Naomi Marks, freelance journalist
Brighton
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Many an oncologist must have been spluttering on their cornflakes while perusing the Daily Telegraph last week. Indeed, any doctor with a passing interest in scientific rigour might have wondered why the country's biggest selling and generally level headed broadsheet had devoted nearly the whole of a news page to an alleged miracle cure for cancer.
Headlined "I've seen herbal remedy make tumours disappear, says respected cancer doctor," the piece gave extraordinary coverage to Dr Rosy Daniel's belief in the efficacy of Carctol, an Indian herbal preparation, and was accompanied by testimonies from Carctol's "walking miracles." It was written by the paper's medical editor, Celia Hall.
Dr Daniel is a former medical director of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre and an integrated medicine specialist of some repute. She is newsworthy in her own right. Still, for a newspaper to give such prominence to the claims of an alternative health product yet to undergo clinical trials is an unusual editorial step.
Receiving it, however, is a "gift" of which few product promoters can ever even dream. For such coverage is also highly valuable. Public relations experts calculate that editorial column inches are worth at least three times the equivalent advertising space. A full page black and white advertisement in the Telegraph costs £50,000.
That, however, is academic: because five of the eight herbal ingredients in Carctol are classed as medicines in the United Kingdom, the preparation cannot be advertised. Dr Daniel says this is at the root of her decision to use a PR company to push news of the unlicensed medicine she has been prescribing to cancer patients for more than two years with, she claims, astonishing results.
"As Carctol is an unlicensed medicine it's effectively gagged," she says. "The importers are not allowed to advertise it or educate about it or even have an informational website."
Dr Daniel is keen to point out that she has spent much of her career investigating unproven therapies and protecting patients from them. But a former patient, a woman who 12 years ago was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer, recently spurred her into taking the publicity trail. "She told me I was unethical in not speaking out because in the current ethos of supposed patient choice and the absolute need for equity of access to treatments, how else were people going to find out about Carctol? I was as good as shamed into publicising it," she says.
She turned to S2 Marketing, a PR company retained by Health Creation, the holistic healthcare company that she founded. Being owned by the husband of one of her patients, she explains, S2 offered to promote the Carctol story at a non-commercial rate.
Saxon Cheng, S2 PR account manager, took the classic PR step of picking a favoured outlet for an exclusive before alerting the rest of the media to the story. The Telegraph was chosen, he says, for the good reason that two years previously it had run a favourable article on the medicine (an article now promoted on the Carctol website).
Dr Daniel, however, says that the Telegraph was the only paper to show an interest, while Celia Hall says she was unaware of any PR push for Carctol at all. Hall says she was just alerted to a good follow-up to the paper's original feature by that piece's author, a freelance whose mother had used the medicine.
Whatever its genesis, having secured the Telegraph exclusive, Cheng went on to issue a press release that spoke of the "walking miracles," as well as "breakthroughs" and "five extraordinary cases [that] have stunned the medical world."
Dr Daniel now regrets the hyperbole. In her defence, though, she adds, "This sort of handling of health information is not scandalous or different. I'm on the nursery slopes of what goes on in mainstream health PR. Weekly there are releases talking about cancer breakthroughs, which are often things just taking place in laboratories in phase-one trials. The hopes of patients are raised on a weekly basis, let's make no mistake about this."
Coverage of Carctol was widespread, including broadsheet and tabloid features and an interview on daytime television. The tone, though—even in the Telegraph—was not to Dr Daniel's liking. Journalists, using standard journalistic practice, approached other cancer experts for comment, all of whom sounded a resounding note of caution—even antagonism—towards the alleged "cure." Within two days of the PR campaign, Dr Daniel was shying away from further interviews as things were, in her words, "spinning out of control".
However, by the end of last week she was more positive. Dr Maurice Slevin, consultant medical oncologist at Barts, had had a letter published in the Telegraph in which he expressed an interest in carrying out formal studies on Carctol. Other doctors too were asking how they could obtain the medicine.
"The hope of going public was two-fold," says Dr Daniel. "One, that people can get access to a treatment that might be helpful, and, two, that research is catalysed."
Rightly or wrongly, thanks to the help of journalists, Dr Daniel has now achieved both her objectives.
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