Dying To Have Known (A Gerson Therapy Documentary)

Pixel8

We could all learn a thing or two from Dr. Joseph Mercola, here's his About Me page:

"Have always been interested in health and started exercising in 1968, went to med school to further my knowledge base and started professional life as a family doctor in 1985. However was completely brainwashed by the system and actually was a paid lecturer by the drug companies in the 80's.

Eventually I saw the light in the early 90s and refined my understanding of health truths. I also have a passion for computers and combined my interest in technology and health by creating this website in the late 90s and it is now the most visited natural health site on the Internet.

The site takes up virtually all of my time and I had to stop seeing patients in 2005 so I can pursue my passion of educating the public about health truths so hundreds of thousands of people don't have to die prematurely every year because of multinational corporations that put profits ahead of serving their customers..

I remain convinced that through coordinated efforts it will be possible to help educate and inform people so they can choose healthier options and radically reduce the amount of unnecessary premature deaths and needless pain and suffering."

- Dr. Joseph Mercola
www.mercola.com

victorhelsing

Pixel8 wrote: »

Linus Pauling did win the Nobel Prize, twice, and he says he cured cancer with mega dose Vitamin C. That sounds to me like Cancer is a Vitamin C deficiency disease.

Wait a minute. I thought cancer was caused by smoking and the AMA and needed to be cured with the Gerson diet and coffee enemas.

You are aware that Gerson people insist on only natural "organic" sources of vitamins while Pauling and Szent Gyorgyi (who actually won the Nobel Prize for work with vitamin C) insisted the synthesized vitamin C is every bit as good in their books.

Damnation! Now I have a crisis of faith. Who am I going to believe?

Oh, no...Toxic vapors rising from my mouth...Now I am getting a broadcast through my mercury laden dental fillings...Something about Alice and the white rabbit...Ouch...Thinking hurts my brain...I was a fool to follow the false prophet of science...Ah...Now a soothing soundtrack...Don't...Stop...Believing...

Pixel8

victorhelsing wrote: »

You are aware that Gerson people insist on only natural "organic" sources of vitamins while Pauling and Szent Gyorgyi (who actually won the Nobel Prize for work with vitamin C) insisted the synthesized vitamin C is every bit as good in their books.

Damnation! Now I have a crisis of faith. Who am I going to believe?

It's still Vitamin C, not chemo lol

Victor, have you tried the Gerson therapy or have you ever taken vitamin supplements? (with all the research you've done into Gerson...)

victorhelsing

Pixel8 wrote: »

It's still Vitamin C, not chemo lol

Victor, have you tried the Gerson therapy or have you ever taken vitamin supplements? (with all the research you've done into Gerson...)

I have taken vitamin C in variable doses. The best way to buy it is as a pure powder, it is quite inexpensive from the right sources (I like Puritan's Pride online for vitamins). You can add the powder to fruit juices and it has a nice tangy flavor. Most of it is not used by the body, of course, since it is water soluble, but it is almost completely non-toxic and if you pay very little for it, you're really not wasting much money (a few pennies a day, at most).

I take a multivitamin as insurance against missing things in the diet. Also relatively inexpensive. I take an aspirin a day since that therapy has been shown in multiple huge trials to cut stroke and heart attack by about half. The sooner you start, the longer you delay your first heart attack. I take Vitamin D supplements as well and fish oil or flax seed for omega-3 when I am in the mood.

Have not tried the Gerson diet, of course have not really needed to. It does seem somewhat more healthy than the average American diet, but VERY restrictive.

My own personal guess is that lots of people like the idea, relatively few can take it for very long (even if they have a "good" reason, like cancer). Despite their protestations to the contrary, there are very good reasons that the body likes salt, fat and protein and the diet seems to harshly restrict these. My suspicion is that they have a huge washout rate (probably 1/2 to 3/4) within several weeks on the diet, and for that reason alone, cannot "fairly" (in their minds) grade its effectiveness because few people stay with the regimen as long as "necessary" to benefit. Unfortunately, they seem very protective of their numbers and I don't think anyone outside their clinic really knows very well what is going on there.

victorhelsing

Pixel8 wrote: »

We could all learn a thing or two from Dr. Joseph Mercola
www.mercola.com

I would think that anyone who liked the Gerson diet would be completely against Mercola, who advocates a diet that is almost polar opposite. That's the great thing about alternative medicine, you can subscribe to numerous mutually exclusive conspiracies or diet philosophies and it does not seem to matter.

If you really like Mercola's general diet approach, I suggest http://www.archevore.com/ which is written by a highly thoughtful M.D. who is rather a heretic when it comes to conventional diet wisdom (and quite opposite Gerson/Campbell and that crowd).

Monty Burnz

Pixel8 wrote: »

Linus Pauling did win the Nobel Prize, twice, and he says he cured cancer with mega dose Vitamin C. That sounds to me like Cancer is a Vitamin C deficiency disease.

So if Obama (who also has won a Nobel Prize) said that you can cure cancer by drinking lots of beer, would you believe him too? Or if Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize winner) said that the moon was made out of cheese, would you believe him?

Iwannahurl

Right, I've had enough of discussing the GT (and its broader context) in this forum.

Any ideas of a better place on Boards to develop a rational, informative and hopefully constructive debate on the substantive issues raised?

IMO the GT is where it is not because of a vast and sustained conspiracy theory but because of a confluence of both complementary and competing socio-political influences.

It can be entertaining to argue conspiracy theories but ultimately it's a frustrating and futile exercise.

I haven't looked at the GT or the highly contested world of 'alternative' and 'experimental' cancer treatments for many years. Just as well perhaps, since it's a fascinating and highly ramified topic and I would probably just get hooked by the debates over scientific evidence and especially by the socio-political aspects of the research process itself. If anything is more interesting than science it's the sociology of science (warning: big file).

When I investigated this area umpteen years ago, there wasn't as much information online as there is now. That's another reason why I need to be careful: you could spend your life trawling the web for information!

Speaking of which, below are some interesting articles and papers I found while searching for scholarly literature on the scientific basis for chemotherapy of advanced, recurrent and metastasised epithelial cancers. As is often the case when I search for such material, one search and/or one publication leads me to another, and so on ad infinitum.

It's too laborious to explain the 'paper trail' but to some extent the links below are self-explanatory.

I now have a new term: Evidence-Based Oncology. The Cochrane Review paper below suggests to me that advanced epithelial cancer RCTs are still somewhat uncommon and that there are still many gaps in the science. Placebo is rarely or never used, and the most usual Control option is "Best Supportive Care". However, Best Supportive Care (BSC) is ill-defined, and this in itself suggests that the science is far from rigorous. Many trials are just tinkering with dosages and combinations rather than comparing a defined intervention versus placebo or BSC. Certainly none are comparing chemo with intensive nutritional interventions.

Searching for this stuff led me to something recent I wasn't aware of: the controversial campaigning in the US, all the way to the Supreme Court, for terminal cancer patients to be allowed access to experimental drugs at their earliest stage of development (post Phase 1 trials).

IMO the developments referred to below raise interesting questions about 'alternative' cancer treatments and their place in all of this high-level debate. Why is the focus only on pharmaceuticals in these controversies? Is there something so unacceptable, or inherently dangerous, about diet that means 'experimental' nutritional therapies must be excluded from such campaigns? Why does the FDA's apparent willingness to relax regulation at certain times and in certain circumstances only extend to (often highly toxic) drugs but not to substances with long-established healthful properties such as fruits and vegetables?

I don't know the answer to that last question, but I don't believe that we need to rely on sinister conspiracy theories for an explanation. What we're seeing are completely different and incompatible paradigms. There is simply no room in mainstream oncology for stand-alone nutritional therapies (whatever about as a patient support). In fact, I would guess that the term "nutritional therapy" is an oxymoron as far as oncologists are concerned. I recall Beata Bishop once suggesting that the GT was utterly ignored because "nutrition equals food equals kitchen equals women's work"!

I think of this medical resistance to nutrition as being of the "appalling vista" kind. Consider this thought experiment: imagine that an impeccable multi-centre RCT is conducted in which outcomes on the Gerson Therapy are compared with conventional treatments. If the GT showed any significant benefits it would have to be taken seriously. However, the natural consequence would not be that the GT would just be readily taken on board by medical practitioners. Rather than being an incremental improvement on current practices, it would be nothing less than a total revolution in treatment. Even if the extraordinary claims made for the GT were demonstrated by extraordinarily persuasive science, how likely is it that the medical profession would just change tack overnight?

What I would like to discuss, in another more suitable forum, is: how can 'alternative' cancer treatments currently beyond the Pale be advanced to the point where they are treated as equal to any experimental drug treatment? It's simply not enough to say that all the Gerson Institute has to do is conduct an RCT and Bob's your uncle. The social and political environment in which they exist ought to be clear from a close reading of the publications below. It is far from being a level playing pitch.

So, any suggestions for a suitable thread title, and an appropriate forum?

Further reading:

http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/3/409.full

http://www.eapcnet.org/download/forCongresses/Trondheim/presentations/Friday/Dickson-Tavern-10.30_Best_supportive_care....pdf

http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/2/5/204.full.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_Alliance_v._von_Eschenbach

http://www.abigail-alliance.org/

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/524839/wantagh_man_trying_to_persuade_pharmaceutical_companies_to_give_him/

http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ByAudience/ForPatientAdvocates/SpeedingAccesstoImportantNewTherapies/ucm177138.htm

http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1445&context=facpub

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=elizabeth_weeks

http://www.issuesinmedicalethics.org/164co170.html

http://bioethics.net/journal/j_articles.php?aid=1365

Monty Burnz

Iwannahurl wrote: »

So, any suggestions for a suitable thread title, and an appropriate forum?

I wish I could help: I can well understand the frustration of debating what may be a viable treatment for a serious afflicition on a forum were the Illuminati and UFOs jostle for position.

Would there be any value on starting a discussion on a dedicated medical-oriented forum, perhaps? At least there you would be addressing those with more expertise in the area and would perhaps have the opportunity to change a few minds that would carry a lot more weight where it matters?

Di0genes

Monty Burnz wrote: »

I wish I could help: I can well understand the frustration of debating what may be a viable treatment for a serious afflicition on a forum were the Illuminati and UFOs jostle for position.

Would there be any value on starting a discussion on a dedicated medical-oriented forum, perhaps? At least there you would be addressing those with more expertise in the area and would perhaps have the opportunity to change a few minds that would carry a lot more weight where it matters?

I'd recommend the JREF Science and Medicine Board.

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=5

Pixel8

victorhelsing wrote: »

I would think that anyone who liked the Gerson diet would be completely against Mercola, who advocates a diet that is almost polar opposite.

Im not sure where you're getting that idea from, i've been receiving Mercola's newsletters for over 2 years and all he talks about are vitamins, minerals, natural remedies and natural substances which contain the best nutritional content etc.

He's a big advocate of most vitamins incl. Vitamin B, Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Vitamin E and more recently a substance which is 65 times more powerful than Vitamin C called Astaxanthin which is supposed to have the highest antioxidant content in the world, can't wait to try that one:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/14/astaxanthin-the-worlds-strongest-antioxidant.aspx

Di0genes

Pixel8 wrote: »

Im not sure where you're getting that idea from, i've been receiving Mercola's newsletters for over 2 years and all he talks about are vitamins, minerals, natural remedies and natural substances which contain the best nutritional content etc.

He's a big advocate of most vitamins incl. Vitamin B, Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Vitamin E and more recently a substance which is 65 times more powerful than Vitamin C called Astaxanthin which is supposed to have the highest antioxidant content in the world, can't wait to try that one:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/14/astaxanthin-the-worlds-strongest-antioxidant.aspx

These are jokes which have gone too far, fat and spotty on wishful thinking. Antioxidants are like an endlessly repeated Christmas movie that you’ve never quite watched from start to finish: let’s recap.
Firstly there’s the theoretical plausibility, from biochemistry textbooks. Sainsbury’s tells this story in the style of a children’s story. “Exposure to UV rays, pollution and smoking produce free radicals,” they say. Oh modern woes! “Free radicals are compounds that cause cell damage, which in the long term can damage health.” It’s a simple tale of right and wrong. “Antioxidants help counteract the harmful effects of free radicals.”
It’s an attractive idea. But if you’re going to pore over the flowcharts in a biochemistry textbook, and pick molecules out at random on the basis of their function in the body, then you can prove anything you like. When you have a bacterial infection white cells build a wall around invading bacteria and then use free radicals – amongst other things – to kill them off, like tipping bleach down the toilet. Should we be selling wine with extra free radicals, instead, to help people fight bacterial infections, on the grounds of theoretical plausibility?


Anyway. In the 1970s men who looked like Father Christmas made amazing discoveries about smoking and health: buoyed with the enthusiasm of it all, they decided that all other cancers must have lifestyle causes, such as diet perhaps. They started looking for data, and this is what they found: people who choose to eat antioxidant pills seem to live longer; people who choose to eat fruit and vegetables seem to live longer; fruits and vegetables contain lots of antioxidants.


Are antioxidants the key to that link? Possibly. But people who choose to eat fruit and vegetables are getting a lot of good stuff into them, and they’re also like me: they’re a bit posh, they get plenty of exercise, they work, they have strong social supports, and more.


So trials were done, in huge numbers, giving one group extra antioxidants, in pills, and the other group our old friend the placebo sugar pill. Some of these trials were stopped early because the people getting the antioxidants were dying faster. Overall, if you look at all the results on a big spreadsheet (a technique called meta-analysis) it seems that antioxidant supplement pills either do nothing, or worse, kill you quicker. There might be something in the antioxidant story, but they might be rubbish. You don’t read that everyday in press releases on wine and chocolate.




So what does this do for our Christmas fable? Well fruit and veg are definitely still good for you. But you like chocolate. I’m not your mother. Eat it. Enjoy it. Believe in Santa. Chocolate is healthier than 5lbs of apples. And in the new year you can perform a symbolic purification ritual, involving five days of abstinence. You can dress that up in crap science too.

http://www.badscience.net/2007/12/epistemological-indulgences/

Pixel8

victorhelsing wrote: »

I have taken vitamin C in variable doses.
I take a multivitamin as insurance against missing things in the diet.
I take an aspirin a day
I take Vitamin D supplements as well and fish oil or flax seed for omega-3 when I am in the mood.

Have not tried the Gerson diet, of course have not really needed to. It does seem somewhat more healthy than the average American diet, but VERY restrictive.

Well that says it all really! Taking Vitamin supplements is Vitamin therapy, which is almost the same as the Gerson therapy, not exactly the same but a milder version of the Gerson Therapy, it's the same path which is the opposite of conventional medicine.

Whether you take fruit and veg drinks or vitamin supplements, the effects are almost exactly the same!

The keyword here is Vitamins.

victorhelsing

Di0genes wrote: »

I'd recommend the JREF Science and Medicine Board.

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=5

That seems better than this forum, although still filled with LOTS of wacky topics.

However, I think the prospect of working with the Gerson therapy is hopeless unless the Gerson people themselves are willing to be honestly involved. They have an established name and attract willing patients offering themselves as guinea pigs (without the huge cost of starting a clinical trial de novo). Operating south of the border, there are no pesky medical/ethical/legal issues to be resolved. Patients are already being treated, so a trial is already running, except that the results are either not being properly recorded or not being released for whatever reason.

I personally think the problem is somewhat simpler than it seems. I break the Gerson approach into three basic parts: diet, coffee enemas and organ extracts in various forms over the years. A fellow named Nicholas Gonzalez actually had enough political clout to get a trial funded by the government with his therapy vs. chemo on pancreatic cancer patients. It was an abysmal failure, with both increased suffering and decreased survival times for his patients. The interesting thing for me is that his therapy is very similar to Gerson on the coffee enemas and organ extracts (in fact, I found out about his therapy from a paper that Howard Straus wrote and gave to me that mentioned it with high praise).

Prior to learning about the Gonzalez therapy, I was highly skeptical of the coffee enemas and their proposed mechanism of benefit anyway (allegedly stimulating Glutathione S transferase through direct portal absorption of caffeine by the liver, leading to some poorly explained "detoxifying" effect).

Gonzalez' proposed benefit of organ (in this case pancreas) extracts, ingested orally, leading to "active proteolytic enzymes" circulating in the blood and (presumably preferentially) seeking out malignant cells to destroy seemed even more fanciful. Gerson's diet also uses organ products although in recent times I understand they have switched (at least partially) toward desiccated extracts rather than "live raw" organ extracts which (at least when prepared in Mexico) had the troublesome tendency to be filled with more biologic activity than was desired (causing repeated and embarassing admissions to other hospitals for Gerson patients with nasty infections).

In any event, since the Gonzalez protocol (substantially incorporating the Gerson coffee enemas and organ extracts) was such a dismal failure in published clinical trials, it seems reasonable to focus on the potential benefits of what remains, the Gerson diet. From the reading I've done over the years on Gerson therapy, including viewing some of the videos from Charlotte Gerson, it seems likely that the diet works (to the extent that it does, yet to be determined) by being basically a starvation chemotherapy. You can see Charlotte in the videos describing adding just a little bit of a particular diet component (in this case a specific fat) and seeing the tumor growing again, and then withdrawing it and the tumor stops. The harshly restricted diet deprives (some) tumors of the substrates they need to grow, and slowing their growth and possibly increasing cell lysis through deprivation, might allow time for a (possibly) activated immune response to dispose of the tumor.

Of course, the trick with any chemotherapy is to kill the tumor more than you kill the host. The same trick (and challenge) probably exists with the dietary regimen. Some tumors may have enough alteration in their metabolism to make them unable to process the restricted nutritional items provided under the diet, allowing the tumor to be starved while the patient is able to survive on what he gets. In cases where the nutritional requirements of the tumor are similar to the host, you get no differential kill from starvation, and the patient fails dietary therapy. I believe this is the essential limitation of the Gerson approach (a similar toxicity limitation is associated with almost all conventional chemotherapies). However, if the tumor growth can be substantially slowed, even a relatively modest differential in nutritional needs between the host and the tumor could allow the host to outlast the tumor over an extended period of time (and this also goes along with some of the Gerson patients who have been followed over many years with relatively slow or modest shrinkage of their tumors).

I proposed this mechanism to Howard Straus and he rejected it out of hand. In fact, he stopped responding to my emails. That's fine. I still think a scientific consideration of this approach is worthwhile, and it is absolutely required to collect proper data so that (if a useful effect is discovered) appropriate adjustments and improvements can be made to allow it to be more widely used.

I think they are afraid to publish their data on overall success rates, fearing that a small success percentage will scare off the patients they are getting. Perhaps so. I would certainly be more inclined to try the Gerson therapy after watching their infomercials than after hearing my chances on their therapy are 10%. But as I emphasized to Howard Straus, even a 10% cure rate would be higher for some tumors than conventional chemotherapy. Without being more open about their trials, they will never be more than a fringe therapy; that experiment has been performed convincingly over the past 50 years or so. As Einstein stated, insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a different result.

CiaranMT

Pixel8 wrote: »

Linus Pauling did win the Nobel Prize, twice, and he says he cured cancer with mega dose Vitamin C. That sounds to me like Cancer is a Vitamin C deficiency disease.

Another interesting thing is that Vitamin C is not in most meats, only liver and one or two other meats, so someone like myself who eats a lot of meat and not many vegetables could easily become deficient in Vitamin C pretty quick and in my own case, that seems to be true.

Another 'Oh Dear' moment for you.

Monty Burnz wrote: »

So if Obama (who also has won a Nobel Prize) said that you can cure cancer by drinking lots of beer, would you believe him too? Or if Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize winner) said that the moon was made out of cheese, would you believe him?

Indeed.

Iwannahurl

victorhelsing wrote: »

As Einstein stated, insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a different result.

No time to respond to your long and thought-provoking post just now.

A quick retort though: the above definition of insanity could be applied to conventional cancer treatments also. They keep doing pretty much the same thing, but as acknowledged in the medical literature the vast majority of cancers remain incurable.

That ongoing failure doesn't stop them trying, though, does it?

Di0genes

Iwannahurl wrote: »

No time to respond to your long and thought-provoking post just now.

A quick retort though: the above definition of insanity could be applied to conventional cancer treatments also. They keep doing pretty much the same thing, but as acknowledged in the medical literature the vast majority of cancers remain incurable.

That ongoing failure doesn't stop them trying, though, does it?

It's the best weapon we have in our arsenal. Aggressive and powerful.

Nothing stops a patient from not taking it, and trying their luck with alternative treatments

victorhelsing

Iwannahurl wrote: »

No time to respond to your long and thought-provoking post just now.

A quick retort though: the above definition of insanity could be applied to conventional cancer treatments also. They keep doing pretty much the same thing, but as acknowledged in the medical literature the vast majority of cancers remain incurable.

That ongoing failure doesn't stop them trying, though, does it?

You are quite right. I am not an apologist for cancer specialists, but I do know they are intensely interested in improving their therapies, and that is one of the reasons they are so fanatical about keeping data to measure even minor changes in results after minor changes in therapy, in hopes of changing (and improving). Change by itself is not necessarily good. If you simply make changes without carefully measuring the results, the change may actually make things worse, and you may not even know it.

Chemotherapy has never been the primary means of curing cancer; it is a salvage approach to buy the otherwise doomed patient additional time. It is the last poor chance to rage against the dying of the light. Often it does provide additional years of life that would otherwise not be available. To cure a cancer, it is not sufficient to kill 90%, or 99% or 99.999% of the tumor cells. Every last tumor cell must be destroyed, or those that remain will multiply again and again, and by definition, they are fiercely resistant to previous and subsequent attempts at chemotherapy.

Modern cancer therapy is focused on early detection and surgical removal of the tumor before it has a chance to spread. Obviously, to the extent practical, reducing risk factors (prevention) is also desirable, but it is incredibly difficult to get patients to modify their behavior sufficiently to make much progress. Smoking is the obvious example, but diabetes is (mostly) an acquired self inflicted dietary disease. Even so, it is virtually impossible to get diabetics to modify their diet and behavior in a way to reduce or even cure their condition. Telling them it is going to make them blind, impotent, destroy their kidneys, destroy their heart and brain, lose their legs and kill them barely has an effect.

Humans are extremely resistant to behavioral change. I am reminded of a friend who snivelled about the fact that whenever he went to the dentist, the dentist would nag him about various things he needed to do to take care of his teeth. And he would say "Shut up and drill." Most physicians have a similar experience with advising their patients, to which many patients reply "Can you give me a pill for that?"

One of the problems with the Gerson diet is that it is so UNnatural *. The body and brain are designed to find certain things desirable, at an extremely primitive level. These are oxygen, water, salt, sugar, fat, protein, sleep, sex, love. You can argue a little bit about the order I have chosen, but in general, you can live for a day with oxygen but no water, a day with water but no salt, a day with salt but no sugar, sugar but no fat, etc.

It is true that in our modern society, we have too much available salt, sugar, fat and protein. But our brains are designed to maximize our intake of these because they were in (population limiting) short supply until very recently.

* - Gerson people claim that salt, sugar and fat are bad for you and we should not eat more than minimal amounts of these, in very specific forms. That is a bit of a moral judgment, which actually goes against how nature has designed us. It is an appeal to a higher state of being, in the words of Lincoln "the better angels of our nature". It would have been healthier for everyone if the Civil War, or the Great War, or the Second World War, had been avoided, but man is designed by nature to engage in behaviors that are quite against the health of the individual. It may be bad, it may be wrong, it may be regrettable, but it is very natural. Repeated clinical trials over many centuries and many different civilizations have established what is natural. Nature is not often pretty, unless you are in the garden of Eden, where ignorance is bliss, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and everyone eats manna from heaven.

Pixel8

CiaranMT wrote: »

Another 'Oh Dear' moment for you.

Indeed.

Another chance for you to be constructive but failing miserably...

Pixel8

Di0genes wrote: »

These are jokes which have gone too far, fat and spotty on wishful thinking. Antioxidants are like an endlessly repeated Christmas movie that you’ve never quite watched from start to finish: let’s recap.........
....... You can dress that up in crap science too.

http://www.badscience.net/2007/12/epistemological-indulgences/

So em... would you like to talk about Astaxanthin now?

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/14/astaxanthin-the-worlds-strongest-antioxidant.aspx

Pixel8

Pixel8 wrote:

Linus Pauling did win the Nobel Prize, twice, and he says he cured cancer with mega dose Vitamin C. That sounds to me like Cancer is a Vitamin C deficiency disease.

Monty Burnz wrote: »

So if Obama (who also has won a Nobel Prize) said that you can cure cancer by drinking lots of beer, would you believe him too? Or if Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize winner) said that the moon was made out of cheese, would you believe him?

You're some twat... Obama is not a doctor of anything, except deception maybe. He does have a Juris Doctor, but thats to do with Law not Heath... Dr. Linus Pauling is one of the most influential Chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century, his fields were Quantum Chemistry and Biochemistry and he won his Nobel Prize for Chemistry and he also won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize. No less than two Peace Prizes? Sounds like a pretty honest genius to me.

Obama has *only* won a Nobel Peace Prize (for going to war?) which has nothing to do with chemistry, biochemistry or nutrition, try using Google next time kids.

Mod Note: User was banned for this post

Monty Burnz

Pixel8 wrote: »

Dr. Linus Pauling is one of the most influential Chemists in history

So he's a chemist? As opposed to - say - someone actually working in the health field? You appreciate that there is a difference between researching molecular biology and actually treating illnesses? I have a friend who has a Phd in chemistry. He works for a company that designs rechargable batteries. I must see if he has any health tips for me.

Iwannahurl

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I know it's a bit pompous to start a Boards post (in Conspiracy Theories, of all places) with a quote from Tennyson, but let me explain.

When I were a lad, the house was full of copies of the Reader's Digest. I was one of those people who always read everything that happened to be within arm's reach, from the back of the cornflakes packet, to The Messenger (my mother was a devout Catholic) to arcane and antique medical textbooks. Later I became a bit more discerning and realised that the Reader's Digest in that era was probably the literary wing of the CIA.

One article, "And Not to Yield", the Feature Condensation of the June 1969 issue, made a strong impression on me at the time. IIRC it was a gripping account of one man's heroic struggle against cancer, in particular the ravages of chemotherapy.

Similar stories have appeared again and again since, as countless newspaper articles and books. Most of these accounts are written by or about people who have fought successful or losing battles with cancer using conventional methods. Some include references to Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM) and a few are about exceptional individuals who have eschewed conventional methods almost entirely and opted for alternative/unorthodox methods instead.

They are all heroes in their own right, but are some heroes better than others?

I would say yes. For decades there has been a dominant discourse on cancer, and that discourse is overwhelmingly biomedical and technological. Sure there are loads of books and other testimonials about people who use CAM to one degree or another, but cancer survivors in this category are not heroes for the masses.

It has always struck me as remarkable that aggressive surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (often characterised as cutting, burning and poisoning by CAM advocates) are embraced as necessary evils, because advanced cancer is such a deadly and desperate disease, whereas a severely restrictive diet like the GT can be easily dismissed as a gruelling torture inflicted by money-grubbing quacks on gullible and vulnerable cancer sufferers who are so terrified of dying that they will try anything that offers even the vaguest hope.

There does seem to be a lot of resistance to preventive/therapeutic "lifestyle" change, yet at the same time a stoic acceptance (at societal level anyway) of the medical need for aggressive and arduous 'commando operations' when sickness become life-threatening. I remember being stunned when I first read about hemicorporectomy, for example.

It was, and still is, incomprehensible to me how drastic medical intervention can be seen as justified in severe cases, whereas a drastically altered diet is bizarre torture. The 'shaved heads for cancer support' meme is commonplace in the mainstream media, whereas a similar group drinking carrot juice, say, might well be seen as a bunch of nutters or hippies, and probably wouldn't be granted such a public platform anyway.

While many doctors' perspective on nutrition seems to start and end with vague recommendations such as "just eat a balanced diet", the culture of biomedicine "remains highly invested in 'aggressive' treatment of terminal disease and the notion that death represents medical failure."

On a basic level, the curative model conflicts with the notion of a good death. Where cure is the ultimate goal, death is the ultimate failure, a symbol of medicine's inadequacy. [...] In the jargon of the curative model, patients whose diseases cannot be stopped or slowed are termed "untreatable" or "beyond help." From a cure-oriented perspective, the care of such patients is considered outside the purview of medicine.

That’s a perspective (1997) from palliative medicine, which can be much more tolerant of some forms of CAM, possibly because their focus is entirely on end-of-life comfort and not on cure. Although Palliative Medicine is to some extent antithetical to the "curative" approach of oncology, it is now a fully-fledged medical speciality, albeit one whose purpose is to provide optimal evidence-based care for people with terminal disease. Palliative Medicine and the hospice movement have brought terminal cancer into the open, in a sense, but the aggressive medical approach is not far away.

There is currently no Third Way in mainstream medicine and society that can accommodate the Gerson approach or others like it.

The dominant discourse, in medicine, the media and the popular mind is that, of necessity, the war on cancer goes on.

While we have not had spectacular breakthroughs in cancer comparable to the antibiotics in infectious diseases or the polio vaccine there is no question that the cancer patient has a better chance today in the hands of good cancer doctors than has been true at any time in the past. [...]

In those cases where tumors are resectable, there has been a tremendous increase in the past three or four years in the emphasis upon the use of chemotherapy and immunotherapy postoperatively to treat those patients with detectable or nondetectable micrometastases.

Early results with these techniques are very encouraging and it now appears likely that cure rates will be materially increased for such common cancers as breast and colon cancer over those achieved in the past by surgery alone.

That was written in 1976, five years after Nixon famously declared war on cancer, but with a few edits it could resemble something written in 2006. No wonder that some critics have referred to the war on cancer as "a medical Vietnam". That's a phrase still used occasionally by advocates of 'alternative' methods, but my impression (and to some extent my experience) is that such criticism is not welcomed either by the medical profession or by the general public.

According to The Rules, criticising aggressive orthodox cancer treatment is heretical and denies people real hope, whereas advocating radical alternatives is irrational and gives people false hope.

Doctors and their patients are immersed in this dominant culture:

A sense of failure where death is imminent still often pervades medical culture. The fear of death is powerful in our community and doctors are habituated into making all therapeutic efforts, even as the chance of survival becomes vanishingly small.

[...]

Community expectations about what medicine can achieve and related end of life options can be unrealistic. This may be reflected in family responses in some cases. This is perhaps not surprising, given the media treatment of ‘hightech’ interventions, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and their outcomes, the latest scientific discovery, or the ‘1 in a million’ case that seemingly miraculously recovers against the odds. These broader representations may colour some families perceptions about what can be achieved in reversing pathology and forestalling death in some cases. In addition, information about disease and prognosis is often sought out via the internet by patients and families facing difficult treatment decisions. Only some of this information is authoritative.

That kind of situation must be played out in hospitals on a daily basis, but the same thinking also seems to dominate research efforts to find a cure or at least the next major advance. Desperate diseases justify both aggressive treatment and aggressive research, as this excellent paper suggests (Jain, 2010, The Mortality Effect: Counting the Dead in the Cancer Trial):

In oncology, injuries [eg the side-effects of treatment] are elided through tropes of hope, the attribution of treatment-related deaths to new primary causes (leukemia becomes leukemia rather than radiation-based injury), the trope of aggression, the lack of attention to cancer causation and early detection, and population statistics as a proxy for individual chances. After all, the war metaphor has been central to framing debates about cancer; the trope of aggression fits well into the life-or-death competition played out through the RCTs’ competition to out-heal. The tropes of competition and war fit so well into each other that they are difficult to see.

Yet they disguise several questions. What is the ethical difference between treatment injury and cancer injury? How long should the period be between distinctions in diagnosis and the continued use of prior categories in new trials? What is to be made of the fact that treatments at least as promising as anthracyclines never make it to the Phase III trials that cost so many millions of dollars to run? Where does responsibility rest for these injuries and false hopes and promises amid so much profit?

Jain says that "because the patients are understood as being in a battle for their lives, in a state of emergency, in some sense already dying, the treatments are always already warranted".

That state of emergency warrants drastic measures such as, for example, removing some of a cancer patient's bone marrow for later replacement, and then giving them a high dose of chemotherapy that would otherwise be quickly lethal.

According to Jain, pursuing such aggressive orthdodox treatments, however extreme and however marginal their benefits, offers "regret insurance".

Unfortunately, because they are currently forced to exist on the fringes of normal society, 'alternative' treatments cannot meet most people's need for such "insurance".

It probably requires similar levels of desperation and determination in order “not to yield” and to go either the 'orthodox' or the 'alternative' route, but each approach requires a very different perspective on what offers hope. Crucially, if you choose the road less travelled, you can find that it's a very lonely path indeed.

victorhelsing

Your ending comment is appropriate to the theme, so I will quote the last lines from that poem: "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." Many years ago I read an interesting interview with Robert Frost, near the end of his life, and he spoke of this poem. Of course, it was his most frequently cited and beloved work, and he said it was also his most misunderstood. The interviewer was surprised by this, so he explained. He said that most people impose their own interpretation on the very clearly written last line, adding their own assumption "difference .. {for the best}".

He was bemused by this, since his words were so carefully chosen for meaning. Had he wished to write "it was for the best", he would have done so. He was a poet, after all, and like most poets, spent most of his life along the path less traveled, {relatively} poorly treated, poorly paid, poorly respected compared to other paths he could have chosen, (until the very end).

We are reminded by Frost that difference, or change, are as they are written. They do not mean better or worse, right or wrong, they mean merely different. The poet leaves to us the essential judgments we must make on our own, and sometimes, as with Frost's poem, we misjudge and make the wrong choices.

Your reference to Vietnam is entirely relevant, and it is the perfect analogy to chemotherapy. We had huge resources available to us in that war, and our enemy was underfunded, underequipped and underpaid. But he could multiply and spread. So we poured in more and more resources, and if you recall the nightly newscasts, you know how we measured our progress - in kill ratios. Tonight we killed 23 Viet Cong, and lost 3 of our troops, so our kill ratio was more than 7 to 1. And night after night, we registered excellent kill ratios. If we only had enough determination and patience, we would wipe out every last VC and the patient would be saved. But of course, we could never kill every last VC, and they continued to multiply, and they wore down the patient, and wore down our resolve, and finally, the patient was lost. This is precisely what chemotherapy is all about, and why the results are generally so poor. Nonetheless, to the extent it is desirable, you can often extend the life of the patient by these means, so that Vietnam did not die in 1954 after the catastrophic defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, or in the early 1960's when the French withdrew. Vietnam lived and suffered, for better or worse, for another 10-15 years beyond the point it might have died.

Of course, it was the politicians, not the soldiers, who made the decision to go into Vietnam, and how to prosecute the war. The soldiers (for the most part), were faithful to their duty and cannot be blamed for the outcome. Just like Balaclava, to quote Tennyson, "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die..."

Contrary to popular perception, Prussian officers who prosecuted the disastrous and unjust second world war were mostly very honorable soldiers doing their duty as creative, thinking soldiers. They were not merely "following orders" (the claim later popularized as Nuernberg defense).

Similarly, physicians who treat cancer are not merely following orders in some foul conspiracy between the AMA, pharmaceutical industry and the tobacco lobby. Most of the cancer physicians I have met are very compassionate, immensely loyal to their patients and determined to do the best they possibly can for them whatever it takes. (Just to be clear, most physicians treating cancer make less money doing that than lots of other fields they might have chosen).

These physicians have far less animosity, jealousy, competitiveness or greed than has been depicted by the alternative medicine community. Most cancer specialists have relatively little ego problem (How can you preserve much ego when most of your patients suffer and die despite your best efforts?)

On the other hand, paradoxically, cancer specialists are fanatical about data collection and analysing results. The reason for this is simple. Their therapies (especially chemo) are not perfect, and when they make an (intended) improvement in the therapy, they need to measure the results very carefully to be sure that they are actually better, rather than a subtle (but very common) statistical variation, placebo effect, confounding variable, etc.

The resistance that cancer specialists have toward "alternative medicine" is actually not qualitatively very different from the resistance they have to any change. They know more intensely than anyone that change can be good OR bad. They are trained to look very carefully, using statistical techniques and scientific reasoning, to assess any new therapy. Whether it comes from conventional or "alternative" sources is almost * beside the point. (It's not ENTIRELY beside the point - when the alternative therapy comes from your crazy uncle Mikey who rejects all antibiotics and immunizations and believes in colloidal silver and dust of horned toad, the alternative is admittedly at some marketing disadvantage.)

So in the minds of conventional medicine, any new therapy, regardless of its source, must have statistical support for its effectiveness. Does it work, or NOT? The fact that it is "different" or "changed" or "alternative" or "natural", does not, by itself, make it better.

The exact opposite appears to be true of alternative proponents. To my eye, it seems that more often they are almost compelled to support a therapy if it is different, alternative, natural - and seem completely indifferent to the question of "Does it actually work?" and the important followup question "How can you prove it?"

Even to this day, despite the negative things I have written, I still believe in my heart that the Gerson diet approach is worth investigating further. What drives me wild is that, for whatever reason, the Gerson people appear determine not to gather or share information about the actual effectiveness of their approach.

For his part, Max Gerson was a very clever classically trained German physician in the great tradition of his generation. He knew the importance of collecting data, and he submitted a bunch of cases in his 50 cases book. These are QUITE interesting, and suggest strongly that he had a useful therapy that should have been investigated further.

Unfortunately, he ran out of time personally to gather enough additional cases, and admittedly, the organized medical community was not supportive. But fifty years have passed since then, and we still don't have more than a relative handful of cases (basically isolated anecdotes) to suggest the therapy has real value.

As I implied in my original comments, a HUGE problem is the resistance of patients to changes in their behavior, even when their life is at stake. Even when you have convincing evidence (smoking, diabetes), most of them refuse to change. They will remain resistant until the point where their physicians can be convinced with real data that this alternative therapy actually offers them a better chance than the accepted treatments.

There is no substitute for properly recording the true success and failure of this approach on many patients to know whether it truly works according to its original promise.

(Not to be too political here, but Obama ran for president on the platform of (essentially) Hope and Change, without much specifics. He was elected by a landslide because most people are in favor of hope and most people even like the idea of change, assuming like those who read Frost's poem, that change means better. The Gerson therapy has plenty of Hope and Change, but still, 50 years later, needs specifics.)

victorhelsing

It is true that treatment of cancer tends to be aggressive. I believe it is appropriate to be aggressive with respect to tumors that can be removed in their entirety, potentially curing the patient.

For cases where the tumor cannot be removed, the answer is less clear. However, in many of those cases, substantial time can be purchased with radiation therapy if the tumor is in one or two places. This radiation can often buy the patient a year or two of additional quality life.

Once other options are exhausted, and the cancer is still growing, you then face the question of salvage chemotherapy. Believe it or not, there are plenty of patients who choose this approach, even with its side effects and relatively poor prognosis. For reasons I don't entirely understand, based in the human spirit, there is often a huge desire to fight for survival. Harmon Killebrew (the great baseball player) recently died after an extended battle with esophageal cancer (a very grim disease), but did everything he could until the very end. Christopher Hitchens is facing the same grim condition with an awful lot of courage (and no faith in divine intervention).

For those who choose not to fight (and it can be a very practical choice), they usually get full support and understanding from their physicians. Often they make the decision in agreement with their physicians. I have not yet met a physician who would subject a patient to expensive or painful chemotherapy against their wishes, despite the alleged profit motive. No doubt they exist, perhaps my experience is not as broad as those in the alternative medicine community.

I believe that the hardcore, win at any cost physicians are relatively rare. They are analogous to commander in Vietnam who proclaimed "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." But admittedly, there are extremists in any discipline.

Brown Bomber

Man saved by vitamin C speaks

Posted at 9:21am Wednesday 18th May, 2011 | By Andrew Campbell

Immediately after vitamin C saved his life, Otorohonga farmer Allan Smith says he kept a low profile while the treatment was registered as a medicine in New Zealand.

Now that’s done he’s quite happy to talk about it – how he was saved from swine flu by intravenous vitamin C that doctors were compelled to give him.


When all traditional medical options had failed, Allan Smith’s life was saved by vitamin C.

Allan’s a Tauranga Coastguard member and was staying on his boat, Oscar, at the marina with his wife Sonia when he got sick.

Their tale is one of a struggle with the medical establishment.

Sonia’s struggle began when the ambulance officers she’d called had no wheelchair or stretcher, and had to support Allan for the long walk from the end of the pier.

Diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia, Allan was taken from Tauranga to Auckland where he went into a coma and was put on life support.

Allan had been in a coma for three weeks and doctors were calling for the machines keeping him alive to be turned off.

The idea to try intravenous vitamin C came from Allan’s brother in law, Jimmy, says Sonia.

“He’s been taking it for about eight years and he was at the meeting when they said they wanted to turn him off.”

Jimmy was the one who contacted the overseas medical specialists using intravenous vitamin C. They put him in touch with a New Zealand doctor importing the product.

Getting the doctors to administer this treatment was not easy for the family.

They found themselves obtaining a legal opinion telling medical staff they were in breach of the Hippocratic Oath if they didn’t administer the vitamin C treatment.

The treatment started and Allan wowed the critics as he came out of the coma.

He was expected to be three months in recovery and walked out 13 days later. He also has no further signs of leukemia with which he was also diagnosed while he was in the coma.

Allan’s speaking about his experiences of just over a year ago at Baypark on May 27.

Starting at 7pm he will give fuller detail about the fight with the medical establishment to save his life.

The evening is a fundraiser for the Tauranga Volunteer Coastguard with tickets available from the Coastguard offices at Sulphur Point or from the Bayfair information centre.

Tickets to hear Allan tell his story are $15, with all proceeds going to the Coastguard. There are 500 tickets available.

http://www.sunlive.co.nz/news/13121-vitamin-c-man-speaks.html

Iwannahurl

Just found this while searching for info on Gar Hildenbrand. He used to be closely involved with the Gerson Institute (having been one of their "cured incurables" IIRC) but several years ago the 'research' and clinical operations separated. Not sure why.

http://garhildenbrand.com

Hildenbrand is apparently still in communication with the Gerson Institute, and maintains a registry of cases.

Our nonprofit scientific research corporation, the Gerson Research Organization, has in its registry 7,785 cases (as of 4/30/2007) from all five Mexican hospitals that offered variants of the Gerson diet therapy for cancer and other diseases from 1977 through 1996 (Hospital La Gloria, Hospital Jardines de la Mesa, Hospital del Sol, Centro Hospitalario Internacional Pacifico, SA, and Hospital Oasis). Of 7,785 charts, 4,738 are cancer cases and comprise our tumor registry. We have published and will continue to publish retrospective analyses of the outcomes of these patients.

See also the Gerson Research Organization website.

victorhelsing

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Just found this while searching for info on Gar Hildenbrand. He used to be closely involved with the Gerson Institute (having been one of their "cured incurables" IIRC) but several years ago the 'research' and clinical operations separated. Not sure why.

http://garhildenbrand.com

Hildenbrand is apparently still in communication with the Gerson Institute, and maintains a registry of cases.

Our nonprofit scientific research corporation, the Gerson Research Organization, has in its registry 7,785 cases (as of 4/30/2007) from all five Mexican hospitals that offered variants of the Gerson diet therapy for cancer and other diseases from 1977 through 1996 (Hospital La Gloria, Hospital Jardines de la Mesa, Hospital del Sol, Centro Hospitalario Internacional Pacifico, SA, and Hospital Oasis). Of 7,785 charts, 4,738 are cancer cases and comprise our tumor registry. We have published and will continue to publish retrospective analyses of the outcomes of these patients.

See also the Gerson Research Organization website.

If you go to the website and listen to the first Hildebrand mp3, you'll hear the following quote mentioned from a letter:

Karol Sikora, Chief Oncology, University of London Hammersmith Hospital:

"Many thanks indeed for the interesting paper following up the Gerson diet. The paper is well written indeed. And I really feel it would do them greater service to publish in more mainstream journals."

Another paper referenced on that site discusses a number of melanoma patients of varying stages which were treated with the Gerson regimen and appeared to achieve better 5 year survival times than the average chemotherapy patients. (The Gerson people are continually trotting out "cures" of melanoma patients. It may be that their regimen is actually better at dealing with melanoma than many of the other cancers they treat. On the other hand, melanoma is known to go dormant for periods of time and reassert itself many years later. Further study on this question is certainly warranted to assess whether the results with melanoma are different than other cancers on the Gerson regimen, and why.)

I agree with Karol Sikora, they need to publish more data in more conventional venues to gain acceptance beyond the fringes.

If you were to publish a proper study of Gerson patients, you would list a number who quit after a very short time on the therapy, another number who failed to complete the therapy after a longer period (for a variety of reasons), and finally a number who completed or stayed on the therapy for the "approved" period of time or cure. I believe these numbers when fully revealed would not be as cheerful as videos like "Dying to have known" or "A beautiful truth" or "The Gerson miracle" would have you believe, but I hold out hope there would still be enough there to stimulate interest in those who treat cancer professionally. Even the interesting melanoma study they cite which has good numbers does not seem to state how many failed or quit the therapy for a variety of reasons, leading me to wonder about selection bias.

____________________

P.S. I did find a rather interesting review of the Gerson therapy on a Norwegian origin website devoted to CAM. http://www.cam-cancer.org/Download/%28f%29/88/CAM-Summaries/Biologically-Based-Practices/Gerson-Therapy/%28merge%29. Their main website page is http://www.cam-cancer.org.

Iwannahurl

Fair point re mainstream journals, though that underscores the sociology and politics of research. Science is science, and assuming the peer review process works generally then any valid research that gets to be published ought to stand on its own merits. However, we all know that some journals carry more weight than others. Indeed some journals are read all the time and some are rarely cited.

A few comments and observations, in no particular order.

The CAM paper you linked to above mentioned the cost of doing the GT. One of the reasons for the overwhelming dominance of the current biomedical model is the fact that recognised diseases and recognised treatments are reimbursable in the health insurance system. It is also the case, in the US system at least, that the cost of medical treatment is one of the most common causes of personal bankruptcy. It all costs money, and the more novel the treatment you seek/choose the more expensive it is.

The significance of multimorbidity
One of the main planks of the GT is that it is non-specific. In other words, it is conceived as a generalised immunomodulating detoxifying treatment that can potentially tackle a range of chronic conditions. As a general concept this ought to be of interest to the medical profession. Multimorbidity is the norm rather than the exception, and studies have shown that as many as two-thirds of patients above the age of fifty or so have multiple conditions simultaneously (eg see this paper). The costs of dealing with multimorbidity are also very high. A 'systemic' treatment that addresses a range of conditions with common risk factors would be more sustainable as well as economically advantageous. Of course, biomedicine doesn't work in that fashion -- another reason for approaches like the GT to be treated with suspicion. Patients will continue to be sent from one specialist to another for treatment of their different chronic/degenerative conditions, and little attention will be paid to how such disease entities happen to be inhabiting the one host.

Biomedical researchers could be exploring such systemic treatment possibilities, but there seems to be little happening on that front. Why? Where is there a concerted effort to devise therapeutic interventions that seek to address the common aetiologies for different chronic diseases? Hasn't the epidemiological research shown us that (a) the major diseases have major risk factors in common, and (b) that, for example, "phytochemicals" are involved in a range of biological processes underlying health and disease?

Evidence base for components of the Gerson Therapy
The alleged reluctance of GT advocates to share their data need not hold up the search for such an integrated response to chronic disease and multimorbidity. There is already a large body of research demonstrating the role of plant substances in health and disease, which means that there is already a biologically plausible basis for a therapeutic intervention utilising such substances in an integrated manner.

Take the example of Hippocrates Soup, one of the principal elements of the GT. Of course, any oncologist worth their salt wouldn't demean themselves by even discussing a recipe -- of all things -- in the context of cancer treatment! But is it really that far-fetched to suggest that it has significant health-promoting properties? The ingredients include celery, parsley root, garlic, leek, tomatoes, onions and potatoes. So far so culinary and domestic. But look a bit closer, and consider what such a concoction contains in terms of phytochemicals and "nutraceuticals". Here's a list of the ingredients, along with some PubMed references to research on the cancer-related characteristics of the nutraceutical associated with each ingredient.

Celery (Apigenin)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17981702
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20709524

Parsley root (Luteolin)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18991571
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18946424

Garlic (Allicin, Ajoene)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16793203
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885009
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19823037
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885009
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15158086

Leek (Organosulphides)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15476856
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240438/pdf/ehp0109-000893.pdf

Tomato (Lycopene)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16563357
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15867308
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11880478

Onions (Thiosulfinates)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17093154
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16010345
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18360714

Potatoes (Anthocyanins)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20574921
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17522067
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17522067
http://www.academicjournals.org/ajpp/PDF/%20pdf2009/October/Zhao%20et%20al.pdf

If you follow up each link carefully you will see that each substance has some sort of role in cancer "chemoprevention", and a few are even being actively considered as potential cancer chemotherapy. And why not? Why should there be a disconnect between the origins of disease and its treatment? If we get sick because of a lack of a macro-nutrient or phytochemical, is it outlandish to suggest that such a substance might have a role in treatment? This is an ancient principle, established by the father of medicine himself, Hippocrates:

Regulation of survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of tumor cells through modulation of inflammatory pathways by nutraceuticals.

Cancer Metastasis Rev. 2010 Sep;29(3):405-34.

Gupta SC, Kim JH, Prasad S, Aggarwal BB.
Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.

Almost 25 centuries ago, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, proclaimed "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Exploring the association between diet and health continues today. For example, we now know that as many as 35% of all cancers can be prevented by dietary changes. Carcinogenesis is a multistep process involving the transformation, survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of the tumor and may take up to 30 years. The pathways associated with this process have been linked to chronic inflammation, a major mediator of tumor progression. The human body consists of about 13 trillion cells, almost all of which are turned over within 100 days, indicating that 70,000 cells undergo apoptosis every minute. Thus, apoptosis/cell death is a normal physiological process, and it is rare that a lack of apoptosis kills the patient. Almost 90% of all deaths due to cancer are linked to metastasis of the tumor. How our diet can prevent cancer is the focus of this review. Specifically, we will discuss how nutraceuticals, such as allicin, apigenin, berberine, butein, caffeic acid, capsaicin, catechin gallate, celastrol, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, fisetin, flavopiridol, gambogic acid, genistein, plumbagin, quercetin, resveratrol, sanguinarine, silibinin, sulforaphane, taxol, gamma-tocotrienol, and zerumbone, derived from spices, legumes, fruits, nuts, and vegetables, can modulate inflammatory pathways and thus affect the survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis of the tumor. Various cell signaling pathways that are modulated by these agents will also be discussed.

Maybe the best or even the only way to get medical researchers and practitioners interested in these concepts and possibilities is to disguise the fact that we are talking about food, instead using technical-sounding terms like chemoprevention, nutraceuticals and phytochemicals? Another aspect of the GT that puts people in a tizzy is the use of coffee enemas. I believe there is some evidence to support the use of coffee at least, but I'll leave that to another post. This one is long enough already...

victorhelsing

"The CAM paper does address the cost of GT." You are right that CAM is at a relative disadvantage because insurers and government agencies pay for these conventional therapies, and not for CAM. At first glance, that seems unjust. But you are a man of the world. Even granting that conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry have some profit motive, you must agree that lots of people have profit motive. If not for the annoying prohibition against paying for unproven therapies, the system would be financially overwhelmed with every imaginable fraudulent therapy seeking the suck the system dry. To a perhaps limited extent, the greedy drug companies earn their money for their new drugs by paying for hugely expensive development and trials prior to being able to charge for individual doses. Most new drugs fail during this process and never make it to market. If proven (but imperfect) drugs were not given some degree of preference to reward this development, conventional therapies would vanish entirely, to be replaced by scam artists on every street corner selling snake oil at a more affordable (government sponsored) price. The PDF quotes the Gerson therapy (some years ago) charging more than $5000 per month (similar to my father's experience). That's pretty expensive for vegetable juice and coffee, although a chef might say that the magic is in the presentation.

"One of the main planks of the GT is that is is non-specific ... generalized immunomodulating detoxifying ... potentially tackle a range of chronic conditions..." Such an approach, if proven to be effective, would be of interest to the medical profession. However, its "main plank" is also something of a problem. To quote my idol Einstein again "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Einstein's greatest work with general relatively was a monstrous simplification claiming acceleration and gravity were the same, and the outrageous implications that fell out of that extremely insightful reduction. On the other hand, his extreme simplification (postulating the equivalence) was never, by itself, sufficient; it was too simple. He needed extremely complex mathematics to prove his case, and ultimately, set up very tedious experiments to acquire physical proof. That the Gerson regimen claims such protean benefits should make it relatively straightforward to prove its effect with experimental models. The lack of such needed experimental data continues to be an obstacle to their acceptance, which leads to the worrisome question, why are those data not available after 50 years of treatments? Could it be not as simple as described?

Also, there is no argument that plants contain many beneficial compounds. While such a view was radical in his time, it has become widely accepted today far beyond hippie counterculture. Saying plants are beneficial is not a problem for the Gerson therapy; claiming they can (reliably) cure cancer, without sufficient evidence, is. The problem for Icarus was not that he could not fly (which was magnificent by itself), but that he tried to fly higher than his technology would allow.

I am reminded of the classic cartoon with two academics looking at a three section blackboard. On the left blackboard, a great mass of equations are written, labeled step 1. On the right blackboard, another mass of equations, labeled step 3. In the middle, labeled step 2, is the simple phrase "A miracle occurs here." And the older man asks the younger "Can you be more specific in step 2?"

Iwannahurl

I think it is an illogical red herring, if you catch my drift, to suggest that one of the main obstacles to properly investigating the GT is the lack of experimental evidence from the Gerson Insitute. It may well be the case, given the abuse, neglect and maginalisation that Gerson and his successors had to endure, that they are concentrating on patient care instead of research. I would also wager that if the GI were to conduct clinical trials on their own, they would be hammered on some convenient grounds, such as lack of FDA approval. They are outside the Pale, and maybe all parties are happy to keep things that way.

In any case, the GT method is totally in the public domain, and has been so for decades. There is nothing to stop individuals from trying it on their own (I know of a few who did, without recourse to the Gerson clinics outside the US Pale, ie in Mexico). There is also nothing to stop laboratory or clinical researchers from investigating it on their own time. For many decades now, modern Western medicine has been quite happy to borrow (or steal) from 'folk medicine' in the hope that profitable pharmaceuticals might be found. They are very willing to accept the ethnographic record as a starting point, and they certainly don't ask for experimental proof from the 'originators' of these modalities. One of my favourite examples of this window-shopping is Xi Shu, a herbal remedy long used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for the treatment of stomach cancer (and as a hair dye, I believe!). The chemotherapeutic potential of Camptotheca Acuminata was spotted way back in the 1970s, IIRC, and dogged researchers laid the groundwork for its eventual transformation into a blockbuster drug, Campto/Irinotecan, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, first for Sanofi-Aventis and then for Pfizer. For some reason the Japanese company Yakult (they of the probiotic drink) have been instrumental in the development and promotion of Campto worldwide.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is many hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. It is based on folk wisdom and empirical evidence accumulated over a very long period, not on formal experimentation as practiced in modern medical science. Had Western medical researchers waited for TCM practitioners to produce experimental evidence for Xi Shu, how far do you think the development of Campto would have progressed?

In this regard, perhaps one thing that's holding up progress in dietary interventions is that such modalities are integrated systems and not individual substances. The Hippies like the idea of a plant-based holistic nutritional treatment, whereas the Drippies ( ) prefer something that can be administered in precise dosages through a Hickman Line. *

I still insist that there is no obligation -- scientific, ethical, moral or legal -- on the Hippies to produce experimental evidence for their 'theories' and practices. They've already put their knowledge into the public domain, and the powers that be could use that information to inform current medical research and practice if they wanted to. They don't want to: their minds are already made up. Curiously, they've already decided that it is a fact that the GT is of no value, despite the lack of data. Funny how lack of evidence can be so conclusive when the decision is in a particular direction. Unproven means "completely worthless" not "worthy of further investigation, given the seriousness of cancer, the limitations of current methods and the substantial evidence for the anti-cancer effects of phytochemicals".

By the way, here's just one small example of the Drippies excellent research methods in action. Their results "suggest that apigenin may be used as a chemopreventive and/or chemotherapeutic agent against human cancer in the future". It remains to be seen whether this phytochemical, present in abundance in the Gerson diet, can be developed into something that can be packaged and prescribed. You can be quite sure that the academic researchers won't wait for experimental evidence from nutritionists before investigating further.

That was a Sidney Harris cartoon you mentioned. Here's a few more. The selection bias should be obvious.














* Maybe that should be Hippies versus Hickies?