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172 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
in publishing "Dietary Considerations in Malignant Neoplastic Disease,"
which appeared in the November-December edition of Review of Gastroenterology.
His work might have been destined to obscurity forever,
but for an investigative reporter who discovered the good doctor working
quietly to cure cancer with his most unorthodox therapies, and determined
to bring Dr. Gerson's life-saving discoveries to public attention.
Raymond Swing, an ABC radio journalist, proposed that Dr. Gerson be
called to testify before the Senate which was debating a bill to allocate
funds for cancer research. Raymond Swing's efforts on Dr. Gerson's
behalf were successful and the doctor, together with five of his patients,
went before a sub-committee of the Senate in 1946 and told their stories.
All of the five patients had had a positive response to Dr. Gerson's therapy,
and had been told by their former doctors that there was no longer any
hope for them. They included: a woman with breast cancer who had
undergone mastectomy and radiation treatments to no avail. Her cancer
had disappeared after nine months of the Gerson therapy; a fifteen year
old girl had been paralysed by a tumour in her spinal cord. Her tumour had
vanished after 8 months of Gerson therapy; a soldier with an inoperable
tumour which had grown from his neck into his skull, making radiation
treatment impossible because of the risk of brain damage—a year after
commencing the Gerson therapy he was completely free of cancer; and a
woman who had suffered from a malignant sarcoma. Prior to beginning
the Gerson therapy, she had large tumours in her groin, neck and abdomen.
After a year on the Gerson therapy she was completely free of cancer.
Unfortunately, Dr. Gerson's successful treatment of these and other
patients who otherwise had been doomed to die did not earn him the
respect and recognition from the medical community that he deserved.
Quite to the contrary. The public display of Dr. Gerson's successful but
unorthodox treatment of cancer victims further alienated him from mainstream
medicine. An abusive editorial in the Journal of the American
Medical Association in November 1946 followed Dr. Gerson's appearance
in front of the Senate sub-committee. The editorial celebrated the
unfortunate fact that, despite the amazing and incredibly newsworthy
results of Dr. Gerson's therapy, his presentation before the Senate subcommittee
had received "little, if any newspaper publicity"—as if the lack
of mainstream publicity itself was an indictment of the treatment! The editor
further denigrated his work by splitting hairs as to what precisely constituted
a "cure." Dr. Gerson, he wrote, "admits lack of any actual cure,
claiming only that patients seemed improved in health and that some
tumours were delayed in growth or became smaller." In one final coup
against Dr. Gerson, who for years had been submitting work to the journal
for publication without success, he wrote that "the journal has on sev-