Shadowing Practice: This Woman Cured Her Cancer with an Insane Method - Learn English Speaking with Video

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A sharp needle breaks skin and pierces the firm, dark tumor.

Millions of viruses invade deep into the deadly cancer, kick-starting an experiment that had never been attempted before.

Bypassing some of the most sacred safety nets in medicine.

This is the story of Dr. Beata Halacy, an expert virologist from Croatia who decided to cure her own cancer.

Thanks to her help, we can tell it as accurately as possible.

It had been a few years since Beata had been diagnosed with breast cancer, a pretty bad one.

After a surgery to remove as much of the cancer as possible, she went through four cycles of pretty harsh chemotherapy.

The goal was to eliminate every last cancer cell that was still hiding in her body.

And the chemo did its job.

All rapidly dividing cells in Beata's body died en masse.

The cells of her immune system, hair and mucosa, and digestive tract died in droves.

We'll spare you the details, but it wasn't fun.

Beate was sure that if this harsh treatment would not destroy the cancer completely, then nothing would.

Unfortunately, at least one cell survived.

After two years, it came back again and was removed again.

And again, it came back, stronger, bigger, and now even more dangerous than before.

A hard, dark mass that had begun invading Beate's muscles and skin, getting ready to spread all over her body.

Stage 3b.

If it was allowed to succeed, her chances of survival were very slim.

This is where Beata decided to take care of this cancer herself with the support of her colleagues, because they actually had a unique mix of expertise and resources.

Her plan was as simple as it was daring.

They would breed viruses that they were deeply familiar with from her lab and inject them directly into her cancer.

Why viruses love cancer?

Like many medical advances, this one was discovered by accident.

In the early 20th century, baffled doctors observed that the tutors of some cancer patients shrank when they got virus infections like influenza or measles,

which makes perfect sense if we understand how both work.

When regular cells are infected with a virus, they fight back hard and without compromise.

First, they slow down, calming their internal machinery

so the virus has a harder time taking them over and making copies of itself.

Then they scream for the immune system to send antivirus killers, which usually means that they'll be killed themselves.

And if they can, they push their self-destruct button and take the virus with them.

Cancer cells are unable to use any of these defenses exactly because of the corruption that makes them cancer.

They're unhinged and hyperactive, eating and reproducing feverishly, unable to slow down.

Cancer cells also can't really cool the immune system to help them out, because it's trying really hard to kill them.

Successful cancers actually build a protective zone around them that hides them from immune cells or even kills them.

And lastly, their self-destruct button is broken.

So, viruses are a horrible enemy for cancer cells, slaying them effortlessly.

But much worse, once a virus starts killing, all of the ensuing death, virus and tumour particles attract the immune system,

which then happily joins the massacre.

Virotherapy became an active field of research and a big hope for beating cancer.

Unfortunately, it turned out that using viruses to kill cancer is way harder than initially thought.

You've got three very complex players trying to kill each other, fighting inside a living human being that somehow has to survive.

Cancer is also very much not cooperative in its own destruction, and often very hard to reach

especially if it's already spread throughout the body

and in the end you need to kill every last cell to really slay it.

Cancer is also a living evolving entity and does not look exactly the same in two people.

So it's extremely difficult to find viral therapies that work in many different patients.

On top of all that cancer is typically treated with chemotherapy first often with incredible results and great survival rates.

The author of this video is only alive because of chemo, so we're not talking it down at all.

But one of its most brutal side effects is that it can severely weaken your immune system.

And without your immune system at its A-game, virotherapy can't work properly because it's doing most of the slaughter.

As an expert virologist with extensive experience, Dr. Hallisey knew all of this.

So she developed a plan.

She would take her chances, forgo another round of chemo, and keep her immune system ready to fight.

Beata would engineer her own anti-cancer virus mix and do her own virotherapy.

Nobody had done anything like this before.

Even with all of her experience and resources, this was not going to be easy.

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Great, that's sorted.

Now back to useful viruses.

Beata's viruses.

In labs, viruses are usually produced by injecting them into cell cultures, letting them multiply and then purifying the mix,

creating a liquid with mostly viruses but also some cell debris and garbage.

This is good enough for most lab experiments but would never be allowed to be used in humans.

Anything that goes into our bodies has to be clinical-grade, way more pure to be as safe as possible.

Beata decided the risk was acceptable for her.

So her next big question was which virus to inject.

The main thing she was looking for was a virus that specifically attacked the cell types the cancer emerged from.

Ideally, it shouldn't cause a serious disease because surviving cancer doesn't help if you then die of Ebola.

And this virus had to have been clinically tested in humans before.

So for her first virus Beata and her colleagues chose measles.

Not the wild, dangerous type that killed about 100,000 people in 2024.

The weakened and pathetic version we have been using in the measles vaccines for over 40 years.

Beata went to work and together with her team produced her first dose.

A syringe filled with about 600,000 measles viruses.

The plan was to get an injection every few days for the next few weeks

and monitor closely what would happen to the cancer.

And so the experiment began.

The needle was pushed directly into her cancer, a dark, hard tumor growing and thriving.

At first nothing seemed to be happening, but after the second dose of tens of thousands of viruses,

the tumor suddenly exploded, almost doubling in size and became more spiky, aggressive looking.

After two more injections, the tumor began to shrink and constrict.

What was happening inside Beata's body?

Let's go back in time.

After the first injection, the viruses couldn't believe their luck.

They'd found the most amazing hunting grounds and they went to work, infecting, killing, multiplying.

Cancer cells were screaming in panic and dying by the millions.

The tumor turned into a battleground, leaking the broken parts of dead cells and countless newborn viruses.

Until this moment the cancer had been protected by a chemical defense zone around itself, hiding from the immune system.

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No anti-cancer cell could cross it, but the measles massacre shattered the protection.

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There's nothing that makes your immune system more aggressive than evidence of cells being killed.

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Death is always an emergency.

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And with that much death and virus parts leaking into healthy tissue, Beata's immune system suddenly jolted awake in shock.

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Not only was there an enormous virus infection that somehow had been able to fester, no, there was something else.

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A hidden arch enemy, suddenly ripped from the shadows and without protection.

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Beata's immune system chose violence.

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Like angry angels of death, millions of immune cells invaded the tumor furiously fighting and killing viruses and cancer.

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This sudden influx of cells is what caused Beata's tumor to swell so explosively.

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What followed was an epic and unhinged massacre.

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Viruses killed defenseless cancer cells, virus hunter cells gobbled up viruses, and cancer killers exploded cancer cells left and right,

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while cancer cells still fought back and deactivated immune cells where they could.

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Every few days, fresh injections followed, saturating Beata's cancer with at least 80 million viruses in total, keeping the massacre going.

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There was one problem though.

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The immune system was too good at its job.

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Soon, Beata would be totally immune against measles and likely eradicate the virus, which might end the therapy before it finished.

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So after a few weeks, Beata started injecting a second virus,

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VSV, a pretty harmless relative of rabies that causes mild flu symptoms in the extremely rare cases a human catches it.

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Within a day after the first VSV injection, Beata fell ill with a fever and chills.

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But amazingly, these would remain her only side effects during the entire experiment.

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Her immune system was freshly offended and once again hurled itself into the tumor with newfound anger.

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The massacre continued as unhinged as before.

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After two months of injections, the tumor was only a shadow of its former self.

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63% smaller, it had turned soft and lost its density.

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And critically, it had completely stopped any advances into the muscle and skin tissue.

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Now surgeons removed the weakened tumor and examined it in the lab.

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Half of its mass was immune cells angrily bashing cancer cells to death.

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Beata had beaten her own cancer.

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To be sure no survivors could grow back, her doctors treated her with additional anti-cancer drugs for a year.

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But at the time of the making of this video, it's been six years and her cancer has not returned.

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It seems that Dr. Hadassi has cured herself for good.

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Why don't we treat patients more often this way?

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Beata's decision to inject herself with viruses earned her much admiration and applause, but also a ton of criticism from medical ethicists,

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mostly because the viruses and methods she used were not approved for use in humans.

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Which begs the question, why is it so hard for patients like her to access experimental treatments?

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Well, the reality is that many things in life are not really right or wrong, but exist on a trade-off slider.

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There's no correct decision, just which payoffs do you want to accept?

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In this case, if you make medical trials easy, fast and cheap, then there'll be experiments that will seriously harm a few people, but on average you'll make more progress faster,

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which will potentially save more lives in the end.

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If you make medical trials hard, very slow and expensive, On average, you'll harm fewer people and can be pretty confident that the new therapies are pretty safe.

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But you also hugely slow down medical progress and even completely prevent some new therapies.

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In today's world, the slider is firmly on this side.

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So, as a result, many novel cancer therapies are usually only given to people who've exhausted all other conventional therapies

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and whose cancer is very advanced.

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as a last resort of sorts.

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At the time of making this video, over 100 studies are actively testing viruses against cancer in humans, but the vast majority are restricted to late-stage cancers.

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And this slows down progress because it means

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that new therapies are tested in people whose body

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and immune systems are already severely weakened while their cancer is at the height of its strength.

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So perhaps it's time to give viruses a chance earlier in the process.

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when the cancer is only getting started and the body is not yet weakened by more aggressive treatments.

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To be crystal clear, virotherapy is not and won't be the cure to cancer.

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Cancer is hundreds of different diseases and the best therapy depends on the type, location and how far it has spread.

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But in the best case, virotherapy could be much less toxic and as effective or better than chemo, especially in combination with other therapies.

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Another weapon in our arsenal.

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So what can we take away from Dr. Hallis' story?

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Her goal was to save her own life in the face of a terminal threat.

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It was not without risk, but she succeeded.

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And in the process, she hoped to inspire more research on virotherapy as early options for patients, to save other lives like hers.

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But she was also in a pretty unique position to try this experiment, and since she was doing it on herself,

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she didn't need to go through the processes that would usually have slowed it down or forbidden it.

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In 2026, six years after Beata's treatment, over a dozen studies are underway to test viruses as early-stage cancer therapies.

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And in our book, this is hugely great news.

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164

Fill your walls with knowledge every aspiring scientist should have at

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a glance from our periodic table poster to our world map poster

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You'll keep discovering over time every poster is created in collaboration with leading experts and meticulously designed right here at Kurzgesagt

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You can now build your own educational poster wall and get 25% off exclusively available on the Kurzgesagt shop

169

You want to listen to the beautiful soundtrack without my annoying voice?

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Hmm, well it's up to you.

171

Just select the audio track interlingua down here and watch the video again as a music video.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “This Woman Cured Her Cancer with an Insane Method”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: cancer, cell, viruses, immune, virus. This video has 171 sentences and 2443 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:09. The speaker talks at a natural 161 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
tumor noun	/tuː.məɹ/	An abnormal growth; differential diagnosis includes abscess, metaplasia, and neoplasia.
measles noun	/ˈmizəlz/	An acute and highly contagious disease which often afflicts children caused by the virus Measles morbillivirus and causing red rashes, fever, runny nose…
virotherapy noun		The use of genetically modified viruses to treat cancer.
chemotherapy noun	/ˌkiːməʊˈθɛɹəpi/	Any chemical treatment intended to be therapeutic with respect to a disease state.
injection noun	/ɪnˈd͡ʒɛk.ʃən/	The act of injecting, or something that is injected.
inject verb	/ɪnˈd͡ʒɛkt/	To push or pump (something, especially fluids) into a cavity or passage.
massacre noun	/ˈmæs.ə.kə(ɹ)/	The killing of a considerable number (usually limited to people) where little or no resistance can be made, with indiscriminate violence, without necessity…
weaken verb	/ˈwikən/	To make weaker or less strong.
unhinge verb	/ʌnˈhɪnd͡ʒ/	To remove the leaf of a door or a window from its supporting hinges.
antivirus noun	/ˈantɪvʌɪrəs/	A piece of software that is used to detect, delete and or neutralize computer-based viruses.
destruct verb	/dɪˈstɹʌkt/	To invoke the destructor of.
slider noun	/ˈslaɪdɚ/	A potentiometer with a linearly sliding control.
virologist noun		A scientist or doctor who studies or specializes in viruses.
hugely adverb	/ˈhjuːd͡ʒli/	Greatly; to a huge extent.
explode verb	/ɪkˈsploʊd/	To fly apart with sudden violent force; to blow up, to burst, to detonate, to go off.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
slow down verb		To decelerate.
come back verb		To return to a place.
fight back verb	/faɪt bæk/	To defend oneself by fighting.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
get off verb		To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it.
take away from verb		To subtract a quality from; make something seem not so good or interesting.
turn out verb		To end up; to result.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

We'll spare you the details, but it wasn't fun.
Let's go back in time.
Why don't we treat patients more often this way?
There's no correct decision, just which payoffs do you want to accept?
You want to listen to the beautiful soundtrack without my annoying voice?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	been attempted · had been diagnosed · was removed
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	it's been · has cured · who've exhausted

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 22 contractions and reduced forms, such as you'll, can't, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: injection /ɪnˈd͡ʒɛk.ʃən/, machinery /məˈʃiːnəɹi/
Long words — get the stress right: chemotherapy /ˌkiːməʊˈθɛɹəpi/, antivirus /ˈantɪvʌɪrəs/, ideally /aɪˈdi.ə.li/, cooperative /kuˈɑp.ɹətɪv/, critically /ˈkɹɪt.ɪ.kə.li/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like tumor, measles, virotherapy.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: This Woman Cured Her Cancer with an Insane Method - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?