Can Dr Gerson’s diet cure cancer?

The Gerson diet is has not been proven to successfully treat one case of cancer, ever. As with other alternative cancer treatments, many people have tried it after or alongside conventional cancer treatments, and some have chosen to credit subsequent improvement in their condition to the Gerson therapy rather than the conventional (proven) treatment. Here are some informed articles on Gerson, the first being about his famous 50 ‘best cases’, only four of which appear anything like credible:

http://www.users.on.net/~pmoran/cancer/Gerson.htm

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/OTA/ota03.html

What follows is a cut and paste of a reply I gave to a recent question on Gerson, detailing my personal experience following my diagnosis with stage 3 grade 3 breast cancer – that’s advanced and aggressive ( it’s too long to type out again). Interestingly, the asker berated me for taking vast quantities of vitamins and supplements, saying this could make the situation worse. Interesting, because while he was passionaately defending Gerson and claiming thousands had been cured by it, he didn’t realise that this huge intake of pills is an essential part of the regime. I followed exactly the type and quantities of supplements recommended in the Gerson regime:

You may be interested to know that at the time of my diagnosis I had been a vegan for 8 years (and a vegetarian for most of my life) and was a juicing enthusiast; I started most days with green juice. I mention this because Gerson’s regime is largely vegan and freshly made juice every hour is an essential part of it.

I was also something of an alternative medicine enthusiast at the time, and frantic to avoid harsh treatments. I visited (among other alternative practitioners) a nutritionist, who guided me in starting a diet almost identical to to Gerson’s, recommended by a British nutrition organisation.

I wasn’t willing to pay the few thousand pounds the organisation wanted for providing the information, visiting me and providing the food, vitamins etc I would need for two years, but the nutritionist agreed to give me the basic diet and guide me through it. I intended to follow it as a substitute for chemotherapy, and spent a couple of hundred pounds on vitamin pills and supplements. I passed on the enemas; the nutritionist thought this would be ok as I was taking milk thistle.

A couple of days into the regime, drinking juice every hour and consuming enormous amounts of vitamin pills caused me to vomit regularly, and in the end my stomach turned even as I contemplated the dreary routine of making and drinking the juices (it put me off juice for years). I could barely bring myself to get out of bed in the morning. There were nights when I went to bed weeping with hunger because I couldn’t face the bland and repetitive food I was ‘allowed’ on this restrictive (even for a vegan) diet. I lasted two weeks and felt so much better when I started eating what the hell I wanted.

I’ve only known one person who followed the Gerson diet to the letter; she was a contributor to a breast cancer forums whose prognosis was almost as bad as mine. She was a fine, strong woman who had surgery but refused further conventional treatment. As well as reading her contributions I had an email exchange with her, first out of interest in Gerson and later as a sceptic.

She had a recurrence after a year or so; she continued with the Gerson diet and seemed to be doing well. A year or so later she stopped posting; I have no idea why, and it’s always a worry on a cancer forum when you stop hearing from someone suddenly. A website she ran on alternative cancer treatments came to a full stop too. I emailed her but, uncharacteristacally, she didn’t reply. I hope she’s still fit and well, but I fear the worst.

Yes, anecdote; but it’s impossible to provide anything else, either way, in the absence of proof.

I went on to have conventional treatment, and am fit and well and have been in remission for over 5 years.

The Dr. Gerson diet is not a bad thing, but it lacks addressing all the issues with cancer. I’ve never known anyone that was hurt by the diet. Contrary to popular beliefs by many people, vegetarianism and veganism is NOT the best healthy diet to follow. Gerson makes a big point in his diet by saying that the person with cancer cannot digest food with fiber very well and this is why he promotes juicing. The coffee enemas have worked wonders for many people, but that is not enough to do the kind of cleansing that needs to be done to address cancer properly.

There are many reasons for getting cancer and many of those cannot be helped by changing your diet to a vegan or vegetarian diet. In fact, the nutritionist the other poster talked about that recommended Milk Thistle for cleaning the liver is misinformed. Yes, it is recommended and some people have reported a benefit, but is falls way short of what should be done to clean the liver, especially if someone has cancer.

We know that 99% of ALL cancers come from infections. Some will say that is not true and that genetics plays a huge roll, but realize that something has to turn that gene on and you are in more control of your genes than you realize in many ways. Most of what medical science does is focus on killing the germ or removing the cancer, but that does little in most cases to get to the root cause of cancer.

Dr. Thomas Rau, who runs the Paracelsus Clinic (cancer clinic since 1958) in Switzerland recently, checked the records of the last 150 breast cancer patients treated in his clinic. He found that 147 of them (98%) had one or more root canal teeth on the same meridian as the original breast cancer tumor. His clinic has a biological dentist section where all cancer patients, on reporting in, have their mouth cleaned up first — especially all root canal teeth removed. They are getting a phenomenal success rate since they have focused on cleaning up the mouth with their patients.

If you ignore the root cause of the cancer and only focus on the cancer itself, you will not get good results, especially the long term successes that everyone wants to achieve. There are over 24 million root canals done each year on Americans. The aniline chemicals used to deaden the nerves such as Lidocaine, Procaine, Carbocaine are all AGGRESSIVELY CARCINOGENIC. The body’s immune system cannot clean up that mess. Each 2cc shot of Lidocaine contains enough toxins to equal you smoking a pack of cigarettes each day for 12.9 years! And it is cumulative. Vaccination toxins do not leave the body and end up in connective tissues from the time you get the shot till you die unless you remediate that injection site.

Our bodies were not designed to deal with the enormous toxic load we put on it. From amalgam fillings to cleaning supplies, and even the food being sold in stores is very toxic with little nutrient value. All this contributes to making people sick and open to get cancer.

When people get rid of ALL OF THEIR TOXIC BURDENS in the body, stop eating toxic foods, eliminate harmful chemicals, remediate EMF’s, and start eating diets like primitive people ate, people get over cancer. I have seen this. GERSON’S diet is not a bad thing, but it does fall short of what needs to be done.

Chemotherapy in many cases causes cancers to metasticize and get worse. Breast, colon, and lung cancers do not respond to chemotherapy, but cancer doctors give this treatments all the time to "give hope to the patient." That is bad science and should be deemed unethical, but no one is paying attention obviously. Each cancer patient is worth $300,000 to the medical community and that is just too much temptation, obviously to find a real way to prevent cancer.

good luck to you

"Sometimes the most complex challenges require the simplest of solutions… "

Nice soundbite but can you think of any situation where that statement is correct? No, me neither.

Diet has not and probably will not ever cure cancer. You can avoid some foods (such as heavily processed meat products) that have been indicated as a cancer risk though.

Ignore the more far-fetched ideas about 99% of all infections causing cancer, or the body’s ‘meridians’ or other conspiracy theories about cancer treatment causing cancer (duh! you’d think that little secret would be difficult to keep wouldn’t you?).