Congratulations to Prof. Baum. In UK the public positions of the Prince of Wales are acting against the serious Science and Medicine.

However, in many other places of the world, the “alternative” Medicine reaches intolerable points, and public personalities, as Prince Charles, artists and so on go in defense of practices, as I say, at least very bizarre.

As the author points, the “alternative” methods should pass to the rigid protocols and methods of “orthodox” Medicine to obtain scientific and evidence-based positions: in other words, there are not “alternative” or “orthodox” methods, only one thing, the real Medicine: if an unusual method should be approved by scientific methodology, they don’t be named “alternative”, only a medical branch one.

Competing interests: None declared

The Prince of Wales's keynote speech to the joint symposium, which this Foundation, the National Cancer Research Institute and four of the UK's leading cancer charitie (Marie Curie Cancer Care; Bristol Cancer Help Centre; Macmillan Cancer Relief and Breakthrough Breast Cancer) held in June, attracted considerable media attention. Much of the interest was generated by inaccurate and misleading reports of his speech.

We all want to understand what works and what doesn't, whether that be conventional, complementary or alternative approaches to cancer.

As The Prince of Wales pointed out, if up to 80% of patients with cancer try complementary or alternative treatments following diagnosis, then surely it makes sense to investigate their efficacy. The Science and Technology Select Committee on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)'s report in December 2000 recommended that the Department of Health should provide this area with dedicated research funding in order to develop "Centres of Excellence". It has been good to see that in response, the Department of Health has made funding available (particularly in its endeavour to build up research capacity), but more needs to be done.

The establishment by the National Cancer Research Institute of a special interest group on research into complementary therapies is a significant step forward in the cancer field and one that this Foundation strongly supports. As The Prince of Wales said, it is essential to adopt a collaborative approach to cancer research - one which takes into account all methods used by cancer patients.

Competing interests: The Prince of Wales is the President of the Foundation for Integrated Health

Editor,

Twenty years ago, on the 150th anniversary of the BMA, Prince Charles was appointed its president and admonished the medical profession for its complacency - according to Professor Baum.

It is a great pity His Royal Highness is not in that position today as the complacency of the profession in tolerating the fabricated diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome sends hundreds of Her Majesty’s subjects to prison and needs the four page exposure of this atrocity which His Royal Highness can command.

Only in England and its former Colonies, {America, Canada and Australia} are doctors so ready to condemn innocent parents for what is essentially a medically induced condition when an adverse vaccine reaction can be identified as the cause.

In these countries Judges and Juries have been deceived into believing the word of doctors rather than that of parents when determining the cause of a subdural haemorrhage, unexplained bruise or so-called “fracture.”

Complacency again afflicts the medical profession and again it needs to be admonished by the Prince to save hundreds of families from false accusations.

“It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science." Please, your royal highness, help us nourish medical science by sharing our agony..”[Baum]

Michael D Innis MBBS; DTM&H; FRCPA; FRCPath.

Competing interests: I have exposed false allegations.

Dr. Moran has used the same old argument that has been floated for years: if it was cured, it cannot have been cancer, but must have been misdiagnosed. He goes a little further, implying that in the 1950s the technology and knowledge was such that the doctors then might not have recognized cancer, they were that backwards.

Cancer in the United States was an enormous problem in the 1950s, though not as pervasive as it is today. One in four people got cancer sometime in their lifetimes. Huge cancer research centers had the most sophisticated equipment for diagnosing and treating the disease, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center in New York City. Gerson did not ever, nor does the Institute today, depend on his own laboratories, biopsies or diagnoses for determination of the presence of cancer, but relied on tests performed by other, often hostile, physicians and laboratories. This is specifically due to a long history of accusations like Dr. Moran’s of fraudulent or mistaken diagnoses. Many of his patients had been through years of cancer treatment, mostly radiation and surgery at the time, before he saw them.

Now, if the disease he was treating really was NOT cancer, then these poor patients had been hoodwinked, burned and mutilated, often nearly to death, by surgeons and radiologists pretending that they had cancer, or perhaps doing repeated draconian treatments for the wrong disease over the course of many years. Gerson published his monograph, A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases, including X-rays, medical records and photographs of some of his best cases. If these patients were left in that condition by surgeons who either ignorantly thought they had cancer or were deliberately misleading them, that is a worse indictment of the oncology community than it is of Gerson. Might it still be occurring?

As far as misdiagnosis, cancer was a well-known disease 50 years before Gerson began treating it, though not as widespread as it is today. There is no way that spreading melanoma can be mistaken for a something else. The “misdiagnosis” accusation started when Gerson began curing tuberculosis in the 1920s, because “everyone knew” that tuberculosis was incurable. Thus, if he cured it, it must not have been tuberculosis! He was accused of retouching X-rays (a total impossibility, as any radiologist knows) to make it look like lung tuberculosis had been cured! It would be interesting to know if all so-called misdiagnosed cases were sent to Gerson to be cured, or if the epidemic of misdiagnosis during Gerson’s lifetime extended itself throughout the oncology community.

Dr. Moran insults his fellow physicians when he implies that the massive cancer industry in the United States was either lying or was so sloppy as to misdiagnose the majority of their cancer cases, mistakenly sending millions of patients to expensive, lengthy and painful treatment for the wrong disease.

And why would the patients have come to Dr. Gerson? After all, if they didn’t have cancer in the first place, and the conventional treatment they were receiving was apparently relieving their disease, they would have stuck to it. That was NOT the case. Patients came to Gerson only after conventional treatment had failed, often repeatedly, to stop the progress of what they were told was cancer, confirmed by biopsies, X-rays, tests and their oncologists. Almost all Gerson’s patients came to him in terminal condition, having suffered from years of treatment for their ostensible cancer. Many of these patients are still alive today, over 50 years later, including melanoma, pancreatic and liver cancer recoveries.

As far as the “pharmaceutical conspiracy” that Dr. Moran dismisses so lightly, it may not be so in the UK or Australia, but in the US, the corruption and influence the pharmaceutical industry has over medical journals has gotten so pervasive and massive that it became a subject of complaint not just by paranoid alternative practitioners, but by Dr. Marcia Angell, the departing Executive Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who said in her farewell editorial that "large-scale breaching of the boundaries between academic and for-profit industry" is taking place. Dr. Angell is the epitome of the establishment physician. Drug companies may not be in direct collusion, but they are all pursuing the same goal, maximizing profits at any cost, including corruption of government, the democratic process, regulatory agencies, research laboratories, researchers and medical journals.

References:

Angell, M. “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?”, New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 342, No. 20, May 18, 2000

Gerson, M. “A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases”, Fifth Edition, The Gerson Institute, San Diego, CA, 1990.

Competing interests: I am Dr. Gerson's grandson, and the author of Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless.