Full Investigation · A Remedy and a Celebrity · 2001–2026
Mistletoe: Suzanne Somers' Cancer Remedy, Tested at Last
In 2001 the actress Suzanne Somers told Larry King she was turning down chemotherapy for breast cancer and injecting herself with a mistletoe extract. For twenty years she sold books and products on the story. In 2024 the largest placebo-controlled trial of mistletoe ever done found it did nothing. In Canada it is injected by naturopaths, three times a week, for months.
Larry King, March 2001
Suzanne Somers, the star of Three's Company, went on CNN's Larry King Live on 28 March 2001 to say she had breast cancer. She had had the tumour removed by lumpectomy and had radiation. She told King she had declined chemotherapy and had decided to find alternative things to do — chiefly injections of Iscador, a mistletoe extract, which she described as a homeopathic preparation. CNN's own medical coverage that week reported that breast cancer specialists were worried other patients would follow her lead.
This site asked at the time what she had actually been treated with, and why she had consulted the publisher of an alternative-medicine magazine. The answers mattered: a patient who has had surgery and radiation for an early cancer has already had the treatments that do most of the work. If she does well afterward, the credit she gives the mistletoe is the credit those treatments earned.
Somers went on to build a publishing and supplement business around the story, including Knockout (2009), interviews with doctors offering alternative cancer treatments. In 2008, by her own account, she was told she had widespread cancer and later concluded it had been a misdiagnosis — an episode she used to argue against conventional oncology. Her publicist said after her death that she had survived an aggressive breast cancer for more than 23 years. She died at home on 15 October 2023.
What mistletoe is, and why it was tried
Mistletoe as a cancer remedy comes from Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, who proposed it in the 1920s on the grounds that a parasitic plant growing on a tree resembles a tumour growing on a body. The first commercial product, Iscador, was made to anthroposophic recipes and is still sold, along with Helixor and others. The extracts contain lectins and other compounds that stimulate the immune system in laboratory tests, which is the modern justification.
In Europe — Germany and Switzerland especially — mistletoe became one of the most widely used complementary cancer treatments. For decades its evidence base was a large number of small, mostly unblinded, often manufacturer-linked studies. Reviews repeatedly found that the better a study was designed, the less likely it was to show any benefit on survival. A European study of patients with melanoma, reported in 2001, found no benefit.
The trial that settled it
MISTRAL
People with advanced pancreatic cancer — a disease where a modest effect would have been easy to see — were randomly assigned to mistletoe injections or placebo, alongside their standard treatment. Neither they nor their doctors knew which they were getting. Mistletoe did not lengthen survival (reported in 2024) and did not improve quality of life (reported in 2026). The lead investigator, Dr. Kathrin Wode, concluded there was no clinical reason to recommend adding it.
Earlier positive results for mistletoe in pancreatic cancer had come from open-label studies, in which patients and doctors knew who was getting it. When the question was put under blinded, placebo-controlled conditions, the benefit was not there.
Mistletoe in Canada
Mistletoe is not a fringe remedy here; it is part of naturopathic cancer practice. The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine's research institute publishes a provider monograph, last updated in November 2022, which reports that Helixor is the product most commonly used in Canada, at doses from 0.1 to 400 mg, usually injected three times a week for several months. The same monograph says plainly that mistletoe is not a cancer cure and not an alternative to conventional care. It also describes its survival evidence as inconclusive and of generally poor quality — and still concludes it is likely to help quality of life, a claim MISTRAL has since tested and not confirmed.
How these injectable products reach Canadian clinics, and under what licence, has not been confirmed for this page. In Ontario, naturopaths' authority to inject substances is set by regulation and policed by the College of Naturopaths of Ontario; the Bad ND Files document what happens when naturopaths inject what they are not authorized to.
Related on QuackeryWatch
Sources
- CNN, Larry King Live, transcripts of 28 March and 24 April 2001; “Somers' cancer treatment worries some experts,” CNN.com, 30 March 2001.
- Wode K, et al. MISTRAL survival results. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International 2024;121:347–54. doi:10.3238/arztebl.m2024.0080.
- Wode K, Björ O, Klein R, et al. MISTRAL quality-of-life results. Palliative Medicine, 2026. doi:10.1177/02692163261437609.
- Umeå University. “Mistletoe extract shows no effect in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer.”
- Patterson Institute for Integrative Oncology Research, Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. Mistletoe: healthcare provider resource, November 2022.
- National Cancer Institute. Mistletoe Extracts (PDQ®), health professional version.
- “Suzanne Somers, star of ‘Three's Company,’ dies at 76.” NBC News, 15 October 2023.
- Edzard Ernst. “Suzanne Somers has died.” November 2023.
The cause of Suzanne Somers' death was not stated publicly by her family; this page does not attribute it to any decision she made. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.