Part I 

Chemotherapy and the Gerson Patient

by Charlotte Gerson, President, The Gerson Institute

During the mid-fifties, just as Dr. Gerson was demonstrating some of his most dramatic results with a nutritional treatment for cancer, chemotherapy started to be used by establishment medicine. The reason was the general disillusion with the results of surgery and radiation in the treatment of cancer patients. The chemotherapeutic drugs were supposed to stop the fast reproduction of tumor cells - and thus stop cancer. Originally, these highly toxic agents were based on the mustard gas of warfare of which there was a huge remaining supply after the end of World War II. When these drugs soon were found to be too toxic and at best only temporarily effective, new combinations were compounded all supposedly stopping or slowing the multiplication of fast growing tissue. But since there are various tissues in the human body which must multiply rapidly (bone marrow producing red and white blood corpuscles which constitute a large part of the immune system) other very serious side-effects were always present with the chemotherapy treatments: damage to bone marrow; poisoning of the liver and often destruction of the kidneys, not to speak of damage also to the heart.

In spite of over 30 years of use of chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer patients, and in spite of its status as a 'proven' cancer treatment, these drugs have never been officially accepted nor do they have the full approval of FDA. Chemotherapy is still an "experimental" treatment, largely because it has never undergone 'double blind' studies. Why not?

Chemotherapy was just being introduced toward the end of Dr. Gerson's practice in New York, shortly before he died. He talks about his experience with Johnny Gunther in Appendix II of A Cancer Therapy Results of 50 Cases, p. 415. (See also John Gunther's book, Death Be Not Proud) Johnny was possibly the only patient Dr. Gerson treated after he had been given chemotherapy. The book describes the terrible response, the swollen arm, the severe bone marrow depression and the doctor's expectation that Johnny would quickly die. Nobody suspected that Dr. Gerson could reverse some of the damage. But Dr. Gerson could not have known what the Gerson doctors in Mexico have discovered after years of working with cancer patients who had previously been given chemotherapy, namely that these heavy drugs are released back into the system and cause the prior poisoning symptoms to show up once more. This generally happens after some six months on the Gerson Therapy. That was also Dr. Gerson's experience with Johnny Gunther - but he did not know that it was due to the prior chemotherapy treatment. He took the blame for Johnny's death, assuming that the only cause was the treatment with hormones which he had applied.

Oncologists using chemotherapy drugs in the treatment of their cancer patients are told that the body, in time, excretes these drugs, and that the damage is thus overcome. It is true that many patients grow hair again after they have lost it; that their blood count comes back up to near normal and their mucous membranes heal after breaking down with ulcers due to the chemotherapy treatments. They overcome the terrible nausea and vomiting caused by the toxic drugs, the weakness and depression, etc. (Of course if they suffer also the loss of kidney function due to the chemotherapeutic drugs, this does not reverse. The kidneys, once destroyed, do not recover.) But overcoming the immediate toxicity does not prove that all the toxic materials have left the body. On the contrary, the Gerson doctors' experience with patients who have had prior treatment with chemotherapy gives an entirely different picture.