THE MOSS REPORTS Newsletter (02/13/05): WILLIAM DONALD KELLEY (1925-2005)

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THE MOSS REPORTS Newsletter (02/13/05)

 

 

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Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. Weekly CancerDecisions.com

Newsletter #171 02/13/05

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WILLIAM DONALD KELLEY (1925-2005)

 

By Ralph W. Moss, PhD

 

 

 

William Donald Kelley, DDS, MS, one of the most significant figures in

the history of alternative cancer treatments, passed away on January

30, 2005, at the age of 79. The cause of death was congestive heart

failure. He had a long history of heart problems, with severe rhythm

disturbances, beginning in the 1960s.

 

Dr. Kelley was born on November 1, 1925 on an 80-acre " dirt farm " in

Winfield, Kansas. His father had died young of a heart attack and, during

the Great Depression, his mother raised three sons alone. All three

sons went to college, then graduate school, and became successful

professionals.

 

William Kelley was an unusual child. He once told me that when he was

three he had a vision of Jesus approaching him, as he was playing in a

sandpile. He took him up into his arms and instructed him to become a

medical missionary. Kelley later moved to Texas and studied at Baylor

University. Under the influence of his father-in-law, he became a

successful orthodontist, working 12 to 14 hours per day putting braces

on the

teeth of the children of Grapevine, Texas. He and his first wife adopted

four children and lived the typical suburban existence of the 1950s. In

what little spare time he had he restored antique cars. Always a

determined worker, he practically lived on candy bars and other junk

food.

 

Around 1960, his health began to deteriorate. The first thing he

noticed was diminishing eyesight. He also developed muscle cramps and

chest

pains and went into a severe mental depression. The culmination came in

1964, when he suffered acute gastric distention and was hospitalized. A

series of X rays showed the signs of advancing pancreatic cancer,

including lesions in his lungs, hip and liver. His surgeon refused to

operate, saying that Kelley had only four to eight weeks to live. The

doctors

were so certain of their diagnosis that they felt no need to take a

biopsy of the tumor, an omission that was to hound Kelley in later years.

 

Kelley was ready to give up, but his redoubtable frontier mother came

from Kansas to rescue him. She threw out the junk food and meat and

instructed him to eat only fresh and raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains

and seeds. After several months, Kelley began to feel better. He was

even able to return to work. In a health food store he then discovered

the

work of dietary pioneer, Max Gerson, who had written the book, Cancer

Therapy: Fifty Cases, which advocated a similar program.

 

After six or seven months, however, Kelley stopped improving and

developed severe digestive problems, probably from the advancing

cancer. He

therefore began taking pancreatic enzymes, at first simply to aid his

digestion. He eventually increased the dose to 50 enzyme capsules per

day. He then discovered the work of the Scottish embryologist, John

Beard,

DSc, who early in the 20th century had postulated that pancreatic

enzymes were a natural control for cancer. He also encountered the

writings

of Dr. Edward Howell, author of Enzyme Nutrition, and an early apostle

of the raw plant food diet. In time, Kelley healed from his own disease

and went on to treat over 30,000 other patients.

 

Initially, Kelley discovered that while many people did well on this

diet, others did not. His second wife, Susie, was one of these. It turned

out that she needed rare red meat in order to control her severe

allergies. Thus was born Kelley's concept of the Metabolic Type, in which

different people, because of genetic heritage and environmental factors,

had different requirements for vegetarian or carnivorous diets, raw

and/or cooked. Kelley was influenced in his thinking about meat by the

work

of Vilhjamur Steffanson, the Harvard-trained explorer who, among other

things, had shown that the Eskimo remained cancer-free on a fatty red

meat diet.

 

 

One Answer to Cancer

 

 

Kelley was the author of several books, including his self-help book,

One Answer to Cancer, first published in 1967, and an updated edition,

Cancer: Curing the Incurable Without Surgery, Chemotherapy or Radiation

(2001). His tests for cancer included the Kelley Enzyme Test and the

Kelley Index of Malignancy. In 1970, Kelley was convicted of practicing

medicine without a license, and in 1976 the courts suspended his dental

license for 5 years. For a while in the late 1970s he worked in a

clinic south of Tijuana.

 

Dr. Kelley's high point of fame came in 1980, when he treated the

popular US film actor Steve McQueen for advanced mesothelioma, a form of

chest and abdomen cancer generally caused by asbestos exposure. McQueen

died after undergoing surgery in 1980. Kelley later claimed that McQueen

had actually been cured, but then murdered because he " was going to

blow the lid off of the cancer racket. " In the public's mind, however,

this failure dealt a blow to all of Kelley's claims of success with

cancer.

 

In the 1970s, Kelley was reasonable in his statements about medical

orthodoxy and, although he appreciated the difficulties of changing

America's life style, looked forward to a fair and proper evaluation

of his

method. As time progressed, however, he became increasingly despondent,

realizing that this would probably never happen.

 

He also became increasingly paranoid. In the 1980s, he moved to rural

Washington state. His marriage to Susie had broken up, he lost control

of his once-thriving organization, and his mental and physical health

began to deteriorate as well. In the late 1980s, he and his

then-companion, a cardiologist named Carol Morrison, MD, whom he had

allegedly cured

of breast cancer, moved to rural Pennsylvania. I visited them twice in

the small town of Saxonburg, north of Pittsburgh. I found this couple –

a former successful orthodontist and board-certified heart specialist –

living in a small rented bungalow on Water Street. They were surviving

on Dr. Kelley's monthly Social Security check.

 

Kelley was a shadow of his former self. Although he still did coffee

enemas every day, he had reverted to drinking huge bottles of Coke, to

which he ascribed health-giving properties. He and Dr. Morrison seemed

only tangentially interested in medicine. They were too busy running

their daisy-wheel printer day and night, churning out racist and

anti-Semitic tracts! It was hard to connect this bitter wreck of a man

with the

vibrant individual of earlier decades.

 

 

Enter Dr. Gonzalez

 

 

It was around that time that Nicholas J. Gonzalez, MD, a recent

graduate of Cornell Medical College, first came to prominence in New

York as a

practitioner of Dr. Kelley's methods. Gonzalez was always scrupulous in

crediting Kelley for his contribution to his own work. Yet the Kelley I

that met in 1990 seethed with anger at the world, and particularly at

those who had tried to help him, including Dr. Gonzalez. Soon

afterwards, Kelley even sued Gonzalez in a vituperative nuisance suit.

The suit

was dismissed, with some unkind words from the judge. After Morrison

died, Kelley moved back to his mother's Kansas farm, where his " strange

eventful history " had begun almost 80 years before.

 

Asked to sum up Kelley's contribution, Dr. Gonzalez wrote the

following:

 

" Over the years, just about anything that could ever be said about

anybody, good bad and indifferent, has been said about William Donald

Kelley. Regardless of how true or untrue such statements might be, my

wish

is that he be remembered for what he truly was, a very brilliant man

who sacrificed all personal happiness for what he believed to be the

truth. Like so many other brilliant men he fit in nowhere and generated

controversy, adulation and scorn for much of his adult life wherever he

went and whatever he did.

 

" The world certainly treated him poorly, and too often in his later

years he responded in kind. His faults, like his strengths, are legion

and extraordinary and he lived an eccentric life, always on the fringe;

at one point during the early 1990s, I heard he was scavenging food out

of dumpsters. Despite all this, I have always remained focused, and

continue to remain so, on his unique ability to see a truth no one else

could see, and stick with it regardless of the cost.

 

" From the day I first met him, in a chiropractor's office in Queens, in

July of 1981, after my second year of medical school, his one goal, his

one wish was to have his work properly evaluated and tested, so that if

it proved of value, it could be integrated into the mainstream of

orthodox medicine. That was to me, whatever was to happen in our own

relationship, and whatever he was to say about me in recent years,

always an

honorable goal, one which I took seriously and continue to work toward.

 

" In my estimation, Kelley, in his scientific thinking, was light years

ahead of the rest of us, both orthodox and alternative. He deserves our

respect for his accomplishments, for his trials and severe

tribulations, and our forgiveness for his foibles. Someday, I believe

his thoughts

about the nature of cancer and human disease will become the foundation

of a new medicine, not merely a fringe footnote, and the world will

remember him at that time with well deserved appreciation. For now, let's

remember him kindly, with gratitude for what he did and what he tried

to do. "

 

 

 

--Ralph W. Moss, PhD

 

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