Elle Macpherson battled breast cancer seven years ago and refused treatment advice from 32 doctors.
The model detailed her secret health struggles and recovery to Australian magazine Women’s Weekly on Monday.
The 60-year-old described her diagnosis, received after a lumpectomy, as a “shock.”
She recalls: “It was unexpected, confusing and intimidating in many ways. And it really gave me an opportunity to dig deep into my inner being to find a solution that worked for me.”
“I realized I was going to need my own truth, my own belief system to help me get through this,” continued Macpherson, who has previously made headlines for promoting an anti-vaccine campaign. “And that’s what I did.”
Despite doctors’ advice that the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit” star should undergo a mastectomy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and breast reconstruction surgery, she fought the cancer with traditional medicine.
“It was a wonderful exercise in being true to myself, in trusting myself and in trusting the nature of my personality and the course of action that I had chosen,” she said.
In an excerpt from her memoir, “Elle,” Macpherson describes her sons’ mixed reactions to her holistic methods.
“Cy just thought chemo kills,” she wrote of her 21-year-old daughter with ex-boyfriend Arpad Busson. “And so he never wanted me to do it because he thought it was a kiss of death.”
As for Flynn, 26, “more conventional,” he “was not at all comfortable with (his mother’s) choice.”
Busson, 61, also “disagreed” with Macpherson but praised his “courage”.
She added: “Sometimes an authentic choice that comes from the heart doesn’t make sense to others… but that doesn’t have to be the case. People thought I was crazy, but I knew I had to make a choice that truly resonated with them.
Me.”
She called her rejection of “standard medical solutions…the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
However, Macpherson noted, “Saying no to my own inner sense would have been even more difficult. … For me, that meant addressing the emotional and physical factors associated with breast cancer.
“It was a time for some deep inner reflection. And that took courage.”
The actress said she was now “in perfect health”, adding: “In traditional terms, you would say I’m in clinical remission.”
New York Post
