Dying to Have Known
Written and produced by Steve Kroschel
The Gerson therapy for cancer treatment has always been controversial and continues to be. In this video an investigator interviews numerous people on both sides of the subject. Naturally Charlotte Gerson, daughter and assistant of Dr. Max Gerson, developer of the therapy, is introduced early on. As you might guess, she is favorable to the Gerson therapy. Shortly after that, Dr. Dean Edell asserts that Gerson hasn’t cured any terminal cancer cases and that all testimonials claiming otherwise are cases of misdiagnosis or involved a type of cancer that would have disappeared without intervention anyway. Several others who are critical of the therapy say similar things. This movie demonstrates that once your mind is made up, it rarely changes regardless of whatever evidence is out there to refute your position.
The current medical system has its shortcomings. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote an editorial titled “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” Her answer, in a nutshell, is yes. Another good question asked in the video is that if allopathic medicine is the only thing that works and works well, why are millions of people looking for alternatives?
Dr. Wallace Sampson says that in order for him to be convinced that the Gerson therapy has any merit he would have to accept that everything we’ve known about cancer for the last fifty years is wrong. Since we don’t have a cure yet, either everything we think we know is not right, or it is right and the best we have been able to come up with after fifty years are treatments that are worse than the disease. If that is the case then I’m forced to conclude that we are truly a race of slobbering idiots. I seriously doubt that anything will ever convince Dr. Sampson to change his mind.
Max Gerson’s original therapy included raw liver juice. When that became hard to get, daughter Charlotte dropped that part of the therapy. Now a crude liver extract injection or desiccated liver tablets are used in the current protocol, something that is not mentioned in this video. That may be because one of the things being promoted here is a plant-based diet. T. Colin Campbell (The China Study) and Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. make appearances to promote that very thing.
This video is pro-Gerson. It is not hard for me to believe that the Gerson therapy (especially the original one) results in cancer remission for many people. For anyone on the standard American diet and lifestyle, just about anything could promote health improvement. However, I think any implication that a vegan or near-vegan diet is the way to go in the long run is wrong. I find myself in the interesting position of disagreeing at least to some extent with both sides of the subject as presented here. That would mean my thumb is DOWN.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2012.
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