The oncologist trying to prevent cancer, not just treat it

From Abbottabad to the NHS: a doctor shaped by loss

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a guest who has travelled, in his own words, “full circle.” Dr. Mohammad Muneeb Khan was born in London, brought back to Pakistan at nine months old after his father’s death, raised in Abbottabad by his mother and grandmother, and eventually returned to England as an adult. That arc — England to Pakistan and back — shaped almost everything about how he thinks about medicine.

His decision to become a doctor came early. As a child he spent long hours in the clinic of his maternal uncle, Kazi Muhibur Rahman, a tuberculosis specialist who saw hundreds of patients a day, charged only what they could afford, and accepted kandairian and kulche as payment. “He would make the patients relax, laugh, show them magic tricks, treat them and not charge them,” Dr. Khan recalls. The lesson he drew was practical: you do not have to overcharge to make a good living, and quantity can compensate for what individual patients cannot pay.

By fifteen he had narrowed his focus to cancer. An aunt died of what the family called “the C disease” — nobody would say the word cancer aloud, as if speaking it might spread it. That silence, and the mystery behind it, pulled him in. When his uncle asked why cancer, Dr. Khan turned the question around: “Why tuberculosis?” His uncle had graduated in 1949, when TB was considered untreatable, and had taken it on as a challenge. Dr. Khan wanted to do the same thing with cancer.

Four years of unemployment, one year of pure passion

After graduating from Ayub Medical College in 1996–97, Dr. Khan spent four years unable to leave Abbottabad because his grandmother was paralysed and he was her carer. He sat the Public Service Commission exam, placed among the top students, and still could not get a government post. For roughly a year of that period he worked as a volunteer oncologist at Ayub Medical Complex — no salary, no dedicated ward, no nurses. “I was not getting paid and it was pure passion,” he says. He mixed chemotherapy himself, found beds in general wards, admitted patients, and monitored side effects around the clock. His mother described it as her son treating poor patients on a widow’s money. He told her to give him one year.

When his grandmother died, his mother told him to go abroad. He had a British passport — unused since infancy — and chose England over America, a decision he now considers a mistake. His American uncles, both doctors, had been calling him for a decade. “With hindsight, if I were to go to America, I would have been this cancer prevention thing ten years earlier.”

Warehouse shifts and the long road to consultant

London in 2001, post-9/11, was not easy for a foreign medical graduate. Dr. Khan woke at five in the morning, took three buses and two trains to a warehouse owned by a Pakistani shopkeeper, and spent his days moving crates and working the till. “I used to sit and think, what on earth am I doing? I am a doctor.” He called his mother once to say he was fed up. Her reply was direct: “You’ve burnt your ships. There’s no way coming back. There’s only way forward.”

Locum jobs followed — two weeks here, three weeks there — until hospitals kept him on longer-term contracts. Getting into oncology training took another four to five years of waiting. He qualified in general medicine (MRCP), then completed a Masters in Clinical Oncology and a Fellowship of the Royal College of Radiologists (FRCR). The FRCR alone covered nuclear physics, biostatistics, pharmacology, radiobiology, and cell biology. “Nuclear physics was like something going over my head,” he admits. The full training programme took roughly five years.

One reason he chose England over America for his training was clinical: in the UK, a clinical oncologist delivers both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Everywhere else, the two are separate specialties. “If I came back to Pakistan, I could give all the treatment to the patient without having to refer to someone else.”

He now works as a consultant — the level at which, as he explains to Muzamil, “the buck stops.” The consultant carries final responsibility for every patient under their care. His specialties are brain tumours and urological cancers: kidney, bladder, and prostate. His base is a cancer centre in Cottingham, the largest village in England, which serves a catchment population of 1.2 million people stretching from Scarborough to Grimsby.

Cancer is not a death sentence — the numbers most people don’t know

Before getting into prevention, Dr. Khan pushes back on the fatalism that surrounds cancer. Muzamil notes that people treat it as a death sentence. Dr. Khan’s response is blunt: “Diabetes — cure rate is zero. Hypertension — zero. Myocardial infarction — zero. We cannot cure a single virus. Common cold, we cannot cure.”

Cancer, by contrast, has improving cure rates when caught early. Breast cancer: ninety percent in early stages. Prostate cancer: ninety percent. Testicular cancer: ninety-seven percent — even after spread to the lungs. Hodgkin lymphoma: one hundred percent. “Cures are increasing. The important thing is to catch it early, and even more important — prevention is the best cure.”

He also offers a reframe of what cancer actually is. He breaks the word down: CAN — can be prevented. CER — certainly can be treated. The first half is about stopping it from happening. The second is about what to do if it does.

Why fifty percent of the UK now gets cancer — and what’s driving it

In 2000, one in three people in the UK developed cancer over their lifetime. By 2020, that figure had risen to one in two. Dr. Khan watched that rise happen in real time and found it unacceptable. He points to elephants as a reference point: they live eighty to ninety years, are large mammals, and have among the lowest cancer rates of any animal. Longevity and body size do not explain the human trajectory.

His explanation centres on lifestyle factors that rarely get discussed because there is no commercial incentive to discuss them. He identifies several:

Synthetic multivitamins. “Trial after trial over the last thirty years has shown that cancer is more common” in people taking synthetic supplements. The body absorbs what it needs from natural food sources and stops. Synthetic vitamins force their way in regardless, and the excess feeds cancer cells rather than healthy ones.

Disrupted circadian rhythm. Modern humans spend an estimated ninety-three percent of their time indoors — eighty-seven percent in buildings, six percent in cars. Dr. Khan describes a technique he calls DAN: thirty seconds of morning light, between dawn and nine a.m., with eyes open but not looking directly at the sun. Near-infrared light reflected off trees and grass is sufficient. The signal travels to the brain, which instructs every cell in the body to produce melatonin in its mitochondria. That melatonin detoxifies the cell — neutralising the poisons and toxins that damage DNA and cause cancer. “In thirty seconds, doing absolutely nothing, you can reduce cancer in every cell of your body.”

Sugar. “In one word — sugar.” Cancer cells carry ten times more glucose receptors than normal cells, and ten times more insulin receptors. Insulin also triggers insulin-like growth factor, another cancer accelerant. PET-CT scans work precisely because of this: radioactive glucose is injected and cancer cells glow ten times brighter than surrounding tissue. Frequent eating compounds the problem. The body feeds every cell indiscriminately — including damaged ones — when food is constantly available. Fasting, which Dr. Khan describes as natural to human beings (the word “breakfast” literally means breaking a fast), gives the body a nightly detox window. “Old people used to eat at sunset, pray, eat, and then nothing until morning.”

Screening: start ten years before your family did

Muzamil asks Dr. Khan how to stay ahead of cancer. The standard advice — begin screening at fifty for breast, bowel, and prostate cancers — is something Dr. Khan explicitly disagrees with. “I disagree with it.” His rule: find out the youngest age at which a close family member was diagnosed, and begin screening ten years before that age. Most cancers take roughly ten years to develop to a detectable stage. “If breast cancer happened to someone in your family at fifty, you screen at forty. Don’t wait till fifty.”

Pakistan has no national screening programme. Killing Cancer Kindly is launching two pilot programmes this year: bowel cancer screening and cervical cancer screening.

Bowel cancer screening is straightforward. A paper strip detects blood in stool — a sample applied to the strip, a colour reaction if blood is present. If positive, a colonoscopy follows to determine whether the cause is cancer, an ulcer, or inflammation. Caught at that stage, treatment costs tens of thousands of rupees. Caught late, after visible blood appears and the patient panics, the treatment pathway is chemotherapy, then surgery, then more chemotherapy — a year of treatment costing lakhs.

Cervical cancer strikes women in their thirties. Its window period is ten to fifteen years, which means a smear test from age twenty-five can catch pre-cancerous changes long before they become dangerous. It is caused by human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection for which a vaccine exists. Pakistan vaccinates for polio but not HPV. Dr. Khan says he is negotiating with the government to launch an HPV vaccination programme targeting girls aged twelve to thirteen.

Treatment: from carpet bombing to chronic disease management

On treatment, Dr. Khan acknowledges the shift away from conventional chemotherapy’s “carpet bombing” approach — kill everything, cancer and healthy cells alike. Targeted therapies now block receptors specific to cancer cells. Immunotherapy removes the molecular disguise that cancer cells use to hide from the immune system. The results are significant: cancers that were fatal within six months are now being controlled for five or six years. His longest-surviving prostate cancer patient has been alive for twenty-six years — outliving two of the oncologists who treated him before Dr. Khan.

But he is careful not to let the progress in treatment distract from prevention. “If you have a spare tyre in your boot, you don’t slash your own tyre.” Immunotherapy has real side effects: an overactivated immune system attacks healthy cells that carry receptors resembling those on cancer cells. Nanoparticle drugs and targeted therapies are expensive to develop and enormously profitable. Prevention is not. “In prevention, there is no money. In new nanoparticle drugs and immunotherapies, invest a million and earn a billion. That is why attention stays there.”

Pakistan in 2050: a cancer-free future led by Pakistanis

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Dr. Khan where Pakistan will be in thirty years. His answer is unambiguous. “Pakistan will be at the centre stage of geopolitical and economic force.” He points to geography — the country sits at a crossroads that the world must pass through, politically, geographically, and economically. He points to philanthropy — Pakistan is among the top charitable nations in the world by GDP, alongside the UK and Canada. He lists Shaukat Khanum as one of only three comprehensive free cancer hospitals on earth. He cites the Akhtar Hameed Khan micro-financing model and the Edhi Foundation’s ambulance service, which began with a wheelbarrow and a mattress and has held the Guinness World Record for the largest free ambulance service every year since 1997.

“Bill Gates walks a well-trodden path — malaria prevention, polio prevention. He does not build a free cancer hospital. That is only the Pakistani who does that.”

By the end of the conversation, Dr. Khan ties his thirty-year vision directly to Killing Cancer Kindly. The charity launched in August of the previous year, is already being translated into six languages including Urdu, Russian, and Greek, and is producing videos on specific prevention techniques. “I have told my children — this is my legacy. Whether I am here or not, you have to carry this forward.”

The YouTube channel — Killing Cancer Kindly with Doctor Khan — is publicly available and regularly updated. For Muzamil, the episode ends where it began: with a doctor who decided at fifteen what he wanted to do, and has not deviated since.