We won the war!!! Why are we still fighting??

Any of us but the youngest are aware of the War on Cancer. But were we aware of this early battle?

CANCER RESEARCH

HEARINGS

Before a

Subcommittee of the

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

SEVENTY-NINTH CONGRESS

Second Session

on

S. 1875

A Bill to authorize and request the President to undertake to mobilize at some convenient place in the United States an adequate number of the World’s Outstanding Experts, and coordinate and utilize their services in a Supreme Effort to Discover Means of Curing and Preventing Cancer.

July 1, 2, and 3, 1946

The early post-war hearings brought to light the work of Max Gerson, MD. Beginning with himself and continuing with his patients, Dr. Gerson treated primarily the untreatable, and very often brought about healing where none was thought (by the medical establishment) possible.

As a young medical student in Germany, Gerson suffered from severe migraine headaches. Others told him they were untreatable and that he should learn to live with them. But Gerson found that by modifying his diet to avoid salt, fat, and pickled and smoked foods and including fresh fruits and vegetables, he could control his migraines. Soon he was sharing his “migraine diet” with his patients.

One of Dr. Gerson’s patients insisted that the migraine diet had cured his skin tuberculosis. Under the sponsorship of a world famous thoracic surgeon and tuberculosis authority, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Dr. Gerson validated the value of his diet. In clinical trials, 446 of 450 TB patients achieved lasting cures. World War II forced Dr. Gerson to leave Germany in 1933.

Among Dr. Gerson’s better known patients were the wife (lung cancer) of Albert Schweitzer, M.D., and later Dr. Schweitzer himself (diabetes). Dr. Gerson demonstrated fifty recovered (terminal!) cancer patients before the Senate Subcommittee hearings on cancer and continued to publish the results of his work.

Of course, Dr. Gerson was hailed as a hero by the US medical establishment, right? Not on your life! Dr. Gerson said it much more politely than I would have:

“The history of medicine reveals that reformers who bring new ideas into the general thinking and practice of physicians have a difficult time. Very few physicians like to change their medical approaches. The majority practice what they have learned and apply the treatment of the textbooks more or less automatically. Right from the beginning, the physician wants most of all to help the patient. He hesitates to take risks for his patients by applying a not-recognized treatment. The history of science, art and technology shows that each new idea has been fought bitterly; most of the reformers did not live to see the realization of their ideas.

“This is one of the reasons why developments in culture made very slow progress all through the centuries; they were restrained forcefully.

“I was in a more favorable position. Ninety to ninety-five per cent of my patients were far advanced (terminal) cases without any risk to take; either all recognized treatments had failed or the patients were inoperable from the beginning. It takes some time to acquire enough experience to see progress, results or failures.”¹

Sixty years ago, Dr. Gerson had recognized that we faced the choice to die of cancer or make fundamental changes of life and nutrition. His counsel was

“We will again need real housewives, not eager to save kitchen time, but homemakers who will devote their lives to the benefit of all, especially the task of developing and maintaining a healthy family. Babies would no longer be fed by a formula but would have the natural mother’s milk; they would grow up without being afflicted with a fatal disease such as leukemia, and without being mentally retarded, both conditions which are increasing rapidly at present.

“For the future of coming generations, I think it is high time that we change our agriculture and food preservation methods. Otherwise, we will have to increase our institutions for mental patients yearly, and we will see the hospitals overcrowded with degenerative diseases even more rapidly and in greater number than the hospitals themselves can be enlarged. Seventy years ago, leukemia was unknown in the United States. Fifty years ago, lung cancer was so seldom observed in clinics and autopsies that every case was worthy of publication. But today – what a change for the worse.” ²

How has history treated the contributions of Dr. Gerson to our wellness? Sixty-one years after presenting his results to the US Senate (and the world), and forty-seven years after his death, he is ignored by the medical establishment. Although his successors at The Gerson Institute continue to deal effectively with terminal cancer (unless the liver has ceased to function), their greatest enemies are the US society of physicians and the apathetic response of patients – the treatment is rigorous enough that too many give up and die rather than endure and live. We continue to throw billions of dollars at cancer with negligible change in mortality rate – for example the recently voter-approved three billion dollar boondoggle in Texas to set up yet another government bureaucracy to soak up resources that have far better uses enriching our lives. The cure for cancer is staring us in the mouth; all we have to do is live the way our bodies were designed for us to live and most of the “diseases of affluence” will go away. But a typical response to this wonderfully liberating news is that of a widow I had met: when she overheard me to suggest that a change of diet could help prevent disease such as cancer, I was perceived as accusing her of murdering her late husband, who had died of cancer.

---------------------------------------------

1. Max Gerson, M.D., A Cancer Therapy, The Gerson Institute, Bonita, CA: 1958, p xiv

2. Ibid., p4