Instead he allegedly prescribed an aggressive and painful treatment called black salve, which ate away at her flesh, leaving her swollen and in pain. Dennis Wayne Jensen claimed he had cured his own brain tumour twice and had cured hundreds of others of cancer, Helen’s family says. Her partner of 21 years, Belinda Davies, said she would drive Helen out to his North Warrandyte home on the bushy outskirts of Melbourne and watch in disbelief as he put his hands on her body, already “mutilated” from his treatment, and say he was driving out the illness. “He put his hands on her stomach and would breathe out like he was trying to blow away the cancer, telling us that the cancer was gone, and there was only a tiny little bit still there,” Belinda said. “And here she was so swollen and distended and just unbelievably ill.”

Helen and partner Belinda Davies at the Australian Open. The case has been described as tragic by Victoria’s Health Complaints Commissioner, Karen Cusack, who has issued Jensen with a 12-week interim prohibition order banning him from providing any health service as the matter is investigated. The commissioner said it was alleged that Helen “had been dissuaded from following conventional cancer treatment and she subsequently died”. “I don’t issue these orders lightly, but I am satisfied that this was necessary in this case to avoid a serious risk to the health, safety or welfare of the public,” she said.

According to her loved ones, Helen discovered a lump in her pelvic region in January last year but initially brushed it off. A scan in October revealed a 17-centimetre growth on her ovary, likely advanced cancer. She was booked in for surgery to remove it but pulled out at the last minute, following a visit to Jensen the day before she was due to go into hospital. Helen, who was a keen cyclist, works on her bike. “She came home and said she wasn’t having a surgery now,” Belinda said. “She said ‘Denn [Jensen] said the surgery is not going to work, and I’m just a number to them, and the black salve will draw out the cancer and the black salve will do what the surgeons can’t.

“I had a huge fight with her. I was just saying, ‘This is insane, give yourself a chance. For God’s sake, just give yourself a chance.' ” Belinda believes that Helen, an emergency department nurse at the Austin Hospital, received a recommendation for Jensen from a paramedic she worked alongside. Shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, she returned to her home with what looked like black tar all over her stomach, which eventually ate away at her flesh. “It rots the skin away. It looks like third-degree burns,” Belinda said. “It was just disgusting.”

It is understood the substance was black salve (also known as red salve or cansema), a widely discredited alternative cancer treatment containing the plant bloodroot or zinc chloride, which can destroy large parts of the skin and underlying tissue, leaving behind a thick black scar. This is what happened to a man in Queensland who applied black salve to his head. “Things like black salve just kill everything, normal skin cells, abnormal skin cells, it doesn’t matter,” said Dr Douglas Grose, president of the Cosmetic Physicians College of Australasia. “You can’t control it. All you’re doing is killing the full thickness of the skin and allowing it to scar up. It’s a ridiculous technique.” It is illegal to sell black salve in Australia, and the Therapeutic Goods Administration says it is not aware of any credible scientific evidence showing it to be effective in treating cancer. Nevertheless, the cream has continued to be promoted in online testimonials, and instructions to make it are easily found on the internet.

In 2014, a man in Brisbane was left with a hole in his head after applying black salve to the side of his face for four months. Other disturbing cases have also been reported globally. Jensen, however, insists black salve “works” and is not an approved mainstream treatment because pharmaceutical companies can’t make any money out of it. “They don’t want black salve on the market because it cures cancer,” he said in an interview with Fairfax Media on Monday. He said that when Helen came to him late last year he first offered her alterative products, including another controversial treatment, vitamin B-17. Jensen said Helen had been told “she wouldn’t live until Christmas”.

“She told me, ‘I want you to pull out everything you’ve got,’ ” Jensen said. Self-proclaimed healer Dennis Wayne Jensen. The self-proclaimed healer said he recently cured a man of a terminal cancer in his neck and had also healed a woman’s ovaries. “I actually put my hand on her tummy, over the ovaries, and I was able to heal the ovaries so she could have a baby,” he said. He said he did not charge for his services, or ask for money – a claim disputed by Belinda, who said he made it clear he expected a donation once Helen recovered.

Jensen attended the interview with two advocates, who brought with them a stack of documents they claimed showed that the interim prohibition order had no legal standing. It’s still baffling to Helen’s family that a woman who spent her life so focused on her health and working as a medical professional would so thoroughly reject doctors' advice. Her sister-in-law, Deb Davies, complained to the Health Complaints Commissioner after Helen’s death, handing over a DVD of graphic photos to investigators. Fairfax Media was provided with an image of the wound on Helen Lawson's stomach after she tried to treat her ovarian cancer with black salve, but has chosen only to run a blurred version because it is so confronting. “You have never seen anything like what happened to Helen. It is so confronting,” she said.

“Literally above her pubic bone, all across her abdomen almost up to her rib cage, she was raw, mutilated bubbling flesh.” Belinda said that within a few weeks of Helen applying the black salve the wound was so large that surgeons could not have operated even if they had wanted to. After screaming matches in which Belinda begged Helen to go hospital, she said she gave in and focussed on trying to be there for her partner. The pair met in hospital just over 20 years ago when Belinda was Helen’s patient. Much of their life together was spent cycling, with Belinda supporting Helen through an elite mature-age criterium career that saw her top the nation in her age category. Helen Lawson was a keen cyclist. Credit:Darrian Traynor

As Helen became progressively sicker, Belinda said, Jensen continued to insist she had been cured. “He promised her that she would get well and the cancer had died,” she said. It was only in the final weeks of her life that Helen’s contact with him began to diminish, but only because Jensen was ignoring many of Helen’s increasingly desperate calls, Belinda said. Helen was rushed to hospital on April 6 after collapsing at home, and died that night. Belinda sent Jensen a message saying that “we lost her, she was riddled with cancer”, but hasn’t spoken to him since. She believes Helen could have survived at least another few years if it wasn’t for his intervention.