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

[Guest guest]

I found the information here about the migraine cure very

interesting; as well as what it says about pain and coffee enemas. And what it

says about

placebos and radiation at the end certainly is thought provoking. Hope you

find this as interesting as I did.

best wishes

Shan

 

Cancer and Flowers:

Max Gerson, M.D. and Edward Bach, M.D.

http://www.doctoryourself.com/cancer_flowers.html

 

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 heretic. 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 2004, 2003 and prior years Andrew W. Saul. Reprinted in part from

the books DOCTOR YOURSELF and FIRE YOUR DOCTOR, available from Andrew Saul,

23 Greenridge Crescent, Hamlin, New York 14464.