History of the Hoxsey Anti-Cancer Treatment

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A very interesting article.

 

Best,

 

Ian

 

 

History of Hoxsey Treatment

by Patricia Spain Ward, PhD

 

The cancer treatment practiced by Harry M. Hoxsey (1901-1974)

is one of the longest-lived unconventional therapies of this century.

It has retained great popular appeal, despite unrelenting opposition

by the medical profession; despite 40 years of biting journalistic

ridicule by such skilled AMA journalists as Arthur Cramp and

Morris Fishbein; despite an unceasing stream of court actions;

even despite an unprecedented " Public Warning Against Hoxsey

Cancer Treatment " which the Commissioner of the FDA ordered

mounted in 46,000 US post offices and substations in 1956 (Young,

1967, 387; Larrick, 1956). Since Hoxsey's death, his treatment has

continued under his longtime nurse assistant, Mildred Nelson, [RN,]

who currently oversees the thriving Bio-Medical Center at Tijuana,

within sight of the border between Mexico and the United States.

(Hoxsey himself chose this site in 1963, when his heart had begun

to fail and the combined pressures of organized medicine and the

FDA had finally closed down his last operation in the US

[Chowka, 1984; New York Times, 1955].)

 

An Illinois coal miner before he began to promote himself as a healer

in the 20s, the colorful, dynamic Hoxsey mixed his medicine with

flamboyant public statements that skillfully contrasted his populist

heritage with the growing elitism and hauteur of the American

medical profession at mid-twentieth century (Young, 1967). In

common with many advocates of unconventional therapies, Hoxsey

considered cancer a systemic disease, however localized its

manifestations might appear to be. Hence his therapy aims

to restore " physiological normalcy " to a disturbed metabolism

throughout the body, with emphasis on purgation [cleansing],

to help carry away wastes from the tumors he believed his herbal

mixtures caused to necrotize [necrotize means to kill or cause

to die; in this instance, to kill the tumor] (Hoxsey, 1956, 44-48, 60).

 

Hoxsey treated external cancers apparently with considerable

success, even in the judgment of his critics, with local applications:

sometimes by a red paste containing antimony sulfide, bloodroot

(Sanguinaria canadensis) and zinc chloride; sometimes by a yellow

powder containing arsenic and antimony sulfides, various plant

substances, talc, and what Hoxsey called yellow precipitate

(JAMA, 1951, 253; Hoxsey, 1956, 47). In 1941 Frederick Mohs, a

respected surgeon in Madison, Wisconsin, with the help of the

Dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and several

of its faculty, devised a method of surgically removing accessible

cancers under complete microscopic control (Mohs, 1941). The

substance which Dr. Mohs and his co-workers created for fixing the

suspected tissue in situ, to enable him to excise it layer by

microscopic layer, contained the same ingredients as Hoxsey's red

paste. Dr. Mohs published his new method in 1941 in the

ultra-respectable Archives of Surgery and in 1948 in JAMA (for later

refinements, see Mohs, 1956; Phelan 1962, 1963a, and 1963b).

Nonetheless, AMA spokesmen, during their accelerated onslaught on

Hoxsey in the 40s and 50s, discounted the fact that Mohs' paste and

Hoxsey's were identical. In condemning caustic pastes as one type of

frauds and fables in 1949, the AMA implied that arsenic was the chief

ingredient of Hoxsey's paste, on the basis of their own testing of a

sample pirated in the 20s (JAMA, 1926, 57; Young, 1967, 365).

Apparently Mohs' use of surgery (which, along with radiation,

constituted

the entire range of what the Council considered " established treatment " )

 

made his method, in contrast to Hoxsey's, " scientific " and acceptable.

The Council failed to grasp the central fact that both men were using

sanguinarine, an alkaloid of bloodroot which has potent antitumor

properties described in the medical literature as early as

1829 (Young, 1967, 365; Hartwell, 1960, 23-24).

 

The most controversial aspect of Hoxsey's method, in the eyes of

orthodox medicine, was the dark brown liquid which he used to treat

internal cancer. For many years Hoxsey refused to divulge the formula

for this substance, generating a frenzy of vituperation in the pages of

JAMA over a period of decades. He later gave several differing accounts

of its origin (Young, 1967, 362). According to his autobiography

(Hoxsey, 1956, 62-64), it was his great grandfather, a horse breeder

named John Hoxsey, who developed it at mid nineteenth century,

out of grasses and flowering wild plants which John took from the

pasture where a favorite stallion, afflicted with a cancerous growth,

grazed daily until the growth necrotized. According to Harry, John

Hoxsey reasoned that the wild plants had caused the stallion's

recovery. He therefore concocted a liquid out of " red clover and

alfalfa,

buckthorn and prickly ash " (and other plants which John could not

identify), gathered from the area where the stallion had apparently

cured himself.

 

John continued adding ingredients from old home remedies for

cancer, until he found an herbal mixture that seemed to help

similarly afflicted horses in the area around his farm, between

Carlinville and Edwardsville, Illinois. According to Harry, John's

reputation as a man with the " healing tetch' " soon brought him

business from horse breeders all over Illinois and as far

away as Kentucky and Indiana (Hoxsey, 1956, 64).

 

As the autobiographical account has it, John Hoxsey bequeathed

the formula to his son, who in turn presented it to Harry's father,

John, a veterinary surgeon licensed under the grandfather clause

of the Illinois Medical Practice Act of 1877. " Fired with the notion

that a remedy effective in curing horses might be of equal benefit

to human beings stricken with the same disease, " John Hoxsey

began " quietly treating cancer patients " under the supervision of

two MDs in the region of Girard, Illinois, where he bought a livery

stable shortly after Harry's birth in 1901. From the age of 8, Harry

served as his father's trusted assistant, as growing numbers of

human patients gradually crowded out his veterinary practice

(Hoxsey, 1956, 66-71). Recognizing Harry's calling to be a doctor,

John gave the family formulas as a deathbed legacy to Harry in 1919,

charging him to go forth and heal the sick if need be, in defiance

of the " High Priests of medicine " (Hoxsey, 1956, 65, 71-74; Young,

1967, 362-363).

 

Harry's initial unwillingness to disclose the formula, taken together

with his peripatetic [moving frequently] existence (Taylorville,

Illinois;

Chicago; Clinton, Iowa;Philadelphia; Detroit; Wheeling; Atlantic City;

Dallas),

his growing financial success, and his open taunting of organized

medicine, led Morris Fishbein to label Harry (and his late father) as

charlatans. This assault, entitled " Blood Money " and published in

1947 in the Hearst chain's widely circulated magazine section,

American Weekly, provoked Harry to sue for libel. He won though

the judgment called only for a token payment for injury

to Harry's and his father's reputations (Young, 1967, 374-375).

 

By 1950, court decisions had sufficiently broadened the labelling

requirements of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to enable

the FDA to act against Hoxsey's interstate shipments. In the

ensuing litigation, Hoxsey revealed the composition of his

long-secret preparation. He explained that, depending on the type

and stage of cancer, and the individual patient's condition, he

added to a basic solution of cascara (Rhamnus purshiana) and

potassium iodide one or more of the following plant substances:

poke root (Phytolacca americana); burdock root (Arctium lappa);

barberry or berberis root (Berberis vulgaris); buckthorn bark

(Rhamnus frangula); Stillingia root (Stillingia sylvatica);

and prickly ash bark (Zanthoxylum americanum)

(Young, 1967, 375; Hoxsey, 1956, 45-46; JAMA, 1951, 252; JAMA,

1954, 667; Farnsworth, 1988).

 

For all that the AMA and the FDA had been trying to force this

revelation from Hoxsey for more than a quarter-century, they

did not respond to it by investigating these botanical constituents

for possible pharmacological properties. Instead, the AMA

Bureau of Investigation dismissed the entire formula as worthless:

" only potassium iodide has any recognized therapeutic activity.

" The Bureau added that " Any person possessing a modicum

of knowledge of the pharmacological action of drugs should

know that any combination of ingredients listed on the current

label of Hoxsey Tonic.. .is without any therapeutic merit in the

treatment of cancer. " Disregarding the most fundamental

question in science -- i.e., What is the evidence? -- the AMA

insisted that " Any intelligent physician " could testify that all

of these substances were worthless in the internal treatment

of cancer (JAMA, 1954, 667-668).

 

A specialist in pharmacological and experimental therapeutics

from Johns Hopkins testified at the FDA trial that there was no

basis for therapeutic claims for any of the contents, but he did

not publish either laboratory or clinical data to support this

conclusion. A noted cancer research scientist testified that, in

an experiment he had conducted for the FDA (also apparently

unpublished), malignant growths in mice appeared larger at autopsy

than before the mice received the Hoxsey tonic (Young, 1967,

375-376). The FDA and the NCI merely reviewed cases. In the

public warning issued against Hoxsey in 1956, Commissioner

George P. Larrick stated that the FDA, after what he called a

thorough and long-continuing investigation, had " not found a

single verified cure of internal cancer effected by the Hoxsey

treatment. " Larrick's warning said an NCI review of case histories

submitted by Hoxsey likewise failed to provide evidence of

therapeutic effect (Larrick, 1956).

 

In addition to an extensive literature attesting the folk use of

Hoxsey's herbal ingredients in the treatment of cancer

(Hartwell, 1967 and 1971), the orthodox medical literature at

that time contained at least one suggestive article about one of

them, based on empirical observation by a regular, orthodox

practitioner. In 1896, in the Medical and Surgical Reporter

(Philadelphia), a surgeon described the action of poke root as

retarding the growth of epitheliomas and increasing the patient's

survival time, if it was given before ulceration became extensive

(Millard, 1896, 421). Despite bibliographic tools that make it easy

to search the medical literature back through the 19th century

and beyond, this article had apparently escaped the

attention of the AMA, the FDA, and the NCI.

 

More recent literature leaves no doubt that Hoxsey's formula,

however strangely concocted by modern scientific standards,

does indeed contain many plant substances of marked

therapeutic activity [emphasis added]. In fact, orthodox

scientific research has by now identified antitumor activity of one

sort or another in all but three of Hoxsey's plants and two of these

three are purgatives, one of them (Rhamnus purshiana) containing

the anthraquinone glycoside structure now recognized as predictive

of antitumor properties (Kupchan, 1976). Between 1964 and 1968 four

articles appeared in Lancet, Pediatrics, and Nature, describing the

mitogenic activity of pokeweed, which triggers the immune system

by increasing the number of lymphocytes, causing the formation of

plasma cells, and elevating levels of immunoglobulin G (Farnes, 1964;

Barker, 1965; Barker, 1966; Downing, 1968).

 

In 1966 two Hungarian scientists, engaged in a screening program

at the University of Szeged, published their findings of " considerable

antitumor activity " in a purified fraction of burdock, a plant which

they included in their project because of its use as a folk remedy

for new growths and ulcerations (Dombradi, 1966). In 1972 Kupchan

described the growth-inhibiting activity of sesquiterpene lactones,

a structural group which includes burdock (Kupchan, 1972). In 1984

researchers at Nagoya University, Japan, found in burdock a new

type of desmutagen: a substance uniquely capable of reducing

mutagenicity both in the absence and in the presence of metabolic

activation. So important is this new property that these scientists

named it the B-factor, for burdock factor (Morita et al., 1984).

 

Two recent studies from the Orient, one Japanese, one Chinese,

have established the presence of antitumor substances in

barberry (which Hoxsey also sometimes called berberis root).

Testing tumor size in mice by the total packed cell volume method,

Hoshi and his co-workers found strong antitumor activity in

berberrubine, an alkaloid isolated from Berberis vulgaris (Hoshi, 1976).

 

Also in 1976, Owen et al. derived from berberine a new antitumor

substance which they have named Lycobetaine (Owen, 1976).

 

At the University of Virginia in the mid-70s, Kupchan and Karim

isolated an antileukemic principle from buckthorn

(Rhamnus frangula). Their discovery that the efficacy of this

substance in leukemia is vehicle-dependent led these scientists

to advise re-testing of other anthraquinone plant substances

for similar antitumor activity (Kupchan, 1976).

 

The least studied of Hoxsey's herbs to date are stillingia

sylvatica and prickly ash (Zanthoxylum americanum), but even

these are represented in the scholarly literature. In 1980 two

German scientists discovered several new diterpene-esters

(a chemical group known to have antitumor activity) in Stillingia

root, the portion of this plant used by Hoxsey (Adolf, 1980). At a

symposium on folk medicine in 1986, Varro Tyler observed that,

despite the wide use of northern prickly ash bark in folk medicine,

it has been nearly 50 years since any studies were done of its

chemical composition and there have never been activity-directed

fractionation studies. Noting that pharmacological tests have

revealed significant anti-inflammatory and anesthetic properties

in several closely related species, Tyler urges scientists to study

prickly ash for these and other therapeutic properties

(Tyler, 1987, 106).

 

Whether there is therapeutic merit in Hoxsey's particular formula

for internal use remains as much a question today as it was in

1925, despite provocative findings of antitumor properties in

many of the individual herbs he used. Neither laboratory nor

clinical reports have roused the AMA, the FDA, or the ACS

to re-examine the possibility of efficacy.

 

In adding Hoxsey's remedy to its Unproven Methods list

(ACS, 1971), the ACS used its customary phraseology about

lack of evidence of worth. In actuality, except for work with

mice done in the 50s by an outside contractor for the NCI,

but never published in the scientific literature, it appears

that Hoxsey's treatment has never been tested, either in

animals or in humans. The only negative investigation cited

by the ACS was a three-day visit to Hoxsey's clinic by

several Canadian physicians, who failed to find merit in

his methods (American Cancer Society; Moss, 1980).

 

As recently as 1965, Morris Fishbein, former long-time

editor of JAMA, repeated in Perspectives in Biology and

Medicine a rolling, melodramatic sentence he had first

coined for a popular presentation of the AMA case against

quackery on the March of Time. In 1947, in a major JAMA

editorial called " Hoxsey Cancer Charlatan " , Fishbein reiterated

this favorite phrase: " Of all the ghouls who feed on the bodies

of the dead and the dying, the cancer quacks are most vicious

and most heartless. " Verbiage such as this, widely circulated

by the influential writer who was the " Voice of American

Medicine " for more than four decades, has done much to

set the low level of discourse and the emotional rather than

analytical tone that have characterized the American medical

profession's response to unorthodox remedies.

 

In 1976, surveying the results of the plant screening program

begun in 1960 by the Cancer Chemotherapy National Services

Center at the NCI, Richard Spjut noted that the occurrence of

activity was found to be higher in plants reported in folk literature

than in plants collected at random, " suggesting a correlation

between plants used in folklore and those with anticancer activity "

(Spjut, 1976, 979). Jonathan Hartwell, the chemist who long directed

this national program of drug development from plant products,

also values folk usage as a guide to plants likely to yield

therapeutically active substances. In his Plant Remedies for

Cancer (1960), Hartwell quoted historian of science, George Sarton,

on the recurrent phenomenon of initial medical hostility toward folk

remedies that eventually become valued tools in conventional

medical usage. Writing in 1947, Sarton had in mind chaulmoogra

(for leprosy), cinchona bark (for malaria), and variolation

(for smallpox): to these we can now add (for cancer alone) periwinkle,

mistletoe (labelled a " promotion " by Morris Fishbein as recently

as 1965), Mayapple, autumn crocus, and chaparral tea. Sarton

counselled the profession to exhibit less intellectual arrogance

and more open-mindedness: " The remembrance of these astounding

folk discoveries should sober our thoughts when we criticize too

freely the old pharmacopoeias. It is easy to make fun of

mediaeval recipes; it is more difficult and may be wiser to investigate

them. Instead of assuming that the mediaeval pharmacist was a

benighted fool, we might wonder whether there was not sometimes

a justification for his strange procedure. " (quoted in Hartwell, 1960,

24).

 

 

Bibliography

 

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