Cancer and Flowers

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Cancer and Flowers: Max Gerson, M.D. and Edward Bach, M.D. JoAnn Guest Feb

05, 2004 16:20 PST

Cancer and Flowers: Max Gerson, M.D. and Edward Bach, M.D.

 

--

Cancer and Flowers

 

What is important is the weight of evidence that impelled me to take

the steps I did.

My personal actions may not have justified the evidence,

but I think the evidence justified my actions. "

(Roger J. Williams, PhD, Nutrition Against Disease, p 91.)

 

Max Gerson, MD, started his professional life as a regular physician

and ended it a quack. So did Edward Bach, MD. The first gave coffee

enemas to cancer patients and the latter healed all manner of diseases

with flowers. Both were fully trained scientists who turned their back

on conventional medicine and never recanted.

 

So how did that happen?

 

The renegade doctor does not fit the public perception of quack very

well. We want our quacks flaming, as Homer Simpson wanted all his gay

acquaintances to be. Only a real nut of a quack, an utterly uneducated,

criminally flamboyant fraud, is repellent enough to cement patients to

the religion of the drug doctors.

 

Dr. Max Gerson is therefore a problem from the start, best left

ignored. You will look long and hard for any reference to him in any

medical history or textbook. And yet, this man developed the single

most successful treatment for cancer in existence over 60 years ago.

 

Gerson was a surgeon in the German army during the first world war. He

and other doctors worked MASH-like 20 hour days operating on what was

left of their countrymen evacuated from the front lines. The British

naval blockade of Germany had resulted in a dire shortage of morphine,

and there was not enough of the pain reliever for patients in recovery.

The doctors, who drank coffee to stay awake day and night to operate,

found that coffee also relieved pain in the wounded. We know this to be

true, as caffeine is one of the active ingredients to this day in many

an extra-strength pain-reliever. Some soldiers had so much of their

faces, throats and stomachs shot away that they were fed by rectum, not

an uncommon practice in the old days. Desperate nurses were instructed

to put coffee in the enema water of these individuals. It worked; any

port in a storm.

 

This is the first straightforward reason why Dr. Gerson gave coffee

enemas to cancer patients: pain relief. He later claimed another:

rectally administered caffeinated coffee seemed to stimulate the liver

to flush waste from the system. He would be neither the first nor the

last to believe that " accumulated toxins " were a cause of cancer. It is

a persistent and recurrent quacky notion... which is also probably quite

accurate.

 

The cancer-preventive aspects of high fiber diets support this. A

study showed that Hispanic women have far lower rates of breast cancer

than black or white women. When all factors were considered, only one

difference could be found: Hispanic women eat considerably more beans

than black or white women do. The fiber is almost certainly the secret.

Other research has pointed to the flip-side conclusion: low-fiber diets

are carcinogenic. In a low fiber diet, any consumed carcinogens have a

longer transit time through the body's digestive tract. More time in

contact with the lining of the GI tract means more opportunity for

carcinogenesis.

 

Lots of fiber may also help the body excrete excess endogenous

chemicals, such as estrogen, thereby lowering the rate of

hormone-dependent cancers. Additionally, soluble fiber removes excess

bile acids (by-products of fat digestion) that are also linked with

cancer. David Reuben's Save Your Life Diet (yes, he was a MD as well)

discusses fiber's anti-cancer roles in detail. That book came out in

the 1970's; this is not new information. Aside from Metamucil, fiber is

too cheap and cannot be patented. What pharmaceutical company can make

the big bucks off beans? There is more money in chemo than Beano.

 

So Gerson the quack is trying to " detoxify " the body, focusing on the

liver. Is this a reasonable focus? Well, weighing in at about four

pounds, the liver is the largest gland in the body. It is well and

clearly identified as the body's site of detoxification of alcohol and

other drugs. It could very well detoxify a cancer patient, and Gerson

was aware of supporting research. So, yes, the liver is at least as

much a key as any other organ, and arguably much more so.

 

To build up the body's ability to fight cancer, Dr. Gerson then

employed the most damned therapy in the twentieth century: vitamins. On

top of that, he was among the pioneers recommending extensive vegetable

juicing. There you go: this all would be right at home on a shopping

channel at 2 am. That, or on Jerry Springer or Rikki Lake.

 

Oddly enough, it was because he had chronic, severe migraines that Max

Gerson got into vitamins and juicing He found no help in the drugs of

the day. Remember, he was a doctor, and he well knew what was

available. Plus, he had colleagues to help with the search. Nothing

worked. So Gerson tried the logic of that great non-person, Sherlock

Holmes: if all reasonable explanations fail, the answer must be some

unreasonable one. Immersed in the unreason that only pain can generate,

Gerson tried different foods, doing an early version of what was

probably much like allergy testing. He found that juiced vegetables,

not medicines, were the cure for his headaches. He was a surprised as

you would be, perhaps even more so because he was a drug doctor who had

been taught nothing of natural healing, except perhaps contempt for it.

 

Nothing succeeds like success. Word got around and people started to

seek out this doctor who cured migraines when the other doctors failed

to. Gerson began to note that many of his migraine patients were also

getting cures of assorted conditions that they hadn't even initially

told him about. He reasoned that juicing was a " metabolic therapy, "

non-specific and broad spectrum in nature. If that concept annoys you,

think of the diverse sicknesses that are expected to respond to a given

antibiotic.

 

Adding vitamin supplements to the regimen, he now had a therapy so

effective that he was experiencing success on a large scale. One of his

patients was the great missionary physician Albert Schweitzer, MD.

Schweitzer himself said, of Gerson, that " he was a medical genius who

walked among us. " High praise indeed from a Nobel prize winner.

 

Was Dr. Schweitzer simply duped, and taken in by master fraud Gerson?

 

Up until now, Gerson was not even thinking of treating cancer. When

ultimately asked to try to, he refused, indicating that he had no

intention of becoming known as another cancer quack. Pressure from

suffering patients eventually changed his mind. He hesitatingly began

using the metabolic therapy, cleansing and restoring the cancer

patient's body, and was delivering a cure rate of over 50% of terminal

cancer patients. This extraordinary success rate was in part the basis

for a 1946 Congressional hearing on cancer therapies. Gerson had

relocated to the United States and now took 50 of his carefully

documented case histories before an investigative committee. Radiation,

surgery, and chemotherapy were all approved for the " war on cancer. "

Vitamins, juices and Gerson were excluded, by four votes.

 

Well, what do you expect? His mistake, and it was a big mistake, was

to recommend coffee enemas for cancer patients. The fact that dying

patients were recovering was secondary. It all sounded too quacky. The

juices and the vitamins just added insult to injury. In the greatest

traditions of the US Congress, they got it wrong and threw the baby out

with the bathwater. Gerson was out in the cold, and would remain a

quack for the rest of his life. The war on cancer would be fought with

one hand tied behind its back.

 

Dr. Gerson's case histories and therapy are fully documented in his

book, A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases. It is an extraordinary,

detailed, practical work. Any good bookstore can order one for you. If

you are interested in quackery, you can start here.

 

And then there is Edward Bach, MD., who by comparison makes Gerson look

like the president of the AMA. Dr. Bach was a vaccinologist with a

practice on Harley Street in London, equivalent to having a Fifth Avenue

professional address in New York City. He left medicine irretrievably

far behind when he ran off to the country to study, and heal with,

flower blossoms of all things. He floated them in spring water (but

never in " dead " tap or distilled water) in glass containers, placed in

the sun. The energy from the flowers was thus collected, then diluted

hundreds of times to make it stronger, and dropped onto patients'

tongues and wrists. Somewhere, anywhere, in here you can find enough

nuttiness to begin snickering.

 

The eccentric Dr. Bach believed that disease was, at its root, a matter

of diseased temperament. He researched a dozen common flowers known as

The Twelve Healers (also the title of his first book). Over two dozen

more were to follow, bringing the total to 38. Impatiens seemed to cure

impatience, Mustard ended black depression " like a dark cloud has

overshadowed life, blotting out all enjoyment. " A combination of

remedies, known as Rescue Remedy, was a first aid preparation for shock

and trauma to the mind. Clematis relieved suicidal tendencies and Holly

dissipated hatred. Honeysuckle dissipated excess nostalgia, and there

were several remedies for fear, classified as to whether fear was from

known or unknown causes, worldly or unfounded, or otherwise.

 

Dr. Bach is especially easy to dismiss. First, he was British, so to

Americans he was not a real scientist, like, say, Charles Darwin, Issac

Newton or Allen Turing. (Whoops: they were all British as well, but no

matter.) Secondly, flowers, especially common blossoms like impatiens

and holly that served as their very names would suggest, offer no

satisfaction to the scientific-spectacle-seeking patient.

 

Thirdly, the idea that dilution increases potency is a homeopathic one,

utterly in opposition to orthodox medical thought. The works of

historian Harris Coulter, especially the three volume masterwork Divided

Legacy, will provide readers with very ample, very rational support for

homeopathy and there is no need to try to justify it here. Homeopathy,

itself regarded as quackery by many, is practiced by a large minority of

licensed medical doctors worldwide. It is at least close enough to

reason that over-the-counter homeopathic remedies are sold in Wal-Marts

and the federal government both codifies and approves the manufacture of

such remedies in the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States.

Double-blind, tightly controlled studies of homeopathic remedies have

indeed verified their statistical significance to a very high degree,

and their record of safety is unassailable even by the Food and Drug

Administration.

 

Back to Bach: his flower remedies seemed to work. Medical doctors

would follow him, leaving a broad trail of case notes, published

articles, and textbooks in their wake. It is a bold move to dismiss all

these physicians as quacks without at least trying the remedies first.

I have seen first hand how they help the people who come to see me.

Placebo effect? You think? How about injections of sterile water?

They have a high cure rate. What of placebo surgery, where you have the

scar, but nothing was changed internally, and the patient doesn't know

it? Again, they are among the most successful of all operations. In a

back issue of the Consultant (a physician's journal), I happened to read

an article called " Placebo Revisited: A Most Useful Therapy. " Placebos

work the best, said the author (an MD), on the most educated people.

Figure that one out.

 

OK, let's. The vast majority of medical procedures have never been

adequately placebo tested. Here's a blatant example: radiation therapy

for cancer. Picture this: a sick, scared patient is told with

confidence that, of course, radiation treatments are the way to go to

kill a tumor or stop it from spreading. The patient is subjected to

long waits in waiting rooms with other believers; high bills for the

procedure; awesomely large equipment with dials, lights, technicians and

mysteries; and finally being placed basically naked under or into this

machine.

 

Now let's be scientific. I want another room, just as white and just

as bright; with a fake machine that is just as impressive; with

confederates disguised as fellow cancer sufferers chatting about the

wonders of the impending treatment with the patient; lots of lights and

dials that make the bridge of the starship Enterprise look like a rusty

waterheater; and lots of dignified technicians, tech-speaking doctors,

and sky-high bills to match. All identical to the radiation room, and

all completely fake. Now that is a placebo.

 

So what do you think will be the success rate of the bogus " treatments "

as opposed to scads of rads? How much is radiation and how much is

expectation? I think the results will be so similar that this control

will never be done.

 

So who are the quacks?

 

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul. From the books QUACK

DOCTOR and PAPERBACK CLINIC, available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8

Van Buren Street, Holley, New York 14470.

 

 

 

Dr. Andrew Saul

--

 

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