Dale Atkinson survived Stage IV esophageal cancer | palliative care | endoscopy | CAPOX | cold neuropathy

11 hours ago
14 min read

DESCRIPTION:

In 2024, Dale Atkinson was diagnosed with Stage IV esophageal cancer. His diagnosis preceded by the death of his mother and was preceded by his partner being diagnosed with lung cancer. All this in the space of a few weeks. Dale was active in sports and consumed a healthy diet, but in 2019 began to suffer chronic acid reflux. His symptoms were repeatedly treated as acid reflux, but it wasn’t until 2024 that he underwent an endoscopy, which immediately revealed a tumor and a diagnosis of Stage IV esophageal cancer. Dale was told he didn’t have long to live and was immediately placed in palliative care. However, he did extensive research and essentially designed his own care plan, combining conventional chemotherapy and immunotherapy with non-mainstream remedies. In 2025, the tumor shrank and he was declared to have No Evidence of Disease.

In 2019, Dale Atkinson was still in his twenties, was on a vegetarian diet and was active in four sports, including rugby. Then he began to experience chronic acid reflux and heartburn. Sleep was interrupted by rising into his throat. He had difficulty swallowing. Dale sought medical attention, but his symptoms were repeatedly treated as reflux.

In 2024, Dale was scheduled for an endoscopy. Because his partner had just been diagnosed with lung cancer, she could not drive, and because of that, Dale was not anesthetized for the procedure. As a result, along with his care team, he viewed the endoscopy, which showed a 9.2cm tumor and with it a diagnosis of Stage IV esophageal cancer.

Doctors told Dale he did not have long to live and that his only treatment option was palliative care. He was diagnosed on October 12, 2024. Nine days earlier, his partner was diagnosed with lung cancer and on October 27, his mother passed away. Overwhelmed with devastating news, once it all sunk in, Dale decided he would let determination spearhead his journey, determination and not fear.

His palliative care regimen was supposed to consist of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but Dale said he approximately 5,000 research paper, concluded which non-traditional therapies could be of help and asked that his regimen include a combination of the non-mainstream medications along with chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

He learned in January 2025 his tumor decreased in size, he was able to swallow normally and could go hours at a time without any pain. He was declared No Evidence of Disease, and thought things were getting back to normal. He got off his protocol, but in March, cancer symptoms returned. Dale got back on his protocol, and months later, again was declared NED. He still suffers from chemo-related brain fog but enjoys life with his partner and two young sons.

Additional Resources:

Dale’s charity: “Beyond the Standard.”

Dale’s blog: https://www.thelifeorganic.com

Dale’s fitness center: https://www.peakhealthandfitness.co.uk

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings, this is the @CancerInterviews podcast, and I am your host, prostate cancer survivor Bruce Morton. Our guest on this episode should be a source of inspiration for anyone on a cancer journey. Dale Atkinson of Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom was diagnosed with Stage IV esophageal cancer, and he is still with us, surviving, thriving and advocating for others within the cancer space. Now it’s time to hear his story, and Dale, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Dale Atkinson: Hi, Bruce, and thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

BM: We want to start our conversation with you the way we do with all of guests and that is to learn a bit more about your life away from cancer. If you would, tell us a bit about where are from, what you have done for work and what you like to do for fun.

DA: My name is Dale Atkinson, I am 37 years old. I have two little boys and so we live in Berkshire, which is about half an hour outside of London. I am from Somerset, which is famous for the Glastonbury Festival. In terms of work, I spent nearly twenty years working in finance. I worked for the Deutschbanks, the BNY Mellons, etc., generally focused on anti-money laundering, fraud detection and compliance work. In terms of fun, I have two little boys. I don’t get to have much of my own fun these days. I get to cook and that’s about it. Lots of running around after the kids. I used to play rugby and love rugby, and I love cars as well. I have a lovely Audi sitting outside.

BM: Dale, this might sound a bit, but perhaps many of our viewers and listeners have little or no knowledge about the esophagus. That said, enlighten us a bit about where it is and what it does.

DA: The esophagus is the food pipe that goes from your throat down to your stomach. Mostly it is the transit pipe for food, it essentially pushes food from your throat down into your stomach.

BM: For all of us who have survived cancer, there was a point in time in which something about our health seemed abnormal and that prompted the seeking of medical attention. In case, when were those symptoms and what were they?

DA: Mine were going for quite a few years before I was diagnosed. So, back in about 2016 or 2017, I started to experience reflux. I was in my late twenties at the time and I went to my GP and they kept telling me it was my lifestyle. I was a vegetarian with a very healthy diet, I played four sports. They thought it was drinking and all these other things because I had an active social life, but it turned out that none of them were quite right. Sadly for me, over the next six years it got worse and worse, and it got to a point where I was waking up every night with acide in my throat. I had what is now referred to as Barrett’s Esophagus. I was suffering with a number of gastric issues as well.

BM: How were those symptoms treated?

DA: My GP essentially turned around and gave me PPI, or Protein Pump Inhibitors. The job of a PPI is to lower stomach acid. It turned out I probably needed the opposite, but that was all they gave me at that point in time. I think the most I got was a referral for a blood test. Six years, they didn’t do any more than that. Finally in 2024, they decided to give me an endoscopy.

BM: By the way, we hope you will find time to like and subscribe to our channel. And if you click on the bell icon, that way you will be notified each time we post an interview. We also want to remind you we are not distributors of medical advice. If you seek medical advice, please contact a licensed healthcare professional.

Eventually, what led to your diagnosis?

DA: Before I cover my diagnosis, I should probably point out that in the summer of 2024, just before I was diagnosed, my partner was actually diagnosed. They thought she had a heart attack. She started having pains shooting through her shoulder. They took her to the hospital, and they found lung cancer purely by accident. In early October 2024, she went in and had a lobectomy, so she had the entire upper lobe of her right lung removed. That was on October 3^rd, then on the 15^th, when our youngest son’s first birthday, was when I had the endoscopy. That endoscopy had been booked the previous February, and it was put on a non-urgent pathway because it was believed that it was not going to be cancer. They thought it was going to be a stomach ulcer. They sent me in for the endoscopy and it was right there on the screen. They usually give you an anesthetic to knock you out completely, for me they didn’t because my partner couldn’t drive at that time and I had children to look after, so I only had a numbing spray. So, I was actually awake and aware of the entire thing. I was able to see the tumor on the screen.

BM: So, you had been hit with not one but two dosages of bad news in a very short period of time. Everyone is different, Dale, but in your case, how did you handle this horrific news?

DA: Well, just to make things worse, there was a third piece of bad news. I had my endoscopy on the 15^th and then on the evening of the 27^th, the night before my eldest son’s third birthday, my mother passed and ironically my mother had been a palliative care nurse for her entire career, so she was an end-of-life healthcare specialist. It was that Thursday that I received the news I was terminal. So, we had three bits of bad news in about three weeks. In terms of how I dealt with that, so I walked in on Thursday after my mother had died on a Monday, I walked in already in shock, I walked in already fearing the worst under a huge amount of grief. So, hearing the news that it was inoperable, incurable, that there was only palliative care that was available to me, that I was Stage IV and that they didn’t believe I had very long left, it didn’t even feel like a shock, it didn’t register at that point in time. I felt numb to it because of the amount of emotions that were already going through me. So, for me, at that exact juncture, I felt very, very little. However, it was on the drive home that the emotions and everything else sort of kicked in and at that point, instead of letting it destroy me as it could have done, I felt sort of the opposite of a lot of people. Instead of a weight on top of me, I actually felt relief. I felt like knowing what was going on and actually finally having a diagnosis was a massive relief to me. I then decided to try and use all of the grief and all of the issues, all of the pain that was there at that point in time to fuel and that’s what I eventually did.

BM: So, next up for you was treatment. Each diagnosis is different. For you, were there treatment options?

DA: So, I wasn’t aware of treatment options at that point in time. They had told me I was palliative, they told me there was very little open to me. They then sent my samples and my biopsy and bloodwork to see if I had any genetic abnormalities. They were looking for things such as Lynch Syndrome, they were looking for my PDL1 score, which is protein marker to see if I was eligible for immunotherapy, they looked at my HER2, to see what markers were available to me. At that point however, they already told me that I may not have long left and they had already told me that it was particularly advanced and there was only palliative care available to me. At that point we weren’t aware that there was going to be much care available, so that instead of deciding the standard of care was going to be my only route, it was that juncture and that conversation that pushed me into researching wider.

BM: So, ultimately, after the diagnosis, after this research you’ve just referenced, what ended up being your treatment regimen?

DA: I took what is called an adjunct therapy approach. So, instead of just using the standard of care or just using alternatives, I found a way to combine the two. Over the space of about two to three months, I read between five- and six-thousand research papers covering everything from the horse medications people talk about, the ivermectins and fenbendazoles, through to much more mainstream science, looking at things like mistletoe therapy. Mistletoe is approved and used in Germany, in multiple countries in Europe. It is a known thing, it is used in multiple settings, it is basically trial-approved, etc. It is very much a mainstream, available thing, but within the standard of care in the UK and I believe the US is the same, it is not something that is currently utilized. So, for me, I began looking at the mechanisms available through these sorts of things. I looked at the different pathways that cancers have, and I looked at what sorts of medications could affect those. That led me to what is called next generation sequencing, which is essentially where they take the biopsy of your cancer, they also took a liquid biopsy, which involves one’s blood and they run it through an analysis, a test to see what feeds your cancer and determines what immunotherapies, what chemotherapies will work, what cell death they are likely to cause, and atop that, what supplements and what compounds might affect your cancer. From there, I took this information to an integrative oncologist and a naturopath, and we devised an adjunct protocol to get atop the chemotherapy and the immunotherapy being prescribed by my mainstream oncologist. Using that, we were able to find multiple gains to fortify my chemotherapy and my immunotherapy.

BM: It sounds like you had a hand in designing your treatment regimen, but part of that regimen included chemotherapy. What sort of chemotherapy were you prescribed and what was the toughest part of it for you?

DA: I had CAPOX chemotherapy, which capecitabine, an oral chemotherapy, plus oxaliplatin, which is intravenous. For me, very much the hardest part of that was the cold neuropathy. I couldn’t open the fridge and because it was in the middle of December in the UK, which is not exactly the warmest of places, walking out of the hospital on my first day of chemotherapy and the feeling the horrible bite of the neuropathy as the cold air hit my face and my hands, that was probably one of the hardest things. However, the hardest of all has actually been the brain fog, which I experience to this day.

BM: Meanwhile, while you are dealing with all this bad news, you are still in the role of being a parent? How challenging was that?

DA: Well, it wasn’t easy. I had a little one who had just turned one year old on the day they had found my cancer and another son who had just turned three. Trying to explain to them what was happening to daddy was not the easiest. I also had a partner diagnosed with lung cancer. She wasn’t able to pick the kids up. She wasn’t able to do a lot of things around the house. So, there was me dealing with my mom’s death, my own diagnosis and my partner who was going through recovery for her own, as well as trying to deal with a one-year-old and a three-year-old. Atop that, we didn’t have a support network in the UK. My partner being Mexican-American, her parents were US-based. My dad lives over in the Channel Islands, so a distant place from here and my mum had just passed. My two brothers live in Australia. We nobody and nothing to help us. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fun.

BM: Nonetheless, you eventually made progress. When did you start to feel you were moving toward survivorship?

DA: Sort of an interesting question. I spent Christmas 2024 hospitalized. I was in a palliative care ward the week or two before Christmas. We didn’t even think I was going to make it home for Christmas. When I did come home, the day before Christmas Eve, it was not an easy Christmas. There was a lot of pain, a lot of problems. I was back in hospital the week after Christmas and then I was back in the week after New Year’s Day. At that point, I didn’t think there was going to be an up. However, in early January I started an early protocol in full. I started chemotherapy in late December. I started the rest of my protocol in mid-January. It took about two weeks after I started the protocol with adjunct therapies, and for context, I was doing two hours in a hyperbaric chamber every day, I was doing ice baths. I was using a variety of different things all day, every day, six to eight hours ever single day, from mid-January onwards, and it very quickly turned. By the end of January, I began to swallow again. I started to be able to have a few hours without pain. They had me on oxycodone and pregabalin for the pain. I started to taper those off because I didn’t need them as much. I was very thankful as they are not fun things to be on. It was by the end of January 2025, two weeks after I started my full protocol, that I started to feel better. Then in March 2025, I went in for my first post-treatment proper CT scan and the output of that backed up everything. By that point I had gone from a 9.2cm primary tumor to the majority of my metastases had gone away by March 2025. In just two months, my primary had shrunk by around twenty percent, so the turnaround was very, very quick. I could feel the tumor disappearing.

BM: These days, if we could call your health, pre-diagnosis, to be 100 percent, how close are you to 100 percent?

DA: Well, I don’t think it was 100 percent pre-diagnosis because I had had the symptoms for quite a while. I think that’s a two-part question. End of the summer in 2025, I was on the verge of No Visible Disease. I was very pleased at the prospect of getting back to normal life, but I didn’t pay as much attention to my health. I got off my protocol. I stopped doing the things that had supported me at that point in time. Suddenly my health started to decline again. By Christmas time, I had new lymph nodes that had lit up, a new growth as well, so at Christmas time I had a new resurgence of the same cancer. Then I took account of that and went back on my protocol and as it stands now, I again have no visible signs of disease. I will soon be taking a PET scan to confirm that I am NED, No Evidence of Disease. I will also mention that in the UK, when one is diagnosed Stage IV, there is no remission because they originally classified me as incurable, they will never classify me as disease-free. The closest I will get will be NED, so for me, that means cancer-free.

BM: And let’s hope it stays that way. We briefly mentioned at the top that you advocate for those in the cancer space. If you would, tell us about your advocacy work.

DA: A couple of different ways. I have decided to buy a health and fitness business, Peak Health & Fitness. I will be trying to provide many of the same therapies that came to my aid. Second of all, there are a couple of charities. One is called Beyond the Standard, set up with Jane McLelland, the author of “How to Starve Cancer.” Jane is very good at what she does and the two of us have a passion for trying to help people. We are pushing for institutional change and the use of medications that oftentimes are off label, that do have anti-cancer and anti-tumor mechanisms. Atop that is a resource for a new business where I am trying to help other businesses to essentially increase and help patients with trust levels and connect with solid practitioners whose service really helps people.

BM: That is a lot on your plate and you are spreading your advocacy in a lot of different directions and in some cases, that is a team effort. That is wonderful.

DA: There is also a book and a blog as well.

BM: If somebody wanted to access that blog, where would they go?

DA: It is https://www.thelifeorganic.com. I post my cancer story and debunk a lot of myths as well because there is a lot of stuff on Facebook groups, there is a lot of crazy information, a lot of drugs with positive qualities, but many of them are misunderstood. I try to put out real information that is properly researched and is written in a way that tries to be accessible as well.

BM: Our guest has been Dale Atkinson of Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. The UK might call him a survivor, but he is still going strong after being diagnosed with Stage IV esophageal cancer. Dale, thank you very much for telling a powerful story, thank you for being with us on Cancer Interviews.

DA: Thank you for having me, Bruce. I appreciate it.

BM: And we want to remind you as we always do when we conclude, that if you or a loved one is on a cancer journey, you are not alone. There are individuals out there like Dale Atkinson who provide information and inspiration that can ease the cancer journey. So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.

Additional Resources:

Dale’s charity: “Beyond the Standard.”

Dale’s blog: https://www.thelifeorganic.com

Dale’s fitness center: https://www.peakhealthandfitness.co.uk

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Dale Atkinson, Esophageal Cancer Survivor – Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom

Additional Resources:

Dale’s Blog: The Life Organic https://www.thelifeorganic.com

Time Stamps:

03:07 Dale said symptoms long preceded his diagnosis, starting with acid reflux.

05:17 Said his diagnosis was only one of three dosages of bad news only weeks apart.

06:15 Was able to view his endoscopy, which immediately revealed his diagnosis.

08:15 Dale said from his diagnosis he drew inspiration and not fear.

10:08 Asked to describe his treatment options.

15:20 Said the hardest part of his chemo regimen was the cold neuropathy.

18:25 Dale recalls when he was progressing toward survivorship.

21:33 Is asked how close his health is to 100 percent.

KEYWORDS (tags):

esophageal cancer

palliative care

barrett’s esophagus

endoscopy

ivermectin

fenbendazole

mistletoe therapy

cold neuropathy

capecitabine

pregabalin

ice bath

adjunct therapy