FRESH JUICES AND VEGETARIAN MEALS Dr. Gerson gave seriously ill patients fresh juice every hour, freshly pressed, organic, free of poisons, rich in the best nutrients, minerals and enzymes. It is all described in Dr. Gerson's book. We give a fresh glass of juice every hour: five glasses of apple-carrot juice, three glasses of plain carrot juice and we give liver capsules with it, four glasses of juice from leafy type greens rich in chlorophyll, iron, nutrients, enzymes, everything the body has been lacking over the years. Did you eat a big salad every day for years and years or did you eat a little bit of salad once in a while? I eat a big salad at lunch and evening to get those nutrients. We also give three full vegetarian meals and a fruit plate every day. That adds up to approximately 20 pounds worth of food that we can pour into patients daily. There is no way anyone can eat that much food, certainly not someone who is seriously ill and dying of cancer. But by drinking the juice, you get enormous flooding of nutrients, minerals, enzymes, and vitamins. These nutrients and juices start to flush out the kidneys, flush out the toxins and the nutrients go into the tissues, into the cells and force out the poisons, and all those poisons are released into the blood stream. The liver filters them out. You have to help the liver get rid of them, and there is only one way - by opening the bile ducts, and Dr. Gerson did this with the famous and much joked about, but enormously serious coffee enemas.

WHY COFFEE ENEMAS ARE IMPORTANT The key to successful treatment is the coffee enemas. The caffeine taken rectally has an opposite effect to taking it by mouth. Taken rectally, caffeine helps the body to open up the bile ducts from the liver, and allows the toxins to be released through the bile ducts into the colon and out. If you don't get rid of them fast enough when you force them out of the tissues, you are going to have all kinds of problems. You could even get a toxic liver or cirrhosis of the liver. The most important part of doing the therapy at home is that you have to first of all understand the basics of what you are doing. You are keeping the body free of poisons and you are helping to detoxify it. It is a total process. The nutrients go into the tissues, into the cells, and the cells release the poisons into the blood stream to be cleared out of the body. It is a total cycle, and it must not be interrupted.

Let me tell you how serious that can be. We had a patient who had melanoma, and melanoma responds exceptionally well to the Gerson Therapy. Melanoma, lymphoma, the most aggressive cancers like ovarian cancers and lung cancers have fantastic results where orthodox medicine fails. This lady was sent home from the doctor to die. She had a large black tumour under her arm, a massive one across the top of her arm, melanoma in her lungs and she was coughing up blood and was in pain. She looked grey and was failing. She came to us and in a matter of a week these tumours started to break up and flatten out. She stopped spitting up blood, had no more pain, and she started to build up. It went so fast, but without detoxifying, you will poison your liver. She left for home in excellent shape with rosy cheeks, and she continued the therapy at home. Three weeks later, six weeks from the start of the treatment she had a flare-up. We often get these flare-ups or reactions where the body really fights hard to heal: the first one the first week, the second comes around the sixth week. I got a call from her son who told me she had been talking incoherently and was only half conscious, so they took her to the hospital, and the doctor said the tumour was going to the brain and she was dying. He asked me what to do. So I said, take her out of the hospital immediately and give her coffee enemas every two hours around the clock and call me in 24 hours. The usual patient gets five a day, every four hours. She was fine after that.

What really happened? She was in a heavy healing reaction. These tumour tissues were being absorbed so rapidly the body wasn't getting rid of them fast enough, and some of these toxins hit her brain and sort of dazed her. So they made the big mistake, instead of doing an enema and detoxifying her, of putting her to bed. It could have killed her. During the night the body was breaking down more tumour tissue. The toxicity increased and they didn't do an enema in the morning. Instead, they took her to the hospital, and of course the doctors don't understand healing of cancer and toxicity. Even if they did, they don't know how to get rid of it. The problem is that doctors have never seen this kind of advanced melanoma healed. Never. It doesn't exist. So you see, you have to understand what you are doing. When the body absorbs these toxins, whether it is from cancer or from tumours, lupus, arthritis, atherosclerosis or anything else, it doesn't matter. The body still has to get rid of these toxins. You must do the coffee enemas - they are life savers. They also get rid of the pain. Often within a week people can get off morphine.

LIVER REGENERATION AND AFTER CARE When the tumour, the cancer, arthritis or other disease symptoms are gone, do not expect that to be a cure. The liver is the most important organ in the body. It is responsible for every bit of biochemical activity in the body, and all biochemistry begins and ends in the liver. The liver is connected with healing, hormones and sugar metabolism. The liver is connected with everything. It also does the important job of detoxifying; it is the filter system. I have heard doctors say that if your liver functions up to 35%, you are all right, but when it drops below that, disease develops; whether it is diabetes, cancer, arthritis, lupus or anything else, the basic underlying problems are always the same. By the time cancer or chronic disease develops, liver function is below 35%. So when your symptoms go away because of the tremendous support that the Gerson Therapy gives to the body, that doesn't mean the body is cured. The body isn't really restored until the liver goes back to its full activity of somewhere between 90 and 100%. We never really know how long it takes to get there, and the trouble is, you don't know either. It is almost impossible to say. But we can guarantee it takes at least a year and a half or two. If all the tumours are gone, all the symptoms are gone, you are feeling very good, and you stop the therapy after eight months and go back to eating average food, the food you used to eat, candies, ice cream, meat and cheese, the cancer will come back rather quickly because the liver is not able to deal with these things. The liver has not yet had a chance to restore itself. Dr. Gerson said it took a year and a half in his day. It takes longer now because we poison ourselves more. Babies are already started on immunization. Children are given antibiotics at a young age, and drugs of all kinds, and fluoride, and food chemicals and all those things. People are more sick, more toxic, more damaged. And people younger and younger are having cancer.

HEALING REACTIONS WHILE DOING THE GERSON THERAPY AT HOME If you go to a doctor what is he going to do? He will give you antibiotics and drugs, and some terrible forecast that you are dying. The doctor has no experience at all with healing. He doesn't know about it and he can't believe it. Your own family as much as they love you won't understand unless they learn about it. When patients do the Gerson Therapy at home, after a few days, usually five to seven days, the body begins to churn up all the junk and tries to get rid of all these poisons. The immune system kicks in, and they get a fever. Fever is good. The fever proves the immune system is working. Fever helps to fight the disease. Fever can destroy tumour cells. It won't touch the healthy cells. But if this happens to you at home and you have no doctor, nobody to advise you and reassure you and tell you what to do, if you are really on your own with one of these healing reactions, you can easily panic. You can go to the doctor and the doctor says "You have nausea. We'll get rid of it with a shot or a pill". Just as the healing is taking place he stops it. He doesn't know. He can't be expected to know. But the nausea is the body getting rid of poison. If you get a shot, it puts new poisons into the body and all the healing is arrested. That's why it's tough if you are trying to do this therapy at home if you don't understand these things. Yet there are a number of patients who don't have the means or the time to come to Mexico, and they have done it at home and they have recovered.

FEVER AND HEALING REACTIONS Let me tell you a little more about fever because it is so important. Out of thousands of patients who have developed fevers during these healing reactions, never never has a healing reaction caused a death. You see the body doesn't heal itself to death. We are not doing it to you. We are helping the body function with the juices and the detoxifying nutrients and enzymes. We are helping all the body's systems. Now the body functions on its own and it is in control. And the body has never ever produced a fever on the Gerson Therapy that has gone above the level where it is safe. Never has a fever in the Gerson Therapy gone over 104.6. The body doesn't really get damaged by liver damage or brain damage until you develop a 106.8 degree fever. Sometimes patients have a healing reaction that lasts a short time, and this means the body is still not strong enough to stand a full healing reaction. It needs more building up, more detoxifying. The next healing reaction will be longer and stronger. Around the third time, usually by the middle of the third or fourth month, we sometimes see the heaviest healing reactions because at this point the body's systems have strengthened and are better able to work. Patients should come to the hospital so that they have a doctor, so that they learn these things and are able to ask for help if necessary, and then later on they can telephone the doctor for guidance.

THE GERSON PRIMER Dr. Gerson wrote the book A Cancer Therapy in 1958. There was virtually no chemotherapy then, no fluoridated cities and towns, so there is nothing in the book about how to alter the treatment in patients who have had chemotherapy or about dealing with fluoridated water. It is toxic, it is poisonous. We can't even use it for coffee enemas. It is very easily and quickly absorbed into the colon. You have to use distilled water, because the fluoride will undo everything. It causes cancer. You must be careful even bathing or showering in fluoridated water. It is absorbed into the skin very easily and very quickly. So we are dealing with a lot of problems that are not even mentioned in the book, and we have published another little book called The Gerson Primer which updates the book with new information.

WATER Dr. Gerson forbids drinking water. You have read you should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. But it is a well established fact that people who have malignant problems or other chronic diseases have poor stomach acid secretion, and when you drink water, you dilute stomach acid. This doesn't occur with juice because it is a food. If you drink water, it makes it very difficult to digest the juices. It gives you gas, it gives you an upset stomach, diarrhea and so on. So when you are on the Gerson therapy, don't drink water. You are getting 13 glasses of juice a day so you are not going to be thirsty during the day. If you are thirsty in the evening, or if you would like a cup of tea after lunch, there are herbal teas. We are very much in favour of using peppermint tea for instance. It stimulates secretion of stomach juices, settles the stomach, helps with gas and helps diarrhea. It is very soothing and very helpful. If you use water you have to use it as a tea, or in your food in soups and of course for your coffee enemas. But whatever water you use has to be clear of fluoride and chlorine.

FLAXSEED OIL Another subject in the Primer is flaxseed oil. Dr. Gerson found after observing for a long time that patients, especially with cancer and also with heart disease, atherosclerosis and so on cannot handle oils and fats, and that is why his book says no oils. Yet he was very much aware that the body needs a certain amount of essential fatty acids and that after deprivation for a year or year and a half, until the tumours disappear, there is a lack of essential fatty acids in the Gerson diet. He searched and searched and tried every kind of oil he could think of, everything from olive oil, sesame oil, safflower oil and sunflower oil. None of them were usable because in each case the tumours would regrow. Fats stimulate tumour growth. But after the book came out, he came across the work of Dr. Johanna Budwig in Germany who showed that one may use flaxseed oil and it is well tolerated by cancer patients. He decided to try it, and he found that it was very effective. It not only provides the body with essential fatty acids, but it helps to carry vitamin A. Therefore it helps to stimulate the immune system, and kill the tumour tissue, and that is what we are trying to do. He also noted that it did not cause tumours to regrow. He started to work with flaxseed oil and he wrote to Albert Schweitzer the amounts he used. It was two tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day - one at lunch and one at dinner, and after a month on the therapy, he cut it down to one tablespoon a day. What are you going to cook with? You can't use oil because it causes cancer tumours to regrow. You are going to cook without oils. You can't cook with flaxseed oil either because if it is heated it deteriorates and causes problems. So the flaxseed oil must only be used raw and cold. And the flaxseed oil is very sensitive to light. It breaks down in light and oxygen, so it comes in a black bottle. It is bottled near Vancouver, B.C. and is sealed under an inert gas, not with air. You can keep it in the freezer unopened for six months. You can keep it refrigerated up to three months. But once you open it, air goes in and you can only use it for three weeks. So you want to be very careful with this flaxseed oil and treat it very gently. Never put it in a pretty crystal bottle where light hits it. Keep it in its black bottle and never never bake or cook with it. And remember there is a very important reason for every "do this" and "don't do that" in the therapy.

DOING GERSON THERAPY AT HOME We are interested in helping people to do this therapy at home. Many can't afford to come to the hospital. It is expensive and so is the trip. , salt free food, no fat, no eggs, no cheese, the things you use to make foods tasty. You have to learn how to cook differently. You don't throw vegetables in pot of water and boil them. They have no taste. You can make foods delightful, tasty and interesting if you do it right. It is a whole new approach to eating and lifestyle, and all of that needs to be learned. Dr. Gerson's book A Cancer Therapy with all the basic information is available, and there are also some very interesting books written by recovered patients.