Original subtitles

This is sort of the documentary that I would have liked to see

two years ago when we were making the decision about Sean's treatment.

I needed to see this.

He said he just felt like he just got lied to.

He trusted the wrong people.

And it's obviously cost him his life.

As you can see, this is really working.

This is healing my body.

Chemotherapy, I've already had it. It done me no good.

Does it make sense to poison yourself

back to good health?

It doesn't. It's not. It's insane.

Why would you poison yourself back to good health?

Sean died in January 2019,

three years after turning down hospital treatment

and deciding he was going to cure his cancer

without his doctor's help.

I'm Layla Wright, and I'm a journalist from Liverpool.

I never met Sean, but I'm friends with his girlfriend Aimee

and followed his journey online as he tried to heal himself naturally.

A year on from his death, I'm investigating why he turned down

conventional medicine and the people he believed were helping him.

I'm meeting Aimee at the cafe where she had her first date with Sean.

He was, like, a foodie, so he knew all the best places in Liverpool.

I've known Aimee for years,

but we became good mates back at uni just after she met him.

Sean was just... I'm going to cry. That's all right.

He was just so funny. Erm...

Just like the life and soul of a party, just so confident.

Before we met, I was just in awe of him,

because he was just so cool.

He'd be playing the gigs and stuff,

and, like, me and my friend Erin would be, like, cheering them on

and dancing.

INDIE ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

Even when he was little, he'd always be, like, doing the peace signs

and stuff, and his dress sense and his hair and his music

and everything, how eccentric he was.

He didn't care what people thought of...

You know, he'd walk down Bell Street with, like,

a fur coat on and he just didn't care.

He was like, "Well, I like it and this is what I'm doing."

Maybe that's why he was a musician.

# How was I supposed to know

# That you'd walk out that door... #

Sean and his band were well-known around Liverpool,

but just a few months before they recorded their first album,

Sean had just got over the worst time of his life.

You just don't imagine...

Mm-hm.

..that your child's going to have cancer.

It just doesn't enter your head, does it?

Came back he had Hodgkin's lymphoma.

And he had to start six months of chemotherapy,

and it was gruesome on him.

He got through that and we thought,

"This is it, he's going to get on with his life."

But Sean was in remission for less than two years.

He started getting poorly again and then they called us in and said

the cancer was back.

He had to undergo chemotherapy with a stem cell transplant.

Obviously, this was just not what Sean wanted to hear.

Didn't want to do it all over again.

I said, "I know these people who are supposed to be helping people

"with cancer, and his wife's apparently

"cured her own breast cancer," and so on.

So, with that, Sean says, "Well, I want to meet them."

And then, from there, that's when it all started, really.

Sean's parents remembered a chance encounter with a homoeopath called

Phillip Hughes, who claims he'd successfully treated his wife Rosa

for breast cancer.

Dawn went along to that first appointment.

Phil was just talking all about how damaging chemotherapy is,

you know, on the human body and, you know, saying,

"I've had lots of people come to my clinic,

"but by the time I get them,

"they're shot with all this chemotherapy, so I can't help them."

And then he was talking all about how you can change your diet,

which can reverse cancer.

And he'd said that Rosa had developed breast cancer.

She's had a lump in her breast

and she decided not to do hospital treatments

and she was going to, you know, reverse the cancer herself.

So obviously, Sean's listening to this thinking,

"Well, if one person's done it,

"and then I'm hearing other little stories off them, I can do this."

When his cancer returned,

Sean's doctors told him he had at least a 50% chance

of long-term survival if he had conventional treatment.

But Sean had decided he didn't want chemotherapy

or any hospital treatment.

Instead, he and Aimee started spending hours online,

researching alternatives and cancer conspiracy theories.

Just scrolling on Instagram, there's so many.

"The pharmaceutical industry do not create cures.

"They create customers."

And people actually, like,

use memes as, like, a valid source of information.

It's quite shocking, really, isn't it?

Yeah, they're the type of stuff that he'd use, like, to justify

what he was doing and, like, he'd share things like this as well.

But then I understand that I was at one point in a situation

where I believed this.

You're in your own bubble.

It really is, like, radicalisation is the word I use,

because I just turned into a different person.

Looking back at this now, it's crazy how

I ever wrote like this and thought this.

I remember from his videos that at one point Sean believed

he could reverse his cancer just by changing his diet.

So, his diet completely changed fully. So he went fully organic,

fully vegan, raw, non-processed, refined, sugar-free, gluten-free.

Pretty much everything.

Just raw foods, mainly.

He was avoiding certain vegetables and certain fruits,

and the sort of list of things he ate

just went smaller and smaller and smaller.

And some days he just wouldn't eat because he was afraid

of what he could and couldn't eat. He was obsessed with his diet.

Thank you.

So, these are like the type of supplements he'd take,

like vitamin D3, milk thistle,

digestive enzymes, B12.

So he'd pretty much take these types of supplements every single day.

Sean, he sort of documented his journey, didn't he?

He was... It's almost like he was an influencer

for this alternative treatment world. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, he was a little bit of like a celebrity, really.

He got, like, thousands of, like, little followers on Facebook

and stuff and views on his videos.

And it was almost like an echo chamber on the internet -

all these people, like, reinforcing his ideas.

I can't remember what this juice is, but I think it's just a green one,

you get handed these every hour alongside the carrot juice.

Sean believed he could cure his cancer by detoxing

and completely changing his lifestyle.

He went vegan, tried cannabis oil and started doing coffee enemas.

Sounds disgusting, but at the end of the day,

someone's got to talk about it.

That's an enema bucket.

That's oil.

I think you know what the oil is for.

HE LAUGHS

There's the cleaning liquid.

So, there you have it, folks.

Here's a big jug of coffee that's going straight up my ass.

Now, the reasons behind it, going up the back...

..going up the back passage is that it detoxifies you,

just pulls all the crap out of you.

Now, not to get into gory detail, but...

..if you've been eating a Western diet your whole life - you know,

processed foods, white bread, cereal -

just all this junk that's got no nutrition in it,

what happens is, inside your body, you get plaque on the...

..on the walls in your bowels.

So it kind of... It rips all that out.

As Sean tried to cure his cancer

through these alternative treatments,

he was also having scans at Rosa and Phillip Hughes's clinic,

which he believed were monitoring his cancer.

The couple provided them through their company,

Medical Thermal Imaging.

Thermography uses an infrared camera to take heat pictures of the body.

They describe their scans as 100% safe and radiation-free.

It is legal to offer it, but the NHS warns that there is no evidence

that thermography is an effective way to either test for cancer

or to monitor its treatment.

Sean's thermography scans were a huge part

of his approach to cancer.

They were Sean's evidence, his hope, his confirmation

that it was working.

He'd say, you know, "Remember, this is all backed up by this

"thermographic scan that my tumours are shrinking."

Erm... Yeah, I think they were pretty much the crux of everything.

And did they ever... as far as you're aware... Yeah.

..encourage Sean to go for the hospital scans as well,

or for conventional treatment?

No, they were totally against it.

And in Sean's words,

"It's like carrying a backpack full of bricks on my back,

"and then when they tell me everything's all clear on the scan,

"it's like taking the backpack off for a bit and just feeling that

"weight just disappear off you."

So, a couple of days ago, Sean's older brother Kev gave me a call

and said that he thinks he's managed to get into Sean's e-mails,

so I'm just headed there now to see if we can get in.

Just kind of get an insight into how he was thinking.

Yeah, I'd found an e-mail from online forums that Sean had been on.

Basically, what it says is,

"Over the last year my health has improved dramatically.

"The further I walk away from the doctors, that building

"and their so-called treatments, the better I have became.

"I have even gained one stone in weight.

"I get private scans via a homoeopathic doctor that confirm

"what I'm doing is working. I'm curing my own cancer."

At one stage, he thought his alternative treatments were working.

Doctors had only given him eight months to live without chemotherapy,

but Sean seemed to be doing amazingly well.

His posts caught the attention of an alternative clinic,

the Gerson Center in Mexico.

They invited him over to stay for free,

but Sean had to pay for some treatments.

He raised thousands of pounds through fundraising and spent

at least $500 on laetrile therapy -

a treatment made from apricot kernels,

which carries the risk of cyanide poisoning.

Back home, we were all watching the videos that he posted online.

I'll give you the sneak peek.

Everything, down to the scenery,

the food you're getting served, the juices, the enemas,

the laetrile, the IVC.

Oh, I'll show you something else, actually.

Here's an oxygen chamber. I have to be very quiet because

someone's currently getting some treatment done,

so I'll just show you a quick glance of what it looks like.

Everything in here's about healing. The total opposite of a hospital.

Anyone from Liverpool, you go in the Royal Hospital,

what's the first thing you notice when you go in there?

The cold, sterile, clinical environment.

And then...

..you're having to deal with these "doctors".

Doctors... Are they real...?

Are they doctors or are they pill salesmen?

I'll leave that up to you to decide,

because I'm not too fond of them myself.

We approached the Gerson Center for a response.

Dr Patrick Vickers said...

He said that Sean didn't stick to their diet and treatments,

and it was unfortunate that he passed away,

"but it clearly had nothing to do with our treatment."

When he got home,

Sean continued trying different alternative treatments

and having thermography scans with Rosa and Phillip Hughes.

When he came home from Mexico...

..he went for a scan and they said, "We can't see nothing,"

so obviously Sean's thinking, "Oh, the cancer's gone."

Disclaimers on Sean's scan reports say...

..and recommend further clinical investigation.

However, on reading their reports, Sean believed his cancer had gone.

February, 2017.

August, 2017.

October, 2017.

But his mum knew something wasn't right.

I'd seen him declining in his health really rapidly,

and it got to the point where he couldn't lie down to sleep,

he couldn't breathe properly.

He was in a bad... He was in a bad way.

I got him straight to the hospital.

We didn't even have to wait in A&E

because they could see how poorly he was.

Even one of the nurses said to me,

"Who has done this to him?"

For the first time in two years,

Sean allowed the hospital to examine him.

He had that much fluid built up,

caused through the cancer.

He had a tumour the size of a grapefruit in his stomach,

he had tumours all in his chest and stuff.

Just got on the bed with him and just said, "Come on, Sean..."

I just said, "Come on, Sean, wake up, please, you can do this."

Obviously the scans were giving me a false hope.

They were sort of reassuring me,

up until the point when he actually went into hospital.

One of the nurses pulled me aside on my own and was sort of saying,

"It doesn't look like he's got much long left,"

and that's sort of when I realised,

"OK, what has been going on the past two years?

"He clearly has not been curing his own cancer.

"It's just been growing all this time."

Doctors started Sean on chemotherapy immediately,

but it was too late for the treatments they'd recommended

when his cancer first came back.

He was in and out of hospital for a year,

but in the end they said his cancer had spread too much

and there was nothing more they could do.

I had the... Essentially the difficult job of...

..the difficult job of bringing

someone to terms with their own death, their own mortality.

You know, "Time is running out and you're going to pass away."

We both sat down, essentially, on this hospital bed

that was in the corner of the living room,

and...it was like I was interviewing his life, like...

I asked him, what was the best part of it?

And he said, "The music."

And then he said he felt it was...

..he felt it was unfair...

..that...

..he only had a short time and...

..you know, for someone who's...

..had cancer since the age of 17,

you never... He never got to experience the full...

..years of being in your 20s or past that.

And...

..essentially, he...

..he realised what was going to be coming.

He realised he was passing away

and that he just wanted to, you know, die.

Sean died in January 2019.

He was just 23.

Sean's mum told me she feared other families had lost loved ones

after trying alternative treatments

so I started searching.

Sean's medical team told me his case is just the tip of the iceberg.

I've arranged to meet Lorna, a senior scientist

at Cambridge University.

Her mum, Linda, died in 2014.

We didn't know that she'd had cancer until she died.

It was breast cancer. She caught it really early.

She was advised to have a mastectomy and chemotherapy and radiotherapy,

and told that if she did that she had really good odds.

But quite quickly she decided that she didn't want to do that.

She went to see Rosa to help her monitor the growth and spread

of her cancer using thermal imaging.

And then...Phillip became Mum's homoeopath.

Linda had always been wary of conventional medicine.

Soon after she was diagnosed, she turned down all NHS treatments

and started taking medicines such as mistletoe injections

from a number of alternative practitioners.

She had thermography scans with Rosa Hughes,

which she thought were tracking her cancer.

She was going to the clinic and saying, "I think it's growing.

"I'm pretty sure it's getting bigger."

And she could feel it was getting bigger.

And yet the scans were saying that it...that it wasn't,

that it wasn't growing.

And I think to some extent,

she was sort of lured into a false sense of belief.

Phillip would prescribe her a new homoeopathic treatment,

so I think she was sort of reassured that she was doing something.

And just how expensive were these treatments

that your mum was receiving?

Oh, she spent a lot of money and, you know, thousands of pounds on it.

And that was really difficult to see

how much was...she was spending on supplements

and on these thermal imaging treatments.

Linda started using a corrosive herbal remedy called black salve,

which she got from another alternative therapist.

She told her GP it was drawing out her cancer.

The doctor said to my mum, "That's an ulcerating...

"..tumour, and you have an open wound,"

and, you know, told Mum the truth.

And I know that Mum was very emotional and very upset.

I think she knew it was probably too late

and couldn't face the truth about what was happening.

But I think part of her knew.

Lorna had noticed her mum behaving strangely.

But one phone call home made her realise her mum was really ill.

I was getting worried at this stage and I said to her,

"I think you need to go and see a doctor," and she said,

"No, I'm in contact, regular contact with a homoeopath from Liverpool."

And at that point, I got a bit cross and said, you know,

"Mum, homoeopathy doesn't...doesn't work."

And she went quite quiet at that point,

but we said our goodbyes.

And that was the last time I spoke to her.

Linda died a couple of days later.

An inquest found she died of septicaemia caused

by the ulceration of her tumour.

The coroner said Linda had made her own decisions

and was beyond persuasion.

If your mum didn't turn down conventional treatment,

do you think she'd still be here now? Absolutely.

I've now met two families whose loved ones believed

they could cure their cancer alternatively and took reassurance

from thermography scans that what they were doing was working.

I want to find out for myself what's going on inside the clinic.

SAT NAV: The destination is on your right.

Medical Thermal Imaging.

Arrived.

So we made an appointment, posing as a patient who'd found a lump.

This is the clinic where Sean came for thermographic monitoring.

This is Rosa Hughes, who provided scans for Sean and Linda.

Rosa Hughes was making quite a lot of medical claims,

so I wanted to show our recording to an expert.

I've come to The Christie in Manchester

to meet Professor Andrew Wardley.

He's an oncologist, but has also been a patient

and recovered from leukaemia.

I started with the footage of Rosa advising against mammograms.

That's preposterous. You don't burst tumours.

They're solid. You do squash the breast down to do a mammogram,

it is unpleasant, but it's a short-term thing.

You do not spread cancer by doing a mammogram.

That's complete fallacy.

So, she's using some terms that are commonly used in in cancer medicine

and cancer science, but the way she's applying this is wrong.

The only way you can prove it's a cancer is if you'd get

the tissue out and see cancer cells under the microscope.

So, my suspicion would be that she didn't have a cancer,

because cancers do not go away spontaneously.

Is it possible that she could have had cancer and recovered

naturally, like she says? It's very, very unlikely.

I've never heard of a spontaneous remission of a breast cancer.

She's actually advising people not to get a diagnosis

and the treatment options given to them properly,

so she's... This is dangerous, in my opinion.

I think these sort of things should be outlawed.

It makes me very concerned.

You know, I've been through the worst treatment

you can possibly have.

I've had chemotherapy that would...did wipe out all of my

bone marrow, whole-body radiotherapy,

and I was extremely ill and nearly died from the treatment,

but I would have definitely died

and died very quickly had I not had the treatment.

For people with Hodgkin's disease, the outcomes are excellent.

And more and more people are cured

or kept alive because of drug treatments that are very effective.

There's so many things that make me highly concerned

about this thing that she's doing, which is very dangerous.

We invited Rosa and Phillip Hughes to an interview.

In response, they said it is...

They...

As regards to Linda Halliday, they said...

They said...

They also said...

I was really shocked by what I'd heard

and wanted to give Aimee and Dawn an update.

So, I found out as well that Sean's testimonial is still being used

on the Mexico clinic's website.

AIMEE GASPS

So, on here, when you go on, it has, like, success stories.

They've got here saying that

Sean's recently returned home and his scan that he had

found that the largest tumour appears to be dead

with no activity and no signs.

I mean, all them testimonies that Sean was reading

and relying upon, how do we know that they weren't already dead?

It's wrong, isn't it? It needs to take them down.

We put our allegations to the Gerson Clinic,

who have since removed Sean's testimony.

They said they will take out newspaper adverts about our team

if this documentary went ahead.

We went undercover at Rosa and Phil's clinic recently.

We found out that they're still, a year on from Sean dying,

they're still warning people against hospitals.

How dare they say that to people?

They need to stop.

I don't know how they sleep at night, to be honest. I don't.

You're vulnerable when you've got cancer.

You're looking to yourself or put yourself in remission at least,

or spend as much time with your loved ones,

and you are going to believe certain people

who are actually making money out of the cancer industry

through vulnerable people.

One of the hardest things to sort of get over

in life is betrayal.

Like, having...having the carpet took

from underneath your feet, and

for him to get to that position...

..it was...it was just...heart-breaking.

Sean introduced me to yoga,

so it's just really lovely to carry it on.

And it's sort of a way for me to connect with Sean.

I just want to help other people and make sure that people aren't

misled down this path and lose someone that they love over it.

It's my duty to get this message across

and to get justice for Sean as well.

When I started following Sean's attempts to cure himself

and saw how well he seemed to be doing,

I knew one day I'd make a documentary about him.

But this is not the film I expected to make.

I've seen just how desperate people can become

and realise now that the stories online about cancer cures

may not be what they seem.