Fwd: The Hoxsey Legend

[Guest guest]

Comments?

 

Misty

 

http://www..com

 

 

The Hoxsey Legend

 

http://www.iknowthecause.com

 

In 1840 Illinois horse farmer John Hoxsey found his

prize stallion with a malignant tumor on its right

hock.

 

As a Quaker, he couldn't bear shooting the animal, so

he put it out to pasture to die peacefully.

 

Three weeks later, he noticed the tumor stabilizing,

and observed the animal browsing knee-deep in a corner

of the pasture with a profusion of weeds, eating

plants not part of its normal diet.

 

Within three months the tumor dried up and began to

separate from the healthy tissue.

 

The farmer retreated to the barn, where he began to

experiment with these herbs revealed to him by " horse

sense. "

 

He devised three formulas: an internal tonic, an

herbal-mineral red paste, and a mineral-based yellow

powder for external use.

 

Within a year the horse was well, and

the veterinarian became locally famous for treating

animals with cancer.

 

The farmer's grandson John C. Hoxsey, a veterinarian

in southern Illinois, was the first to try the

remedies on people, and claimed positive results.

 

His son Harry showed an early interest and began

working with him at the age of eight.

 

When John suffered an untimely accident, he bequeathed

the formulas to the fifteen-year-old boy with a charge

to treat poor people for free, and to minister to all

races, creeds, and religions without prejudice.

 

He asked that the treatment carry the Hoxsey name.

Finally, he warned the boy against the " High Priests

of Medicine " who would fight him tooth-and-nail

because he was taking money out of their pockets.

 

Hoxsey planned to go to medical school to bring the

treatment to the world, but soon found he had been

blackballed after secretly treating several terminal

patients who pled for their lives.

 

With a local banker backing him, he founded the first

Hoxsey Cancer Clinic in 1924, championed by the

chamber of commerce and high school marching bands on

Main Street.

 

As early word of his reputed successes spread, Hoxsey

was invited to nearby Chicago, headquarters of the

newly powerful AMA, to demonstrate the treatment.

 

Grisly and indisputable photographic proof of the

terminal case Hoxsey treated verifies that the patient

recovered, living on for twelve years, cancer-free.

 

Hoxsey then claimed that a high AMA official offered

him a contract for the rights to the formulas.

 

The alleged agreement assigned the property rights to

a consortium of doctors including Dr. Morris Fishbein,

the AMA chief and editor of the JAMA.

 

Hoxsey himself would be required to cease any further

practice, to be awarded a small percentage of profits

after ten years if the treatment panned out.

 

Invoking his Quaker father's deathbed charge that poor

people be treated for free and that the treatment

carry the family name, Hoxsey said the official

threatened to hound him out of business unless he

acquiesced.

 

Whatever may have happened, that's when the battle

started.

 

The AMA first denied the entire incident, then later

acknowledged the patient's remission, though crediting

it to prior treatments by surgery and radiation.

 

Yet one thing was certain: Hoxsey had made a very

powerful enemy.

 

By crossing swords with Fishbein, he alienated the

most powerful figure in medicine.

 

The AMA promptly dubbed him the worst cancer quack of

the century, and he would be arrested more times than

any other person in medical history.

 

Hoxsey quickly found himself opposing Fishbein's

emerging medical-corporate complex.

 

As late as 1900, medicine was therapeutically

pluralistic and financially unprofitable.

 

Doctors had the highest suicide rate of any profession

owing to their extreme poverty and low social

standing.

 

Fishbein's AMA would engineer an industrialized

medical monoculture.

 

What radically tipped the balance of power was an

arranged marriage between big business and organized

medicine.

 

Under Fishbein's direction, the AMA sailed into a

golden harbor of prosperity fueled by surgery,

radiation, drugs, and a sprawling high-tech hospital

system.

 

The corporatization of medicine throttled diversity.

The code word for competition was quackery.

 

It was easy for the medical profession to paint Hoxsey

as a quack: he fit the image perfectly.

 

Brandishing his famed tonic bottle, the ex-coal miner

arrived straight from central casting as the

stereotype of the snake-oil salesman.

 

When the AMA coerced the pathologist who performed

Hoxsey's biopsies to cease and desist, Hoxsey could no

longer verify the validity of his reputed successes.

 

Organized medicine quickly adopted the stance that his

alleged " cures " fell into three categories: those who

never had cancer in the first place; those who were

cured by prior radiation and surgery; and those who

died.

 

In exasperation, Hoxsey attempted an end run by

approaching the National Cancer Institute.

 

In close collaboration with the AMA, the federal

agency refused his application for a test because his

medical records did not include all the biopsies.

 

Meanwhile Hoxsey struck oil in Texas and used his

riches to promote his burgeoning clinic and finance

his court battles.

 

Piqued at Hoxsey's rise, Fishbein struck back in the

public media, penning an inflammatory article in the

Hearst Sunday papers entitled " Blood Money, " in a

classic example of purple prose and yellow journalism.

 

 

Outraged, Hoxsey sued Fishbein.

 

In two consecutive trials, Hoxsey beat Fishbein,

standing as the first person labeled a " quack " to

defeat the AMA in court.

 

During the trials, Hoxsey's lawyers revealed that

Fishbein had failed anatomy in medical school, never

completed his internship, and never practiced a day of

medicine in his entire career.

 

By now Fishbein was mired in multiple scandals,

including his effective but unpopular obstruction of

national health insurance at a time when doctors had

become the richest professionals in the country and

the Journal the most profitable publication in the

world.

 

Drug ads powered JAMA, but its biggest single

advertiser in the 1940s was Phillip Morris.

 

(Camel cigarettes had the largest booth at the AMA's

1948 convention, boasting in its ads that " More

doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. " )

 

Enmeshed in controversy, Fishbein's stock was trading

low, and, shortly after his first loss to Hoxsey, the

AMA chief was deposed in a humiliating spectacle.

 

But ironically Hoxsey's stunning dark-horse victory

against the " most terrifying trade organization on

Earth " only ended up bringing the house down.

 

He immediately faced a decade-long " quackdown " by the

FDA.

 

By the 1950s, Hoxsey was riding what was arguably the

largest alternative-medicine movement in American

history.

 

A survey by the Chicago Medical Society showed 85

percent of people still using " drugless healers. "

 

Hoxsey's Dallas stronghold grew to be the world's

largest privately owned cancer center with 12,000

patients and branches spreading to seventeen states.

 

Congressmen, judges, and even some doctors ardently

supported his quest for an investigation.

 

Two federal courts upheld the therapeutic value of the

treatment.

 

Even his archenemies, the American Medical Association

and the Food and Drug Administration, admitted that

the therapy does cure certain forms of cancer.

 

JAMA itself had published the research of a respected

physician who got results superior to surgery using a

red paste identical to Hoxsey's for skin cancers

including lethal melanoma, a skin cancer that also

spreads internally.

 

Medical authorities escalated their quackdown in the

McCarthyite wake of the 1950s.

 

On the heels of a California law criminalizing all

cancer treatments except surgery, radiation, and

chemotherapy, the federal government finally outlawed

Hoxsey entirely in the United States in 1960 on

questionable technicalities.

 

Chief nurse Mildred Nelson took the clinic to Tijuana

in 1963, abandoning any hope of operating in the

United States.

 

It was the first alternative clinic to set up shop

south of the border.

 

Mildred quietly treated another 30,000 patients there

until her death in

1999.

 

Like Hoxsey, she claimed a high success rate, but her

contention is unverifiable since the treatment has yet

to be rigorously tested.

 

Hoxsey never claimed a panacea or cure-all.

 

He maintained that the Dallas doctors used his clinic

as a " dumping ground " for hopeless cases, and that the

great majority of patients he got were terminal,

having already had the limit of surgery and radiation.

 

 

He said he cured about 25 percent of those. Of virgin

cases with no prior treatment, he claimed an 80

percent success rate.

 

Seventy-five years after Hoxsey began, why do we still

not know the validity of his claims?

 

 

=====

Alternative_Breast_Cancer/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!