Thomas Smith spoke to Patrick McIntosh, the chartered financial planner and director at adviser firm KMG, who went to Antarctica to raise awareness of critical illness cover.
McIntosh said: "Critical illness policies are grossly undersold, or grossly under-bought, the message isn't out there.
"People need to be far more aware of the fact that you're 10 times more likely to get a critical illness than die, people need to take far more responsibility for getting themselves checked out.
"One of the great things about critical illness policies is you end up with a medical examination, if you fail that's a good early warning sign you need to do something about your health, even if you don't get the critical illness."
McIntosh decided to raise awareness of critical illness policies, after being diagnosed with cancer. His expedition to the South Pole was supported by Aegon UK - McIntosh's businsess protection critical illness policy had been with this insurer.
He said: "I thought about how I could engage the public, and the most iconic thing you can do is to follow in the footsteps of Shackleton who left 100 years ago on the day I left for the Antarctic, to arrive on the 103rd anniversary of Scott's ill-fated trip to Antartica."
McIntosh said: "To engage the public in something and to be able to say, I've now got the world record for the first guy with triple cancer to drag a sledge unaided across Antarctica. 220km at -40°C at 4,000 feet above sea level, is an extreme way of explaining to people that cancer doesn't kill anybody anymore."
McIntosh said that his motivation for taking out the policy which financially saw him through his cancers: "was primarily the important need to ensure that the business could survive if anything awful happened to me."
He also described Antarctica as "brutal", adding: "The harshness of the conditions, the terrain, the distance to travel, the sheer logistics of getting onto and off Antarctica is incredible and very difficult."
McIntosh met a climber ascending Antartica's Mount Vinson: "He had also gone up Everest and said although Everest is very difficult technically and very harsh walking to the South Pole was more difficult than climbing Everest."
Of the South Pole itself he said: "It's quite an extraordinary thing to be standing at the geographical South Pole and realise all the lines of longitude arrive at your feet, to know there's nowhere you can go other than back."
"The disappointment right at the South Pole is although the Antarctic treaty says nobody owns the South Pole, the Americans have established a camp for Scientific research.
He said: "They have really made a mess of the South Pole, it's really sad, you travel for thousands of hours across pristine white clean environment and you get to this industrial dump."
His next plan is to do the Engadin marathon, the world's largest ski marathon in the St Moritz valley.
He said of all his efforts in addition to promoting critical illness policies: "I'm hoping I'll be able to encourage people to eat better food, take more exercise and take ownership of their health.
"The NHS isn't going to be there for any of us in the future unless we take more responsibility for looking after our health."
McIntosh also saw research in Antartica looking at the ways cancer is formed, he said: "You may have a DNA that is predisposed towards cancer, you can keep that under control if you adapt your lifestyle to your unique profile."
He warned that profiling could make critical illness cover harder to underwrite in the future.
He concluded: "It's quite clear each of us has a different profile about how we react to exercise and food and how cancer cells may or may not erupt."
