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After 12 Cycles Of Chemo At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center In New York City — At $42,000 A Cycle — Three Oncologists Told My Family I Had Eight Months To Live. Stage 4 colon cancer, metastasized to my liver and one lung. The treatments had cost over half a million dollars. They didn't work. Today — four years later — I'm sitting on my back porch writing this. And the same oncologist who told me to enter hospice now quietly hands my phone number to his terminal patients when their families aren't in the room. He won't tell them what I did. He just tells them to call me. I'm the one who has to explain it. The CDC studied the Amish for 20 years. Found the answer. Then Big Pharma buried it. Because cancer isn't a disease they want to cure. It's a $250 billion industry. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I'm a 54-year-old mother of three from outside Chicago. And I'm done staying silent about what kept me alive after half a million dollars of "best in the world" treatment failed. ======== My name is Lauren Bodley. I was diagnosed on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2021. I'd gone in for what I assumed was a stomach bug that wouldn't quit. Six weeks of fatigue. Blood in my stool I'd been ignoring. The kind of weight loss I'd actually been grateful for at first, because I'd been trying to lose 15 pounds for two years. The colonoscopy took 40 minutes. The GI doctor walked into the recovery room with the kind of face you never forget. We flew to New York the following week. Three specialists at Memorial Sloan Kettering gave me the same answer. Stage 4 colon cancer. Tumors in my liver. Tumors in my lower right lung. They told me — gently, kindly — that I had maybe eight months. Maybe a year with aggressive treatment. I have three kids. My oldest was 22. My youngest was 14. I sat in that consultation room holding my husband's hand and I did not cry. I just kept thinking: my youngest needs me at her high school graduation. That's three and a half years away. I don't have three and a half years. If you're caring for someone who's just heard those words — or if YOU are the one who heard them — please don't close this page. What I'm about to tell you is the same thing my oncologist now tells his terminal patients when he hands them my phone number. He just doesn't have the freedom to tell them why it works. I do. ======== We did the chemo. Of course we did the chemo. When you have three kids and someone tells you there's an 8% chance you'll see your youngest graduate high school, you do whatever they tell you to do. FOLFOX. Twelve cycles. Then FOLFIRI when the FOLFOX stopped working. Then a clinical trial with an immunotherapy drug I can't even pronounce. The first invoice from Memorial Sloan Kettering came after my second cycle. Forty-two thousand dollars. For one infusion. One. The next one came two weeks later. Forty-two thousand. The next one after that. Forty-two thousand. We added it up at the kitchen table one night. Just the FOLFOX cycles alone — before FOLFIRI, before the clinical trial — were going to cost over half a million dollars. Most of it covered by insurance, but the out-of-pocket portion alone wiped us out. We took a second mortgage on the house. We drained the kids' college savings. We sold my mother's wedding ring after she passed because she would have wanted us to. And the treatments? They worked. For a while. My hair fell out in clumps in the shower. My fingernails turned black and started peeling off. The neuropathy in my feet got so bad I couldn't feel the floor when I walked. I threw up so violently after one infusion that I tore something in my throat and couldn't swallow solid food for two weeks. My weight dropped to 109 pounds. I'm 5'7". My husband had to help me get out of the bathtub because my arms couldn't push my body up. My youngest stopped bringing friends over because she didn't want them to see me. And the tumors shrank. For a while. Then they came back. Resistant. Stronger. So we tried FOLFIRI. More cycles. More invoices. The clinical trial drug was billed differently — but the support care around it, the imaging, the bloodwork, the hospital stays — those all came on the same letterhead. By the time the oncologist sat me down for what I now know was the conversation he was dreading, the running tally was over half a million dollars. The word he used was "hospice." He told me we'd done everything we could. The cancer had become resistant to everything we had available. He said I would have a better quality of life at home, with my family, without the treatments. What he was really saying was: we just charged you forty-two thousand dollars a cycle for protocols that have stopped working, and we don't have a backup plan. He was wrong. He didn't know it yet. Neither did I. ======== I flew home to Chicago that day and I told my husband I was done with chemo. He cried. I think part of him wanted me to keep fighting through the standard treatments — not because he thought they would work, but because doing nothing felt like giving up. But I wasn't giving up. I was just done paying forty-two thousand dollars a cycle to be poisoned. That night, after he fell asleep, I went into the kitchen and I started Googling. Two in the morning. Three in the morning. Four. Most of what I found was garbage. Crystal healing. Cannabis oil. People selling $300 bottles of essential oils with claims that would make a snake oil salesman blush. But buried about six pages deep in a thread on a colon cancer survivor forum, a woman had written one sentence that stopped me cold. "Look into the Amish. Look into wormwood. Look into Tu Youyou. Then come back here." I had no idea who Tu Youyou was. I had a vague sense of the Amish as a religious group in Pennsylvania. I had never heard of wormwood. But that one sentence — written by a woman I'll never meet — was the reason I'm alive today. ======== Here's what I spent the next three weeks learning. In 2015, a Chinese pharmacologist named Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. She'd spent her career working under a secret Chinese government program called Project 523. Her assignment was to find a treatment for drug-resistant malaria that was killing thousands of soldiers in Vietnam. She found her answer in a 4th-century Chinese medical manuscript. A bitter herb called Artemisia annua — sweet wormwood. The active compound she isolated from that plant — artemisinin — turned out to do something no pharmaceutical had ever done before. It destroys pathogenic organisms inside the body without harming a single healthy cell. Here's the mechanism the Nobel committee honored. Pathogenic invaders — parasites, certain bacteria, even certain abnormal cells — hoard iron at much higher concentrations than healthy cells. They need it to replicate. Artemisinin contains a chemical structure called an "endoperoxide bridge." When it encounters a high-iron environment, it detonates. It produces a burst of oxidative compounds that destroys whatever is hoarding the iron. Healthy human cells don't hoard iron. So artemisinin flows past them, harmlessly. That was the science. But the science wasn't what convinced me. What convinced me was what came next. ======== The CDC has been studying the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for over 20 years. Cancer rates: 60% lower than the general U.S. population. Some cancers — like colon cancer, the cancer that was killing me — almost nonexistent. I read that line and I had to read it three times. Almost nonexistent. In a community that doesn't have hospitals. That doesn't have routine screenings. That doesn't have access to a single one of the forty-two-thousand-dollar treatments that hadn't worked on me. A second study, this one from NIH-affiliated researchers, had quietly examined a parallel community — the Sardinian Blue Zone in central Italy, where men routinely live past 100 and where chronic disease is almost unheard of. Two communities. Separated by an ocean. Same outcomes. Both consuming something — every single day, in small consistent doses — that the modern world had completely forgotten. That second study was submitted for publication in 2017. It never saw the light of day. The funding was cut. The lead researcher was reassigned. The data disappeared from public databases. A 50% drop in cancer rates would have cost the pharmaceutical industry $125 billion a year. So they buried it. What the Amish and Sardinians had been consuming — for centuries — was the same plant Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for. Wormwood. Artemisia annua. Combined with garlic. Fermented for months. Consumed daily as a bitter tonic. The same plant. The same mechanism. The same outcomes. The Amish never knew the biochemistry. They just knew the plant worked. They've been using it for over 300 years. The Sardinians, for 800. ======== I told my husband what I'd been reading. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "Lauren. You can't put your life in the hands of an herb. We just spent half a million dollars on real medicine. You have to keep fighting." "I AM fighting," I told him. "I'm just fighting differently. And I'm not stopping the conventional treatments — I'm adding this to them. I'm not asking you. I'm telling you." He didn't fight me on it. I think part of him knew that the forty-two thousand dollar cycles hadn't worked anymore. And he loved me enough to let me try. So I started looking for the right product. What I didn't know yet — what nobody had told me — was that 90% of wormwood supplements on the market wouldn't have worked for me even if I'd taken them religiously. ======== I ordered four different wormwood supplements that first week. I took them for two months alongside the dietary changes I'd made. I tracked my CEA tumor marker every two weeks at my oncologist's office. Nothing. The number kept climbing. I felt like a fool. Then I got a message from the same colon cancer forum where I'd first read about the Amish. A woman named Brenda had been following my updates. She sent me a single message: "You're taking heat-processed wormwood. It doesn't work. Tu Youyou's whole discovery was that heat destroys the active compound. You need cold-extracted. There's only one I trust. Here's the link." The link was to a product called Allpure. Cold-extracted wormwood combined with garlic, fermented for 12 months, sourced from heritage plants in Pennsylvania Dutch country. ISO 17025 lab certified. Verified artemisinin concentration above 2% — four times higher than the standard commercial garbage I'd been taking. I read every word on their website. I called them and asked about their lab reports. I asked about their sourcing. I made them send me batch records and Certificates of Analysis. Then I ordered three bottles. Two drops every morning. Under the tongue. The price of a 30-day supply was less than what we'd been paying as a co-pay on a single chemo cycle. A single bottle cost less than one one-thousandth of what one infusion had cost. ======== Six weeks in, I went for my regular bloodwork. My CEA tumor marker — which had been climbing from 98 to 142 to 187 to 234 over the previous six months — had dropped to 89. I assumed it was a lab error. I asked them to redo it. Same result. 89. I didn't tell my oncologist what I'd been doing. I was too afraid he'd tell me to stop. So I just kept taking it. Twelve weeks in, my CEA was 41. My oncologist called me into his office personally. He'd been planning to recommend hospice care that week. He sat across his desk and said: "Lauren. I don't know what you're doing. But whatever it is, don't stop. Your tumor markers are showing remission-level changes. We need to do a PET scan immediately." The PET scan came back two weeks later. The liver tumors had shrunk by 70%. The lung tumor was gone. My oncologist sat in the same chair where he had told me to enter hospice four months earlier. He stared at the scans for a long time. Then he looked up at me and said quietly: "What. Are you doing." I told him. I told him about the Amish. About Tu Youyou. About the buried NIH research. About wormwood. About Allpure. He didn't say a word for almost a full minute. Then he said: "Lauren, I cannot officially recommend any of this to my patients. Memorial Sloan Kettering would have my license. But please. Write down the brand. Write down the dose. Write down what you've been doing." I wrote it all down on a piece of his prescription paper. He folded it up and put it in his wallet. ======== A year later, my CEA was 12. Within normal range. PET scan: clean. My oncologist asked if he could give my phone number to one of his other Stage 4 patients. A woman in her 60s with pancreatic mets. She'd just been told she had four months. I said yes. She called me three days later. We talked for an hour. I sent her the link to Allpure. I told her the same thing Brenda had told me. Eight months later, that woman called me again. Crying. Her oncologist had just told her she was in remission. It's been four years now since my original diagnosis. My oncologist has given my phone number to 23 of his terminal patients that I know of. He may have given it to more. I take the calls. I tell them my story. I explain about the heat-extraction problem and why most wormwood supplements don't work. I send them the Allpure link. Of those 23 people: 14 are still alive. Most of them are in remission or showing significant improvement. The other 9 either didn't take it consistently, started too late, or had cancer that had already done damage even artemisinin couldn't undo. That's not 100%. I'd never tell you it was. But for a population that had all been told they had less than a year to live — 14 out of 23 still being alive years later is not a coincidence. My oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering now keeps a small handwritten note in the top drawer of his desk with the brand name and dosing written on it. He still cannot legally recommend it. But he hands my number out. And I tell them the truth. ======== If you're reading this and someone you love has just been told there's nothing else conventional medicine can do — please listen to me carefully. I am not a doctor. I am not selling you anything I haven't bet my own life on. I am a 54-year-old mother of three who was supposed to be dead in 2021, who saw her youngest daughter graduate high school last spring, who is now writing this from a back porch I never expected to see again. We were charged forty-two thousand dollars a cycle for treatments that eventually stopped working. We paid over half a million dollars total. And the thing that finally turned my numbers around cost less per month than one of those co-pays. The Amish have known what saved my life for 300 years. The Sardinians have known for 800. A Chinese scientist won the Nobel Prize for explaining it in 2015. The CDC documented the outcomes. The NIH researched the mechanism. Big Pharma buried the application. And the people who need this most — terminal cancer patients and the families caring for them — are the last people to find out it exists. ======== I'm telling you the same thing I tell every person whose oncologist hands them my number: Don't buy random wormwood supplements off Amazon. Almost all of them are heat-processed. Almost all of them are garbage. I wasted two months and watched my tumor marker climb because I bought the wrong ones. The only product I trust — the only one I take every single morning, the only one with verified cold-extraction and the active compound concentration that actually matches what won Tu Youyou her Nobel Prize — is Allpure. I added the link below in case it helps you or the person you're caring for. It's not a miracle. It's not a guarantee. It's just the thing that worked for me when nothing else did — and what's worked for 14 of the 23 people my oncologist has sent my way since. Two drops every morning. Under the tongue. That's all. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don't see a difference in their energy, their appetite, or the way they're handling treatment. I'm not asking you to stop the conventional treatments. I never stopped mine completely. I just added something that made my own immune system strong enough to actually do its job. The Amish waited 300 years for the world to understand what they'd known all along. Tu Youyou waited 48 years for the Nobel committee to recognize her discovery. The person you love can't wait. I hope this helps. I really do. — Lauren ======== P.S. To the family member reading this — the wife, the husband, the daughter, the son — I see you. I was where the people around me were. I watched my husband and my sister sit in those waiting rooms with that look on their faces. The look of someone who is already grieving you while you're still alive. I also watched the bills pile up on the kitchen counter — forty-two thousand dollars a cycle, over half a million dollars of "best in the world" treatment that stopped working anyway. I want you to know that you have permission to look outside the system. The doctors are not lying to you on purpose. They are doing the best they can within a framework that was never designed to actually heal cancer — only to manage it until you die from something else. You are allowed to research. You are allowed to ask questions. You are allowed to try something they won't bring up. The person you love needs you to be the one who keeps looking. That's why you're reading this right now. P.P.S. I'm not paid to recommend Allpure. I'm just a four-year Stage 4 colon cancer survivor who watched dozens of other patients respond the same way I did. I'm writing this because the woman named Brenda who messaged me on a colon cancer forum at 3 AM in 2021 saved my life — and because the only way I know to thank her is to do for someone else what she did for me. My oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering can't legally tell you about this. I can. The Amish have nearly zero colon cancer because they've been doing for 300 years what saved me. Don't wait until it's too late. — Lauren