The Gerson therapy, CANCER RESEARCH UK correctly informs us, is an alternative therapy which means it is usually used instead of conventional cancer treatment. It aims to rid the body of toxins and strengthen the body’s immune system. There is no scientific evidence that Gerson therapy can treat cancer. In fact, in certain situations Gerson therapy can be very harmful to your health. The diet should not be used instead of conventional cancer treatment.
I would go two steps further:
- I would avoid the treatment at all cost.
- I would distrust anyone who promotes it.
Like this article about Gerson therapy and its coffee enemas, for instance:
START OF QUOTE
…The Gerson Institute, along with many other high-profile alternative practitioners, prescribes coffee enemas to their patients up to five times per day in order to assist the liver in its mammoth task of detoxification and encouraging healthy bile production, which can further assist in breaking down toxins and cleansing the body.
It might sound a little wacky (and more than a little uncomfortable!), but the continuing popularity of coffee enemas suggests that it may be worth giving them a go if you’re suffering from stubborn health problems or planning on starting a detox diet…
Here are some of the reasons why you might want to try a coffee enema for yourself:
Eliminate toxins
You’ve probably already guessed by now that helping the liver to eliminate toxins from the body is the main reason why coffee enemas are so popular these days. The fact is, we live in an increasingly toxic world, surrounding ourselves in machines that spew forth toxic fumes, food that introduces increasing levels of harmful chemicals and excesses of vitamins and minerals, and chronic stress which tricks our bodies into retaining toxins rather than expelling them.
Eventually, something’s gotta give — it’s either your liver or the toxins (hint: it’s usually the liver). Liver failure is often accompanied by other serious health conditions, with anything from diabetes to cancer as possible outcomes. Coffee enemas bypass the digestive acids of the stomach, thereby delivering higher concentrations of caffeine to the colonic walls and stimulating greater bile secretion. This greatly helps the liver break down and eliminate toxins, a process which is marked by reduced gastrointestinal and liver pain, and a clearing of those Herxheimer symptoms.
Promote a healthy digestive tract
Over time, our digestive system can start to get a bit “down in the dumps” (pun intended). Bits of food waste can accumulate in the colon, along with toxins and other harmful compounds that stick to the colonic walls and can begin to degrade the overall health of your digestive tract. Coffee enemas, by stimulating bile secretion, help to purge the colon of that accumulated debris. This is helped by the physical flushing of fluids through the colon in the opposite direction, along with the enema encouraging greater peristalsis. Peristalsis refers to the wave-like contractions that help to move your food from one end to the other. More peristalsis means more movement of food wastes… and toxins.
Ease bloating and stomach pain
Bloating, gas and stomach pain are usually signs that your digestive system is underperforming. This is often due to a lack of bile secretion, poor food transit time and an overloaded liver… all of which are improved via coffee enemas! By using coffee enemas, you’re likely to see a marked improvement in your digestive issues, with less bloating, upset stomachs and gas.
Improve mood
Hundreds of recent studies have found a strong link between the gut and our mood. That link, referred to as the gut-brain axis, proves that a healthy gut is associated with a healthy state of mind. When your digestive system (and therefore gut) is overloaded with toxins, you’re bound to feel depressed and constantly suffering from negative emotions. Clearing up your toxin problem with a regular coffee enema should help to improve your mood and alleviate depression.
Treat candida
Candida is one of the biggest problems facing Americans today. It’s a stubborn form of yeast that resides in the gut (along with the mouth and, er, lady bits) and wreaks havoc with your immune system. Not only that, candida overgrowth contributes to insatiable sugar cravings, which in turn causes the overgrowth to establish itself more firmly.
Coffee enemas may selectively flush out candida overgrowths in the gut while preserving the beneficial bacteria that we rely on to break down food and support healthy immune function. Many people report a significant reduction in their symptoms of candida with regular coffee enema flushing.
END OF QUOTE
The article where these quotes come from is entitled ‘5 REASONS TO TRY COFFEE ENEMAS’. I think it is only fair for me to respond by writing a (much shorter) comment entitled
5 REASONS TO AVOID COFFEE ENEMAS
- None of the claims made above is supported by good evidence.
- Enemas with or without coffee are far from pleasant.
- Enemas are not risk-free.
- Such treatments cost money which could be used for something sensible.
- Coffee taken via the other end of the digestive tract is a much nicer experience.
Of all organisations to use as a reputable source of information about an alternative cancer therapy, you have chosen Cancer Research UK. You may as well have asked Monsanto to give an unbiased write-up about Roundup, about which incidentally the truth of its carcinogenic nature has recently been revealed after many years of deceit and corruption.
Perhaps your readers may be interested to learn more about Cancer Research UK and its relationship with Big Pharma at:
http://www.chriswoollamshealthwatch.com/blog/cancer-research-uk-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing/1012 Because of their relationship and funding by Big Pharma, of course, Cancer Research UK will not support natural treatments.
As for attacking the Gerson Therapy, which has been so successful in curing cancer over the decades, does your bias know no bounds? Why not tell us instead the facts about the success (or lack of it) of conventional Big Pharma treatments on cancer? That would be embarrassing, though.
Again, perhaps your readers might like to learn a bit about the Gerson Therapy at:
https://www.cancertutor.com/gerson-therapy/
“Gerson Therapy… has been so successful in curing cancer over the decades…”
ANY EVIDENCE FOR THIS STATEMENT?
Any evidence chemo saves lives? I work In hospitals and I’ve seen hundreds of patients die from the chemo side effects! I never saw people die from eating a vegetarian/ Gerson diet!!!
yes, plenty – go on Medline and find it yourself.
It is sad that even with a PhD, you seem short of being able to understand primary medical literature findings and their parametric implications.
what about PhD + MD
Arul said:
Oh? What precisely does Prof Ernst not understand?
@Edzard on Friday 11 May 2018 at 08:07 said:
“yes, plenty – go on Medline and find it yourself.”
I type:
“pubmed chemotherapy survival rates”
Into Google, and the third entry down (the first with layman’s terms in its title: “Does chemotherapy improve survival in advanced breast cancer“ – is this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246459/
Granted that it is 1977 and is obsolete (1967 – 1977) by now, hence its 3% 10 year survival for stage IV breast cancer, is irrelevant.
So I google:
pubmed chemotherapy breast cancer 10 year survival
The same link appears at No. 1 spot, but at No. 3 is this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4845895/
I.e. “10-year Outcomes of Breast Cancer Patients with Cytologically Confirmed Axillary Lymph Node Metastases and Pathologic Complete Response after Primary Systemic Chemotherapy”
This, “Primary systemic therapy for operable breast cancer–10-year survival…“ is at No. 5 spot:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9376273:
The abstract contains “…appalling prognosis…” which is cherry-picked, but what is the rest of it saying?
At No.7 (“Evaluation of the Survival Benefit of Different Chemotherapy Regimens”) is this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600692/
At the bottom of the first page is this promising title “Cancer treatment and survivorship statistics, 2016” here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21349
From figure 3, 67% of all-women with breast cancer at all-sites of median age 65, survive 5 years relatively. There are no 10 year survival rates.
Help? Where can I find 10 year survival rates for breast cancer? (apart from the No. 1 Google hit above)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=cancer+survival+rates
I was diagnosed with 4th Stage Ovarian Cancer in 2015, underwent 24 chemo treatments. My cancer has reoccurred three times. I have been doing the Gerson Therapy for 4 months and my Ca-125 cancer marker has already dropped double. I feel better than I have in the past 4 years, I have lost weight, and I am still working full time at my job. I am thriving by eating a organic, healthy vegetarian diet. My Gerson Practioner is very supportive and knowledgeable, and adjusts my diet regimen according to my lab work which I have done every 6 weeks. I have seen more positive results on my Gerson Therapy Support Group then on Medline. Chemo is toxic and poison. I have been there and done that, with no results. Nothing in your article will make me change my mind, and go back to chemo.
“Nothing in your article will make me change my mind, and go back to chemo.”
you probably mean: No evidence will make me change my mind, and go back to chemo.
I do wish you luck!
Vanessa,
When you say that you have had no results from chemo, what exactly do you mean? If this is your third recurrence, that means that it has been brought under control three times in the past. I am presuming that you had standard surgery the first time round (total abdominal hysterectomy, bilateral salpingooopherectomy and omentectomy) in combination with chemotherapy (probably paclitaxel and carboplatin). How was the cancer treated the first and second time it recurred, and what sort of response did you have?
It is rather difficult to know how to interpret your story without this information.
It is obvious to anyone that Vanessa is talking about her Ca-125 cancer marker, which continued to rise on Chemo and was going down on the Gerson Therapy. That is how Chemo wasn’t helping, what part of that can people not understand? Her test results to her are her evidence. And in spite of that evidence some would urger her to restart her chemo? is that an evidence based recommendation or an ideological one that is so committed to Chemo and big pharma that it is blind to evidence? I know someone who has undergone a similar experience with chemo with the same cancer. With numbers continuing to go up you are going to die. How is it out of the question to try anything else? The side affects of immunotherapy are horrid. Gerson isn’t easy or even at times pleasant but isn’t the truth in the numbers?
yes, but where are the numbers that suggest Gerson works for cancer?
@Edzard on Friday 08 March 2019 at 17:09 said:
“yes, but where are the numbers that suggest Gerson works for cancer?”
Here:
https://tratamenteanticancer.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/max-gerson-a-cancer-therapy-results-of-fifty-cases.pdf
you are a bit like a broken record;
have you started to learn about evidence yet?
obviously not!
SocialMedic,
“It is obvious to anyone that Vanessa is talking about her Ca-125 cancer marker, which continued to rise on Chemo and was going down on the Gerson Therapy. That is how Chemo wasn’t helping, what part of that can people not understand?”
It is not obvious to me. However, I am a clinical oncologist.
Indeed it is not at all clear to me what is going on here, which is why I feel that further information is required in order to interpret Vanessa’s story.
She has supplied the information that her cancer was diagnosed four years ago, and that she has had extensive conventional treatment, including 24 cycles of chemotherapy, which has put her into remission three times. She has been on Gerson treatment for 4 months, during which time “my Ca-125 cancer marker has already dropped double” by which I assume she means it has halved; she states that she is having it checked 6-weekly, which means that she has had two measurements since starting treatment. She also states that she has lost weight, though not how much, and we don’t know whether she was overweight or underweight to begin with, or indeed whether there have been any shifts in fluid balance to account for this change. As a general rule, weight loss is something that oncologists view with concern, though this depends on context. The improvement in her well-being, although important for her quality of life, is a less reliable marker of what is going on, as patients frequently report such improvements regardless, and in any case if she has recently stopped chemotherapy I would expect it to take three months or so for the side-effects to wear off.
Although CA-125 is useful as part of the clinical assessment of how ovarian cancer is doing it is by no means the whole story. CA-125 is not specific to ovarian cancer and can be affected by non-malignant inflammation within the abdomen. As tumours grow they frequently de-differentiate, which not only makes them more aggressive but can reduce their marker production. We have no information on what Vanessa’s CA-125 levels were, or whether they were showing an exponential rise (indicative of cancer progression) or a logarithmic fall (indicative of treatment response) as opposed to any other pattern of change.
In my experience patients tend to get fixated on month-by-month changes in tumour markers and lose sight of overall trends and indeed of other indicators. The aim of chemotherapy (or oncology treatment in general for ovarian cancer) is not to reduce the CA-125, it is to improve the well-being of the patient by controlling the cancer.
The only tumours where markers really do give an accurate picture of what is going on are germ-cell tumours. These can occur in the ovary (though not commonly) and they don’t make CA-125.
Vanessa says of chemotherapy:
“I have been there and done that, with no results.”
However, four years after diagnosis, and following treatment with chemotherapy, she is alive and well.
vegetarian diet and Gerson as a treatment for cancer are criminal neglect!
Get a grip you fool
such a bright comment; thanks
You’re a Big Pharma bought and sold ideologist!
are you sure?
Start with looking up cure rates for childhood leukaemias, Brian. All treated with chemotherapy. Then look up survival times for untreated cancers. Then look up Jess Ainscough and her mother, both Gerson enthusiasts, both dead as a result from cancers which stood a fair chance of being cured if conventional protocols had been applied.
No, but they die from cancer after not receiving life-prolonging chemotherapy.
Life saving chemotherapy? You mean the one with a 97% failure rate? Sounds wonderful.
if you are claiming that chemotherapy has a 97% failure rate, you should also tell us what evidence you have this to be true; please provide a link!
Chemo kills good cells as well as bad cells sometimes resulting in the death of patients, so does not always prolong it and makes that extra time if it works absolutely horrendous
. Had chemo have you??? Fool
Chemo is indeed a horrible experience and it can kill you. But the data is clear. Cancer kills you. Chemo is better than cancer.
Gerson claims to cure you by emptying out your bowels, including probiotics, food waste, and water. Bowel flora does not cause cancer and does not need to be removed. Gerson cannot save you, it actually can kill you, and it kills people all the time b
Katrina:
I have had chemo. I would disagree with almost everything you are saying here.
Christina:
Actually there is quite a bit of evidence that bowel flora contributes to the risk of many diseases, including malignancies, and quite possibly bacteria elsewhere in the body (there has been a lot of interest recently in Porphyromonas gingivalis). However, there are a lot of details to work out and as yet nobody knows what we should be doing about it (other than a sensible balanced diet and regular exercise). But I agree with everything you are saying about the Gerson diet. Indeed I have personally witnessed the harm it can do (though of course this is anecdotal).
This is just plain wrong.
The “97% failure rate” canard. Again.
My wif had breast cancer. It was treated with surgery. Surgery alone gave a 85% success rate in her case. She was advised to have local radiotherapy, increasing survival rates to 90% and adjunctive chemotherapy, raising things to 95%. So the chemotherapy and radiotherapy will each only help in 5% of such cases. “95% failure!” trumpet the fools. “Cut, poison, burn!”
We ignore them and listen instead to the experts like Dr Money-Kyrle.
“I never saw people die from eating a vegetarian/ Gerson diet!!!”
I have.
thank you; that needed saying!
AMEN! Big phrama only wants the $$$$ . and it is big $. They can’t make money on natural cures!!! Thank you for being brave enough to speak up and tell the TRUTH!!!!!
funny then that they DO make big money on ‘natural’ supplements etc.
If only there were ‘natural cures’…
Gerson don’t do treatment for free my sister has been quoted 5000 pound for a week’s treatment
Mary,
Most new cancer drugs are priced at around £5,000 per month. On the other hand the pharmaceutical companies only have a few years to recoup their research and development costs, and at least we know how effective they are. £5,000 a week sounds a lot of money for organically grown pressed fruit and vegetable juices, beans and coffee, particularly as the only evidence for any benefit comes from testimonials, dubious case histories and marketing spiel.
I’m sorry to hear that your sister is in this position. I hope she doesn’t turn her back on the NHS, which will continue to look after her even if they are not promising a cure.
Truth!!
You sound like a complete dolt.
So, I’m trying to figure out whether to use the Gerson method for my husband who just got diagnosed. And I came across this study that stating Gerson patients died so quickly, they had to discontinue their study. I want what is best for my husband…whatever that takes. I don’t think with this study I can say Gerson is best.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/gerson-therapy-vs-chemotherapy/
@Tina
You want to do the best for your husband, so take the advice of a proper, qualified oncologist. Gerson therapy is of zero value, despite what some deluded individuals say on this thread.
Please take a look at this Wikipedia entry: your husband would be well advised not to risk any of the treatments listed. (Gerson therapy comes under the heading ‘hybrid’).
I sincerely hope that your husband didn’t choose the Gerson programme and that he sought advice from a properly qualified oncologist. Hope he’s doing well.
AMEN!!!
@ Leonardo Davila
Amen to what? This thread is impossibly long to discover who you’re replying to via the indentations. Please indicate who your reply is intended for (@ name of person is the usual way to do this).
Ah, you have not read: A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer, Gerson published in 1958
Dr. Max Gerson: 50 Case Studies. Get the book! Shows the gradual decrease and elimination of cancer over the course of treatments on 50 patients including x Rays!
I prefer evidence to anecdote
@Edzard on Wednesday 13 February 2019 at 06:51 said:
“I prefer evidence to anecdote”
Then read the book.
This book shows how angels “helped and guided her through traumatic events, lead to a detailed description of what angels are like, the different types of angels, how they behave in interact with God and other angels as well as human beings, their role during our lives and after death.” Get the book!
I personally know two people who have cured themselves of cancer using guerson therapy on who had prostate cancer from jamaice and one who was a neuro surgeon living in cyprus.
I know someone who’s cancer disappeared without any treatment – same person?
SPONTANEOUS REMISSIONS ARE RARE BUT THEY EXIST.
Evidence:
1.Gerson M: A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and The Cure of Advanced Cancer by Diet Therapy. San Diego, Calif: The Gerson Institute, 2002.
2.Gerson C, Walker M: The Gerson Therapy: The Amazing Nutritional Program for Cancer and Other Illnesses. New York, NY: Kensington Publishing Corp, 2001.
3.Gerson M: Effects of a combined dietary regime on patients with malignant tumors. Exp Med Surg 7 (4): 299-317, illust, 1949.
4.Gerson M: Dietary considerations in malignant neoplastic disease: preliminary report. Rev Gastroenterol 12: 419-25, 1945. Also available onlineExit Disclaimer. Last accessed April 11, 2016.
5.Gerson M: The cure of advanced cancer by diet therapy: a summary of 30 years of clinical experimentation. Physiol Chem Phys 10 (5): 449-64, 1978.
6.Green S: A critique of the rationale for cancer treatment with coffee enemas and diet. JAMA 268 (22): 3224-7, 1992.
7.Brown BT: Treating cancer with coffee enemas and diet. JAMA 269 (13): 1635-6, 1993.
8.Cope FW: A medical application of the Ling association-induction hypothesis: the high potassium, low sodium diet of the Gerson cancer therapy. Physiol Chem Phys 10 (5): 465-8, 1978.
https://edzardernst.com/2012/11/what-is-and-what-isnt-clinical-evidence-and-why-is-the-distinction-important/
@Edzard on Tuesday 19 February 2019 at 07:19 said:
“https://edzardernst.com/2012/11/what-is-and-what-isnt-clinical-evidence-and-why-is-the-distinction-important/”
Mark Twain said “Facts are stubborn but statistics are more pliable.”
fact is that there is no evidence nor statistic to show Gerson works
@Edzard on Tuesday 19 February 2019 at 08:32 said:
“fact is that there is no evidence nor statistic to show Gerson works”
Or how about the next case of Mrs Beatrice Sharpe, (page 113), the fifth of the ten cases:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/1946_Testimony_ocr.pdf
you are hopeless!
Old-Bob,
I think we are all getting rather fed up with your nonsense and nit-picking, also with you bringing up the same discredited case histories over and over again, and your strange and rather meaningless ramblings concerning subjects that you clearly don’t understand. It doesn’t really make for very interesting reading. Unless you have anything sensible or new to contribute, I for one would appreciate it if you could stay silent.
Paper number 6 offered as evidence by Joe concludes “These facts make the rationales offered for coffee enemas and diets by proponents of the Gerson therapy impossible to accept.”
I helped a girlfriend with stage 3 rectal cancer back in 2016. the only option was surgery to remove the tumor, sew up the anus and install a colostomy bag. Although the doctor said eating an organic diet would not hurt her, they knew of no cancer cures from it. Less than 5 months later the tumor had disappeared , gone from the blood analysis and no surgeries needed. The doctors would not comment.
hey Dr Julian Money-Kyrle give us a “job security” perspective scientific evaluation of this case.
The simple fact that “oncologists” like you do not prescribe or not even care to understand how a vegetarian diet can help patients even on the same time with chemotherapy after you solemnly yeled the Hypocrite creed : let food be your medicine…..prove that the medicine today is an industry that protects from competition and you are not a doctor but a corporate troll that only do standardized medicine for profit.
Also to make sure my point is valid please explain why oncologists do not study any diet/nutrition courses in medical school? not part of curriculum? are you afraid the food pyramid will change again and got upside down . We never forget “margarine is better than fat “and “best doctors smoke camel” your industry lost credibility long ago.
1. I try to keep any discussion that I am part of civil; trading insults does not form part of any serious discourse.
2. I have addressed your queries in comments elsewhere if you would take the trouble to read them.
3. The “Best doctors smoke camel” slogan was from 1949, two years before Doll and PEto started their study showing the link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
Dr Julian – you may try to keep your comments civil (as I do) but we are in the minority: the tenet of this blog is to ridicule and denigrate those who support and use CAM. A scan of comments over many years will confirm this, and pleas for moderation have been made in the past ( I hardly bother now)
I have no comment on the discourse between you and the poster, it is a general observation. Maybe the Professor could invoke another top banner – blue is a nice healing colour?- stating no insults allowed on my blog.
Prof Michael Gearin Tosh, Living Proof, read his book – science said his cancer could not be cured and he’d be dead inside 2 years even with chemo, it was a blood cancer, and gerson did not even claim to be successful with that but he did it anyway and taught on at Oxford till his retirement 11 years later.
When doctors nearly killed me 14 years back they said ‘medical science’ had nothing to offer an adverse reaction to anaesthetic, it was game over, so a coffee enema restored my ability to move and walk, gerson therapy had me walking inside 4 months when they said I was going to be confined to bed and nearly was. When I told them I didn’t think I was suitable for an anaesthetic for an unnecessary procedure in the first place they dismissed my concerns and proceded to nearly kill me, and left me in a state worse than death. All your nonsense is costing people lives by putting them off good things – I did other things like herbs [put away your crucifix and garlic] and supplements like EPA too, we should be building on gerson, but it certainly is foundational
coffee enemas upregulate glutathione – you clearly are not reading the science at all.. just regurtitating certain beliefs within certain circles, and I have a science degree and other degrees, this scientific cherry picking of loaded biased limited studies is getting old already, and the medical profession are the top killers with iatrogenic death #1, they just killed my aunt last week giving her antibiotics for a heart attack…duh…and then let her systems fail…
I am glad to hear that you have recovered, yet I can assure you that Gerson therapy had nothing to do with it.
@Edzard on Thursday 28 February 2019 at 07:05 said:
“…yet I can assure you that Gerson therapy had nothing to do with it.”
No you can’t.
yes, I can!
treatments that have neither biological plausibility nor evidence to back them up, do not work.
@Edzard on Thursday 28 February 2019 at 08:19 said:
“yes, I can!”
OK, let’s test that: Mary, did Dr Edzard reassure you?
stop behaving like a deluded nutter
@Edzard on Thursday 28 February 2019 at 12:59 said:
“stop behaving like a deluded nutter”
Perhaps, someday you might understand that words have meanings.
stop behaving like a deluded nutter
@Edzard on Thursday 28 February 2019 at 13:23 repeated:
“stop behaving like a deluded nutter”
…instead of simply as a means of force.
Edzard- You make me want to vomit.
And I can assure you that chemo causes more cancers and its success rate is less than 3%. And I go one step further and say nobody has to listen to doctors who promote big pharma.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/chemotherapy-cancer-spread-cells-tumours-more-advanced-treatment-study-breast-metastatic-albert-a7826461.html
and I go even one more step further and tell you THE MOON IS MADE OF CHEDDAR CHEESE
Ali,
Thank-you for that assurance. Can I ask what it is based on?
In all fairness it is true that certain chemotherapy drugs (alkylating agents, for instance) can increase the risk of future cancers. This risk is well-established and quantified, and provided that the drugs are given appropriately it is more than outweighed by the benefits from treating the cancer that the patient actually has.
What do you even mean by that? It sounds as though you are saying that in only 3% of cases does chemotherapy have the intended effect. You only need to think about it for a moment to realise that this cannot possibly be true. For a start, do you really think that doctors who have devoted their careers to helping cancer patients would be giving toxic treatment with such a poor risk-to-benefit ratio? For that matter, do you really think that national health systems around the world (or even insurance companies) would be prepared to pay for it?
The 3% figure is a misquotation from an Australian study published a few years ago which concluded that in only 3% of cancer patients was survival of 5 years or more attributable to chemotherapy. This may not sound like much, but if you read the original paper you will find that the authors included ALL cancers diagnosed over the study period. Many of these were small skin cancers treated by minor surgery, and of the other common cancers, most would not have routinely had chemotherapy as part of their treatment. Furthermore, a large number would have been advanced at the time of diagnosis and never have been expected to live the required five years (even though some of them undoubtedly would have had an additional year or two from chemotherapy). Most of the 3% therefore were rarer cancers that were cured by chemotherapy (childhood cancers, acute leukaemias, high-grade lymphomas, metastatic testicular cancer etc.).
So – 3% of all cancer patients, most of which were never treated with chemotherapy at all, and many of which weren’t expected to live long, nevertheless had an additional 5 years or more DIRECTLY AS A RESULT OF CHEMOTHERAPY.
I should add that the patients in the study received their diagnosis several decades ago, and cancer treatment has moved on a lot since then, both in terms of genetic markers identifying who will benefit most from chemotherapy and who won’t (and can therefore be spared it) and also with many non-chemotherapy-based treatments, such as immunotherapy in its various forms and other targeted biological therapies.
I have also read the article that you linked to in The Independent, a UK national newpaper, which was written by a journalist, not a scientist. The article itself seems to be rather muddled and it is not very clear that the author understood what the researchers were looking at or what they found.
From the article, it seems there were two studies, one looking at circulating tumour cells in mice with breast cancer (the type of mice generally used in this type of experiment are genetically engineered to have no immune system so that human tumour cultures can be grown in them in a standardised system), the other looking at biopsies taken from 20 breast cancer patients where the vasculature was reportedly different following chemotherapy but with no information about what it was different from.
The authors speculated that increased circulating tumour cells in mice after chemotherapy may correspond to a similar effect in humans and this, in turn, may mean an increased risk of secondary tumours (rather than, for instance, cells rendered non-viable by chemotherapy becoming detached from the main tumour). They also speculated that biopsies during a course of chemotherapy could be used to determine whether the chemotherapy should continue based on vascular changes that they hypothesise could increase the risk of tumour cells entering the circulation.
This is an interesting area of research, but not anything that can form the basis of treatment recommendations in its present form.
On the contrary, we have clear evidence, from many large clinical trials, that in high-risk patients with breast cancer, chemotherapy in conjunction with surgery reduces the rate of recurrence and improves long-term survival compared with surgery alone. This is well-established and forms the basis of current treatment protocols.
The type of research reported may one day help us to understand why chemotherapy works better in some cases than in others, and enable oncologists to be more selective in their choice of treatments. It does not demonstrate either that chemotherapy doesn’t work or that it causes cancer.
I think you should take the trouble to read your sources more carefully and understand what the research is actually telling us, rather than giving your assurances that it says the opposite.
No you cannot assure anyone of anything. You seem to ignore any facts that contradict your narrative, I sm sure you mean well but you sre severly under educated, and are in no way capable of giving anyone any advice
how interesting!
Says ‘Trev’.
Actually I’m very new to the Gerson Therapy and very old to the world of the medical system and people in it. There is no Doctor Welby, Dr. Casey, House or Doctor Kildare anywhere near. I’m surprised to still be alive after the treatment I’ve received in the last four years. It ranges from drug overdoses to surgery that wasn’t needed. You are so right Mary that it hurts!
Yea thousands of real people getting better. What makes more logical sense, taking a sick weakened body and resting it, flooding it with an abundance of live nutrition and helping it remove toxins, or take that same body and just pump poisons into it. There is no way that you can ever regain great health by putting toxic chemicals into a sick weak body. Just like a healthy person would get sick from chemicals going into their Body. At best a person may shrink the cancer while destroying their immune system and then die a horrible death once the cancer grows again. Cancer success rates are no better than they were 50 years ago. They will never be. You want to know why? Because you’ll never be able to poison someone back into health! That will never change! If that was right, it would have worked already. 100s of billions of dollars have gone into trying to poison someone back into health and it never works. It never will, but as long as company’s and hospitals make their living by trying to find ways to chemically induce health, we will keep seeing this happen. You don’t need a bunch of evidence based studies to prove that using the Gerson Therapy works. All you need is common sense. Besides the studies that the pharmaceutical companies perform are supported by their own money. It’s not evidence based. It’s bad evidence based. The company’s report what is good and ommit what is not favorable to get the drugs approved. It’s really a sad broken system. If you are in an emergency situation like a gun shot, hit by a car, etc., you are in the best place in the world for that here in the USA, but if you are trying to get healthy again, that system of chemicals will only drive you further away from becoming healthy again.
if you are right, all the cancer statistics are wrong – probably fake news?
go and get therapy for your paranoia, John!
Paranoia appears to be widespread, I wonder how that came about ? Likely it came from failed allopathic medicine. Why would people pleased with allopathic medcine look for other solutions ?
The actual statistics do are terrifying. Chemo kills
Care to share those statistics, Trev? I’m sure that, for example, all the people who are alive because chemotherapy cured their leukaemias and lymphomas will be impressed to learn that they are actually dead.
Trev,
Which statistics are those?
It is true that some people die as a result of chemotherapy toxicity. However, on its own it cures a lot of people with acute leukaemia, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodkgin’s lymphoma, testicular teratoma and non-sesminomatous germ-cell tumours. In combination with other treatment it increases the number of long-term survivers with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, bladder cancer and others.
I would be very interested to see what statistics you are quoting as I suspect that you may not have understood them properly.
I’m not sure that anything you are saying is true, even about treating gun shots, though the US has a lot of experience of that, with about fifty times the rate of firearms-related deaths than the UK.
Cancer treatment is vastly different from 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago, and the statistics bear that out. As examples, metastatic testicular cancer, acute leukaemia and high-grade lymphoma were almost always fatal 50 years ago and are now usually curable with chemotherapy alone. Though now we have immunotherapy and other targeted therapies with many more in the pipeline.
How can you show anything without evidence?
Yes, the thousands now healed.
thanks for confirming that you have no evidence
https://edzardernst.com/2012/11/what-is-and-what-isnt-clinical-evidence-and-why-is-the-distinction-important/
Yes I can say for myself, I was diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma (16 cm) in July /17, and I’m cured, still on treatment (Gerson therapy) but no activity cancer cells been found on my last pet scan!
crickets
1. What sort of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was it?
2. How was it diagnosed?
3. Did you have any other treatment?
Hi Edzard,
I appreciate your point of view and and when you actually look at the documented facts, you can be pleasantly astonished how the Gerson Therapy successfully cures many chronic and terminal diseases.
If you had terminal cancer and you had tried everything else, would you not rejoice by the news that your death sentence could be postponed to allow you a ripe full life?
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the Noble Peace Prize winner of medicine, called Gerson “one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine”. Gerson cured Schwitzer’s wife of lung tubercliosi which was considered incurable and then Gerson cured Schzitser of his chronic dibatis type II.
There are many hundreds of DOCUMENTED cases of terminal cancer patients who were told by doctors that they had only months remaining to live but whom were instead cured by the Gerson Protocal.
In 1946, Dr Gerson presented 5 documented terminal patients to the US Congress at the Capitol building.
Gerson presented the documented proof 5 cured terminal patients who were questioned by congress and after Gerson received a standing ovation for his miraculous results.
A few weeks later, The American Medical Association launched the new cancer treatment of chemo therapy, a very expensive and profitable system based on patents from the drug companies.
For this reason, Gerson was blacklisted and prohibited from practicing in the United States of the free.
My mother also cured herself of her chronic type II diabetes, chronic high blood pressure, high cholesterol and debilitating artherities of the knees, After the first month on the Gerson protocall, my mother became 20 years younger. 10 years later, she is still cured of all of her conditions and she is in the best shape she has ever been in her life.
You are what you eat so eat clean and green and your body will stay strong and healthy and be able to heal itself.
Be well everybody and happy 2020!
perhaps you need to read up about what constitutes evidence and what not:
https://edzardernst.com/2012/11/what-is-and-what-isnt-clinical-evidence-and-why-is-the-distinction-important/
@EE
ABSOLUTELY …. professor.
Studies are the important matter !
Who actually cares what actually occurred in the real life of an individual ?
Because anecdotes are just that and correlation does not equal causation, RG. And dead people don’t post on blogs about how their Gerson therapy didn’t work. How many times do we have to tell you this?
You don’t like nasty horrible studies and proper evidence because they show the voids in your arguments. Personal testimony, the lowest rung on the evidential ladder, however tallies with your confirmation bias.
If testimony trumps studies, shouldn’t we still be bleeding patients and treating them with purgatives and enemas like we did 200 years ago? Lots of people said that these treatments worked for them.
@Edzard – I find it funny how you brag of your credentials (MD, PhD, FMedSci, FRSB, FRCP, FRCPEd) while at the same time telling other human beings they are “hopeless” and acting like “a delusional nutter”. How professional of you. I find it even more funny how when people bring up evidence and mention the THOUSANDS of people that have personally testified that Gerson therapy saved their lives, you completely dismiss it and then regurgitate that same reply of “that’s not real evidence”.
Scientists and Doctors can be bought & paid for, just like politicians. You’ve clearly have been bought or you’ve just been indoctrinated so severely that you’re downing under water in your own cognitive dissonance. Either way, you’re a pathetic excuse for a human and a clown of a man in my eyes. A true product of our corrupt Rockefeller Medical System. I hope a bird sh*ts in your mouth tomorrow morning, you disinformation agent piece of trash.
P.S. I personally know two people that cured their cancer with the Gerson methods and an alkaline diet and they both told me to tell you, “GO F*** YOURSELF!!!” Lol
nice one for my collection of moronic insults.
THANK YOU
And then you roll in here and prove Professor Ernst right. Well done, you.
That which is asserted without evidence can be laughed out the room with equal ease. Perhaps you can explain to us the mechanism by which overpriced vitamins and sticking coffee up your bum selectively targets malignant cells for destruction? And as for “alkaline diet”, you really want to ask a high-school biology student what “homeostasis” means. Go on; we’ll wait.
Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952. He did not win the prize for Medicine.
While I am not terminal yet, I know that my cancer will cut my life short, so of course I would rejoice if there were such a thing. But wishing for something doesn’t make it true (except in Disney films) and I prefer to go with the evidence. Modern medicine has given me nearly three extra years so far.
Many cases of pulmonary tuberculosis do recover without treatment. Many die, of course, without antibiotics, but recovery isn’t that rare.
It is difficult to comment in detail without knowing the details of her case, but all of these conditions would be expected to improve with a suitable diet (standard recommendation for type II diabetes) and particularly weight loss.
I don’t think type II diabetes was a recognised diagnosis at that time.
The ones I have looked at don’t appear to be well documented at all. Many of them do not meet the diagnostic criteria for cancer, and of those where the evidence is more convincing, a lot of them had surgery and radiotherapy as well, so it is misleading to ascribe their recovery to Gerson therapy.
In any case our understanding of cancer and our treatment of it have come a long way since Gerson developed his ideas nearly a century ago.
@Dr. JMK
Be Happy said:
“My mother also cured herself of her chronic type II diabetes, chronic high blood pressure, high cholesterol and debilitating artherities of the knees.”
Dr. JMK said:
“It is difficult to comment in detail without knowing the details of her case, but all of these conditions would be expected to improve with a suitable diet (standard recommendation for type II diabetes) and particularly weight loss.”
Say Doc, if your conclusion is true. Then why don’t doctors quit prescribing deadly meds, and convince people to change what they eat ?
I’m not saying you made the wrong conclusion, I think you are correct in fact. I’m just pointing out the greed and hypocrisy of the pharma industry…. ya know. Cauz you know damn well if the MD prescribes meds for the illnesses mentioned with good results that he’s be patting himself on the back for the same results you say could have been achieved through diet….no ?
@RG
Who says they don’t?
Perhaps you are unlucky and the doctor in your village is not a good, well educated one?
In the civilized parts of the world, where doctors get a good education, doctors reallly do use a holistic approach in general health care (GP’s; family doctors etc.) and emphasize lifestyle improvement as a first order therapy and medicines only whern appropriate. I am sorry that you are possibly not privileged to live in a country with proper health care.
As to “deadly”, of course most medicines are deadly if used improperly. That is because they have an effect in the body. If you take too much, the effects can certainly be deadly but proper doctors know how much is safe and only prescribe the correct doses. If your doctor is so bad, maybe you should always double check with the pharmacist that you are being prescribed the correct drug and dosage.
Try to ask your librarian to help you find simple books about basic health care and medicine. You have much to learn.
The best advice for staying healthy is very simple:
Eat less
Exercise more
Don’t smoke
Doctors give this advice all the time. Convincing people to change, however, is not easy. Most people would rather go for an imaginary quick fix that make the effort to change their unhealthy habits, whether this is a pill or a “detox” (whatever that means).
Leaving aside the US, which is not representative of healthcare worldwide (and France, where patients demand and doctors prescribe at least twice as many items as any in any other industrialised country, mainly in the form of suppositories as far as I can tell), most doctors are strongly aware of the cost-effectiveness of any given intervention and certainly prefer the cheaper and safer option of advising lifestyle changes rather than spending their limited budgets on expensive drugs.
For instance, for type II diabetes, the prescribed treatment is diet plus exercise plus (if necessary) weight loss, plus (maybe) metformin, which has been shown to reduce long-term morbidity. Other oral drugs are only added if that doesn’t work, and insulin only as a last resort.
For hypertension the advice is to lose weight, cut down on alcohol and avoid adding salt to food. If that doesn’t work, then adding antihypertensive drugs has also been shown to reduce the risk of strokes and heart failure.
High cholesterol is a bit different as it is not a chronic disorder as such, but a risk factor for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Management depends on an assessment of the overall risk (including smoking, alcohol intake, blood pressure, age, presence of other problems affecting cholesterol such as thyroid disease and diabetes) and advising accordingly. For those at high risk, statins have clearly been shown to save lives.
The first thing any doctor should be advising for arthritis of the knees is weight loss.
I think you need to appraise yourself of what doctors actually do. I think you would be quite surprised.
EDZARD ERNST -A CAREER BUILT ON DISCREDITING NATURAL HEALTH SCIENCE- SEE ARTICLE BELOW THAT SAYS ALOT ABOUT EDZARD ERNST!
https://www.dr-rath-foundation.org/2017/11/professor-edzard-ernst-a-career-built-on-discrediting-natural-health-science/
https://edzardernst.com/2017/11/i-am-sooo-proud-dr-rath-foundation-published-an-entire-article-all-about-me/
Tons, but not gathered the same way Big Pharma gathers evidence, and so the anecdotes aren’t acknowledged by the traditional medical community.
In the natural medicine world, when an individual patient needs treatment, he or she is treated and then anecdotal evidence is created.
Traditional medicine does it differently. They test 200 rats with the same thing.
Traditional medicine refuses to use common sense. Why? Because they can’t patent and sell natural foods and supplements.
because ‘common sense’ can be frightfully misleading.
have you heard this bon mot?
the plural of anecdote is anecdotes and not evidence
THINK ABOUT IT
Anecdotes are evidence, they just carry a lot of issues.
“Evidence based on anecdotes arising from the analysis of individual clinical cases, rather than the study of scientifically randomized groups of patients. Such evidence may be true or false, but it is always unreliable because it is based on hearsay, faulty reasoning, or other cause.”
Medical Dictionary, © 2009 Farlex and Partners
“Anecdotes are extremely weak support of a theory; even if the event itself has been verified, its occurrence may be inappropriately attributed to an unusual therapy, and other unrecognised factors (confounders) may have invalidated the initial prediction of demise. Multiple similar anecdotes do not significantly increase support and at best serve justify a scientific experiment to empirically test the theory.”
Segen’s Medical Dictionary. © 2012
@DC: “Anecdotes are evidence, they just carry a lot of issues.”
That’s putting it politely. Anecdotes are the lowest-quality evidence there is. At best, they sit at the beginning of scientific enquiry (the “hmm, that’s odd” stage); NOT at its conclusion as they do in AltMed.
Hence our well-worn cynicism: if AltMedders genuinely cared about evidence, they’d already have done basic due dilligence to determine if there is any actual substance to their anecdotes before declaring that they have found The Truth.
That they’ve not done so betrays their anecdotes’ true purpose: they are articles of Faith, to be loudly, frequently recited with enthusiastic devotion and unquestioning acceptance. Because, as we’ve all figured out by now: the harder an Altie believes in something, the more true that makes it.
And you wonder why folks don’t take you seriously. But no, no, it is everybody else who is wrong.
EE: the plural of anecdote is anecdotes and not evidence
DC: Anecdotes are evidence, they just carry a lot of issues.
has: Anecdotes are the lowest-quality evidence there is.
So it appears that you agree with me. OK.
@DC, has
Another huge problem with anecdotes is that they often tend to get lots of publicity, especially when they hint at some spectacular result, whereas the subsequent grunt work (i.e. the tedious, laborious research to see if there’s actually something to those anecdotes) is usually only publicized and discussed among a relatively small group of insiders. Even worse: if the outcome of the study is negative, it is often ignored completely.
Also note that scientists themselves(*) are not immune to spreading anecdotal ‘results’ that later turn out to be complete duds. Just search for press releases, news items or preprint publications about e.g. ‘very promising’ cancer treatments from 10-20 years ago, and try looking up the state of that research now. Only very rarely are there any real results, and in many cases those old press releases are the only publications one will find.
All this means that anecdotes should be treated with the utmost reticence, and I personally tend to ignore them completely, at least as a form of ‘evidence’.
*: However it is AltMed that not only tends to jump on the bandwagon of every new ‘insight’ that fits their narrative, but will also permanently incorporate it in their byzantine arsenal of treatments, even if it eventually turns out to be useless. One example is curcumin: some time around the early 2000’s, curcumin was found to have significant antioxidant properties, along with some other interesting pharmaceutical characteristics – in vitro. So AltMed immediately started touting curcumin as a sort of cure-all, administering it to their hapless customers it in any way conceivable, up to and including intravenously (which I personally think is criminally stupid). And they still do, even though there is not a single study showing that curcumin has significant therapeutic effects for any condition. AltMed also ignores other facts that suggest that they’re wrong, e.g. that countries where curcumin/turmeric is an everyday food ingredient do not have a remarkably healthier population.
@DC: Yes, we agree. However, your choice of wording (“[anecdotes] just carry a lot of issues”) was extremely unfortunate as it massively downplayed just how low-quality anecdotes are. They really are the bottom rung, frequently confused, inaccurate, exaggerated, misinterpreted, just plain wrong, or outright fraudulent, and should never inform any decision beyond “perhaps we should investigate further?”
That’s why “personal anecdotes” doesn’t even appear in the Hierarchy of Scientific Evidence, but in the “Not Scientific Evidence” pile, while professional anecdotes (case reports) are right at the very bottom of the hierarchy.
Remember, new conventional drugs coming onto market don’t even get out the door until they’ve cleared RCTs (second highest on the hierarchy) first. Yet new AltMed products are globally marketed and sold largely on the basis of “well this person says it helped them”, without even checking the veracity of that claim, never mind checking the product itself.
For all the Altie ravings on the evil of Big Pharma, even the most greedy and corrupt of Big Pharmas could only dream of getting away with half of what AltMed does as standard.
—
p.s. I am happy to assume you were not deliberately trying to minimize just how rotten and misleading anecdotes really are. But there are many a lot less ethical than you in AltMed who loudly, proudly, knowingly proclaim anecdotal testimonials as the Gold Standard while oh-so-conveniently skipping their numerous giant caveats completely, so I hope you’ll understand the need to clarify.
@Sam Lupowitz
Traditional medicine has used common sense for thousands of years, up until some 150 years ago. It did not work. Child mortality rates were invariably in the double digits, and the average life span was maybe 50 years, and included a lot of suffering, often caused by what we now consider ‘simple infections’.
Once smart people (a.k.a. scientists) really started figuring things out about biology, chemistry and physiology, progress was made. Nowadays, child mortality in most western countries is less than 0.5%, and the average life expectancy is higher than it has ever been, all thanks to real medicine, NOT ‘natural medicine’.
Now this may come as a shock to you, but Big Pharma IS selling ‘natural foods’ and supplements. Some 10% of their total annual turnover is made selling ‘natural foods’ and supplements.
Where do you think that most ‘natural foods’ and supplements come from? Old ladies who stir bubbling cauldrons of herb extract? Natural Food Fairies? Pharmaceutical companies are best equipped to produce pills and potions that people want to buy, so that’s what they do. If you don’t believe me, just pick up a jar of an arbitrary supplement, read the label, and track down the factory that makes it. Almost always, you end up at some kind of pharma company, often in India or China.
And the most ironic thing is that your real ‘natural foods’ and supplements, i.e. products that are indeed made by mostly uneducated people grinding up herbs and other ingredients at crude workbenches, are quite often harmful because they neglect even the most basic safety standards. Here’s a recent example: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1022-aromatherapy-bacteria.html
Then again, Burkholderia pseudomallei is 100% natural, so it can’t be bad, now can it?
Oh dear. Obligatory.
And who the heck do you think manufactures all those millions of bottles of supplements for which you preening mung beans shell out significant wads of cash? I’ll give you a hint: it’s NOT the happy organic garden pixies. So much for your “common sense”!
Er, not really. The trials that require large numbers of test subjects tend to be with humans, as there are a great many random factors influencing the outcome and larger numbers make it more likely that any findings are not due to chance, and the questions are usually along the lines of “Does this intervention work?” and “Is it safe?”. In a laboratory the environment can be carefully controlled, and the lab animals (usually mice rather than rats) are specially bred to be genetically very similar, and the experiments tend to be designed to answer very specific questions regarding details of physiology, pathology, pharmacology etc.
Humans vary enormously in their genes, their personal history and their behaviour, and in an individual case it is not at all clear what effect a particular treatment has had, or how the course of an illness might have been different without it. Unfortunately when it comes to matters of probability and chance, our instincts are very misleading and often downright wrong, and without an understanding of the behaviour of random numbers it is hard not to to draw erroneous conclusions. The branch of mathematics known as statistics was invented to deal with these problems, and provides tools for identifying genuine patterns among random noise which can be used in the design and analysis of clinical studies so that we know how certain (or uncertain) we can be of the results.
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it is only collected when a treatment is followed by the expected outcome, and since the assumption is made at the start that they are cause and effect it cannot answer the question of whether this is in fact the case. Furthermore, instances where the expected outcome does not occur tend to be ignored, which makes it impossible to assess their frequency.
I am not sure what you mean by “natural medicine”. The aim of science is to understand Nature, and Nature is at the root of evidence-based medicine. Most of what comes under the heading of traditional medicine is based on magical thinking, and not on Nature at all.
Marketing pablum. The devotional chant of the Purity Cult. Vacuously recited by pampered children who have conveniently forgotten/never cared that for almost all of human history, what “natural” really meant was “died young during childbirth”. (And for a good fraction of humanity still does.)
It is the armor with which they gird their loins as they plunge into brave battle against those evil reductionist allopathic scientists who gave them lifespans of 80 years, antibiotics, microwave ovens, the atom bomb, and so on.
As a physiological treatment it is as much use as a paper ball cup. As a retail therapy for needy neuroses, it is worth about $100 billion/year, and growing fast. It is everything and anything and whatever they want it to be. It is the puddle to their Narcissus.
Evidence? They don’t need no steenkin’ evidence. They’ve got Testimonials!
Would you like to buy more?
How about the original book published by Dr. Gerson who cured his own debilitating ills, and profoundly cured cancer in first 50 patients he set up in the Gerson Diet? I recommend everyone read the book and find out for sure if it can or does work.
Or we could just listen to the Big Med/Big Pharma/Big Chemical conglomerates and inject their poisons into our systems instead.
the book does NOT contain convincing evidence. Gerson NEVER managed to produce anything near compelling evidence. The only evidence that does exist about his therapy fails to show effectiveness.
Googling “Peter McAlpine” to see what undeclared COIs you might be flogging, I happened to discover this absolute work of genius which I recommend to all:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-hospitality-does-make-emotional-connection-guests-peter-mcalpine
Any relation? I think we should be told.
has
But he uses the Quantum’ word at least hree times.
So he must know what he’s talking about.
Take name of any med used for cancer and add summary of product characteristics. I think European provide more information than US or British, but you will find everything about the success during the research stage. Show me any studies of the same quality done with coffee enemas and Gerson’s in general!
@McAlpine:
I use to promote Gerson therapy and I am really ashamed of it. I know very well what it is. In fact despite my love of science I got dragged into this irrational world of alternative “medicine” when I was 21 and the Big Pharma was the evil.
Until I almost permanently damaged my kidneys, had a very unhealthy weight of 46 kg (fasting, enemas, Gerson dieat and juicing, other extreme fad health diets were all making me feel great – in my head) and even my cholesterol was too low! The kidney issue – I was pissing blood and the detox gospel preachers told me it was normal! That I have to wait, beacuse these are the toxins leaving my body! Well I went straight to a GP, later got my facts straight and have never looked back.
I managed to ruin my otherwise perfect health when I was 27, because I was listening to all this alternative crap. It took me a while to get back to normal. If all of this BS does this to a healty young person, then we can safely assume that it does way more harm to a person with a serious illness like cancer.
So with all this said – you are the one being bias – check the evidence and stop being so naive and trusting of every charlatane with a magical pseudoscientific vocabulary. I suggest you sit down and read quite a few books on the history of medicine (in fact history of science in general – do you even have a clue what kind of impact the scientific method has had on the lives of ordinary people and what has happened in the last 400 years???) and the principles of evidence-based medicine and the huge impacts it has had on each of us for the better. We don’t have all the answers yet, but that is ok, because the progress has been huge in just a few decades. We will get there – but not with people like you (and past me) yapping and spreading middle age mentality and conspiracy theories. This will lead us back to the age of irrationality, ignorance, superstition, magic medicine and burning witches. Back to the world where anything goes – because who needs evidence!
I’m pleased you realised your mistake in thinking that the pharmaceutical industry is the source of all evil and anything claiming to be vastly superior to drugs must necessarily be so – particularly if the word “natural” is attached to it. The suggestion being that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. Be healed in a simple and even pleasing way. Indeed be healed spiritually as well as physically. Filthy pharma could never, ever, heal in that way!
Hugely profitable and powerful industries should be held morally and legally accountable for their actions. As a society we need to ensure sure that this happens.
We should all be accountable for our actions, cranks included.
This site is helping to do this.
I have adrenal cortical cancer I was stage 4. I am the only person who has survived from that stage in the UK. I have followed the Gerson therapy for years and it stops my tumours growing, 1mm in 3 yrs. You went wrong be a use you were anorexic. People who follow the therapy under a consultant who is a normally qualified doctor, have regular blood and health checks and are not thin. They are the right weight and eat a nutricious diet. My consultants at St. Bartholomews hospital in London have backed me with letters of support as they realise that any regime which followed correctly repairs the immune system, repairs you.I am now being studied to see why I am here as I should be dead.
Any supposed doctor that allows you to continue this treatment under their supervision is a quack, not a physician.
Congratulations Claire on surviving. It is good that you have sensible open eyed consultants that arent tunnel visioned. You are right you need to get your immune system healthy and the only way is good natural wholesome food. Nothing manufactured with chemical preservatives food enhancers food colouring etc This is what everyone seems to eat these days. CHEMO destroys your immune system red and white blood cells. it just destroys everything in your body. and also causes cancer . they tell you this quite openly. how I know is I am having chemo now. HOW I know that natural is best is because I am doing it. and my white Blood platelets are high and GOOD my white blood cells are fighting back. the Oncologist cant understand how this is happening. . I told him and he said ohhhhh. really. the nurses just told me to keep doing whatever I am doing because its working. they told me they arent allowed to endorse anything except chemo. so go figure. Plants cant be patented . so no money can be made from them. so everyone else BACK OFF unless you have cancer or have gone through cancer you dont have a clue.
would love to know what you are doing Carolena Huddy…..I am starting adjuvant chemo tomorrow, but am very interested in alternative medicine to go alongside it….it makes sense to me to hit this cancer with everything and support my body while doing it….It’s incredibly confusing out there for the lay cancer patient to wade through all the conflicting information….probably the bottom line is cancer is a bugger of a disease and no one knows really why it happens, therefore a decent treatment that works universally is difficult to find. But obviously people have healed from both ‘alternative’ and conventional treatments….surely it’s time for a meeting of both worlds….I understand they are underpinned by different philosphies on health but really…anyway. If you see this message, information would be great. Thank you
the worlds are constantly meeting; the fact that a therapy is ‘alternative’ means that it has been rejected by critical evaluation of the existing evidence. don’t fall for the false hope BS-merchants are selling!
Charlie,
If you have read any of my other comments you will know that I am an oncologist and I know have a widespread cancer. I have had chemotherapy and radiotherapy myself, and my treatment is continuing lifelong.
I’m sorry that you are having to have adjuvant chemo, especially as these treatments seem to go on for ever while you are having them, but at least it means that your chance of a long-term cure is good.
Be careful with alternative treatments. Those that have been tested and found to work are incorporated into conventional medicine, so most of what is left has already been shown not to be effective. Some are actively harmful – for instance there can be interactions with chemotherapy. Also, there are alternative practitioners who will tell you that chemotherapy is harming your body and you should stop it. Remember that the dangers of chemotherapy are well-known, and the team looking after you will do all they can to minimise them. Also remember that in the long-run, the studies have shown that on balance you are better of having chemotherapy than not (or your oncologist would not be recommending it).
There is a lot of nonsense talked about supporting the immune system, mostly by people who don’t have any idea at all what the immune system does and how it works (it is immensely complicated). Certainly there are times when you will be more susceptible to particular sorts of infection as a result of the chemotherapy, and the most important thing you can do is tell your team at once if you are unwell.
With regard to diet, there are many theories about how diet or certain foods can fight cancer or worsen it, and in the main there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true, and indeed some diets (such as the Gerson diet) are based on a complete misunderstanding of how the human body works. If a diet sounds strange then it is best avoided. Also be aware that some foods (e.g. grapefruit) can affect particular drugs; hopefully if that is an issue you will be given information about it. Some supplements can also interact with chemotherapy, so it is very important that your oncologist knows what you are taking.
I would advocate a diet that is rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, not too much red meat or dairy, and some oily fish (e.g. salmon or mackerel) twice a week. Whole foods are better than processed. Beans and pulses are also a good idea. But keep it balanced – moderation in everything is best. You may find that the chemotherapy affects your sense of taste or smell, in which case stick with what still tastes OK. If there are problems eating (e.g. due to nausea or mouth ulcers) then the oncology team will include a dietician (or whatever they are called where you live) who can advise you about specifics.
Please note that whether your red cells or white cells go down or not has very little to do with what you eat (provided you are not malnourished) and you can’t bring the counts up with supplements if the problem is the chemotherapy. There is quite wide variation in how different people’s bodies handle chemotherapy, mostly due to genetic variations such as different versions of certain enzymes. Indeed, if the white count doesn’t fall, that may mean that your body is getting rid of the chemotherapy faster than usual, and in some situations the dose has to be increased to compensate (this isn’t usually required). More often, the count falls too much and the dose has to be reduced or delayed in order to individualise your treatment.
I hope your treatment goes smoothly, and I wish you all the best for your eventual recovery.
Thank you for replying with such a measured balanced response. I appreciate the time you took to reply to me. Wishing everyone here well in their battle with this sneaky, horrible disease.
I am so happy for you Claire! Praise God! I have been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer and I am deciding which clinic to go to.
“I have been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer”
I am very sorry to hear that. Sadly this is not curable. However, the combination of surgery to remove as much as possible of the cancer, together with chemotherapy, can keep you well and prolong your life. The treatment and its side-effects may seem unpleasant, but it isn’t that bad, you will recover from it, and believe me, it is a lot better than the alternative.
There are people who will be happy to take your money and promise you a cure. They may appear to be very nice and genuine people, and some of them may even believe what they are saying. However, if Gerson therapy or any other of these alternative approaches really worked they would be standard treatment in every oncology clinic. If something seems too good to be true, then it usually is, whether it is a cancer cure or a get-rich-quick scheme.
Why were you doing GT if you had perfect health? Just curious.
Amanda, I recently lost a friend who was on the Gerson therapy. She went on it to cleanse and lose weight. She was having pains in her back but continued on it not seeing the correlation. She developed severe kidney infection which late turned to cancer. She still continued with the diet. Only when her mother forced her to go to the hospital and get a proper diagnosis did she finally stop. But it was too late. She was stage 4 and it had spread to her lungs. Do you know of any class action law suits?
You are blaming the Gerson Therapy entirely on your DIY- Idea of practicing it. No treatments for that matter are ever encouraged to be undertaken without medical supervision. How do we know whether you might have had some kind of preexisting health condition. You also mention having been on numerous other diets. How strict were you on the Gerson diet and did you in fact follow through with it exactly as you should have as per the clinics methods? No salt at all? Did you use the right kind of coffee? did you own a Norwalk juicer and press them freshly 8 times a day? Didn’t you have to go to school? Being on the Gerson diet is a full time job as you are supposed to be detoxifying a body which was weakened by decade long lifestyle choices. Following a half arsed version of the diet does not reap any results-so they say. And with 46kgs, regardless of your height, as an adult (unless you’re a small person), something must have definitely been wrong with you. How long did you fast for? Weeks at a time?? Don’t blame Gerson for your under researched, self-proclaimed healing methods.
I am glad you have been reading up on the history of medicine and yes we are blessed with what we know today. God forbid I get into a traumatic accident where I will need an ER doctor to put me back together, however do not underestimate the power of nature and its tools. It is easy to point fingers and start insulting others over their beliefs. Its the same with religion isn’t it? Yes, The Gerson Therapy is very much science related. And I’m sure If this brilliant man were still alive he would own all of you deluded mainstreamers.
When the oncology unit started giving my dad sugared yoghurt and treats I knew then and there- that they dont have a clue what they are feeding to their patients. Mr. Oncologist, how do you explain such behavior?
As much as for all you other tools playing into the hands of the big Pharma, go get yourself radiated and blasted with chemo if you will. We all have the freedom of choice to decide what is best for our bodies. and shame on everyone who discourages others from reaching out for help other than poisonous chemo, because there ARE OPTIONS AND THERE IS HOPE! I do encourage everyone nonetheless to keep an open heart and do your research with as much scrutiny as possible because there is a great deal of quackery out there – the Gerson Therapy is legit!!
evidence please!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12767595
you really do have a problem, if you think that this supports Gerson.
Yes Edzard
Gerson supports the therapy, so the therapy supports Gerson
try to make some sense, please.
Sorry you don’t understand.
Try some of this;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138224/
I did
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17480002
Touche
lol… good one Edzard.
Never tried it myself, so you’re a step ahead of me on that.
Basically if Gerson treatment doesn’t work it is because it isn’t being done correctly. I have heard that one too many times. It is bad enough giving false hope to desperate patients, subjecting them to a taxing and unpleasant regimen and taking their money. However, if it doesn’t work they are then made to feel guilty about not complying with treatment.
There is nothing natural about coffee enemas or hydraulic presses.
In the UK such hate crimes are illegal. However, I don’t think that has anything to do with treating the sick.
No it isn’t. Max Gerson started with his own rather bizarre theories about the pathophysiology of malignant disease and then followed them to some strange logical conclusion without applying the scientific method at all. He was clearly a creative and intelligent man, but he was not self-critical.
That is difficult to answer without more details. Perhaps he had lost his appetite and yoghurt was all he could manage, with sugar added to give him much-needed calories. People in the late stages of cancer are very often subject to extreme weight loss due to a combination of difficulty eating and the direct catabolic effects of malignancy. Getting calories and protein into them (which is what they most need from their diet) is quite a struggle, and the nutrition team often have to be quite creative here.
Or maybe you believe, against all evidence, that restricting sugar is beneficial in late-stage cancer.
I have. I learnt a few things which would have been useful to know when I was practising as an oncologist.
No we don’t.
We do have the freedom of choice to believe what we like, and to act how we like within reason (the Law does not protect us from making bad choices), but what is actually best for our bodies is a matter of objective fact. I am constantly amazed at the large number of people who cannot distinguish between what IS and what OUGHT TO BE (by their reckoning).
I really despair when it comes to Gerson therapy. It seems to bring out the worst in woolly thinking, magical thinking, witchcraft-like beliefs and practices, conspiracy theories, and charlatans out to make money from desparate people. Its advocates believe in it with a religious fervour and are blind to evidence or reason. As I have previously stated, I have seen for myself the harm it can do and the misery that it puts patients through, shortening the lives of many in the process.
Dr. J
Dr. J said;
“Basically if Gerson treatment doesn’t work it is because it isn’t being done correctly. I have heard that one too many times. It is bad enough giving false hope to desperate patients, subjecting them to a taxing and unpleasant regimen and taking their money. However, if it doesn’t work they are then made to feel guilty about not complying with treatment”
Question Doc.
If the cancer patient comes to the Oncologist office sporadically to receive his/her chemo cocktail infusion, you think the oncologist just might take issue with with the patient, for failing to follow his regimen ?
yup…I thought so
@RG
The difference being that conventional oncology does not demand the patient to commit to an hour-by-hour daily regimen of interventions with a notional sword of Damocles hanging over them that the treatment will fail if they do not follow it’s outrageous requirements. And if the patient is struggling with the current treatments, oncologists are kind and find ways to make it easier. They don’t tell the patient they’re going to die for not doing it properly. Do I exaggerate? Patrick Vickers, a naturopath, bilks sufferers with this nonsense.
“The therapy itself is based around a gruelling and ultra-restrictive diet, with the patient consuming 20lbs of raw organic vegetables per day, juiced into a thick sludge which is to be drunk on the hour, every hour, from 8am until 8pm. Naturally, this means an extensive stay in an expensive clinic (Vickers’ own establishment charges nearly $18,000 for the three-week stay most patients ‘require’) in order to learn how to prepare so meticulous a diet.
If the constant juicing (and inevitably subsequent bathroom adjacency) weren’t inconvenient enough, patients are expected to endure a minimum of five coffee enemas every day, along with a regime of supplement pills administered in doses that border on the downright dangerous. As Vickers boasted during his presentation: “If a medical doctor learned how much potassium we give patients every day, they’d be frantic”. Topping off the programme is a range of pseudoscientific adjuvant therapies: ozone therapy, pancreatic enzymes, vitamin C megadosing, laetrile (derived from apricot kernels and containing cyanide), and hydrotherapeutic immersion in a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide (a.k.a. bleach).
The Gerson regime is as extreme in its proscriptions as it is in its prescriptions: all sodium is strictly prohibited, as is all meat (Vickers: “If you eat meat on the Gerson diet, you will die”) and all forms of exercise (Vickers: “If you do any exercise on the Gerson diet, you won’t heal”). ”
Look up the names of those who have famously and publicly spoken about their Gerson journeys. Like Jess Ainscough and her mother. Both now dead. Of cancers with excellent cure rates under conventional therapy. Scared women, seduced by the quacks. Who paid with their lives.
But of course they were probably sticking the wrong type of coffe up their arses and missed a couple of juicings. So it was their fault. they died, wasn’t it, RG?
Lenny
So hypocrisy is justifiable, if it fits your agenda…. nothing changes here.
Point out the hypocrisy, RG. I’ve explained to you why you are provably and demonstrably wrong. Dr J has done similarly, but more patiently, expertly and eloquently. That you continue to spout your ignorant unevidenced, paranoiac, tinfoil-hatted nonsense is your problem, not ours. That you think your ten minutes on Google gives you the right to criticise the expertise of a consultant oncologist is hubris of barely comprehensible depth. I could tell you to run and stick your Gerson Therapy up,your arse but, if you ever contract cancer, that is what you’ll be doing with most of it.
RG
You really have no idea at all what goes on in oncology clinics, do you?
For a start, compliance is high and it is very rare for a patient not to turn up for treatment. Usually when this happens there is a very good reason for it.
When it comes to palliative (i.e. non-curative) treatment, the aim of chemotherapy is to improve quality of life and if possible to prolong it. Believe me, the side-effects of chemotherapy are much preferable to the effects of uncontrolled cancer (and both compare favourably to the ordeal of Gerson therapy, which is demanding and unpleasant to the point that it is difficult to stick to the protocol). Treatment plans are continuously reassessed on the basis of response, side-effects and patient wishes. This includes convincing the patient that it is OK to stop treatment if that is what they really want, and that they are not letting anybody down if they do.
For adjuvant treatment the equation is a little different. The patient has already had their primary treatment (usually surgery) and the chemotherapy is to reduce the rate of relapse. Many are already cured by the surgery, and some will relapse regardless; neither of these two groups actually benefit from the chemotherapy at all. However, for those where chemotherapy prevents the cancer from coming back it is literally a life or death difference. Unfortunately we don’t know in advance who is going to benefit (although molecular biology and tumour genetics are starting to give some answers here) and it might be as few as 1 in 20 who will be cured by chemotherapy who would otherwise die (though usually it is closer to 1 in 10). It is very important that the patient understands this before agreeing to treatment, and that they understand what chemotherapy will involve. And if they do decide, part-way through the course, that they have had enough, then that is OK, though unfortunately there aren’t usually trial data to be able to tell them how effective half a course of treatment will be (in general, for chemo, probably still quite effective, for radiotherapy, probably not).
The difficult group are the ones who have a high chance of being cured by chemotherapy but not otherwise. This includes acute leukaemia, high-grade lymphoma and metastatic testicular cancer. My experience here is predominantly in testicular cancer, where the chance of long-term cure with chemotherapy is in excess of 95%, and without it death is almost certain. Unfortunately any deviation from protocol, and particularly delays in treatment, seriously affects the outcome. Unfortunately, too, these are very often young men (many in their 20’s) who still think that the rules of reality don’t apply to them. It is very sad and difficult watching these people die unnecessarily when they had their whole lives ahead of them. I can think of three such cases in the past few years. One was long-term mentally ill and believed that he would be healed by God, the second had learning difficulties and simply didn’t understand what was happening to him (and it proved impossible to treat him without his co-operation). The third was an a****le who just couldn’t be bothered and whose family thought that supporting him meant acceding to his demands; he would turn up when he felt like it and discharge himself before the chemotherapy was finished. Despite all this we managed to get enough chemo into him to achieve a complete response and I hope that will translate into a long-term cure (only time will tell, but as I am no longer working I won’t ever know the end of the story). The other two died, of course.
These cases tend to involve all sorts of people, including social services, mental health, care homes, psychiatric hospitals, independent patient advocates, ethics committees and the Courts. There is seldom a right answer to such ethical and moral problems, and often what you can achieve in practice is very different from what you think is right. They also take a disproportionate amount of time which could otherwise be spent on other patients.
Your ill-considered and stupid comments are quite frankly insulting to the many dedicated individuals working in cancer care who, so often, work well beyond their paid hours to provide the service that they feel their patients deserve.
Lenny
You prove nothing. So Gerson is an intensive treatment, while Chemo drags on and on. The point was either treatment requires the patient to follow the regimen. You somehow only want to apply the requirement to Gerson and not Oncology. It’s a double standard Lenny…. no denying it.
Yes, I’m a googleologist, aren’t we all ?
Welcome, and happy are the days in the last 25 years when we can find information at our fingertips. No more reliance on AMA and Pharma trained Physicians…. whoo-hoo !!
Case in point, which you here will no doubt refer to as an anecdote;
My primary physician drew my blood because he said due to being over 50 years old, he would like to check my prostate for potential cancer regularly, I agreed.
The blood was drawn and the PSA result from my blood was elevated. My primary physician referred my to a Urologist that suggested I have a prostate biopsy to find out more. Before scheduling, I decided to do some googling and find out more about the risks of the biopsy, and why I might need one.
After about forty-five minutes or so of reading, I discovered that the elevated PSA result could be from an ejaculation, an ejaculation within 48 hours of the blood draw can elevate the PSA result.
So I contacted the urologist and explained to him what I had discovered. I told him that before doing anything further, I wanted to have my blood drawn and tested again. He agreed….. and the PSA result fell back to normal…. BINGO !
So either I had a stupid urologist, or he was SCAM-ing me.
Either way, I don’t need that crap…. gimme google.
RG
Maybe Google can explain to you the difference between “requires” and “demands”.
Your blinkered Dunning-Krugerism is becoming tiresome. Go and find another place to play.
You may want to read this book (written by a phd, md): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study
Spiceman,
The China Study is fully of serious methodological flaws, cherry-picking of evidence, conclusions contradicted by its own data and many other problems. It has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere e.g. by Chris Masterjohn and separately by Denise Minger. It is not taken seriously by anybody who understands epidemiology, statistics or dietary science.
I fully agree
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Thursday 24 October 2019 at 07:17 said:
“It has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere e.g. by Chris Masterjohn and separately by Denise Minger.”
Chris, (hard sell: get 20% off today), Masterjohn:
https://chris-masterjohn-phd.myshopify.com/products/did-you-know-dont-forget-to-add-save20
And Denise (another nobody) Minger:
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/denise-minger
Are you examples? Why not read The China Study yourself?
Molly,
Others have taken the trouble to spend months going over Colin Campbell’s book in details, examining his data, how it was collected and how it was analysed statistically. They have found serious flaws in his methodology and it seems as though he started with his conclusions and then tried to find evidence supporting them and ignoring that which contradicted him.
For instance he examined so many variables that there were thousands of potential correlations, of which many would be expected to show a high degree of statistical significance purely by chance, but only published the ones that fitted his theories.
Why would I want to waste my time repeating their work, or indeed reading any of the many books out there expounding strange theories?
What do you mean by that? Are you using the “Colin Campbell has a lot of letters after his name so he must be right” argument, of “Colin Campbel is famous so we should believe him” argument?
Am I examples of what?
Denise Minger has also been debunked, both she and Dr. Campbell had their own agendas.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
RG,
Could you point me to where I can read about that? Although it probably doesn’t invalidate the statistical problems with Dr Campbell’s work. Mathematics speaks for itself.
True. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has also written a lot of nonsense.
,blockquote>The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
That is often the case, though are you talking here about the truth of Dr Campbell’s conclusions or the truth about the problems with the methodology of the China Study? I am fairly convinced that Dr Campbell was wrong with regard to the latter. As for his beliefs, since the China Study doesn’t really provide very good evidence one way or the other we would have to look elsewhere.
I have read the China Study
I think a better conversation about the data on the subject here;
http://castig.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/the-protein-debate-campbell-cordain.pdf
I think also a better job of debunking …. if you will, Dr. Campbell.
One thing I take from Dr. Campbell and the China Study. Many if not most people eat more total protein than necessary, and this may explain many modern day illnesses. It does not indicate people need to eat plant protein exclusively. It means that overall protein intake can be lowered and maintain, or achieve better health, while still ingesting some animal protein…. along side plant protein.
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle said:
“Am I examples of what?”
Of someone who has read neither the thing being attacked nor the attackers of it.
RG,
I agree with you that a lot of people eat very badly, although research in this area is problematic as diet may exert a gradual influence over a very long period. I have long suspected that what we eat in childhood could have lifelong effects; indeed only yesterday there was an article in the BBC news about baryatric surgery as treatment for type II diabetes in teenagers referring to evidence from animal studies that controlling calorie (and carbohydrate) intake, as well as weight, during puberty can strongly influence the course of diabetes in adulthood.
While there are undoubtedly ways that people can and should modify their diets to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and other problems, many people find it difficult to change long-established habits, and on the other hand there are those who believe that they have much more control over their bodies than they actually do (diet only accounts for part of the risk of these conditions, for instance).
Personally I think eating locally produced food, in season, is a good start, and it certainly tastes better.
I grew up in times when, if you would go to the doctor it would make time for you to talk about your health properly. It would always give you advises about what to eat and what to drink along with the treatment, and trying to avoid to prescribe too many chemicals. I still remember the posters on the walls talking about that you should move more, eat fruits and vegetables and avoid many bad habits(smocking for example). And I grew up in an eastern Europe ex. communist country (communist at the time of my childhood). I had the chance to spend time at the country side. It was an incredible life. You can’t find such a thing in the big cities of the western civilization (where I actually live now). People would leave much longer than now. And usually old people would be in power until almost the end of their life. They wouldn’t have gym facilities and nutritionists. Also, not too many doctors in the village. But they would always know a lot about a lot in a good way.
Nowadays, if you enter in a doctor’s office, their walls are filled with posters for new “discovered” pills with “incredible” benefits for your health. The doctor’s have maximum ten minutes for you and most of the time you end up at the pharmacy shelves. There is a big business related with Big Pharma.
You said that we should support our comments with evidence.
I can fill a big notebook with lost cases on cancer (starting with my mom, my grandmother, my father in law, many friends, artists, musicians, etc) on chemotherapy. No result at all. And the numbers are growing. Where? Mostly in the countries where canned food and fast food and processed food is everywhere. US is an example. When I moved to the west I was shocked to see how incredibly disorganized life people live, how they eat, how little personal time they have. Family time is almost non existent. Stress is at high level. They live like rats in a race running like crazy every day for nothing. It is a consumerist society that kills its own citizen every day. You only need to get on the street to see what you can eat fresh and organic. Mc Donalds, Starbucks, KFC and so on. Is this food? Does anybody care? Are you guys even realizing what are you debating here?
Go and watch the playgrounds. Are empty. Kids don’t even bother anymore to go outside to play. They have enough entertainment inside at TV, Computer, Tablet, Phone. I recently have been at a conference about cancer and the presenters stated that we have more and more cancer cases in younger people…
Facts? What facts are you still waiting for? The entire society is built on greed. Doctors make a fortune for not being able to realize the real cause of all the health problems in their patients. There’s a pill for each ill now. When was the last time when your family doctor gave you anything else than a paper with prescriptions? It is enough to read this: https://time.com/4475628/the-new-science-of-exercise/
to figure out that we are far away from where we should be.
If you want facts, go to an Amish community, or look at the statistics to see more about them. Or you could take the Adventist believers in US to see their mortality rates. They don’t have so many PHD experts. Still they live a much better life. Or go in other places of the earth where the stupidity of the consumerist society didn’t yet came over.
As in a cancer patient the cancerous cells are multiplying uncontrolled, so this planet is invaded by the multiplication of the wrong actions and things in an uncontrolled and metastatic process. One of this is the greed of their own inhabitants including the so many doctors unfortunately and the drug companies and on and on. But we keep smiling and waiving.
People forgot the simple things, the beauty of life. And this is so sad…
Spiceman
And when there is no more money to extract from the patient, or the patient becomes too expensive… they kill the patient off fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UikHCFTQI4
Hi Amanda,
My mother cured herself of 4 chronic incurable diseases at the same time when she went on the Gerson therapy,
Gerson saved her life and 10 years later she is still in the best physical health that she has ever been in her life.
To show my solidarity for her, I went on the Gerson therapy with her in the first couple of months. Healthy people are not supposed to follow the Gerson protocal and I did not know that.
After 2 months I was too skinny and I went back to a healthy balanced vegan diet.
My mother, who needed the Gerson, continued on the diet and completely healed herself.
So people who are healthy can follow the Gerson Principles of health and use Gerson recipes but the full protocal should only be used by people with specific medical conditions that the Gerson Instiutie recognizes as compatible.
I wanted to share this with other people who should be aware.
Take Care!
Exactly!
I sat BULLSHIT!
Great and very “scientific” answer. Thank you
Excellent reply Peter!!!
Please don’t tell people that the Gerson therapy does not work just to ensure your income keeps coming in, which are your never-ending sick patients. Most of the patients the Gerson Therapy received were those that were told by their oncologist that there is nothing else they can do and go put your affairs in order. They have helped so many people, where medicine gave up. Many years have gone by without much improvement on the cancers that are killing so many people through Big Pharma treatments. I think we can see that Chemo is not the long term answer, but it seems to have a short term answer, however, the cancer usually comes back stronger and will no longer work with chemo. The medical field does not really want the cure, because they would lose out out so much money in many angles. Big Pharma is greedy and your cost!!!
“To ensure your income keeps coming in”
Oh please do one, Julie. Show me a Gerson practitioner who generously gives their services for free.
Julie,
I am not sure that a single one of your statements is true.
“Please don’t tell people that the Gerson therapy does not work”
I tell people that Gerson therapy does not work because it is not only useless but harmful. The theories of physiology, metabolism and the pathogenesis of cancer upon which it is based are nonsense, there is no evidence that it works, the case histories are rather dubious (see my previous post for a discussion of some of them), the treatment itself is dangerous and I have seen first-hand the misery, guilt and physical harm that it causes.
“just to ensure your income keeps coming in, which are your never-ending sick patients.”
It does not in any way threaten my income (which is my pension) nor that of working oncologists. There will always be a demand for doctors, because, yes, the sick patients are never-ending, and I don’t know any oncologist (in the UK at least) who does not work well beyond their paid ours in order to try to meet that demand.
” Most of the patients the Gerson Therapy received were those that were told by their oncologist that there is nothing else they can do and go put your affairs in order.”
Of course I can’t know what most of the patients seeking Gerson Therapy were told by their oncologists, and I don’t suppose you can, either. It is very unusual that there is nothing that we can do, even if the cancer itself has become resistant to conventional treatment, and it is very important that the patient knows that their oncology team will always continue to care for them. In any case, putting our affairs in order is something that everyone should do as you never know what is round the corner (anybody who has lost a family member in an accident can attest to that). As far as I can see, the main reason why people seek Gerson Therapy is pressure from their relatives.
“They have helped so many people, where medicine gave up.”
One of the most distressing things about having cancer is the feeling of being out of control (though in fact we have much less control over our bodies than we think we do). The Gerson treatment gives people a false illusion of being back in control again, which they may feel is helpful at first, but when they find they are unable to stick to the demanding protocol, and they are told that this is the reason why their cancer is continuing to progress, it adds guilt to their misery.
“Many years have gone by without much improvement on the cancers that are killing so many people”
That is completely untrue. Over the course of my career research has revolutionised our understanding of what is going on with cancer and has led to huge changes in the way that they are treated, as well as technical developments in computers which have changed the way radiotherapy is delivered almost beyond recognition. These changes in treatment have led to demonstrably improved outcomes.
“Big Pharma treatments”
The molecular biologists may be the people unravelling the pathways involved in cancer behaviour, but somebody has to make the drugs, and given the huge cost of exploring the many candidate drugs, only a tiny fraction of which pass the required tests of safety and efficacy, Big Pharma are the only ones that are in a position to do it.
“I think we can see that Chemo is not the long term answer”
It is one of many approaches. Though for many people it has been and still is the long-term answer. Most chemotherapy treatments are either given with the intent of curing the cancer (testicular cancer, leukaemia, lymphoma etc.) or improving the cure rate in conjuction of with treatment modalities (breast cancer, bladder cancer, colorectal cancer etc.).
“the cancer usually comes back stronger and will no longer work with chemo”
In the case of palliative treatments, chemotherapy is not given with the intent to cure. However, it can be very effective in controlling the cancer, improving survival and quality of life. Advanced cancers are genetically unstable and therefore contain a great variety of different mutations among their component cells, with the result that even if most of them are sensitive to a specific treatment, there will always be some that aren’t, and Darwinian selection occuring within the tumour means that the resistant cells that are left will eventually dominate.
“The medical field does not really want the cure, because they would lose out out so much money in many angles. ”
I think you need to speak to some of the millions of doctors and biomedical scientists worldwide devoting their lives to cancer research, or maybe to the government bodies and charities funding them
” Big Pharma is greedy and your cost!!!”
Legally any company’s primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not to their customers. Therefore they need to be regulated. Unfortunately, particularly in the USA, this regulation isn’t always as strong as it should be, which has led to a bizarre situation where more money is spent on health care in the US than anywhere else, and yet the health and life expectancy of US citizens is among the worst in the developed world. A government that prioritises industry over the welfare of its citizens is bad for everybody.
Yes that’s why the Oncologist keeps pushing for Chemo. They get a Big Kickback. From Big Pharma. Why is it if Western Medicine is so great why is it that there are So Many Lawsuits against Companies because of all the Side effects And CANCER CAUSING.? DOCTORS KNOWS THIS. Too. But when it comes down to it they act like they didn’t have a Clue. . ALL THE ONCOLIGIST OUT THERE WOULD YOU DO CHEMO. ESPECIALLY IF YOU KNOW ITS NOT GOING TO Help your Family member YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS..
I never got anything of the sort. I prescribed chemo when the evidence suggested that it was the appropriate thing to do.
What lawsuits? The side-effects are well-known and explained to patients so that they can give informed consent.
Yes, they do. On the other hand when you are faced with a definite cancer now vs. an increased risk of a cancer in 30 years’ time (and the patient is probably in their 60’s) how are you going to call it?
I have always believed that I should treat my patients the same way that I would want to be treated myself, or my family for that matter. So yes, I have recommended chemotherapy for my father, my brother-in-law and my wife, and they have all done very well with it. I have had chemotherapy myself but it didn’t work for me, unfortunately. Happily I am now on a new targeted therapy which is keeping my cancer under control.
I should add that all oncologists are very much concerned with the side-effects of treatment and spend a great deal of time and energy monitoring for unusually severe and dangerous effects, and doing all they can to keep them at a minimum.
thank you – I do admire you patience with some people!
I don’t expect to change the mind of whoever it is I am replying to, but I hope somebody else reading it might find my comments educational.
I am constantly astounded at the strange things people believe, and their complete ignorance of what oncologists (and doctors in general) do all day. Perhaps some of your regular contributers should contact a local oncologist / rheumatologist / physician and arrange to shadow them for a week.
While I was waiting to pick up a prescription just now I saw a product in the pharmacy which was some kind of detoxifying foot patch based on lavender, though containing many other things, including minerals such as tourmeline. The instructions on the back included a diagram of the soles of the feet marked up with reflexology homunculi and acupuncture points, and recomended various places to apply the patch for optimal sleep, thereby combining reflexology, acupuncture and aromatherapy. The small print listed as “active ingredients” some kind of strach (74%), and as “inactive ingredients” lavender and about twenty other things. I asked the pharmacist about it and she said the patches were very popular and people swore by them.
Really, many people seem to live in a different world full of magic and witchcraft, and they genuinely seem to believe in it.
yes, and as long as they do no harm to themselves or others, one might say this is ok. but sadly they do much harm, perhaps no more than in oncology.
I wonder how much money gets spent on ineffectual tripe which people imagine will improve their lives? AltMed, lucky charms, religious gewgaws, horoscopes..
There’s a market out there and money to be made by the unscrupulous.
As ever, really.
This article is exactly what I thought, that this dr is big pharma backed and it is senseless to waste his time to undermining a safe path of living for health conscious people and then trying to say its dangerous on top of it.
Unless he is getting paid to do it, which is a big industry on the internet now.
Why else would a sane person oppose it? Minus the coffee enemas, ( which hippocrates, the founder of medicine advocated 2000 years ago) its the way people ate and drank until a a hundred years ago before the factory processed foods with chemicals, preservatives, aadditives, and then genetically modified plants began. Then factory farming wasted and depleted the soil of its 60 minerals which prevent disease to just 3, and are only mandated to add back the 3 of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
My urologist responded when asked about the dangers of eating organic foods, doing coffee enemas, drinking pure water and taking natural plant based supplements for vitamins that she saw zero risk in it.
Simple as this, let those who are smart do their own research and see for themselves. gerson works, I saw a stage 3 cured personally. If she had listened to this guy, she would now have a colostomy bag.
I will be not be contributing to further profits by posting and actions here as that may contribute to profits just like ‘likes’ do on the internet. I will also cancel this subscription for the same reason, as this is just a big pharma shill.
I cannot decide which notion is more amusing/wrong
1) Hippocrates has his coffee anally
2) I am ‘big pharma backed’
3) 100 years ago, there was no cancer
4) Gerson works
THERE IS MUCH MADNESS OUT THERE!
5) “I will also cancel this subscription” Now then, Edzard, be honest: are you making people as misguided as Amante Tadique subscribe to your blog?! How much is the fee?
don’t ask, you could not possibly afford it!
Could you supply the reference to where Hippocrates advocated coffee enemas? As far as I am aware coffee was not known in ancient Greece, and indeed anywhere as a drink until about 1,500 years after Hippocrates.
I doubt you’ll get a response from Amante, but I bet the Hippocrates coffee enema notion comes from a misreading of this website: https://hippocrates.com.au/hippocrates-news-archive/detoxification/how-you-can-do-detoxifying-coffee-enemas/
If Hippocrates ever experienced a ‘burning bum’ sensation after enjoying a coffee enema, he could always use coconut oil, according to the same website. (Please don’t be a spoilsport and point out that coconuts weren’t known in Greece in the 4th century BCE.)
I don’t know about coconuts, but somewhere I have a British Army medical manual from around the time of World War I recommending coffee enemas as emergency treatment for asthma. I would imagine that they would work as it would be an effective way of getting a large amount of caffeine into the body at once. Nowadays we use IV aminophylline, which is a similar drug.
@Frank Odds on Friday 01 March 2019 at 08:50 said:
“…(Please don’t be a spoilsport and point out that coconuts weren’t known in Greece in the 4th century BCE.)”
From here:
http://cocos.arecaceae.com/ancient.html
This:
BC 415
A Greek physician Ctesias (around 415 BC), wrote that he had seen these fruits in India.
Chiovenda 1921-3 Webbia 5, 199-294 & 359-449.
??❤
You are totally worthless. MD with a PHD of stupidity? Try inventing something that should help others, instead of relying in your outdated studies and google surfing universities. Sadly, it is your only source of research and “proof” of your claims.
I’m a 22 years pancreatic cancer survivor, using the gerson therapy. I can’t wait for you to have cancer or one of your loved ones, and try your great chemo, let’s chat again then. I’ll wait to have a big laugh you. Yes, because that’s what people like you deserve. Good luck with your life and useless titles, which obviously make you very proud but show how insecure you are.
For the rest of the readers, don’t waste your time reading this worthless blog, and take control of your own health!
“I can’t wait for you to have cancer or one of your loved ones”
pure kindness!
EE
This tone from Mike is a result of the pain that SBM has inflicted on sick people, and you wonder why they turn elsewhere.
Which pancreatic cancer, Mike? There’s more than one type. And what other treatment did you receive before you started sticking apricot stones and coffee up your arse and concluding that it was what cured you?
@ Mike:
I have to say: you are NOT “totally worthless”!
In just one short blog post, you manage to show human kindness, deep knowledge of psychology AND spread good health advice! Chapeau!
If ingenious people like you have concluded that personal experience is sufficient evidence to evaluate a medical intervention, then who on earth seriously needs expensive, statistically solid, large-scale randomized controlled trials?!
Anyway, at least I had one good laugh today… so thank you!
🙂
Maybe this dude is paid by pharma to discredit Gerson’s . Such nonsense !!!! I love Gerson’s for many reasons. Ive used it to cure my RA and know many that have had cancer and are healed now.
“I see, in Dr. Max Gerson, M.D., the most eminent genius in medical history.”
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.
appeal to authority = logical fallacy.
Edzard on Wednesday 27 May 2020 at 06:08 said
“appeal to authority = logical fallacy.”
Such as the FDA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs
Medicine has moved on since Schweitzer’s day, particularly cancer treatment.
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Wednesday 27 May 2020 at 09:39 said:
“Medicine has moved on since Schweitzer’s day, particularly cancer treatment.”
Gerson cured the 75 year old Schweitzer of diabetes who then lived for another 15 years as opposed to modern medicine that has “…moved on since Schweitzer’s time…” but is still searching:
https://www.diabetes.org.uk/diabetes-the-basics/is-there-a-cure
From here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/04/uk-cancer-death-rates-drop-10-per-cent-ten-years
This:
“Death rates from cancer in the UK have dropped by 10% over the last decade, thanks to progress in diagnosing and treating the disease, but the number of deaths keeps rising because more people are falling ill.”
Whereas in Schweitzer’s day, Gerson had a 30% success rate with patients (who had been abandoned by the, then-primitive-by-today’s-standards, cancer-doctors.)
Today, standard cancer care is being disrupted:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30243-6/fulltext
But not Gerson Therapy (organic apples, carrots and green stuff have generally been available the whole time – likewise the supplements).
It is not unknown to live 15 years with diabetes even with conventional treatment…
I know very little about the circumstances of Schweitzer’s diagnosis of diabetes, or how he was treated (70 or more years ago) or on what basis he believed that he was cured. However, the management of type II diabetes is primarily diet, exercise and weight loss and from what I know of the Gerson diet it is low in carbohydrates and tends to bring the weight down.
That is because:
1. There are more people
2. They are no longer dying of something else first (most cancers occurring in later life)
So he claimed. I have looked at his case histories. For many of them it is unclear on what basis the diagnosis of cancer was made. Others had received conventional treatment as well which was probably the reason for the “cure”. I have not seen any that I found convincing. I have, however, looked after several patients undergoing Gerson therapy in the UK when I was a junior doctor working for an oncologist who had agreed to provide medical supervision – only one of them survived more than three weeks after starting it.
My understanding is that the organically-grown fruit and vegetables have to be supplied by the Gerson Foundation to be part of the treatment, and foodstuffs which are generally available are not acceptable. Do you have specific information that they have been able to maintain their supply chain or are you just making this up?
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Thursday 28 May 2020 at 23:34 said
“My understanding is that the organically-grown fruit and vegetables have to be supplied by the Gerson Foundation to be part of the treatment, and foodstuffs which are generally available are not acceptable. Do you have specific information that they have been able to maintain their supply chain or are you just making this up?”
No, Gerson Therapy is no secret, it was and has always been open – he even says so on the first page of his book “…there is no secret!” – you buy your own organic vegetables, or grow them yourself, permission is not required!
Everyone reading this knows the availability of organic carrots for the last few months, in their area/country – were they available or not? – now what about local healthcare, was that available or not?
Old Bob,
Ah, that must be how the Gerson Foundation make their money, then.
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Friday 29 May 2020 at 15:03 said:
“Ah, that must be how the Gerson Foundation make their money, then.”
Yes, that is correct, money must be made (before it can be looted or mouched), by every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows he cannot consume more than he has produced. – Atlas Shrugged, penguin edition, page 411.
I know a man who did the Herson diet, no other treatment. He had a stage 3 Cancer his lymph node was the size of an egg. That was 1999 and he’s still cancer free in 2021.
yes, spontaneous remissions do happen. nothing to do with Herson, not even with Gerson!
Yet, it just happens to be a coincidence that his “spontaneous remission” occurred just when the man enacted the special diet. Who woulda thought ?
Just like it just happens to be coincidental that patients that take vaccines have immediate bad reactions…. the two just happen to occur around the same time.
Nothing to see here, more along.
he might also have had some vanilla ice cream at the time – think about it!
I had some vanilla ice cream the other day and had an immediate headache. Obviously a bad reaction. Think about it. You’re just a shill for Big Dairy, Edzard.
Lenny dear
I went to the dentist last week. When I came home, my mouth was in pain. Do you think my visit to the dentist had any relation to why my mouth was hurting ? Or was it did a correlation ?
change your dentist
I do believe Gerson to be a genius. This website is probably sponsored by big pharma. Remember to look everywhere for the truth but to discard rubbish site like this one!
“… sponsored by big pharma”
oh, yes – how very original! we did not have this fallacy for a while…
@Ruthy: An analytical, scientific mind would first work to identify all possible causes for this observation (incorrect diagnosis, indolent tumor, spontaneous remission, overlooked conventional treatment, false claim, magic diet, etc. etc) and then, much like Sherlock Holmes, do its best to disprove each one in turn, on basis that anything left standing at the very end is perhaps not entirely wrong.
It is a careful process that may not give you the answer you’d like, but hopefully it gives you an answer that is useful.
Whereas what you are doing is seeking to confirm and strengthen your existing bias. That is the work of a religious mind. And it should take no part in medicine; not when people’s lives are at stake.
Sadly, as a career misanthrope, it has not escaped my notice that far too many human beings, when given the choice between pleasing belief and hard truth, would far rather choose the pleasing belief—even where that choice may ultimately result in the deaths of themselves and/or others.
It takes a conscious ongoing effort not to lie to oneself. And Alties like yourself aren’t merely really bad at doing that, but often deliberately choose to do the exact opposite; for ego, for money, for social standing. As self-deception it is disgustingly self-serving.
You fool no-one but yourselves. And I would pity all of you, were it not for blood on your hands.
As to the rest: Evidence or GTFO. It should not be that hard.
@Ruthy
No, this is no coincidence, but is actually to be expected.
A large percentage of cancer patients (estimates run from 50% all the way up to 85%) use some sort of alternative treatment in the hope that this will help them somehow. So it isn’t strange at all if a subsequent remission is often attributed to this treatment – even if the patient had other, regular treatments as well. Also, these people then tend to become quite vocal proponents of the particular alternative treatment that they followed.
Unfortunately, they are quite wrong: when looking at larger numbers than just N=1, remission rates are not higher among people who use these ‘special diets’ or any other alternative treatments – quite the opposite in fact: those who turn to alternative treatments tend to have higher mortality rates and a lower quality of life, especially if they forego or neglect regular treatments.
You are being silly here. Vaccination activates the immune system, causing some sort of reaction, and dental work can cause pain. Hence the guideline to look out for allergic reactions after vaccination and the routine use of dental anaesthetics. These are generally accepted facts with lots of scientific evidence. It is NOT a generally accepted scientific fact that following any diet helps against cancer – there isn’t even the slightest shred of evidence; there are just anecdotal reports such as yours, but those are simply wrong.
Here are some reasons why anecdotes such as yours are spread and believed. First some general principles:
– Control: people like to be in control of their life, and a cancer diagnosis is often quite devastating in that respect: all of a sudden, the future looks uncertain and full of suffering, and just passively submitting to unpleasant medical treatments contributes to feeling helpless. But actively doing something like following a diet is something that people can do by themselves, thereby giving them back a sense of control.
– Hope: people don’t like to give up hope, or dash other people’s hope. So no matter how bleak things are, there will always be people who come up with optimistic stories about miraculous treatments, regardless of how improbable they are.
Other reasons have to do with ignoring or denying reality, or fabricating their own truth:
– Letting own beliefs prevail: people who recovered from cancer while using both alternative and regular treatments often attribute their recovery to their self-chosen alternative treatments, while ignoring or even omitting the fact that they also underwent regular treatment – which was far more likely to have cured them. One well-known example is Chris Wark who had surgery to treat his colon cancer, but declined follow-up chemotherapy and chose to follow a raw vegan diet instead. When his cancer didn’t recur, he loudly proclaimed that he had ‘beat cancer‘, starting off a cancer diet hype. In reality, his recovery had nothing to do with his diet, as surgery alone already had a high chance of eradicating his cancer. These people often attain a guru-like status, prompting them to keep promoting their false message.
– False diagnosis: quite a few miraculously healed ‘cancer’ patients were in fact never diagnosed by a competent doctor, but were told by a quack or convinced themselves that a particular lump here or a skin blemish there was cancer. And when these things ultimately resolved naturally, the patient of course attributed this to the (alternative) treatment that they followed at the time.
– Outright lies: unfortunately, people lie, sometimes even about very serious conditions such as cancer, usually because they crave attention and compassion from other people. There are several examples where people claimed to have cancer, and later turned out to have lied about their condition, such as this Dutch politician. To make things worse, these people often make up a ‘miracle cure’ as well to avoid being exposed as a liar, contributing to the narrative of successful alternative cancer treatments.
Then there is the category of commercially motivated lies about alternative cancer treatments:
– Personal gain: one egregious example is that of Belle Gibson, who raised huge amounts of money through crowdfunding by lying about her cancer diagnosis and her ‘treatments’ – invariably expensive alternative treatments.
– Business model: and finally there are the outright cancer quacks who have turned taking huge sums of money from desperately ill people into a business model. A prime example is Stanislaw Burzynski, who has been charging patients tens of thousands of dollars for treatments that even after 40 years(!!) are still called ‘experimental’, and have no evidence of efficacy whatsoever. Other examples are cancer quacks who operate clinics in Mexico, robbing cancer patients of their last money as well as their last months or weeks of life while promising improvement or even a cure all the while. And yes, several of these clinics sell Gerson ‘therapy’.
@Richard: Well said. See also: post-hoc, Texas sharpshooter fallacies. One of the reasons the scientific method is designed to work the way it does is to minimize opportunities for these very human biases to creep in and pollute results. But it is highly counter-intuitive to those who would pride themselves on their “common sense” reasoning.
Which is probably why it took a couple thousand years to get from the ancient Greek philosophers’ methods of “knowing” to Sir Francis Bacon and the start of the Enlightenment: Aristotle et al greatly enjoyed their own intelligent reasoning, through which they would arrive at pleasing conclusions; they saw no reason to test their conclusions (to destruction) to actually check they were right.
Which is to say, a lot of very smart, educated, deep-thinking people have already made the very same mistakes which Ruthy now makes; and most of them never realized and/or learned from those mistakes themselves. So there’s no inherent shame in making such mistakes: we have all done it, and easily still do.
What is shameful is refusing to recognize our mistakes when we make them, accept them, admit them, and embrace the positive learning opportunities they present. But so AltMed goes. It is very bad for Ego.
I’m not a proponent of Gerson Therapy. Never used it, nor personally known anybody that used the diet. However, I do subscribe to using diet as a means of treating chronic illnesses. “Let food be your medicine”. So in that respect, Gerson is not far off the mark.
diet is effective mostly for disease prevention; there are very few illnesses that can be cured by diet.
Gerso was very far off the mark indeed.
What an amazing quote Ruthy! Did you come up with that yourself or rip it off of this book’s title.
Coming to the topic of Gerson’s therapy that you think hits the mark in terms of curing ailments with food, what foods do you suggest people eat to say…cure covid? How would they take that food? i.e., orally or anally?
ha Talker
The idea of let food by thy medicine has been a concept for longer than I’ve been alive. If you had any brains you would know that.
You expect me to teach you how to eat to cure ailments ? I won’t waste my time on ignorant cyber-bully, you figure it out yourself. I already told your where to look, the FOOD, and personal eating habits.
Of course, Ruthy! I expect you to teach me how to eat to cure ailments. Like you said, I have no “brains”, so I rely on very intelligent persons like you to get by in my daily life. You are right, you cannot go wrong with any ideology that existed longer than we ourselves have on this planet. So, I tried to put your advice to use the other day and ate four BigMac’s in one sitting to try and cure an upset stomach, but it made it worse. I am wondering where I went wrong. Should I be following Gerson’s teachings and ingest the foods anally? Have you tried the anal route? Does it work?
Although I have no “brains” I have a curious mind. Since you refuse to tell me what foods would cure covid, I did my own “research” and found out that trying to cure covid with food is a fool’s errand. The best option is to avoid getting infected by social distancing, masking and vaccinations. In fact, a recent study found that mRNA vaccine induced immunity is far superior to natural immunity from a previous covid infection. Here is a quote for the study:
So, I decided to rely on superior vaccine induced immunity and scheduled a vaccination appointment.
@Ruthy: “The idea of let food by thy medicine has been a concept for longer than I’ve been alive.”
So what? That doesn’t mean it’s right.
Galenic medicine ruled supreme for over 1500 until Harvey actually put them to the test and quickly proved them wrong. 1500 years of the One True Cause and Cure of Disease, destroyed virtually overnight. By applying science.
And across those 1500 years, how many sick people died not so much from the disease but from the “cure” (Galenic bloodletting) which every physician and layperson knew was right? How many lives would have been saved—how much further advanced might medicine be today—had Hippocrates and Galen actually bothered to test their own claims to destruction first?
“If you had any brains you would know that.”
As others have already noted, there is plenty of scientific research that points to the importance of good diet and regular exercise for maintaining good health, and very little that shows diet—especially quack diets— effective at treating diseases beyond mild type 2 diabetes and various food intolerances. So who’s the one that’s not exercising their brains here? Because you’re the only person in this thread who’s presenting the dismal Appeal to Antiquity as her answer, and—as Galen attests—that doesn’t make you correct, only blindly arrogant and dangerously stubborn.
…
So might I respectfully suggest you go away and learn how to ask questions first. Once you’ve developed basic competence in that, come back here and we’ll be happy to help you in learning how to obtain answers to those questions that are worth a damn. Or don’t, because as we’ve also learned by now, Alties don’t actually want answers that are accurate; only answers that fatten their egos, and fatten their wallets, and make them feel clever and superior to everyone else, and couldn’t care less for all the misery and pain and lives lost chasing those precious falsehoods.
’Cos Galen was piker compared to you lot.
I would say “For shame!”, but I’ve yet to meet an altie who has any. So it goes.
@Talker: “Let food be thy medicine” is generally ascribed to Hippocrates (460-370BC), and thus is even older than Galen, though no more inherently correct for it. And, to be clear: H & G did lay the foundations for the modern mainstream system of medicine we now enjoy today. But that doesn’t mean they were utterly, appallingly, lethally ignorant and wrong on a lot of extremely important details, not least the causes disease and how [not] to cure it.
The only good sacred cow is a dead one, which is what Alties fundamentally fail to understand about us, because they’ve never ever butchered one themselves, or even contemplated it as a possibility; and so they assume that because they blindly worship one, that we must blindly worship another. It is a failure of imagination, it is a failure of self-awareness (especially insight into one’s own limitations), it is a shocking ignorance of how the universe works and the millennia-long process by which humanity has gradually taught itself how to figure things out. All buoyed up by overinflated egos and a desperate cloying need for the social acceptance and praise of their fellow rah-rah cheerleaders. Just so mung beans like Ruthie and Roger can believe themselves Special, while the grifters get rich and sick people needlessly suffer and die.
—
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Isaac Asimov
@has
Certainly, alties don’t seem to have the capability to think beyond binary numbers. If one doesn’t worship the alt-med gods, then that person for sure is sacrificing baby goats at the altar of big-pharma gods. Most people when confronted with cold hard scientific facts would most likely change their position, but not alties. Truthiness reigns supreme in alternate realities they inhabit, where 2+2 equals anything but four.
P.S: Sherlock Holmes captured my imagination at a very young age followed by writing of Asimov, Vonnegut and Orwell. Reading your posts, it appears you had similar experiences as well.
Unfortunately the full text is behind a paywall, but this paper argues that:
“the alleged Hippocratic phrase “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” is a widespread misquotation, lying at the root of an entire misconception about the ancient concepts of food and medicine”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212826313000924
@zebra: “the alleged Hippocratic phrase “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” is a widespread misquotation, lying at the root of an entire misconception about the ancient concepts of food and medicine”
This is entirely possible. Although, as we regularly observe, accuracy is not the first concern of AltMed advocates. Whatever serves.
Talker
I already explained to you that I don’t do Gerson, why are you implicating me ? … like I said, no brains.
So now I’m about 100% certain that you are of the male sex. Only men conjure up dreams of inserting lubricated meat up the poop-shoot. Have I ever tried it ? …. you would want to know, but that’s my business.
If loads of BigMacs are you thing… by all means, enjoy. Just keep in mind that the top three comorbidity factors for Covid-19 death is hypertension, lipid metabolism, and obesity. These three make up about 45% of the contributing factors to covid death rates. Let’s you and me go to Mcdonalds land and I’ll by you all you want.
Now I see you’ve jumped from oral and anal food to meatless injection in the arm. You want to bring vaccines in the conversation ? So a healthy diet will go further than a jab in the arm, because a vaccine won’t cure covid-19 either.
@Ruthy
I thought some anecdotal evidence would go a long way. Since you think that is a private matter, I will not push further.
And….we are back to the starting point, when you were extoling the virtues of food cures without any evidence, I asked you what foods would cure covid and you refused to provide any information. So, I tried to walk in your footsteps for a day and try and cure something with food. Since you are unwilling to share your experience, I tried to eat BigMac as a cure and that didn’t work. I set forth to doing my own research and found that one can’t cure covid with food and vaccines PREVENT infection (never said anything about vaccines curing covid) and provided evidence of my claim. I explained all this in my last post which you clearly haven’t grasped, therefore no brains.
Talker was making a reference to Gerson therapy, which involves coffee enemas and is the original subject of this thread. Meat was never mentioned and as far as I know the Gerson diet is vegetarian.
good Doctor
“So, I tried to put your advice to use the other day and ate four BigMac’s in one sitting to try and cure an upset stomach, but it made it worse. I am wondering where I went wrong. Should I be following Gerson’s teachings and ingest the foods anally? Have you tried the anal route? Does it work?”
Thus my reply.
@Ruthy: While it is arguable that BigMacs are to food what Gerson is to medicine, you were the one who gleefully jumped on the Gerson bandwagon from out of nowhere—and apparently did so without even stopping to check what the Gerson “diet” actually involves.
Yes, it is 100% true. Blasting coffee up the ol’ poop chute is the center pole [sic] in the Gerson big tenet. And you just boosted it. Euwww.
(Also swallowing vast quantities of vitamin pills and generally feeling far more miserable and dying sooner than if they’d just taken the damn chemo. Gerson would be one of the more comically clownish claims of AltMed-dom, were it not also for its loathesomely lethal exploitation of some of the most desperate and frightened people currently alive. Not that they’ll be alive for much longer, mind, if Gerson “treatment” is the best that they’ve got.)
Honestly, if you don’t want others to point and laugh at you in the future, perhaps try checking where you’re landing your feet before you plant them in a steaming cow patty the size of Texas.
To has
I jumped on the Gerson bandwagon ? That’s what you say, I did not, I clearly said I do not support Gerson Therapy. I said I support eating healthy food with healthy habits.
I’ve known of Gerson Therapy for more than ten years. Yes, including the coffee enemas, you assume too much.
I am quite sure there are MD’s that prescribe coffee enemas to their patients. I can believe that these enemas can produce benefits for some patients, and I suspect that when done aside from the direction of a professional that the patient is taking on risk.
Enough of Gerson, I focus on diet. My issues with Gerson diet is that far too much of the recommended foods are fruits, a diet of high sugar is against my personal protocol. I try to eat fruits only whole, never juiced.
@Ruthy
So, you say you don’t support Gerson Therapy (GT), but that doesn’t stop you from contradicting yourself in the next paragraph, like so:
You don’t support GT, but you think it can be beneficial to some patients. Also, you believe in letting food be medicine and that GT being in line with that ideology but you don’t support GT. Is it Ruthy’s Gerson Therapy Paradox where she simultaneously supports and does not support GT?
Coming to the issue of diet, I doubt that you understand the difference between using diet for disease prevention vs cure and it has been explained to you by others, but you don’t seem to be capable of wrapping your head around the concept. That said, if you keep parroting evidence free claims from alt-med fantasy lands, you are going to get mocked. Have a nice life!
@Ruthy: “I jumped on the Gerson bandwagon ? That’s what you say, I did not, I clearly said I do not support Gerson Therapy. I said I support eating healthy food with healthy habits.”
Also @Ruthie: “Yet, it just happens to be a coincidence that his “spontaneous remission” occurred just when the man enacted the special [Gerson] diet. Who woulda thought?”
Please. You embarrass yourself.
There was a problem with this post that meant that not all the text was visible. Now fixed.
Cancer Research UK is being funded by “Big Pharma”? Good! People who haven’t the foggiest about what constitutes proof of efficacy for a cancer treatment and promote Gerson Therapy? Bad! Endangering the lives of others is an unconscionable act. In claiming his therapy worked, Max Gerson either invented the cases or cherry-picked them over many years from patients who experienced spontaneous remissions. For that matter, there has never been a plausible scientific explanation for why it would work in the first place. Just a lot of hot air. Today, it’s a business and a profitable one at that. In my over 30 years of watching the world of alternative cancer therapies and those who bilk the innocent out of their money, I’ve seen more patients die from cancer with Gerson and other so-called therapies than I want to remember. Instead of building a wall, Trump would better to impose heavy trade sanctions on Mexico until they shut down and ban the bogus cancer clinics in Tijuana and anywhere else in the country.
Just curious if you have looked at the numbers of people who have died from cancer from both forms of treatment? I have….. People should be shocked at the huge numbers of failure from the pseudo science of chemo. Honestly reading the posts from most of you claiming to be doctors or in the field of medicine disgust me. You bash anything that you are told is not accepted, spread disinformation and KILL people with your poison every day. “Big Pharma” Good????? are you all that brainwashed. I am sorry to speak like this but I am so tired of the B.S. touted by many of the health professionals who are slaves to both the drug companies and their insurance companies. If you think something like the Gerson method is incorrect, prove it, don’t bash it. You are scientists, where is your scientific method proving your claim? Oh thats right, you don’t have any…… If you all actually cared about patients you would be looking at everything that might be on to something. Tell me this, why was Dr. Max Gerson funded for his method by the U.S. when he first found it as the cure for T.B. Why was he a hero when he discovered this and then systematically torn down and had to leave the country? Could it be????? Because of “dare I say it” Big Pharma? I like many of you asking questions in here are reading because of cancer. My wife, at 30 years of age, two months after our son was born, who had been in, “oh how did the doctor put it” ” You are is such GREAT health” was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. At first I listened intently to what the doctors were telling us. But as things progressed and getting worse I looked elsewhere. I found the the information on the Gerson method and seeing how the chemo was not working, begged my wife to try it. She asked the doctors and of course was given the same B.S. you are slinging in here. She didn’t think it would be wise to try and was strong in her faith that something would work. When it was obvious that nothing tried was working I proposed to the doctors a way to use their treatments that might have a chance of prolonging her time here and allow us more time to fight it. They agreed that my idea could work…….but against policy? Really??????? WTF!!! You all can take your crap that has a list of harmful effects so long that they have to give you a book on it. The lies and pussy behavior of you slaves sickens me. Remember it is called “Practicing Medicine” because you don’t have all the answers. The point is to keep looking and learning, and haven’t you learned by know that poison doesn’t fix things. We don’t drink bleach to clean our system out. Grow up!!
Keep calm, and look at it this way: American doctors live 73 years on average whereas the average American lives 78 years.
Let the doctors choose their chemo, it’s their funeral.
oh dear!
what a comment,
what an insight,
what wisdom!
It’s not a comment (an opinion or reaction), it’s fact
Doctors (73.0 years):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11020591
Men (78.69):
https://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1CAACAH_enGB771GB771&ei=lmQJXJqaE4X8kwWsx4uoDw&q=life+expectancy+of+men+usa&oq=life+expectancy+of+men+usa&gs_l=psy-ab.3…26210.27521..27712…0.0..0.209.421.1j1j1……0….1..gws-wiz…….0i71j0i67.GmDGZzmtFOg
Has it occurred to you that there might be other factors than chemo involved?
Yes, that’s the main point: the near-infinite-interactions make conventional-testing very expensive and difficult hence “unproven” for many things that might be true such as Gerson-therapy-works or doctor’s-short-lifespan-is-because-of-stress.
Max Gerson lived to be 78
Charlotte Gerson is still alive at 95
https://gerson.org/gerpress/happy-95th-birthday-charlotte/
Evidently this proves nothing, scientifically.
For scientific proof, we would have to re-run Charlotte Gerson’s life, without coffee enemas and without her father healing her at age 12, and see how long she lived then – but that is impossible, hence the above is “unproven”.
When the “unproven” word is used often enough against certain things, the word itself changes its meaning: “a rose by any other name…” as the poet said.
Hi you are fired, I am so sorry to hear about your wife’s cancer.
It wasn’t clear to me if she was cured and survived?
Well done to you for trying the Gerson Method and I totally agree with what you are saying about the pharmaceutical industry.
My sister died of leukaemia which she contracted from the chemo she received for breast cancer 5 years prior. The chemo attacked her bone marrow and caused the leukaemia.
I wish we had known about the Gerson method as we would have followed their method.
Sooner or later, Candida was bound to raise its ugly head on this blog. The quote in the OP vcan be commended as one of the more succinct accounts of the total ignorance on the part of believers in the gospel of the ‘chronic candidiasis syndrome’, ‘The Yeast Connection’, ‘Candida hypersensitivity syndrome’ and various other titles.
Candida is the name of a genus of fungi with several hundreds of species. About seven of these cause infections in humans, (other species are exceptionally rare causes). In real medicine, Candida infections have long been recognized as ‘diseases of the already diseased’, sentinels of various kinds of immune dysfunction. Genital thrush is the commonest form of Candida infection, and the immune dysfunction that predisposes to episodes of genital thrush is still uncertain, despite considerable research efforts, but for other forms of candidiasis the nature of the immune deficit is clear. Oral thrush is one of the earliest indicators of a decline in CD4 lymphocyte counts/increased viral load in patients with AIDS, and disseminated, potentially fatal Candida infections arise in patients with serious, multiple immune defects.
“It’s a stubborn form of yeast that resides in the gut…” Correct: like other ‘stubborn’ microbes (mostly bacteria) it forms part of the normal, commensal gut flora.
“…and wreaks havoc with your immune system.” Nonsense! the converse is the case. Defects in the immune system permit Candida yeasts to become pathogenic. (Exactly the same thing happens with other members of the gut flora, e.g. E. coli and other Gram-negative gut bacteria.)
“candida overgrowth contributes to insatiable sugar cravings, which in turn causes the overgrowth to establish itself more firmly.” Ignorant horse manure with no supporting evidence.
“Coffee enemas may selectively flush out candida overgrowths in the gut while preserving the beneficial bacteria that we rely on to break down food and support healthy immune function.” Ignorant horse manure with no supporting evidence.
“Many people report a significant reduction in their symptoms of candida with regular coffee enema flushing.” And many people report having been abducted by aliens.
The main basis for diagnosis of this non-existent ‘clinical entity’ is your score on a subjective questionnaire. Examples of these moronic questions include: “Have you at any time in your life taken a course of antibiotics?”, “Do you have any symptoms that worsen on damp or muggy days or in moldy places?” and “Do you experience the feeling of being drained (exhausted without obvious cause)? Many of us would answer ‘yes’ to this type of question. The notion of sampling a patient for the presence of a Candida sp. is usually not entertained because ‘we all carry Candida’.
The Chronic Candida syndrome was first introduced to the world in 1981 by a doctor of ‘orthomolecular medicine’ called Truss. It came of age a couple of years later with the publication of ‘The Yeast Connection’ — a best-seller book of unproven therapeutic recipes — authored by a gentleman called Crook [sic].
I remember it well. Talk about recycled horse pucks! It’s astounding to me that anyone would deem to promote the Candida or yeast syndrome today, especially when naturopaths in the U.S. now shy from the term for fear of being called quacks.
I am very pleased to see that this is being discussed here, I have just had a most dispiriting conversation with several of the Candida faithful, all sorts of “remedies” being pushed, from anthroposophical medicine to reiki, all convinced that they are suffering from this murky condition: do you know of any good material in Spanish on the subject? I was only able to find material in English, which is not very helpful to spanish (or catalan) speakers, as are the “sufferers” with whom I was concerned.
I was about to comment on Gerson ‘Therapy’, and how,
of all the quack beliefs it is still, after all these years, one that the hysterics defend most vehemently.
And then along comes the fellow McAlpine, wearing his own suicide vest disguised as an argument, but managing to blow himself up before reaching any targets.
As I pointed out before, the Cancer Tutor site mentioned in the clueless post above is worth checking, if only to confirm the type of people on the other side of the argument.
All the usual stuff is available- anger, lies,verbal abuse.
One person in particular- it wouldn’t be fair to name her, but she’s called Darlina Idan, and seems to be involved with a quckcentre in the Philippines- particularly dislikes being politely asked for evidence, and has several times called me an ‘ignorant fool’, a ‘frustrated artist’, a ‘troll’, and told me to get an education. One fellow said that it was quite obvious that ‘natural treatments’ have science on their side( I haven’t heard back from him), another said ‘For god’s sake man, you’re on a site where there are more than 200 reports of natural treatment. What more do you need?’. ‘Evidence’, said I. He disappeared also. Oh, I forgot the two occasions I was called an ‘asshole’. Not very scientific, or wholesome family reading, but I merely report.
As long as McAlpine, Colin, Iqbal etc are working feverishly away removing the sandy foundations from their own beliefs, we can be sure that homeopathy is in unsafe hands.
“particularly dislikes being politely asked for evidence, and has several times called me an ‘ignorant fool’, a ‘frustrated artist’, a ‘troll’, and told me to get an education. One fellow said that it was quite obvious that ‘natural treatments’ have science on their side( I haven’t heard back from him), another said ‘For god’s sake man, you’re on a site where there are more than 200 reports of natural treatment. What more do you need?’. ‘Evidence’, said I. He disappeared also. Oh, I forgot the two occasions I was called an ‘asshole’. Not very scientific, or wholesome family reading, but I merely report.”
Seems to be a common experience among truth seekers.
I love the replies! Some are so personal! I’m impressed! Sadly, though, many people here seem to be so full of anger and aggression, which is a recipe alone for getting cancer.
Please ask yourself this question, if you are unfortunate to get cancer: “Will I walk my anti-natural treatment talk and go for Big Pharma’s conventional cancer treatments, i.e. chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, when I know that they have a deplorably and extremely low success rate globally and that I will most probably die? Or will I (be a hypocrite and) try natural treatments instead as they have far better success rates and I may well be cured?” … That’s got to hurt! So, breathe deeply and slowly in and out, and let the aggression flow out!
Demonstrably false, Peter. A swift Google search on cancer survival rates will let you now how successful medicine has been in treating a large number of cancers. It will also show that, with a few exceptions, that cure rate has increased with time. Contrast that with all the people cured by natural methods.
Oh. That’ll be none, then.
Google Jess Ainscough for starters. Who, along with her mother, took the “natural” path when the conventional one was available and offered a good chance of a cure. Both died.
Lenny
And it doesn’t stop there of course.
The ‘Wellness Warrior’, as she chose to call herself, acted as a magnet for many women, some of whom saw this as an adjunct to their wacky interpretation of ‘feminism’., with its appearance of spirited rebelliousness.. As you know, she appeared in public until very late in the day,saying that her awful appearance by then was simply part of the process of getting more and more ill before getting better.
I feel sorry for the girl, but her delusional beliefs quite possibly caused deaths among those who took them up themselves.
Sorry for the extreme anger and aggression I’m exhibiting in presenting my case here, Peter.
Please let Jess Ainscough and her mother RIP. Let’s stick to randomised controlled trials.
Peter, you are trying to get people to delay treatments that have real proven clinical value in properly conducted clinical studies for treatments that do not have such evidence. That simply (to prove your own “special” knowledge) puts people’s lives at risk. On average, people who abjure conventional treatment for “alternative” treatments — including nutritional treatments die earlier.
Frankly, I have to assume that you honestly believe this nonsense, else you would be knowingly promoting suicide. The problem with your view, and the dearth of scientific evidence supporting it, is that promoting this takes advantage of scared people. That is, to use a word appropriate to the context, malign.
Well,my mother, sister and uncle survived cancer because of chemo,soooo
Yes to chemo.
You’ll no doubt be disappointed to read that I’m not flogging anything here. Since you have asked, yes, I create for hotels a very different kind of hospitality, i.e. energetic, heart-based hospitality. I apply the principles of energy to organic agriculture, which is why I don’t have to work ever again.
You’ll be even more disappointed to know that heart field energy and thought energy have been so well researched for many, many decades that it is old science; though don’t expect Big Pharma to do any research studies on energy as its application to health care would dent their profits hugely.
It is amazing what can be achieved when you allow loving energy to flow through yourself and from yourself. Together with meditations it is indeed one of the regime of natural ways for treating cancer. Moreover, several universities in India have researched its effect on crop growth and shown that you can increase crop growth far above chemicals by sending loving energy to the plants. This ancient knowledge is enshrined so to speak in the famous old book called “The Secret Life of Plants” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.
You are free to choose and defend to the death Big Pharma’s money-making chemical treatments, if you wish, and to try to deny the effectiveness of natural treatments, but you can’t beat Nature.
“It is amazing what can be achieved when you allow loving energy to flow through yourself and from yourself. Together with meditations it is indeed one of the regime of natural ways for treating cancer. Moreover, several universities in India have researched its effect on crop growth and shown that you can increase crop growth far above chemicals by sending loving energy to the plants. This ancient knowledge is enshrined so to speak in the famous old book called “The Secret Life of Plants” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.”
Anyone with a very basic fantasy bullshit detector will find this one drives their instrument off scale.
Personally, I’ve been drawn into the secret life of Peter McAlpine.
Who could have guessed early on that he was quite this s crackers?
Once again, I apologise for my anger and aggression.
Ah. the ancient art ot B’uul sh’itt.
I know it well.
I imagine I’ve pissed on my chips already viz asking for names and details of these hotels?
If you have actual studies and statistics to back this up please share them. They don’t have to be published by “Big Pharma” but they do have to follow scientific protocol and have actual patients and real studies to back them up. I have been doing a lot of online research and the “traditional” medicine has lots of studies and articles and databases – from multiple sources – that give you statistics on chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. They list both good and bad outcomes and have study after study and explain in detail the patient groups, controls, etc. In trying to find the same information on the “natural” cures I find a lot of claims that they have cured every disease known to man – from diabetes and high blood pressure to mental illness and cancer – yet I can’t find a single report with facts and statistics to back up these cures. The so called proof is usually all on the same website making the lofty claims. Don’t preach to me in a Youtube video – give me some real examples – some real scientific proof. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it can’t be backed up by science. Eating healthy will make you thinner and exercise will make you more fit – there are plenty of scientific statistics to back this up – so show me the proof that this stuff cures cancer. Don’t go off on “Big Pharma” – just show me what you have both good and bad. That is a real conversation – a real debate. When you defend zealously without a single scrap of proof it comes off as cultish not scientific. I would also like to know how much money you make doing this. “Big Pharma” discloses that information as well – many claim they do this for very noble reasons but often that “nobility” also makes them wealthy – which is fine – just don’t be a hypocrite about it.
Blimey! Peter McAlpine is back! With more rubbish and outright lies!
Welcome back, Peter. You’ll find there’s lots of fun to be had here, albeit at your expense.
I note that you accuse others of anger and aggression- like we’re children and have never encountered that one before ( the Cancer Tutor site sets the standard for this though).
As to the idea that people who perceive the lies and idiocy of altmed would nonetheless turn to it when desperate-while this is a fantasy which no doubt comforts you, it reminds me somewhat of the gloating religious extremists who crowed, and celebrated Christopher Hitchens’ cancer by saying ‘NOW will you take God into your life?’.
Needless to say, because he had courage as well as intelligence( we’ll overlook for now his support for the illegal invasion of Iraq), he declined the invitation.
As for your hotel nonsense, and the vast millions you’ve managed to accrue- well done! You ‘spotted an opportunity’, as my Dad used to say, and you went straight for its neck!
“It is amazing what can be achieved when you allow loving energy to flow through yourself and from yourself. ”
How did that work out for Steve Jobs? Someone with all the resources in the world able to have any therapy. One of his biggest regrets was to not seek allopathic medicine sooner and succumbing to or in my opinion becoming the victim of charlatanism and the metaphysical world that is cam.
Steve Jobs returned to his office (for more stressful ‘work’), from a non-WIFI environment to a full-WiFi environment. Getting well from any severe illness requires rest and freedom from stress of all kinds, above all, so one can rethink one’s priorities. Cancer is an ‘existential life crisis’ that needs to be met mentally, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually as well as physically. People have healed themselves by finding a new, healthier (on every level) life course as part of their regimen. We are not simply bodies, operating mechanically. We need nourishment on many levels. That the mind affects the body is well known; there is a whole area of science known as psychoneuroimmunobiology.
and you think that one can cure cancer with psychoneuroimmunobiology?
I sincerely hope you never have to test this notion yourself.
Interesting by the way to see that altmed has its own diseases that go in and out of fashion
.Anybody remember the ‘recovered memory syndrome’ craze that spread like wildfire through the quacky end of feminism a few years ago?
Complete with ‘recovered memory syndrome survivors’ cruises’ ( the ship no doubt crewed by a lcomplement of daft feminist matelots), and survivors’ pins’ ( ‘buy one get one free’).
For those of you wanting to have ‘scientific’ evidence and proof, let me explain to you why you will NEVER get it under the current economic oligarchy that exists in the world. It takes $1 Billion USD to get a drug on the market. You read that correctly. One billion dollars. There are animal trials, human trials, the expense to get it through the FDA, etc. etc. etc. Pharmaceutical companies, university hospitals, etc, are all spending their time trying to find the next ‘big thing’ that they can sell which will recoup the enormous cost of getting their drugs to market, and that will continue making them money for years to come. Not a single one is going to shell out money to do studies on Gerson Therapy, Rife Machines, Himalayan Salt, etc. because there is no return on investment for those studies.
I have a friend, Kerry Salmon, who died of breast cancer two years ago, after fighting it for 8 years. The total cost? Over 1.1 million USD, paid mostly by her insurance company to Mayo Clinic and the pharmaceutical companies. Toward the end, she was getting shots that cost $10k a piece to stimulate her white blood cells. But does Mayo Clinic report this as a loss? No, of course not. We kept her alive for 8 years – we’re heroes! It doesn’t matter that she was in horrible health from multiple rounds of chemo and radiation, infection from her pic line that left a hole in her chest, crying every night from the pain and stress of the treatment and the job she had to keep so her health insurance would pay for it. To them, she’s a success. She lived past her expected date, and they got rich in the process.
Did they tell her what to eat to strengthen her body? No. Did they tell her what caused her cancer? No. Perhaps estrogen dominance from the fact that she was constipated all the time and she should take enemas. Perhaps it was from bacteria, viruses, or parasites that her body wasn’t able to eliminate. Here in Phoenix, we have an institute that is testing cancer patients and finding out that 60% of them have Lyme disease. But those patients have to pay for the testing themselves. Interestingly, curing the Lyme is making their cancer go away.
The fact is that the medical profession doesn’t know any more about cancer than the natural medical profession. And that is the god’s honest truth. If you read a book called ‘The Scientific Structure of Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn, you will see that is because science, which you’d like to think is infallible, is really just a bunch of people following fads and trends that the current institutions will accept and pay for or that they can publish, or doing what will make money, and people who have truly amazing, revolutionary breakthroughs are usually labeled as heretics until enough people start to accept their work and it becomes the new standard. And that will never happen with natural medicine as long as there is no money in it.
Most doctors have enough stuff to read just keeping up with the ‘science’ in their profession, much less being able to seriously study the effects of natural medicines. In addition, just like univeristy professors, they know that if they actually find something legitimate in those methods, they will never be able to tell anyone. Touting natural medicines rather than pharmaceuticals would cause them to lose their relationships with current insurance companies, lose their jobs, lose their medical licenses, etc. In order to practice medicine in our society, you have to practice it the way the AMA wants you to.
So, until there a different economic system where pharmaceutical companies and hospitals actually get paid for wellness rather than disease, you are not going to see any changes in the types of studies that are done, or any mainstream proponents of natural medicine. And it is horribly shortsighted to claim that just because medical studies don’t exist, a natural method must not work. Even worse, sometimes pharmaceutical companies will do studies to discredit natural methods so that people won’t follow them. It is very, very easy to alter methods and skew data results. If you doubt that this is true, let me ask you what you would do for one billion dollars, much less the $7.21 billion that Pfizer or $11 billion that Mayo Clinic made last year.
“The fact is that the medical profession doesn’t know any more about cancer than the natural medical profession.”
TOTALLY RIDICULOUS
I am sorry, but we don’t really care about money here, only evidence. In order to practice medicine in our society, you have to practice it using only treatments that work. “Natural” is an abstract term that makes no more of a specification as an adjective for “medicine”, than it does for “mortality”.
James
“….but we don’t really care about money here, only evidence.”
A small part of evidence is here:
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption Marcia Angell
NEJM editor: “No longer possible to believe much of clinical research published”
Campbell EG, Louis KS, Blumenthal D. looking a gift horse in the mouth. JAMA 1999; 279: 995-999.
Why Doctors Are Losing the Public’s Trust by Physicians Weekly
ted.com ben goldcare: what doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe.
Or is it some other evidence that you have up your sleeve?
Uneducable Iqbal keeps clipping and pasting.
If only he knew a little about modern medicine he might be helped to understand that the selectively picked morsels he keeps pasting are not evidence but debate. Much of it is correctly critical to medicine but as most of us understand, the shortcomings of medicine do not corroborate substituting health care with fake medicine such as his beloved homeopathy. Some of what Iqbal pulls out of other´s hats even counters his beliefs.
Björn Geir
“If only he knew a little about modern medicine he might be helped to understand that the selectively picked morsels he keeps pasting are not evidence but debate.”
…not evidence but debate? Issues raised about Missing evidence or cooked evidence qualifies as debate after years of show casing it as scientific evidence behind medicine? This is the truth about scientific medicine and the reason behind increasing deaths and maiming of hapless patients across the world.
This is ONLY about MONEY. Flash $ (or is it EURO and get any evidence that you want.)
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0555-0
We identified 77 trials (28,636 patients) assessing 47 treatments with 54 comparisons and 29 systematic reviews (13 published after 2013). From 2009 to 2015, the evidence covered by existing systematic reviews was consistently incomplete: 45 % to 70 % of trials; 30 % to 58 % of patients; 40 % to 66 % of treatments; and 38 % to 71 % of comparisons were missing. In the cumulative networks of randomized evidence, 10 % to 17 % of treatment comparisons were partially covered by systematic reviews and 55 % to 85 % were partially or not covered.
This is NOT HOMEOPATHIC outcome.
Edzard: you missed this one?
I am not sure you managed to understand the article you quote here.
what has it to do with our discussion?
Fellow Iqbal, are you on spoilt hallucinogens?
I repeat, we do not care about money here, only evidence. Modern medicine has lots of problems that need addressing. One of these problems is the intrusion of fake claims and practices (such as homeopathy and Gerson therapy). Although not exclusively, this is the main aspect tackled in this blog.
You quote an interesting article, by the way, thank you for being useful, for a change.
Oh, I almost forgot, you are right(!), this is not homeopathic outcome… The primary homeopathic outcomes are natural course of disease (short term use) and natural mortality (long term use).
Bjorn,
Are you expecting a written statement from big pharma confessing all their lies and corruption? I am not a doctor neither a survivor, but I am an attorney and I have seeing how corporations lie. If you want evidence, you won’t find it discussing or asking here for evidence, this is so obvious that is embarrassing . You would have to travel and conduct your own investigation studying also and letting your believes on the side (being objective). Then you will be able to come to a conclusion based on what your research takes you.
Otherwise you are just a sheep following second hand information. Then you will have the authority to discredit other alternatives
@claudia
See my response to your similar comment here.
Someone as dopey as you is a lawyer? Gawd help us!
@scienceskeptic
Your comment contains so much muddled thinking, it indicates you have a poor grasp on reality. I’ll pick on just one of your statements…
You wrote
You can’t get away with that one without providing concrete examples.
Oh really? Because everyone here is providing such concrete examples of their statements. And I’m in the last year of a phd so my thinking and ability to research are pretty clear at this point, regardless of what you believe. But, since you can’t seem to use Google for yourself, let me give you some links:
“…[Dr. John Ioannidis has] become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
“A 2012 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found that misconduct, not errors, was responsible for most retractions from journals. Among the 2,047 retracted papers they analyzed, the researchers found that “21 percent of the retractions were attributable to error, while 67 percent were due to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43 percent), duplicate publication (14 percent), and plagiarism (10 percent). Miscellaneous or unknown reasons accounted for the remaining 12 percent.” … “After an allegation is made, Brodnicki and members of her team, which very often includes Litt, meet to determine whether the allegation meets the definition of research misconduct, defined by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” http://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/surgery/data-dont-lie-do-they
“Recent cases of research misconduct: In April 2016, a former University of Queensland professor, Bruce Murdoch, received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to 17 fraud-related charges. A number of these arose from an article he published in the European Journal of Neurology, which asserted a breakthrough in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.” … In 2015, Anna Ahimastos, who was employed at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, admitted to fabricating research on blood-pressure medications published in two international journals. The research purported to establish that for patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD), intermittent claudication (a condition in which exercise induces cramping pain in the leg) treatment with a particular drug resulted in significant improvements.” https://theconversation.com/research-fraud-the-temptation-to-lie-and-the-challenges-of-regulation-58161
Honestly, I could do this all day. Medical fraud, research fraud, the fact that doctors lie to patients and cover up medical errors (https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/11/health/dishonest-doctors-survey-brawley/index.html) should NOT be new to you. And note that these are from Harvard med and the top medical journals that publish Dr. Ioannidis. If you think my arguments are flawed it is more likely due to your lack of information/background in this area and limited perspective that prevent you from understanding my argument, but it’s also that my time is extremely limited so I’m not giving you the background. That’s why you have Google.
Here is an article showing some evidence in favor of Gerson therapy. No, it’s not one of the prestigious medical journals I quoted from above, and it’s a case study. But it is a hopeful beginning. Surviving against all odds: analysis of 6 case studies of patients with cancer who followed the Gerson therapy. Molassiotis A1, Peat P. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1534735406298258
More questions? Let’s keep nailing this thing until I get you to understand the economics of medicine…
” … my thinking and ability to research are pretty clear …”
evidently not!
otherwise you would not have cited a small case series in support of an entirely implausible intervention.
I already cited the limitations of the study and simply noted it as a beginning. But really, no response to Harvard med or my other amazing sources? I am aghast.
SO AM I!
1) your ‘amazing’ sources have been known to me [and probably most readers of this blog] for long. I even have one publication with Ioannidis.
2) you use them not as a proper argument but as a fallacy.
3) Ioannidis never showed what you seem to argue against [“sometimes pharmaceutical companies will do studies to discredit natural methods so that people won’t follow them.
You can’t get away with that one without providing concrete examples.”]
@scienceskeptic
Sorry, but your links don’t provide any support at all for your original statement. You said “sometimes pharmaceutical companies will do studies to discredit natural methods so that people won’t follow them.” I wanted concrete examples of studies done by pharmaceutical companies, designed to discredit ‘natural methods’ (whatever that means). You’ve merely provided links to (journalistic) articles on research misconduct — something that’s been with us as long as research has existed.
Your first link explains how John Ioannidis tackled the reported links between individual dietary factors — particularly vitamins — and diseases. Which might be regarded as discrediting a ‘natural’ method. But there’s no indication Ioannidis was paid by a pharmaceutical company to do this: what’s more, the piece goes on to tell how Ioannidis considers drug company misconduct in pushing their own products to be even worse than the trumpeting of nutritional studies. (And surely anyone with half a brain already knows to take studies linking specific nutritional factors as causes or cures for disease with a heavy pinch of salt.)
You say “I’m in the last year of a phd so my thinking and ability to research are pretty clear at this point, regardless of what you believe.” If I were your PhD supervisor (I’ve supervised and examined many PhDs) I’d be seriously worried I might have to advise you not to write up and submit a thesis. At PhD level I’d expect someone, asked to provide concrete examples in support of a statement, to do better than to say “If you think my arguments are flawed it is more likely due to your lack of information/background in this area and limited perspective that prevent you from understanding my argument, but it’s also that my time is extremely limited so I’m not giving you the background. That’s why you have Google.” You seem to have a serious scholarship deficiency. Google is not the place to find original sources. You seem not to know about PubMed, Web of Science or Medline, to name just three professional science databases.
scienceskeptic said:
That cost includes all drug discovery, development, dead ends, overheads, etc, etc, etc, as well as the cost of testing.
I can buy a 200 g jar of coffee at my local supermarket for £4.00. When can we expect to see Gerson therapy being rigorously tested?
Using the moniker ‘scienceskeptic’ gves a good indication you neither understand nor have an interest in critical thinking and logic. It’s part of a muddled tactic that religious apologists like to use with atheists; claiming that the atheist is just as religious as the believer but atheism is their “religion”. Nut-thinking. Your nut-thinking somehow gives you solice that you have uncovered some ineffable truth regarding the “way things are”….when in fact you are simply bloviating and self-aggrandizing and shaking a fist at the sky.
I’m sure as a scienceskeptic you hold no college degree(s) since that’s where all those cheating MDs and PhD get their start.
@Michael Kenny. Awesome job using the red herring (diverting the topic to religion) and ad hominem (attacking the character attributes of the poster) fallacies. The fact that you are doing this, rather than sticking to the argument…well, I’m not going to finish that sentence. But rather than insulting my educational background, why don’t you try doing some research? I’ve posted quite a few links above proving my points, and I’m interested in your arguments against Harvard med and the mainstream journals listed.
I really have no idea where you get any of the ideas you threw at me. It’s a great way to form a different bias – ingroup/outgroup. I’m obviously one of those crazy ‘outgroup’ people on the internet who is nothing like you. Why could I not be someone just like you? Someone who is simply tired of watching everyone go to the doctor and get more drugs that make them sicker rather than well?
Looking back at your post, I believe the tactic religious apologists use is to tell people that atheism is just as pervasive of a world-view as a religion is – whether they want to believe it or not. If you believe in religion, all information you take in is colored by that perspective: god has a plan, everything happens for a reason, god inspired you to do something, you are going somewhere after death, etc.
Similarly, if you are an atheist, all information you take in is colored by that perspective: sometimes things happen for no reason at all, you create a plan for your own life, you were inspired by BLANK (something else not god), and you have one life so you’d better live it while you can, etc. If you have a pervasive worldview, you are not open to evidence of the contrary. Your mind will simply push it away as inconsistent with your worldview. In that way, atheism is just as dogmatic as religion is.
If you really want an amazing book on how paradigms or worldviews influence every aspect of your thinking, I would encourage you to read “The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Human Potential…and How We Can Change Them”. Then we could actually have a conversation on this matter.
Shouldn’t all scientists be sceptical? Aren’t curiosity, scepticism and even argumentativeness essential qualities for being a scientist, for critical thinking and for inventiveness? And can you really be sure this person ‘scienceskeptic’, whom you presumably do not know, holds:
‘no college degree(s) since that’s where all those cheating MDs and PhD get their start.’ (your words in brackets).
Why not stick to the argument rather than attacking a poster who disagrees with you.
You are so right! It’s about the money not the truth or cure or prevention because there’s little profit in that route.
if you were correct, why do oncologists die of cancer?
Yes and HOW MANY PEOLE HAVE DIED FROM CHEMO COMPARED TO THE 2 YOU MENTIONED. HAS ANYONE BEEN SUED FROM EATING NATURAL FOODS? LETS SEE DOES ANY FRUITS CAUSE CANCER? LETS SEE ALL THE WESTERN MEDICINE GAVE ALL SIDE EFFECTS. LIKE IT COULD CAUSE CANCER. THAT S WHY ALL THESE BIG PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE BEING SUED RIGHT.
The Courts, as far as I can see, have a much lower standard of proof than the scientific method.
Somebody choosing to start a Court Action isn’t proof of anything.
Because they used CHEMO OR RADIATIONOR SURGERY WHICH DIES CONTRIBUTE FOR MORE CANCER TO SPREAD. I KNOW I WORK IN SURGERY I SEE THIS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME
It is well-established that breaching tissue planes can open up a route of spread for certain kinds of cancer (particularly sarcomas), and it is very important that surgery is planned to take that into account. I have also seen tumours metastasising to surgical and other scars, although this is a lot less common, and I would imagine that the healing process releases growth factors which also promote tumour growth.
On the other hand, for localised tumours surgery usually achieves a long-term cure, and there are often no effective alternatives.
You might as well say that ambulances are sometimes involved in road traffic accidents and should therefore be banned.
It is world known that corporations lie for profit. They don’t care about people, you can believe it or not it is your choice. Illnesses make profits, so why would they be interested in curing? that would be the end of their profits. Easy
SO now you keep believing in big pharma
Guess who else lies?
You alties. Like pigs in shit.
Hardly a foundation on which to build trust.
What corporations do you have in mind? Perhaps Boiron (homeopathy: $515 million gross profit, $82 million net USA income in 2016)? Nelsons UK (homeopathy and Bach flower remedies: £4.5 million profit in 2008)?
CAM “is expected to generate a revenue of USD 196.87 billion by 2025” (click here for source).
SO now you keep believing in Big Snakeoil.
I’m horrified by the lack of intelligence here. The Gerson Therapy has cured my Lupus. I followed the therapy at home. To nourish your body with simple organic food. If I was to enter the hospital I would have been given drugs which cause more drugs to be given and so on and so on.
Are you saying then that it is not true that an alkalized body can not host cancer? You had better be able to prove it if you don’t. Vegetables, apple cider vinegar, lemon, what about pure cranberries?, all of these natural scary things create an alkalized environment that cancer CANT live in.
Why is this so impossible for most here to understand. You seem like a group of lemmings that works in the health industry, terrified to lose your jobs.
Big Pharma and the powers in the government in the U.S. regularly attack supplement companies. Talk about Tumeric – or the more targeted component – Curcumin, the inflammation decreasing properties are amazing – but YOU people would prefer to take a Tylenol. What does Tylenol do?, it causes a mess in your body, clinically proven messes that now puts stern warning labels on these over the counter poisons.
You can’t put a patent on organic apples and carrots – it really is the reason you will never understand from the readings here. Big Pharma-Big Money – you have been brainwashed.
I suggest you learn about the mechanisms by which our bodies regulate the pH to remain constant.
get an easy to understand physiology text.
This simple graphic might help you:
I guess that explains why cancer can’t survive in an alkalized body.
There are a lot of reasons why Gerson Therapy might have worked for you, alkalinity aside. The high-quality and high-quantity diet of fresh fruits and vegetables, the supplements, the detoxing effects of removing junk food and meats, as well as toxins from your environment and health and beauty regimens, etc. Here is an article which explains why having a lot of alkaline foods can help you fight cancer, while not changing the pH of your blood.
“Fortunately, the same foods that Berthelot found to be alkaline back in the 1800s are many of the same foods that are recommended today for their cancer-fighting properties. These plant-based foods – including citrus fruits and tomatoes – protect cells from damage, encourage normal cell growth, and other processes which help fight cancer and other chronic illnesses.[5] Conversely, high-intakes acidic foods such as meat and animal-based proteins, have been linked to inflammation, insulin insensitivity, and increased cell division.” https://mnoncology.com/about-us/practice-news/acid-alkaline-balance-and-cancer-the-truth-behind-the-myth/
OMG – I do fear for your PhD!
@Cindy Galloway well said
I would also suggest consulting a good psychiatrist… Living with persecution complex is hard.
Shame on you for discrediting a major issue in our country, I surely hope you can sleep at night knowing you are NOT helping being a DR. I think you forgot about WHY you wanted to be a DR!!!! Nutrition and detoxing the body is KEY and you know this to be true. May GOD bless and enlighten you and your colleagues!!!
good grief!
Always curious about the mentality that needs to invoke God (whichever of the 3000 they happen to favor at the time) to try to win an argument based in logic? Are you a well known daft about town?
I think your God has killed enough of us with cancer that REAL scientists ought to be allowed to try to fight back.
Really, Michael Kenny? Because you performed the same type of red herring above invoking religious apologists. If you are going to invoke atheism I have no idea why you would object to someone invoking whatever god they believe in.
He’s not just a doctor, he’s a MD, PhD, FMedSci, FRSB, FRCP, FRCPEd. Seems a little excessive to me, but he might be compensating for other deficiencies, like common sense or morality.
yes, of course, it is well-known that these fellowships are only awarded to deficient people.
Having recently discovered this site, I looked up Gerson therapy as I was curious from my own experiences. When I was a trainee oncologist in the 1990’s, one of the Consultants I worked for had agreed to provide medical supervision of patients being treated by a local Gerson centre, I suppose on the grounds that it might be better for them to see a qualified doctor from time to time than not.
I remember four patients altogether. Three of them were dead within three weeks of starting treatment. The fourth wasn’t particularly unwell to begin with and dropped off the radar after a while so I don’t know the outcome. I do remember that they all found the treatment very difficult and unpleasant (not to mention expensive) and none were able to manage the full five coffee enemas a day.
Apart from trying to get my head round the idea that cancer could be cured by changing the pH and electrolyte concentrations in the body (or that the therapy could even achieve this in the presence of functioning kidneys) I did wonder what the true physiological effects were. I found a 1920’s Army medical manual recommending coffee enemas as emergency treatment for acute asthma. Of course it is an effective way of getting a lot of caffeine into the body very quickly. Nowadays we have the caffeine analogue aminophylline, which can be given intravenously and is much safer, as well as many other effective treatments for asthma (though I will not pretend that modern medicine has all the answers, and the memory of a young man dying of asthma in front of me when I was a medical SHO has been with me all my life).
By the way, I like Alan Henness’s chart of pH homeostasis, which is very clear.
What do you think about Gerson for severe autoimmune? I have a severe case of Primary Sjögrens, destroying my body and tissues and suspect a larger connective tissue disease. Rhrumatology sends me home with no solutions – and I have been to Hopkins, Mayo- Gerson has helped anecdotally with lupus, scleroderma and Sjögrens. With literally no medical solutions, what is the harm in trying?
Do you think there’s any good reason to suspect it might do any good?
Just anecdotal evidence; testimony. There are documented cases of Sjogrens and other autoimmune remissions. I have not available medical therapy to help.
@Christine
It sounds like MD’s have failed you. Much of science based medicine falls short of real benefit. Some science based medicine in turn actually causes disease in our bodies. I call science based medicine “over-promise & under-deliver medicine”. Your mileage may vary.
If you have not already addressed most of the issues that are pointed out in the link I will provide below…. then you should make every effort to follow the guidelines for better health laid out in the link. In addition, yoga is already mentioned in the link. But I would also find a way to enlighten yourself about some additional deep breathing techniques… check Google or Youtube.
Gerson diet is likely not a solution for you problem, yet diet could be a part of your problem… again refer to the link provided, and then get deeper into the diet regimen as you see fit.
Sometimes we can find health just by helping our body to help itself. MD’s don’t have solutions for chronic illnesses.
https://www.ruthieharper.com/when-your-body-attacks/
Good luck
Thank you, RG. I honestly have a lot of respect for MDs, having worked with them to provide patient care for 20 years. I worked in laboratory services which led me to be in the trenches with numerous practices around the country over these decades – and even in the field of dermatology where it’s easy to forgo optimal patient care for cash – rarely did I ever see a physician ever that wasn’t dedicated to medicine for the right reason. There really are rare kickbacks from pharma, money is not the driver behind prescribed care. But yes….there is a point such as mine where MDs just don’t know any more than what they have available, which can’t help. That is where I am. Thank you for this resource – I’ve addressed these areas but halfheartedly, usually fatigued by too many supplements or lack of grains in a diet, etc but I am circling back to be sure that I’ve given it a good honest try. My issue is that I have no inflammation showing in my blood and even HUGE doses of steroids do nothing for my symptoms, leading me to believe that reducing inflammation with diet will be about the same. Still, there is more to it as you know and thank you.
So, your answer to my question is, ‘no’.
@Christine
This is a good place to start
https://www.painscience.com/articles/respiration-connection.php
I follow this type of breathing to alkalize my blood daily
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCaZQqAs9I
good to know that you also fail to understand human physiology
RG,
I followed your link and looked at the video to see if your suggestion is really as daft as it sounds. It is.
Normally the body maintains its pH (level of acidity / alkalinity) within very strict limits – it only goes outside these in severe illness or poisoning. Part of the mechanism involves maintaining a low level of carbon dioxide dissolved in the blood, which helps to buffer the system against fluctuations.
The breathing shown in the video is what is known as hyperventilation, which is breathing more deeply and at a faster rate than required to eliminate excess carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. Since the haemoglobin in the blood binds oxygen very strongly, it is already 98 – 99% saturated by normal breathing, so hyperventilation doesn’t increase oxygenation. However, it will blow off the carbon dioxide that is normally in the blood. This has the effect of making the blood slightly more alkaline, which shifts the balance of calcium ions from an unbound state to a protein-bound state, therefore reducing the free calcium level in the blood. Calcium also needs to be within strict levels for nerves and muscles to function properly, and as the level falls you will notice the effect of these systems starting to struggle:
As the sensory nerves start to fail you will notice tingling around the mouth and in the extremities. You may also experience chest pain.
The muscles become abnormally excitable and twitch at the least stimulus. If you continue, they will enter a state of fixed contraction known as tetany – people hyperventilating from fear sometimes find that they are no longer able to move as a result, hence the term “petrified” (i.e. turned to stone).
The central nervous system is affected which can result in dizziness and often a sense of panic. If you are epileptic it can trigger a fit (some people don’t know they are epileptic and have their first fit while hyperventilating).
Carbon dioxide is also important as the main stimulus to breathing (not lack of oxygen, unless you have severe chronic lung disease). Hyperventilation therefore removes the drive to breathe, and if you stop consciously over-breathing you may well not breathe at all until you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen.
For somebody who is fit and well this is unlikely to result in permanent harm, unless you fall over and hit yourself on something. For somebody with pre-existing medical problems (heart or kidney trouble, undiagnosed epilepsy, other metabolic problems…) it could be dangerous.
There are all sorts of things that you can do to make yourself feel strange. This is one of them, but it really doesn’t have any health benefits, and I would discourage anybody reading this from following your advice.
@Dr JMK
It would appear that RG is a disciple of Robert O. Young, the reprehensible and predatory quack whose halfwitted and long-disproven concepts of “alkilinity” have been seized upon by certain rather credulous members of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_O._Young
@ Dr. JMK Lenny & Alan
Lenny, in truth I tried to read the book, however it was both above my interest level and my comprehension. I did not finish the book. To get that scientific about diet is not helpful to the average person.
I agree that alkaline water, and to a lesser degree diet are poor means of attempting to alkalize the body, for the reasons mentioned. In fact, I would agree that these means of alkalizing blood could do more harm than good in the long term, especially for otherwise healthy people.
I am not attempting to, nor want to change my blood PH for long, it’s a temporary daily change, and a method that works to achieve this goal.
The average person does not breath correctly, nor breath enough. The links I provided for breathing can “do no harm”….. please keep this in mind when giving medical attention…. you know the drill.
I will remind you doc, I am the healthy one here, you are not.
you are obscenely stupid, that’s all!
Severeal people are known to have died from following the dangerous fad invented by the Dutchman Wim Hof, who claims all kinds of unlikely health benefits from the extreme practices he promotes. Hyperventilation before diving and the cold-shock-response are the cause of many drowning accidents. Only few of the deaths this idiot is responsible for ever get publicised:
https://bit.ly/3f5JolY
https://bit.ly/2Z0A5xM
The following two links are in Dutch, the native language of Wim Hof. Use Google translate or Chrome to read:
https://bit.ly/3e5oPVc and https://bit.ly/3e6ld5f
@Bjorn
Nice try Bjorn,
The first two links you provided are the same story from different publishers. One of the two deaths mentioned was a man NOT using Wim Hof method of breathing. In fact he was meditating yoga while face down in the river. The one man that did die using Wim Hof breathing went against the recommendation to not use the technique in water.
“The Wim Hof site also contains a warning, however: “Never practice it before or during diving, driving, swimming, taking a bath or any other environment/place where it might be dangerous to faint.” … as in driving a motor vehicle.
One of the Dutch links you provided refers to three men dying in a pool…. again this is against the recommendation of the Wim Hof organization.
It’s tantamount to patients being prescribed meds by the MD and not following the dose…. people die. In fact, people die when they do follow the dosing regimen…. hmmm. Patients die everyday on the operating table for routine procedures. EBM holds no high ground when it comes to patients dying.
The other treatment mentioned in your links you provided refers to training oneself to endure cold. Wim Hof is not alone in this type of therapy. Many will testify of the benefits of a cold swim or shower. I don’t like cold water, however I do believe there could be a health benefit from adrenaline being raised. I will finish my shower many times with 20-25 seconds of cold water. No health benefit claims from personally about the cold water treatment, but many times I do find it invigorating.
Wim Hofs methods should be learned slowly over time in a similar way that athletes need to train to push their bodies higher and further. Attempting to push the body beyond it’s physical limits can and does end bad sometimes.
Doctor Dissects the Wim Hof Method – Cold Hard Science Analysis
Alan Henness on Monday 06 July 2020 at 18:50 posted a youTube titled:
“Doctor Dissects the Wim Hof Method – Cold Hard Science Analysis”
Got bored after 3 minutes – that guy needed to stop telling us what he is going to say and say it (also who cares who he is or how qualified he imagines he is).
LOL!
@Old Bob on Monday 06 July 2020 at 20:24
“Alan Henness on Monday 06 July 2020 at 18:50 posted a youTube titled:
“Doctor Dissects the Wim Hof Method – Cold Hard Science Analysis”
Got bored after 3 minutes – that guy needed to stop telling us what he is going to say and say it (also who cares who he is or how qualified he imagines he is).”
I think you getting bored says a lot more about your attention span, intelligence, and comprehension of basic information than it does about the video. I can’t speak for you, however, I would be too embarrassed to post something so unspeakably stupid.
@Alan Henness
Hey, if you dummbasses choose to continue popping pills rather than breathing, who am I to tell you otherwise.
I already found what works and doesn’t work for me. I was just trying to help a person with no solutions from EBM…. and there are many.
Frank Collins on Monday 06 July 2020 at 23:14 said:
“…I would be too embarrassed to post something so unspeakably stupid.”
What do you care what other people think?
RG said:
Awww… bless.
BTW
If you don’t like the Wim Hof method of breathing. There are hundreds of others on the WWW teaching how to breath correctly. I actually combine a few different methods.
For example, I won’t practice Wim Hof while I’m driving, but there are other methods of breathing that are safe during auto driving.
bless you too Alan
RG said:
Are there any that teach how to breathe incorrectly?
RG,
Are there any methods for teaching animals to breathe correctly? Or are humans the only species to have evolved a respiratory system that they don’t know how to use?
@Alan Henness
“Are there any that teach how to breathe incorrectly?”
Answer me this Alan,
Are there any in the world that carry the title MD, that you don’t agree with ?
@Dr. JMK
doc, that is a fair question
However, we’re speaking here of improving health, not surviving.
In this age, do people need to be how to exercise, eat properly, and drink enough water ? …. and yes breathe. I think these subjects are in discussion everyday round the world.
Effects of stress, lack of exercise, elimination of toxic overload, and downright poor breathing habits abound. Even the posture of sitting in a chair for many hours per day is not conducive to proper breathing.
Doc, con’t be a dummbass, you’re better than that.
RG said:
LOL!
Now, can you answer the question I asked?
@Alan Henness
When someone answers a question with a question, there is a reason.
Evidently, you haven’t learned how to read in between the lines yet…. Alan.
“Are there any that teach how to breath incorrectly ?” ….
I suppose there are those Alan, but I wouldn’t know as I don’t make a habit of searching out to discover and expose therapies that don’t benefit… as some here are obsessed with. Why do you ask me, you seem to specialize in these matters.
RG said:
LOL!
The Gerson diet is not very physiological, and the coffee enemas introduce a very large amount of caffeine into the body which (among other things) has the effect of upset the balance between sodium and potassium in the body, exacerbated by the high levels of potassium in the fruit and vegetable juices that are part of the diet.
When I was a trainee oncologist, my boss had agreed to see any cancer patients that were being treated at the local Gerson centre, I think just to ensure that they were seeing a normal doctor from time to time. He admitted some of them and I ended up looking after the in-patients on his behalf. What struck me was that:
They were all very ill, over and above what might be expected from their cancer
They were losing weight very quickly
They had very abnormal serum electrolyte levels
Most of them died within a few weeks of starting the Gerson treatment
They also found the treatment very difficult to stick to – the diet is unpleasant and demanding, and nobody managed the requisite five coffee enemas daily. I also got the impression that they didn’t all want to continue, but they didn’t want to let their partners / families down.
In addition to that it was quite expensive, as the Gerson Foundation insisted that the vegetable juices were from specially grown vegetables that only they could supply, extracted using a hydraulic press, which the patient was also expected to buy from them.
My overall impression in this group of patients is that the Gerson treatment hastened their end and made them miserable for the last weeks of their lives.
Clearly with an autoimmune condition rather than malignancy you are in a different position. However, there is no reason at all to suppose that Gerson therapy will help you. Anecdotal evidence in this situation can be quite misleading as most people with authoimmune problems go through good periods and bad periods, and are more likely to seek treatment at a time when their condition is worse than usual. Testimonials are even worse – nobody who does badly is ever going to leave a testimonial, and they are often fabricated in any case. So the Gerson Foundation is free to choose its testimonials and anecdotes.
The Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins have international reputations, at least for medical research, though I don’t know what sort of care you get from them in practice. Health care in the US is rather different from the rest of the world (I live in the UK). I get the impression that it is very fragmented, and somehow it manages to achieve less with more resources and at vastly more cost than in other countries. I can well believe that you might somehow be missing out on all the support services that are essential in managing and coping with a chronic illness of this type.
I am not a rheumatologist and my knowledge of Sjorgren’s etc. is decades out of date. The immune system is probably the most complex system in the body (arguably more complex than the brain), but medical researchers are beginning to unravel its pathways and control systems. This has already had a big impact on cancer treatment (I wouldn’t be alive today otherwise) and I would expect that understanding how it can go wrong will lead to new and much more effective strategies in autoimmune disease. Certainly the drugs that have been traditionally used are rather blunt instruments – either steroids or immunosuppressives – and the targeted approach that is proving so useful in cancer treatment must surely be the way to go for autoimmune disease as well.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind reply. You are right, there is no reason to believe the Gerson therapy may work for my autoimmune, short of a Hail Mary and those few anecdotal cases. The same type cases that led me to try things like hookworm therapy, yielding nothing of course.
The world of biologics has seemed to help immensely for certain autoimmune ; RA and psoriasis to name a few. Even lupus seems more treatable. Sjögrens however and my possible mixed connective tissue disease – nothing helps and nothing remotely exciting is even in phase 1 clinical trials. Scary when you have a disease that is destroying your glands in real time. In the world of autoimmune, all there is is bloodwork, clinical symptoms, often seronegative situations and doctors shrugging and walking out the door. They admit in all the research and papers I can find that, as of now, there simply is no treatment for my particular ailment (severe glandular assault). So I find myself grasping at all fringe therapies – functional medicine, stem cell therapy (HSCT), even those damn hookworms. I have worked in medicine (pathology and dermatology l) for over 20 years with access to physicians with access to the best physicians. I’m confident I’m not missing a treatment opportunity. It’s a scary place to be, 41, two little kids, disabled and progressive. Agree though from reading today here and elsewhere, Gersen is not the answer. Wishing doesn’t make wishes come true!
Thank you again for your thoughtful post.
Christine on Sunday 05 July 2020 at 05:58 said:
“…Gersen is not the answer…”
Check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WyEsN9DzSo&t
Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Sunday 05 July 2020 at 01:26 said:
“…They were all very ill… Most of them died within a few weeks of starting the Gerson treatment…”
After which he said,
“…Anecdotal evidence in this situation can be quite misleading…”
And then he said,
“…So the Gerson Foundation is free to choose its testimonials and anecdotes…”
Lol. Then you need to do your homework. Gerson does not have ONE confirmed case of success. Just because they say so, does not make it true. Don’t believe anything unless it’s been proven by the masses. Of course chemo isn’t a cure. No one said it was hon. Not even the doctors. Chemo gives time to patients. That’s it. No one ever stated chemo saved lives. You came up with that all on your own.
The only chance someone has for NED, is catching it early. Period. There. Is. No. Cure. For. Cancer.
Gerson filmed a documentary following six cancer patients doing the therapy. They all died. You have to dig to find the information, but it’s there. A gentleman on Youtube did the digging and found out this information. this is why the documentary isn’t promoted.
Where are the television ad’s promoting Gerson? If they had the cure, they’d spend millions advertising. Oncologists would have their brochures in their offices.
We all know pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money, but you can’t drag that argument into this.
If Gerson were the answer, the public would dive on that with a passion so fierce, it would be mind boggling.
Fact: You cannot consume enough nutrition to cure yourself from disease. It is not physically possible. You’ll glow, have shiny hair and a few less colds and coughs, but that’s the extent of it. It’s science and proven.
No one should be satisfied with the information tossed around out there unless it has been confirmed without question.
That Chris guy who promotes Gerson? No one, NO ONE has confirmed his medical records. No one has confirmed he even had cancer.
Fact: Gerson costs $1700 per week (cost as of July, 2018). 99.9% of the population could never even begin to afford it.
Also, no one ever said people die from Gerson therapy. What they WILL die from however, is their cancer.
Be really careful Brian. You can’t sit there and just believe what you hear, just because it sounds good. Question everything. Demand proof. Were Gerson the cure the world was looking for, it would be shouted from the rooftops and spoken about on the news channels. It would win the Nobel prize.
No one should ever believe anything they read on the internet and take it as the truth. What would convince me? Firstly, I would have heard about it before a couple of days ago.
Secondly, oncologists from multiple universities and hospitals viewing successful cases studies would be available to the public and all cancer patients. Multiple cases studies.
Saying doctors and pharmaceutical companies are keeping Gerson from the public, because of money is an irresponsible thing to say or claim.
You can’t eat your way to a cure and when something is only available to the wealthy, that makes me question it, right off the bat.
I have been reading and reading what I perceive as a fair amount of negative and degenerative dialog following this posted article, but wanted to complement you on what I consider a very selfless and civil sharing thus far.
I actually enjoyed your comments and arguments even if I do not fully agree, not based on scientific study or facts, but acknowledged personal logic, belief, and hope.
Before I open myself to getting slammed, I think I understand at the heart of all this debate is whether there is strong clinical research, peer-reviewed studies, etc. that can validate the efficacy of a Gerson Therapy or Diet regimen. If my understanding is correct, neither my reasoning, beliefs, or hope will add anything to these spirited and sometimes disheartening sharing’s but I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for what you expressed here.
Personally, I am of the belief that eating a whole Food’s diet, with no added salts, sugar, and definitely oil, as advocated by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, have a positive impact on cardio health and other human ailments. I read his book as well as the China Study and even though it is my understanding that T. Colin Campbell does not assert his research definitively proves any particular thing, it does seem to suggest with a high degree of probability that eating a healthy diet, high in whole foods and low in animal protein may have positive impact on ones health, reduce ones chance of activating cancer or deactivating cancer growth.
As a person who has been called intelligent at different times in my life, and who has also been formally educated and achieved a degree in law (yeah, one of those degrees and profession humanity loves to poke fun at), I find it very hard to know what is true, what is correct, and what is right in this whole arena of natural verses pharmaceutical.
I do believe that perception, beliefs, and perspectives have a significant effect on how we understand each other, hear each other, and interact with one another. I know that pharmaceuticals, founders of industry and people of influence have impacted the greater masses in manners far from altruistic or positive. I know corruption exists on all levels of life and industry and there are very few absolutes in life.
I believe there is good and bad on both sides of these discussions. My understanding is the drugs that big pharmaceutical companies develop are extracted from natural plants that can give life or death; can heal or make us sick, as are true from the naturalist side of the industry in the realm of unregulated supplements and other concoctions.
For me it is a shame that such an important topic is met with such disrespect towards each other to TRUMP a particular cause or idea. I have read so much ugliness here that is, in my opinion, as deadly, painful and destructive, as the very cancers that are at the heart of these discussions. When I say heart, I am referring to whether a natural approach such as Gerson can promote viable recovery from cancer, or not.
Someone mentioned Steve Jobs earlier and he is a person who has been on my heart a lot as I think about my own heath and my own struggle to grapple with this very topic, that for me is larger than Gerson, but encompasses life in general for at the root, in my opinion, is are we able to have a direct impact on our health and are we able to cure ourselves from cancer, heart disease, and other ailments by following strict natural regiments or are we really at the mercy of our genes, our environment and the luck of the draw.
I know that he allegedly later expressed regret for not undergoing the traditional treatment, but vehemently believed, possibly to his own detriment that he could heal himself if he at particular things. What was unknown to me at the time of reading his story, was I was unaware that he was allegedly a stringent whole foods consumer and had been for many years of his life, yet he contracted cancer but back to the overall discussion about what is quackery and what is hard proof.
I am not science breed. I love science and studied it as deeply as I needed to, in order to earn the various pieces of papers I have achieved (HS, BIS, JD) but I cannot give you the requirements that must be followed to qualify as a valid study that meets the criteria expressed among this group. I know the terminology, about blinded and double blinded, but could not give you their definition.
What I can say is it seems harsh to be antagonistic, disrespectful, condescending in this forum. It is sad to read what seems to be many egos demanding or badgering one point of view or position, and this response is devoid of such expression and is further devoid of all that negative energy I have been soaking us as I have worked my way to the point of your response.
I may not 100% agree with all the conclusions expressed by you but I am 100% grateful for this response and the manner in which it was expressed.
Most of what I have read here, is why I tend to walk away from such discussion and not participate at all. We all have busy lives. The question for me becomes, will I add any value if I open my mouth and share and could the value I add have a positive impact on the discussion as a whole?
I do not dictate how any adult decides to conduct themselves but I can share when something someone writes has a positive impact on me. I can share when something someone writes makes me feel proud to have shared a few moments of my precious life taking in what they had to express. That is what you have done and given to me.
I mentioned Dr. Esselsyn and T. Collin Campbell as authors who have both had distinguished careers, who are labeled QUACKS in certain circles and their life’s work is laughed at and criticized by some as well. To this, what does a person say or do? I really do not know. What I know is Dr. Gerson probably gave his life trying to make the lives of others better and it is probably extremely judgmental to demean a persons life work, whether it is an effective alternative method to fighting cancer, a placebo, or whatever.
It seems to me, probably because of my legal training, unless someone can clearly illustrate that this man had malicious and intentional intent to harm those he took an oath or heal and protect, the level of judgment and vehement expressed is unfortunate.
I am aware part of what ignites the emotions, is probably a zealous desire for one side or the other to no have to witness anyone get harmed from false information. That in itself is a beautiful intention, if indeed that is at the heart of such a debate, but when did name calling and expressing ourselves in a defamatory manner ever bring about something constructive?
We human beings are such a strange lot and I wish I knew if other life forms (animal, insect, etc.) are as equally capable of creating so much beauty as well as hardship for one another as humans do.
I have been known to tell friends we are the most dysfunctional species on the planet. We are capable of so much infinite good as well as evil. That dichotomy is perplexing to me but I love us as a species and dedicate my life trying to help people become the best version of themselves, as defined by them.
What I mean is I facilitate their journey, I do not dictate it. Only each person can decide for themselves who they truly are and what their ideal self and life would be or could be. But I digress for this is not about me, it is about you.
I simply want to say thank you for what you have shared and being so civil in your delivery. It was worth reading and did not leave me disappointed for expending my life reading it.
This does not imply yours is the only reply worthy of such remarks. However, yours is the one that stood out thus far for me and generated something inside me to stall my research on whether naturopathic medicine is quackery or has a reasonable place in my venue of medical options to cure things that may ail me.
This is how I found this thread and post. A licensed doctor, was proud of the fact that besides having her medical degree, she also studied what she called “Integrative Medicine.”
She listed as part of her additional studies the Gerson Institute, presumably for purpose of detoxification of the body. I will find out tomorrow. Sometimes it is hard for me to keep an open mind. One is quick to label and judge others but I know for a fact, when I practiced law, I was deemed strange because I had a huge heart and was very compassionate.
I too had client’s come to me after others left them with no hope and said there was no way possible. A lot of times I say things differently, and worked some mojo that some considered was magic, but I would grow to understand we live in a world of things we know, things we know we do not know, and the realm of things “do don’t know we do not know.” The magic I supposedly created was manifested from that place.
I learned to ask the write questions, and life some how made a way. Yes, people died and are going to die who fallow any particular treatment. Nothing is 100% except for the fact that as things stand to day, we are all going to die but some suggest that even that absolute is not truly certain some someday they may be able to jack our consciousness into the CLOUD. I do not know. What I know is there is room for discussion and sharing and I love the way you expressed your thoughts.
Wishing you Peace, Love, and Tranquility
EJ
Dear EJ,
I have enjoyed reading your interesting post. One thing that it does highlight for me is the difference in approach in those mainly educated in the arts versus the sciences. The two branches largely ignore each other, which I think is a great pity as there are many ways in which each can inform the other’s thinking. One particular difference, it seems to me, is that in the arts is that anybody’s opinion can be considered the right one, and while there is much discussion and argument and different schools of thought, there is no universal truth. In the sciences, however, there is only one final arbiter and that is nature.
I should briefly mention my own background at this point. I am an oncologist with thirty years’ experience practising as a physician. I have had to retire early, however, as I now have an incurable cancer myself.
Science is a method of finding the truth. So far it has been the best method we have. Essentially it is very simple. You start with obervations, from which you form a hypothesis. You then make predictions from the hypothesis, and devise experiments to test the hypothesis. All the time you are trying to prove it wrong, not right, and if it stands up to these tests, then it is a good hypothesis. If it doesn’t make testable predictions in the first place, then it is not really worthy of consideration. When you have failed to knock down your hypothesis, you can publish it, along with the evidence you have collected and details of how you have tested it. Then everybody else tries hard to prove it false. Eventually evidence will be found that disproves it, and a better, modified version will stand in its place which is a closer approximation to nature. Scientific knowledge, then, is the best explanation that we have so far for how the world works. We know that it is incomplete, and there are some areas where we simply have to accept that we don’t know the answers and may not ever know them.
If somebody has devoted his life to the pursuit of a particular area, and evidence is subsequently found that proves his ideas to be wrong, then his life’s work cannot form the basis of any valid scientific theory, even though that is not the same as saying that it has nothing to teach us.
It matters not if somebody has distinguished themselves in an illustrious career if they are wrong. Science is based on evidence, not authority or dogma.
Of course in the real world scientists can’t simply concentrate on the science. They have to think of their sources of funding and they are often judged on how much they have published and where. There is fraud, and particularly where the research has been funded by big business, undesirable results are regularly suppressed. This does not invalidate the scientific method, but it does mean that care is required in interpreting the literature.
The whole thing becomes much more complicated as soon as biological systems are involved. The huge variation between individual organisms, the complicated feedbacks and the varied conditions mean that whatever you try to measure is greatly affected by a wealth of random factors. In order to tease out real effects from chance you have to understand the behaviour of random numbers, chance and probability, and our instincts here are very misleading, if not just plain wrong. Hence the branch of mathematics known as statistics was developed. Statistics enables us to discern true effects among randomness, to give us a measure of how sure we can be of our results (or more usually, a measure of how likely we are to have obtained our results purely out of chance, which is not the same thing), and it helps us to design studies to maximise our chances of learning something useful from them.
Unfortunately, without some training in statistics it is very difficult to make sense of a scientific paper, particularly in the sphere of medicine, and it is very easy to come to the wrong conclusions. This is not helped when the authors of a paper are not very good statisticians themselves.
When trying to assess the effects of medical interventions, there is a further problem, which is that the knowledge and beliefs of the subjects in the study strongly influence the outcome. This is the placebo effect, and is the reason why most trials are designed so that the subjects, and if possible the investigators, do not know who has received what treatment.
As a medical practitioner, I have always striven where possible to base my practice on my knowledge of the medical sciences, and on the evidence from clinical trials. As new knowledge has arisen I have tried to keep up-to-date and to change my practice accordingly. Personal experience, too, counts for a great deal, but one has to accept that one’s own experience is limited and to know when not to place too much reliance on it. Even so, I have often been faced with the situation where the patient in front of me doesn’t fit into the data from the trials, and I still have to make a decision.
Actually much of what I do involves explaining to the patient as best as I can what is going on and how their tumour is likely to behave, what treatment involves and can and can’t do, and what the uncertainties are, so that they can be suitably informed to make their own decisions.
I worked in a system where I had to study for many years and pass a number of exams to become an accredited specialist, where I was part of a multidisciplinary team, where practice and outcomes were continually being evaluated by audit and other feedback, where I was monitored and subject to annual appraisals and five-yearly revalidation.
What about those who treat sick and vulnerable people without these safeguards? Those who base their practice on schools of thought which have no scientific basis, and where no evidence has been found of their efficacy? Whether they are cynically trying to make money out of others’ misfortune, or whether they are genuinely trying to improve the lot of those less fortunate than themselves, they are in a position to do a great deal of harm. Should I stand by and let this happen? Should you? I care not about the motives of so-called alternative practitioners, their intent to harm, or lack of it. What matters are the consequences of promoting useless or dangerous treatment.
At the very least we need to educate people better, to give them the tools to distinguish truth from falsehood, to be able to spot implausible claims, and to know what questions to ask. This is not going to be easy, I know.
It is interesting that you mention Steve Jobs. In my experience, people who are well-educated, intelligent and able to think logically are the ones who are most able to convince themselves that they are right, against all evidence otherwise. What people believe is generally what appeals to them most, and they are very selective about the evidence that they will accept. This seems to be particularly true of scientists, as soon as they step out of their own field, however rigorous they are within their own area of expertise (I can think of a few Nobel prizewinners who have very strange ideas).
How much effort someone has put into their life’s work, how strongly they believe in it, how genuine their motivations, how great their sacrifices, all this counts for nothing if the evidence proves them wrong. Write an opera about them, but don’t let them treat you.
Ok so how Many people have died from Chemo Compared to the Gerson Company? Also You Oncologist get kickbacks from Big Pharma and you know this. But ofcourse you won’t admit to it. Your are about the Money!!!!!. Becsuse if you Cured patients You would be ouT of BUSINESS!!!!
Lack of evidence is not an evidence against.
It may well be a lack of research.
There is plenty of research claiming that numerous phytochemicals and specific aminoacid restrictions have decisive impact on cancer development and outcomes.
So let’s ask ourselves…
Why does a program that :
1) mimics calorie restriction (known to modulate angiogenesis and reinforce TH1 immune defenses);
2) includes antioxidant-dense food (decreasing ROS and favouring mitochondrial recoupling, a serious cancer hallmark.. see Warburg Effect for further comprehension);
3) Restricts elements that create burden for liver detoxification pathways;
Why it doesn’t receive solid and continuous funding for research ?
Why xenobiotics have the preference for funding ?
Any evidence-based replies to these two questions will be highly esteemed ?
Thank you and congratulations for your blog.
lack of evidence means the therapy is unproven; and this means that we should not use it in routine care on patients who need treatments that work.
What about the five cases presented by Gerson during the hearings in the Pepper-Neely bill of 1946? – they still exist today, document 89471 in the archives of the U.S. Government Printing Office.
YES, what about them?
do you think they are a proof of anything?
I rest my case.
you don’t have a case.
If you say so.
Well if Chemo is so Great why does Cancer Keep coming back. If it cures Cancer. If it Cured cancer it wouldn’t come back Right????? So Chemo is just a Bandaid Not a Cure. Would you want MUSTARD GAS IN YOUR BODY. ALSO ARE YOU A CANCER PATIENT OR EVER HAD CANCER
I believe in alternative treatments for curing cancer but Gerson Therapy has a lot of flaws in it..it doesnt build the immune system that supplements like AHCC, MGN-3, IP6 and Beta Glucan do (and which have clinical studies to prove they help with cancer patients, can slow down metastasis and prolong survival..). The reason cancer spreads is because the immune system is weak..if you fix the immune system then the malignant cells can be stopped. Second thing is that carrot and apple smoothies like Gerson promotes aren’t very effective. If you want to take lots of fruit and veg, it has to be hardcore stuff like broccoli, brussel sprouts, leeks, spring onions, garlic, blueberries, pomegranate, pineapples. Common things like carrots and apples which are in every day diets aren’t going to cut it, so no wonder that “Wellness Warrior” girl wasn’t getting cured.
Next thing to say is you need certain “exotic” supplements too to deal with cancer stem cells..like curcumin, nigella sativa, both with huge amounts of research showing effectiveness against human cancer cells. (as disclosure, both of my parents got diagnosed with cancer, so Ive been researching and studying this topic a lot)
if you have been researching this topic, why don’t you show us some evidence?
By the same kind of evidence and reasoning, a Vodka is also highly effective against cancer cells.
I’m not sure that there is a great deal of evidence in favour of the supplements that you recommend, otherwise we would be using them as standard treatment.
There is some evidence that certain dietary factors affect the risk of getting particular cancers. This kind of research is always difficult due to the long lead time between dietary exposure and the appearance of diagnosable cancer, the impossibility of controlling a diet for the duration of such a study (30 – 40 years) and the multitude of confounding factors.
There is no reason to suppose that dietary factors influencing the appearance of cancer will then influence its behaviour once it has become established.
The behaviour of cancer cells in culture, or indeed animal models, is very different from the behaviour of tumours within the human body, and many promising approaches turn out to be ineffective, too toxic or unworkable.
There was a widely-publicised study showing that pomegranite juice reduced the level of PSA in patients with prostate cancer. However, it is important to remember that, while PSA can be a very useful marker for how prostate cancer is reponding to treatment, what really matters is the wellbeing of the patient. What was not publicised was that the numbers were small, and the study was funded by the makers of pomegranite juice.
A colleague of mine (Professor Rob Thomas, Consultant Oncologist at Cambridge – UK, that is) is very interested in the influence of diet on prostate cancer, and he developed a supplement called Pomi-T containing extracts of pomegranite, broccoli, turmeric and green tea. In a prospective randomised trial of early, low-grade prostate cancer, those taking the active treatment went on to have fewer prostatectomies than those on placebo. An interesting result, but further research is required to establish the place of this preparation in the management of prostate cancer.
I would be interested to see the data supporting the treatments that you are advocating. Could you supply some references?
Edzard Ernst MD, PhD, FMedSci, FRSB, FRCP, FRCPEd
Thousands of studies show the effects and cure from eating plant based ‘gerson’ foods.
Do your homework idiot!
can you name a few that you find reliable instead of hurling insults, please?
The China Study by Campbell
I think for balance it is worth reading this commentary on The China Study:
http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html
It highlights many shortcomings of how the study was conducted, and also how Campbell seems to have cherry-picked the correlations found in the study which support his conclusions (many of them were not very strong and may have been entirely due to chance).
However vast in scope it was an observational study of a cross-section of a population at a specific time. It used historical mortality data as a surrogate for the expected fate of the individuals assessed, who were assumed to have the same risk as their forebears. The nutritional composition of the diet was not directly measured but based on standard tables which did not take account of geographical and effects such as soil quality.
There is no question that environmental factors, including lifestyle factors such as diet, have an enormous influence on health and cancer risk specifically. The China Study appears to be addressing this question, but I am not convinced that it does it very well. Unfortunately it is very difficult to tease out specific factors which may be exerting their effect over the entire lifetime of the individual, or may only be important at certain times, such as childhood, adolescence or even during gestation. Indeed, we know that epigenetic mechanisms enable environmental conditions (such as famine) to affect health several generations down the line.
In any case there is no reason to suppose that factors that might influence the risk of cancer in the first place should have a similar effect once the cancer is established. In other words if eating dairy produce increases cancer risk, then this does not imply that avoiding dairy produce would be an effective treatment for cancer.
There is also the question of how applicable findings in a rural Chinese population are to the typical Western caucasian. To take the example of dairy again, many Chinese (along with most of the population of the world) are lactose-intolerant and cannot drink milk. However, those of us in the West who are descended from the original domesticators of cattle have evolved to tolerate lactose and indeed milk has been an important component of our diet for several thousand years.
I am certainly not against a vegan diet, and in any case livestock are a significant contributor to global warming. However, I don’t think there is any convincing evidence that it (or any other diet) can cure cancer.
I had a quick look at that link, and it suffers from the same “problem” that the subject of this thread does: you end up reading the thing being criticised (because they are attacks).
For “balance”, my definition would be something created that came to the opposite conclusion of The China Study, and this thing would, for instance, never mention Campbell’s name – it would use The China Study data, but come to the reverse conclusion – and if likewise, it did it for the layperson – that, I would buy.
The subject here, i.e. the opening above, is a quote about coffee enemas. As I was skimming through it, it grabbed my attention and I thought the author (of this website) was in agreement with coffee enemas – it was only by the “end of quote” that I realised he was not, and the final five bullet points were his rebuttal (which I disagree with).
Now this is the interesting thing: the author expected his audience to do the reverse by default. It was self-evident to him that coffee enemas are dangerous hence the quote is self-evidently dangerous and also that his bullet points are self-evidently true – in which case, why publish in the first place?
In contrast I read every word of your post. It is better than either this website or the link you posted because it is interesting e.g. I too agree that diet cannot cure cancer, it just helps the immune system to keep it under control so that you don’t know you have it, and live well – after all the final degenerative disease is… old age.
Bob,
When a scientist publishes their findings, all the other scientists working in the same field will try hard to find all the problems in it, and this nit-picking is part of the scientific process. It is expected and even invited and is not regarded as an attack, but a way of getting closer to the truth. Usually the strongest critics are the authors themselves, because they know that if they miss something, somebody else is going to pick it up. Science is not like party politics, with each side trying to convince voters that they are right. Scientists know that if they are proved wrong then progress is being made. I don’t think Campbell seems to be engaging in this process at all.
It is dangerous in science to assume that something is self-evident. Different things are evident to different people (sometimes a cause of dispute between me and my wife), and this is dependent on what they already believe or know. I once met a very intelligent and well-read lady in India (as part of her preparation for a visit to England she read the Bible from cover to cover) to whom it was self-evident that turning on a light switch somehow invoked a kind of demon or spirit to illuminate the room.
Coffee enemas are indeed dangerous. Apart from the risk of perforation they are a way of getting much more caffeine into the system than is possible from drinking coffee, and this does have profound pharmacological effects. But without a knowledge of the pharmacology of methylxanthines this isn’t necessarily evident at all.
Coming back to diet and the immune system (which rivals the brain for the most complex system in the body) I don’t think there is much data supporting specific diets to help the immune system fight cancer. In any case the more we look into it the more it seems that individual tumours (rather than tumour types) interact with the immune system in different ways. This is an exciting area of cancer research and has already given us new drugs with many more following behind.
Certainly if you have an unhealthy diet you are starting at a disadvantage, and if you don’t look after yourself properly than no treatment will be able to give you its full benefit.
(in reply to Julian Money-Kyrle) above:
Yes, ideally, science should be objective, but, as the scientist said “Science advances one funeral at a time.” e.g. we all agree that quantum mechanics is true, now?
It was “self-evident” to the Romans that bad-air caused malaria because after draining the swamps… no more malaria! But now we know that they were “wrong” – but draining the swamps still works. In other words, for me, after reading Max Gerson’s Fifty Cases, it is self-evident that he is doing something right.
This something-right still works OK today e.g. Jesse Yu on youTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WyEsN9DzSo&list=PLcTAc4l3tN_gNh6s7w1q0J8wURZcZt6u3
This is the modern version of Max Gerson’s book i.e. a thing that is self-evident.
(In reply to Allan Henness) above
Sorry about that, but the 28% was a page I found before that I could not find again, and the circuitous route was my next best effort – it was hard to find, but maybe that is just me.
When some in this thread uses the term ‘alternative crap’ you just know they’re objective and unbiased – not.
Three months ago I was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer. A bone scan confirmed the cancer was still restricted to he prostate. Gleason of 7, PSA of 10.8. All from London’s Chelsea & Westminster, a very well respected NHS hospital. I have no complaints.
The consultant surgeon was suggesting taking the prostate out, the consultant radiologist suggested, yes, you guessed it, some radiation treatment. Again, both offering subjective and unbiased views, of course. Do you hear the same words I do, that of ‘production line’?
I decided to go down the bi-carb, B17 and vegan diet route with lots of supplements.
Guess what, PSA down to 0.5! I now feel better than I’ve done in many a year.
You know what you can do with your conventional cancer therapies, thats right, stick them where the sun don’t shine.
Regards from sunny Cyprus.
David
I am honestly concerned that the option you chose is going to shorten your life; please reconsider!
the surgeon and the radiologist were both right; both are effective options.
the PSA is a very unreliable indicator.
Actually there is no evidence that prostatectomy prolongs survival, though urologists as a whole are somewhat resistant to randomised trials in cancer treatment on the grounds that they already know how to treat it (a source of much frustration to me over the course of my career). The evidence for radiotherapy is better, and indeed the mindset of oncologists is much more trial- and evidence-orientated.
A prostate cancer such as this (though we don’t know whether it is T1c or T2, nor whether Gleason 3+4 or 4+3, all of which make a difference to the prognosis) is likely to continue for many years before becoming symptomatic, and indeed if it were at the less agressive end of the scale (T1c, Gleason 3+4) some oncologists would advocate active surveillance, with repeat MRI scans and biopsies to assess what it is doing (as you say, PSA is unreliable).
I’m sure that adopting a healthier lifestyle will make him feel much better, and a vegan diet can be a very healthy one. The only effect of bicarb will be to increase his blood pressure (due to the sodium load) and B17 is unlikely to have any effect (other than a small risk of death from cyanide poisoning). Some supplements have been shown to increase the risk of prostate cancer (e.g. vitamin E, in a large, double-blinded, randomised trial) but most probably won’t do anything. He may, of course, be taking something with an anti-androgenic effect, which would lower the PSA and perhaps slow the cancer a bit.
Provided that the cancer is adequately monitored (e.g. another MRI in a year or so) he is unlikely to be doing himself any long-term harm.
Of course I can only speak in general terms, and I can’t give an opinion on a patient who I have not seen.
Should the First Law Of Edzard’s Blog Be as follows:
“When Dr Money-Kyrle Speaks, All Should Listen”
There are some here who are experts in their fields, and some who are wise, and some who can write well.
None can combine the three as Julian does.
@DrJ: you sir are a wonderful, perspicacious and extremely well-reasoned contributor to this blog and I’m sure my “thank you for your input” is echoed by most every reader!
Evidently you have blocked my most recent replies – it’s your website, why would you do otherwise 🙂
But, just between you and me, why not skim through Jesse Yu’s youTube video, just to see what you are up against! – Know your enemy and all that – can your really go against Albert Schweitzer, or Prince Charles, or even Jesse Yu… It’s not the big people who are your enemy, it’s the little people… but NB that you are not their enemy.
no, I haven’t
Please accept exceedingly grovelling apologies – I no refresh the bleeder 🙁
David, Kalos orisate!
I was diagnosed at the next state, hence inoperable, with metastasised prostate cancer 11 months ago therefore, officially, I am doomed with a 28% chance of survival but, after sticking to the Budwig diet, my PSA is coming down, but more significantly, all my bone pain has gone, and I feel wonderful, e.g. if I do a whole day’s gardening, the next morning I no longer feel the usual lactic-acid-effect, that takes half an hour of work to “work off” i.e. I seem to have the same energy I had when I was 18 years old.
Have you read, The China Study? By Campbell – everyone should read that first (especially oncologists).
That, I believe, is why the Budwig diet works – since reading The China Study, I have also further limited the small amount of animal-protein there, as well.
Bob,
I have just looked up the Budwig diet. The ideas behind it seem to be based on a very simplistic, and completely wrong idea of how the body works and the pathogenesis of cancer. The diet itself seems reasonably OK at a brief glance but I can’t see any reason why it should work and I don’t suppose there is any evidence (other than anecdotal) in favour of it.
As a (recently retired) prostate oncologist I have no idea what you mean by a 28% chance of survival. Survival figures come from clinical trials and are useful in comparing one treatment against another, but have little bearing on the fate of individuals. In any case if you have a long enough follow-up period all of us have a 0% chance of survival.
Bone pain does come and go, and I don’t know whether you have a few isolated metastases or extensive involvement of the skeleton, nor what grade of tumour you have (which strongly influences how it is likely to behave). Nevertheless your symptomatic improvement is consistent with something reducing your testosterone level, and this could be related to something that you are eating.
Survival from metastatic prostate cancer can be many years. Nevertheless there is robust data showing that chemotherapy given relatively early in the course of treatment has a substantial effect on survival and wellbeing (except of course during the few months of the chemotherapy). The STAMPEDE trial found that the group treated with docetaxol lived 22 months longer on average than the group receiving standard treatment (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)01037-5.pdf). The benefit was much less in other trials looking at chemotherapy after other treatments had failed (about a 3-month improvement) so it seems to make quite a big difference how soon the chemotherapy is started.
Last month further data was released from the same trial (which has many arms looking at different treatments) showing that, even in patients with metastatic disease, the addition of relatively low-dose radiotherapy to the prostate delayed progression of the metastases, and in patients with relatively limited metastases it also improved survival (https://www.esmo.org/Press-Office/Press-Releases/STAMPEDE-prostate-cancer-radiotherapy-Parker)
Whatever claims might be made for the Budwig diet, I doubt if their proponents can supply the same robust evidence. However, perhaps they are promising you a cure. Your oncologist can’t do that, but he can substantially improve your outlook, and he can supply evidence to back that up.
I should add that a lot of people are understandably frightened of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and ultimately it is a personal choice, but you should talk to your oncology team about exactly what treatment involves and what the side-effects will be before making a final decision. Even with side-effects your treatment is unlikely to be as bad as uncontrolled cancer. Having had both radiotherapy and chemotherapy myself (for another type of incurable cancer), I can tell you that they aren’t that bad. I am also aware of the loss of control that comes with a cancer treatment, and how disruptive it is having to plan your life around hospital appointments (believe me it is a pain in the a***), but at least I am alive and well enough to live a normal life in between. That is much better than the false sense of control you get by relying on diet alone.
Thank you for this generous reply.
The statistic comes from “cancerresearchuk” here:
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/prostate-cancer/survival#heading-Three
(see the graph at stage IV).
I don’t believe you need to criticise Gerson at all because it is simply impossible for a lone person to do it. You would have to pay someone to help out, at least for the first months, it is physically impossible to wash/juice/cleanup for thirteen hours a day *and* interleave the three intermediate coffee enemas (the first and last are possible, outside the juicing).
So it is “safe” because it is impossible, to do it alone.
The reason I am doing Budwig is not just because of the pain I had, but to reduce the chances of the other diseases of diet too e.g. dementia, arthritis, diabetes II etc, as described in The China Study by Campbell.
As far as I can tell, Gerson and Budwig simply discovered what The China Study proved, but much earlier, no more or less.
I decided not to take the Zoladex or the Bicalutamide because of the side effects. I just want quality of life, not quantity – but the hospital said that I might last as little as a year or maybe as long as several years, it was very depressing – especially as the whole process was drawn out into two months (of tests, MRI, bone scan, CT scan, biopsy etc) – you are just a cabbage, waiting for things to happen to you.
The alternative, I discovered, is very positive. All I had to do (from Bill Henderson’s book) is to stop eating sugar (that I love), cakes, etc, dairy, etc (i.e. animal protein, as it turned out) and take the supplements (i.e. Linus Paulin’s vitamin C + L-Proline + L-Lysine) and the other things including Budwig, as outlined in Henderson – that put me onto Buwig, and that, finally put me onto The China Study – that is the main book, all the evidence is in there.
Gerson just discovered these things earlier (as did Hippocrates – as Campbell points out in the last pages of The China Study).
Bob,
I have followed your link to the Cancer Research UK Web site, and I still can’t see where your 28% chance came from. Are you referring to your chances of surviving to five years? Or your chance of dying of something else, other than prostate cancer? Much of this data is age-standardised, which is a statistical trick allowing you to compare data e.g. between countries with a different age structure (whatever the stage of prostate cancer, a 90-year-old has a lower chance of surviving five years than a 50-year-old). It is primarily useful to professionals and particularly to people who are planning various aspects of health-care systems. It is not intended for giving a prognosis to individuals and it can by quite misleading to try to use it that way. Similarly, survival data from clinical trials are for comparing treatments, not predicting what will happen to an individual. There are many ways of presenting data for different purposes, and as your link pointed to the section of the site aimed at health care professionals, it is assumed that the reader will have some training in statistics (a prerequisite for practising oncology).
I should also add that these figures were published in 2014, which actually makes them out-of-date now. They came from patients who had died by the time their survival data was collected, so they were treated before the gold standard was to give chemotherapy at diagnosis, let alone irradiating the prostate in metastatic disease, which will become the new gold standard, following last month’s revelations at the ESMO meeting. They probably came from patients treated before we had enzalutamide and abiraterone, intravenous radium-223 or even widespread use of intensity-modulated radiotherapy.
I agree with you that the Gerson diet is impossible. It also makes you feel awful, due to the disruption of electrolytes that it causes, and all but one of the people I have seen who tried it were dead within three weeks. Gerson had some mad idea that cancer was caused by an imbalance of sodium and potassium, and the idea was to correct it (certainly coffee enemas will put your potassium up and your sodium down). However, at the time he was formulating his theories I don’t think the techniques even existed to measure intracellular electrolyte levels, and the physiological importance of electrolyte gradients, electrical potentials across cell membranes, ion channels etc. was still in the future.
Linus Pauling’s advocacy of vitamin C as an anticancer agent has been thoroughly debunked and is an example of the sad fact that expertise in one area doesn’t necessarily carry over to others, and many renowned experts have ended up with egg on their face when they have tried to make pronouncements outside their own field. At least Einstein had the wit to know that he would make a hopeless President of Israel when he was offered the job. Another example is Jane Plant, who approached nutrition and cancer from the perspective of a geologist, with no training or expertise in biomedical sciences.
Hippocrates was a wise man, but he did not have the knowledge that we have now. His model of disease, arising from imbalance between the four body fluids or humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile), was the basis of mainstream medical practice up until the mid-19th century, and led to treatments such as purging and blood-letting aimed at restoring the balance. I have recently been reading the letters that my great-great-great-grandparents wrote to each other when they were apart (e.g. when one of them was away from home chasing a cure for some disease or other) and their physicians put them through some horrors. She was one of twelve siblings who lived to a (reasonably) ripe old age, but she had another six brothers and sisters who died before the age of 18.
A modern understanding of disease has put in place public health measures such as access to clean water and vaccination, which means that it is no longer common to have eighteen children in the expectation that a third of them will not reach adulthood. While we can still learn from Hippocrates, really he has had his time.
And it does seem that Campbell’s conclusions from the China Study are actually not justified by the data.
I am glad you are finding life more positive now, but please don’t rely on false promises. If you are afraid of the effects of Zoladex, you can try it for a few months using the monthly version (3.6mg injection) and stop it if you don’t like it. The three-monthly version (10.8mg) actually lasts well over a year in many people so stay clear of that until you are sure you are happy with it. And do consider the substantial benefits that chemotherapy at this stage can bring.
Remember that improved survival from cancer treatment comes as a result of reducing the amount of cancer in your body, so it is the symptom-free, useful part of your life that is extended, not the part at the end when the cancer is widespread enough to make you ill.
(Where the 28% comes from)
From that link, you click on the lower option
“Prostate cancer by stage at diagnoses”
and then view the second graph down.
Bob,
Thank-you for your clarification regarding the CRUK prostate survival data. Actually if I chase the graphs as you suggest the figure for stage IV is 30.4% – maybe the site has been updated since you last looked. But I should point out:
1. These figures are relative survival, rather than absolute survival, so in order to calculate your chance of dying from prostate cancer from them you need to know your chance of dying from other causes.
2. The data are from 2002-2006, and I would expect the survival to be much higher now, given the progress in prostate cancer treatment since then.
3. The figures include all ages from 15-99, so are not directly applicable to a specific age group.
4. The data come from East Anglia, which may not be representative of the UK as a whole as this part of the country has a strange demographic.
I should add that relative survival can be very misleading indeed. Newspapers frequently report stories such as “sausages can double your risk of…”, but this might mean that the risk is increased from 1 in 1000 to 2 in 1000, in which case you may feel that eating sausages is still worth it.
This is the problem with statistics of any kind – you need to know how the figures are arrived at before you can interpret them.
Ok Dr Julian if had Cancer WHAT ROUTE WOULD YOU TAKE. ?????? OR YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS????
Liz, if you paid even the faintest bit of attention to these blogs rather than posting unhinged and ill-informed streams of paranoid nonsense you would realise that Dr Money-Kyrle is a retired oncologist who is currently under treatment for multiple myeloma. He has cancer. He is being treated with chemotheraputics. He recognises Gerson Therapy for the quacktastic nonsense it is. You may wish to look up “Dunning-Kruger Effect” before posting further.
Ok so never answered my Question what Treatments would he be doing if had Cancer?????? Your just saying he is getting Treatment but which one??????. You like to manipulate the answer by Not answering it. . Also Are you a CANCER PATIENT?? ABD WHAT TREATMENTS WOULD YOU DO?????. SIMPLE QUESTIONS
“Ok so never answered my Question”
You have given me about 13 hours or so to answer the question, which you posted while I was asleep, and this is the first time I have seen it. I think it is a bit premature to complain that I have never answered it.
I have always taken the view that I would want the same treatment for my family and myself as I give to my patients. Anything else would imply that I was not treating my own patients properly.
The National Health Service in the UK, in which I have worked for my whole career, offers excellent cancer care.
When I was first diagnosed with cancer I was very happy to be treated in the hospital where I worked, and indeed I cannot fault the care I received there, especially when I was unluckly enough to require a week in intensive care. I am now being treated at a different centre as I require specialist treatment that my own unit does not offer.
To be a bit more specific, I have been treated with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy and various kinds of immunotherapy. On the basis of my experience as an oncologist, I don’t think I would still be alive without this treatment. I have never expected that I would be cured, but I am pleased that over two years on from diagnosis I am reasonably well and still able to have a good quality of life, though I no longer have the energy to work.
I have various family members who have had cancer, though I will not go into a lot of detail due to respect for their privacy. They have all received conventional therapy, too (surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy).
And, Liz, if that stream of yammering was aimed at me, six years ago my wife was diagnosed with stage 2, borderline 3, triple positive breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy with (negative) sentinel node biopsy. She was treated with adjunctive chemotherapy. IV Fluorouracil, epirubicin, cyclophosphamide and docetaxel with subcutaneous Herceptin. She received localised radiotherapy over two weeks. Cure rate with surgery alone would be around 80%, increasing to 95% with the adjuncts.
She was discharged from care last year and remains fit and well. She takes tamoxifen daily and will continue to do so for another five years.
At no time did we even remotely contemplate following anything other than the advice of the surgeons and oncologists.
Because we’re both healthcare professionals and we’re not stupid.
Liz
The AMA approved methods CAN help keep you alive longer. After all, how else can they create a paying customer except to keep you breathing. You don’t need a doctor to make you immune system stronger. There are multiple things you can do yourself to improve your immune system. You help you immune system to help itself (the body), as the body can do infinitly more to help itself than anyone or any doctor.
The truth is that physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs and surgery kill over 225,000 people every year in the US . That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the US., behing only cancer and heart disease.
Cause of Death —————————— Deaths
Diseases of the Heart 710,760
Cancer (Malignant Neoplasma) 553,091
Medical Care 225,400
Stroke (Cerebrovascular Diseases) 167,661
Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease 122,009
Diabetes Melitus 69,301
Influenza and Pneumonia 65,313
Alzheimer’s Disease 49,558
———————————————————————–
Deaths by Health Care Deaths
Medication Errors 7,400
Unnecessory Surgery 12,000
Other Preventable Errors in Hospitals 20,000
Hospital Borne Infections 80,000
Adverse Drug Effects 106,000
Don’t drink the kool-Aid
RG:
“The AMA approved methods CAN help keep you alive longer. After all, how else can they create a paying customer”
I am not in the USA, which is unique in the world in having such a highly dysfunctional healthcare system. In my country, as in much of the world, payment for healthcare is through taxation.
yes Dr. J
You can call it dysfunctional, and it might be.
That is largely because patients are paying good money to doctors and hospitals and not receiving much for their money. In fact, many are getting more sick…. more disease.
If you think your system of healthcare in England is superior, congratulations. I know of nobody going to England to have proceedures done, or to see doctors more wise. The money flow is not that much different on the other side of the pond. It still flows from the paitient to the doctor or Pharma, it just gets paid in the end via the governemnt, as you stated (taxation). The costs are higher here, but is the care vastly different ? I’ve conversed about healthcare with people from England, I’m not so sure it’s better.
The basic principle of the NHS is that it is free at the point of delivery to anybody living in the UK.
And actually, yes, a lot of people come to the UK for medical treatment, though hopefully most of them are paying privately rather than at our taxpayers’ expense.
Dr. J
There is no free lunch, including healthcare, unless you live in UAE. Even Cuba levies 50% income taxes to the 50% of the population that does not work for the government, it all goes in the same general pot, same as it does here in the USA. They tell us that our Social Security Taxes are kept in a separate fund….. lol, that’s a crock.
Hey, people come to the USA for treatment, as they also leave. All around the world patients go seeking treatment in other countries….I was talking about a net net. I do suppose in countries where healthcare is free (already paid through taxation), I could imagine people have less motivation to seek care elsewhere.
RG
Health costs in the USA are acknowledged to be the highest in the world, to the point where travel health insurance sold elsewhere often covers all countries except America.
Of course the NHS is funded by taxation, but it keeps a close eye on costs and does manage to achieve a lot given that the funding is less than in many first-world countries.
We don’t have the situation where if you lose your job then your family loses their health care. We don’t have essential drugs (such as insulin for type I diabetes) not covered by insurance and so expensive that people struggle to pay for them.
There are a lot of other things that we don’t have, such as direct advertising of drugs to the public.
We do have problems such as waiting lists for non-urgent surgery, and it is certainly not a perfect system, but at least it is able to provide care for everybody.
Dr J
I’m not convinced healthcare for all is a given birthright, and many on this side of the pond aren’t sure either. I’d be much more inclined to let a free market system rule the day. A true free market system has been absent here for many decades, and for this reason I believe our system is dysfunctional as you say. I can’t well defend an industry I beleive is corrupt and yes… to a large extent failing. Why the failures ? Largely because paitents don’t get well, not because of prices or unavailability. Between the Veterans Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA (Obamacare), we have a freekish mixture of goverenment healthcare already. To add, we have the previous stated also mixed with a “for profit system” of healthcare based on medical insureance. A lame insureance system that nobody knows actyally what they actually pay for services rendered….. herin lies a big problem. Why can’t we just go to the doctor and pay what the free market system will allow ? Noooo, that would make too much sense. Get rid of governments, and for profit Insurance alike in my view. So to defent our healthcare industry…. I can not. To defend free markets, I will everytime because nothing has proven to more efficient than truely free markets.
“I’m not convinced healthcare for all is a given birthright, and many on this side of the pond aren’t sure either.”
RG
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
Thomas Jefferson
Dr J
That’s a great quote you reference, thanks to Mr. Jefferson. That said, I seriously doubt it refers to the USA Healthcare standards.
If you believe so you are mistaken. If that were so, we are 243 years deficient in compliance, and many many a politiican has overlooked the Declaration.
@RG
“…we are 243 years deficient in compliance, and many many a politiican has overlooked the Declaration.”
That’s right. The USA was the next to last country to abandon apartheid as part of its political system. Your comments on health care reveal that the sole criterion on which you judge the worth of people is the quantity of greenback dollars they possess. Shame on you.
Dear Frankie
G’day Mate !! … a shot across the bow with that apartheid comment. If we must regress hundreds of years earlier, the UK and Europe were complicit in the BEGINNING of apartheid. Well, let’s just call it what it was, slave trade. The US slave trade came along later. Overall the years it lasted were similar on both sides of the pond. Im 65 years old, I was not involved in that, please leave me out in your accusation, neither do I accuse you.
Now, back to the subject. I’m not putting down the healthcare system in the UK, if it works… by all means don’t fix it. I’ve admitted our US system is not working so well, many reason and explanations can be offered… I’ll pass on that for now. My best argument is this: there are free market systems that are working well in the world, without single payer systems, without relying on taxes, and without Healthcare Insurance Corporations that are working quite well, both Singapore and Hong Kong. They are wonderful models for the world (in my view). What I like about these systems of healthcare is that the consumer has choices with regard to what care and from who. Few controls over how money is spent, but does force individual to have a health savings account. In a big way, what I love about Singapore and Hong Kong is that they put some incentive on the consumer to be proactive in living healthy. In other words, if you want to make bad choices by smoking, drinking, eating bad, not excercing etc….. you will pay in more than one way. They are achieving great success at a fraction of the cost. The US healthcare system only needed tweeking before Barack Obama screwed things up with the ACA. All that was need was a mandate to purchase Catastrophic Care coverage… NOT COMPLETE HEALTH INSURANCE FOR ALL. Now they F’d up the system worse than it was. We still have the failures of the previous system, with the addition of the ACA still fumbling and failing. Truthfully, the ACA was designed to fail, and that it did. It was designed as a failure because it was to be a step in the direction to a single payer system…. we may still get there eventually. The US government is cabable of doing nothing efficiently, this is a well known fact. I for one do not want a disfunctional govenment involved in my personal health, as many others feel the same way.
Frank Odds, or any of you in the UK
I don’t know if this is true or not, perhaps you can verify it for me.
Thousands in Britain left to go blind due to eye surgery rationing: Report
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/thousands-in-britain-left-to-go-blind-due-to-eye-surgery-rationing-report?fbclid=IwAR1m2WRVBW46aB_suHjProIHOsLxvqj_MQGUSU8WrccE24W93TlNDxAiBV4
@RG
The report is correct (though spun in the most negative manner possible). Please don’t imagine for one minute that I think the NHS is perfect or fully defensible in its details! I just find the system in the USA reprehensible because it is entirely based on a person’s ability to pay (directly or indirectly via insurance). Like Julian Money-Kyrle said about the NHS: “We do have problems such as waiting lists for non-urgent surgery, and it is certainly not a perfect system, but at least it is able to provide care for everybody.”
So cataract surgery obviously comes under the heading of “non-urgent” and, like a handful of other procedures, it therefore gets rationed. Different local administrations ration fewer or more procedures so we have a UK-wide expression: “postcode lottery” (you’d call it a zip code lottery) which means that depending on precisely where you live, a procedure you’d like to undergo may or may not be available.
The question of which treatments to ration and which not has been with the NHS since it was first founded. No healthcare system ever enjoys a bottomless pit of financial resource. That’s one reason why I find it so annoying that the NHS devotes any of its funds to outdated, irrational, ineffective forms of treatment like those that are grouped under the umbrella terms ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’.
You can find a fairly comprehensive list of NHS procedures rationed in England on a ‘postcode’ basis in this article. (Accuracy warning: it’s a list from the Daily Mail.)
Thanks Frank
That’s an honest reply, I appreciate your thoughts.
I have no idea why you didn’t just link to the data rather than your obscure, circuitous route.
Anyway, cherry-picking only the stage 4 cases, the five-year survival rate is 30.4%, not 28%, and overall, the rate is 87.4%:
I’ve not particularly been following this thread, but perhaps you can provide the same data for gerson therapy so we can make a proper comparison…
Actually what most people would understand by the five-year survival (technically the absolute survival) is not 30.4%. This figure is for the five-year relative survival, which is the survival after diagnosis of prostate cancer divided by the survival in the same population of patients not diagnosed with prostate cancer.
I have already discussed the shortcomings of these data elsewhere in this thread. They are clearly well out-of-date by now, though I don’t know how much they are influenced by a sub-population in the fens located within the Anglia area (in the East of England) who are rural, rather in-bred, and who very seldom avail themselves of medical care.
Let Max Gerson’s own words convince you here:
https://tratamenteanticancer.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/max-gerson-a-cancer-therapy-results-of-fifty-cases.pdf
For a top-level-overview of everything in a ten minute read (including the why of the coffee enemas), see the Appendix II from page 204 to 212 and the Q & A at the end.
This information, I have not seen, so nicely compact, elsewhere e.g.
“Cancer patients are not able for a long time to digest fats to the end products. When some intermediate substances are left in the body, they work as carcinogenic substances. Therefore we had to cut out fats, oils, and goods containing them for a long Time.”
Which explains where e.g. Budwig (working completely independently) discovered the same thing empirically except for one special case: Flaxseed oil.
Gerson, after publication, discovered Budwig and, because he had not tried flaxseed oil, tried it, and it worked, hence after his book was published, he advocated 2 tbsp of flaxseed oil per day too, to the Gerson Therapy in 1959, which is still used today.
And there is other nicely compact info e.g. fasting is not allowed, nor most vitamins/minerals (except for potassium, iodine, vitamin C, B3 etc) and the story about the failure of the hormones where they all worked “at first” and then, because they depleted the liver’s inadequate reserves, backfired.
you might have forgotten to mention: this was published 60 years ago, and since then oncology has moved on and made quite a bit of progress.
That’s right, his book was published 60 years ago, after 30 years of clinical results (published in the book, complete with x-rays etc) so that makes it 90 years old – and as you can see from Appendix II, the original Hippocrates’s soup (which is still used today) is 2,500 years old, as is “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food” – which is still true today, as is “first do no harm”.
The coffee enemas cannot be taken in isolation, just as food cannot be isolated from the land – our gut and the land are a system. Disrupt that billion year old system at one’s peril (e.g. by siphoning off sewage into the sea).
it is, in other words, an unproven treatment; and we now know (also from ‘clinical results’) that it reduces patients’ quality of life and often shortens their lives
Ah, you have not read the easy-read above i.e. pages 204 to 212, about the cures shown to the audience e.g. that of Mr Eyerly.
Since you refuse to read my link, I copy and paste one of the fifty cases at random (page 195 to 196) for other readers to decide accordingly what the word, “unproven” means to you.
CASE No. 47
Mrs. V. B., age—36, married, two children. Family, negative.
Clinical Diagnosis; Cervix carcinoma, inoperable case. Biopsy and Operation Report: Report of specialist: “She had not been in my office in over a year until February 3, 1947, at which time she gave a history of irregular menstruation with some bloody stain each day which had persisted for several months. “On examination, I found the cervix covered with a growth which on biopsy proved to be squamous epithelial carcinoma. It was an inoperative case, so I turned her over to our leading radiologists,”
Previous History: At the first delivery. seventeen vears ago. she had a bad hemorrhage. Menstruation was not regular; she hemorrhaged often twice a month, each time lasting seven to nine days. Finally, a fibroid tumor was discovered. She was operated on in 1947, and the uterus was fixed in a normal position. Then she had another pregnancy, with normal delivery and no abnormal hemorrhage. February, .1946 patient observed slight discharge from the vagina which became darker and more bloody. Examination by gynecologist revealed the findings mentioned above. Biopsy taken; See above. February and April, 1947, patient had radium and X-ray treatments, which could not be continued.
Discharge discontinued for a while, but the last six weeks the discharge returned, containing blood and more pus. Artificial sterilization performed at that time. Condition at time first seen, September 3, 1947: Gynecological examination revealed a large ulcerated cervix mass covered with blood and pus, easily bleeding on touch. Therefore, no further examination was called for. At the same time, patient had some hyperinsulinism which was corrected with the regular treatment in five weeks. Patient felt free of discharge and free of pain, July, 1949. She started to get cramps in the chest and upper abdomen with a burning sensation. She kept on eating, but “nothing did me good.” Her nervous excitement and depression became worse. She couldn’t sleep, was tearing, menstruation had not returned since the deep X-ray treatments.
[Gerson Therapy applied] Hot flashes appeared with bad palpitation. Larger potassium doses helped again without additional sex hormones, as I observed on several patients that additional sex hormones reactivated the cancer condition. I was and am very hesitant to give the cancer patients the same or contrary sex hormones a year or longer before they are entirely free of symptoms and general disturbances.
Report of the Gynecological Examination, September 16, 1949: Examination of Mrs. B- reveals no evidence of any pelvic or abdominal palpable recurrence. The vaginal wall is completely fibrosed. There is no area of erosion whatsoever. The entire pelvic findings are similarly negative. There is slight sensitivity in the right adnexal area but there are areas of thickening, nor pelvic mass. Nothing definite was felt in the upper abdomen. “I therefore would consider this patient at present free from any recurrence in the pelvis and in the abdomen.”
In the following years, patient felt good and remained free of any recurrence or pathological disturbance. On June 23, 1954, she wrote the following: “I am delighted to tell you I am feeling wonderful. I would say my physical condition is probably better than it has been since the birth of my first child twenty-four years ago. I had a complete physical a few months ago and the only trouble anywhere was a spastic condition in my stomach; however, that is all right now. No, I have not had any recurrence of my former condition.”
Last Report, August 5, 1957: Very good condition, bodily and mentally. “I am in wonderful health. I have not had any cause to be concerned or anxious about my old condition.”
Julian replied to your notions, and – as an oncologist – he is much more competent than I. therefore, I will not respond to this.
Bob,
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make of case No. 47. This is a description of squamous carcinoma cured by radiotherapy.
I don’t know exactly what technique was used in 1947, but since he mentions radium it was probably a form of brachytherapy, and probably using the Manchester system, whereby radium sources are placed in the uterine cavity and against the cervix, packed in place and left there for five or six days before removal (there are better systems in use now which don’t involve irradiating all the staff concerned). Depending on the stage of the tumour it may have been combined with external-beam radiotherapy, which could have been deep x-ray treatment (i.e. 250 – 300 KV x-rays, which don’t penetrate very well and give a large dose to the skin) or from a cobalt unit (better penetration and skin sparing). Either way, most or all of the dose would have been given from the radium application, and if there was an external-beam component which wasn’t completed she probably still received a curative dose.
The effects of radiotherapy are delayed, so at the end of her treatment she probably still had obvious tumour at the cervix, together with ulceration from the tumour, the radiotherapy or infection. I would expect the healing process to take several months.
Nowadays we plan radiotherapy from CT scans and we are very careful to limit the dose to sensitive structures such as the bowel. In 1947 (and indeed in 1997) radiotherapy planning involved a lot of guesswork, and the use of standard rather than individualised treatment plans. I would not be at all surprised if she had gastrointestinal symptoms from her treatment, which would take months to resolve.
The radiotherapy would have induced a rather abrupt menopause, since the ovaries are very sensitive to radiation, hence the menopausal symptoms described, which seem to have been accompanied by depression. Gerson advised against the use of hormones in the mistaken belief that a squamous carcinoma of the cervix would be hormone-driven (I suppose he was confusing it with adenocarcinoma of the endometrium, which is a very different gynaecological tumour). This was probably good advice, however, as the rather primitive HRT available was probably diethylstilboestrol, which is a dangerous drug causing significant fluid retention (often to the point of overloading the heart) and abnormal blood clotting (a frequent cause of death from strokes and myocardial infarction if it is not given together with antocoagulation).
Eventually her post-radiotherapy symptoms resolved as expected, her depression lifted and her post-menopausal symptoms improved. I don’t think Gerson can claim credit for that.
I have treated many similar patients myself, using older techniques at the beginning of my specialist career. I don’t think this case history is particularly remarkable.
I have followed your link and looked through Gerson’s book. I won’t pretend that I have read it carefully. I have also had a look at some of the case histories.
Starting with the histories, the first few I had a look at were all benign tumours which had been surgically debulked, and the reported improvements were consistent with the expected recovery after surgery. Others were extremely rare tumours. With most of them, however, it was rather difficult to know what was going on at all. The pathological techniques used in their diagnosis were very primative, and the names given refer to classification systems that are obsolete on the basis of what is now known of tumour pathology. Modern imaging techniques and even blood tests weren’t available, so the staging and metabolic effects of the tumours in question are unknown.
For instance, one of the cases was of a benign but large pituitary tumour that appears to have spontaneously resolved; this is not unknown as these tumours can outgrow their blood supply and infarct (a technical term for tissue death following loss of blood supply). Another case was of a woman who seems to have been cured of breast cancer by her mastectomy but also had hyperparathyroidism, which for some reason Gerson regarded as another form of cancer. Yet another case was of a young man diagnosed with embryonal carcinoma; his tumour, however, seems to have been behaving much more like a seminoma (even with modern techniques, non-specialist pathologists have difficulty telling them apart), which we now know is very sensitive to low doses of radiation and was probably cured by the radiotherapy.
This series of very unusual cases is clearly a selection from a much larger number, and I doubt if they were very representative. I am sure that if I were to look through the records of thirty years of patients treated at my own cancer centre I would be able to select fifty oddities.
Moving on to what he had to say about his beliefs concerning the pathogenesis of cancer and the effects of his treatment, they are complete nonsense, and bear very little relationship to what we know about physiology, biochemistry and pathology. They also run contrary to my own experience of 30 years of medical practice. Gerson seems to be a man who has come up with some rather strange theories based on goodness-knows-what, and then fitted his observations to his theories. This is quite easy to do with any complex belief system, whether it is astrology, Chinese Traditional Medicine or whatever.
You talk about the wisdom of 90 years of experience. Please note that this is the experience of a single man and his followers. Contrast this with the collective experience of the many clinicians and biomedical scientists involved in the research and treatment of cancer worldwide.
And please, please be aware that because something is appealing that doesn’t make it true. There is a huge difference between what ought to be and what is.
It is true that you are a doctor and I am not, so I cannot pretend to understand every case properly, and as you say, the terms are old and some are obsolete ( I found that out trying to Google them ), also he has a habit of omitting the phase so that is implied in all the cases, which is disconcerting, so yes, there is a lot “wrong” with it in that sense – even for me as a layman, so I try to learn from you and e.g. Google hyperparathyroidism here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperparathyroidism
(because, to quote you above: “…but also had hyperparathyroidism, which for some reason Gerson regarded as another form of cancer.”)
But this link says:
“Primary hyperparathyroidism in 80% of cases is due to a single benign tumor known as a
parathyroid adenoma with most of the rest of the cases due to a multiple benign tumors.[1][2] Rarely it may be due to parathyroid cancer”
So this is correct i.e. Gerson will always call hyperparathyroidism a degenerate disease (cancer is just a special case, albeit “rare” in this case – but in Gerson “benign tumor” is just another symptom that takes “much longer to eradicate” simply because the immune system does not recognise it as alien, as easily it does “malignant tumors” (I hope I am using the correct terms here? If not apologies).
As a layperson, this theory of what is the ultimate cause of e.g. cancer (amongst all the other degenerate diseases) is satisfying (than e.g. DNA damage (or is it “epigenetics” these days? – I am guessing again)) whereas the idea that “we don’t know” is not satisfying.
Suppose everything Gerson said and did was wrong in some way or mistaken. That would be irrelevant if the Gerson Therapy produced results. It would simply mean that his model was wrong, not its effects, and would only require that the model be revised e.g. Newton was “wrong” and had to revised by Einstein, but Newton was still good enough for the Apollo missions.
Likewise Gerson where the protocol has a 40% result in the so “called terminal” patients of allopathic medicine (it was 50% in 1948, but the food quality has been dropping off ever since e.g. “buttermilk” and “cottage cheese” are now too processed and cannot be used in Gerson anymore) and allopathic treatment has improved of course (as has Gerson).
In 1976, I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, reading the public information cards when I spotted that the one on diabetes II that said that “dietary cholesterol had no effect on body cholesterol levels…” – today (I am guessing) this is no longer the case? Yes, No?
In 1981, global warming was “unproven” – this is no longer the case?
In 1930 Gerson said that diet was the cause of many diseases. He was ridiculed for it then – but is now proved correct:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/14/poor-diet-is-a-factor-in-one-in-five-deaths-global-disease-study-reveals
In my simple way, I just do not see how drinking carrot juice can be harmful. I can see why taking coffee up one’s rectum might be harmful, but Google only brings up three cases, is this really dangerous? Compared to what, drinking alcohol – does allopathic medicine still say that drinking one glass of red wine is good for you?
Bob,
You are correct in that hyperparathyroidism is usually due to a parathyroid adenoma. This is a nodule of glandular tissue which no longer responds to the normal feedback mechanisms to switch of parathyroid hormone secretion when the calcium level rises. In the sense that it is a localised swelling it can be described as a tumour (“tumor” is Latin for swelling) and it is treated by surgical removal. They are quite hard to find (there are four parathyroid glands in the neck, each about the size of a pea) and we now use radioisotopic labelling in order to find them. They are not malignant and do not in any way behave like cancer. Malignant tumour of the parathyroid gland are vanishingly rare to the extent that I have never seen one. There are also a number of uncommon genetic syndromes where parathyroid adenomas occur in conjunction with other endocrine (glandular) tumours, again usually benign.
Gerson describes both cancer and tuberculosis as degenerative diseases. When I was a medical student, as a mnemonic to aid diagnosis I learnt that disease can be classified into traumatic, infective, neoplastic, vascular, immunological, metabolic, iatrogenic and degenerative (TINVIMID). Tuberculosis is infective, cancer is neoplastic. Degenerative disease includes such things as osteoarthritis and other age-related conditions.
The idea of not knowing is unsatisfying and indeed frightening for many people, which is why throughout history plausible-sounding explanations have been made up to explain the unknown. That doesn’t make them true. A scientist has to accept that there is much that we don’t know, though his job is to try to find out.
Cancer is primarily a disease of the DNA of cells. We have very effective mechanisms for recognising and dealing with DNA damage, but occasionally mutations can occur that affect these very systems (due to radiation from cosmic rays, chemical irritants, viral DNA being incorporated into the cell genome or simple copying errors). This allows other mutations to build up within individual cells, including in genes concerned with cell growth and response to their local microenvironment, eventually leading to malignant transformation of the cell, which can then grow into a tumour. Within the tumour, many more mutations continue to occur, so that by the time it is large enough to diagnose (a 1cm tumour has 1,000,000,000 cells) the DNA of the cells making it up is very abnormal. Epigenetics don’t really figure very much in this process as far as I am aware, though our understanding of epigenetics is growing all the time.
Molecular biology is largely the study of what is going on here.
I think likening Gerson to Newton is a bit simplistic. It is more like trying to build a rocket to the moon using what you can find in a scrapyard. And Newton may be good enough for Apollo but certainly not for SatNav.
I think buttermilk and cottage cheese are rather different in the USA than in the rest of the world, and food standards there certainly wouldn’t pass in Europe (use of hormones and antibiotics in animal feed, for instance).
I would take Gerson’s claims of success in terminally ill patients with more than a pinch of salt. I think they are lies, or if I am charitable, self-delusion, with a very muddled series of case-histories cited to make them seem more plausible.
I think it is probably true that dietary cholesterol has no effect on serum cholesterol. This is largely determined by your genetics, and secondarily by your weight. The specific dietary component that can put it up is carbohydrate, and the mechanism is increased insulin levels.
If you watch the BBC news reporting the climate summit in Poland last week you will realise that global warming is accepted as true by virtually all climate scientists, and indeed the heads of state of most of the world except the USA, Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It is almost too late to limit the effects to something that won’t be life-changing for the whole world, and if it continues at the current rate most species (including ours) will be going extinct as a result.
Diet certainly contributes to many disease, as do many other lifestyle influences, though these are not always easy to identify if they act over a long time or have effects delayed by many decades. Sensible diet can certainly tip the balance in your favour, but it isn’t the whole story. Gerson’s dietary advice is anything but sensible. A diet which reduces the risk of particular types of cancer is not the same as a treatment for cancer that is already established.
A coffee enema is a way of getting a lot of caffeine into the system very quickly. Many drugs are absorbed better per rectum than by mouth, and it can be easier than giving them intravenously. It is a very popular route of dosing in France. Indeed, coffee enemas used to be used in the 1920’s as emergency treatment for asthma. Nowadays we use theophylline or aminophylline rather than caffeine (they are closely related) and we give them intravenously or by nebuliser. A caffeine overdose can be dangerous in somebody with a tendency to cardiac arrhythmias, or indeed with a high serum potassium level as it will raise it further (if the potassium gets too high the heart will suddenly stop). This is apart from the obvious, such as bowel perforation.
I don’t think carrot juice is dangerous, but if you drink too much it turns the skin orange/green (the colour your hands go if you have been peeling carrots). I saw this happen overnight once in a woman with cervical cancer. She had a sudden bleed from her tumour and lost so much blood that the carrot colour of her skin was revealed when she went from pink to green.
I don’t think allopathic medicine has very much to say about drinking a glass of wine. Every time any of the components of wine are found to have a biological effect, whether in cell culture or in rats, the media report it in the form of dietary advice. Personally I love a glass or two of decent wine (or I did before I lost my sense of smell as a result of a cancer-related infection). My advice is to do everything in moderation.
You said of Gerson:
“…I think they are lies, or if I am charitable, self delusion…”
Whereas Albert Schweitzer said of Gerson:
“I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine”.
Bob,
I have a lot of respect for Albert Schweitzer, not least for his championing the music of J S Bach, but cancer treatment wasn’t really his area of expertise. Also medicine has moved on a great deal since his time.
@Bob on Thursday 13 December 2018 at 18:49
“Whereas Albert Schweitzer said of Gerson:
“I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine”.”
Bob, this is the classic logical fallacy, “Argument from Authority”, and is no argument at all. I suggest you research logical fallacies, Wikipedia has a very good entry and many others, to relieve yourself of the burden of falling into fallacious arguments.
@Frank on Friday 14 December 2018
No, it’s an opinion. Schweitzer is of the opinion of Gerson’s merit whereas Julian is of the opposite opinion.
The point being that opinions don’t carry weight (unless folks are impressed by the argument from authority) so Julian’s opinions are just as irrelevant as Schweitzer’s (if you don’t fall for the argument from authority).
“Bob” wrote:
Wrong. Julian Money-Kyrle is a certified authority on modern medicine, namely cancer therapy.
Albert Schweitzer was far from being an authority on cancer in his day. His infatuation with Gerson was not based on any miracles, the health problems said to have kindled his admiration for Albert did not include cancer. They (adult onset diabetes, tuberculosis and migraine) are all known to improve spontaneously or by improvements in lifestyle.
Julian’s views on cancer therapy, whether genuine or fake, is not an opinion but that of a trustworthy authority and therefore carries weight.
I don’t think I would quite describe myself as an authority on modern medicine, except to the extent that I am a qualified doctor with specialist training in clinical oncology, and I have practised as a consultant oncologist for many years. I don’t think that the opinions I have expressed here would differ very much from those of most other oncologists. They are, however, based on my training, my experience and my knowledge of the evidence base.
You may have to take my word for it as I voluntarily removed myself from the Medical Register on my retirement as I was no longer able to meet the requirements for revalidation (which include annual appraisals and reports from colleagues and patients), so unless you are looking through a pre-2018 edition you won’t find me there.
I am not, however, arguing from authority, although there are many wiser men (and women) than I working in my field whom I could quote if I thought that would be helpful.
It is all very well saying that everybody’s opinion carries equal weight, but that won’t help very much if you are trying to decide on a course of action. An experienced specialist is usually going to give more helpful advice than a layman, whether it concerns what is wrong with your car, how to deal with damp in your house, where is the best spot in the garden for a particular plant etc.
Oddly enough, it does seem to be the case that the less somebody knows about a topic the more fixed their opinion will be.
I hope I am not guilty of self-aggrandisement if I say that I believe that my opinions on cancer treatment in the 21st century should carry more weight than Albert Schweitzer’s. On the other hand, I would not expect you to take so seriously my opinions regarding how to play Bach on the organ (which would be a very interesting discussion to have with Schweitzer but not really the right subject for this forum).
These days the Internet makes a great deal of information available to anybody who is able to find it (given the propensity of search engines to base their results on your previous search and browsing history) and to judge whether it is trustworthy (since anybody can post anything on the Web with no oversight). But information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom and indeed wisdom is not the same as skill (though both take much time and effort to acquire).
@Julian on Friday 14th December 2018
I agree with every paragraph you wrote except for the fifth paragraph:
“Oddly enough, it does seem to be the case that the less somebody knows about a topic the more fixed their opinion will be.”
It is incomplete: the word “less” should be replaced with “less/more” e.g. an oaf who happened to live inside the arctic circle, and knew nothing about mathematics, would be able to tell Ptolemy, that he was wrong i.e. the earth goes round the sun – “Come to the north and look at it!”
Whereas Ptolemy was able, by Fourier Analysis (epicycles), to make anything possible, even the Earth going round the Sun – or anything under the Sun, even a Homer Simpson e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw
Of course you could argue that the oaf knows more, which is true, evidently and also that Ptolemy is making reality fit his fantasy, which is true, evidently – because the definition of knowing more is the better fit of your fantasy to reality i.e. one’s better model.
But who would you believe, the illiterate oaf or Ptolemy? – how could the Sun possible go all around the sky, in plain sight, all day, without any night! That’s impossible! That would make a mockery of Ptolemy’s beautiful model!
Your sixth paragraph, about J.S. Bach: there’s a guy on youTube – a piano tuner, with a splendid “tough” New York accent, who plays a little of e.g. prelude 2 (C# minor) in Bach’s own tuning – *that* is very interesting – after that no one would want to play Bach in ET again.
The most beautiful bars ever written are those that sing “Truly, this was the son of God” in The St. Matthew Passion especially the version by the German conductor (I forget his name) who plays everything really slowly.
In the Bernstein lectures, in his lecture on J.S. Bach, he rightly concentrates on The St. Matthew Passion. The best Bernstein lecture is The Unanswered Question (it was on British TV in the 1980s, one Christmas time).
@bjorn on Friday 14th December 2018
You are saying that Julian’s arguments carry more weight than Schweitzer’s – i.e. you are using Frank’s the-fallacy-from-authority-argument.
Erratum: evidently the second “Earth going round the sun” should have been “Sun going round the Earth” i.e. Ptolemy’s version – I hope nobody will quibble about that obvious error, but if you do, shame on you 🙂
Erratum: evidently the second “Earth going round the sun” should have been “Sun going round the Earth” i.e. Ptolemy’s version – I hope nobody will quibble about that obvious error, but if you do, shame on you 🙂
Note to moderator:
Dear moderator,
Would you please insert the above correction? And delete this erratum?
Many thanks
And, could you add some music to this?
“Bach’s own tuning”
I think you must be referring to the Lehmann temperament, named for the musicologist who had the insight that the loops and curlicues decorating the front page of the first edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier were not purely decorative, but were tuning instructions (Bach always used to insist on tuning his own clavichords and harpsichords). The result was a tuning system that worked in every key, but since the semitones were not even, each key had its own character. Prior to Bach, keyboard instruments were tuned so that the commonly-used keys were harmonious, but the more sharps or flats in the key the worse it sounded, to the extent that some intervals were so far off that they were referred to as a “wolf” from the howling sound that resulted. Many North European organs are still tuned in this way since they have stops to reinforce particular harmonics, and they wouldn’t work properly in an even-tempered instrument.
If you ever get the chance to hear Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F played on such an instrument, you will hear how he uses this to his advantage, modulating in and out of the unharmonious keys to increase and then resolve the tension in the music, each time going further from the home key, making the music more and more discordant until he finally returns to F at the end of the Toccata.
“The most beautiful bars ever written are those that sing “Truly, this was the son of God” in The St. Matthew Passion especially the version by the German conductor (I forget his name) who plays everything really slowly”
That must be Otto Klemperer.
I think it is rather hard to pick the best part of the St. Matthew Passion as it is all wonderful. Personally I love “Erbame dich” (“Have mercy Lord”). Nowadays this is usually sung by a male countertenor, but there is a famous recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing it (in English); it is a very emotional performance and wouldn’t suit everyone’s taste but it is certainly worth hearing. She had a tragically short career after being discovered in a talent competition and then dying young from breast cancer. As a trainee oncologist working at the Middlesex Hospital in London in the 1990’s I was shocked that nobody on the oncology ward – Kathleen Ferrier Ward – knew who she was.
I had never thought of Ptolemy’s epicycles as being akin to Fourier analysis, but I see what you are saying. If you can describe any wave either as a displacement against time, or as the sum of a number of sine waves (Fourier showed that they were mathematically equivalent), then you should be able to describe any orbit as a sum of number of circular orbits (intuitively this sounds right to me but I don’t know enough maths to be sure).
I have always regarded the heliocentric view of the solar system as a way of simplifying the calculation of the orbits and positions of the planets, asteroids, comets etc., though since the solar system is orbiting the centre of the galaxy, and the galaxy itself isn’t stationary, it isn’t strictly speaking correct to take anything as a truly fixed point. Indeed, I believe that astronomers commonly use a geocentric co-ordinate system for describing the positions of celestial bodies, though there are other systems in place for specific purposes.
I never saw the Bernstein lectures – I will have to look out for them. Another very interesting musician.
I wonder if, in the future, computers will be equipped with sensors to help prevent commenting under the influence of psychoactive substances?
To equate the weight of Julian’s arguments with that of Schweitzer’s or Gerson’s, for that matter, is a fallacy of its own and using the “you too” argumentation to simply “return” the argument-from-authority gambit without actually weighing the circumstances brings to mind a kind of primary school mentality. Much to his honour, Julian modestly and humbly accepts the counter-argument despite coming from a self-acknowledged non-expert on the field. An accredited doctor that can so comfortably express that they don’t consider themselves special, that they clearly don’t know everything, and, beside training and experience, always strive to defer to an accepted evidence base, as well as the consensus of contemporary expertise on the specialty, is the kind of doctor you would comfortably trust with your life. One such doctor could be the man behind the name Julian and because we happen to have him in this blog for quite a long time, we have since long understood that pretending is a totally foreign word to him. In short, he is one such doctor.
As to why the counter-use of the same argument (from authority) is not valid, it is quite simple. The sole time that has passed since Gerson’s era has led to an unprecedented accumulation of high-quality information in the field of medicine. Given that Julian would meet even the absolutely minimum current contemporary requirements of bearing the title of a specialist Doctor, he is almost automatically more trustworthy, if not for any other reason, purely by virtue of having had access to better information. That is to say that even a fresh graduate of a proper medical school), knows much more than Gerson could have known in his time. Much in the same way that any high school student of today could easily teach Archimedes a thing or two about geometry.
In short, argument from trustworthy authority is not the same as argument from authority. Trustworthy, in this case, means following the current medical expert consensus, which always takes into account the highest-quality evidence currently available.
I find this discussion of the ‘argument from authority’ fallacy insightful. Ultimately, all forms of ‘teaching’ are essentially arguments from authority, and we’re all familiar with the different ‘teachings’ from diverse religious beliefs (often based on ‘holy scriptures’, which are a form of inanimate authority).
James sums up the situation commendably: “In short, argument from trustworthy authority is not the same as argument from authority. Trustworthy, in this case, means following the current medical expert consensus, which always takes into account the highest-quality evidence currently available.” But, of course, the use of the word ‘current’ in the context of medical expert consensus implies that expert consensus is subject to change, and one suspects that ‘authorities’ may differ in the speed with which they adopt change.
On this blog, we often hear that courses in, e.g., chiropractic last for several years, and involve a lot of the same basic education in anatomy and physiology, etc., that is given to medical students. But the students on these courses inevitably regard their teachers as trustworthy authorities and when the teaching they’re given departs wildly from the current medical expert consensus, how can they know? Their official textbooks say the same things as the teachers, yet as Prof. Ernst has often pointed out — most recently yesterday — teaching nonsense even at the highest level must result in nonsense.
There can be no easy solution to the basic problem of effective critical thinking, which is essential to ascertaining the reliability of different ‘authorities’. Almost every opinion expressed in the comments on this blog (including this one) represent an argument from the commenter’s personal authority. But the contrast between Bob’s cherry-picked support for some aspects of Gerson Therapy and Julian Money-Kyrle’s erudite and witty responses must cause any but the most Gerson-committed reader to agree with James that “To equate the weight of Julian’s arguments with that of Schweitzer’s or Gerson’s, for that matter, is a fallacy of its own”.
Bob didn’t cite the ‘authority’ admired by many people in the UK, but he might have mentioned that no less a figure than Prince Charles has publicly supported Gerson Therapy. The Prince, an ‘authority’ by virtue of an accident of birth, clearly outranks Schweitzer in terms of seniority. However, he fails the ‘trustworthy’ test since he has never even studied medicine, let alone agreed with the ‘current medical expert consensus’.
in essence, it seems to me that the fallacy is named incorrectly
APPEAL TO AUTHORITY should be called APPEAL TO FALSE AUTHORITY.
it would, of course, not solve the problem, but it would point out that there is a problem.
Nice one!
I disagree. Appeal to authority is fallacious no matter who the authority is. Even ackowledged experts are wrong sometimes and an essential part of the scientific process is to challenge accepted wisdom.
However, there is a difference between striving to determine objective truth, and seeking out the best advice when faced with a practical problem. To argue that something is true because Galen or Hippocrates or Darwin or Einstein said so is fallacious. On the other hand if you are looking for the appropriate treatment for your prostate cancer, it should be quite clear that not everybody’s opinion is equally valid.
Another problem with appeal to authority is that it can be used to justify almost anything. The evils perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of Social Darwinism are an example, and were a travesty of Darwin’s ideas.
@Frank Odds on Saturday 15 December 2018 at 08:32 said:
Bob didn’t cite the ‘authority’ admired by many people in the UK, but he might have mentioned that no less a figure than Prince Charles
I did mention Charles, see my post above on Wednesday 28 November 2018 at 14:26
@Frank Odds then continued with:
“However, he fails the ‘trustworthy’ test since he has never even studied medicine, let alone agreed with the ‘current medical expert consensus’.”
I agree with you that it seems impossible go against the ‘xyz consensus’ as in my example above of going against Ptolemy – but Ptolemy turned out to be wrong.
Here is another example, that of Alan Smith in NZ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrhkoFcOMII
The hospital authorities in NZ still argue that Alan Smith’s recovery was from their turning him on his stomach. They will never believe that vitamin C saved his life, no matter what evidence is presented to them.
Here the ‘trusted authority’ is the entire NZ health system, but they were wrong whereas Alan Smith’s family are lay people, but they were right.
Sorry for overlooking your citing Charles, along with Schweitzer and Jesse Yu (who he?!). But I’m not clear what we’re now debating, Bob. You began on this thread with a comment that cited Gerson’s book from 1958, then returned after a while with a longer post citing examples of cases from that source. You engaged in a dialogue with Julian Money-Kyrle, in which his responses to you showed his characteristic good nature coupled with a clear exposition of why you were mistaken in supporting Gerson.
Then a remark of yours prompted Frank Collins to point out that you were using the fallacious ‘argument from authority’ to support your case. Bjorn Geir suggested that Julian was a more trustworthy authority than the ones you were citing, to which you responded “You are saying that Julian’s arguments carry more weight than Schweitzer’s – i.e. you are using Frank’s the-fallacy-from-authority-argument.” You were perfectly correct in this comment, but the situation caused me to reflect that ‘authorities’ differ substantially in their training, knowledge and intelligence.
There is no foolproof way to tell who is a reliable authority in any situation, and since the current ‘scientific consensus’ at any time may be changed by new evidence and data (which happened over the centuries not only to Ptolemy’s epicycles but also to many other scientific paradigms), even the ‘scientific consensus’ cannot be regarded as infallible. I hoped to convey these thoughts in my comment of Saturday 15th December.
From your latest comment directed at me, it seems you are now less interested in Gerson therapy for cancer specifically, but you’re trying to present examples of medical cases in which one or other therapeutic approach regarded by ‘trusted authorities’ as a non-starter triumphed over a decision or recommendation from physicians attending a patient. Well, good luck: there’s no shortage of such material out there: the video you linked to is just one example.
Charles Fort was a person who devoted his life to recording anecdotes of phenomena science couldn’t explain. He and his associates collected sufficient material to fill a monthly magazine, the Fortean Times which is still published. Maybe you could do something similar with altmed, although you may find several publications (What Doctors Don’t Tell You springs to mind) provide stiff competition.
I am trying to play the Socrates card of “I don’t know” – more or less – I think the source of the misunderstanding is the comparison, side by side, of Julian’s opinion and Schweitzer’s opinion, standalone.
Evidently because I am contesting Julian’s view, the assumption is that I support Schweitzer’s view – (which is a case of the bleedin’ obvious) – but a better response would have been to note the contradiction and make a case against it, which is what Julian did (that Schweitzer was not a cancer doctor) instead of *assuming* that I was using the authority-thing as a mechanism (I hate the authority-thing, as it happens, but that is irrelevant – also, volunteering personal info like that just feeds future ad hominems – something which this group does not use, (if it did, I would stop posting and run away).
The Gerson detractors demand evidence that Gerson works – which, to say the least is reasonable. But what is unreasonable is to avoid looking at it, or when forced to look at it, to reject it out-of-hand (Julian does not do that, he argues the case on its merits – but he also makes a slip-up and opines too – which makes it easy for his opponent to challenge him, as I did above – Julian does not need to do that (as tempting as it is 🙂 ).
The most interesting thing of all, generally is that what we see is so highly coloured by what we already know, that two reasonable people can view the same thing as opposites (the oaf and Ptolemy) which means that one can be completely fooled by one’s own eyesight and never know it. And *that* tells us (the bleedin’ obvious) that the brain uses models for recognition i.e. recognising something is only recalling the model by definition hence if the model is wrong, the thing seen is wrong (but the viewer will argue the point to the death).
Right now, I am of the opinion that Gerson is absolutely correct and will fight to the death to defend it (my model is that the immune system is the only way to slow/stop/reverse cancer which also implies start/speedup/encourage cancer (of course) ) – but I might be completely wrong and have no way, at the moment of knowing it by definition.
Gerson (to me) means, by his crude empirical methods of discovery (death == bad == don’t do that again, recovery == good, keeping doing that) and the thing being done is diet-in at the front-end together with pulling toxins out (coffee enemas) at the back-end – and all this in an effort to assist the only thing that can recover the body: the immune system.
The evidence that Gerson exists is vast. There is his book. The Pepper-Neely documents. His daughter’s book and the time-span of 80 years. He definitely exists.
Does his method work? Over that time, it is more likely that he has “dealt” with many patients rather than a few or no patients at all (he would need something to live on).
Suppose that he is a fraud. All his patients would die (only the terminal ones would risk their lives on an unknown quack who always kills all his patients, because they have nothing to lose).
If all his patients die, then he would become a concept in the dictionary:
Gersontherapy, noun, death by carrot juice and coffee enema
But this is not the case, somewhere, by some means, some people live, they must do, otherwise he would have been exposed long ago like the case of Thalidomide.
So the question is: do the survivors survive because of Gerson or by “spontaneous recovery” (e.g. from previous allopathic treatment or from ) – there has been a study of 200 cases of spontaneous remission (cited by Charlotte Gerson) by a third party and their evidence is that their changed diet is remarkably similar to the food used in Gerson (whole, plant-based).
But suppose that all this written evidence is false, there is some massive cover-up that is somehow sustained on the income of ? – what could fund such a scheme? – what’s the next best thing? Viewing the evidence live i.e. youTube e.g. Jesse Yu.
If Jesse Yu is an actor, funded by the Gerson Institute, then they could have made a much better production. So suppose the hesitant, semi-stutter of Yu is artificial for verisimilitude (of non-actor) and likewise the amateur video, and partial-audience (they must be plants – right?) – well all that can be instantly exposed by the sheer volume of it (as they did in the Columbo scripts i.e. the more intricate and perfect the crime, the more likely errors must occur for Columbo to find) – there are the three hospitals for starters – they must all be lying etc.
But it is much simpler than that. A reporter simply has to go to the Gerson clinic in Mexico and film the patients and their progress – The Gerson clinic would try to prevent that happening – right? No, they encourage it. There is no cover up. You can buy Charlotter Gerson’s book for ten bucks and discover all their secrets and buy the equipment from third parties and get the blood tests done anywhere – an amateur can do it in their own home (well not quite, you need two people at least).
But what do I know – as Socrates would say, “I am only a layman.”
Bob,
If you want to know more about the immune system, I can strongly recommend “The Beautiful Cure” by Daniel Davis (a UK professor of immunology). It is an overview of how the various components of the immune system work, and how we know about them. It brought home to me just how much has changed since my immunology course at medical school, and just what an extraordinary thing the immune system is. It is written for the layman, though some knowledge of cellular biology is helpful.
@Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Sunday 16 December 2018 at 22:21 said:
“If you want to know more about the immune system, I can strongly recommend “The Beautiful Cure” by Daniel Davis…”
Thanks.
I think that you might enjoy this?:
Tripping Over The Truth by Travis Christofferson.
here
https://www.amazon.com/Tripping-over-Truth-Overturning-Entrenched/dp/1603587292/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RDC3VV3J1I43&keywords=tripping+over+the+truth+by+travis+christofferson
Continued from my post above on Monday 18 February 2019 at 22:28 to Dr Money-Kyrle
…this video (on GBM) is referenced on page 196 of the same book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV4epXiKgrM
I.e. you of all people would have a tremendous advantage in this approach (against metastatic prostate cancer, not GBM, obviously) – you already have a lifetime of experience and access – or would you be against this? (I mean for yourself only – in principle).
Alan Smith’s case is very interesting. I wish I knew the medical details. Hopefully he will be written up in the medical literature as a case report. As far as I can understand, the main problem was respiratory failure due to an inability to ventilate the lungs, and so he was treated with some sort of pulmonary by-pass system, about which I know very little (I certainly haven’t seen anything like that used in the UK). Usually in ITU, provided that only one system is failing there is a reasonable chance of saving the patient, but somebody as ill as this frequently has metabolic / biochemical problems which can lead to a cascade of multiple systems failing and the situation is very difficult to retrieve. This would include such things as secondary infection, kidney or even liver failure, failure of the heart muscle to contract adequately, blood clotting problems etc. etc. I doubt if the doctors treating him would consider withdrawing care if the only problem were respiratory failure, although it does sound as though there was no improvement in that after several weeks on the by-pass system, which was probably never intended to be used for so long.
I don’t know how much difference the hairy-cell leukaemia would have made, or how urgently it needed to be treated. I am not a haematologist, so I don’t have any practical experience of treating leukaemia, but I understand that there is very effective treatment available. On the other hand a certain level of fitness is required before commencing treatment for any kind of malignancy, and indeed the performance status (i.e. to what extent the patient is up and about and able to carry on with their normal activities) is the most important prognostic factor in cancer treatment generally.
Certainly there would be a mechanical element to the respiratory failure, and it would be surprising if a change of posture didn’t have an effect. Also I would expect the flu infection itself to have cleared fairly quickly, even if the effects of it were prolonged. Most things in medicine become clearer with time – they either get better or they get worse, and maybe his condition had reached the point where it was about to improve anyway.
It is very difficult to know what part the vitamin C played as there were so many other things going on. This is why it is so important to have clinical trials. We don’t really know whether he got better because of the vitamin C or in spite of it, or indeed whether it made any difference at all.
I am willing to believe that it probably did have some effect, though not necessarily beneficial. It was a very large dose (25g at a time), which at the very least would have been a significant acid load on the system. It is also a reducing agent, and indeed it is sometimes given as treatment for poisoning with oxidising agents as it is relatively non-toxic. So certainly I would expect it to have a metabolic effect.
Regarding its use in oncology (did the family want to use it because of the leukaemia?), I am not aware of any good evidence that it is effective as a cancer treatment. However, it has been investigated in cancer prevention trials, where it has been found to increase the risk of developing cancer (as have other antioxidants).
I have no idea whether and to what extent its use has been, or is being investigated in critically ill patients. If there are other, similar cases, then perhaps it would be interesting to consider a clinical trial, but I am afraid critical care is well out of my area of expertise (last time I was in an ITU I was the patient).
In severe septicaemia the situation is often desperate so the weakest of straws are often gladly grasped. One such that has been increasingly popular is a cocktail of corticosteroids, thiamine and vitamin C, which is thought to lower mortality and shorten ICU stay. A possible mechanism has been postulated but the evidence, even if it is promising, is still of low quality and the duration and dosage is uncertain. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2767105/
Here, the old saying of “more research is needed” is certainly valid.
It has long been known that vitamin shortage (C and many other) occurs in sepsis so vitamins are always given along with parenteral (intravenous) nutrition, both fat- and water soluble one’s e.g. ascorbic acid (= vitamin C)
That Mr. Smith recovered does not mean extreme-dose vitamin C made the difference. I looked through the film and of course his recovery was fantastic but it was not unique. There are a lot of if’s to this story as it is told in the film.
In the first place, he would not be alive if it were not for the ECMO-ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, which literally replaced his lungs while they were inflamed and fluid filled. It is a highly specialised technique where the blood is literally oxygenised outside the body. Another if is the hairy-cell leukaemia diagnosis. The hospitals involved did not (understandably)participate in the making of this rather partisan documentary so we cannot know if he still has this slow, often chronically symptom free disease. It may have been inconsequential to all this and it may even have been a misdiagnosis.
Turning a white-lung patient on his stomach is an old well tried ICU trick that may work wonders in getting the lungs air filled. I am surprised they did not try that earlier. It may be that the relatives just did not know about it or remember?
As Julian pointed out, his pneumonia was caused by swine-flu and that may have simply run its course, making it possible for his body to start recovering since it did not manage to kill him thanks to the ECMO. That the Vitamin C infusions coincided with his improvement may indicate that it may have had a positive role but it certainly was not the only miracle in this story and it has not been confirmed.
Vitamin C happens to be extensively researched, not the least because of the respectful status of Linus Pauling, and it is quite clear that high- or low-dose, it is not the miracle that many believe, like this amateur:
https://youtu.be/1cBp879mfgI
@Björn Geir on Tuesday 18 December 2018 at 22:24 said:
“In severe septicaemia the situation is often desperate so the weakest of straws are often gladly grasped. One such that has been increasingly popular is a cocktail of corticosteroids, thiamine and vitamin C, which is thought to lower mortality and shorten ICU stay.”
Yes, that is the experience of Paul Marik here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVk7WyfP6J0&t=2561s
This is still very experimental and this is not the high-dose vitamin C therapy Naturopaths and other bungling amateurs promote, which does nothing in sepsis.
This does not mean vitamin C cures illness on its own (other than scurvy of course) or is a panacea for anything from cancer to cholera.
@Björn Geir on Saturday 22 December 2018 at 14:33 said:
“This is still very experimental…”
…yes, ever since 1747, why don’t you watch it?
This guy is on your side. He begins with the fact that vitamin C does nothing on it’s own, you have to also treat with antibiotics as a prerequisite… you professionals can be so dismissive, without listening to each other – you attack amateurs, but set a bad example yourself as a professional.
I am exactly the same as you. In my own specialisation, I am as arrogant as the next person, but one day, this guy taught me a lesson. He set a trap for me in advance. I fell for it with “Of course it’s not the xyz!!!” – after ten minutes, I discovered that it was the xyz. This humiliation was completely avoidable: I only needed to, Groundhog-Day-Like, repeat like this:
“You say it’s xyz? Let’s try it!” (in secret, what an idiot he is, but let’s play along)
It is xyz.
“Your were right.” (Jeez, good job I did not make an issue of it.)
That way you protect yourself as an indifferent-observer, but if it turned out, as you knew all along, that it was not xyz then…
“Ok, it’s not xyz, watch this.”
And you can be the hero, but on the off chance that even the mighty-ego is wrong, there is still nothing lost and everything to gain by one’s native honesty.
“Well, I dunno…”
And as you have not pressurized yourself, you might even get inspired and discover xyz there and then and shine as some super-hero.
But the best thing is that, to the customer, you will always come across as a nice guy – which as a professional is essential, seeing that they are paying you, not the other way round.
Amateurs, by definition are not paid. They don’t have to prove anything. Attacking them is futile: “I want my money back!”
I agree absolutely.
What is Gerson therapy? is it a diet?
http://skepdic.com/gersontherapy.html
@Edzard on Monday 17 December 2018 at 13:51 posted:
“http://skepdic.com/gersontherapy.html”
That is an unsecured website (all secure websites use the https protocol) try this one instead:
https://gerson.org/gerpress/
that’s a good one:
to inform someone about a dangerous quackery, recommend the site of the quack,
just has to show of what calibre you are.
The site you recommend may be unsecured, but it is much easier to make sense of than the official Gerson Web site. Nor has it triggered any flags from my Internet Security software.
@Julian Money-Kyrle said on Monday 17 December 2018 at 20:20
“The site you recommend may be unsecured, but it is much easier to make sense of than the official Gerson Web site. Nor has it triggered any flags from my Internet Security software.”
Use Linux instead, then you won’t need Internet Security software.
Windows is an example of the easier-to-understand than e.g. the command-line, but it is limited to the death-by-a-thousand-mouse-clicks, whereas the command-line is always all-powerful by conceptual-hierarchy (the power used by the human mind to hold unlimited content).
Also, you are always held captive by MS and *you* pay them to do it to you.
With Open Software, *you* are in control, and can freely swap between hundreds of different versions for free – and all updates are free. The only “downside” is that you have to think for yourself.
Your link is the better recommendation for Max Gerson than my link e.g. this quote from your link:
“Max Gerson was the personal physician and friend of Albert Einstein and the philanthropist and missionary, Albert Schweitzer….”
So Max Gerson was also Einstein’s personal physician.
Bob said:
And your point is???
point is: he doesn’t like people to speak the truth about Gerson, I guess.
Always check the URL.
I have a good knowledge of TLS but you seem to have completely failed to understand my question: why did you point out that skepdic.com didn’t use https?