Suzanne Somers' Cause of Death: Inside the 'Three's Company' Star's Health Battle and Controversies
Suzanne Somers in 2018
Suzanne Somers died on Oct. 15, 2023.
The Three's Company star, who authored several books on health and vehemently denounced the Affordable Care Act, passed away a day before her 77th birthday.
Find out Suzanne Somers' cause of death and what she's said about wellness through the years.
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What was Suzanne Somers' cause of death?
As was widely known, Somers died of an aggressive form of breast cancer. She'd battled the disease off and on for more than 20 years.
A copy of her death certificate obtained by the Daily Blast sheds further insight into her health conditions.
The outlets reports that Somers had “breast cancer with metastasis to the brain.” Other underlying conditions that contributed to her death included hypertension and hydrocephalus. No autopsy was was performed.
What did Suzanne Somers take for cancer?
Somers said in an August 2023 Instagram post that she's taken the best "alternative and conventional" cancer treatments, though she didn't specify what those were at the time. In 2007, she told The Los Angeles Times that she had been cancer-free thanks to a lumpectomy, radiation and alternative treatments (the latter of which she didn't specify).
Somers previously slammed chemotherapy in a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey—who also famously also platformed anti-vaccine misinformation from Jenny McCarthy—and even blamed chemotherapy for Patrick Swayze's tragic death from pancreatic cancer. The American Cancer Society fired back at her hot takes on cancer treatments.
"I am very afraid that people are going to listen to her message and follow what she says and be harmed by it," Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, told NBC News. "We use current treatments because they've been proven to prolong life. They've gone through a logical, scientific method of evaluation. I don't know if Suzanne Somers even knows there IS a logical, scientific method."
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He added, "There's a tendency to oversimplify medical messages. Well, oversimplification can kill."
Somers also claimed that she used stem cells to "regrow" her breast post-lumpectomy, which actual breast reconstruction surgeons said was, at best, a misnomer, and at worst, potentially harmful misinformation, because the breast wasn't actually regrown so much as reconstructed.
“I would say that her statement is not accurate. It’s a significant exaggeration of what she had done, and it's an exaggeration of the state of the art and the reconstruction options that women have available to them," Dr. Oren Lerman, director of breast reconstruction at Lenox Hill Hospital, told Healthline in 2018.
What she actually had done was called autologous fat transplantation, which is when fat removed from another area through liposuction is cleaned and injected into the breast with stem cells.
"The procedure that she had done is not actually a tried-and-true method of regrowing the breast," Dr. Lerman said. "There is no such procedure that can regrow the breast."
What kind of cancer did Susan Summer have?
Somers had several different kinds of cancer throughout her life. While it's relatively well known that she's battled breast cancer off and on since 2001, when she first revealed her diagnosis on Larry King Live, it's not the only form of the disease she's had.
In 2020, she told CBS News that she had cancer three separate times while starring on Three's Company in the 1970s.
"They call it severe hyperplasia in your uterus," she said. "I didn't make a big deal about it." (It's important to note that while hyperplasia can be pre-cancerous, hyperplasia itself is not a form of cancer. Somers' husband Alan Hamel acknowledged that to Page Six, calling it "the waiting room for cancer" instead of actual cancer.)
She also revealed in the same interview that she had malignant melanoma when she was in her 30s.
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How old was Suzanne Somers when she first got cancer?
Somers said she had malignant melanoma in her 30s. In terms of breast cancer, she first revealed her diagnosis in 2001, when she was between 54 and 55 years old.
How long did Suzanne Somers have cancer?
Somers was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. The disease "popped up" several times since, she wrote on Instagram in August 2023.
When did Suzanne Somers first get cancer?
Somers first got malignant melanoma, a form of skin cancer, in her 30s. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer, her cause of death, in 2001.
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