Max Gerson

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Max Gerson (18 October 1881 - 8 March 1959) was the developer of the Gerson therapy, an alternative therapy for cancer and most chronic, degenerative diseases.

1 Early life
2 "Migraine diet" and tuberculosis
3 First cancer case
4 Emigration to the United States
5 Publications
6 Gerson therapy
7 Congressional testimony
8 Death and legacy
9 Criticism
10 References:
11 External links

[edit] Early life

In 1881, Gerson was born to a prosperous vegetable oil factor in Wongrowitz, in, what was then, German Poland. His choice of career in medicine was highly influenced by the general anti-Semitism of German science at the time.

[edit] "Migraine diet" and tuberculosis

During Gerson's residency as a young physician, the migraine headaches he had experienced since youth became intolerably more intense, leading him to research the problem for his own sanity. After much study and some false starts, he determined that his daily dietary intake had a major influence on the malady. When he regulated his diet to eliminate the causative elements from his diet, he claimed that he was able to completely avoid migraine headaches.

The foods that Gerson was sensitive to included many of the staples of young German medical students, including spicy sausages, creamy fish dishes, wine, beer, and other alcohol, salt and fatty meats. He eliminated them from his diet for his own comfort. Later, when he entered private practice in Bielefeld, Germany, Gerson began prescribing his migraine diet to his own patients and reported great success.

One migraine patient reported that his lupus vulgaris, or skin tuberculosis, had also cleared up on Gerson's migraine diet. Gerson claimed he was able to replicate his success with other lupus sufferers, and said other forms of tuberculosis were also yielding to his dietary therapy.

A prominent pulmonary surgeon, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, heard about Gerson's success with lupus and invited him to conduct a clinical trial of his therapy at Sauerbruch's Munich tuberculosis ward. 450 end-stage tuberculosis patients were chosen, and Gerson's dietary regime was applied. In the first clinical trial of his therapy for a disease then considered "incurable," it was reported that 446 patients completely recovered.

With Sauerbruch's backing, Gerson and his dietary therapy quickly became household words in most of Europe, and his therapy was adopted by many as standard treatment for immune system disorders of all kinds, as well as tuberculosis. Advocates of the therapy claim many Swiss mountain tuberculosis sanatoria were put out of business by Gerson's discoveries, and are now ski resorts, including Davos, Gstaad and others.

During his career in Europe, Dr. Gerson supervised tuberculosis sanatoria in Germany (Bielefeld, Kassel, Berlin, Munich), Austria (Vienna) and France (Ville d'Avray, near Paris). He published dozens of papers in prominent European medical journals, and lectured widely to university and medical society audiences all over western Europe. He claimed to be preparing to publish a definitive and incontrovertible study documenting the cure of tuberculosis by dietary therapy when the rising tide of Hitler's Nazism washed all such considerations away.

[edit] First cancer case

Gerson's fame quickly grew in Europe, and he was invited to speak at many medical universities and medical societies in Western Europe.

Gerson said in 1928 he received a call from a woman who was told she had incurable bile-duct cancer. According to Gerson, she begged him to treat her with his migraine and tuberculosis therapy, accepting that he knew nothing about cancer and could not predict the outcome of his treatment. Gerson claimed she totally recovered on his therapy, as did two friends of hers who had cancer.

Gerson continued to attack the problem of TB, which was at the time a much larger problem than cancer in Europe. He became convinced that the denaturing of the soil by artificial fertilizers and the poisoning of the plants with pesticides were at least partially to blame for the growing epidemic of degenerative diseases, leading him to explore agricultural practices as a consultant to the regional government.

Gerson's peers were not convinced of his successes with tuberculosis. They criticized him vociferously, accusing him of faking x-rays and treating patients who never had TB in the first place, among other unethical behavior.

Gerson embarked on a clinical trial of his therapy that would attempt to silence his critics once and for all. He decided to treat only patients who had been declared "terminal" in writing by at least two specialists, so there was no doubt as to the disease or its prognosis. On April 1, 1933, just six weeks before he was to present the results of his study, Adolf Hitler began arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Gerson literally escaped arrest by accident, and left Germany for good, leaving behind the results of his study.

[edit] Emigration to the United States

As a German Jew, Gerson was forced to flee Germany with his family in 1933, first to Vienna and then to Ville d'Avray (near Paris) and London. He settled in New York City in 1936.

Gerson had reported good results with stomach cancer in Bielefeld, and the idea that he had something to contribute to the field haunted him. In the U.S., Gerson began applying his dietary therapy to a few cancer patients. After a few adjustments to the therapy, he reported achieving consistently good results and declared that patients with "terminal" cancer survived for many years. Colleagues declared his therapy ineffective, but desperate patients continued to seek out his practice.

[edit] Publications

Gerson had published dozens of articles in the European medical literature, but he was almost completely shut out of publishing in his adopted homeland. Eventually Gerson published his methods and findings in 1958, along with fifty cases of "cured" "terminal" patients, in a book, A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases.

[edit] Gerson therapy

Main article: Gerson therapy

The Therapy is based on hyperalimentation, or flooding the body with bioavailable micronutrients from salt-free, fat-free, organic, vegetarian food, including 13 fresh-pressed fruit and vegetable juices daily. It is not solely a diet therapy, however. Gerson also prescribed 56mg/day of iodine (as Lugol's solution), five grains of desiccated thyroid gland, daily B12 shots, and other components as appropriate for the patient.

Advocates claim that a critical element of the Therapy is support for the liver in its task of removing toxins from the blood stream through the use of several coffee enemas daily, although Gerson did not add Coffee enemas to his regimen until long after he had had many successes with migraines, lupus, TB, etc. Advocates claim that coffee enemas stimulate liver detox activity, especially bile production, flushing accumulated toxins into the upper intestinal tract for elimination.

In addition, some vitamin, mineral and enzyme supplementation is applied, in general only substances that would be normally found in a healthy body. The diet, supplementation and detoxification are intended to rectify conditions that Gerson considered caused chronic diseases as diverse as migraine, all forms of tuberculosis, fibromyalgia, most forms of advanced cancer, arthritis, both osteo- and rheumatoid, and diabetes.

These causal conditions he identified as deficiency and toxicity; deficiency brought about by the paucity of nutrients in our heavily processed, artificially fertilized foods, and toxicity from the thousands of chemicals and pollutants in our food, air, water and soil. Gerson considered most pharmaceutical products to be liver-toxic in the long run, and avoided them, as well as "recreational" and over-the-counter drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.

[edit] Congressional testimony

Gerson's claims of success attracted many high-profile patients, including Nobel Laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his family, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria, Former Premier Paul Painlevé of France, Panama Canal engineer Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, Johnny Gunther (the subject of John Gunther's "Death Be Not Proud"), Raymond Gram Swing, and ABC Radio Network commentator and Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale University. In 1946, Sen. Claude Pepper (D-FL) summoned Gerson to testify about his cancer therapy before a Congressional Subcommittee's hearing to appropriate $100 million to fund a cancer research center in which Gerson was expected to play a major part.

Gerson presented to the US Congress what he claimed were five healed terminal cancer patients who testified to recovering from incurable disease, but he got little media attention and the appropriations bill died in the Senate.

[edit] Death and legacy

In 1959, Gerson died of arsenic poisoning [book: Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless by Howard Straus] at his home in New York City [Schweitzer, his lifelong friend and patient, called Gerson "a medical genius who walked among us." Schweitzer (diabetes), his wife Helene (lung TB), and his daughter Rhena were all patients who claimed to be healed by Gerson.[www.gerson.org]

In 2005, Gerson was inducted, along with seven other major contributors to natural medicine, into the Hall of Fame of the International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine. Gerson's ground-breaking book, A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases, first published in 1958, has sold over 250,000 copies in five languages around the world. Advocates of his therapy claim that many of his terminal cancer patients who survived him were still alive as of 2005.

[edit] Criticism

While anecdotal reports abound in the Gerson literature, the Gerson organization provides no statistical scientific studies. For example, no complete data has been published on the number of patients entering Gerson clinics, their medical history, or their outcomes after treatment.

In his book, Gerson discusses the results of 50 cases, but the lack of detail on his total number of patients or their medical histories led other scientists to suggest that Gerson had cherry-picked patients who got better because of the placebo effect, natural remission, or other factors, and not reported unsuccessful cases.

Outside sources (reference 3 below) report that the Gerson clinic in Mexico charges $4,900 per week for instruction in the therapy, suggesting that Gerson training is a profit-making industry in its own right. The therapy is illegal in the U.S. when described as a cancer cure due to the lack of scientific data demonstrating its efficacy.

Defenders of mainstream cancer therapies say the paranoid belief that Gerson success are hidden by the medical world is insulting and unproven. They say the idea that all cancer doctors are colluding to make Gerson look bad lacks merit, and demonstrates that Gerson followers are on the lunatic fringe and not interested in data.

[edit] References:

A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases, Max Gerson, MD, The Gerson Institute, San Diego, CA, 1990.
The Gerson Therapy, Charlotte Gerson, Kensington Publishing, NYC, 2001.
Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless, Howard Straus, Quarry Books, Kingston, ONT, 2001.
Censured for Curing Cancer: the American Experience of Dr. Max Gerson, S. J. Haught, Station Hill Press, NY, 1991.
History of the Gerson Therapy, Patricia Spain Ward, Ph.D., under contract to the Office of Technology Assessment.
Master Surgeon (a.k.a. A Surgeon's Life) [Das War Mein Leben], Ferdinand Sauerbruch, London, Andre Deutsch, 1953 [Muenchen Kindler 1951] reprinted since