Gerson Therapy — The Documentary Record

The documentary record of the Gerson Therapy, as Max Gerson and Charlotte Gerson present it, runs from Gerson's early tuberculosis work with Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch in Munich, through his treatment of the Schweitzer family, his July 1946 testimony with five recovered cancer patients before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the Pepper-Neely bill, and his 1958 monograph A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, to the 1995 Hildenbrand retrospective review of 153 melanoma patients and the clinical work of the Austrian surgeon Peter Lechner in Graz. This page sets out that record as the Gerson authors report it, drawn closely from The Gerson Therapy by Charlotte Gerson and Morton Walker, D.P.M., together with the way the book documents its own patients.

Table of Contents

  1. Gerson's 1958 Monograph — The Fifty Cases
  2. The Pepper-Neely Anti-Cancer Hearings (1946)
  3. The Sauerbruch Skin-Tuberculosis Trial
  4. The Schweitzer Family — Tuberculosis and Diabetes
  5. Hildenbrand 1995 — The Melanoma Retrospective
  6. Molassiotis and the Austrian Work in Graz
  7. How the Book Documents Its Patients
  8. Key Research Papers
  9. Connections
  10. Featured Videos

Gerson's 1958 Monograph — The Fifty Cases

Max Gerson's 1958 book A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, published the year before his death, is the foundational documentary text of the protocol. Charlotte Gerson and Morton Walker call it “the most complete presentation of the Gerson Therapy program” and report that it has been reprinted thirty-eight times, with over 250,000 copies in English and some 88,000 more in four other languages.

The book is built around 50 individual patient histories from Gerson's New York practice, supplemented by chapters on the theory of the protocol, the dietary and enema technique, and Gerson's own medical history — including the severe migraine that first led him to dietary medicine as a young physician.

According to The Gerson Therapy, the 1958 monograph is “the largest body of evidence offering proof of the Gerson Therapy's value.” The book states that:

Gerson summarized the arc of his cancer work in his Senate testimony: his first cancer patient, with cancer of the bile ducts, was treated in 1928 with success, and “seven favorable cases followed out of twelve and remain free of symptoms up to seven years.” His posthumously published summary of thirty years of clinical work (Physiological Chemistry and Physics, 1978) restates the same approach. The biography chapter of The Gerson Therapy reports that his therapy brought far-advanced cancer patients “up to a 50 percent rate of recovery,” and that this rate fell once chemotherapy came into use and patients arrived already treated with it.

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The Pepper-Neely Anti-Cancer Hearings (1946)

Over three days, July 1 to 3, 1946, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations of the 79th Congress took testimony on U.S. Senate Bill 1875, the Pepper-Neely anticancer proposal. In the bill, Senators Claude Pepper (Florida) and Matthew Neely (West Virginia) proposed appropriating $100 million in federal funds for cancer research.

The book reports that two Washington-based investigators, a physician and an attorney, reported back to Senator Pepper that Gerson did have a successful cancer treatment, and that the Senate then invited him to demonstrate it. Gerson brought five of his recovered cancer patients and the records of five more for presentation to the subcommittee. In his testimony he described the diet's origin in his own migraine, its success in lupus vulgaris (skin tuberculosis) and then in tuberculosis of the bones, kidneys, eyes and lungs, and its use in arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure, psoriasis and liver and gallbladder disease. He set out the three components he believed explained its results: removing displaced sodium and toxins from the tissues, restoring the potassium group to the organs where it belongs, and restoring cell differentiation and oxidation with activated iodine.

The book reprints the broadcast that the radio commentator Raymond Gram Swing gave on the evening of July 3, 1946, after attending the hearing. Swing described a seventeen-year-old girl with an inoperable, paralyzing tumor at the base of the brain who walked without assistance to the witness chair; a former army sergeant, also with a tumor at the base of the brain, who testified as “the picture of health”; and a woman whose spreading breast cancer had resolved. “They are attested facts and not flukes,” Swing said, “and as such they have to be accounted for.”

The book reports that the bill was defeated by four votes after organized lobbying by medical and pharmaceutical interests, with four senators who were also medical doctors voting against it, and that the 227-page bill (Document No. 89471) now sits in the archives of the U.S. Government Printing Office. Senator Pepper's own words open the book's preface: “Dr. Max Gerson dedicated his life to the mastery of this scourge of cancer and all should honor his great work.”

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The Sauerbruch Skin-Tuberculosis Trial

The earliest large documented series in the Gerson record is the tuberculosis trial run by Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D., the Munich lung-tuberculosis specialist. As The Gerson Therapy tells it, Gerson's migraine diet unexpectedly healed a patient's lupus vulgaris; the patient sent other tubercular friends from his hospital, and they too recovered on the diet.

News of these recoveries reached Sauerbruch, who, after long discussions with Gerson on dietary concepts, set up a clinical trial of the Gerson method. The book reports that over an extended period Sauerbruch treated 450 “incurable” skin-tuberculosis patients with Gerson's diet, and that 446 recovered fully. The book states that Sauerbruch reported the trial and its results in his autobiography, Master Surgeon, and Swing's 1946 broadcast described the Sauerbruch-Gerson diet for skin tuberculosis as “well-known to European medicine” and “part of accepted medical literature.”

Gerson then extended the diet to lung, kidney and bone tuberculosis and, the book reports, found that those cases responded and were cured as well. In treating them he observed that other conditions the patients carried — high blood pressure, asthma, allergies, kidney damage, arthritis — also cleared, which led him to conclude that he was helping the body heal itself rather than treating one disease.

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The Schweitzer Family — Tuberculosis and Diabetes

The book names the medical missionary, philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer, M.D., as Gerson's most famous patient, and the Schweitzer family as one of the best-documented chapters in his tuberculosis and chronic-disease work.

Helene Schweitzer's lung tuberculosis

According to The Gerson Therapy, Helene Schweitzer had contracted tuberculosis at an early age in the tropics and was in terminal condition when her husband brought her to Gerson. The book reports that she recovered from her disease completely; the preface states that she went on to live another twenty-eight years, and the biography chapter that she lived well into her eighties.

Albert Schweitzer's diabetes

The book reports that Gerson treated Albert Schweitzer for adult-onset diabetes when Schweitzer was seventy-five years old, and that he was completely well after only six weeks of the therapy. Schweitzer returned to his hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon, French Equatorial Africa, where he ministered to many thousands of patients, received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, and worked past the age of ninety. “With diabetes eliminated from his life,” the book states, “Albert Schweitzer lived to be ninety-three years old.”

Rhena Schweitzer and the friendship of the two families

The book adds that Gerson healed a serious skin disease in the Schweitzers' nineteen-year-old daughter, Rhena, and that Charlotte (Lotte) Gerson and Rhena Schweitzer were friends during their teen years. The two physicians corresponded for years: Charlotte Gerson reports finding a letter from her father to Schweitzer describing the good results he had obtained with flaxseed oil and the amounts he used, and the Gerson Institute still follows that prescription. The book also quotes Schweitzer's 1954 observations from Lambaréné that cancer, rare when he arrived in 1913, became more frequent as local people moved from fruits, vegetables and root crops to salted, canned and preserved foods.

On Gerson's death in 1959, Schweitzer wrote, as the book quotes him: “I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. He has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.”

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Hildenbrand 1995 — The Melanoma Retrospective

The Gerson authors point to one peer-reviewed statistical analysis of a single cancer type: Gar Hildenbrand, L. Christeene Hildenbrand, Karen Bradford and Shirley Cavin, “Five-year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of Gerson: a retrospective review,” published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine in September 1995. The book reports that the study was carried out by members of the Gerson Institute and the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the University of California, both in San Diego.

The review covered 153 adult melanoma patients, aged twenty-five to seventy-two, treated with the Gerson Therapy from 1975 through July 1990. Almost all had been hospitalized at a Gerson facility in the Tijuana area of Mexico, and records were examined from four different hospitals there. The book stresses that the review described all patients, including those who did not respond to therapy. Patients followed a lacto-vegetarian, low-sodium, low-fat, low-protein diet of 2,600 to 3,200 calories a day, with hourly eight-ounce glasses of raw vegetable and fruit juice, thyroid, and coffee enemas as needed.

As the book reports them, the five-year survival results compared with published reference groups were:

The book adds that male and female survival was identical in the earlier stages, while women with stage IVA melanoma had a strong survival advantage over men. The authors did not assess stage IVB (visceral metastases) because, the book reports, they could not find a single comparable treatment group anywhere with which to make the comparison. The Gerson Therapy illustrates the series with the case history of Dael Mintz, a stage IV melanoma patient who began the therapy under medical supervision and continued it at home.

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Molassiotis and the Austrian Work in Graz

A second peer-reviewed record of Gerson patients is Molassiotis and Peat, “Surviving against all odds: analysis of 6 case studies of patients with cancer who followed the Gerson therapy,” Integrative Cancer Therapies 2007. It is a detailed case series of six long-term cancer survivors who attributed their survival to the Gerson protocol, reconstructing each patient's disease course, prior treatment history and adherence to the program, and the authors call for prospective study of the therapy.

In Austria, The Gerson Therapy reports, the surgeon Peter Lechner, M.D., of the Second Surgical Division of the Landeskrankenhaus in Graz, became interested in the Gerson Therapy and applied it to many of his outpatients. The book credits him with several pieces of work:

The Municipal Hospital of Graz is listed among the institutions the book's authors worked with, and the book's chapter on coffee enemas draws on Lechner's clinical observations throughout.

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How the Book Documents Its Patients

The Gerson Therapy builds its cancer chapters around named patient case histories, and it follows a consistent documentary practice in presenting them:

The book is candid about the limits of its own record keeping. It states that malignant melanoma is the only cancer for which a peer-reviewed retrospective statistical analysis has been published, and that exact figures for other cancers are not yet available because the Gerson Institute loses track of patients: once well, “they tend to stop communicating and go on with their lives.” To address this, the Gerson Institute's Client Services department created a Patient Support Network that puts new patients in touch with others who have undertaken the treatment. The book also gives practical guidance that it treats as part of responsible use: the program is stringent and work-intensive, it can be self-administered at home or carried out under physician supervision, and a licensed health professional is needed to interpret laboratory tests during treatment.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Gerson M, A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases (1958 monograph) — PubMed: Gerson 1958 monograph
  2. Gerson M. The cure of advanced cancer by diet therapy: a summary of 30 years of clinical experimentation. Physiol Chem Phys. 1978;10(5):449-464. — PubMed PMID: 751079
  3. Gerson MB. Dietary considerations in malignant neoplastic diseases; a preliminary report. Rev Gastroenterol. 1945;12:419-424. — PubMed PMID: 21005988
  4. Hildenbrand GL et al., Five-year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by Gerson diet therapy (1995) — PubMed: Hildenbrand 1995
  5. Molassiotis A and Peat P, Surviving against all odds: case studies of Gerson therapy patients (2007) — PubMed: Molassiotis 2007

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Gerson therapy
  2. PubMed: Gerson M, diet (author search)
  3. PubMed: Gerson diet and tuberculosis
  4. PubMed: Gerson diet therapy and melanoma

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Connections

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