Talk:Max Gerson

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[edit] My take

I know hardly anything about Max, but i am giving him the benefit of the doubt and would say he was a good doctor to the best he knew at his time. Besides he was on to something regarding thyroid diseases which could acount for virtually all his mystery cases and the use of dessicated thyroid as treament. But he has nothing todo really with what can now be considered the Gerson therapy which is driven by sheer greed. I am sure given Max would have had more time todo research he would have revised a lot of things. His daughter however knows nothing and also seems to only be a part in a bigger scheme of people (as she really isn`t the brightest) - who keep this gerson engine running. I watched the propaganda movie "The Gerson Miracle" (actually entirely because i am interested in propagana movies to learn how to best influence human psychology et al). But for some reason i feel like i should do the right thing and comment on Max anyways, namely he is nowhere in it, no historical material nothing - so he cannot speak for himself. So anyone interested in psychology should definitly watch it amongst the "eternal jew", and newer propaganda movies such as "Unlocking the Mystery of Life", "Universe - The Cosmology Quest". You can also see a nice evolution of propaganda movies - although their purpose of course is still the very same. Slicky 20:53, 16 September 2006 (UTC)


[edit] And a Response

I see by your bio that you are from Austria. Because you "hardly know anything" about Dr. Gerson, you would not know that after WWII the University of Vienna offered Gerson the Chair of Nutritional Medicine, a sign of great respect. He turned the Chair down because by that time, Gerson had established himself in the United States, and his family was well-settled there, too. In addition, his memories of Austrians' Nazi sympathies remained too fresh. Even today, the "eternal Nazi" in Austria continues to infect national politics there more than the rest of Europe is comfortable with, so Gerson was not imagining things.

Coming from someone who "knows hardly anything" by his own admission, the slander against Charlotte Gerson is specious and irrelevant. To all who would take this critique seriously, you should consider the source.

The criticism of "driven by sheer greed" simply invites comparison of Gerson Therapy practitioners with chemotherapy oncologists, who, recent studies have shown, prescribe, dispense and administer chemotherapy drugs more on the basis of which one will be most profitable than on any other consideration. In the United States, this widespread practice is known as the "chemotherapy concession" and it nets these practitioners in the neighborhood of a million or two dollars a year. I can assure you that never in the history of the Gerson Therapy has even ONE practitioner netted a million dollars a year, so I guess your baseless criticism there underscores the fact that you know little or nothing. But you certainly are passionate in your ignorance.

I suggest that if you are sincerely out to stop an exercise in greed, you should go after the murderous pharmaceutical companies, whose products kill a documented 100,000 people annually in the US alone, and who are the most profitable industry on the planet! Howard Straus 13:00, 23 October 2006

[edit] Neutrality/accuracy

Major POV/factual cleanup needed on completely pro-Gerson article (see also Gerson therapy. The page history shows that the main contributor of this material - 69.109.140.164 (talk · contribs) / 69.109.140.199 (talk · contribs) / Howard Straus (talk · contribs) - is Howard Straus, Gerson's grandson, biographer and promoter. Tearlach 17:00, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Please point out the facts that need to be clarified or documented. As Dr. Gerson's biographer, I have done the research necessary, and have posted the relevant references, as well as linked the user to hundreds of other references. The ACS, which disputes the facts, has not posted a single scientific publication that supports their contention. (The idea that skeptics must prove the negative is simply absurd. The burden is on Gerson and his followers to prove their contentions, and they have failed at every turn to do so. How many patients does a typical Clinic treat each year? What is their incoming diagnosis? What is their diagnosis after 1, 5 and 10 years? The publication of "cherry picked" cases does not qualify. Even simple checks by Sloan-Kettering of the results shows nothing more than random success, from the little data available. Why do you persist on this paranoid theory when the data must be provided by Gerson followers?) If the simple fact that I am Dr. Gerson's ONLY biographer disqualifies me, and you accept unsubstantiated disputes equally with facts that are thoroughly documented in over a hundred published scientific articles by many medical scientists, I must question your own neutrality. I will be happy to back up any statement on the contribution with documentation, something that the ACS will not do. This comment is true for both this page and for the Gerson Therapy page.

Regarding Major POV problems, you need to also check out the POV of the ACS, an organization that is heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and has a provision in its charter requiring it to disband if a "cure for cancer" is ever found. That alone should give you pause as to its own neutrality.

- Howard Straus

Those external links are mostly biased as one is the main chemo centre in the USA, and Quackwatch is an obvious pharma shill outfit. john 12:53, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
The last remark is an obvious immunization tactic. Anyone who disagrees with you is automatically not credible, so any argument against your opinion is automatically dismissed, and your opinion is immune against criticism.
Quackwatch is a skeptic organization, trying to protect science and rationality, not some industry. --Hob Gadling 13:40, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Nonsense, it is well documented all quack outfits like quackwatch, CSICOP etc are industry fronts. Martin Walker has done most of that research on UK ones and blown them out of the water. I have collected some [1]. It is easy to fool most of the people most of the time (as they are asleep and reading only corporate media), along with the ones who have an interest in being fooled, like allopaths. john 20:01, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
LOL! That's just a collection of opinions and conspiracy theories, not "documentation". --Hob Gadling 22:28, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
'Conspiracy theory' is ad hominem. Really. I don't expect the shills to roll over and admit it. Ad hominem is an admission there is no argument. Which was why they tried to delete Martin Walker [2].Dr Victor Herbert, Stephen Barrett and William Jarvis are on the Scientific Board of the American Council on Science and Health. Founded in 1978, this organisation is funded solely by the large pharmaceutical and chemical companies, the AMA and industry supported Foundations. Bit obvious I would have thought, even for people with 2 brain cells. john 08:04, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Of course "conspiracy theory" is not "ad hominem". Conspiracy theories are recognizable by the following properties:
  • Opponents of the theorist are claimed to hide evidence.
  • The absence of evidence is used as evidence for the conspiracy theory - it is missing because someone is hiding it.
So, where is your evidence that American Council on Science and Health is "funded solely by the large pharmaceutical and chemical companies, the AMA and industry supported Foundations"? Also, what's wrong with the AMA?
BTW, one can become a member of ACSH, and that costs money! [3] Doesn't that disprove your claim?
That they all disagree with you is not evidence that they are paid for disagreeing with you - maybe you are just wrong and the are right. Did you consider that possibility? --Hob Gadling 14:38, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
Another point: you say "they tried to delete Martin Walker". As I said, conspiracy theorists lump everybody who disagrees with them into on big "they". Sorry, but since you duck (arguments) like a quack, I guess the label fits. --Hob Gadling 14:44, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
'Conspiracy theorists' is ad hominem. To be specific, the medical boys. I wasn't aware I duck arguments, do you think I have all day to trawl pages for arguments? The AMA [4] run the medical monopoly. Fine if you like that sort of thing, or work for them. john 17:21, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
Of course, 'conspiracy theorists' is not ad hominem. It has nothing to do with your person, it points out the structure of your argument. And your argument is that opponents are opponents because they are paid for it (now this is ad hominem), but when I ask you to show that they are, you can't. Instead you duck my argument again and talk about something else instead. --Hob Gadling 12:44, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
It is the propaganda technique called Name Calling---1. Word Games Name Calling---"The name-calling technique links a person, or idea, to a negative symbol. The propagandist who uses this technique hopes that the audience will reject the person or the idea on the basis of the negative symbol, instead of looking at the available evidence." Conspiracy theorist is the term most often used [5]. john 20:04, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
This has nothing to do with name calling. "all quack outfits like quackwatch, CSICOP etc are industry fronts" is pure fantasy not backed up by evidence. Making such unevidenced claims connecting different persons as conspiring together is called a conspiracy theory. And your attempts at sticking a fallacy on me is a straw man as well as a red herring. --Hob Gadling 18:01, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Just two quotes from the literature should clear up the factual nature of the effectiveness of the Gerson Therapy, and the bias of its critics:

"Under the influence of the Gerson-Sauerbruch-Herrmannsdorfer diet tubercular skin lesions, namely also lupus lesions disappear and heal. This fact cannot be argued. But how does disappearance and healing happen?" -- Jesionek, A., Münch. Med. Wchnschr., 76:867, 1929

"[Gerson’s original] dietary therapy for cutaneous tuberculosis has been extensively tested and approved by the majority of authors (Jesionek, Jesionek and Bernhardt, Bommer, Volk, Wichmann, Jadassohn, Stuempke and Mohrmann, Brunsgaard, Scolari, Dundas-Grant, Stokes, and others. Particularly noteworthy are the investigations which Jacobson and Brill and Gawalowski carried out over a number of years on extensive material. The Russian authors treated 124 patients who were under observation for five years, while the Czechoslovak investigator followed 127 cases. Both groups showed marked improvement. Interesting, too, is the report submitted by Simon and Kaplanskaja which shows the necessity for adhering to the salt-poor diet for an adequate period of time." – Erich Urbach, MD, FACA and Edward B. LeWinn, BS, MD, FACP, Skin Diseases, Nutrition and Metabolism, p. 530. Grune and Stratton, New York, 1946.

I challenge the ACS to quote the scientific underpinnings of their assertions with published papers. And why is the ACS, a lobbying organization with interest in cancer, commenting on the effectiveness of the Gerson Therapy against tuberculosis? They clearly have little or no knowledge in this area.

And I challenge the Gerson clinics to publish how many patients they recieve each year, what they are diagnosed with and what the outcomes are. The lack of data is amazing, as is the purely paraniod assertion that doctors want to kill their patients, so they surp[ress Gerson theropy results. get a life, and get a grip. It is up to you, the salesman, to show us the data. Please do not insult us with 1929 and 1946 one liners. Where is the literature on the thousands who are suckered every year into spending $5000 a week to eat carrots in Mexico? - Nick Lappos 1/23/06

Better carrots than chemo [6]. Suppression of non-pharma med is well documented [7]. john 09:12, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
"Just two quotes from the literature should clear up the factual nature of the effectiveness of the Gerson Therapy, and the bias of its critics"
  1. You folks were not asked to clear up "the bias of its critics", you were asked to back up your claim of "industry shill".
  2. Those quotes don't even talk about critics. They are the opinions of proponents, and the proponents say that they are proponents. Big deal. --Hob Gadling 12:44, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

March 03, 2006: Did some minor cleanup, removing redundant passages, rewording poor phrasings and removing some biased language (just a few adverbs, adjectives, etc). This is an interesting entry that should be preserved, but it must always be made clear where the source of facts is only Gerson himself or his followers.

March 11, 2006: In response to Nick Lappos, here is some historical and factual data: The Gerson clinics in Mexico over the past 28 years have had from ten to 28 rooms, and have seldom operated at 100% capacity. The current clinic has 10 rooms, with a turnover of approximately three weeks, or 17+ per year. This means that the total annual capacity of the clinic is 10 x 17 or about 170 patients per year. Most of the patients arrive having been told by their own oncologists that their situation is "terminal", and they should go home and get their lives in order in the time remaining to them. So much for the claims that "thousands" of patients are treated each year, and that a few survive. It would take six years at maximum capacity to treat 1,000 patients.

Now, since a certain number of these patients (about 25-30%) survive, (my wife and my mother included) when conventional medicine counted most of them as "terminal", conventional medicine should at least do a fair and unbiased test of the Therapy.

And that is exactly what is going on in Japan right now. There are two five-year studies being done, one with 50 patients and one with 500. We welcome these studies. One is being done by one of Japan's top oncological surgeons, who uses the Therapy postoperatively to surprisingly good effect. The other is being done by a medical school professor who cured himself of colon cancer with liver metastases over 11 years ago using the Gerson Therapy, and wrote a book about his experience. He and two other physicians are using the Gerson Therapy in their own clinic, and have been for some years, also with excellent effect. The surgeon, Dr. Takaho Watayo, has presented his results to date at a Tokyo symposium, and has published them as well.

The British newspaper (since when are they authoritative?) got it wrong as well. The cost of a stay at the clinic in Mexico is $5,500 per week, not $4,900. That is expensive compared to a Big Mac, but a small fraction of the cost of a stay at an American cancer ward, with much better results. Where I live, a DAY in a cancer ward costs in the neighborhood of $15,000, before the $25 Tylenol or any other medical treatment or tests. Accusing the Gerson clinic of "profiting from desperate people" invites comparison with US facilities. Before the oil spike, pharmaceutical companies were the most profitable industry on the planet, making hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the US alone. The annual US medical bill is over $1.6 Trillion dollars, and we get the 28th ranked medical care system in the world, somewhere after Rumania! Talk about profiting!

Another criticism from the same source was that the quotations from the published literature were over 50 years old. I take it that the critic doesn't believe in Einstein's theory of relativity, Newton's law of gravity, or the laws of planetary motion, all of which were formulated well over 50 years ago, and all of which are just as relevant today as they were then. Human physiology has not changed that much since 1900. The quoted statements were not made by "proponents", but were published by respected medical scientists. The medical scientists who published their own research were serious medical researchers and physicians (Ferdinand Sauerbruch held the second chair in surgery at the University of Berlin) who published in the finest peer-reviewed journals of the time, something that the critics always request. The two statements are far from the only confirming statements, as a glance at the list of publications both by Gerson [8] and by dozens of medical scientists [9] will readily show. I just didn't want to quote from hundreds of papers in the discussion. Any competent researcher can find the literature in a few days of literature search; I have all Gerson's papers if you can't locate them and need them.

The question, of course, should be, "How did these patients get so desperate that they were willing to leave sterile, shiny, insurance-covered US hospitals to travel to a Mexican clinic, which all the 'authorities' claim is quackery?" The US cancer industry is hugely expensive, hugely ineffective, and has seen a rise in cancer of some twenty-fold since the foundation of the American Cancer Society. If allopathic, scientific, American medicine had any kind of a decent record with cancer patients, the Gerson clinic would be out of business in a heartbeat. Instead, Gerson clinics are springing up all over the world, because physicians (except for American ones) are seeing for themselves the benefits of this Therapy. Interestingly, even the American Cancer Society touts their suggestions for preventing cancer (eat more vegetables and fruits), and the program is surprisingly close to the Gerson Therapy, while they claim that Gerson was a quack.

Whether you want to believe the ACS or Albert Schweitzer is, of course, your choice.

Howard Straus, Author, Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless.

[edit] Don't forget that there's more than one article...

I've trimmed this article by a fair margin. I would remind contributors here that this article is a biography of Gerson. While his novel therapy is certainly one aspect of his life, it is certainly not the only aspect. Further, Wikipedia has a separate, extensive article on the Gerson therapy; detailed discussion about the therapy (methods, pros and cons, etc.) belongs there. Otherwise that discussion is apt to overwhelm the remainder of this article and turn it into a coatrack. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 03:54, 29 June 2007 (UTC)