Cancer Diaries

Part Two:  The Medical Conspiracy

Written by Rick Archer
July 2013
 

Do you believe in Conspiracies?  Do Conspiracies really exist? 

There are a lot of JFK, Area 51, Roswell, Alien Abductee, UFO and 9-11 people who would argue in the affirmative. 

Who can forget “The Truth is Out There”, the famous refrain of the late great X-Files series?  The show suggested a massive conspiracy inside our government. 

X-Files was successful because there are many Americans who have a latent suspicion of power in general.  That distrust includes our government, our spy agencies, big business, the media and the military.

As it turns out, there are those who suspect a conspiracy in the Medical World as well.

Laetrile

The Medical Establishment has all sorts of letters.  AMA stands for American Medical Association.  ACS stands for American Cancer Society.  NIH stands for National Institute of Health.  NCI stands for National Cancer Institute.  FDA stands for Food and Drug Administration.  Big Pharma is the nickname for the Pharmaceutical industry which is said to be the most profitable industry in the country.  The Medical Conspiracy Theorists typically lump the whole bunch of them together.

There are those who contend certain nameless, faceless men inside the Medical Establishment have teamed up over the years to eliminate certain alternative cures for cancer.  Laetrile is as good a place to start as any.

I remember when I was back in college, I read about a huge fight over a natural cancer remedy named Laetrile. I was impressed by a magazine article that praised the treatment and suggested Laetrile was a major breakthrough.  This was about 1970.

Laetrile is a chemically modified form of amygdalin, a naturally-occurring substance found mainly in the kernels of apricots, peaches, and almonds.  A lot of people were furious that the medical establishment was making it very difficult for medical professionals to experiment.  Certain doctors wanted to treat their willing patients with the Laetrile drug, but to do so invited an FDA crackdown. 

I was far too busy trying to get a college degree to pay much attention to the controversy, but I do remember wondering why the AMA or the FDA was going to so much trouble to prosecute people at a time when there was no existing cure for cancer to begin with.  What if something natural and inexpensive drawn from an apricot of all things could be proven effective?  There were many people claiming the stuff worked, so it seemed reasonable to expect a reputable laboratory would at least conduct some clinical trials. 

Such were the thoughts of a naive young man. That was 40 years ago.  I am older now and a lot more pessimistic.  I no longer expect people to automatically do the right thing. 

When I decided to write this chapter on "Conspiracy", the first thing I did was to check back on Laetrile.  Surely the controversy would have died down in 40 years.  I was amazed to find there is still a hornet's nest of bitterness on both side of the issue.

Does Laetrile have any value?  Well, if you believe Ralph Moss, yes it does.  Moss served as a science writer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the 1970s. In his book The Cancer Industry, Moss told an interesting story. 

As part of his job at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a prestigious cancer research and treatment facility in New York, Moss was able to keep tabs on the various research being conducted. Moss says he quit when that institution deliberately misled the press and public about test results for a promising treatment. That treatment was the much-maligned Laetrile (vitamin B-17).  It was finally banned by the FDA and its proponents were forced underground. 

Moss reports that Sloan-Kettering's most respected researcher, Kanematsu Sugiura, stood by the efficacy of laetrile until his death.

If that story is true, then post it as Exhibit One in my Conspiracy article.
 

Who Can I Trust? There is only one problem.  How do I know if any of this is true?  The first thing anyone older than six learns is that the Internet is full of inaccuracy and deliberate lies.  I learned my lesson the hard way.  Back in 2007 I wrote a simple story about an obscure village in China known as "Guoliangcun".  It was an interesting place because its villagers had carved a tunnel into the mountain with little more than rudimentary tools. I think my article was probably the first story in English about the village.  My story instantly reached the top spot on Google for "Guoliang" and remained there for years.  In fact, even today my article is still on Google's Page One.  Only one problem - I got "Hunan" and "Henan" province mixed up and put the village in the wrong spot by 200 miles.  To understand the significance, at the time there were no readily accessible detailed road maps in English on the Internet like there are today.  Since I couldn't translate Chinese, no Western reader could find the place without a serious effort. Then one day someone who lived in Korea emailed to point out my mistake.  I thought he was nuts.  Now a very odd thing happened.  I googled a bunch of different sites to see where they put the place and every single one of them agreed with me.  Ha!  What was this Korean guy talking about?  Heck, every site I visited said the same thing as me!!  Then it dawned on me... these sites were using my exact words. Oh no.  Every site agreed with me because every one of these sites had copied my work!  Not one of these people had done a lick of independent research on their own.  It was all cut and paste. Thanks to me, dozens of different web sites had the wrong location and it was all my fault!  I had dozens of people quoting me verbatim as if I was a world authority.  This was ridiculous.  I have never even been there.  Good grief.  I cannot even begin to explain the nagging guilt I felt.  I had written about the place as a way to interest tourism only to discover I was responsible for losing Guoliang to countless Internet users and tourists FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS!  (Search for Guoliang) That embarrassing incident is what helped me develop a healthy skepticism for anything I read on the Internet.  It was very clear to me how easy it was to either accidentally or deliberately create an inaccuracy... then step back and watch it multiply.  So what about this Ralph Moss guy?  Was he a good guy or was he a malcontent?  How much credibility does "Ralph Moss" have?  Good question.  So I decided to Google "Ralph Moss".
Wikipedia immediately popped up.  No surprise there. Wikipedia figures prominently in practically any Internet research these days.  For any subject I checked, Wikipedia generally occupied the first, second, or third listing. I decided to go click into Wikipedia, the current font of all knowledge.  Let's see what our friend Wikipedia had to say about Laetrile. "Studies have found Laetrile compounds to be clinically ineffective in the treatment of cancer, as well as dangerously toxic. They are potentially lethal when taken by mouth, because certain enzymes (in particular, glucosidases that occur in the gut and in various kinds of seeds, edible or inedible) act on them to produce cyanide. The promotion of laetrile to treat cancer has been described in the medical literature as a canonical example of quackery, and as "the slickest, most sophisticated, and certainly the most remunerative cancer quack promotion in medical history." And what about Ralph Moss?  Wikipedia said:  "Moss served as a science writer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the 1970s. He was fired in 1977 by Sloan-Kettering after publicly accusing the institution of suppressing information on laetrile, a now-discredited alternative cancer treatment Well, so much for Laetrile and that Moss guy.  Laetrile is obviously something only a quack would ever use.  Wikipedia made that perfectly clear.  However, to my surprise, the more I poked around, the more I began to sense that Wikipedia didn't have a nice word to say about anyone I was curious about.  It seemed to me that Wikipedia had a disturbing and extremely predictable slant against Alternative Medicine.
Wikipedia wasn't the only place where there was contradiction.  When it comes to cancer, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty. It is nearly impossible to decide who is telling the truth due to one highly disconcerting reality - no matter what the cure, most people still continue to die of cancer.  It doesn't matter whether the treatment is mainstream or alternative, chemotherapy or apricot seeds... people still die.  As long as people keep dying, it is tough to believe anyone who claims their method works.  That opens the door for much arguing, suspicion and contradiction.  If you believe in your cure, you point to the people still standing.  If you don't believe, you point to the people who died. Furthermore, the stakes are incredible.  Since there is such a ridiculous amount of money involved in winning or losing, the search for a cure to cancer is the most bitter, contentious playing field I have ever witnessed. In fact, the stakes are so high that people might be tempted to cheat to win.  It has been suggested a cabal of powerful men have systematically erased several promising cancer cures over the past century in a desperate and highly ruthless attempt to pave the way for their own treatment methods.  And with that, we begin our story.  Rick Archer July 2013

Cancer - The Forbidden Cures

In June 2012, Mr. Skeptical challenged me to watch a 2010 documentary titled
Cancer - The Forbidden Cures.  This 73 minute documentary was created created by Massimo Mazzucco.  You may remember Mr. Skeptical from Chapter One.  It was his derision of my ignorance about cancer that started my research project in the first place.

Mr. Skeptical pointed out I didn't even have to pay for the video... it sits there on the Internet for anyone to see.  Here is the Introduction. 

This Documentary claims cancer is the only disease that has been defeated dozens of times without anyone knowing it.  It says there have been successful cures against cancer discovered in the last 100 years and lists the reasons why they were suppressed. 

In the last 100 years, dozens of doctors, scientists, and researchers have developed diverse and effective solutions against cancer only to be thwarted by the political and propaganda power of the drug-dominated medical profession.

This is the story of Essiac, Hoxsey, Laetrile, Gerson, Shark Cartilage, Mistletoe, and Bicarbonate of Soda all put together in a stunning overview that leaves no doubt that inexpensive cures for cancer do exist but are systematically blocked by Big Pharma because they come from nature and cannot be patented.

So I watched it... and I am glad I did.  If I didn't believe a Conspiracy existed before, I did now.  I will now review the case put out by the Documentary.

Here are two reviews from Amazon regarding Cancer - the Forbidden Cures

Positive Review of 'Cancer - the Forbidden Cures'

This documentary provides the viewer with multiple natural alternatives to, or supplements to, traditional medicine. It also exposes the dangers of traditional medicine.

However, the viewer is struck by the abundance of documented cancer cures that were debated on television screens and in the print media over a period of many decades, but the American people have been kept in the dark about this long-standing debate.

Clearly, the government, the media, and the education establishment do not inform, educate, and protect the public; instead they serve the money changers to the detriment of the public.

Negative Review of 'Cancer - the Forbidden Cures'

This review is from: Cancer - The Forbidden Cures (DVD)
By joczerw, April 14, 2013

Don't be fooled by this!

The DVD does not give any scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of any of the presented therapies. According to the websites quoted below these therapies have been tested by reputable institutions and found no cancer curing effects.

ESSIAC (done by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center)

Researchers found that Essiac did not make the immune system more active and did not act as an anticancer drug.'

HOXSEY Therapy (done by American Cancer Society)

In 1946, the National Cancer Institute reviewed 77 case reports of Hoxsey's patients and concluded that none of them met the criteria for scientific evaluation.'

A study published in the Journal of Naturopathic Medicine involved 39 people with various types of cancer who took the Hoxsey herbal treatment. Ten patients died after an average of 15 months, and 23 never completed the study. Six patients claimed to be disease-free after 4 years.'

GERSON Therapy (done by U.S. National Cancer Institute, Cancer Research)

A review by the U.S. National Cancer Institute was unable to find any evidence that Gerson's claims were accurate. Similarly, several case series by Gerson Institute staff published in the alternative medical literature suffered from significant methodological flaws, and no independent entity has been able to reproduce the claims.'

Cancer Research UK states that "Available scientific evidence does not support any claims that Gerson therapy can treat cancer

'Gerson therapy can be very harmful to your health.'

The case studies showed in the movie date back to the 1980s or earlier than that. I am sure that back in these days cancer identification was very inaccurate as any masses could have been mistakenly taken for it.

Therefore, there is a high probability that any allegedly cured patients did not have cancer at all. I also wonder why the movie does not state how many people died after starting either of the therapies?!

Every year lots of money is being fuelled into the cancer research as it is an extremely expensive disease to be tackled for any country. So the claims that drug companies don't want to research any `natural remedies' is ridiculous. There is an endless list of drugs whose active ingredients are derived from natural products.

Lastly, when looking at cancer from the economical point of view it becomes obvious that no country wants to lose young people to a disease as that decreases the amount of working elite.

So whenever you hear scientifically unproven theories, try to read a bit more about them...

Wikipedia is a good place to start.
 

Big Business Takes over the Medical Field

The Forbidden Cures Documentary began by discussing the Big Business aspects of cancer and the dependency of today's medical industry on the money generated by the current pharmaceutical model of treatment. 

It started with the history of the conflict between Empirical healers and Mainstream Medicine. 

Mainstream medicine refers to the orthodox or commonly-accepted medical use of pharmacologically active agents (drugs) or physical interventions (surgery) to treat or suppress symptoms of diseases.  The philosophy is to drive the disease from the body.

Empirical treatment is medical treatment based on the healer's observation or previous experience with the problem.  The idea is to test an educated hunch and see if works... in other words, learn by experience.  The philosophy is to stimulate the body’s own defenses to heal itself.  Empirical treatment is also called Holistic treatment and Alternative treatment.

The AMA (American Medicine Association) doctors are Mainstream and the alternative healers are the Empiricists. 

As you can see, simply by calling the Empirical methods "Alternative", mainstream medicine puts Empirical methods at a disadvantage.  Anyone who uses natural methods to cure becomes lumped with shamans, medicine men, witch doctors, faith healers, and, of course, everyone's favorite term... quacks.

If given a choice, my own personal bias would always be to cure any disease by natural remedies.  The only problem is that I don't actually know anyone with this kind of knowledge.  Hence I use mainstream medicine like everyone else. 

That said, it really isn't as far-fetched as one might think to believe a cure for cancer could be found in nature.

Nature's Medicine Chest

Times have changed, but more than half of the world's population still relies entirely on plants for medicines.  Plants supply the active ingredients of most traditional medical products. Plants have also served as the starting point for countless drugs on the market today. One need look no further than penicillin derived from fungi to realize the value of looking to nature for cures. 

Researchers generally agree that natural products from plants and other organisms have been the most consistently successful source for ideas for new drugs, since nature is a master chemist. Drug discovery scientists often refer to these ideas as "leads," and chemicals that have desirable properties in lab tests are called lead compounds. 

Scientists estimate that Earth is home to at least 250,000 different species of plants, and that up to 30 million species of insects crawl or fly somewhere around the globe.  Equal numbers of species of fungi, algae, and bacteria probably also exist. Despite these vast numbers, chemists have tested only a few of these organisms to see whether they harbor some sort of medically useful substance.

Source: National Institute of Health

You might be surprised to learn that at one time the Empiricists and Mainstream were on even footing.  The Documentary said that in the late Nineteenth Century, the popularity of these two radically different approaches to healing people who were sick or wounded were about equal.  Furthermore, anyone who was sick had a free choice of which approach to use.

The Documentary suggested this situation changed at the turn of the century.  Sometime around 1900, there was a striking shift in the balance of power.  It began with the takeover of the medical schools by moneyed interests. The AMA joined forces with powerful financial forces to transform medicine into an industry.

In particular, men like Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, John Jacob Astor and John D Rockefeller offered medical schools large grants.  However, there was a catch.  For the money, was it too much to ask if the medical school would accept 1 or 2 new people on their board of directors?  These men would only be there to make sure their money was being spent wisely.  So now people with an eye on the cash register were seated at the table.  The Documentary claims these financial overseers steered the entire focus of medical research towards the pharmaceutical industry where some real money could be made.

All the great teaching intuitions began to teach the exclusive use of manufactured drugs.  Doctors were trained to use surgery, radiation, and synthetic drugs in their attack upon cancer.  The increased use of surgery led to the need for more hospitals. Furthermore the use of synthetic drugs to treat disease increased dramatically over time... one or two drugs killed the disease, two or three other drugs tried to minimize the harmful side affects.  The pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry were now completely intertwined. 

The Quack Hunt Begins At this point, the Documentary claimed the AMA began a relentless crackdown on anyone who refused to play by their rules.  This took place during the first half of the Twentieth Century.  Organized medicine labeled the empirics as "quacks" and used questionable tactics to drive them out of business.  The Documentary would go on to offer a compelling look at how the AMA developed its stranglehold on the entire industry by putting Alternative treatments out of business. Then came the most interesting part of the Documentary.  It went into great detail over alleged AMA witch hunts... or quack hunts if you prefer... against Rene Caisse, Harry Hoxsey, and Max Gerson, three of the best-known practitioners of Alternative Medicine.  It told the story of how these three people and others were systematically driven out of business.  And why would the AMA even bother?  If these people were frauds, surely their total lack of success would soon become evident and people would abandon their treatment. The AMA's stated reason to attack the quacks was the noble attempt to protect naive dying people from being exploited by medical charlatans.  However, the Documentary suggested the real reason was far darker.  All of the "alternative" methods for curing cancer come from nature.  Apparently the law says that any medical cure that comes from nature cannot be patented.  Since there was no money in a natural cure, the game was to find a synthetic method to treat cancer before any herbal tea or magic mushroom could come along and upset the apple cart.

The Great Race to the Cure Theoretically competition brings out the best in all of us.  There have been many great races in medical history.  For example, the controversy over who could be the first to discover HIV was covered in the 1993 docudrama And the Band Played On. Never have the stakes been higher than the search for the cure for cancer.  It would be one thing if it was just "Beta" versus "VHS" or Microsoft versus Apple. But since there is so incredibly much money involved, over the past century, the make or break consequences of victory and defeat have apparently brought out the worst in certain shadowy nameless faceless figures.
The Documentary suggests the drug interests were more than willing to play dirty.  It is one thing to lie, cheat, and steal a little, but in this high-stakes game, mainstream medicine decided to systematically eliminate all competition.  The dark forces would do practically anything to suppress any possible attempt to solve the cancer problem if it turned out to be something they couldn't control or profit by.  That's the "Cancer Conspiracy" in a nutshell. And here is the crippling irony of it all.  Not only does it appear that there was an organized effort to suppress several potential natural cures for cancer, the organized medicine side was still completely unable to solve the problem on its own. It is one thing to kill off the competition, but one would assume the winners would have at least something as good or better to offer.  Not so.  For the past century, the pharmaceutical industry has been unable to find a cure despite an incredible amount of effort... and money.

It all boils down to "Time"  For the record, mainstream medicine has failed to produce a cure for cancer for at least one hundred years.  Meanwhile the beat goes on. The drug industry suggests they might find the right combination next month.  Or maybe one year from now.  And so on.  One never knows.  But at the moment, a solution does not appear to be on the horizon.

Considering the stakes, one would assume the pharmaceutical industry would be panic-stricken someone might beat them to the cure.  Considering their own "Turtle Pace", one would assume they would be looking over their shoulder for the rabbit in the race. If only they had just a little more TIME! But as it turns out, there is no rush.  The most effective way to buy TIME is to kill off all competition.  Now you're catching on.  When no one is racing against you, what's the hurry? The Documentary made a good case for its argument that the alternative approaches to curing cancer were stifled because they posed a serious threat to Big Pharma, a derogatory nickname given to the medical drug industry.  No one wanted to see the money train derailed by some cheap herbal tea remedy or non-patentable magic mushroom treatment.  And let us not forget tree bark and apricot seeds.

The Nightmare Moment

Back in 1937, the crisis the drug industry feared the most almost came to pass. 

A simple, little known woman named Rene Caisse came within 3 votes of getting the Canadian legislature to approve her cancer cure made out of herbs.  Caisse claimed it was an ancient Indian remedy that was producing startling results... and she had a lot of people who agreed with her. 

This was Big Pharma's worst nightmare unfolding right before their eyes! 

 

[Side Note: Before I tell the story of Rene Caisse, let me say that nothing I write will ever be as persuasive as the documentary itself. The Documentary actually has real people speaking candidly on film about the problems they experienced.  Nothing I write can be more compelling or dramatic than listening to a dying woman as she screams at a panel of lawmakers. 

It upset me to hear her demand these men show some respect for her god-given right to let her use any "damn illegal drug" she pleased in her dying days.  What, she added, is this pompous talk about protecting her "safety" when she is almost dead?!!

So if at any point you become fascinated with my story, I highly recommend you go watch the documentary yourself and make up your own mind.  Cancer - The Forbidden Cures]

 

Essiac - The Herbal Tea that Became a Nightmare

(To view the Documentary's Essiac story, fast forward to 22:40 minutes)

In 1923 Rene Caisse, a Canadian nurse, observed that one of her doctor's patients, a woman with terminal breast cancer, made a complete recovery.  Since the word 'terminal' is generally assumed to mean 'hopeless', naturally Ms. Caisse's curiosity was aroused. Rene found that the woman had used a herbal remedy given to her by an Ojibwa Indian 'medicine man'.  The woman gladly passed on the little-known herbal formula to Ms. Caisse. The recipe originally consisted of just four common herbs - Sheep Sorrel, Burdock Root, Slippery Elm Bark and Rhubarb Root, but was later expanded with the inclusion of Blessed Thistle, Kelp, Red Clover and Watercress to make it even more potent. With her doctor's permission, Nurse Rene began to administer the herbal remedy to other cancer patients.  She was amazed by the remarkable success. Essiac, 'Caisse' spelled backwards, became the name given to the herbal tea Nurse Caisse successfully used to treat thousands of cancer patients from the 1920s until her death in 1978.  Unfortunately the Canadian medical establishment did not take kindly to this nurse administering the remedy directly to anyone with cancer who requested her help. However, Caisse conducted her business in a rural outpost where there wasn't much scrutiny.  Thanks to her positive reputation, the local authorities found a way let her operate under the radar.  She was not allowed to receive direct payment for her services.  In addition, all prospective patients had to bring along a doctor's notice of cancer.  If Nurse Caisse met those conditions, she was welcome to continue.

The Documentary suggests that she brought remissions to hundreds of documented cases, many abandoned as "hopeless" or "terminal" by orthodox medicine. Rene Caisse aided countless more in prolonging life and relieving pain. Caisse obtained remarkable results against a wide variety of cancers by administering Essiac through hypodermic injection or oral ingestion.

At 27:45 of the Documentary, a claim was made that a group of doctors offered Caisse a million dollars to sell them her cure.  However they failed to give her assurances how the formula would be used.  Caisse did not trust these men and turned them down.

As word of Rene Caisse and her magic potion spread, her patients began a campaign to have her medicine legalized so it could be offered to the entire country.  55,000 signatures were collected on a petition to present to the Canadian Parliament to encourage these men to legalize its use.  In 1937 the Royal Cancer Commission conducted hearings about Essiac.  Incredibly, Essiac failed by just 3 votes to be approved as an officially sanctioned cure for cancer.

The drug industry had barely dodged the one thing it feared the most - a legal treatment for cancer that might actually work and could not be patented.

The pressure got to Caisse.  She had a nervous breakdown.  It was just too much to stand up to these powerful forces. 

When she recovered, Caisse went underground - literally.  She no longer operated from a local hospital, but rather from her own basement.  She would grind up her potion of roots and herbs in her basement and treat people outside the eyes of the Establishment.  It didn't work.  She was arrested more than once on various trumped up charges. 

Rene Caisse, a woman who comes across on camera as fragile and decent, was incredulous to find she was being constantly harassed and punished for simply trying to cure people.  However, what hurt the most was the unwillingness of the medical community to take note of all the people given up for dead who continued to live.  Why did these critics refuse to give her credit for saving lives?  It literally broke her heart to think she had a cure for cancer and no one in power would listen.

At this point (30 minutes) the Documentary pointed out that there were some prominent physicians who voiced their support for the efficacy of Caisse's medicine. For example, Dr. Charles Brusch, founder of the prestigious Brusch Medical Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, declared that "Essiac has merit in the treatment of cancer".  Brusch was not a "quack".  He was about as mainstream as they come.  Dr. Brusch was a former physician to President John F. Kennedy and a close personal friend.

Dr. Brusch revealed that he had cured his own cancer with Essiac. In a notarized statement made on April 6, 1990, Dr. Brusch testified,

"I endorse this therapy even today for I have in fact cured my own cancer, the original site of which was the lower bowels, through Essiac alone."

Unfortunately for Rene Caisse, she was eventually discredited by mainstream medicine. 

As Wikipedia, the staunch supporter of mainstream medicine, states,

“Essiac is an herbal tea promoted as an alternative treatment for cancer and other illnesses.  As with many alternative remedies, the exact composition of essiac is unclear, but it reportedly contains burdock, Indian rhubarb, sheep sorrel, and slippery elm bark. Some formulations may also contain watercress, blessed thistle, red clover, and kelp.

Essiac's purported effect on cancer has been reviewed by several major medical and scientific bodies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society. All have found no evidence that essiac has any effect against cancer. The U.S. FDA described essiac as a "Fake Cancer 'Cure' Consumers Should Avoid". 

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have written that Essiac continues to be a popular cancer therapy despite unsubstantiated claims of its effectiveness.”

The Documentary concluded its section on Rene Caisse by showing bus after bus after bus pulling up to the woman's residence to help the woman celebrate her 90th birthday.  These people were all former patients of Rene Caisse who had gathered en masse to thank the woman for her help with their cancer.  There were hundreds of people!  You would have to be very cynical not to be affected by this clip detailing the overwhelming outpouring of affection and gratitude. I have no idea whether Essiac works or not.  But after viewing the Documentary, I have no doubt whatsoever that a lot of ordinary people believed in her.  This was a sincere, decent woman who was badly mistreated by the Medical Establishment of her country.

Why was Essiac Suppressed?

After the dramatic encounter with the Canadian Parliament, Essiac never came close again to gaining mainstream acceptance. 

Over the next 40 years, Essiac was tested by reputable labs several times.  Each time it was found wanting.  For example, Rene Caisse tried to have her magic potion tested by a mainstream treatment center in New York known as Memorial Sloan Kettering or MSK for short.  Founded in 1884 and heavily funded by John D. Rockefeller, you can't get much more "mainstream" than Sloan Kettering. 

Unfortunately, every time the results came back with a shrug of the shoulders.  "Nothing conclusive was discovered". 

It used to be that Caisse was harassed at every turn.  However, since she is dead now, everything has become very polite these days.

Let's see what Wikipedia has to say.

"Essiac's purported effect on cancer has been reviewed by several major medical and scientific bodies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society.

All have found no evidence that essiac has any effect against cancer.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have written that Essiac continues to be a popular cancer therapy despite unsubstantiated claims of its effectiveness.” 

In other words, the damn thing doesn't work, but lots of people like it anyway.  Nothing like killing it with kindness.

The Susan B Komen website has this to say about Essiac: 

A laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center tested Essiac samples (provided by Caisse) on mice during the 1970s. This research was never formally published, and there is controversy regarding the results, with some accounts noting no benefits, and others reporting significant effects (including an account by Dr. Brusch).

Questions were later raised of improper preparation of the formula. Caisse subsequently refused requests by researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and the U.S. National Cancer Institute for access to the recipe.

[Side Note: The best summary of the mainstream medical opinion of Essiac can be viewed on the MD Anderson web site.]

 

When I told my wife that I had learned of an incident that suggested men had deliberately suppressed a potential cure for cancer, she looked at me skeptically and said, "Every doctor I've ever met has tried his or her best to treat my illness.  Why would anyone deliberately eliminate a cure for the worst disease of all?"

Good question.  One might indeed ask why a well-meaning woman with an entire legion of supporters was ignored.  Why would a group of faceless men want to stop an entire army of well-wishers who begged their government to legalize the herbal tea?

The answer is there are no profits in any drug found in nature.  Anything that comes from nature cannot be patented.

Let's explore that idea.

Essiac and the FDA From what I gather, those herbs in the picture are the ingredients for Essiac.  The law says that these natural substances cannot become someone's private domain. The law that says "Anything that comes from nature cannot be patented" has been around for some time.  In fact, this law recently came back into the news during a 2013 DNA dispute.  Here is an article to read.

Drug companies cannot patent anything natural or profit from nutritional therapy as they can from chemical substances which they alone control through patents. Laetrile is a good example. It is a naturally-occurring substance found in many foods, including apricots. Hydrazine sulfate is a very cheap substance that is readily available.  For that exact reason - "a cheap substance" - the cynics say that Essiac Tea never had a chance.    Thanks to that rule about nature and patents, the people who call the shots, aka Big Pharma and their doctor cronies, are not interested in any natural cure for cancer.   A conservative estimate says it might take 20 million dollars of research to get the FDA to declare a bunch of Essiac weeds from the woods "legally safe". Who's gonna spend 20 mill for a cheap little pill?

All Along the Watchtower "Legally safe"... let's talk about that for a moment. Unless the FDA declares Essiac "legally safe", it cannot be  marketed except on the black market or through some Internet marketing trick.  You definitely can't buy it in a pharmacy. As it turns out, the FDA is the modern weapon that guards the Watchtower. Today the FDA protects Big Pharma against the terror of another herbal tea meltdown.  There are those who claim that the Essiac situation in the 1930s paved the way for the massive Laetrile takedown in the 1970s. Since Essiac won't be made available without TESTING (thanks to the FDA), the pharmaceutical industry can relax.  It has a chokehold on any competition. This gives Big Pharma all the time it needs to plod its way to the Holy Grail of cancer cures.

The Essiac legalization process was a close call.  In fact, some termed it a "wake-up call".

Back in the first half of the 20th Century, the AMA had a much harder time discrediting the so-called quacks.  They played dirty with all kinds of intimidation such as police arrests, law suits in the courts and nasty stories in the media. 

However, what the AMA didn't have was enough authority to stop these brush fires in their tracks.  The Essiac disaster was the last straw.  The AMA needed a new weapon to put these upstarts where they belonged.  

The FDA became the weapon Big Pharma needed for protection against another nightmare.  It showed up shortly after the Essiac near-miss.  Now wasn't that convenient?  So convenient in fact you wonder if maybe it wasn't a coincidence. 

In 1938, the government strengthened the Food and Drug Administration's powers to regulate anything and everything.  The FDA became responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs, medications, vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood transfusions, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices, and veterinary products. 

It's important to note that pet supplies are regulated too in case someone decided to slip some Essiac in there.  The FDA doesn't dare let a dog be cured of cancer by eating Alpo. That was supposed to be a joke, incidentally, but to my surprise I discovered there actually is Essiac for Pets.  Good grief.  Here is what it says: Your cats and dog’s well being begins with world renowned Canadian formulas that have been trusted for centuries. TRU-PINE® for Pets is made from Jacques Cartier’s original pine bark formula Since 1935. ESSIAC® for Pets is made from Nurse Rene Caisse’s original herbal formula Since 1922. Now take a note of the disclaimer below:

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the new Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act into law in 1938.  

The new law significantly increased federal regulatory authority over drugs by mandating a pre-market review of the safety of all new drugs, as well as banning false therapeutic claims in drug labeling.  

This was a powerful bill.  Under the guise of protecting the public against bad drugs, no new medicine could be marketed unless the FDA gave permission. 

In addition, soon after passage of the 1938 Act, the FDA began to designate certain drugs as safe for use only under the supervision of a medical professional.  Now many drugs that were previously available over the counter suddenly required a doctor's prescription.  And who do you suppose benefitted from that rule?  I'll let you guess.

 

Catch 22 Hopelessness

One can certainly imagine shadowy men having a nervous breakdown over the close call with Essiac.  It is indeed within the realm of possibility these men decided they needed a better way to stop those dangerous quacks in the future.  Why not get the politicians and the LAW on their side?  

In 1938, less than a year after the 1937 Canadian vote on Essiac, the FDA became the Medical Establishment's new ace in the hole.  And that's the way it has been ever since.  Today the drug manufacturers have the law on their side to eliminate any serious competition for a natural cancer cure. For example, there are rumors the FDA beat Laetrile into submission with one legal threat after another.

No drug can be marketed without FDA approval, so Essiac would have be tested first.  After all, the FDA says its illegal to use anything unless it has been tested for efficacy and safety.   Gee, is Essiac safe?  It's an herbal tea for crying out loud!  Essiac is probably a lot safer than half the stuff we eat, but unless the FDA says it is "legally safe", fuhgedaboutit.

The problem is that no one is going to test Essiac.  Why bother?  There is no money in it.

No drug company is going to bother spending 20 million dollars testing any substance from nature.  Why would any lab invest 20 million dollars testing something they can't even patent?  How absurd!  The testing might be good for humanity, but for the drug company, it would be an utterly senseless waste of money. 

Consequently there’s a Catch-22 hopelessness to all of this. 

Any cure from nature will always be condemned by the FDA as an unproven and potentially unsafe cancer cure. 

And since an unproven cancer cure is illegal to use, how is someone supposed to legally experiment with it to see if it might have value?

And even if something seems to work,  nothing from nature - regardless of how effective it might promise to be - will ever be proven safe or effective according to the FDA standards because no one is going to spend the money to fund the test.  

Essiac, a simple concoction of herbs gained from the Ojibwa Indians.… 55,000 signatures... Missed being legalized by 3 votes... Next year, the FDA received the power to prevent anything from being marketed without its approval. 

Game over.  Big Medicine wins.  The FDA was the missing piece.  Now the Monopoly was safe. 
 

FDA - Friend or Foe?  Allegations of FDA Collusion with the Pharmaceutical Industry The Essiac vote took place in 1937, 74 years ago. Today, 74 years later, Mainstream Medicine still has not produced a cure for cancer. Who cares?   Big Pharma has all the time in the world.  Thanks to the FDA, Time is on its side. Thanks in large part to its FDA-guaranteed monopoly, Big Pharma has never been more profitable.  In fact, industry critic Marcia Angell claims that Big Pharma makes money off cancer drugs that don't even work.  In her article What Ails the FDA?, Dr. Angell cites the example of Vioxx.  Read for yourself.

Question: What Ails the FDA? 
Answer:   Payola

By Marcia Angell | Boston Globe
March 10, 2005

LET'S FACE IT. The FDA is doing a poor job of ensuring that prescription drugs are safe and effective. It approves drugs that offer only minimal benefit, and then sometimes leaves them on the market long after they've been shown to be dangerous.

Take Vioxx, the hugely popular arthritis drug that was taken off the market in September and now might return if an FDA advisory panel has its way. This is one of a class of drugs called COX-2 inhibitors (Celebrex and Bextra are the others) that are supposedly easier on the stomach than over-the-counter remedies like Advil or Aleve.

Vioxx was rushed to market in 1999 even though it was never shown to be any better for relieving pain than the older drugs.

The FDA then let it stay on the market for four years after a clinical trial showed it was probably more likely to cause heart attacks or strokes than to prevent stomach ulcers. It could have insisted that the manufacturer, Merck, immediately conduct a large-scale study to better define the risks and that the company add a warning in its direct-to-consumer ads that made Vioxx sound like a miracle drug. The FDA is now implying it doesn't have that authority, but it does. Why is the nation's most important regulatory agency appeasing the pharmaceutical industry instead of protecting the public? One answer is that it is on the industry's payroll. Literally. Since 1992, by an act of Congress, drug companies pay the FDA "user fees," which are earmarked almost entirely for speeding up drug approvals. Consequently, the agency now behaves as though that were its main job, not ensuring safety and effectiveness. Even worse, the 18 standing advisory committees of outside experts who help the agency decide whether drugs should be approved include paid consultants to drug companies.

They are supposed to recuse themselves from decisions that directly affect the companies they work for, but that rule is regularly waived on the dubious grounds that their expertise is uniquely valuable. (Imagine judges not recusing themselves from cases in which they have a financial stake on the grounds that their expertise is invaluable!) The advisory committee that originally recommended approval of Vioxx, for example, consisted of six people, four of whom had received waivers because of their "potential for a conflict of interest."

Vioxx is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of heart attacks or strokes. It is hard to see how the panel could have concluded that the benefits were worth those risks, especially given the fact that taking over-the-counter Prilosec in addition to an older pain reliever would probably have provided as much protection from stomach ulcers. The fact is, this was a public health disaster.

Their conflict of interest is real, not "potential." The excuse that they are indispensable is not only self-serving but insulting to the experts who don't consult for industry.

The FDA is vital to our public health. We need to strengthen it as an independent watchdog, not an industry lapdog.
 

So what's my point?  The Conspiracy theorists said the monopoly began when the financial barons first began to place their money men on the board of the the medical schools.  Soon enough the main focus of medicine was shifted to synthetic drugs.

Today the drug companies have figured out a way to get their own consultants on the board of the FDA as well.  If we can believe Dr. Angell, these people do not act in the public interest.  They act in the best interests of their own drug companies. 

If you believe those profit statistics, someone is DEFINITELY acting in the best interests of the drug companies.  And if you believe Dr. Angell, they are making money even off drugs that don't even work. 

Meanwhile, your medical bills skyrocket.  Your health insurance skyrockets.  And no one can stop them. 

It is obvious that a select group of people have a great deal of control while the vast majority of patients and practitioners have little say in the matter.  Time and again suspicious things take place where profits obviously take priority over people.  
 

Follow the Bouncing Ball

Ralph Moss is considered the man who did more to pull back the curtains on the ruthless practices of the cancer industry than any other single person.  His 1996 book, The Cancer Industry, is considered the Bible by the forces opposed to the practices of the drug companies, et al.  This is an excerpt from a 1994 interview.  Source

LL: You were mentioning that patients hear cure rate when something very different is being talked about. And we can go into the poor statistics for the standard modalities. They are not that effective, which is why everyone is looking for an alternative.

RM: When I was at MSK a lot of very weird things started to happen to me, there was this cognitive distance between what I was told, and was writing about treatment, especially chemotherapy, and what I was seeing with my own eyes. One time I heard the head of the intensive care unit give a talk in which he bragged about how he had one of the lowest mortality rates in his unit. I went out to lunch with him, where he became a bit inebriated, and told me how he managed to get those statistics -- by wheeling the dying patients out into the corridor where they died and didn't sully our departments record.

LL: Why would people manipulate the cure rate?

RM: Cancer is big money. You have to understand that cancer is 1/9th of the overall health budget in the United States. The last figures I have seen from the American Cancer Society of money spent on cancer indirectly or directly at 107 Billion dollars.

LL: AIDS is a 4 billion dollar...

RM: Research, but you can't come compare AIDS to cancer. Cancer we are talking about well over a million cases a year, not counting skin cancer which probably equals that.

LL: One million new cases discounting skin cancer?

RM: Right. About 630,000 people die every year of cancer in the US, and it really is an epidemic disease. We have got a tremendous industry. Every one of those people who is getting cancer and dying of it is going to be treated, and these treatments are extremely expensive. Chemo is tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bone marrow transplantation which is basically another way of giving chemotherapy or radiation can run to about 150,000 dollars per person, and is almost never effective. It kills about 25%..

LL: Why carry on doing it?

RM: Because of the money, which is tremendous. If you look at the board of directors of MSK (Memorial Sloan Kettering), you will find that the drug industry has a dominant position on that board. One company in particular, Bristol Myers, which produces between 40-50% of all the chemotherapy in the world, and they have top positions at MSK hospital.

LL: Doesn't that constitute a serious conflict of interest?

RM: They are selling their own drugs to that particular hospital but they have written into the by-laws of the center that it does not constitute a conflict of interest to sell their company drugs to the center. They get around it by not taking a salary. They are not paid, they are volunteers. Look what happens. You have a man like Benno Schmidt, who was first head of the president's cancer panel under Nixon, then becomes head of MSK. He then goes on using the knowledge he gained at MSK to set up his own drug company to make tens of millions of dollars.

Every now and then I allude to "harrassment by faceless nameless men", but don't go much further. 

The story of Gary Glum is a good example of what I am referring to.  Gary Glum is a man who claims that he has been persecuted for trying to carry on the tradition of Essiac.  Apparently his problems began he wrote a book about Rene Caisse titled Calling of an Angel.

Glum claims that Nurse Caisse entrusted him with the Magic Formula.  Ever since then, Glum says his life has been a complete hell.  I will share two sources that contain Glum's allegations.

On the right is an example about how Gary Glum says he has been harassed.  I found this article at a UK web site called the Truthseeker.  What you see on the right is about half the article.  I listed the URL if you wish to read the complete article.

The second source is a 1992 interview between Elizabeth Robinson and Gary Glum.  As you will see, Dr. Glum made one assertion after another claiming government suppression. 

So what is my point?  You have to ask yourself if this stuff is real or if this stuff is complete garbage.  We don't know who Gary Glum is from Adam.  Maybe he has a history of mental illness. Maybe these rants are the delusions of a crackpot.

If you believe Conspiracies are a possibility, then maybe you are receptive to these claims.  But even the most open-minded person will agree these stories are a bit far-fetched.

On the other hand, a pattern begins to emerge when you have one person after another saying similar things.  As the saying goes, "Where there's smoke, there's fire". 

Let's add the Gary Glum story to the mounting file of circumstantial evidence pointing to a conspiracy. 

If you wish, you can read the entire interview yourself. 

The Harry Hoxsey Witch Hunt

After Rene Caisse, the Documentary moved on to the story of Harry Hoxsey (35 minutes). 

Unlike Rene Caisse, an unsophisticated woman from a small town who wasn't mentally equipped to cope with the strong-arm politics, Harry Hoxsey was said to be a natural born fighter who feared no one. 

Hoxsey started out as a poor coal miner.  Then he came out of nowhere claiming to cure cancer using a country remedy handed down within his family.  Somehow he built the largest privately-owned cancer treatment center in America with 17 different branches at its peak. 

Naturally anyone who claims to cure cancer invites scrutiny. Back in the Fifties, Hoxsey went toe to toe with the AMA.  He fought them tooth and nail in the court of law. 

The fight became increasingly vicious.  Hoxsey set the record for being arrested for practicing medicine without a license more times than anyone else in medical history. 

The AMA would go on to label Hoxsey the "Worst Cancer Quack of the Century". 

Healer or Huckster?  Let's investigate.

 

We will start the story of Harry Hoxsey with a brief summary of his career written by Richard Walters, one of Hoxsey's admirers. Please note I have paraphrased some of this article.  I have listed the link if you wish to go to the source. 
 

Source:  Harry Hoxsey: Jailed For Curing Cancer, written by Richard Walters

Harry Hoxsey (1901-1974) was a self taught healer who cured many cancer patients using an herbal remedy reportedly handed down by his great grandfather.  His great grandfather was a veterinarian who discovered that his prized stallion had an inoperable tumor.  Unwilling to put the animal to sleep until the suffering began, the man put the horse in an isolated area of his pasture.  To his surprise, the tumor had disappeared.  The vet speculated that perhaps those strange plants the horse had been chewing on had made the difference.  Noting those plants were not part of the horse's normal diet, he began to experiment. Soon he discovered distinct medicinal values in the plants.

As the legend goes, the great grandfather passed the secret on to Harry Hoxsey.  By the 1950's, the Hoxsey Cancer Clinic in Dallas was the world's largest private cancer center.

Hoxsey treated people using an herbal tea.  Hoxsey's plant-based remedies contain naturally occurring compounds with potent anti-cancer effects.   Hoxsey treated external cancers with a red paste made of bloodroot - a common wildflower- mixed with zinc chloride and antimony sulfide.  

Apparently, the Hoxsey herbs have long been used by Native American healers to treat cancer.  This treatment was handed down from North American Indians living along the shores of Lake Superior who used the red sap from bloodroot to treat cancer.  The root stock of blood root, a spring-blooming flower, contains sanguinarine, an alkaloid that has powerful anti-tumor properties.

Hoxsey's success brought him a great amount of publicity.  However, it also brought him big trouble.  In addition to patients who flocked to Dallas from every part of the country, the AMA began a smear campaign.

Harry Hoxsey was a wealthy man before he ever got into medicine.  Furthermore, he was used to fighting back.  Consequently he didn't take the intimidation sitting down.  He had the wherewithal to stand up to the medical profession as well as to the authorities.  Hoxsey set the record for being arrested for practicing medicine without a license more times than anyone else in medical history.  In one two-year period, he was arrested more than 100 times!  Then, ironically, the assistant district attorney's brother got cancer.  Now the Assistant DA secretly sent his brother to Hoxsey.  When his brother was cured, the Assistant DA quietly stopped the arrests.

FDA officials would go to patients' houses, intimidate them, tell them they were being duped by a quack, and take away their Hoxsey medicines. The American Cancer Society added the Hoxsey therapy to its blacklist of Unproven Methods in 1968, using its customary phraseology about the lack of any evidence that the treatment works.

Hoxsey would always fight back, but alas, it was to no avail.  For every friend and convert Hoxsey made, another enemy stepped forward.  In particular, an AMA representative named Morris Fishbein spent 25 years trying to take Hoxsey down. The fight became so vicious and so personal that the medical orthodoxy labeled Harry Hoxsey "the worst cancer quack of the century."  His herbal medicine was denigrated as worthless.  It was called a "simple bottle of colored water" containing extracts of useless backyard weeds.  The Hoxsey Treatment was laughed at as the worst scam since Snake Oil back in the Wild West.

In the 1950s, at the tail end of the McCarthy era, Hoxsey's clinics were shut down. The AMA, NCI, and FDA organized a "conspiracy" to suppress a fair, unbiased assessment of Hoxsey's methods, according to a 1953 federal report to Congress.
 

This article made some strong points to suggest the Hoxsey treatment had some real promise.  Whether that is true or not we will never know because the AMA eventually shut this guy down lock stock and barrel.

That said, Hoxsey put up one hell of a fight.  The Documentary report about the rivalry was great stuff.  For example, the documentary told a story of how Dallas Assistant DA Al Templeton arrested Hoxsey over 100 times.  Then one day Templeton's brother Michael got cancer.  When Michael's condition worsened, Al Templeton took his brother to Hoxsey on the sly.  Sure enough, according to the Documentary, Michael was cured.  From that point on, Al Templeton became Hoxsey's new best friend. 

Then the documentary covered a fight to the death between Hoxsey and Morris Fishbein, the lead hatchet guy for the AMA.  Fishbein labeled Hoxsey "The Worst cancer quack of the century".

With that statement, Fishbein had gone too far.  Hoxsey filed a libel suit against Fishbein for saying things about him and his treatment that Fishbein couldn't prove. Talk about turning the tables!  Amazingly, Hoxsey won.  In fact, the Documentary suggests Fishbein even had to step down from his position after the trial.

However, the Fishbein trial was Hoxsey's last hurrah.  The AMA fought back, both in legal courts and in the court of public opinion. The AMA brought in its Big Gun, the FDA, and nailed Hoxsey on violations of Interstate Commerce. 

The FDA imposes sanitation requirements on interstate travel and is charged with preventing the spread of disease in all products - vegetables, meats, drugs, etc.  The FDA has the right to criminally investigate fraudulent claims regarding willfully shipping known adulterated goods across state lines. The FDA can take action against the interstate marketing of any drug in which the "standard of strength, quality, or purity" of the active ingredient is not stated clearly on the label.

The FDA claimed Hoxsey was allowing his "untested, potentially unsafe drug" to cross state lines to his various clinics in the different states.  That violated Interstate Commerce laws.  One day the feds put locks on the doors of every one of Hoxsey's 17 clinics.  They shut him down cold and he was never able to rally.   Hoxsey was like King Kong trying to futilely swat away those planes shooting him down.  Hoxsey fought as hard as he could, but he seemed to have an entire army of opponents allied against him.

Hoxsey ultimately lost the fight.  His one-time highly successful Dallas clinic was forced to close its doors in 1960.  After Hoxsey passed away, his successors began to operate a clinic somewhere in Mexico.  Good luck getting your insurance to cover a visit.

I have no idea whether any of this story is true, but I will say the entertainment value was over the top.  The Documentary made the Hoxsey-Fishbein vendetta seem as vicious and personal as the Hatfields and McCoys.

Before we move on, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about Harry Hoxsey.

Hoxsey Therapy - From Wikipedia 

“Reviews by major medical bodies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, have found no evidence that the Hoxsey Therapy is an effective treatment for cancer. The sale or marketing of the Hoxsey Method was banned in the United States by the FDA on September 21, 1960 as a "worthless and discredited" remedy and a form of quackery.

Discrediting Doctor Gerson Now that we have covered Rene Caisse and Harry Hoxsey, now it is time to turn our attention to Max Gerson.  The Conspiracy theorists claim you can’t trust the medical people who are in control because they are the bad guys who don't want anyone to find a cure for cancer unless they can profit from it. Do I think there is a Conspiracy in the Medical World?  I am not a medical person nor am I an investigative reporter.  The fact of the matter is that I don't have one shred of hard evidence.  I could not give you the name of a single member of the Conspiracy even if I wanted to.  Whatever I know, you know, because I have taken you down the same path I followed.    What I will say is there seems to be an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.  It appears Somebody has gone to a lot of effort to discredit people who seemed to be sincerely trying to find a cure for this dread disease. For the record, I think Rene Caisse was the real deal.  I can't say whether her tea worked or not, but I am convinced she sincerely believed in it. Harry Hoxsey I am not so sure about, but there is no denying he had a lot of supporters.  If the stories of Harry Hoxsey and Rene Caisse were not enough to convince you that something is rotten in Denmark, perhaps the story of Max Gerson will push you over the edge.  Max Gerson was easily the most controversial person in the Documentary's attempts to prove a conspiracy exists.

There are some persuasive reasons to believe Max Gerson was the real deal. Gerson wasn't an outsider like Hoxsey and Caisse.  Gerson was a bona fide classically trained doctor.  Gerson was not only a graduate of prestigious German medical schools, he had better credentials than many of the people trying to discredit him.  Gerson explained he had made empirical discoveries and wanted to test his cure, but no one would listen.   Gerson's diet therapy clearly held promise.  There is a well-documented study that showed Gerson used his diet to healed 446 out of 450 patients who had 'incurable' skin tuberculosis.   Unlike Caisse and Hoxsey, Gerson wrote a book about his career as a doctor and as a cancer healer.  It's there with plenty of case histories for everyone to evaluate.    Gerson appeared before a Senate committee in 1946 and gave testimony that was very well-received.  In fact, it was so well-received that the AMA nearly had a heart attack.   Unlike the others, Gerson didn't inherit his treatment from an Ojibwa medicine man or a 19th century horse vet... he actually developed it himself.  Gerson not only explained in medical terms how he developed his treatment, he explained why he believed it worked.    Finally, as you will see, despite his very powerful enemies, Gerson had some very impressive friends. One man said this about Gerson: "I see in Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine." That man was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the distinguished winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize. Just some quack, eh?  The story of Max Gerson was definitely the most fascinating story in the entire cancer documentary.  You can go watch it yourself.  Fast forward to the 49 minute mark.

The Dissenters

Max Gerson was the creator of the Gerson Therapy.  This was the name given to a diet regimen that claims to be able to cure even severe cases of cancer. The regimen consists of a special diet, vegetable juice, coffee enemas, and various supplements. 

As Gerson's critics like to point out, his therapy appeals to those who believe a "natural cure" exists for cancer and most other diseases.  Defenders of the Gerson Therapy like to claim that 'special interests' have suppressed this cure.

Theoretically the Gerson Therapy appeals to cancer patients who are extremely fearful of or violently opposed to surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The Gerson Therapy appeals to cancer patients who have been told that science-based medical treatments have no hope for them.  Due to their desperate desire to continue living, they are willing to grasp at any far-fetched, last-ditch hope to survive.

Strong words.  Don't you hate being called a sissy for preferring a natural cure over chemo?

Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has little good to say about Gerson.  You are welcome to read Wikipedia on Gerson for yourself.  Or you can settle for this brief excerpt.

“Max Gerson (1881 – 1959) was a German physician who developed the Gerson Therapy, an alternative dietary therapy, which he claimed could cure cancer and most chronic, degenerative diseases.

Gerson described his approach in the book A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases.

However, when Gerson's claims were examined by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), they found that his records lacked the basic information necessary to systematically evaluate his claims.

The NCI concluded that Gerson’s data showed no benefit from his treatment.

The therapy is scientifically unsupported and potentially hazardous.”

Well, that pretty much sums it up, huh?  They didn't come right out and say it, but the Wikipedia summary implies this Gerson fellow was either misguided or even possibly dangerous.   

Or was he?  I wouldn't be in any hurry to pull the plug on this guy just yet.  In the Forbidden Cures Documentary, the story of Max Gerson stands out as very compelling evidence of unscrupulous harassment by mainstream medicine. 

On the other hand, people would say Max Gerson was a fraud who never submitted his material for scientific testing.  Yes, maybe the AMA went a little far, but they were just trying to protect innocent people from exploitation by this clever charlatan.

Some people say Gerson was cheated out of a Nobel Prize not just for his cancer cure, but also for his skin tuberculosis cure.  Others say he was just a lost and misguided old man who could barely speak English. 

Welcome to the controversy.  So was this man a quack or a genius?  I don't know the truth, but I do consider his story quite remarkable.

Let's begin our exploration of the mystery with this brief biography of Max Gerson supplied by the Gerson Institute.

Who Was Max Gerson?

There are some who consider Dr. Gerson to be father of the nutrition movement.  Whether this is true or not is open to debate, but there can be no question he was one of the first men to discover the importance of diet and nutrition in health. Thanks to his own personal trial and error research, Gerson became an early champion for the benefits of diet and detoxification.

Max Gerson, M.D., was born in Wongrowitz, Germany, in 1881.

He attended the universities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg.  Suffering from severe migraines since childhood, Dr. Gerson focused his initial experimentation with diet on preventing his headaches.

In 1910, Dr. Gerson came across a book written by an Italian doctor who claimed that some migraine headaches could be relieved by a milk diet, while others could be relieved by a fresh-fruit-and-vegetable diet.

Gerson first tried the milk diet, but without success. He then put himself on the fruit-and-vegetable diet, with an emphasis on apples, both raw and cooked. In a short period of time, his migraines disappeared.  He further experimented by adding salt and a variety of other substances to the fruits and vegetables, only to find that his migraines returned very quickly, sometimes within a half-hour.  Gerson was discouraged from using salt.  His studies also led him to eliminate meat from his diet. 

One of Dr. Gerson’s patients discovered in the course of his treatment, that the “migraine diet” had cured his skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to further study the diet, and he went on to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients using his Gerson diet. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D., in the late 1920s.

Under Sauerbruch’s supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin "end stage" tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely.  This was quite an accomplishment for a disease then considered “incurable”.  Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.

At this time, Dr. Gerson took note of the increasing Nazi influence in Germany.  He left Germany in 1933 and emigrated first to Vienna. Gerson spent two years in Vienna, then in 1935 he went to France, associating with a clinic near Paris before moving to London in 1936. Shortly after that, he moved to the United States where he settled in New York City.

In 1938, Dr. Gerson passed his boards and was licensed to practice in the state of New York. For twenty years, he treated hundreds of cancer patients who had been given up to die after all conventional treatments had failed.

In 1946, Gerson demonstrated recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee, during hearings on a bill to fund research into cancer treatment. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients.

In 1958, after thirty years of clinical experimentation, Gerson published A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases. This medical monograph details the theories, treatment, and results achieved by a great physician.

Gerson died in 1959
 

Here is more information about Max Gerson.  The following excerpt was written by Robert Ringer. 

Origins of the Gerson Therapy

“One of the earliest truth messengers to feel the sting of the American Medical Association's (AMA) attacks was Dr. Max Gerson, a German immigrant born October 18, 1881 in Wongrowitz, Germany.

Gerson attended the Universities of Breslau, Wurzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg from 1901 to 1906. He then served as an intern at a number of hospitals and clinics throughout Germany.

Doctor Gerson suffered from terrible migraine headaches at the time; they were hereditary. Every doctor told him the same thing: that it was incurable and that he had to live with it.  Gerson did not accept that.  He decided to find his own way to heal himself, so he began to study and research. After two years, he read in an Italian magazine about a woman who changed her diet and got better.  This was 1910.  The claim was that some migraine headaches could be relieved by a milk diet, while others could be relieved by a fresh-fruit-and-vegetable diet.

Gerson was confused because no one had ever told him anything about the importance of diet. He was discouraged with everything else so he decided to give it a shot. He decided to build a diet on process of elimination.  He started off with milk because babies drank it all the time, but it didn't work. He was as sick as ever.  Then it occurred to him that nowhere in nature do animals drink milk after they’ve weaned, especially milk that came from another species.  Maybe milk wasn't the right idea.

Gerson decided to try vegetarian, or vegan, food.  He put himself on the fruit-and-vegetable diet, with an emphasis on apples, both raw and cooked.  Apples were widely available in Germany so he ate nothing but apples.  He ate raw apples, apple sauce, apple juice, baked apples, etc.  To his surprise, he got better. In a short period of time, his migraines disappeared.

He added one food to his diet at a time so he could determine what triggered the headaches. He further experimented by adding salt and a variety of other substances to the fruits and vegetables, only to find that his migraines returned very quickly, sometimes within a half-hour.  Out went the salt.

If something didn’t agree with Gerson, he’d have a migraine within twenty minutes. He eventually worked out what he called his migraine diet.  This migraine diet, unbeknownst to him, would later cure some of the most chronic diseases known to man.

After serving in World War I, Dr. Gerson set up practice in Bielefeld, Germany, as an internist and specialist in nervous diseases. Expanding his experimentation with diet, he was successful in curing 446 out of 450 supposedly incurable cases of lupus (an autoimmune disorder characterized by skin lesions).

For his pioneering work in this area, Dr. Gerson was hopeful that he might earn the Nobel Prize for Medicine. To his disbelief, he instead was challenged by the German medical establishment and hauled into court.  The charge was that he was not a specialist in skin disorders, and therefore his work in this area was in violation of the German medical code.

After having similar success with "incurable" tuberculosis, he again was challenged by the establishment medical community. Unfortunately, he was unable to defend his belief that his natural diet therapy did in fact cure tuberculosis.  Due to the worsening political climate, Dr. Gerson, who was Jewish, had to flee his homeland.

After his escape from Germany, Dr. Gerson lived in Vienna and then moved to Ville d'Avray near Paris to become chief of staff of a sanatorium. Finally, after a short stay in England, he emigrated to the United States.

In New York, at age fifty-five, Dr. Gerson had to start all over. He had go to school with first and second graders to learn how to speak English, a prerequisite for his earning a medical license. He received his license in January 1936 after passing the New York State Board examination.

After setting up practice in New York City, Gerson continued his diet experiments with incurable arthritis and cancer patients. His success rate was astonishing even to him, and it made the medical establishment very uneasy.

On July 3, 1946, Dr. Gerson demonstrated his healing techniques before a U.S. Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Claude Pepper, bringing with him five cancer patients whom he had cured with his organic fruit-and-vegetable therapy.

The AMA went berserk - to put it mildly.

In its November 16, 1946 edition, the Journal of the American Medical Association stated the following:

"Fortunately for the American people, this presentation received little, if any, newspaper publicity." Later, in its January 8, 1949 edition, the same publication declared, "There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to indicate that modifications in the dietary intake of food or other nutritional essentials are of any specific value in the control of cancer."

The AMA pressured hospitals, laboratories, and other doctors not to do business with Dr. Gerson. This made it difficult for him to document his work because he was prevented from bringing his patients to established medical facilities for testing.

The final blow, however, was when Dr. Gerson was invited to be a guest on a radio talk show hosted by the popular Long John Nebel.  At the time, Nebel was famous for bringing all sorts of oddballs onto his show.  On any given night, Nebel would interview UFO hunters, parapsychologists, science fiction writers, and psychics.  Therefore Gerson, oft-criticized as a cancer hoax, expected he would fit right in.  To his surprise, he received a respectful hearing.  The show lasted for several hours, and the public's response was overwhelming.

The result? The radio network was threatened by the AMA, and Nebel was fired the next day.

Finally, on March 8, 1959, after years of harassment from the AMA and other segments of the establishment medical community, Dr. Max Gerson, the ultimate medical messenger, died of pneumonia.”

Five Situations That Suggest Suppression of Max Gerson

1. Raymond Swing

The Robert Ringer article above referred to two incidents that smacked of AMA suppression.  The first incident concerned Gerson's 1946 testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Claude Pepper.  I decided to look it up.

I found a very interesting story written about Raymond Gram Swing, a man I had never heard of before.  Swing is relevant to our story about Gerson.

According to Wikipedia, Raymond Gram Swing (1887–1968) was an American print and broadcast journalist. He was one of the most influential news commentators of his era, heard by people worldwide as a leading American voice from Britain during World War II.  

During the buildup to WW II, he began to broadcast on European affairs, Swing emerged as a strong voice of opposition to Adolf Hitler and Fascism. As the Nazis rose in power and influence and began to threaten Europe, his show was increased to five broadcasts a week. Swing also gave a number of lectures in the United States and abroad on the dangers of Fascism.

Because of his prestige and credibility, Swing was chosen to be chairman of the Council for Democracy, a group founded in 1940 to support American rearmament and combat domestic isolationism. Funded by Henry Luce, the Council was led by Harvard political science professor Carl Joachim Friedrich and Charles Douglas Jackson, vice president of Time magazine.

During the war, Swing was reportedly the nation's highest-paid radio commentator.  After the war he worked at ABC, BBC and the Blue Network. 
 

So what does Raymond Gram Swing have to do with Max Gerson?   Well, here is what Wikipedia said:  

After thirty years with ABC, in 1946 Raymond Gram Swing was released from his position two weeks after reporting on the Senate bill known as the Pepper-Neely bill, that advocated a dietary treatment for cancer.
 

Wikipedia confirmed Swing was involved in Claude Pepper's 1946 Senate hearing.  In addition, Wikipedia hinted at the Gerson "Diet" Therapy. However, it omitted any mention of the Raymond Swing - Max Gerson connection.  Surely that wasn't the same hearing where Senator Claude Pepper praised Max Gerson?? It took a little digging, but I found more information on another web site. I can't be positive, but I think Raymond Swing was being treated at the time for cancer by Dr. Gerson.  It was probably Raymond Swing who asked Gerson to appear before the Senate Committee.  In July 1946, ABC news commentator Raymond Swing, also an ABC radio journalist, proposed that Dr. Gerson be called to testify before the Senate which was debating a bill to allocate funds for cancer research. This broadcast resulted in Swing's firing due to pressure from both the pharmaceutical and the American medical establishment.   Despite his 30 years as a well-respected correspondent, Swing was blacklisted simply because he reported a cure for cancer had been found using Dr. Gerson's treatment regimen.

2. John Nebel

Besides the story about the Raymond Swing firing, Robert Ringer suggested a second man was fired for allowing Gerson to speak.  His name was John Nebel.  "The result? The radio network was threatened by the AMA, and Nebel was fired the next day." This Amazon picture shows there can be no doubt the interview took definitely took place.

3. Wikipedia Shuns Alternative Medicine in General

A very curious part of my research was devoted to keeping track of Wikipedia's unwavering support for Mainstream Medicine.

Ordinarily Wikipedia is an extremely useful reference.  I am a big fan - I use Wikipedia all the time to write my Travel stories.  To show my gratitude, I have contributed to Wikipedia at Christmas time for the past three years.  And I am sure I will contribute again.

That said, despite all the warm fuzzies I feel for Wikipedia, I could not help but notice that Wikipedia has a determined bias in favor of orthodox medicine.  I can't imagine Wikipedia toeing the line any more dutifully.  In fact, Wikipedia might as well just say, "The following article was written by the American Medical Association".

For example, Mr. Skeptical gave me a list of "alternative medicine" people to check out.  It turned out that every single person identified by Mr. Skeptical as blacklisted by the AMA had a distinctly negative Wikipedia writeup.  I decided this could not be a coincidence.  It became obvious to me that somebody was determined to make sure that Wikipedia had nothing good to say about the medical renegades. 

I actually went to the trouble of documenting my point.  Look for yourself.  Always remember it is effortless to check my work.  Just type the same names into Wikipedia if you don't believe me.

Luigi di Bella

“During the late 1980s, Di Bella developed a cocktail of drugs, vitamins and hormones (Melatonin, ACTH and Somatostatin) which he argued would be useful in fighting cancer. Following national exposure in 1997 and 1998, several cancer patients from around Italy traveled to his clinic seeking access to a "miracle cure". In 1998 Italian medical authorities declared his treatment to be without scientific merit.

"The working group of the Board of Health considers that it has no evidence of the effectiveness of "multitherapy Di Bella" and therefore does not recommend a new clinical trial; this could be not only ineffective but also harmful to the patients by denying them (or procrastinating) access to anti-cancer drugs of proven effectiveness."

This method can have side effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, diabetes mellitus, increased blood sugar levels, low blood pressure, sleepiness and other neurological symptoms.”

Stanislaw Burzynski

“The Burzynski Clinic is a clinic in Houston, Texas, offering unproven cancer treatment.

The clinic has been the focus of much criticism due to the way its unproven antineoplaston therapy is promoted, the costs for cancer sufferers participating in "trials", significant problems with the way these trials are run, legal cases brought as a result of the sale of the therapy without board approval, and for other causes.

There is a scientific consensus that antineoplaston therapy is unproven and of little promise in treating cancer. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has stated: "Bottom Line: There is no clear evidence to support the anticancer effects of antineoplastons in humans."

Issels Treatment

The Issels Treatment is an alternative cancer treatment based on the ideas of Josef Issels. The Issels Treatment is considered ineffective against cancer by the American Cancer Society, and is listed as a "Dubious Treatment" by the alternative medicine watchdog website, Quackwatch.

Johanna Budwig

“Cancer Research UK have stated that there is no reliable evidence to show that the Budwig diet helps people with cancer.

Proponents of the Budwig protocol often claim that she was nominated for a Nobel Prize either six or seven times.  However, the names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they have been considered for the Prize. All nomination records for a prize are sealed for 50 years from the awarding of that prize.  As there are no limits on nominations, any university professor in the world may nominate as many people as he or she chooses—thousands of people are nominated for these awards each year.”

Let me make it clear that I have no idea of the effectiveness of any cure or the integrity of any person named above.  I have simply copied and pasted what Wikipedia said.  My point is to illustrate that someone has gone to considerable effort to systematically discredit people who have tried different approaches to curing cancer. 

From what I gather, manipulation of Wikipedia content is fairly common.

Here's an excerpt from a blog I found related to the subject.

The Dark Side of Wikipedia 

Biased manipulation runs wild on Wikipedia, and the extent to which it influences the pages of that site will probably never be known.

Do all of these Wiki-Wars Really Matter?  The most accurate answer is probably "it depends." It's very hard to gauge how much the public trusts information on Wikipedia. 

My gut tells me that, sadly, a lot of people simply accept whatever Wikipedia says without checking real sources of information. 

Yes, I am saying that Wikipedia by its very nature is untrustworthy, even if 95% of the information there is factual, which is probably a big stretch.

However, I can say with some certainty that businesses and individuals get a great deal of value and suffer a great deal of loss when Wikipedia contains positive/negative information about them in a way very similar to Google or other search engines. 

(November 20th, 2007 - Posted by randfish to White Hat / Black Hat)   Source: The Moz Blog

4. Wikipedia Deliberately Edits its Profile of Max Gerson

Max Gerson has been dead for 50 years, but someone is going to a lot of trouble to undermine his credibility even today.  I found evidence that Max Gerson is currently the victim of some very serious Wikipedia manipulation. 

I came across a web page titled “The Hidden Wikipedia:  How to Find Deleted Material about Nutritional Medicine”.

This article documented how Max Gerson’s original Wikipedia page had undergone a serious transformation to undermine his credibility.  Here is the link; you don't have to take my word for any of this.

Here are some excerpts. 

“May 11, 2010

There is nothing quite like a paper trail, and Wikipedia has one.

Consequently, you can read for yourself all the material that has been added, and then deleted.

Let’s take for example material that was deleted from Wikipedia's page about Max Gerson, M.D.

Dr. Gerson is widely known for the nutritional cancer therapy that bears his name.  Gerson's principal biographer is his grandson, Howard Straus.

Mr. Straus tells the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service of some interesting experiences he has had with Wikipedia bias:

"Some years ago, on seeing that the pages for Dr. Max Gerson and the Gerson Therapy were only stubs (short place-holders with little information on them), I took it upon myself to flesh out the pages.

I thought Wikipedia was fairly neutral on balance, so I put in all the information that I could, and kept it factual with references, citations, and literature links.

Within a month, the following had happened:

My information was labeled as "biased" and "unreliable" because I am Dr. Gerson's grandson and biographer. There appeared a big red flag at the top of the article labeling the neutrality of the articles I wrote as "dubious."

Furthermore, the photograph of my grandfather that I had posted was removed.

Provable, referenced facts, with dates and places, all suddenly became "claims," even the quote from no less than Nobel Laureate Albert Schweitzer, M.D., who famously said: "I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in medical history."

Dr. Schweitzer and his wife were patients of Dr. Gerson, making this a first-hand account from a rather reliable source. Nevertheless Dr. Schweitzer’s comment had been removed from Wikipedia.  

In fact, all my links, references and citations were removed. They were replaced by links to the American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute, which offer only criticism of the Gerson Therapy.

Even quotations from published scientific papers were removed. Attempts to rectify these actions were immediately overwritten.

It's easy enough to show the progression of the pages, since Wikipedia displays former edits on request, dated and documented.”

There’s more.  If you are curious, you can go read the rest yourself.  The Hidden Wikipedia
 

5. Wikipedia makes no mention of Gerson's Greatest Accomplishment


In 1927, Max Gerson tested his diet in a scientifically-controlled experiment on people with incurable skin tuberculosis.  These trials took place in Germany in conjunction with other physicians. 

Dr. Patricia Spain Ward, Ph.D., a medical historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote about this aspect of Gerson's work in her
History of the Gerson Therapy:

The historical record shows that progress lagged especially in cancer immunotherapy – including nutrition and hyperthermia – because power over professional affiliation and publication (and hence over practice and research) rested with men who were neither scholars nor practitioners nor researchers themselves, and who were often unequipped to grasp the rapidly evolving complexities of the sciences underlying mid-twentieth-century medicine.

Nowhere is this maladaptation of professional structure to medicine’s changing scientific content more tragically illustrated than in the American experience of Max B. Gerson (1881-1959), founder of the best-known nutritional treatment for cancer of the pre-macrobiotic era. A scholar’s scholar and a superlative observer of clinical phenomena, Gerson was a product of the German medical education which Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries considered so superior to our own American system that all who could afford it went to Germany to perfect their training. In 1924 Gerson's success in treating tuberculosis of the skin brought an invitation from the noted thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, to test Gerson's diet in a special lupus clinic to be provided by the Bavarian government at the University of Munich.  As Sauerbruch recounts it in his autobiography, 446 patients out of 450 recovered - once he had discovered and put an end to the smuggling of sausages, cream and beer to the patients in the late afternoons (Sauerbruch, 1953, 167-171 ).

Unless one has a medical background, the magnitude of this accomplishment might not be understood.  So let's dig a little deeper.

In those days, tuberculosis was typically a death sentence.  For example, in his book, Incurable and Intolerable: Chronic Disease and Slow Death in the 19th Century, Jason Szabo wrote:

"Throughout the Nineteenth Century, no incurable disease rivaled Tuberculosis, the undisputed captain of death. 

Many scholars have remarked that tuberculosis was to the 19th century what cancer was to the 20th, the most widespread and most feared deadly disease. It was called "consumption" then, and even appeared in popular literature, drama, and opera, where it claimed many a tragic heroine and hero. More importantly, it was the leading cause of death in the U.S."

Gerson's study states that he cured 446 patients out of 450 of incurable skin tuberculosis.  In other words, the man accomplished a medical miracle.

One would think a major accomplishment like this would at least rate a mention in a person's Wikipedia profile.  There can be little doubt Gerson's study took place - there are references to the study in many different places.

So what exactly did Wikipedia say? 

By 1927, Gerson was specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis, developing the Gerson-Sauerbrach-Hermannsdorfer diet, claiming it was a major advance in the treatment of tuberculosis

How generous of them.

As I have said repeatedly, I find it curious that every single cancer renegade has a distinctly negative Wikipedia presence.  Even before I discovered The Hidden Wikipedia article, I had already come to the conclusion that someone favoring the medical establishment had been editing these pages.  The Hidden Wikipedia story made it obvious my instincts were right. Someone with a serious agenda is deliberately going out of their way to suppress any possible positive information about Max Gerson as well as other practitioners of Alternative Medicine.
Oh, and there's one more thing.  Why on earth would Wikipedia delete a reference to Albert Schweitzer?  If you are curious, I found another page titled Wikipedia Talks About Max Gerson.  It is difficult reading because it contains all kinds of squabbles over the material deleted from Gerson's page. Here is an excerpt regarding the Albert Schweitzer quote reflecting on Dr. Gerson's work.  It is an attempt to justify why his "eminent genius" quote has been excluded: We can't use an unreliable source (a private website that openly boasts of being for quacks!?!), but the quote probably exists somewhere else on the internet. I can imagine using this quote as an example of a notable supporter of Gerson. That's important enough for inclusion. -- Brangifer (talk) 17:05, 29 April 2012 (UTC) This is an exceptional (though not entirely unbelievable) claim, and thus requires very solid sourcing (per policy). There are all sorts of misattributed quotes floating around the darker corners of the Internet (and being echoed uncritically), so we need a really good source here before deciding whether to include this. MastCell Talk 17:28, 29 April 2012 (UTC)   Schweitzer made that "eminent genius" statement as part of eulogy he gave at Max Gerson's funeral.  It seems absurd the hoops Wikipedia expects Gerson loyalists to jump through to get this compliment reinstated in his Wikipedia profile.  I say this is deliberate censorship designed discredit Max Gerson.  Wikipedia claims it is bending over backwards to make sure everything is factual.  However, ultimately it leans so far in the direction of orthodox medicine that in the end Wikipedia loses its own credibility.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Distinguished Winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize Today Albert Schweitzer is largely unknown to anyone younger than 50. However, back in the Fifties, Dr. Schweitzer was one of the ten most famous men in the world.  He became a household name because he was the pre-eminent humanitarian of the time.  Schweitzer spoke boldly of the dangers of atomic research.  He pricked the world's conscience regarding the wide-spread apathy towards the problems of Africa.  He beseeched everyone to develop a greater reverence for life.  A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Schweitzer didn't just say wonderful things, he went out and did them.  The world took notice when he and his wife Helene opened a jungle hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, on the coast of West Africa.  Schweitzer spent 60 years of his life healing thousands and bringing world attention to Africa's many plights.  Although the mission was many times beset by adversities that would have discouraged a less dedicated man, it had grown at his death to more than 70 buildings, 350 beds and a leper village of 200. Upon his death in 1965, Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the most widely admired and loved man in the world.

Schweitzer and Gerson's Lifelong Friendship Dr. Gerson cured Schweitzer’s wife Helene of life-threatening pulmonary lung tuberculosis in 1932.  She was extremely sick at the time and in great danger of dying.  Her condition did not respond to conventional treatment, so Schweitzer asked Gerson to step in. According to epidemiologist Gar Hildebrand, "With no antibiotic drugs, Gerson cured Schweitzer’s wife Helene of lung tuberculosis with diet-based immunotherapy. This was not the carrot-juice and coffee enemas diet therapy being promoted by today’s Gerson enthusiasts; it was weeks of raw foods alternating with short bursts of apple-potato days, plentiful orange-, grapefruit-, lemon-, and grapejuice; the enemas were chamomile with caffeine sodium benzoate." Whatever Gerson did, it worked.  Helene Schweitzer recovered completely and went on to live another 25 years.   Schweitzer was unbelievably grateful.  He never forgot what Gerson had done for his wife.  During Helene's treatment, Schweitzer and Gerson became friends.  They remained close even after Helene recovered. Gerson and Schweitzer discovered they had much in common.  They were both German-trained physicians of a similar age.  They were both repulsed by the growing Nazi threat and quick to leave Germany in the early Thirties. Indeed, Gerson's foreboding was accurate. Every member of Gerson's extended family would go on to die in concentration camps.  What a shame that they failed to recognize how much danger they were in until it was too late. After Gerson and Schweitzer's departure from Germany, the two men were now expatriates living in different countries.  That didn't stop them.  Gerson and Schweitzer maintained a regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress, commenting with satisfaction as Gerson's dietary therapy was successfully applied to ailments such as heart disease, kidney failure, and finally cancer as well. In 1938, Gerson came to Schweitzer's aid again when he cured Schweitzer's 19 year old daughter Rhena of a recurring rare skin disease. Then came the crisis.  In 1947, Albert Schweitzer developed Type II diabetes.  This was a very serious illness, especially since Schweitzer was 75 at the time.  Type II diabetes is so debilitating that it is generally associated with a ten-year deduction in life expectancy.  No one seemed to be able to help him, so Schweitzer turned to his old friend.  Gerson got to work.  The treatment of Schweitzer’s condition lasted six weeks.  In the end, the cure was complete. Schweitzer was incredibly grateful.  Thanks to Gerson’s intervention, now Schweitzer was able to return to his hospital in Africa and resume his missionary work.  Schweitzer would go on to live 18 more years.  Max Gerson passed away in 1959.  Helene Gerson asked Albert Schweitzer to deliver the eulogy.  Schweitzer wrote back that he would be honored.  In his letter to Frau Gerson, Schweitzer wrote "Your husband was a medical Christ who walked among us."
	Now isn't that Curious? The story about the Hidden Wikipedia information suggested that all mention of Albert Schweitzer had been deliberately removed from Dr. Gerson's Wikipedia page.  Here again is what Howard Strauss said about Wikipedia's omission: Provable, referenced facts, with dates and places, all suddenly became "claims," even the quote from no less than Nobel Laureate Albert Schweitzer, M.D. Dr. Schweitzer and his wife were patients of Dr. Gerson, making this a first-hand account from a rather reliable source.   Nevertheless Dr. Schweitzer’s comment had been permanently removed from Wikipedia.   Sure enough, if you read Wikipedia's current listing about Max Gerson, there is no mention of Albert Schweitzer.  It's gone. Here is the eulogy Albert Schweitzer gave at Gerson's funeral. “I see in Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. Yet, he has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas. Unfortunately, he could not engage in scientific research or teach; and he was greatly impeded by adverse political conditions. In ordinary times he would have been able to expound his ideas for many years as a professor at one of the important German universities; would have taught pupils who could carry on his research and teachings; would have found recognition and encouragement. ... All this was denied him. His was the hard lot of searching and working as an uprooted immigrant, to be challenged and stand as a fighter. We who knew and understood him admired him for working his way out of discouragement again and again, and for undertaking to conquer the obstacles.”

Michael Lerner stated that Max Gerson’s fall from grace in the mainstream medical community did not occur until after he testified at the 1946 congressional hearing.  He himself said nothing controversial, but another person enthusiastically touted his cancer recoveries as “miracles”. 

His life was never the same after that.  Max Gerson had unknowingly challenged the Gods.  It was this direct affront to the authority of organized medicine that brought on the legal and professional harassment that destroyed Gerson’s career. ( Source )

He was attacked in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association for treating cancer patients with diet therapy.

He was expelled from the New York Medical Society and deprived of his hospital affiliations.

His therapy was blacklisted and featured on the American Cancer Society's (ACS) Unproven Methods list.  ( Source )

So let me ask you, the reader, a question.  Have you ever heard of Max Gerson before?  I would assume not.

And yet none other than the leading humanitarian of the Twentieth Century knew Max Gerson personally and watched carefully as Gerson healed his wife, his daughter, and Schweitzer himself.  One would assume Albert Schweitzer, a physician himself, would know a fraud from a true healer.  And this doctor, perhaps the most trusted man of his time, was convinced that Gerson had wonderful healing abilities.  He called Gerson "a genius in the history of medicine."

One would assume this powerful personal endorsement offered willingly by the world's most widely admired man would find its way into Max Gerson's Wikipedia profile.  It was there once upon a time.  But someone doesn't want it in there, do they?  Someone had to deliberately remove it. 

It turns out that Albert Schweitzer wasn’t Gerson’s only famous patient.  Apparently Gerson was the personal physician of some guy named Albert Einstein.  The last time I checked, Albert Einstein had been named by Time Magazine as the most important man of the entire Twentieth Century.  One would assume Einstein was bright enough to recognize what a dangerous man Gerson was, but maybe not.

Another close friend of Gerson's was Albert Schatz.  Schatz was the man who first isolated Streptomycin in 1943, a valuable drug that became the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis.  The work of Schatz led to the 1952 Nobel Prize for Medicine, an honor that was actually stolen from him.  We will get to that story later.

1. Albert Schweitzer - Nobel Laureate and the Most Trusted man of the century

2. Albert Einstein - Nobel Laureate and the Most Important Man of the Century

3. Albert Schatz - discoverer of Streptomycin

I think we can conclude that Dr. Gerson kept some pretty good company, especially with guys named 'Albert'.  But you won't see any of those names linked with Gerson in his Wikipedia profile.

What you do see in Gerson's Wikipedia profile is the notable reference to Gerson's “potentially hazardous treatment”.

Let's put those statements side by side. 

potentially hazardous treatment - Wikipedia

one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine - Schweitzer

This, my friends, is a “contradiction”.

Doesn't it strike you as odd that a cancer renegade was given lofty praise by a Nobel Prize winner only to be diminished by Wikipedia as little more than a quack? 

Out of curiosity, just who are you more likely to believe, Wikipedia or Albert Schweitzer?   

Now the question must be asked - Why would someone go to so much trouble to censor the positive aspects of Gerson's career even today?  The doctor has been dead for over fifty years.  Who is it that doesn't want the casual reader to discover in Wikipedia that the so-called potentially hazardous treatment of this fringe doctor was once endorsed by the most admired man in the world?

Someone asked me why I was making such a big deal about "Wikipedia" of all things.  Well, let me turn that around.  Why would Gerson's name be considered such a threat 50 years later that someone would go to these lengths to destroy his reputation?  Someone is bound and determined to keep this man's name buried. 

So I ask this question, "What are they hiding?  What is that they don't want us to know about Max Gerson?"

 

So what is my point? 

There is no question that I am openly sympathetic to any cure that tries to rally the body's own resources to fight disease... especially if it works!  Gerson's Therapy seemed to offer some real hope, but after the run-in with the medical brass in 1946, he was basically handcuffed by the medical establishment during the last 13 years of his career. 

Whether Gerson's cure works or doesn't work is debatable, but what bothers me is that I believe Dr. Gerson's therapy held PROMISE. 

In fact, the way he was treated here in this country was downright shameful.  I read that this gentle man was totally bewildered by the obstacles thrown in his path.  He simply could not comprehend the reasoning behind the politics that would cause people to deliberately suppress his cure.  Didn't American doctors want to find a cure for cancer?

Dr. Max Gerson was hardly a quack.  Quite the contrary.  Dr. Gerson appears to have been a well-meaning and highly trained medical expert. Gerson clearly wanted nothing more than to help find a cure not just for cancer, but for all kinds of disease.  Whether one believes his therapy has value or not, no one can deny Gerson had a very successful career healing people of all kinds of diseases.  I base this statement on a thorough medical report by Dr. Patricia Spain Ward (History of the Gerson Therapy)
 

Today the name of Max Gerson is completely unknown to the American public.  It can't be easy hiding the identity of "one of the most eminent geniuses in medical history," but that is basically what has happened.  Someone has done a good job burying his story as far out of sight as possible.  And that's a shame because Max Gerson had a far greater impact on medicine than any superficial search on his name will ever show.  One has to assume that Max Gerson posed a serious threat to the Medical Establishment or they wouldn't have gone to such lengths to discredit him.  Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the medical world will ever allow anyone to openly experiment using his methods.  More likely they will fight it tooth and nail.  Having spent 80 years using threats and advertising revenue to effectively silence the U.S. media, the name of Max Gerson will forever be kept in the shadows.  The story of the Wikipedia manipulation of Gerson's legacy (The Hidden Wikipedia) is a clear-cut example that the people who fear Gerson's methods remain constantly on the alert for anything that might escape the media blackout. I contend certain ruthless people have deprived the world of a very promising line of research.  And that, my friends, is a huge loss for all of us.  In fact, I will go further than that... I think it is a crime.  Someone threw a promising cure for cancer in the wastebasket.

Another Look at the Conspiracy I don't know if a formal, well-organized core of evil conspirators exists in medicine.  That's probably going a little too far.  Yes, there are bound to be various Old Boy Networks where efforts are secretly coordinated. However, I strongly doubt that a dozen powerful shadowy men meet regularly behind closed doors to call the shots and plot the next move.  If there is a conspiracy, it is not an organized one.  It is more likely a group of 100, 500 or 1,000 like-minded executives making independent decisions that benefit their companies, but not necessarily the cancer victims.  I suspect these are wealthy men at the top who are quite content with things the way they are and want to keep it that way. Although these people appear to work in tandem with one another, that's not necessarily the case.  More likely, they are working independently, but coming to similar conclusions on how to keep the monopoly running smoothly.  I think most of the dirty work was done a long time ago.  Once you are on top, it's not that hard to stay there.  Today a powerful monopoly exists that exerts an iron grip on the field of medicine.  All these executives really have to do these days is continue to control the media and use the FDA to shut down any emerging threats.  This will allow the drug industry to control its market and make obscene profits while the researchers plod their way to a synthetic "patentable" drug.  Once the Holy Grail is finally attained, then all of today's painful chemo stuff will disappear into the history books and the medical breakthrough will guarantee a new round of obscene profits. These people don't feel a shred of guilt about keeping the system just the way it is.  These conscience-impaired executives have been looking the other way so long it has become second nature to them.  Locked away in their board rooms and steel glass towers, they don't have to get anywhere near the horrible suffering.  Instead they turn a blind eye to the pain and go about their business.   Another Look at Laetrile If I have learned nothing else on my journey, at least I have discovered Wikipedia isn't quite as reliable as I originally thought.  It crossed my mind that in my journey, I had ignored Laetrile based on Wikipedia's breezy dismissal.  Now I was suspicious to see if I missed something.  Consequently I decided to take another look at Laetrile.  People have referred to cancer as the disease caused by civilization.  Epidemiologists have noticed that many primitive people are cancer free, but somehow begin to get cancer when the white man appears... a small joke.  So cancer researchers identify places with low rates of cancer, then ask themselves what might explain the absence of cancer in the first place.  Research has shown that a tribe in the mountains of Pakistan known as the 'Hunza' never contract cancer of any kind as long as they stick to their native diet.  Apparently their diet is exceptionally high in both apricots and millet. However, once exposed to western diets, they become vulnerable.  Working off this clue, in 1952, a biochemist named Ernest Krebs postulated that cancer is caused by a deficiency of nitrilosides, another name for Vitamin B 17.  This substance occurs naturally in over twelve hundred foods and plants, including bitter almonds, millet, wheat grass, and lima beans. The diet of primitive man and most fruit-eating animals was very rich in nitrilosides. They regularly ate the seeds and kernels of all fruits, since these seeds are rich in protein, polyunsaturated fats, and other nutrients.  Furthermore, animals seem to instinctively seek out grasses and other plants which contain nitrilosides.  Krebs asked himself could there be anti-cancer agents in these substances?  Amygdalin, one of the most common nitrilosides, occurs in the pits and kernels of the seeds of many fruits and particularly in apricots.  Krebs developed a compound using Amygdalin from the apricot pit and called it "Laetrile".  Krebs began marketing Laetrile as vitamin B-17 as a way to get around the FDA's "safety and efficacy" requirements for new drugs.  Krebs made an interesting point.  He said if we can control scurvy by curing a vitamin C deficiency, perhaps it is possible to do the same for cancer today with B-17.  This rather clever suggestion allowed Laetrile to gain a wide usage - especially in California - before the inevitable FDA crackdown began.  Krebs, a colorful character, had all sorts of problems from that point on.  Just take my word for it. Meanwhile, the Laetrile movement gained a powerful adherent in Dr. Dean Burk.  Burk was a biochemist with a Ph.D. from Cornell Medical College who had joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1939 as a research fellow.  After ten years he was appointed as Head of NCI's Cytochemistry Section, which had a staff of four persons at the time of his retirement 25 years later. Burk did an experiment in which Laetrile was used to kill a tissue culture of cancer cells.  Burk reported that he could "see the cancer cells dying off like flies."   Burk's endorsement created a lot of curiosity.  Several labs decided to research this interesting new lead. One of those laboratories was located in New York city.  Its name was Memorial Sloan Kettering. Whistleblowers Something I have never come to grips with is how corporations blithely turn a blind eye to the damage they do.  We all know corruption exists, but it is typically so well disguised through media distortions that we never get angry enough to do something about it.  There are companies that knowingly do things that cause cancer.  We know that our food supply contains far too much sugar and dioxins. We know the asbestos manufacturers deceived the America public for decades.  We know from movies like A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich that companies knowingly pollute the soil and then spend millions of dollars trying to avoid paying penalties. Perhaps my all-time favorite story of how dangers to the public stay hidden involves Jeffrey Wigand, one of my personal heroes.  Wigand was the tobacco company insider who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco in the mid-1990s, exposing the lies we had all been told for decades about cigarettes.  He possessed Insider Information that the cigarette industry had possession of research that proved nicotine was addictive, but then pretended to the world it wasn’t. Formerly a research scientist for Brown & Williamson, Wigand revealed that cigarette companies were consciously trying to get us hooked on nicotine, despite tobacco executives' public statements to the contrary. What's more, Wigand told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes that his former colleagues knew all along that their tobacco products contained additives that increased the danger of developing diseases.  Take a guess which 'disease' in particular Wigand was referring to.   Wigand decided the public deserved to know.  At great personal risk and despite tremendous harassment from Big Tobacco, Wigand went on 60 Minutes and told his story.  The tobacco has never been the same since.  Dr. Wigand was the man who singlehandedly brought Big Tobacco to its knees.  So what is my point?  I personally do not understand how rich and powerful people think.  How can any executive know his company is polluting the soil or putting out a product like cigarettes with the complete knowledge that it is making people sick and live with themselves? And yet thanks to Jeffrey Wigand, we have indisputable evidence that powerful people have no conscience whatsoever about hurting us for their own gain and lying about it.   Here is an interesting quote attributed to Dr. Dean Burk, the NCI biochemist who never wavered in his support of Laetrile: "It's time you learned the facts of life. You see, there are really only two kinds of people in the world, the eaters and the eaten. You just have to make up your mind which group you're going to be in.  When you have the power, you don't have to tell the truth. That's a rule that's been working in this world for generations.  And there are a great many people who don't tell the truth when they are in power in administrative positions."   Memorial Sloan Kettering "These conscience-impaired executives have been looking the other way so long it has become second nature to them."  Thanks Ralph Moss, another whistle blower, I ran across a remarkable story about board room shenanigans in the cancer industry that suggest further corruption. Moss pulled back the curtain and gave us all an Insider's Look at how powerful people treat a serious threat to their Cancer Empire. This article was written by James Jaeger of the Jaeger Research Institute.  Dr. Jaeger relied on Ralph Moss for much of the remarkable insider accounts. Please keep in mind this is a very long and complex story in its original form.  I have therefore condensed the story.  Nevertheless, I thoroughly recommend to anyone who is interested that they read the complete account.  Laetrile: The Suppressed Cure for Cancer, By James Jaeger The longest and most famous Laetrile tests ever performed were run for nearly five years at America's most prestigious cancer research center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering (MSK) Laetrile was meticulously tested under the direction of Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura. As the senior laboratory researcher there, with over 60 years of experience, Dr. Sugiura had earned the highest respect for his knowledge and integrity.  Few, if any, names in cancer research are as widely known a Kanematsu Sugiura’s.  Possibly the high regard in which his work is held is best characterized by a comment made to me (Jaeger) by a visiting investigator in cancer research from Russia.  The Russian said, "When Dr. Sugiura publishes, we know we don’t have to repeat the study, for we would obtain the same results he has reported." In a science laboratory, where truth is sought to the exclusion of all else, Sugiura would have been the perfect man for this test. For the purposes of Sloan-Kettering, however, he was the worst possible choice. The official report prepared by Sugiura stated:  The results clearly show that Amygdalin significantly inhibits the appearance of lung metastases in mice bearing spontaneous mammary tumors and increases significantly the inhibition of the growth of the primary tumors  Laetrile also seemed to prevent slightly the appearance of new tumors  The improvement of health and appearance of the treated animals in comparison to controls is always a common observation  Dr. Sugiura has never observed complete regression of these tumors on all his cosmic experience with other chemotherapeutic agents. The board of directors at Sloan-Kettering is virtually controlled by corporate executives representing the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies. Most of that control is held by the Rockefeller dynasty and their cartel partners. At the time of the Sugiura tests, there were three Rockefellers sitting on the board plus more than a dozen men whose companies were within the Rockefeller financial orbit. The history of how the Rockefellers became involved in the pharmaceutical industry began when John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and his son, J.D., II, began donating to Memorial Hospital in 1927. They also gave a full block of land on which the new hospital was built in the 1930’s. Nothing was given without something to be received. In this case, it was control over one of the great medical centers of the world. How that happened was described by Ralph Moss, former Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Sloan-Kettering. Speaking of the expansion of Sloan-Kettering after World War II, Moss wrote: The composition of the board of trustees at that time reveals a kind of balance of power, with the Rockefellers and their allies in overall control, but with those representing the Morgan interests assuming many positions of power. From this period forward the world’s largest private cancer center was ruled by what looks like a consortium of Wall Street’s top banks and corporations. By the mid 1960’s, the MSKCC board had begun to take on a rather uniform appearance. What stood out was that many of its leading members were individuals whose corporations stood to loose or gain a great deal of money, depending on the outcome of the "cancer war." With this background in mind, it should come as no surprise to learn that Sugiura’s findings did not please his employer. What goes on inside the laboratories is generally of little interest to board members. It is assumed that, whatever it is, it will result in a new patented drug that will keep the cash flow moving in their direction. They were slow to pick up on the implications of Sugiura’s work but, when they did figure it out, all hell broke lose in the board room.  If a cure for cancer were to be found in an extract from the lowly apricot seed, it would be a terrible economic blow to the cancer-drug industry. As it turned out, several other researchers had already duplicated Sugiura’s experiments and had obtained essentially the same positive results.  One was Dr. Elizabeth Stockert and another was Dr. Lloyd Schloen. Both were biochemists at Sloan-Kettering when they did the work. Schloen had gone so far as to add proteolytic enzymes to the injections - as is commonly done by Laetrile doctors - and reported a 100% cure rate among his Swiss albino mice!  Rick Archer's Note:   The executives were not happy with Sugiura.  They would have preferred let the furor die down and move on to something else.  However, as the media debated the contradiction between the leaked findings and the official stance, MSK was forced to begin another round of testing.  It was time to put Pandora back in her box. That was not the result the executives wanted. In fact, it was downright embarrassing. These broadsides became a source of embarrassment to the administrators who were anxious to close the book on the subject and let it fade from public attention. One of the most outspoken proponents of this view was Benno Schmidt, Sloan-Kettering’s Vice Chairman. Schmidt was an investment banker with powerful connections in all the right places. He was a close friend of Laurance Rockefeller, a member of SK’s board of managers, and Chairman of President Carter’s National panel of Consultants on the Conquest of cancer. That is the group that dreamed up the so-called "war on cancer" which turned out to be primarily a means for channeling billions of tax dollars into research centers such as Sloan-Kettering. To Schmidt, the only purpose of testing Laetrile was to convince the public that it doesn’t work. Whether it might work or not was unimportant. This reality was brought to light quite accidentally, no doubt, in an interview with Dr. Martin that appeared in the December 23, 1977, issue of Science.  When the reporter asked Dr. Martin if the Sloan-Kettering tests were aimed primarily at scientists, he replied: "Nonsense. Of course this was done to help people like [Benno] Schmidt and congressmen answer the laetrilists." Not to advance science, not to test a possible cancer cure, not to find truth, but to "answer the laetrilists"! In a statement carried in the August 11, 1975, issue of Medical World News, Schmidt said: "Clinical trials? No way! There’s no way, I believe, that they can convince the people at Sloan-Kettering there’s any basis for going further." Dr. Daniel S. Martin at the Catholic Medical Center in Queens, New York, had previously failed to obtain positive results with Laetrile, but had not used the same protocol as Sugiura. To overcome this problem, Sugiura was asked to participate in a second series of tests by Martin, which he did.  This time, however, the results were in favor of Laetrile. Now, however, Martin made a complicated clinical maneuver that virtually guaranteed the negative result he was looking for. By visual examination, there were twice as many new tumors in mice that did not receive Laetrile than in those that did. The next step in the Sugiura protocol would have been to use a microscope to examine the lung tissue (which is where the cancer had been located) to measure the extent of tumor growth at the end of the experiment. Martin, however, refused to accept either visual or microscope examination and insisted instead that a process be used called bioassay. In bioassay, the mouse’s lung tissue was shredded and then injected into two other mice. If cancer developed in either of them, it was assumed that the injected tissue was cancerous. This cleared away all the variances between great improvement, small improvement, or no improvement at all. No matter how much the cancer might have been weakened, no matter that it might be in the process of being destroyed altogether by Laetrile, so long as there were any cancer cells left for transfer to the living mice, it was called a failure. Since the original mice were sacrificed before the Laetrile had a long-term chance to do its work, it was assured that virtually all of them no matter how improved they may be, would still have at least some cancer cells.  Therefore, they all would be classified as failures for Laetrile. By this method, Dr. Martin was able to announce with a straight face that there was no difference between the treated and the control animals. Once again, science had been used to conceal the truth. By this time, a group of employees at Sloan-Kettering became angered over the way their top management was attempting to cover up Sugiura’s findings. They began to circulate a series of open letters to the public under the name Second Opinion. The identities of the authors were not known, but it was obvious from the data they released that they were well connected within the organization. Photocopies of important internal memos -even copies of Sugiura’s laboratory notes - were sent to Laetrile advocates and to selected members of the press.  The furor caused by publication of Second Opinion forced the strategists to keep the book open a little longer and to assume the stance of fairness and open-mindedness.  And what could be more fair than another test? This new round of testing came back in favor of Sugiura.  However, in a situation darkly reminiscent of the 1972 Olympics where the Russians got three chances to win the basketball game, MSK kept organizing more tests until they got the answer they wanted. With this newest result, Sugiura was vindicated at last. The casual observer might have concluded that the issue was finally settled. But the casual observer might have been wrong. There was too much at stake here to simply jump over the net and congratulate the victorious opponent.  It was a case of "Damn it all. Let’s play another round, and another, and another until the proper side wins." The Jaeger Report suggest Suguira won the next round as well.  The tally at the end of the test showed that the Laetrile-treated mice had less than half the number of tumors as the controls. Once again, Sugiura had been proven correct. Another round was scheduled.  This third test had some serious lab irregularities that resulted in a very strange test result.  It is very complicated, so I will simply the results favored that anti-Laetrile side. "Results from the experiment do not confirm the earlier positive findings of Sugiura." Sugiura vigorously opposed the result.  He said the test was rigged.  Dr. Sugiura was incensed at the audacity of releasing blatantly impossible statistics. He said: "There’s something funny here. The small tumors stopped growing 40% of the time in the saline control group and only 27% of the time in the treated group. We people in chemotherapy use saline solution because it does not affect tumor growth. Now this happens. They must not forget to mention that there was more stoppage in the controls than in the treated!   I won’t give in to this!" But no one listened to him.  Now that MSK finally had the result it wanted, it scheduled a news conference. On June 15, 1977, a news conference was called at Sloan-Kettering to announce the conclusion of the Laetrile trials. All of the key players were in the room: Dr. Robert Good, Director and President of the Center; Dr. C. Chester Stock, vice president; Dr. Daniel Martin, from the Catholic Medical Center; and seven others including Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura who had been invited to attend but not to participate. Dr. Good began the conference by reading aloud the press release which said that, after exhaustive and carefully controlled testing: "Laetrile was found to possess neither preventive, nor tumor-regressant, nor anti metastatic, nor curative anti-cancer activity". After Dr. Good was finished, the floor was opened to questions from the media.  "Dr. Sugiura," someone shouted out suddenly. "Do you stick by your belief that Laetrile stops the spread of cancer?" The television cameras quickly turned to Sugiura for his reply. A hush fell across the room. Sugiura looked at the reporter and replied in a loud, clear voice: "I stick!" Sugiura's defiance went for naught.  Laetrile's "failure" according to MSK was the feed that was carried on nationwide television that evening. One month later, July 1977, Dr. Lewis Thomas, President of Sloan-Kettering, appeared before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, which was under the chairmanship of Senator Edward Kennedy. This is what Lewis Thomas said: There is not a particle of scientific evidence to suggest that Laetrile possesses any anti-cancer properties at all. I am not aware of any scientific papers, published in any of the world’s accredited journals of medical science, presenting data in support of the substance, although there are several papers, one of these recently made public by Sloan Kettering Institute, reporting the complete absence of anti-cancer properties in a variety of experimental animals. In the following months, the directors and officers at Sloan-Kettering continued to denigrate Sugiura’s findings, claiming that no one else had ever been able to duplicate them. In other words, they lied. Not only did they lie, they did so on a subject that directly effects the lives of hundreds of thousands of cancer victims each year. It is not an exaggeration to say that a million people have needlessly done to their death as a result of that lie. Ralph Moss was the Assistant Director of Public Affairs at the Sloan-Kettering during most of these events. In fact, he was the one who was required to write the press release claiming that Laetrile was ineffective. But Moss was secretly one of the leaders in the Second Opinion underground and had previously helped to get the truth out to the rest of the world. Finally, in November of 1977, Moss decided to "surface" and go public. He called a press conference of his own and, before a battery of reporters and cameramen, charged that Sloan-Kettering officials had engineered a massive cover-up. Moss provided supporting documents and named names. Not surprisingly, Moss was fired the next day. What was the official justification?  As Moss explained it: "I had failed to carry out my most basic responsibilities - in other words, to collaborate in falsifying evidence."   [Side Note: Ralph Moss reported that about 20 Laetrile experiments completed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center produced positive results  ( Source )]   Excerpts from a 1994 Interview with Ralph Moss Concerning MSK and Laetrile Twenty years ago I was hired at Memorial Sloane Kettering (MSK) cancer centre in New York as the science writer, later promoted to assistant director of public affairs.  Shortly after I went to work there, I went to visit an elderly Japanese scientist, Kanematsu Sugiura, who astonished me when he told me he was working on Laetrile (B17). At the time Laetrile was the most controversial thing in cancer, reputed to be a cure for cancer. We in public affairs were giving out statements that Laetrile was worthless, it was quackery, and people should not abandon proven therapies. I assumed our own press releases were correct, so I was astonished that our most distinguished scientist would even be bothering with something as worthless as Laetrile.  I said, "Dr. Sugiura, why are you doing this if it does not work?" He took down lab books and showed me that in fact Laetrile is dramatically effective in stopping the spread of cancer. The animals were genetically programmed to get breast cancer and about 80 - 90% of them normally get spread of the cancer from the breast to the lungs which is a common route in humans, also for how people die of breast cancer.  Instead, when they gave the animals Laetrile by injection, only 10-20% of them got lung metastases. And these facts were verified by many people, including the pathology department. So this is verified, that Laetrile can have this positive effect? We were finding this and yet we in public affairs were told to issue statements to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically, and as the years went by I got more wrapped up in this thing.  Three years later I finally couldn't take it anymore and said all this in my own press conference, and was fired the next day, "for failing to carry out his most basic job responsibility" -- i.e. to lie to the public what goes on in cancer research. How can these people justify this in their own minds? Basically the attitude was best expressed by Lewis Thomas, the president of the centre, who told my boss, as he would not see me, "I am not going to die on the barricades for Laetrile. It is not a cure, it is only a palliative, (meaning it relieves pain and stops the spread of cancer), if it were a cure it might be a different story, but I am not going to give up my career, to die on the barricades". That's how they justified it in their own minds. I could not do that, nor could Dr Sugiura, who never renounced the results of his own studies, despite the fact they put enormous pressure on him to do so. [Read the Complete Interview: World Without Cancer]   The Faceless Conspiracy I am going to leave you with a thought.  We already know what the face of evil looks like.  It is the face of Adolph Hitler who murdered 6 million Jews.  It is the face of Joseph Stalin who caused the death of 20 million Russians.  It is the face of Saddam Hussein who murdered his own people, started senseless wars and torched the Kuwaiti oil fields out of spite when he lost the Gulf War. But there is no face for the evil of the cancer industry.   We can't point to this guy or that guy and say, "It's him, that's the guy who did it."  Furthermore, since people die of cancer one at a time and in different places, we don't have dramatic gruesome pictures of bodies stacked on top of each other and pictures of mass graves.  Unless we work in a hospital, most of us probably don't even realize that people are dying right and left.  However, if you piled the bodies of all the people who die of cancer every day here in America, the death pit would look just as full.  Of course these people were not deliberately murdered, but if it is true that potential cures for cancer were deliberately sabotaged, there is a form of responsibility here.  I say look at the numbers.  In 1900, 1 in 20 people died of cancer.  That's the same time the money people got involved in the medical industry.  Under their century of stewardship, the incidence of cancer has risen to 1 in 2.  In 2013, 600,000 Americans are slated to die of cancer.  The World Health Organization says that number expands to 8 million deaths worldwide.  Although it is true there are some promising breakthroughs in mainstream cancer research on the horizon, we have been waiting now for a ridiculous number of years without answers.  In the meantime, somebody - we really don't know who - has managed to sweep at least three promising cures under the carpet. I have presented anecdotal evidence that at least 3 promising "alternative cures" offered potential breakthroughs as far back as 1930 (Essiac), 1945 (Gerson), and 1970 (Laetrile).  One can only wonder who made the decision to curtail these possibilities and what their motives were.  Now immediately the protest begins. "No one ever proved that stuff worked!"   I agree, that's true. But at the same time, at least in the case of Essiac, Hoxsey and Gerson, there were people STANDING who should have been dead and their death-defying presence was ignored.  And if you believe Ralph Moss, you have Dr Sugiura, the top researcher at Sloan Kettering who went to his grave convinced that Laetrile really did shrink tumors. Furthermore, what would have happened if science had put some real muscle into researching any of these three cures?  Now immediately the protest begins again.  "We tested every one of those cures and none of them worked!" There's only one problem with this argument.  Ralph Moss went on record to explain that Memorial Sloan Kettering deliberately falsified its data with Laetrile.  Moss added that Dr. Sugiura, a top researcher in MSK's own clinic, never backed down from his conclusion that Laetrile held promise.  And why would MSK go to war with its own respected researcher?  Unfortunately, if an effective cancer treatment or cure was found in the lowly apricot seed, it would spell economic disaster for the cancer industry.  So what did MSK do?  They handed Ralph Moss phony press releases that said the opposite of what their top scientist had discovered.  And when Moss spoke up, they fired him for his impertinence. If that isn't evidence of a conspiracy, then what would you call it?   MSK's questionable behavior casts doubt on the earlier research done at Sloan Kettering regarding Essiac and Gerson.  Was there a similar whitewash? At this point, it is very difficult to believe that MSK gave Essiac and Gerson a fair shake.  So what we are left with are at least three promising alternative cures that could have been nurtured and explored, but instead were sabotaged and suppressed.  I consider this shameful.  Rather than explore two paths to a cure - natural and synthetic - we are left with what I consider the less desirable path.  If given a choice, I think most people would prefer to find the cure in nature.  Women would choose a bitter herbal tea or a strict diet or ground up apricot seeds over a mastectomy any day of the week.  Let's fantasize a bit.  Let's pretend we hit the jackpot with Essiac all the way back in 1930.  Half a million cancer deaths in America per year could possibly have been avoided.  I know this is far-fetched, but bear with me. 80 years times 500,000 deaths per year = 40 million lives. As you can see in the picture, Max Gerson's daughter Charlotte came up with a similar number.  Of course the cancer victims were not deliberately let to die, but nevertheless every year the bodies continue to pile up.  Now we are starting to talk Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam body counts all rolled into one.  The utter magnitude of the damage caused by the closed-minded attitude against alternative cures over the past century is hard to accept. For the good of mankind, I hope the drug industry finds that synthetic, patentable cure for cancer soon.  But in the meantime, it feels to me there is a real sickness inside the medical field that probably isn't going away any time in the near future.  Considering the medical field is dedicated to healing and care, you have to wonder about the seeming lack of compassion on the part of the nameless faceless people who have been looking the other way for over a century.   "Behind every great fortune is a crime" - Honore de Balzac "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" - Edmund Burke "During the process of applying for this job, I had to submit to interviews with all the leaders of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).  I well remember meeting with Lewis Thomas, MD, president of MSKCC, who stared at me vacantly through a cloud of pipe smoke, as remote as the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.   Perhaps he was thinking about his next essay for the New England Journal of Medicine, soon to be published as the award-winning book, 'Lives of a Cell'.  Whatever the reason for his remoteness, my interview with him (and every subsequent encounter) was both mystifying and intimidating."  - quotation from Ralph Moss, recalling Lewis Thomas "I am not going to die on the barricades for Laetrile.  It is not a cure, it is only a palliative (meaning it relieves pain and stops the spread of cancer).  If it were a cure, this might be a different story, but I am not going to give up my career to die on the barricades." Lewis Thomas, President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering  (quotation from Ralph Moss) NEW YORK (Dec 4, 1993) - Lewis Thomas, 1913-1993, the charismatic physician whose ruminations on biology won him acclaim as the "poet laureate of 20th-century medical science," died yesterday of cancer, a disease he spent his life studying and fighting.  From 1973 to 1980, Dr. Thomas was president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, one of the world's leading cancer institutions. Rick Archer July 2013 Send comments to: dance@ssqq.com I will honor any request to keep your comments private.

Rick Archer's Note:  I will simply say this - If you thought this story was interesting, the next one is a blockbuster.

Chapter Three -  Burzynski

Correspondence

"Rick, I was very intrigued by your article(s) on the cancer.  I have believed this for a long time also - it's a multi-billion dollar business, so why present a cure?

I have a good friend who about 20 years ago told me that her father was told he had just a few months to live but would live longer if he took the chemo etc.  He told them no and went to the health food store and got some "tea" which I am assuming was probably some sort of green tea.  He drank it every day (not sure how many times) and about a year later, he went back to the doctor and .... cancer-free! 

The doctor kept drilling him about what he had done and when he told him, the doctor just kept asking him what else he had done.  He repeated the "tea" story.  The doctor repeatedly said that it could not have had anything to do with it.  When the doctor left the room, the technician told her dad that he did know what tea he was talking about but that because they were in a multi-million dollar business, they were not allowed to tell patients about it.  A similar thing happened to my same friend's uncle and he drank the tea and they are both alive and well today.  I have heard stories where the cancer places tell patients that if they take "this" or "that" from other places, they will not treat them with chemo. It is unbelievable ... but very true."