Questioning the NIH Warning About GrapeFruit Seed Extract and Others

[Guest guest]

Basically, I would consider the article below and especially the 5th

paragraph- just take out the word cancer and insert anything that requires

healing. Though the whole article is interesting in regards to the history of

organized medicine resisting natural cures. For those of us who are questioning

the motives of such warnings as these I wonder if the powers that be just

haven't become more crafty. Don't debunk alternative medicine outright- too

many people have woken up for that to be credible. Instead do a scientific

study/analysis and then find a scientific reason to debunk/disway. Not to say

that things can't also become *accidentally* contaminated.

Misty L. Trepke

http://health./

 

When Healing Becomes a Crime

 

---

-----------

 

 

Kenny Ausubel, Tikkun Magazine

June 12, 2001

There is another cancer war -- against " unproven " alternative cancer

therapies. But is the medical standard of proof a double standard?

 

In February 2001, a federal government-sponsored report under the

auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was published

finding " noteworthy cases of survival " among cancer patients using

the Hoxsey herbal treatment. After seventy-five years, Uncle Sam is

finally giving a state nod to what is arguably the most notorious

alternative cancer therapy in American history.

 

In the 1950s at the height of organized medicine's crusade against

the Hoxsey Cancer Clinics, the American Medical Association

crystallized the medical establishment's sentiments in its supremely

influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). " It

is fair to observe that the American Medical Association or any

other association or individual has no need to go beyond the Hoxsey

label to be convinced. Any such person who would seriously contend

that scientific medicine is under any obligation to investigate such

a mixture or its promoter is either stupid or dishonest. "

 

The recent NIH report marks a surprising reversal in the

longstanding medical civil war between conventional and alternative

approaches. After a long exile, alternative therapies are now

ascendant, riding a crest of popular demand, scientific validation,

and commercial promise. The face of cancer treatment may soon become

almost unrecognizable as valuable alternative therapies begin to

permeate mainstream practice.

 

If Harry Hoxsey had lived to witness this apparent sea-change in

medicine, he might likely feel very mixed emotions. He would

heartily cheer the grassroots surge propelling the movement, the

same kind that once carried his Hoxsey Cancer Clinics to unmatched

heights of popularity and validation. He would be exhilarated by the

philosophical conversion of his enemies. But he would also be

cynical, suspicious that a clinging monopoly was fighting to save

face and above all keep its corner on the cancer market. But then,

Hoxsey survived decades of being " hunted like a wild beast " only to

see his clinics padlocked without the scientific test he

relentlessly sought. He died a broken man, anguished over the future

he felt was robbed from humanity. Yet the Hoxsey treatment did live

on, thriving as an underground legend, still attracting more

patients today than any of the other banished therapies,

irrepressible after all.

 

The astonishing saga of the rise and fall and rebirth of Hoxsey

provides a classic case history of the corrosive medical politics

that have long prevented the fair investigation of promising

alternative cancer therapies. Paradoxically, this long-standing

denunciation has not been based on the objective scientific evidence

that is supposed to determine the acceptance or rejection of medical

therapies. Rather, the dismissal typifies the kind of pre-factual

conclusion that has characterized " scientific " medicine's century-

long pattern of condemnation without investigation.

 

In fact, the unspoken reason for the renaissance of alternative

cancer therapies is sadly obvious: The medical establishment has

largely lost its celebrated " War on Cancer " based on surgery,

radiation, and chemotherapy. But what has remained hidden from most

people is the existence of the other cancer war: organized

medicine's zealous campaign against " unorthodox " cancer treatments

and their practitioners. Over the course of the twentieth century,

innovators such as Harry Hoxsey advanced more than one hundred

alternative approaches, at least several of which have seemed to

hold significant promise. Yet rather than inviting interest and

investigation from mainstream medicine, their champions have been

ridiculed, threatened with the loss of professional licenses,

harassed, prosecuted, or driven out of the country.

 

The facts clearly reveal that a consortium of interests has

consistently condemned these treatments without investigation: the

American Medical Association (AMA), the Food and Drug Administration

(FDA), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the American Cancer

Society (ACS), as well as certain large corporations that profit

from the cancer industry. It is important to emphasize that this

confederation of interests known as organized medicine consists

principally of medical politicians and business interests, not

practicing doctors. Physicians themselves have often objected to the

unscientific rejection of alternative therapies and to restrictions

on their own freedom to research or administer them.

 

The news blackout and disinformation campaign muffling this scandal

have been so effective that most people do not happen into the

underground of " disappeared " therapies until the fateful moment when

they or their friends or relations are diagnosed with the dread

disease. Usually only while fighting for their lives do patients

discover the plethora of alternative cancer therapies claiming to

offer hope and benefit, though with little if any scientific

evidence to support the assertions. The story of Hoxsey sheds

disturbing light on the many anecdotes of " people who got well when

they weren't supposed to, " as cancer surgeon Dr. Bernie Siegel terms

these remarkable remissions in the netherworld of alternative

therapies.

 

The Hoxsey Legend

 

In 1840 Illinois horse farmer John Hoxsey found his prize stallion

with a malignant tumor on its right hock. As a Quaker, he couldn't

bear shooting the animal, so he put it out to pasture to die

peacefully. Three weeks later, he noticed the tumor stabilizing, and

observed the animal browsing knee-deep in a corner of the pasture

with a profusion of weeds, eating plants not part of its normal

diet.

 

Within three months the tumor dried up and began to separate from

the healthy tissue. The farmer retreated to the barn, where he began

to experiment with these herbs revealed to him by " horse sense. " He

devised three formulas: an internal tonic, an herbal-mineral red

paste, and a mineral-based yellow powder for external use. Within a

year the horse was well, and the veterinarian became locally famous

for treating animals with cancer.

 

The farmer's grandson John C. Hoxsey, a veterinarian in southern

Illinois, was the first to try the remedies on people, and claimed

positive results. His son Harry showed an early interest and began

working with him at the age of eight. When John suffered an untimely

accident, he bequeathed the formulas to the fifteen-year-old boy

with a charge to treat poor people for free, and to minister to all

races, creeds, and religions without prejudice. He asked that the

treatment carry the Hoxsey name. Finally, he warned the boy against

the " High Priests of Medicine " who would fight him tooth-and-nail

because he was taking money out of their pockets.

 

Hoxsey planned to go to medical school to bring the treatment to the

world, but soon found he had been blackballed after secretly

treating several terminal patients who pled for their lives. With a

local banker backing him, he founded the first Hoxsey Cancer Clinic

in 1924, championed by the chamber of commerce and high school

marching bands on Main Street.

 

As early word of his reputed successes spread, Hoxsey was invited to

nearby Chicago, headquarters of the newly powerful AMA, to

demonstrate the treatment. Grisly and indisputable photographic

proof of the terminal case Hoxsey treated verifies that the patient

recovered, living on for twelve years, cancer-free.

 

Hoxsey then claimed that a high AMA official offered him a contract

for the rights to the formulas. The alleged agreement assigned the

property rights to a consortium of doctors including Dr. Morris

Fishbein, the AMA chief and editor of the JAMA. Hoxsey himself would

be required to cease any further practice, to be awarded a small

percentage of profits after ten years if the treatment panned out.

Invoking his Quaker father's deathbed charge that poor people be

treated for free and that the treatment carry the family name,

Hoxsey said the official threatened to hound him out of business

unless he acquiesced.

 

Whatever may have happened, that's when the battle started. The AMA

first denied the entire incident, then later acknowledged the

patient's remission, though crediting it to prior treatments by

surgery and radiation.

 

Yet one thing was certain: Hoxsey had made a very powerful enemy. By

crossing swords with Fishbein, he alienated the most powerful figure

in medicine. The AMA promptly dubbed him the worst cancer quack of

the century, and he would be arrested more times than any other

person in medical history.

 

Hoxsey quickly found himself opposing Fishbein's emerging medical-

corporate complex. As late as 1900, medicine was therapeutically

pluralistic and financially unprofitable. Doctors had the highest

suicide rate of any profession owing to their extreme poverty and

low social standing. Fishbein's AMA would engineer an industrialized

medical monoculture. What radically tipped the balance of power was

an arranged marriage between big business and organized medicine.

Under Fishbein's direction, the AMA sailed into a golden harbor of

prosperity fueled by surgery, radiation, drugs, and a sprawling high-

tech hospital system. The corporatization of medicine throttled

diversity. The code word for competition was quackery.

 

It was easy for the medical profession to paint Hoxsey as a quack:

he fit the image perfectly. Brandishing his famed tonic bottle, the

ex-coal miner arrived straight from central casting as the

stereotype of the snake-oil salesman. When the AMA coerced the

pathologist who performed Hoxsey's biopsies to cease and desist,

Hoxsey could no longer verify the validity of his reputed successes.

Organized medicine quickly adopted the stance that his

alleged " cures " fell into three categories: those who never had

cancer in the first place; those who were cured by prior radiation

and surgery; and those who died. In exasperation, Hoxsey attempted

an end run by approaching the National Cancer Institute. In close

collaboration with the AMA, the federal agency refused his

application for a test because his medical records did not include

all the biopsies.

 

Meanwhile Hoxsey struck oil in Texas and used his riches to promote

his burgeoning clinic and finance his court battles. Piqued at

Hoxsey's rise, Fishbein struck back in the public media, penning an

inflammatory article in the Hearst Sunday papers entitled " Blood

Money, " in a classic example of purple prose and yellow journalism.

Outraged, Hoxsey sued Fishbein. In two consecutive trials, Hoxsey

beat Fishbein, standing as the first person labeled a " quack " to

defeat the AMA in court. During the trials, Hoxsey's lawyers

revealed that Fishbein had failed anatomy in medical school, never

completed his internship, and never practiced a day of medicine in

his entire career.

 

By now Fishbein was mired in multiple scandals, including his

effective but unpopular obstruction of national health insurance at

a time when doctors had become the richest professionals in the

country and the Journal the most profitable publication in the

world. Drug ads powered JAMA, but its biggest single advertiser in

the 1940s was Phillip Morris. (Camel cigarettes had the largest

booth at the AMA's 1948 convention, boasting in its ads that " More

doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. " ) Enmeshed in

controversy, Fishbein's stock was trading low, and, shortly after

his first loss to Hoxsey, the AMA chief was deposed in a humiliating

spectacle.

 

But ironically Hoxsey's stunning dark-horse victory against

the " most terrifying trade organization on Earth " only ended up

bringing the house down. He immediately faced a decade-

long " quackdown " by the FDA.

 

By the 1950s, Hoxsey was riding what was arguably the largest

alternative-medicine movement in American history. A survey by the

Chicago Medical Society showed 85 percent of people still

using " drugless healers. " Hoxsey's Dallas stronghold grew to be the

world's largest privately owned cancer center with 12,000 patients

and branches spreading to seventeen states. Congressmen, judges, and

even some doctors ardently supported his quest for an investigation.

Two federal courts upheld the therapeutic value of the treatment.

Even his archenemies, the American Medical Association and the Food

and Drug Administration, admitted that the therapy does cure certain

forms of cancer. JAMA itself had published the research of a

respected physician who got results superior to surgery using a red

paste identical to Hoxsey's for skin cancers including lethal

melanoma, a skin cancer that also spreads internally.

 

Medical authorities escalated their quackdown in the McCarthyite

wake of the 1950s. On the heels of a California law criminalizing

all cancer treatments except surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy,

the federal government finally outlawed Hoxsey entirely in the

United States in 1960 on questionable technicalities. Chief nurse

Mildred Nelson took the clinic to Tijuana in 1963, abandoning any

hope of operating in the United States. It was the first alternative

clinic to set up shop south of the border. Mildred quietly treated

another 30,000 patients there until her death in 1999. Like Hoxsey,

she claimed a high success rate, but her contention is unverifiable

since the treatment has yet to be rigorously tested.

 

Hoxsey never claimed a panacea or cure-all. He maintained that the

Dallas doctors used his clinic as a " dumping ground " for hopeless

cases, and that the great majority of patients he got were terminal,

having already had the limit of surgery and radiation. He said he

cured about 25 percent of those. Of virgin cases with no prior

treatment, he claimed an 80 percent success rate. Seventy-five years

after Hoxsey began, why do we still not know the validity of his

claims?

 

The " Unproven Treatments "

 

Organized medicine has systematically dismissed alternative cancer

therapies as " unproven, " lacking the rigorous scientific proof of

clinical trials. But if the Hoxsey treatment is unproven, it's not

disproven. Like virtually all the " unorthodox " cancer therapies over

the course of the twentieth century, it was politically railroaded

rather than medically tested. However, over the last few decades,

controlled laboratory tests have shown all the individual herbs in

the internal tonic to possess anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties,

as I documented in detail in my recent book on Hoxsey, When Healing

Becomes A Crime. Though the formula has never been tested as a whole

entity, clearly there is a credible scientific basis for looking at

it. Organized medicine has not disputed the effectiveness of the

external remedies since 1950, and the red paste (Mohs treatment) is

listed in Taber's Medical Encyclopedia as a " standard treatment, "

though it is seldom used.

 

After all, plants are the cornerstone of pharmaceutical drugs. The

very word drug derives from the Dutch term droog, which means " to

dry, " since people have historically dried plants to make medicinal

preparations. It is well proven that many botanicals possess

powerful anti-cancer properties. Numerous primary pharmaceuticals

derive from plants, as do several major chemotherapy drugs, such as

Taxol from the Pacific Yew tree, Vincristine and Vinblastine from

the Madagascar periwinkle, and Camptothecin from the wood and bark

of a Chinese tree. About 30 percent of chemotherapy drugs altogether

are derived from natural substances, mainly plants. A quarter of

modern drugs still contain a plant substance, and about half are

modeled on plant chemistry.

 

During Hoxsey's era, surgery and radiation were primitive and

excessive. Both were solely local treatments, reflecting the

profession's belief that cancer was a local disease. As such they

could address just a quarter of all cases, claiming to cure only

about a quarter of those. With the advent of toxic chemotherapy

drugs in the 1950s, organized medicine at last acknowledged cancer

as a systemic disease, which Hoxsey and the other " unorthodox "

practitioners had been asserting throughout.

 

Clearly, conventional cancer treatments have an important place in

medicine and save lives. But since the 1950s, evidence has steadily

accumulated that surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy are far less

effective than the public is being led to believe. Investigative

journalist Daniel Greenberg, writing in the Columbia Journalism

Review in 1975, produced the first widely reported exposé showing

that cancer survival rates since the 1950s had not progressed, and

that improvements from 1930 to 1950 were mainly a consequence of

improved hospital nursing care and support systems. Greenberg found

that even the valid improvements were very, very small, and that

there had been no significant advancements in treating any of the

major forms of cancer.

 

By 1969, Dr. Hardin Jones had already released a shocking report on

this issue at the Science Writers Convention, sponsored by the

American Cancer Society. Jones, a respected professor of medical

physics from the University of California at Berkeley and an expert

on statistics and the effects of radiation and drugs, concluded

that " the common malignancies show a remarkably similar rate of

demise, whether treated or untreated. " Joining the fray, Nobel

laureate James Watson charged that the American public had been sold

a " nasty bill of goods about cancer. " This eminent co-discoverer of

the DNA double helix remarked bluntly that the War on Cancer was " a

bunch of shit. "

 

These " proven " cancer treatments are themselves largely unproven.

The standard of proof for therapeutic efficacy is in fact a double

standard. Surgery was grandfathered in as standard practice early in

the twentieth century without randomized, double-blind clinical

trials, which only became widespread in the 1960s with the advent of

chemotherapy. Its dangers and limitations have since been only

superficially acknowledged or studied, and little is known about its

efficacy in relation to a baseline marker of no treatment.

 

Like surgery, radiation therapy was grandfathered in without

rigorous testing. Radiation is carcinogenic and mutagenic. In the

few tests comparing radiation treatment against no treatment,

according to Jones, " Most of the time, it makes not the slightest

difference if the machine is turned on or not. " Jones went even

further, saying, " My studies have proved conclusively that untreated

cancer victims actually live up to four times longer. " Radiation is

often combined with surgery despite the fact that tests have

generally shown it made no apparent favorable difference. A recent

study with patients with the most common form of lung cancer found

that postoperative radiation therapy, which is routinely given,

actually raises the relative risk of death by 21 percent, with its

most detrimental effects on those in the early stages of illness.

Nevertheless, radiation is used on about half of cancer patients.

 

It was into this disappointing setting that chemotherapy entered as

the next great hope of cancer treatment. Chemotherapy drugs are

poisons that are indiscriminate killers of cells, both healthy and

malignant. The strategy is quite literally to kill the cancer

without killing the patient. By the mid-1980s, prominent members of

orthodoxy published unsettling assessments that could no longer be

dismissed. Writing in Scientific American, Dr. John Cairns of

Harvard found that chemotherapy was able to save the lives of just 2

to 3 percent of cancer patients, mostly those with the rarest kinds

of the disease. By medicine's own standards, at best chemotherapy is

unproved against 90 percent of adult solid tumors, the huge majority

of common cancers resulting in death. Moreover, true placebo

controls have been almost abandoned in the testing of chemotherapy.

Drug regimen is tested against drug regimen, and doctors hardly ever

look at whether the drugs do better than simple good nursing care.

Because chemotherapy drugs are outright poisons, many carcinogenic,

the drugs themselves can cause " treatment deaths " and additional

cancers. One study among women surviving ovarian cancer after

chemotherapy treatment showed a one-hundred-fold greater subsequent

incidence of leukemia over those not receiving chemotherapy. In some

studies, when chemotherapy and radiation were combined, the

incidence of secondary tumors was about twenty-five times the

expected rate. Nevertheless, chemotherapy is given to 80 percent of

patients

 

Amazingly, 85 percent of prescribed standard medical treatments

across the board lack scientific validation, according to the New

York Times. Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal,

suggests that " this is partly because only one percent of the

articles in medical journals are scientifically sound, and partly

because many treatments have never been assessed at all. "

 

A hundred years from now, medicine will likely come to regard some

of these " proven " cancer treatments the way we now remember the use

of mercury and bloodletting. As Dr. Abigail Zuger recently wrote in

the New York Times contemplating the hundredth anniversary of the

1899 Merck Manual: " We have harnessed our own set of poisons for

medical treatment; in a hundred years a discussion of cancer

chemotherapy may read as chillingly as endorsements of strychnine

for tuberculosis and arsenic for diabetes do today. "

 

The Big Business of Cancer

 

The medical civil war between Hoxsey and organized medicine has

largely reflected a trade war. Profitability has often been the

driving force behind the adoption of official therapeutics. At over

$110 billion a year just in the United States, cancer is big

business, a whopping 10 percent of the national health-care bill.

The typical cancer patient spends upward of $100,000 on treatment.

It is estimated that each hospital admission for cancer produces two

to three times the billings of a typical non-cancer admission. More

people work in the field than die from the disease each year.

According to Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of environmental and

occupational medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago, " For

decades, the war on cancer has been dominated by powerful groups of

interlocking professional and financial interests, with the highly

profitable drug development system at its hub. " Global sales of

chemotherapy drugs in 1997 were $30.9 billion, about $12 billion of

it in the United States.

 

 

 

Pharmaceutical companies pin the high costs of drugs on the

forbidding expense of testing and approving each new drug, now

pegged at $500 million. In fact, this prohibitive figure has served

as a barrier of entry for all but giant corporations. The entire

system is founded in patents, twenty-year exclusive licenses that

provide monopoly protection. As an herbal product, the Hoxsey tonic

cannot be patented and therefore occupies the status of an orphan

drug that no company will develop. While approving about forty

highly toxic cancer drugs, the FDA has yet to approve a single

nontoxic cancer agent or one not patented by a major pharmaceutical

company.

 

Alternative therapies are finally emerging in part because of the

dramatic cost savings they represent, and because at least some may

well represent a major new profit center. " Alternative medicine is

clearly the largest growth industry in health care today, " wrote

Jane Brody in the New York Times in 1998. Dr. David Eisenberg of

Harvard surveyed the American public to find 42 percent using

alternative therapies in 1997. The number of visits to alternative

practitioners exceeded total visits to primary-care physicians.

Spending was conservatively estimated at $21.2 billion, with at

least $12.2 billion paid out-of-pocket by committed customers. Total

out-of-pocket expenditures for alternative therapies were comparable

with expenditures for all physician services.

 

The numbers are no less dramatic for cancer treatment. A national

study estimated 64 percent of cancer patients to be using

alternative therapies. A recent survey at M.D. Anderson Cancer

Center, the world's largest with 13,000 patients, found an

astounding 83 percent using alternatives.

 

Major corporations are already entering the alternative marketplace.

Procter & Gamble initially spent millions sponsoring the research of

Dr. Nick Gonzalez, who took up the work of Donald Kelley, a dentist

who reputedly cured himself of terminal pancreatic cancer using

enzymes and other nutritional means. A pilot study with pancreatic

cancer patients provided better results than had been seen in the

history of medicine for a disease that is 95 percent incurable. The

subjects lived an average of triple the usual survival rate, and two

patients have lived for four and five years with no detectable

disease. Nestlé has also financed the work of Dr. Gonzalez. These

studies led to a $1.4 million grant to Columbia University College

of Physicians and Surgeons by the NIH's National Center for

Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and supervised by the

NCI. The engagement of large corporations vaulted the formerly

reviled treatment to instant plausibility. When big companies start

to take a stake in alternative cancer therapies, it signifies the

maturation of a market and consecrates a political realignment.

 

Both M. D. Anderson and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have

been testing green tea, or more accurately several of its " active "

ingredients, for anti-cancer properties. Because various studies

have shown that green tea reduces the risk of colorectal, lung,

esophageal, and pancreatic cancers, Lipton tea company is also

testing the substance at the University of Arizona.

 

In association with the NCI, M. D. Anderson is set to evaluate shark

cartilage, which is reputed to have anti-cancer activity and is

widely used by a cancer underground in the United States and abroad.

(Sadly, this market surge is further endangering several shark

species.) The University of Toronto is testing mistletoe, a folk

remedy for cancer espoused by the Austrian spiritual philosopher

Rudolf Steiner, originator of Waldorf education and biodynamic

farming. Mistletoe has shown anti-tumor effects in both human and

animals studies in Germany.

 

The release of the report on Hoxsey through the NIH's NCCAM is a

harbinger of the changes to come. As the report concludes, further

investigation " is justified not only because of the public health

issue to justify the large number of patients who seek treatment at

this clinic, but also because of the several noteworthy cases of

survival. " The report specifically notes a seven-year melanoma

patient who had no other treatment besides Hoxsey's tonic and

external salves. Average survival time for advanced melanoma is

seven months. If such a remarkable remission occurred using

conventional treatments, it would be front-page news worldwide.

 

" It's interesting to contemplate the dilemma that the National

Cancer Institute is in, " conjectures Ralph Moss, an advisor to the

NCCAM and NCI, and a respected researcher and author on both

alternative and conventional cancer treatments. " If they do decide

to do the tests, then there's always that possibility -- and I think

it's a damn good possibility -- that some of these treatments are

going to turn out to be quite valuable. If they decide not to do the

tests, there's going to be tremendous fury in Congress and the

public, because what then are they about? If they're not about

scientific testing, what good are they? Why are we wasting our

money?

 

" What we're saying is: Prove them or disprove them. We've had

seventy-five years of Hoxsey. Does it work? Doesn't it work? Nobody

knows. How do you know? Short of good studies, how does one decide

issues like that? We don't want people doing something if it's not

going to work for them, not in terms of just conventional treatment,

but alternative treatments as well. "

 

" The best-case scenario, " Moss speculates, " is that some tests will

be carried out with the imprimatur of NCI, NCCAM, and probably other

collaborative centers like the University of Texas and Columbia.

Some of those will show that there's no effectiveness, and some of

them will probably show that there is effectiveness in some

treatments. The ones that are shown to be effective that are funded

by and based on NCI-reported research are then going to be published

in major medical journals. The first one that validates a nontoxic

treatment is the beginning of the end of this Middle Ages that we're

in. Because once one goes through the door, then a lot of others are

going through the door, and that's what they're afraid of. They're

afraid that, if a Hoxsey were proven to be effective, the public

will run to it because nobody wants the chemo drugs. If chemo is the

only choice, then they'll reluctantly take it, but the minute it's

known there is something nontoxic out there, everybody's going to

want it. "

 

The abiding truth for cancer patients is that they want unrestricted

access to all treatments. According to one analysis, only about 5

percent entirely abandon conventional cancer care even when pursuing

an alternative. What patients seek is the best of all worlds, an

expanded menu of options supported by access to credible

information. The stereotype that orthodoxy has long put forth of

poor, credulous cancer patients ripe for exploitation by clever

promoters turns out to be false. In a study by sociologist Barrie

Cassileth, the profile of patients using alternative cancer

therapies describes well-educated, middle-income, often female

clients who have done a considerable amount of due diligence to make

their choice.

 

While physicians fought fiercely for their professional sovereignty

during the twentieth century, the greater social issue today is the

sovereignty of the patient. In a market economy, goes the old saw,

the customer is always right. The AMA's Oliver Field, an architect

of the aggressive repression against Hoxsey and myriad " quack "

therapies in the 1950s, responded surprisingly when I posed to him

the polarizing question of freedom of medical choice. " This is a

free country. You pays your money and you takes your choice. If it's

wrong, you're the one who's going to suffer. "

 

It was anomalous to hear the former head of the AMA's Bureau of

Investigation, which once boasted a rolodex of over

300,000 " quacks, " echo the words of his past nemesis. Judge William

Hawley Atwell, who ruled twice in Hoxsey's favor in federal courts

and fully affirmed the therapy's value, had stated in 1949 regarding

Hoxsey's victory over Dr. Morris Fishbein: " So I wish to say, pay

your money and take your choice. Those who need a doctor, if you

think one side is the best, go and get him. If you think the other

side is best, you certainly have the right to go and get him. This

is a free country; that is what we stand for in America. "

 

Why was the Hoxsey therapy not investigated in the first place

seventy-five years ago? The overarching truth is that it has been

politically railroaded instead of medically tested. The medical

civil war has distorted cancer from a medical question into a

political issue. The many practitioners and doctors thrust

involuntarily into the front lines of the cancer wars would surely

prefer to settle the question in a clinic or laboratory, not a

courtroom. Meanwhile, cancer patients remain trapped in the

crossfire, fighting for their lives.

 

http://curezone.com/art/read.asp?ID=91 & db=5 & C0=779

 

 

 

 

 

 

, " snickers2261 "

<long.robin wrote:

>

> Do you think this would include Grapeseed Oil too?

> ~Robin

>

> , " hptx444 "

> <hptx444@> wrote:

> >

> > As has been posted on several other boards, grapefruit seed

> > extract has come under suspicion. Several studies have been

unable

> to

> > show antifungal or antibacterial action when all natural

grapefruit

> > components were used in extracts. Other studies found that when

> > commercial products like Source Naturals Citricidex (the brand

> > sold by Vitamin World and others) were tested they contained

> > substantial contaminants including solvents. One U.S. Department

of

> > Agriculture study found that benzethonium chloride, a synthetic

> > antimicrobial agent comprised a whopping 8.03% of the total

volume

> of

> > the commercial grapefruit seed extract sample.

> >

> > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?

> >

>

itool=abstractplus & db=pubmed & cmd=Retrieve & dopt=abstractplus & list_uids

=

> > 11453769

> >

> > It might be wise to avoid or find an alternative to the

> > commercial products. Benzethonium chloride is extremely toxic if

> > ingested.

> >

> > http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/r?

> dbs+hsdb:@term+@rn+121-

> > 54-0

> >

>