Changing Body pH Or Drinking Raw Potato Juice To Treat Cancer Is Pure Nonsense

This is an old essay of mine, first published under the pen name Huaici Jushi on Sina Blog; it was later reposted by many people. I have now rearranged the old piece and post it here, hoping that cancer patients and their families who read it will be on their guard. After a family member develops cancer, many people are anxious and read all kinds of articles about cancer everywhere; I myself went through such a phase, and, anxious about being misled, did many wrong things. So now I write from time to time to refute various fallacies, hoping to help other cancer patients and their families. I especially remind readers: heresies such as changing body pH and drinking potato juice to treat cancer are spreading everywhere; be very careful and do not try them lightly.

The claim that changing the body's pH can cure cancer is said to originate with a certain doctor in Taiwan, who supposedly claimed that most cancer sufferers have an acidic constitution, and that if the acidic constitution is changed to an alkaline one, cancer can be cured and a long life gained. In 2009, believing this, I bought a whole sackful of water chestnuts (lingjiao) and boiled them in water for my mother to drink; I persisted for half a year, only to give her chronic gastroenteritis, with daily diarrhea. It took a whole year of treatment before a gastroenterologist back in my hometown finally cured her with trimebutine maleate tablets. The truth is that such so-called folk remedies, not confirmed by large clinical trials, are utterly useless. Sadly, this nonsense circulates widely online; I actually saw a little shop selling "acid-alkaline water" to cure disease somewhere near my home in central Beijing.

Human blood pH must be maintained within a constant range to survive. If a person forcibly alters the body's pH, it will directly cause death, not longevity. So everyone must be on guard against such heresies.

Another legend is that drinking potato juice cures cancer; several netizens strongly recommended it to me. I contacted a certain man in Hunan, who was said to have a father-in-law who had successfully beaten cancer by drinking potato juice—this was widely circulated in the potato-juice anti-cancer circles. When I asked him directly, he denied it. The example he then recommended to me was a bladder cancer patient he knew who, after surgery, had drunk potato juice for nine months (nine months as of the time I contacted him) without recurrence. I followed up by interviewing the patient's wife, who told me that he not only drank potato juice but also took Chinese medicine and had chemotherapy. Quite apart from all those other treatments, my own mother, after surgery, did not receive nearly so much treatment, and did not recur for over two years—and hers was gastric cancer, which has a much worse prognosis than bladder cancer. But drinking potato juice does indeed improve stool consistency; this I have personally verified. As for the claim that it cures cancer, that is pure nonsense. One patient's family in Beijing, firmly believing potato juice fought cancer, gave it to her mother for a long time, finally causing her mother to develop gastrointestinal flora imbalance and indigestion, in great distress. Yet it did not save her mother's life; her mother died within the deadline predicted by Western medicine.

These claims generally cannot stand up to scrutiny; if patients or their families keep tracing them to the source, they find that the source does not exist at all. The claim about changing body pH is loved most by the merchants involved, because the doctor supposedly first recommended water chestnuts; so when I bought them, the seller eagerly emphasized their anti-cancer properties and repeatedly explained the principle of changing body pH to fight cancer. I fell for this trick back then.

Perhaps others will keep trying this road in future and keep coming to grief. There are many more such heresies lacking evidence; fellow cancer patients often ask me to judge whether they are right or wrong. I cannot declare that every such legend is nonsense, but I believe the great majority of them are. I hope other patients' families who have tried them will come forward and, through their own experience, confirm the truth or falsehood.