the heart muscle gets exposed to too much radiotherapy.

So, for example, you can experience this side effect when you get treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma or cancers of the lung, esophagus, or breast cancer.

You can develop cardiotoxicity within days, months, or even years after your treatments. This condition can reduce your quality of life and increase the risk of death from heart problems.

So, for example, if you manage to survive from the radiotherapy treatments and later die of heart problems, the doctors will put heart problems on your death certificate and not blame radiotherapy.

One famous celebrity that went through radiotherapy but not chemotherapy was Suzanne Summers. She got diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001.

I read her testimony of her cancer journey, and she told everyone that her radiotherapy treatments caused constant pain in her breasts.

Her breasts gradually got flatter and flatter until it looked like she had completely removed her breast. Suzanne had a problem wearing a bra, and it was extremely painful to remove her bra.

Another side effect of radiotherapy that is not often discussed is when you treat brain tumors. There's a lethal side effect of using radiotherapy called radiation necrosis.

Radiation necrosis is the death of a healthy tissue in the brain caused by radiation therapy,  and this condition kills the majority of its victims. So when you treat the brain with radiotherapy, you take this enormous risk.

 Even if doctors tell you that radiation therapy cured your cancer, you can still die later from other causes, and the doctors will not blame the therapy.

Before you do any radiotherapy, you should download our questionnaire. This document contains questions you should ask your radiation oncologist before risking your life. 

When you ask them these questions, you will find some disturbing facts about this treatment, and you will think twice before you try this treatment.

If you have already done some radiotherapy, then you can read our radiotherapy detox guide for free on our course page. In this course, you will learn natural remedies that you should use to detox from radiotherapy treatments. 

So I will provide links to these resources in the description box. Thanks for listening to this episode, and I'll see you in the next episode.