results published in the medical literature but was blocked at every turn? Isn't that the case with many others too? Yes, let's look at this.  Like most of those who discover an alt cure for cancer Gerson had little actual experience with cancer patients.  He developed his regime for TB patients in a remote  sanatorium in Europe, and would have seen little cancer until later trying his treatment out on American  cancer patients. Although quite a few 'alternative cancer cures' have arisen from doctors, they are never from areas of medicine where cancer patients are actually treated.    The vast majority of 'cures' arise form those employed in even more remote fields such as   dentists (Kelley), laboratory scientists (Pauling, Krebs, Warburg, Budwig) , naturopaths (Clark) and even entirely non-medical personages (Rife, etc). The relevance of this is that the founders of the treatments actually have little or no knowledge of the natural variability of cancer outcomes and progress.  They may assume it is always a rapidly progressive disease, they invariably tend to underestimate the results of conventional treatment, and they tend to generalise from cases that may only represent the extremes of a bell curve. This, along with ubiquitous placebo influences,  is why practitioners  can try  out a cancer treatment on a few patients and genuinely think they are helping.    They may subsequently submit  what they sincerely think are impressive case histories (selected out of a lot of dismal ones that are disregarded, or for which excuses can always be found),  but those more experienced with cancer can be quite unimpressed. (There is also often a lot of rewriting of history about old cancer legends like Gerson, and it is usually impossible to check the actual cases or what really happened..  ) Now, is this more elitism, and poo-pooing of what conventional medicine just doesn't want to believe?   No.  I can prove what I say.  I can show how easily and repeatedly this happens.. Are you aware of recent events within Italy, where a doctor named Di Bella claimed that he had a cancer cure?   His genuinely held claims, rumours of cures, and immense public pressure actually  forced the government to provide his very expensive treatment to cancer patients, until two separate large trials showed it did not work in any patient. Similarly  with Laetrile.   Despite the claims of the promoters, all the testimonials and enormous hype, a nationwide call to find patients cured by Laetrile produced only one or two reasonably impressive cases at a time when it had been used by many thousands of cancer sufferers.  While alt.med supporters always like to emphasise the few amongst the thousands,  this is what you would expect with any widely used treatment.  Even within conventional medicine we have the odd unexpected outcome. The same happened recently with shark cartilage, initially  promoted by Lane, who was a biochemist, but I think at the time he was attached to a fishery concern.   It failed in several controlled trials. Pauling was surprised when Vitamin C failed in clinical trials.      Hoffer (a psychiatrist) claimed to also have an orthomolecular  cancer cure with his huge doses of vitamins, but recent analysis of his patients with breast cancer showed his patients if anything did worse. Do you not see the recurring pattern?   Hoffer and Pauling and Gerson are/were quite sincere individuals.  We are not talking about cancer frauds here, although Lane goes close and Clark is probably just delusional, having no basis other than a ridiculous quack machine (that no one else can get to work) on which to claim she has ever cured cancer.. The proof of the pudding so far as  Gerson is concerned is the clinic's recently published results for melanoma, a cancer for which they  thought they were getting their best results.  They were not impressive.  They had NO survivors in patients with Stage 1V disease, by far the largest group treated.   .Allowing for the fact that over a third of their patients were unaccounted for and possibly deceased,  their results with other stages were not particularly impressive.  They claimed 100% survival rates in a few patients who had had stage 1 melanomas.  I can get that just by cutting them out, and I wonder why they were treating already cured patients. Recent review of patients at the Livingstone-Wheeler and American Biologics clinics show little indication that those treatments have any substantial influence on cancer.   There were very few five year survivors. Understand I am not claiming that no alternative cancer treatment has NO effect on cancer.    Some could prolong survival, a question that is impossible to prove or disprove outside complex prospective trials. The problem is that they are being unquestionably promoted as cures*, and often at an expense and stress to the patient which makes anything less scarcely worthwhile.  The Gerson and Clark regimes are  very arduous, and many are unable to keep them up.  Of course that enables any failures to  be blamed on the patient for not doing it all right. * which can result in patients not using truly useful curative and palliative treatments.  That is why I think 'alternatives' need to validate themselves better, and a little truth needs to be injected into all the nonsense spread within alt circles. Peter Moran

Peter Moran ****************************************************   Nice trick Peter. Set up some straw men to knock down and claim they represent alternative medicine's answer to cancer as a whole. Now for some of organised medicine's games read on. Many people are deceived by orthodox medicines clinical trials game. It is used as a stick to beat unapproved treatments with. They repeat ad-nauseum the erroneous charge of it's untested, there is only anecdotal (a purposeful mis-use of the word) evidence to support the claims. First of all, the only drug test worth anything are double-blind studies. Quite obviously radiation and chemotherapy cannot be tested this way because everyone would know who was getting the treatment. The fact is that a 1978 report by the Office of Technology Assessment found that between 80% and 90% of current orthodox medical procedures have never met this standard. Secondly, other drug trials are not a magic formula for truth. They are run by scientists who are under a lot of pressure and financial incentives to provide positive results for pharmaceutical companies who spend millions of dollars for these trials. Anybody can skew statistics any way they want, and as the articles below show, corruption is rampant in drug trials and medicine as a whole. A Harvard Ph.D is worthless without the foundations of scrupulous ethics and honesty. The best evidence that any cancer treatment works are the patients alive and side-effect free because of it. The fact is that pharmaceutical companies run medicine in America. They have one all-consuming preocupation; to make as much profit as possible,

Remember old Dr Max Gerson? Remember how he battled to have his results published in the medical literature but was blocked at every turn? Isn't that the case with many others too? YES,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,read Peter Moran's posts and you have the answer to this question. If he sees the word alt,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,the brain goes into high organized medicine gear. He is ridiculous hopeless. Don't be fooled, do your own research and see why many people are turning to alternative/complementary medicine. Jan

Apologies.  I realise I referred to Stage 1 melanoma when I meant Level 1 (Melanoma in Situ) Peter Moran