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Sheila Dillon asks if food and nutrition should have a bigger role in treating cancer. Is the medical profession too reluctant to see food as an essential component in improving the well-being of cancer patients.

Previewing the programme on Friday 17th May 2013 [listen at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sdw1p, 22 minutes 35s in, or a short clip at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0195c67], Sheila Dillon, the show's presenter, herself diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, spoke on BBC R4's Women's Hour about the lack of nutritional knowledge among doctors. Doctors trained at Edinburgh University Medical School declared that nutrition formed no part of the syllabus, and that there is a lack of human based empirical evidence for the effect of diet or supplements in the treatment of cancer. In a busy clinic it's just not the doctors' priority to talk about diet when they would much rather talk about the anti-cancer treatments where there is a huge amount of evidence of it working in almost all patients.  Read More...