Dying To Have Known (A Gerson Therapy Documentary)

Di0genes wrote: »

SACN advise that the maximum amount of salt you should have in your diet is 4g a day.

Two pinches of salt in addition to the high sodium food that is standard western diet may exceed your RDA.

Not only that, the Gerson diet practically prohibits salt. Don't place your health at risk!

I've watched multiple of the Gerson videos, and read multiple of the Gerson books, and other related books (including the China Study by Campbell). So I've wasted more time than King Mob, and certainly more than Mahatma Coat, on this topic.

If someone is telling you something too good to be true, that's your clue that it is not true, or at the very least, it is only PART of the truth. Remember the old adage - a half truth is a whole lie.

Albert Einstein, the great iconoclastic jew, restated Occam's razor along the line of "The description of any system should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."

If you choose to look at a limited set of data, you can be deceived, even if those specific data are actually true. For example, the following facts were true, 50 years ago, when Gerson was promoting his therapy for cancer and many other diseases:

1) Cigarettes taste and smell good to those who choose to smoke them. (This is still largely true today, even though more people are concerned about the known health effects and trying to stop smoking. Even to most of them, the taste of the cigarette and its associated addictive reward is almost impossible to resist. Do you know that an IV drug addict actually LIKES the feel of the needle poking into his skin?) But the fact that they taste and smell good to smokers does not mean they ARE good - that is a false inference, one we are likely to draw based on past experience.

2) More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. {This was TRUE, in keeping with the cigarette industry's attempt to be as truthful as they could be without destroying their advertising campaign. Of course, they wanted the viewer to infer that doctors would know which cigarettes were safest, and for that reason, chose to smoke camels.}

3) Handsome manly men choose to smoke Marlboros. Philip Morris required that ALL of its Marlboro men (the models in the commercials) were actually Marlboro smokers (part of their "truth" in advertising campaign). Again, the truth, stated incompletely, can actually deceive. {Of course, it does not mean that ALL handsome manly men smoke Marlboros, or more importantly, does not mean that I will be handsome and manly if I smoke Marlboros - but that is not what the statement says.}

To be fair to the Gerson people, they make some claims which are true, as far as they go:

1) Diet causes cancer. This is true. We know, as an example, that the classical western diet increases the risk of colon and breast cancer. That's fine. We all "know" that the western diet is bad for you and eating more veggies is good. That's fine. Except that gastric cancer is VERY common in Japan and China, and virtually unheard of in the U.S. Yes, it's diet related, and their diet is full of veggies. And don't forget liver cancer, very rare in the U.S., but the most common organ cancer in the third world (among those eating a vegetarian diet including badly stored nuts). Denise Minger covers some of these misconceptions in her very insightful analysis of Campbell's results and claims.

2) Many people are cured of cancer by the Gerson therapy. I suspect this statement is true, although it depends on how you define many. If you have cancer, and you are cured by the Gerson therapy, 1 is a pretty high number for you, thus the enthusiasm of those in the video who were happy about the therapy. Unfortunately, if you are 1 in a 100, or 1 in a thousand who was treated, the remainder of whom died, the triumphant anecdote is no longer the compelling victory it first seemed. A half truth is a whole lie - why do the people promoting these therapies refuse to tell the number of failures as well as the number of successes? The simple answer is that the whole truth tells a different story.

3) Gerson therapy is a "natural" therapy. That's largely true, as far as it goes, since it is based on natural elements. Coffee is a natural plant product, true enough, but is it still natural if I am taking it in my butt? Perhaps the truth depends, as Clinton once famously said, on what your definition of the word "is" is. Is it "natural" to have a purely vegetarian low fat diet yet give additional organ supplements (pancreas or liver, previously uncooked)? Is it natural to severely restrict sodium (salt) in the diet to the point where numerous Gerson patients have been admitted to the hospital with complications related to low sodium or infections? Gerson also treated patients for syphilis with his diet. That sounds swell, and natural, but I would prefer to treat my syphilis with another natural product, penicillin, which is widely accepted by conventional medicine as the definitive cure. I avoid other purely "natural" products, such as cocaine, opium and tobacco. And sugar is a natural product that I try to minimize, similar to Gerson. It seems that some natural things are good, and other natural things are bad. So it is not the natural part that's important after all, it is whether it is good or bad for you. And honest, educated and scientifically based people can disagree about that question. That is what science is all about.

In the end, if you wish to accept a particular doctrine as a matter of faith, that's fine. That is called religion. No proof or science is required to adopt a religion. Just don't call it scientific, and when it runs counter to scientific "truths", don't call it conspiracy.

And it is never permissible to lie or deceive when proving the "truth". If your therapy is natural and swell, and it cured 50 people of cancer, say so. But don't be ashamed to admit that it failed to cure 10,000 others. People who are making the most important decision of their lives about how to treat their cancer deserve to know the truth, and in this case especially, need to know the whole truth.

There are some kinds of cancer where even a 10% cure rate would be considered a huge improvement over conventional therapy - and would be welcomed by the orthodox medical community.

I am struck by the level of certainty among those in the alternative medicine business. Walk toward the man who seeks the truth, run from the man who knows it.

RoboClam wrote: »

I made a post a while ago in a similar thread, which was never responded to. Perhaps someone can answer me this time?

I am always keen to know how things work, but I'd also be an empiricist: if something works, even if I don't understand it, I'll use it. So if it worked, I would adopt the Gerson Therapy approach if I needed to, even without knowing how it kills cancer cells. Unfortunately, not only do we not know by what mechanism it works, we don't even know IF it works.

Until we know that it does, there isn't much point in looking for a mechanism.

digme wrote: »

This is cancer related so I had to ask yee did anyone see the fella who said he can cure cancer using an old medicine? He was in the news this week saying the medicine is so old you can't patent it.
Does anyone have any idea of what I'm talking about?

I may have heard something about that in relation to aspirin (salicylic acid), but I'm not sure.

There is something in the notion that treatments that cannot be patented are not researched because the pharma companies will only research stuff where they can make a return, and they pay for most of the medical research that is done around the world. It's not because they are evil, it's because they would not get very far if the were working for free. It is up to university researchers and charities to carry out research where there is no profit motive, otherwise there is a 'market failure'.

I don't wish to 'bump' this thread inappropriately (Mods take note), but I find it interesting that the Gerson Therapy is still being discussed (as well as debated and/or denied?). Not sure why the topic should surface in Conspiracy Theories.

I looked closely at the GT many years ago, and even met a few "cured incurables". However, I had formed the impression that its star had faded and I've been out of touch for quite a while.

Interesting film. 79 minutes too long for me to look at now, but I flicked through it at random and noticed a familiar face or two (Charlotte Gerson, Beata Bishop). It seems to be a sober and gentle enough documentary, not hyping the medical-industrial conspiracy angle. Reassuring that some of the people advocating the GT are medical doctors, and that they are making the therapy available to patients in Europe who would like to avail of it.

Scepticism and debate regarding the GT and cancer treatment needs to go beyond talk of randomised trials and peer review, IMO.

Monty Burnz wrote: »

I find it depressing that the same video Pixel8 links to has a long rant at the start about Obama's long-form birth certificate being a fake. Did anyone ever expect these guys to be satisfied by it? Totally ridiculous.

I can understand how people are interested in CTs (I am). I can understand how some people believe there may be some truth in CTs (I do). I cannot for the life of me understand people who are so credulous that they believe every single CT in every single field. Seriously, that must be some sort of personality disorder or something, especially when you consider that many of these CTs flatly contradict each other. How can you believe two contradictory things at the same time?

I think you have raised a very important point. I'm fully committed to using scientific evidence to bring about advances in medicine and human welfare generally. Once the science genie is out of the bottle there is no going back, IMO. By which I mean that once you know the value of the scientific method you can't revert to just accepting certain claims purely on the basis of intuition, hunches, "common sense" or the word of charismatic people.

All these subjective approaches to knowledge are valid and have stood the test of time. However, they are more fallible than the scientific method, and some things are too important -- and often too risky -- to be left to such subjective judgments.

A key point, though, in relation to "alternative" medicine is that absence of evidence does not necessarily mean absence of effect.

By now there are a large number of anecdotal reports, and some medical case studies, of the Gerson Therapy's effectiveness. Max Gerson himself was a well-qualified, experienced and respected physician, and he presented his evidence as best he could at the time he was developing his methods (the 1950s). See History of the Gerson Therapy by medical historian Patricia Spain Ward PhD. Excerpt: Such incomplete and indirect evidence, though falling far short of the requirements of the canonical randomised clinical trial, is sufficient for a small proportion of cancer patients and their supporters who are either motivated enough or desperate enough to try it, whether out of prior conviction or because they have run out of conventional options.

Regarding your point about some people's credulity, a significant problem IMO is that often the people who readily accept the claims made for "alternative" cancer treatments also buy into a host of crackpot "theories" such as that Obama is not an American citizen, that "chemtrails" are a toxic conspiracy and, as a chiropractor friend of mine said years ago, "cancer cells look like cities".

Some years ago I accidentally found a reference to the Gerson Therapy which mentioned that a guy called Giuliano Dego had claimed he heard the long-dead Dr Gerson speak to him over the radio revealing that he had not died of pneumonia as stated on his death cert but had been poisoned by arsenic. Some alternative types will believe such crazy stuff in a heartbeat; to me it sounds like mental illness.

With friends like that, who needs enemies? Or enemas.

I don't blame medical professionals who steer clear of studying the Gerson Therapy for fear of being lumped in with a bunch of cranks and wackos. Maybe Gerson's treatment remains beyond the medical pale not because of a huge medical conspiracy (which would be hard to organise) but because so many of its adherents are just plain loopy. These "early adopters" may actually be the biggest barrier to progress.

IRMC.

Pixel8 wrote: »

Why does this graph from cancer.org look so different to yours, Monty? Coz yours is based on CHILDREN with cancer who are obviously in much better health than adults because they obviously haven't eaten half as much processed, meaty, GMO crap food as us yet...!

Without getting into the graphs that you have posted (I'll think about them when I get a chance ) I'd just like to point out that the point you make here does not make any sense. You are saying that cancer survival rates for children are going up because they have eaten less processed GMO etc. bad food than adults. But surely these children/young adults (for this is what the statistics cover) have eaten a hell of a lot more GMO etc. stuff than they would have in the 50s?

So in spite of eating way more processed food, their survival rates have gone through the roof in recent years for some reason. Could this be due to modern medical science?

Pixel8 wrote: »

Yes, for some reason, but not because of chemo, surgery or radio therapy...

Maybe it's because of the freely available info about how important nutrition is for good health and because we have the internet now, people are trying alternative medicine a lot more than they did even 10 years ago, and rightly so. People are waking up, finally.

Again, your point makes no sense. Why are they developing cancer in the first place with all of the 'freely available info' that should be keeping them healthy?

Also, do you have any proof to show that the majority* of parents who discover that their children have have cancer are shunning medical science and are switching to alternative treatments?

*It would have to be most of them, if your reason for the improvement is correct.