Anyone with first or second-hand experience knows chemotherapy is no joke. You are literally being poisoned, with the drugs used targeting and killing fast-growing cells in your body.
The drugs kill cancer cells, but also affect normal fast-growing cells like your hair and stomach lining. Chemo is a truly miserable process that’s incredibly hard on the body and mind, but it is undoubtedly effective in fighting cancer.
But now, in a true horror story, a mom is launching legal action after spending six and a half years undergoing chemotherapy she didn’t even need!
Samantha Smith, 45, is a British woman who was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, with doctors signing her up for surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. Her oncologist, Professor Ian Brown, advised her that she needed to continue the treatment. She did exactly as ordered until 2021, assuming her oncologist knew best.
Then Professor Brown retired, and Smith learned to her horror that she’d undergone years of completely unnecessary chemo:
“Undergoing chemotherapy is a gruelling process and I’ve been very unwell for the best part of a decade. But I told myself it was all worth it to get better. So to find out that around six-and-a-half years of my treatment wasn’t needed came as a huge shock.”
“I spent so long unable to function properly”
Brain tumour patient taking legal action after she had six years of unnecessary chemotherapy https://t.co/mIldon6vTD
— Metro (@MetroUK) January 27, 2026
She says, rightly, that part of her life has been “stolen”:
“I feel like that part of my life has been stolen from me, as I spent so long unable to function properly and just getting by day-to-day. I also had the burden of getting myself to monthly blood tests, collecting my tablets and keeping myself protected during the pandemic, which wasn’t easy when I felt as ill as I did.”
Worse, the extended chemo has left her with lingering health problems, with fatigue, increased susceptibility to infections, rotting teeth, and mobility issues. As she explains:
“I can’t move my right side leg upwards and can’t move my shoulder. All I want to do now is get some answers and help make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
Prof. Brown’s employers, the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, have admitted that a huge mistake was made, confirming that Smith’s chemo was “not supported by scientific evidence” and have launched an internal review to find out how this could have happened.
Meanwhile Prof. Brown himself is under investigation by the General Medical Council in an attempt to discover how a course of cancer treatment could go so horribly wrong. We can only hope Smith gets some hefty and well-deserved compensation for this, and that no other patient has to undergo a similar ordeal!
