Hello friend! It’s been a while since I have written, partly because I have been hacking away at the book and partly because I was busy traveling, first to Tijuana to visit a cancer clinic, then to Miami to celebrate my birthday with some friends. Now I’m back in Mexico City! Phew! It’s pretty exhausting I can tell you, but I feel very strongly that I am living my purpose right now so I am just going where my nose leads me.
I first heard of Gerson Therapy when the documentary film The Beautiful Truth came out around 2008, but I didn’t want to cover it in the book without seeing it for myself. I went to Tijuana to meet with Dr. Patrick Vickers at The Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic. He was very gracious when I told him about the book project and offered to put me up for a few days and take me through the protocol. I made a couple of videos there for my TikTok channel as well - if you’re hip enough to be on there! I’m not, but I hear that’s where the kids hang out so I’m making little videos of one minute long on various pharma scandals for those with a short attention span.
I have gone to a bunch of retreats and met “healers” with big egos who like to do all the talking, but what I found in Dr. Vickers was an honest man, full of passion, who is as beautiful a listener as he is a speaker! I interviewed him for YouTube.
Anyway at this rate it’s going to be a long email so I better get on.
Dr. Gerson discovered his protocol while experimenting on himself to try and relieve his migraines. It seemed to work so he started suggesting it to his patients. One of these patients had tuberculosis and saw a complete reversal on the Gerson diet and so The Gerson Therapy was born. Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, arranged trials of Gerson therapy for the treatment of tuberculosis at University of Munich which he reported to be remarkably successful. Gerson soon discovered that the protocol worked for some patients who had cancer. Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dr. Albert Schweitzer said, “I see, in Dr. Max Gerson, one of the most eminent geniuses in medical history.” Otto Warburg, who received the Nobel prize in 1931 for the discovery that unlike all other cells in the human body, cancer cells do not breathe oxygen, was also born in Freiburg and thought to be heavily influenced by Gerson’s work.
When the Nazis came to power Gerson was forced to flee to America to avoid persecution, and while there was much interest in his work there – even from the government – he was eventually disallowed from administering the Gerson Therapy legally. Eventually his daughter and other students of his had to flee to Mexico to administer Gerson therapy, where it is still sometimes administered today in various clinics. Gerson Therapy includes juicing of organic fruits and vegetables to cleanse the digestive tract and provide radical amounts of nutrients to the body with the minimum of work for the digestive tract. It also includes the notorious coffee enema which Gerson popularized but was widely used as a treatment long before he adopted them. The mechanism by which the coffee enema works in not entirely known as little research has been done on it, but there are a couple of studies, one out of Korea which shows that it increases bile production, and other research conducted by Dr. Peter Lechner from Graz, Austria stating that the palmitic acid found in coffee promotes the activity of glutathione S-transferase and other ligands which can be observed with an endoscope, and supports the liver in its job of detoxification of the body.
Thousands have reported that Gerson Therapy reversed their melanoma, lymphoma, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, infertility, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. A study on the five-year survival rates of 153 melanoma patients showed they had considerably higher 5-year survival rates on Gerson Therapy than those reported elsewhere in the melanoma literature.[1] This should have prompted more studies, but it hasn’t happened yet, perhaps because Gerson Therapy is banned in the United States. And the pharmaceutical industry is hardly likely to fund massive clinical trials on it now, either, is it? Not when chemo can run upwards of $250,000.
I want to be realistic here. I don’t like it when people talk about protocols like they are miracle cures that will work on everyone with certainty, and to be honest, some of the Gerson documentaries really sound like that. There is no magic silver bullet cure for cancer. Gerson Therapy definitely doesn’t work on everyone with late-stage cancer, but I am absolutely convinced that it works for some people.
King Charles, of the United Kingdom, stated in 2004, “I know of one patient who turned to the Gerson Therapy having been told that she was suffering from terminal cancer and would not survive another course of chemotherapy. Happily, seven years later she is alive and well. So therefore, it is vital that, rather than dismissing such experiences, we should further investigate the beneficial nature of these treatments.”
The Gerson regime is gruelling as well. If it was as simple as sipping a serum three times a day everyone would be doing it. But it’s a long, hard road, and it’s difficult to get people to comply with it, especially for a total of two years, which is the amount of time that Gerson believed it takes for the liver to regenerate itself.
It seems to me that Gerson was just at the beginning of something. If the resources had been allocated to further investigate the mechanisms by which Gerson does work, when it works, and why it fails, when it fails, then perhaps the treatment could have been optimized and individualized to suit different people. For example, Dr. Linda Isaac, a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, offers individualized nutritional programs for patients with cancer and other illnesses, which include the use of pancreatic enzymes as well as dietary changes, and has also seen the complete reversal of late-stage cancer. Many of the people she sees are those who did not fare well under the Gerson regime.
Like Wikipedia, you may think that Gerson therapy is hokey. Still, most of those who opt for it are far better informed than the average patient, and have decided, that, based on their own values, they want to roll the dice on it rather than opt for chemo, radiation and surgery, which they judge are unlikely to work for them. The data supports them on that point. The truth is, it wouldn’t be hard for Gerson Therapy to rival survival rates for mainstream treatments. According to The Journal of Clinical Oncology (2004), the 5-year survival rate of chemotherapy for all adult-onset cancers is 3%.
Besides, most patients who go for Gerson therapy are there of last resort. They have either tried conventional treatments and been told there’s nothing more that can be done for them, or they were diagnosed terminal in the first place. So, what harm can the treatment do?
It can’t harm terminal patients, but it can harm commercial interests. The fact is, even if Gerson Therapy only works in 1 out of 25 cases, and only because it is a placebo, it would still pose a major threat to the pharmaceutical profit margins.
Let’s be realistic here about the so-called “achievements” of mainstream medicine when it comes to the treatment of cancer.
Despite $500 billion or more being spent in the war against cancer, we have a one in three chance of contracting cancer today as compared to with a one in ten chance back in the 1970s. According to The National Center for Health Statistics, the age-adjusted deathrate for cancer in the United States has actually increased by 74 percent from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Statistics are often bent to make it look like more people are living longer after cancer treatment because the cancer was detected earlier. They also include slow-growing cancers and ones that have high fiver-year survival rates without treatment in the overall figures which raises the average. Still, the official “The System” is in charge of the very definition of informed consent. Unless you consent to mainstream treatments: chemo, radiation or surgery, by definition, your must have been mislead, and are therefore not allowed the treatment of your choice.
If you want to learn more about Max Gerson I read the book Censured for Curing Cancer: The American Experience of Dr. Max Gerson in Tijuana and found it thrilling. It was written by a journalist who set out to prove Gerson was a crank but eventually had to concede that The Gerson Therapy worked!
If you want to support the important work I’m doing here please leave a voluntary contribution via the link at 7pharmamyths.com
[1] Hildenbrand, Hildenbrand, Bradford, Cavin (1995) “Five-year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of Gerson: a retrospective review” Altern Ther Health Med.
Antony, sounds like Linda Isaac is using the Nicholas Gonzales protocol, which he developed based on work by Dr. Kelly. I have to disagree with you on this one. Cancer could be just about 100% cured if the patients first followed a natural therapy before they are poisoned by ms medicine. Gerson and Gonzales got amazing results despite their patients being nearly poisoned to death before going to them. It appears there are a variety of protocols that can do the trick, and the gist of all of them is detox your body, detox your environment, get proper nutrition and improve your outlook on life. It's simple, but for some reason, it's not easy. Strangely, it's incredibly rare to find peops who will change their diet these days even to save their lives. Witness the obesity epidemic.
You might be interested in reading the work of Dr. Kelly Brogan who worked with Gonzales. She specialized in getting women off psychiatric drugs and recovering from anxiety and depression. Even though I can't stand him, Brogan had an interview on Joe Rogan. You might want to take a look at that.
Hi Anthony,
you referred to a publication about the benefit of chemotherapy.
I have come to the conclusion that the title of the study and the study itself is disingenuous. Let me explain:
The authors collected all studies that reported a benefit for chemo. Let´s think about what that means: There are those studies that show a decent benefit for chemo, and those chemo schedules go into the guidelines and are administered to many patients. But there are also those studies that show a meagre benefit and are not adopted in the guidlines. So the authors studied a mixed bag of chemos, the ´successful´, now recommended in the medical treatment guidlines, and the ´losers´ that did´nt make it that far. It is good that those failures are published, but to the extent that they are they tarnish the conclusion the authors draw. Of course, the headline benefit number in this study is expected to be less than the benefit of all the currently administered recommended chemos.
To really challenge chemo, they should have pooled data from all the currently recommended chemos.
Another way of questioning the scientific value of this enterprise is to ask: why didn´t they collect data of all comparisons of treatments with and without chemo, even those that show a detrimental effect of chemo. That might happen: a chemo is tried out for a different cancer, and patients die. Why exclude those studies?
If I want to discredit chemo, the results of that alternative study I just outlined would not help me: The result would show such a low benefit that my study would not be taken seriously. And it would be obvious that the bad apples are in the heap. But the authors did something else: The only collected data on studies showing benefits of chemo - so they can superficially be perceived as pro chemo. But then a scandalously low number comes out - hooray, we have a scandal.
I don´t know if I am doing justice to the intentions of the authors, but I hope I have made clear my point that there is something fishy about this study. The studied data set makes no practical sense.