By Pip Cornall. This article follows part one on the topic.
Introduction – The following article attempts to provide links showing supporting evidence for this important case. Following the links will take some time but if you wish to know the errors and omissions in the Ian Gawler cancer healing story then you’ll find the evidence compelling… view post
Although Ian Gawler’s remarkable recovery has received 100′s of major media coverages in the last three decades, Grace Gawler, as his full time care giver/healer has been largely refused opportunities to tell her account of the story in the media. This has again happened in the past week with the ABC in Australia.
Surprisingly and ironically, it has been the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) who have provided the opportunity!
Letters like the following are frequently received by Grace (extract) – Kevin writes…. “Grace – about the vegan diet. I had a friend just die with stage 4 lung cancer . I walked with him for two years….then after funeral his wife rang for a coffee and told me that he never faced his death…believed that all the diet and naturopathic stuff would heal him…denied it right up to the end and left the family pretty angry..but when people claim that this ( the diet or pills form naturopath) was the sole cure or the soul cause I miss a breath or two… “
Since malnourishment is an important issue for many cancer patients, adding a diet regime like Gerson’s can exacerbate the problem – (see Malnourishment article below)
Grace reports, that following Ian Gawler’s problems with the Gerson diet in 1976, she has, in her 35 years of cancer support work, never seen any patients who did well on it and recovered – See US Science Based Medicine critique of Gerson
Another critique by retired surgeon general in Australia, Peter Moran, who states he has no bias against alternative medicine but wants to see the evidence. Dr Max Gerson and his Fifty cases (How sincere practitioners Can get it wrong)
Moran writes – “I had quite a lengthy exchange with Howard Strauss (from the Gerson Cinic) some years ago in which I challenged him to supply me with one case of proven established cancer that remitted with the Gerson treatment alone, and he could not do so. Every case he supplied was either completely misrepresented (e.g. the supposed “stage 1V” melanoma of their flagship testimonial at that time was actually “level 1V” – the doctors here will know what that means), or the results were as expected from other treatment, or consistent with the natural history for the disease.
He appears sincere, but if so he is the worst kind of ignorant fool, believing that conventional methods never work. When the method fails, as it invariably does when used on its own for proven established cancer, it is always the patient’s fault for not doing everything right in a very complex and arduous routine.
It is not merely the implausibility of Gerson’s treatment that tells us it won’t work. The material produced by Gerson himself and by his own clinic subsequent toi his death is consistent with the method having no beneficial effect on established cancer, even those cancers where the clinic believes they get their best results, such as melanoma.”
Malnutrition Widespread in Cancer Patients; Counseling Prolongs Survival
Elsevier Global Medical News. 2010 Sept 24, S Freeman
BARCELONA (EGMN) – Malnutrition remains a significant problem in cancer treatment, with a study reporting that all of nearly 1,000 cancer patients evaluated in Spanish hospitals were malnourished, more than 70% of them at levels ranging from moderate to severe.
New data from Portugal suggest, however, that individualized nutritional counseling not only improves patients’ nutritional status, but can also prolong their overall survival after they undergo radiotherapy.
Long-term follow-up (median, 6.5 years) of 111 colorectal cancer patients in a prospective trial revealed that the shortest survival (4.1 years) and highest mortality rate (30%) occurred in patients who were not given any nutritional intervention.
Patients who were given high-protein liquid supplements had a median survival of 6.5 years and a mortality rate of 22%, but the longest survival (7.3 years) and lowest mortality (8%) were observed in patients who received personalized nutritional advice.
Both studies were presented at the biennial meeting of the European Society of Therapeutic Radiation and Oncology (ESTRO 29). “Malnutrition and its clinical consequences still remain as a major problem in our daily practice,” despite the more active care of patients, said Dr. Albert Biete, who reported on the NUTRIDIS study from Spain.