Gerson Clinic - Cancer Compass An Alternate Route

“I see in him 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. Yet, 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 has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.” Albert Schweitzer M.D., about his good friend Max Gerson

The Gerson Clinic

Max Gerson was born October 18, 1881. He attended the universities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. As a young man he frequently suffered from severe migraine headaches, so he began to focus his experimentation with diet on preventing them. As time progressed, one of Dr. Gerson’s patients discovered that the “migraine diet” also cured skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D. Under Sauerbruch’s supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.

Around this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer’s wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed her. Schweitzer’s own Type II diabetes was also cured by treatment with Gerson’s therapy, and the two men remained good friends for for the rest of their lives, maintaining regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally – cancer.

It was in 1938 that Dr. Gerson passed his medical boards and became a licensed doctor in the state of New York, and his work began to focus more on cancer. For twenty years, he treated hundreds of cancer patients who had been given up for dead after all conventional treatments had failed them. In 1946, Gerson demonstrated his work before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee which was holding hearing to determine funding for future cancer research. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients. Gerson described his approach in the book titled ‘‘A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer.’ Max Gerson died on March 8, 1959.

Charlotte Gerson, the daughter of the late Max Gerson, continued on with his work of healing cancer and other chronic illnesses. She founded the Gerson Institute and authored several books relating to healing from illnesses using the Gerson Therapy including, Healing the Gerson Way: Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases. For over 40 years, she lectured worldwide in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia on the cancer therapy that her father started so many decades ago. Charlotte has been featured in several documentaries to preserve the work of her father and recently celebrated her 91st birthday.

The therapy advocates the drinking of 13 servings of organic, raw juices daily, combined with a low-fat, low-sodium, vegetarian diet, specialized supplements, and digestive enzymes. The therapy also includes some detoxing therapies which included the use of coffee enemas (5 per day at the onset of therapy, with lessening as healing progresses), which are used to detoxify the liver, with the addition of castor oil enemas every other day at the beginning of the therapy. Castor oil enemas are only used by patients who have not had chemotherapy, and they are used specifically to remove any accumulated sludge from the intestines. Both are said to be an important part of healing with Gerson therapy.

The therapy usually begins by the patient and a companion going to the Gerson Clinic for a two or three week stay to learn all aspects of using the therapy, then patients are sent home to incorporate the dietary and detoxification teachings on their own. According to Dr Gerson, it will take about 2 years for the body to eliminate tumors, fully detoxify, and then rebuild the tissues when healing from a serious cancer. Stopping your healing diet prematurely would be detrimental, as would returning to your old diet and lifestyle habits after healing from cancer.

Gerson is an effective treatment for many cancers and other health issues, but it is not a recommended treatments for patients with brain cancers and the clinic will recommend that you be seen elsewhere. My own suggestions are to look at testimonials on this page for brain cancer, consider the ketogenic diet, and also look at the work of Dr Stanislaw Burzynski.