Over the first quarter of the 21st century, medical breakthroughs have helped transform cancer prognoses from near-certain death sentences to far more treatable and survivable conditions, across the oncological spectrum. But even with these advances—encouraging enough to compel then-candidate Joe Biden to promise “we’re gonna cure cancer” on the 2019 campaign trail—the problem of uncontrolled cell growth within the human body is not yet solved.
Cancer’s frustrating lack of a single silver bullet remedy stems from it being not one disease, but rather a complex family of over 200 distinct maladies. And when such an open-ended affliction meets with human desperation to save a life, you inevitably wind up with pseudoscientific treatment plans peddled by grifters and true believers alike. These ineffective larks might take the form of ear candling or juice fasts (RIP Steve Jobs), but they never actually help cure the patient of their malignant cells.
One of the more plainly ludicrous examples of “alternative” treatment comes to us from a south London clinic where stage 4 cancer patients are sealed naked in a plastic bag with only their heads out. Next, their bodies gassed with chlorine dioxide, also known as oxidizing industrial bleach. The belief is that the gas will cause severe oxidative stress to the cancer cell, altering its internal pH and forcing tumors to self-destruct.
As reported in WIRED, this treatment method has “no scientific evidence” backing it, according to Cancer Research UK’s senior specialist information nurse, Caroline Geraghty. It’s also so harmful to the body that even the stockbroker-turned-ice-cream-man-turned-holistic-healer, Alistair Jessel, who inflicts this on patients out of his Battersea Park Clinic, admits it’s “dangerous.” But Jessel, son of knighted gentry and real-life Industry character, is merely putting a fresh spin on the pseudoscientific ramblings of another.
His inspiration comes from a German, Andreas Kalcker, who first proposed this gaseous bleach method as “Protocol G” for treating non-cancer ailments in his 2021 independently published book Forbidden Health: Incurable Was Yesterday.
As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic broke many people’s brains, so many long-peddled bits of hokum found a wider audience with the “do your own research” crowd once mainstream, science-backed medicine became a side in the broader culture war. While he wasn’t behind the similarly bunk “bleach cure” many used at that time to treat COVID, Kalcker’s book got a boost from that wave of crazies. So now he’s revered by folks like Jessel and others in the “bleacher community,” which I regret to inform you exists.
And wherever there’s a community of dummies telling each other “exaaaaactlyyyy,” there are podcasts to proliferate that message. It’s on one of these, the Chlorine Dioxide Testimonies (CDT) Live Chat Support Group, that Jessel proselytized about chlorine dioxide’s supposed abilities to cure not just cancer, but HIV and autism too.
“Having people naked in a bag, which in a clinic situation is probably what a lot of doctors have to face, but as an entrepreneur sitting in front of a naked person in front of me is something I hadn’t sort of planned on doing in the last few years,” Jessel told the hosts, “but what it’s achieving has been really quite incredible.”
Jessel refused to answer any of WIRED’s questions for the story, only referring them to Kalcker’s book. He has, however, further opined about cancer on another holistic medicine podcast, The It’s All Good Show, claiming one of its “nine causes” is a “bad marriage.”
While Protocol G’s ability to remove cancer from the body remains scientifically unproven, what Jessel has undoubtedly achieved is the ability to remove money from suckers’ wallets. Beyond the harm these quack treatments do to individual vulnerable patients, either financially, physically, or by keeping them from care that would actually improve their condition, there’s a larger concern to address. The charlatans are getting rich and gaining followings. And that equates to political power in our broken world full of even more broken institutions. Stories like these can only add to the growing concern among those who still believe in science about broader deregulations in the medical field. Jessel and his clinic may be London’s problem, but the bleacher community has its own metastasized cells replicating across America. And they’re quite keen to work with US Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. to add bleach to the MAHA menu.