"Cancer Cure Blarney of the Irish Yoga Teacher", News of the World, by William Rankine
For £10, yoga instructor Tony Quinn says he can teach you to relax. By the also makes a dangerous claim. He reckons he can cure cancer.
He boasts that he has healed more than a third of the people who have been to him with the killer disease.
And in the leaflet delivered to 100,000 homes – he claims he has also successfully treated heart trouble, ulcers and bronchitis.
‘Results speak for themselves’, says the leaflet.
And it claims that 94 per cent of Mr Quinn’s cases ‘including those of a serious nature’ have showed marked improvement.
It adds ‘Come see for yourself – the proof of the pudding’.
But the News of the World’s medical expert Dr David Delvin, says Mr Quinn’s talk of cancer cures is heartless and irresponsible.
Absent
And he warns the yoga teacher who came to England from Eire six months ago: ‘It’s the type of blarney we can do without’.
Mr Quinn, 32, says he launched 30 yoga groups in Ireland.
And he now runs five in hired halls in parts of North London including Muswell Hill and St John’s Wood.
Sometimes he packs in more than 100 people charging £10 for a six week course.
But he says he cures for nothing.
He claims to heal by meditating with the sufferer. There is no physical contact.
The ‘patient’ either goes to his home of stays where he is for what Mr Quinn calls ‘absent healing’.
This means that he and Mr Quinn meditate at the same time even though they might be miles apart.
‘I believe that inside everybody is this life force,’ says Mr Quinn.
‘Healing takes place by meditating on it’.
Mr Quinn has said all his cures had taken place in Ireland. He had not yet dealt with any cases in England.
He said his success rate for curing cancer was more than 35 per cent.
‘I won’t make any rash claims,’ he added.
‘But years ago one of the cases I did involved a woman who had discharged herself from a Belfast hospital.
‘She had been in pain for five years and she had this terrible cancer in the stomach.
‘The first healing I gave her, the pain stopped. After the second one, she went home and spat it up.
‘Someone I trained rang me up two nights ago and told me about two cancer cases he’d been involved in.
‘One chap was down to six stone when the healing began.
He had cancer of the stomach, and of the head.
Since he started on the healing about six weeks ago the cancer of the stomach has gone and the growth in the head is getting steadily smaller.’
I asked Mr Quinn about the danger of raising false hopes.
Mistake
He told me: ‘That’s something I’m always worried about myself.
‘I don’t like to do it – with cancer in particular.’
Mr Quinn, of Lyncroft Gardens, West Hampstead, showed me 200 letters which he said were from grateful patients.
I read him a section from the Cancer Act, 1939, which says:
‘No person shall take part in the publication of any advertisement containing an offer to treat any person for cancer.’
He told me: ‘I wasn’t aware of that. It was a genuine mistake.’
This article was sourced from Dialogue Ireland (second article).
Update (4 May 2023): PDF from source.