In a report from our “Too Much Information” department, legendary actor Michael Douglas speculated that performing oral sex on his wife both gave him throat cancer and then cured his throat cancer.
The elderly actor, most recently seen in HBO’s Liberace bio-pic, “Behind the Candelabra,” was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer three years ago. Though he has made a complete recovery after having a walnut-sized tumor removed from the base of his tongue and undergoing intense chemotherapy and radiation treatment, there is still a five percent chance that his cancer could return.
In an interview with the Guardian, Douglas discussed, among other things, his cancer. As the conversation turned to what causes cancer, Douglas dismissed his years of smoking and drinking as the source of his poor health. He told the interviewer that, when he first became ill, he thought that it was related to stress surrounding his son’s imprisonment, before blaming the cause of his illness on a more salacious source.
When asked if he thought his smoking had caused his throat cancer, Douglas responded by saying, “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus. I did worry if the stress caused by my son’s incarceration didn’t help trigger it. But yeah, it’s a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer. And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it.”
HPV is a virus that is transferred between humans during physical contact. There are a wide variety of HPVs, and not all of them are known to cause cancer. Douglas is correct when he said that HPV can cause throat cancer by way of oral sex, though it is not known if that indeed is the source of Douglas’ cancer. There are no studies that show that the effects of HPV-based cancer can be cured by more oral sex, however.
Shortly after his claims made headlines, Douglas’ publicist began spinning the actor’s words, and denied that Douglas’ disease was definitively the result of cunnilingus with his wife, actor Catherine Zeta Jones. “In a discussion with the newspaper, they talked about the causes of oral cancer, one of which was oral sex, which is noted and has been known for a while now.” The publicist did not mention Douglas’ claims that oral sex can also cure cancer.
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