Does Suzanne Somers Cause Cancer?

Dominic Chan, WENN.com / Newscom The former actress has one of the nation’s top books, touting secret cancer cures. But these methods, reports Gerald Posner, may actually increase the disease risk. Specifically, Posner reveals how:

• Her book promotes a regimen that many doctors believe causes cancer rather than cures it.
• This regimen might have contributed to her own bout with cancer.
• Several doctors and experts she uses as the basis for her book have medically checkered backgrounds.
• Cancer is a recurring thread and marketing tool for her wide-ranging business interests.
• One outside expert, based on his examination of 30 years of photographs, believes she had plastic surgery, which would undercut her reputation for health through alternative medicine.

PLUS: Somers Defends Herself: 'My War on Cancer'

Suzanne Somers, who came to fame in the 1970s as the ditzy Chrissy Snow on the iconic Three’s Company, yesterday pulled off the kind of feat generally reserved for the likes of John Grisham and Malcolm Gladwell. She scored her second New York Times bestseller in three years, Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer and How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place. Knockout further established the 63-year-old Somers as the high priestess of alternative health remedies.

More than that, Somers has positioned herself, with Knockout, as a messenger with the solution to a top killer in human history. “There are doctors out there who are curing cancer,” the book declares, citing interviews with 13 doctors, nutritionists, and Ph.Ds.

“We will eventually see a dramatic increase in uterine cancer,” says one doctor, “because of bioidentical regimens like the one promoted by Somers.”

Somers is no stranger to boastful medical discoveries. Her last bestseller, 2006’s Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones, claimed to have discovered “the fountain of youth we've all been looking for,” through her daily regimen, which involves injecting human growth hormone and two vitamin B solutions, shooting an estrogen hormone into her vagina, rubbing estrogen cream into her arm and taking 60 supplements. (“She just might be a pioneer,” said Oprah, who hosted Somers on her show in January and then began Somers’ bioidentical hormone program.)

Ageless, however, was mostly about quality of life. Knockout tackles life-and-death, painting a picture of traditional cancer care as “a debilitating, often deadly fraud,” and suggests a vast conspiracy involving the FDA, Big Pharma, a compliant mainstream media, and most oncologists, who all have an “incentive to keep cancer alive and well” since it’s “big business.”

• Somers Defends Herself: 'My War on Cancer'
To many cancer experts interviewed by The Daily Beast, this now makes Somers extremely dangerous. A flawed decision won’t lead to a lower sex drive or body aches. It will lead to death.

Specifically, these doctors told me, not only are some of the methods Somers espouses not proven to cure cancer, they are in fact more likely to cause cancer. Doctors who have followed her medical history even suggest that she may have helped bring on her own breast cancer.

I’m not someone who would naturally be skeptical of Somers’ 19 tomes. I’ve long used alternative medicine and take almost 20 supplements daily. In 2000, I helped research my wife Trisha’s book, No Hormones, No Fear, in which she used natural supplements and herbs to pass through menopause without resorting to Big Pharma’s hormone-replacement drugs. But a look at Somers’ background and motivations—and those of the experts on which she bases Knockout, raises some serious concerns.

The Suzanne Somers Wonder Drug

Somers’ core message revolves around the use of bioidentical hormones as wonder drugs. In Knockout, she writes that they fix “sex drive, inability to sleep, weight gain, bloating, body itches, mood swings, hot flashes, and memory loss… [and] also restores quality of life.” Bioidenticals, she writes, are “a good idea if you want to stay alive for twice as long as your body intended.”

So what makes bioidenticals different from hormones packaged and sold by major pharmaceutical firms?

According to doctors I spoke with, nothing.

“Bioidentical is a pseudo-scientific term used by Somers and others only as a marketing gimmick,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, an Associate Professor in Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Georgetown’s School of Medicine. “Bioidentical hormones are not natural products; they are synthesized in a laboratory. Bioidentical preparations use exactly the same pharmaceutical hormones that are used in branded hormone preparations.”