Charlotte Gerson is the daughter of the late Dr. Max Gerson, M.D. who founded a nutritional healing therapy for degenerative diseases including cancer. The Gerson Therapy is a type of “metabolic therapy” designed to eliminate toxins from the body and enhance immune function so that the body can defend itself against cancer.
Dr. Gerson’s method is described in his book, “A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer.” The Gerson Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to the alternative treatment of degenerative disease. Founded by Charlotte Gerson in 1977, it is the only source for information on the true and unmodified Gerson Therapy.
Excerpts and quotes from Ms. Gerson’s discussion:
There are two major causes why the body breaks down: toxicity and deficiency. Our soils and foods are deficient. Foods are damaged by processing, salting, and canning. And they are toxic from the artificial fertilizers put in the soil. Artificial fertilizers mainly consist of 3 minerals – NPK – Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. But, that’s not enough. The body requires over 50 different minerals. Because the soil is deficient, the plants are deficient and are vulnerable to pests so they have to be treated with poisons with pesticides and fungicides and other toxic substances.
What we are getting with commercial food is toxic deficient food. Then the food is further damaged by processing, over-cooking, salting, freezing, canning, and so on.
The body requires fresh living active foods that are rich in nutrients. And those foods can’t be assimilated into the body when the body is full of poisons. The body has to be de-toxified and how are you going to do that? I believe that the detoxification of the body was one of the most important contributions that my father made to healing cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases.
When you detoxify the body and are able to restore to the body all the fresh living active nutrients that give the healing systems, the normal body defenses back, the body heals.
Dr. Gerson thought that the main organ that for all the biochemistry of the body is the liver.
The electrical system of the human body and the various exchanges that take place in the body can only happen when the tissues contain sufficient potassium. But in food processing, potassium is often lost and sodium is added almost all the time. One of the goals is to restore to the body potassium in the living active nutrients that the cells can absorb and thereby restrict the influx of sodium.
I’m 84 years old and from the time I was born I was raised without any salt in my diet. Yet, my blood is perfectly normal in respect to sodium content. Why? Because vegetables contain everything you need.
You cannot test the Gerson therapy in a double-blind study, the gold standard of clinical studies, where neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is getting what. It is impossible. You can only do these types of studies with drugs. You can’t keep it blinded when you change diet and give patients juices, organic food, and enemas, – how can you keep them from knowing what is what? However, there was a study published about the Gerson Therapy and Melanoma that was published in the Alternative Medicine Digest a number of years ago.
