Cancer is a fungus. And can be cured by baking soda. Barmy

So claims the notoriously accurate David Icke. I was alerted to this nonsense by a conspiracy-obsessed friend on Facebook.

One such case is the Italian doctor, Tullio Simoncini, a brilliant and courageous man who has refused to bow to the enormous pressure he has faced, and continues to face, after he realised what cancer is and how it can be dealt with.

Simoncini's 'crime' has been to discover that cancer is a fungus caused by Candida, a yeast-like organism that lives in the body in small amounts even in healthy people. The immune system keeps it under control normally, but when the Candida morphs into a powerful fungus some serious health problems can follow - including cancer.

Naturally, Icke has an explanation for why Big Pharma is trying to silence Simoncini (I can't bring myself to give him the title "Doctor").

But look at what has been happening as cancer numbers worldwide have soared and soared. There has been a calculated war on the human immune system that has got more vociferous with every decade.

The immune system is weakened and attacked by food and drink additives, chemical farming, vaccinations, electromagnetic and microwave technology and frequencies, pharmaceutical drugs, the stress of modern 'life', and so much more.

What defences are today's children going to have when they are given 25 vaccinations and combinations of them, before the age of two - while their immune system is still forming for goodness sake?

This is how the Illuminati families are seeking to instigate a mass cull of the population. By dismantling the body's natural defence to disease.

Yes, of course it's all a dastardly plan by those blood-sucking lizards to keep the human population down. How could we ever have doubted otherwise?

We can leave aside Icke's deluded ravings, but cancer is a serious business. Cancerous cells reproduce uncontrollably inside the body, invading and destroying healthy tissue. Generally, the only treatment is to remove the cancerous cells, and then follow up with courses of radiation or chemotherapy, to ensure all the cells are destroyed. This also damages healthy tissue, and unfortunately doesn't always succeed. The prognosis for some cancer survivors, even after surgery, may be less than 50/50.

Given such an unpromising diagnosis, it's understandable, I suppose, that many turn to alternative (or as I like to call them, untested and dangerous) treatments. And this is where quacks like Simoncini enter the picture. According to Icke:

Instead, Simoncini found something much, much simpler - sodium bicarbonate. Yes, the main ingredient in good old baking soda (but I stress not the same as baking soda, which has other ingredients).

He used this because it is a powerful destroyer of fungus and, unlike the drugs, the Candida cannot 'adapt' to it. The patient is given sodium bicarbonate orally and through internal means like an endoscope, a long thin tube that doctors use to see inside the body without surgery. This allows the sodium bicarbonate to be placed directly on the cancer - the fungus.

Baking soda. 

A quick bio of Simoncini:

Tullio Simoncini lost his offcial license to practice medicine in 2003  in Italy. On May 2006 he was convicted to 3 y. for manslaughter of the first patient and 16 months for having charged 7.500 EUR each to the other 2 patients.

Even a prison sentence didn't stop him. In 2010, a Scottish man suffering from cancer turned to Simoncini after refusing chemotherapy on the NHS.

"I've always refused chemotherapy because it just kills your immune system. I think if I'd gone through it I'd maybe even be dead by now.

Of course, Simoncini's baking soda doesn't come for free.

He has agreed to treat Mr Fyvie, from Musselburgh, but they must come up with £10,000 by 21 March to make the procedure happen.

He has the full backing of his children, one of whom ran a sponsored ten miles on Friday to add to the £1,200 they have already collected.

£10,000. One pound of baking soda costs £1.47 from American Soda. By my calculation, that money could have bought 6,802 pounds of baking soda. That's one big shopping trolley.

In any case, it did Fyvie little good, because within six months, he was dead.

The family of Robert Fyvie has been left devastated after he passed away last Friday morning, with his 10-year-old son, Marc, distraught his dad will not be there to see his first boxing match.

Mr Fyvie, 54, of Eskview Terrace, died peacefully beside his wife Angie as they slept, five months after he travelled to Rome in the hope that a cutting-edge treatment would help him overcome his illness. Sadly, it was not to be.

Still, presumably Simoncini put the money to good use.

I do think Fyvie's actions were fundamentally irresponsible towards himself and his family - he also travelled to Thailand for herbal treatments for cancer, and refused chemo, so he was dicing with death anyway. But Simoncini deserves nothing but shame for taking an obscene amount of money from a dying man and his desperate family for his sham treatments. People like that are wasting perfectly good oxygen for the rest of us.