Dr. Max Gerson

Dr. Max Gerson was a German physician who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1936 to come to New York, where he preached a gospel of pure organic food and farming. He treated and in many cases cured even advanced cancer with an almost completely dietary approach. When he allowed himself to be interviewed on a popular radio talk show, he was condemned by his colleagues in the New York State Medical Society. His real crime was that he was independent of the main cancer agencies and several decades ahead of them in recognizing the important role of diet in cancer.

Since then, Gerson's diet-oriented, holistic philosophy has swept the world, although his name is not always attached to the sweeping new ideas that so many recognize today. Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer, his most famous patient and whom Dr. Gerson cured of diabetes, wrote: "I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine", also later describing him as "a medical genius who walked among us".

Dr. Gerson had published dozens of articles in the European medical literature, but he was almost completely shut out of publishing in his adopted homeland. Eventually he published his methods and findings in 1958, along with fifty cases of cured "terminal" cancer patients, in a book, A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases, selling over 250,000 copies in five languages around the world

His now well-known Gerson Therapy is based on flooding the body with micronutrients from salt-free, fat-free, organic, vegetarian food, including 13 fresh-pressed fruit and vegetable juices daily. Gerson also prescribed Lugol's iodine, desiccated thyroid gland, daily B12 shots, and and other components as appropriate for the patient.

Those currently practicing his techniques explain that a critical element of the Therapy is support for the liver in its task of removing toxins from the blood stream through the use of several coffee enemas daily, although Gerson did not add coffee enemas to his regimen until long after he had had many successes with migraines, lupus, TB, and the like; coffee enemas are said to stimulate liver detox activity, especially bile production, flushing accumulated toxins into the upper intestinal tract for elimination. Advocates of his therapy state that many of his terminal cancer patients who survived him are still alive today.

Dr. Gerson died suddenly on March 8, 1959. Charlotte (Lotte) Gerson, Dr. Gerson's daughter and founder of the Gerson Institute, stated: "My father, aged 78, was in perfectly good health when, from one day to the next, he felt awful. They tested his blood and found a high level of arsenic." When asked if she had called the police, she replied: ""No, we had our suspicions, but knew from experience that justice would not be done."