Leigh Erin Connealy

Leigh Erin Connealy was born in 1957 and earned her MD from the University of Health Sciences Chicago Medical School, completing a family practice residency at Harbor/UCLA Medical Center. She has no fellowship or specialty board certification in oncology. Despite this, she founded the Center for New Medicine in Irvine, California in 1992 and established the Cancer Center for Healing in 2009, which she markets as a leading institution for cancer care.

The Cancer Center offers expensive integrative protocols including intravenous vitamin C, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, detoxification regimens, and various complementary treatments marketed as capable of reversing and preventing cancer.

In March 2017 the Medical Board of California formally charged Connealy with unprofessional conduct related to the management of two post-menopausal patients. In the first case, a patient with uterine cancer had been bleeding without receiving a cancer workup for months under Connealy's care. In the second case, she prescribed estrogen to a woman with an undiagnosed breast lump without pursuing diagnosis for more than three months. The case was resolved by consent agreement: Connealy accepted a public reprimand and was ordered to complete a medical record-keeping course.

Connealy continues to operate the Cancer Center for Healing and appear on alternative health podcasts, where her MD credential lends apparent authority to claims that exceed what she could defend in a conventional oncology setting.

“Integrative therapies including IV vitamin C, hyperbaric oxygen, and detoxification protocols treat and reverse cancer”

While some integrative approaches have supportive care evidence, claiming they treat or reverse cancer is unsupported by randomized controlled trial data. Marketing these expensive protocols to cancer patients as primary treatment or cancer reversal is not evidence-based.