Tuesday, 4 August 2020

CANCER chancer Nicholas Quigley

BOGUS healer Nicholas Quigley is still in business, 10 years after being first exposed as a chancer selling potions made from mouthwash and muscle rub. Despite an outcry from relatives of duped patients, Quigley has continued to make up to €1,000 a day claiming to be able to cure serious illnesses like cancer.
Working from a shabby flat in Kildare town, Ireland, Quigley’s appointment book is full with people queuing for cures and paying €60 for the privilege. Over 20 people were booked in on the day the Fakes, Frauds and Scams called.
The smell of his cigarette smoke permeates the waiting room, while the occupant of the flat upstairs treated the waiting clients to Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits. Despite the queue, there are many who have condemned his healing powers as a scam, giving seriously ill people false hope. One man from the north-west this week condemned Quigley as “a complete fraud” who preys on the old and vulnerable. An elderly relative drove two hours to see Quigley at his Castlebar clinic where she waited for over an hour in a hall full with other clients. “She is crippled with arthritis and his advice to her was to not eat chicken,” he told the Sunday World.
People travel from all over Ireland and the UK to see Quigley in his clinics in Mayo, Kildare and Tipperary “My father went and Quigley told him he was clear of cancer. When he was scanned again the cancer was back,” one person told the Sunday World. “I’m worried now that he’ll want to make the trip again and he’s not able for it,” they added. Another person from Castlebar expressed anger that the quack was still able to operate. Quigley wasn’t always so modest about his healing powers and in the past told his clients to stop taking their life-saving medicine.
Ten years ago, one man who suffered from diabetes told how taking Quigley’s advice almost cost him his life. He said on North West radio that Quigley had told him “there was no way he had diabetes.
“I stopped taking the tablets but three weeks later collapsed. I was out in the farmyard and my brother found me in a semi-conscious state.” The man added he had been referred to Quigley by a terminally ill patient who later died. Quigley recently told one patient at his Kildare clinic that he would be crippled if he hadn’t come to him with his back problem. The consultation took place in a room at the back of the house where an unwashed towel was spread over a massage table. The wall beside the table was scuffed with shoe marks from Quigley’s patients.
His open box of cigarettes sat on a table beside his mug of coffee. Tobacco smoke hung in the air.
Asked if he should keep taking his medication Quigley replied: “You’ll feel so good you won’t want to take it.” The client said he suffered from agonising nerve pain caused by a car crash and sports injuries. “I’ll be very gentle, I won’t hurt you at all. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. I’ll have you perfect,” Quigley re-assured him. “The worst person you can go to is a chiropractor” Quigley advised our man. “Never let anyone do any thing to you again.”
The healer stuck his thumb in his client’s abdomen and told him he was pressing on a gland that was a reservoir of healing: “I’m going to unlock that,” he claimed. He then advised the patient to take an iodine bath for 20 minutes and that would be enough to cure his ailment. He wrote down a note to buy the seaweed bath from a chemist. Quigley told how one man had come to see him almost unable to walk but that now he could walk perfectly and “you’ll be the same”.
Back in 1999, the Sunday World bought one of his bottles of cure-all lotion for IR£400, which he mass-produced in a milk churn. A leading chemist tested the mag ic potion and discovered it contained Winter Green cream, methanol mouthwash and anti-rheumatic gel.
The Tipperary-born chancer claims he inherited the gift of healing powers from an aunt and always guarantees his clients that he can cure them. He once stood as Dáil candidate in Tipperary and has previously owned race-horses. Another client previously told the Sunday World that she would have been dead if she had listened to Quigley. She was suffering from skin cancer but Quigley had told her he had cured her after one visit. “He rubbed his thumbs over my face, where the cancer was, and told me I would not need any more treatment. Thankfully I didn’t listen to him,” the woman said. Cancer specialists rubbished claims that such a serious disease can be cured by a healer. Quigley told one man, who later had to have a lung removed, he had “blasted away” the cancer with his thumbs. People who claim to be healers are not breaking the law even if they give dangerous advice contrary to proper medical practice.
On the other hand, registered doctors face being struck and charged with a criminal offence if they give reckless advice.

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