The news has just broke that Eddie Van Halen has been flying too Germany in recent years to receive radiation treatments for throat cancer. He was first diagnosed with the health issue in 2000 when he underwent surgery to remove a third of his tongue and was declared cancer free in 2002. Despite the fact that Van Halen has been a heavy smoker for most of his life, he has always stated that it’s his belief that the source of the cancer was a series of guitar picks he had made in the late 1990’s. “I used metal picks, they’re brass and copper, which I always held in my mouth in the exact place where I got tongue cancer, plus I live in a recording studio that’s filled with electromagnetic energy. So that’s one theory, I mean I was smoking and doing a lot of drugs and a lot of everything, but at the same time my lungs are totally clear. This is just my own theory but doctors say that it IS possible.” While Van Haklen has switched from smoking to vaping, sources are now saying that he has traveled to Germany for the last five years to get treatments that included doctors scraping cancer cells directly out of his throat and for the most part that has worked in keeping the disease in check.