Dr Max Gerson Healing the Hopeless

Description

Dr. Max Gerson's life story deserves to be told. He was a pioneer physician of dietary therapy for chronic diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer, recognizing the value of good nutrition in enabling the healing process and maintaining good health. He was also what one might classify as a health ecologist, a practitioner of environmental medicine, concerned about the adverse effects of modem technology upon the natural world and the human body. And he was possibly the first truly holistic physician to practice in the United States, in the time just before holistic medicine became the watchword for a new medical philosophy that addressed the whole person, integrating body, mind and spirit. Gerson called his own approach to medicine "totality"- originally known as Ganzlidt in his homeland, Germany . • Many alternative or complementary practitioners now employ parts of the Gerson's dietary and detoxifying therapies, often without recognition of their source, yet a large body of scientific literature published in the 1920s and 1930s confirms Gerson's pioneering work in diet therapy - work that might have been recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine had the political situation gone very differently in his native Germany prior to World War ll under Nazi rule ... or had the American medical profession, after this German-Jew fled Nazi persecution to the United States in the mid 1930s, been more open to investigating the methods and results of his treatment of cancer and other intractable, degenerative diseases. Few if any references to Gerson's name and work can be found in American medical literature after 1946, unless they are defamatory. The sheer immensity of Dr. Gerson's achievements is staggering. He was able to prevent and cure, not simply arrest or slow, a wide range of degenerative diseases, including the top four killers in the United States-heart attack, cancer, stroke and diabetes - which together account for between two and three million deaths annually. Dr. Gerson also had remarkable success in treating rheumatoid arthritis, mu1- tiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, multiple chemical sensitivity and other immune system- connected or toxin-associated disorders. He did this without the financial or academic support of any university, government, institute or laboratory- working alone, while treating patients and maintaining a practice-though for brief periods of time, small private foundations did provide limited support. Yet Dr. Gerson's name remains unmentionable in medical literature, even as his principles regarding the importance of diet as prevention of and therapy for a wide variety of diseases are becoming accepted as standard medical thinking. His emphasis for health maintenance on sticking to a saltless, low-fat, largely vegetarian diet with ample fresh fruits and vegetables and whole-grain products, with no (or much restricted) stimulating or alcoholic drinks, no longer seems threatening to the establishment, but for over 6o years, the medical, pharmaceutical and governmental health authorities in the United States and abroad have seemingly done their utmost to maintain a total blackout on Gerson's therapies. Clinics have been shut down and physicians expelled from practice when they began to use the Gerson's therapeutic methods, specifically as a cure for cancer.