Negative energy and how I invited ‘my little friend’ cancer to leave me Even the cat and dog are wired up to the machine
An extraordinary audience with Noel Edmonds and his wife as he claims an electric mat helped cure his prostate cancer
No EL Edmonds’s pretty wife Liz is beside herself. ‘Why are people so vicious? Why are they out to get Noel?’ she sobs huge noisy tears. ‘They don’t know him. He isn’t in their daily life. Why do they have to be so bitchy? I’m sorry...’ she struggles to speak.
‘Noel is incredible. He has a trust fund where he buys wheelchairs for people.’
she turns to her husband. ‘You send people on holiday anonymously. You pay for gardens in hospices. You do so much that nobody knows about and that’s why you’re my hero.
‘At Christmas, the children from the hospice came here with their families and on his birthday [Noel, 67, was born three days before Christmas Day] he was rowing them out to the island on our lake where we had a santa and elves.
‘on Christmas Day he goes round the hospice in Bristol giving out gifts. That’s the kind of man he is. That’s why I love him so much. He is such a good soul, yet people can be so nasty. They just throw daggers.’
overwhelmed, she leaves the sitting room for a tissue. Noel needs one, too. His wife’s impassioned outburst has reduced him to tears.
Liz has, you see, changed Noel markedly since ‘the cosmos’ [more of which later] gave him to her ten years ago.
she is, he tells me, ‘the most extraordinary person’ he has ever met; ‘a life force’, ‘a special soul’. she has taught him to engage with his ‘spiritual side’, to not be embarrassed, to ‘let my emotions flow’ and opened his eyes to . . . Well, best let Noel explain.
‘she can see auras around people. I can’t,’ he says. ‘she was very frustrated until recently because she would keep saying, “Can’t you see the energy in the sky?” I tried to get what she was seeing but it gave me a bloody headache. she said, “You must be able to see it.”
‘she described it as golden sperm writhing around. Then, one day recently, we were walking the dog across a field near Bath and she said, “Try again”. After about ten minutes I suddenly saw it. only mine weren’t golden, they were silver.
‘I’ve managed to do it on two other occasions and I’m getting nearer to feeling whatever this energy is.’
We’re in the sitting room of their idyllic Georgian home near Bristol. It looks as if it’s come straight from the pages of Country Life magazine, right down to the stone statues dotted around the immaculately landscaped gardens. A mother duck leads her noisy ducklings to the lake in front of the house, while soft music from one of Noel’s 15 ‘happy’ radio stations plays in the background.
Noel, who has an estimated £30 million fortune, set up the stations with no news bulletins or advertisements because Liz was desperately upset by the negativity she heard on the radio on the school run (she has two children, aged 14 and 12, from an earlier marriage).
‘Every hour you’d be bombarded with murder, rape and bombings,’ she explains. ‘You’d think, “God, I don’t want my kids subjected to that.” Your cells react immediately when you see or hear about violence.
‘The brain starts to pick up the vibration of what you’re seeing or hearing which causes your DNA to basically get tight. It should be more relaxed.’
Which makes about as much sense as the ducks’ quacking, but Noel looks on with doe-eyed admiration for his 47-year-old wife, who was working as a make-up artist when they first met.
He is so besotted with her you can’t help but feel that if she told him to jump, he’d ask her how high. she is, it turns out, ‘a forensic researcher’ who is never happier than when surfing the net for, largely alternative, health solutions. she continues: ‘When your DNA is tight it doesn’t function properly. That’s when the illness sets in.’
This is why I’m here. Upstairs, they have a £2,300 EmPad — a sort of electro-magnetic yoga mat that aims to stimulate ‘cellular resonance’ in the body or, in Noel-speak, it sorts out his ‘body energy vibration’.
Indeed, they believe so fervently in this box of magic tricks that everyone in the house, including the dog and cat, is wired up to it for eight minutes a day.
Noel calls it a ‘miracle pad’ but this week went a step further by claiming it helped him tackle his prostate cancer with which he was diagnosed in November 2013. His comments attracted ridicule and then anger when he told a sceptical cancer patient on Twitter that his disease could have been caused by his ‘negative attitude’.
He was, as he says, ‘slaughtered’ on ITV’s This morning by hosts Phillip schofield and Holly Willoughby, with an outraged Holly questioning if he’d ask a child if their cancer was caused by negative energy. The cancer sufferer on Twitter called him ‘a f***ing idiot’, adding: ‘This sort of quackery should be illegal.’
‘I don’t care if someone calls me names,’ says Noel. ‘What I actually tweeted was, “Disease is caused by negative energy. Is it possible your ill-health is caused by your negative attitude?”
‘I think that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask somebody. I wanted a dialogue, but my words have been corrupted. I’d hoped by telling my story it might save lives, but Phillip and Holly were so hell-bent on pursuing an agenda.
‘It was as if Phillip never heard a word I said. I was very sad he didn’t even say a word of sympathy when I revealed my prostate cancer.
‘I didn’t say a pulsed electromagnetic field cures cancer. I don’t believe it does. All I said is that it will help tackle cancer.’
Noel is using the generic term for his miracle pad as the owners sent him a letter warning his claims could reflect badly on their business. He has since taken down a video of the pad from his website.
‘The notion I laid on a pad and the tumour shrunk itself is nonsense. I am not pontificating. I am not saying I know more than anybody else.
‘What we’re wanting to do is to open a few doors and windows and let people feel the breeze.
‘I got cancer, which shows I haven’t got a magic formula.’
Gently, but firmly, his wife interrupts. ‘Isn’t it better to have your immune system in tip-top condition rather than being torn to pieces by chemotherapy and drugs?’ she asks, before producing images of blood cells taken before and after an eight-minute stint on the mat. (Apparently in the ‘after’ picture they’re flowing more freely.)
she then searches through her computer for more of her forensic research showing photographs of — wait for it — water crystals after they’ve been played excerpts from John Lennon’s Imagine and then heavy rock.
Yup, it seems in this never-never energy land that even water is affected by violence, so the Edmondses have a £400 filter fitted to their homes in Bristol and France which produces ‘positive water’.
Liz says she’s been ‘attuned to the natural world’ for as long as she can remember, but began exploring alternative beliefs in earnest when she befriended a spiritual healer 16 years ago. she wasn’t looking for a partner when she met Noel, but the cosmos had other ideas. Noel wrote a wishlist of ambitions and, rather like a mail-order company, the cosmos
I put a cancer scan on my phone screen and told it ‘bye bye’
delivered Liz, who was working as a makeup artist on Noel’s show Deal Or No Deal when they met.
‘Some people call it love at first sight,’ Noel says. ‘For us it was two energy forces — two souls, some people call it — in the true meaning of soulmate. As our relationship has developed it’s quite extraordinary. It’s almost telepathic.’
In fact, when Noel was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he says Liz knew without having to be told.
‘It was a Thursday when I sat down with Professor Raj Persad [a hugely respected urology consultant in Bristol] to look at the results of the scans taken after my GP found a spike in my PSA levels [a blood test that can be used to help detect prostate cancer. Normal levels are 4 and below. Noel’s had risen to 7.]
‘We went through the options. I was facing chemotherapy and surgery. I said, “Is this an urgent job?” He said, “Not at all. You’re on the edge of observe and wait.”
‘Throughout the entire two-and-a-halfyear process, the only time I had any emotion was during that drive home when I thought, “S***, I’ve got to tell Liz.”
‘However irrational it is, I felt I’d let her down. I thought, “The most important thing is to be strong” but the moment I came through the back door and looked at her, she caved in.
‘She knew. I didn’t have to say anything. We hugged each other for a long time and cried, then we made a pact, which I believe would be useful for other people: we never said, “We’re going to fight this”, because that’s negative. We decided to invite “my little friend” as we called it, to leave.
‘I put the picture of the cancer as the background of my phone, so every time my phone rang I looked at it and said, “Bye, bye”.’
It sounds about as wacky as believing negative energy causes cancer. But Noel is adamant. ‘I came through a very difficult end of a marriage (to his second wife, Helen).
‘If I was going to attribute my prostate cancer to anything, it would be that my body energy vibration, the balance of my body, was wrecked by what was going on.’
Noel divorced Helen in 2004. Wasn’t that stress all over and done with by the time cancer was detected?
And given that his father died of prostate cancer in 1990, wouldn’t it more reasonable to assume Noel’s cancer was down to genes rather than negative energy?
‘He died of ignorance,’ says Noel of his father, beginning to cry again. ‘He rotted away. As an only child to be there when your parents say goodbye, that’s tough.
‘That happened 26 years ago and it still does this to me. Seeing this wonderful person literally disintegrate in front of me and knowing there was nothing I could do was very painful.’
He shakes his head. ‘Death is a word in the dictionary. I don’t believe in that word. I think the most appropriate word is ‘departure’ because we are energy and you can’t create or destroy energy, you can only change its form. So where does our energy go?’
His theory is that his mother and father are two little orbs that visit him regularly.
Within hours of Noel’s diagnosis, Liz began her forensic research. In came the positive water, the superfood turmeric, a NutriBullet smoothie maker and lifting weights three days a week.
‘The best personal trainer is yourself,’ says Liz — and, of course, that mat.
‘I’d been using it for about a year after my osteopath suggested it to help with muscle pain,’ says Noel. ‘But we changed its functions to help tackle the cancer.’
Liz says: ‘I started digging for new technologies and medicines — natural substances to take to support your body.’
This led them to Professor Mark Emberton, a professor of interventional oncology at University College Hospital, London, who specialises in High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) — using sound waves to heat and destroy tumours.
A spokesman for Cancer Research UK advises that the treatment has fewer side-effects — such as incontinence and erection problems — than conventional cancer treatments, but that it ‘hasn’t been around long enough for us to know’ if long-term results are as good as those resulting from surgery or radiotherapy. Noel had his procedure in July 2014. ‘Mark said it couldn’t have gone better,’ he says. ‘The great thing was that I went to Princess Grace clinic, which had a lovely positive feel because we have a great love of Monaco and Princess Grace. I only had to have painkillers for two days.’
When Noel had a second scan following the procedure, his tumour had disappeared and, within nine months, his PSA level had fallen to 4.
‘My cancer left me because of a combination of things I did, including the most natural thing you can have: sound. It was literally destroyed by sound waves. I didn’t say pulsed electro-magnetic field therapy cures, but I believe it helps.
‘Mark said my results were in the top ten of more than 10,000 procedures because I presented him with a fit body. The other thing he said is, “I love your attitude and your beautiful wife’s attitude”, which I interpret as positive energy.
‘Further down the road our dream — and we will fulfil our dream — is to open at least one positivity haven. Somewhere people can come and learn this information,’ says Noel.
‘It won’t be like a spa where people go for ten days and then go back to their old ways. It will open people’s eyes to living a more positive lifestyle.’
With which he reveals worrying news: a PSA test five weeks ago revealed his level has risen from a relatively safe 4 to 9.
‘If cancer came back I would consider chemotherapy and surgery,’ he says. ‘Why cut your options? You have to keep a sense of reality here.’
Finally, from Noel, some wise words.
We have made a donation to a charity in return for this interview.