Charlotte Gerson is the daughter of the late Dr. Max Gerson, M.D. who was well known for his revolutionary nutritional healing therapy for cancer and other degenerative diseases. His method is described in his classic book, A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases. Dr. Albert Schweitzer called Dr. Gerson "a medical genius who walked among us". Charlotte Gerson continues her father's work as president of the Gerson Institute and consultant to doctors who work at the Gerson Therapy Center near Tijuana, Mexico.

DON'T MIX THERAPIES Many people have read a great many different books about treating cancer and there are many different treatments and opinions. But it is a very dangerous thing to mix ideas because some treatments have different directions than others. And we have seen constantly over the years that the Gerson Therapy works, that we have dramatic results even in the worst situations and with the most serious and damaged patients. The Gerson Therapy has been and is still the most basic, the best recognized, the most complete, and the longest existing effective treatment. We also know that we have to stick very very exactly to the treatment, and it isn't easy. There are a lot of things to do and things not to do. We can only tell you that every "do this" and "don't do that" has a very important reason. When we say you have to use organic food, clearly it is because you have to have food that is rich in nutrients and devoid of poisons. The whole Gerson Therapy is directed to detoxifying the body and putting lots of fresh nutrients into it. How can you do that with poisoned deficient food? You can't. We also know that when the tumour is gone we cannot tell the patient that he is cured, and that is a very important part of the Gerson Therapy.

THE PRE-CANCEROUS CONDITION Before the body can deteriorate into cancer, before tumours can develop, all the body's defense systems, the immune system, the enzyme system, the hormone system and mineral balances have to be depressed and out of balance. For instance, if your pancreas is working properly and you have adequate pancreatic enzymes, you cannot develop cancer. Around 1905, Dr. J. Beard demonstrated he had cancer, and he would take pancreatic enzymes by the handful and control the cancer. The pancreatic enzymes depress, destroy and digest malignant tissue. They recognize it as foreign and get rid of it. Cancer does not develop because your pancreatic enzymes digest all the protein you eat. Excess protein causes cancer.

GERSON THERAPY CURES OTHER DISEASES There are two basic reasons for all disease, not just cancer, but all disease: toxicity and deficiency. With the Gerson Therapy, we have seen heart disease totally disappear. A lady who was scheduled for heart-bypass surgery came to us and was put on the full Gerson Therapy. Two years later the doctor found her arteries were 100% clean. When she came to us they were 90% clogged. So you can dissolve the plaque, get rid of heart disease, high blood pressure, lupus, thyroid problems, colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and many others. We have seen multiple sclerosis disappear. We have seen Alzheimer's disease improve if it's not too advanced. Diseases are all toxic situations, deterioration of the cell systems, of the brain, heart, liver or elsewhere. Nobody needs to be sick. You can prevent disease and really change your life style so that you won't get sick. People often don't do it, but keep in mind when disease comes that it is curable. We had one patient who had prostate cancer. He also had three herniated discs in his spine which caused severe pressure on the sciatic nerve and his leg muscles were atrophied by 50%. He also had high blood pressure. He came to us for cancer treatment. Not only was his cancer cured, but his high blood pressure was gone after the first week of therapy, the pain in his spine disappeared, and two year later his X-rays showed the herniated discs had reformed. We see results, and we see recoveries. Albert Schweitzer was treated by my father for diabetes, and he recovered. His wife had previously been a patient for widespread lung tuberculosis and recovered. Their daughter was a patient. The whole Schweitzer family were my father's friends and patients.

NUTRIENT DEFICIENCY Food grown on deficient soil which is fertilized with artificial fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium is deficient in nutrients. That is very nice: three minerals. Food requires 52 minerals. Where is the calcium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, iron and iodine? They are not in the soil, and they are not in the food. Where are you going to get them? If you take vitamin supplements when you are toxic, your body will not absorb those pills. Nutrients have to be fresh and alive. It is very unfortunate that it is more expensive, but you have to have food that is free of poison and organically grown on rich soil, properly fertilized with the proper nutrients so that the food contains those nutrients. If disease is caused by toxicity and deficiency, we have to get rid of the toxins, the fertilizers and the sprays. When we are deficient we get diseases. The plants also get diseases and the bugs and fungus attack them. So the farmers have to do something or lose their crops. So what do they do? They poison it. They spray poison, chemicals, insecticides, fungicides, pesticides and so on. It goes into the plants, and don't think you can wash it out. There is no way you can get rid of it. Even if you do get rid of it, you still have deficient food. You can't heal toxic deficient people with toxic deficient food.

TOXIC CHEMICALS We get toxicity from the chemicals in food, chemicals from the soil and sprays, and chemicals used in processing, preservatives, emulsifiers and dyes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved 10,000 food chemicals as safe. A number of years ago, Red Dye #2 was labelled as safe; five years later it was found to be a carcinogen. After that they introduced Red Dye #5, and who's to say which additive is safe today? There are no drugs or chemicals that are safe to take, whether doctor-prescribed drugs, street drugs or over the counter drugs, they are all toxic.

DRUGS Drugs don't heal. They do nothing but suppress symptoms. People go to the doctor partly to get rid of the symptoms which are uncomfortable, but they want to get well, be well and stay well. There are no drugs, not one, that isn't toxic to the liver. Drugs have never cured anything. They can only suppress symptoms temporarily until they cause a new disease. So drugs are not the answer.

FLUORIDE On top of that you have toxic water. Fluoride is poison, rat poison. It is an enzyme inhibitor. Drs. Dean Burke and John Yamouiyannis showed that fluoridated cities with similar populations have 10% greater cancer rates than their sister cities. Fluoride mottles the teeth, makes the bones brittle, causes allergies and causes cancer. Let us assume that fluoride prevents cavities which it doesn't. Would you like to bury your child with leukemia but a perfect set of teeth? And don't think that fluoride in your toothpaste isn't absorbed into your body. It is absorbed very rapidly.

BAKING SODA Now they are putting baking soda into toothpaste. Sodium stimulates tumour growth. It interferes with body function. You need high potassium and low sodium, the same ratio it has in fresh live foods. We had a patient who had been treated for colon cancer, her tumours had disappeared and she was fine. Seven months later the tumours were back. We knew the therapy was working for her, so we asked her what she had been doing. She had been following all the right procedures, but told us her dentist had told her to brush her teeth with baking soda, in other words sodium bicarbonate. That was enough to cause her tumours to grow again. We told her to cut it out immediately and sure enough, the tumours went away. So it is not much, but it doesn't take much to hurt a cancer patient.

POTASSIUM VERSUS SALT We have to supplement the body with the very important mineral potassium. Everyone nowadays eats salt. Every bit of prepared food that comes from the store whether it is bread, cookies or canned food contains salt. All processed foods contain reduced potassium and raised sodium. Salt is required for tumour growth. For health, we need a low level of sodium and a high level of potassium. By eating salt, we are reversing the actual levels of minerals that we need in our body.

HIGH PROTEIN - MEAT, SAUSAGES, CHEESE AND HOT DOGS Doctors and nutritionists advise you that animal protein is needed for strength and tissue repair, but that is absolutely the worst advice you can get. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tested what happens to meat when it is cooked. They found that when any kind of flesh including chicken, poultry, white meat, red meat, pork and lamb was heated to 212 degrees, whether it was boiled, broiled, fried or baked, the protein in the meat changed into toxic amides that do nothing in your body except provide you with carcinogens. Meat is strictly a carcinogen. This was discovered and reported before a Congressional Committee in the U.S. in 1978 when they showed that meat eaters versus non-meat eaters in the population have ten times the incidence of colon cancer. Now if you like meat for the taste, that is a different story, I won't argue about tastes. But meat gives you neither strength, energy nor good health. The latest research done at the University of California at Irvine, showed that children who eat only as many as 12 hot dogs a month, only three a week had 10 to 12 times higher incidence of leukemia and brain tumours. This is terrible. Children are being fed these toxic and deficient foods. And cancer in children is increasing. Cancer deaths in children now exceed deaths due to accidents. Children should be healthy. Cancer used to be a disease of old age. Sausages are some of the worst food there is. The meat is already bad if it is fresh. Sausages are chemically treated, dyed and preserved. They have nitrites, nitrates and nitrosamines. Cheese is also a terribly dangerous food - high in fat, sodium and protein, the very things you need to grow tumours. Cheese is just as bad as meat.

MOTHER'S MILK FOR BABIES Start right at the beginning if possible. Babies need mother's milk. Cow's milk is not the same thing. Cow babies grow rapidly. They are usually adults within two years. In two years your baby is a toddler; humans are not fast growing, but grow with fine delicate differentiation. You are not raising a cow's brain but a human brain. It takes entirely different minerals from the cow's milk. The cow's milk is fairly high in sodium for fast growth, and will give you a big baby, a fat baby. You want a good healthy baby with a fine brain, and you will get that from mother's milk.

CARROT JUICE FOR PROTEIN If you don't drink milk and eat meat where will you get your protein? I don't say don't eat protein, I say don't eat animal protein. Carrot juice happens to have 1.4% protein. Mother's milk is 1.8% protein. Babies who are totally allergic to everything - formula, cow's milk, even mother's milk, goat's milk, soya milk and every kind of milk you can think of, have been raised exclusively on nothing but carrot juice. There is enough protein in carrot juice to raise a healthy baby, which means enough protein to maintain a healthy body. I assure you that you don't need meat.

RADIATION DAMAGE is remarkable reversible. If you look in A Cancer Therapy at case number 11, this man had been exposed originally to the atomic bomb explosion in Los Alamos, and he had developed testicular cancer like so many of those soldiers. They then gave him 88 deep X-ray treatments! Seven months later the cancer was back in both his lungs, and they sent him home to die. This was in 1956, at age 28. He went to my father's clinic in New York. The man is alive and well today. The X-ray damage took longer to heal than the cancer, but it healed completely, all the X-ray burns on the skin and the internal organs, everything healed.

CHEMOTHERAPY It is actually harder to reverse chemotherapy because chemotherapy leaves poison in the body. X-rays leave burns and damage in the body, not poison. But even after chemo, you can recover. The Gerson Therapy can detoxify most chemo damage. When people are given chemotherapy, the body excretes approximately 40 to 50% after they are given it, but the rest stays. Where exactly it stays I have no idea. I believe some of it goes into the fatty tissue and some may well go into the connective tissues, I don't know.

What happens though, and we found this out, when you detoxify these patients, the body lets go of the stored chemo, and it goes into the blood stream before it is filtered out through the liver and out of the body. Now comes the problem. We have had patients who came to us after six, eight, ten treatments of chemo. We put them on a full detoxifying therapy with as many as five coffee enemas a day plus castor oil every other day by mouth and they got terribly sick. The body was releasing all this chemotherapy from the tissues and they got an overdose of chemo. Of course we stopped that quickly. We learned the hard way. We learned that chemo patients have to be treated more gently and be detoxified more slowly. You would think it would be good to get rid of the suff, but you can't hurry it. The body usually produces healing reactions after the first week, the sixth and about three and a half months into the treatment. The body lets go of a lot of junk. With patients who have had chemo, we see a very heavy reaction after six months. I can't tell you why, but that is what we have observed. Then the body is clean and you heal.

We had a lady who had had a bone marrow transplant and an enormous amount of chemo for an ovarian cancer. She didn't admit to the bone marrow transplant because she thought we wouldn't admit her. Chances are we might not have, it is too much. But she got in and started to improve little by little and then she had a healing reaction at six months. She broke out all over her body in boils. This is the only case we have ever observed with boils. We have to assume that in her case, all the chemo was right under the skin in the fatty or connective tissue. For a couple of weeks she had these boils, but she fought her way through it and they went away. Then her body was clean and she healed. So it is possible that sometimes you go through very unpleasant problems on account of chemotherapy. We have even seen two patients after bone marrow transplants and it is pretty terrible. If you can possibly avoid it do so. But we have had no luck with pancreatic cancer patients who have had chemo. Without chemo, pancreatic cancer is still curable. We have two patients right here in Canada on Vancouver Island who are fully recovered from terminal pancreatic cancer, one for nine years and one for fifteen years.

Read Dr. Max Gerson's excellent book A Cancer Therapy, and The Gerson Primer, and Gerson Therapy Recipes. If you would like to contact the Gerson Therapy Clinic, please call 619-267-1150 or write The Gerson Institute, P.O. Box 430, Bonita, California 92002.