Jo survived her breast cancer against all the odds. With very little money, either for commercially made medicines, or the crucial biochemical tests she sought as an objective means of monitoring the process of her preferred treatment system.

Her research likewise had to be carried out without official access to important medical collections and her requests for specific bits of information from doctors and specicialists were often grudgingly given, and then usually only against a background of psychologically damaging criticism.

"You will die within (12) months...the time varied according to the doctor, or "if you don't have radiotherapy/chemotherapy/surgery...treatment varied according to the preference of the specialist.

These predictions grew less credible as the patients of these specialists (the recipients of the very best radiation, chemicals and surgery that money could buy) began to die.

This was not in the script - how could this woman living on carrot juice, vitamin C and strange oriental potions not only survive but look at the very peak of health?

Jo's success with her treatment lead her to think that perhaps she could ease off a bit. So she accepted an offer to tour with her photographs for three months throughout Australia, the USA and Canada, during the course of which she had to give up her health treatments.

Returning home at the end of the trip she complained of excessive tiredness and was diagnosed as having leukemia. She attempted to work her health treatments to meet this new challenge but her exhausted body was no longer responding as it should.

My researches of the literature carried out after her death in 1992 have turned up a number of research papers and animal studies which warn of the dangers associated with such sudden withdrawals from long term treatment (the so called "rebound effect").

So keep taking the carrot juice, or whatever, DON'T stop.

Terry Dennett - Jo Spence Memorial Archive
June 1995

Terry Dennett continues to maintain and update Jo Spence's original cancer project database and is happy to talk to cancer groups and individuals about the positive and negative aspects of her approach to her health as an independent cancer patient.

Tel: 020 7 354 1176

Email: dennett@gmx.net