Elle Macpherson Says She Refused Chemo for Breast Cancer

Photo: Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

In an interview published Tuesday, model and businesswoman Elle Macpherson revealed she declined to undergo chemotherapy after being diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago.

Speaking with The Australian Women’s Weekly, Macpherson recalled the day that a lumpectomy came back positive for HER2 positive oestrogen receptive intraductal carcinoma. After consulting with 32 doctors, including her own — who recommended a mastectomy with radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and breast reconstruction — she prayed and meditated on a beach in Miami and then decided on an “intuitive, heart-led, holistic approach” to treatment.

Macpherson, who writes about her cancer journey in a forthcoming autobiography, elle, called her diagnosis a “wonderful exercise in being true to myself, trusting myself and trusting the nature of my body and the course of action that I had chosen.” She told the magazine her treatment plan involved retreating to a rental house in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight months with a team of practitioners — including a “doctor of naturopathy, holistic dentist, osteopath, chiropractor and two therapists,” plus her primary doctor, who the publication says “specializes in integrative medicine which uses therapies and lifestyle changes to treat and heal the whole person.” She says she is now “in clinical remission” and also “in utter wellness.”

Although Macpherson didn’t specify in the interview what her treatment entailed, alternative treatments for breast cancer — which are more formally known in the medical community as complementary and integrative therapies — aren’t unusual. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, such approaches are often used alongside conventional treatments to help relieve symptoms and improve quality of life — but none of these alternative treatments have been shown to cure cancer.

An estimated 42,780 people will die from breast cancer in the U.S. in 2024. The mortality rate declined by an estimated 58 percent between 1975 and 2019, which experts credit to earlier and more effective treatment. That treatment doesn’t necessarily always have to include chemotherapy; HER2-positive breast cancer in particular, the type that Macpherson says she had, has been shown to respond better to less intensive chemotherapy. Still, according to the director of Yale’s Center for Breast Cancer, “almost all women with HER2-positive cancers still need some amount of chemotherapy.”

Macpherson, who dated the disgraced anti-vaccine academic Andrew Wakefield between 2017 and 2019 — around the time of her cancer diagnosis — says that sharing her story is “not about giving advice to others” but that she’s “simply sharing what I discovered through my own real experiences.” (She also sells a line of supplements through her wellness company, WelleCo, allegedly formulated by a clinical naturopath named Dr. Simone Laubscher.) “Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she told Women’s Weekly. “But saying no to my own inner sense would have been harder.”