WILLIAMSTON, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Former professional model Gayle Gurchiek seemed to embody health, success, and vitality. Her career took her across the globe, with her image featured in international campaigns and on the pages of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Vogue. To the outside world, she was the picture of accomplishment and well-being.
But behind the lens was a story she never intended to tell – yet knew she had to: her decade-long battle with cancer that has transformed not only her life but also how she sees the medical system and the hometown that may have played a role in her illness. That journey comes to life in her YouTube film Poster Girl, released Thursday, October 2.
The diagnosis that changed everything.
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Gurchiek was first diagnosed with stage-one breast cancer in 2014 when she was 44 years old. She followed the standard path – surgery and radiation – choices she now regrets. In a support group of women with the same diagnosis, she watched as two of them who pursued the standard Western medical protocol of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and medication passed away within two years.
Breaking from western medicine.
Now that her own cancer has returned – stage-four metastatic breast cancer, diagnosed in October 2023 – Gurchiek’s battle has become as much about navigating a maze of medical systems as it is about staying alive. She has seen countless doctors and has endured seizures, vision loss, tremors, and physical collapse, all while hearing the blunt truth from physicians: her prognosis remains uncertain.
At one point, a doctor dismissively said that stage-four people are “gonna die anyway” when talking about what she characterized as “experimental” therapy. The offhand remark – delivered with a shocking lack of compassion – reduced Gurchiek to tears after leaving the appointment, stunned by the crudeness of being told her life was already written off.
That moment marked a turning point. Disillusioned by what she describes as a medical system that treats charts and tumors instead of people – overlooking the seizures, pain, and cascade of side effects tied to conventional cancer treatment – Gurchiek turned toward a whole-body, functional medicine approach.
Gurchiek sought a way to heal her body – not just fight her disease.
Gurchiek embraced therapies that sought not only to kill cancer but to ask why it develops in the first place. She says on her GoFundMe site, “After countless hours of research to find treatments that could potentially save my life I landed on a functional medicine approach. These treatments have been keeping me alive by treating the whole body and root cause, not just the cancer. This isn’t guesswork – it’s science-based, personalized, and incredibly thorough which has kept me hopeful during this time.”
Those new treatments have included things like holistic retreats, plasma exchanges aimed at cleansing toxins from her body, and personalized therapies that have restored her hope – and, remarkably, have led to a dramatic reduction in her cancer.
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About the plasma exchanges, she says, “My body is overwhelmed with bacteria, viruses, toxins, and parasites. These pathogens have caused my white blood cell count and immune system to be dangerously low. Pathogens are what create disease so this is critical in my success. These plasma exchanges will clean my system so I can better fight the cancer.”
Gurchiek’s family history.
But Gurchiek’s fight isn’t just personal – it’s tied to Williamston, Michigan, the agricultural town where she grew up. Her documentary Poster Girl weaves her personal battle with the broader community’s struggle, asking if decades of pollution and neglect are to blame for a town’s legacy of illness.
Her family has been devastated by cancer over the years: her brother Jeff died of brain cancer in 1986 at the age of 17, her mother passed away in 2018 from lung cancer, and her father has faced multiple cancer diagnoses. The striking fact? Gurchiek and her brother were both adopted, with no one being biologically related to each other. She asked, “What are the odds of that being just coincidence? We are not the only ones cancer has swallowed in this town. Now that I’m faced with this daunting diagnosis, I’m determined to figure out what is going on in Williamston.”
Neighbors tell similar stories to hers. Families up and down the same streets and all across Williamston have been stricken with brain, breast, and lung cancers as spotlighted in Gurchiek’s film.
Gurchiek explained to Michigan News Source, “Once I got diagnosed with stage-four metastatic breast cancer, I realized that I may not get the chance to talk about this, and I’m so tired of seeing people die, that I wanna raise awareness and I wanna have a discussion. I want to help my hometown.”
Gurchiek points to seeing crops sprayed by crop-dusting planes over yards, swimming pools and ponds when she was growing up, including her own backyard. She says in her movie, “My childhood home sits to this day surrounded by corn fields that were sprayed regularly by crop dusting planes right where we played and swam.” She asks, “Was my family a victim of our toxic environment?”
Click here for part-two of this story.
