MC: Yesterday, we had a talk from Dr. Leo Roy on Essiac and herbal therapy. Today, Dr. Roy, again, will address us and included in his talk today will be the work of the therapy of Dr. May Gerson. Many of us are familiar with Dr. Gerson’s work. Dr. Gerson did some of his definitive therapy in applying nutrition in the treatment of cancer and wrote a very well-done scientific book about his therapy. I’ll be very interested to hear Dr. Roy’s extension of that work. Please welcome Dr. Leo Roy.
DR. LEO ROY: Thank you again. It is a privilege to be back on the program with you a second time. As I get to talk to a lot of you, I get to feel more at home and realize your enthusiasm and interest is very valuable. In a sort of way we are here as much for you, so that you can spread the word.
You mentioned that I was going to talk about Dr. Gerson’s work. But I also want to put in some ideas, other ideas that I believe fit in with Dr. Gerson’s work, so it won’t be exclusively one subject. However, Dr. Gerson does deserve, at any kind of cancer convention like this, to be recognized and appreciated for the genius and pioneer that he was. When I think of Gerson, probably the first thought that comes to my mind is, “Here is a Marconi in the healing world.” And if we think on that, we realize that without Marconi, you wouldn’t be sitting down in the evenings listening to your hi-fi set or your TV; that he had the genius to assemble the knowledge available at that time and to create a whole door of knowledge that has made a whole change in this fantastic world.
Dr. Gerson and all the rest of us in the cancer field are still Marconis and this is one thought almost more than others that I would like to stress and get across to you, There is no cure for cancer. There never will be a cure for cancer there are no cancer gods or specialists. But we all have a great contribution to make in this field.
Dr. Gerson did not have a cure for cancer. Gerson had, like every one of the rest of us the knowledge or therapies or herbs or systems or techniques which, applied to some people, or certain people, under certain circumstances, at certain times, will be what these people need to bring about the balance and the healing of their body. I still feel that the greatest statement for the cure for cancer comes from the direct orthodox medical books. There is only one cure for disease and that is host resistance, and this has been imprinted in medical books thirty, forty, fifty years. Again, getting back to what Dr. Diamond said, “There is only one disease and that’s the loss of vitality and life force, and if that’s so, there is only one cure and that is the restoration from the disease through the renewal of the life force.”
As I was saying yesterday, enzymes and the whole total approach through supplements or whatever a person needs is only nutritional and capable of restoring the life force. Thus, the only cure for cancer is when you start putting more life force into a cancer patient’s body than what the body is burning up, whether it is locally or throughout the whole organism.
Now, Dr. Gerson was capable of studying a lot of this. He made a tremendous contribution. He made us realize that although the truth is still there, it isn’t as simple as that; that there are many things that interfere with the life force. It’s not just a question of taking this force and putting it in your body. The body has to assimilate and use it. And it’s not just the food life force. It is all of the life forces. And the body needs everything. I would like to give you an example.
Take an executive. He has his own company worth a million dollars a beautiful wife, wonderful family big home-everything going his way-complete success in life. And yet, everyone of us knows that there are days when every man like this one will sit at his desk and say, “I can’t take it any more. I’ve had it. I’m disappearing. I just feel miserable.” So he will cancel all his appointments and get out, shall we say on the golf course or tennis game, and he’ll beat the bejeebers out of the golf ball all afternoon. Then he’ll come back in the next morning feeling great.
Now, literally, what is being said is that one part of him has gone out of balance, or it could be as simple as this. To illustrate the point: “I have been sitting at a desk too long. I have created an excess in my life. This excess is devitalizing me. And all I’ve got to do is get away get out in the open – the fresh air get the circulation going again and I have immediately counteracted the abnormality in my life, and as I do this now, the life forces are capable of functioning again, and I can act and be my executive. I can be a happy person. I can be alive again.”
Now, this is common sense. And it applies in cancer as well as in colds or in anything else. So the main factor is always to remember, it is not the system that you are using. It is not the herb. It is not Dr. Gerson. It is not Dr. Schenk. It is not Dr. Anybody. It is your individual body. And what are the specific individual needs that you have, and does your system correspond to your needs and does it rejuvenate the life force in your body? Only you have a cure for your cancer or your cold or what have you.
Of course, we are being bombarded so much on all sides that vitamins cure this, or this or that cures cancer, and something else is a cure for everything. Drug companies have been pushing all these panaceas for hundreds of years so that it’s hard for us to get this kind of thinking out of our minds, and I believe that without this kind of thinking, you and I and everyone of us in this field would be a bunch of faddists. And it is this faddist attitude that is bringing down the revenge of the medical association, because when we put our ideas into focus and use them discriminately, discreetly, we may convince medical men people who do not know what you and I know, that such healing methods exist.
Now, one reason why I’m bringing out all this thought, and I believe it is extremely important, is because with my great admiration and what I’ve learned from Dr. Gerson, I believe that this factor was missed in the Gerson system.
Dr. Gerson, like all pioneers like all inventors had to find out where he was going and had to get some sort of foundation, something to go on. In the early stages, anybody and everybody has got to systematize. If you keep varying for every individual, you never come to the point of having any knowledge that you can evaluate, and realize the full value for attacking a disease, including cancer. So Dr. Gerson was a researcher all right he was a clinician. But I think he was primarily a researcher and like all researchers, one has to generalize; one has to be categorical. One has to be sometimes even oversimple and although Dr. Gerson always said, he did not have the answer to cancer, that he was studying. He was changing. He was learning every year all the time, even till the day he died. But people are taking Dr. Gerson’s work and saying he did have a system, he did have a cure, he did know where he was going. He, himself, said, “I don’t. I’m only a pioneer.” But in order to do his work, he did also have a state of mind that every patient had to molded into his system.
And to me, I believe this is the greatest and the most categorical error that any doctor can make. Now, I’m not saying this as a condemnation, because as a researcher he had to do it this way. But accept the fact that when you are talking about and trying to make a god of Gerson, like everyone wants to do, or a god of this man or god of that man, he was human. He was doing what he had to do and the way he had to do it. There is no system of curing cancer. The only system is what you look at in an individual patient and evaluate every one of his or her needs, my needs, and what have you. Then you’ve got a therapy for cancer. Now, for instance, I told you a couple of cases yesterday. I’m going to give you another little example that might surprise you a little bit.
I had someone extremely close to me-actually a sister, who died a year ago of cancer. Cancer of the liver. And this girl was dynamic, exuberant, happy, lived close to very good nutrition, had a beautiful life, lived two or three months of the year out in the northern wilds of Canada amid the forests and the streams and all the purity and the wonder life-force-giving factors of nature, very good husband, everything you can think, and yet she died of cancer of the liver. We spent two or three days together at the time when all of a sudden she realized what was going on, and we said there has got to be a cause like always there has to be a cause. And so I said, “I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but let’s first start by getting rid of the fears that the medical men of the mentality of this age put into our minds.
This is enough to cause cancer in a lot of people. Let’s start there, since we don’t know where else to go.” We got rid of those fears and all of a sudden another one came out. Then another little idea came out. Another little emotional complex came out. And all of a sudden it all came out. And the final conclusion was this. She was a person who was, as I say, an individualist and a dynamo like many others that I know very strong in character very strong minded emotions and as a child she had said to herself “I am supposed to be a good girl. I’ve got to be a good daughter to my parents. I’ve got to do things right. I’ve got to. I should.” And to me this is one of the most diabolical words in any language, “I’ve got to and I should,” when it is used in the sense I am referring to now. So she spent all her life being what someone
else wanted her to be. What er parents; what her religion; what her principles told her she had to be. Then she got married to a very, very fine man a good friend of mine, and she said ‘I’ve lot to be a good wife. And she spent her whole life suppressing, repressing, frustrating all the individuality of her nature. And anything that kills causes cancer. An is woman because of one thing that she kept in her make-up for forty years, or fifty years, killed herself with one idea.
Now there is no way that any system in the world is going to cure this kind of cancer, and there’s no way that you can say that using the Gerson method or using Essiac or using laetrile or anything else, is going to change an attitude. There’s no medical system or chemical in the world as powerful as a thought pattern.
And so, every patient has to be analyzed and assessed on what he or she is and where is the killing force, the destroying force in that person’s life. Not only in their body but in their whole life. And so I learned from Gerson, when I saw a lot of the cases he was treating were failures, that you cannot systematize cancer. Every system has to be applied to the patient and the patient never to the system.
I have been working twenty years, trying to see if there is any way I or anybody else (and there are many, many doctors like me, thank god) whereby I can get to know enough about each individual. I say you can treat that individual and what I have found I would like to share with you for a few minutes before getting back to Gerson.
I started off by asking questions, of course (this is where you’ve got to start) and the questions grew from 500 to a 1000 to 1500 to 2000 to 4000, and now they are up to about 6000 or 7000 questions And I find that every year that I
added another 500 questions I eliminated a certain number of errors or inadequacies in trying to create a regime that fitted each person’s pattern and demands. In other words, everything a doctor knows, whether it’s nutrition, supplements, exercise, counsels, thought patterns, life styles, habits. No matter what it is, everything has to be fitted into that particular person’s pattern, which means I have to know all these things about the patient. This goes back to my original thought, that the only cure for cancer is host resistance.
Therefore, the first thing that one learns in treating cancer, or the first thing that a cancer patient should think about when he’s got cancer, is not, “Hey, what kind of a remedy am I going to look for now? I’m going to rush down to Tijuana, or I’m going to grab a hold of this remedy.” No, the first thing is to say, “What am I? What is it in me that caused it? How can I learn what it’s all about, and what can I do to correct the imbalances, whether it’s lack of circulation from sitting at a desk, or a proper attitude toward myself, or rejections of the joys of living or what have you.”
And so I hope and I believe that when we have developed questionnaire systems, and analytical methods, that are applied to every cancer patient as well as every person who’s got a cold or whatever, that when each person will know in totality that the information can be fed through a computer that is not trying to diagnose but is trying to correlate and make possible the evaluation of the individual, that this knowledge will make as big an inroad into cancer therapy as all the remedies available.
And there’s another little thing that comes in here too. As for instance, we all have the idea, “Hey, all I’ve got to do is get a hair analysis and a blood test and I will know what I am and where I am.” But think about this for a minute. Your hair analysis and your blood tests and your x-rays are telling you one thing. They are saying loud and clear, “This is where you are now.” But, why did the blood tests go through those changes? Why did the x-ra)T show that this breakdown is in the tissue? So you’ve got a diagnosis on paper that you’ve got acute myelogenous leukemia, or any other big name you want to use. Why did you get that disease? And the whys are always to be found in your lifestyle, your heredity, what you did to yourself, your attitudes, the food that you eat, the chemicals that you ingest, the things that you have deprived yourself of, the extremes of fatigue and exhaustion, the demoralization, and on and on and on and on. These are host resistance factors and these are the things that we all do to ourselves. And believe me, I’m no exception; and it takes a thief to know one. I’m as good at doing it as anybody else. And any single thing that devitalizes you or drains the life force out of you is contributing to cancer. And it does not have to be drugs. This is why I’ve told you these stories. When we get our homework done and can start off from the basis of knowing the host, a hundred percent thoroughly, I think that we’re going to find a considerable improvement in any or all cancer therapies.
Getting rid of aspects of your life that are draining your vital force can do more to cure cancer than surgery, or x-rays.
Every one of you, I’m sure, at some time or another remembers a time when you were in your teens, 18, 22 or something* like that, and came home from work, or whatever you were doing, just drained, exhausted, so that you could hardly move. “Thank god it’s Friday. My god, I hope I don’t have to move for the next couple of days.” So you flop on the sofa, not capable of doing anything, no ambition, no desire to go or do anything. And then the phone rings. At the other end of the line, you hear, “Hey honey, let’s go dancing.” How long does it take to have your hair done up and your makeup on, a bath or shower, and just feeling in terrific shape, and at 2 o’clock in the morning you’re still whipping it up. Where did you get the energy from? The greatest healing power and the greatest force on earth is the joy of living.
As, for example, when you go off on a vacation. Don’t take your pills on a vacation. Don’t take your vitamins and supplements on vacation. The joy of living will do ten times more for you than all the supplements will ever do. And so, if you want a “cure” for cancer, the greatest cure on earth that I know is to get out and make sure that not one single thing that you ever think or do or try is ever done without the joy of living.
So never ever do anything o a should or a got to. Always do it out of joy. That is the greatest single factor for e prevention of cancer that I know.
O.K. Now that we sort of got things in focus a little better, I’ll try to give you a few concrete ideas. There are these pros and cons in every system and every doctor’s work. There were pros and cons in Gerson’s method. Dr. Gerson was one of the early one she wasn’t the first, but he was one of the early ones to realize the wholism of therapy. And this is one of his great acts of genius. I think his great genius was wholism and detoxification. And, therefore, regardless of what we call it, or where we get it, or what idea we use that is similar to it, let’s at least learn from him that the key patterns in curing cancer have to be wholism and have to be detoxification. The wholism started off with two things: you have to have a therapy for your tumor. And, you’ve got to have a therapy for the cause. And the cause is always in the human body and in the individual. And any person who treats the end results without going back to the cause would inevitably fail.
O.K. I’m going to put a bonfire in the room here. Now any fool knows that when you’ve got smoke in the room the most fantastic, effective therapy in the world is a fan. So let’s get a fan in and get rid of that smoke. And this is what we do with symptom therapy. You don’t fan the smoke. You get in there and you put out the fire. O.K. The cause of the fire in cancer is always to be found in the human body. Therefore, you always have to have a two-pronged approach to cancer. It’s not just the question of having laetrile or something that will attack the tumor. You can use those. Nor is it just a question of having a nutritional regime that’s going to restore the deficiency. You’ve got to restore
the whole life force and the whole balance of the whole body and the mind and the emotions and everything else. Then you have a therapy that’s good for the cancer patient.
Dr. Gerson was pretty close to that. He also was far from it in some ways. He disregarded emotions. He was not an emotional man. He was a scientist. A very, very cool calculating, intelligent, extremely brilliant mind. And he totally disregarded the emotions. As a matter of fact, let me share a little experience here. During the months I was in the Gerson clinic, there were very few cures at any time, contrary to what a lot of people believe. The only people I believe that I saw cured in the Gerson Cancer Clinic were people who walked into that place saying,t, “This man is God.” And they had such complete, blind faith accepting things in life so openly, that their attitude was what helped cure them. These were people who already had inner happiness and an inner serenity. Now, that’s just sort of a general statement. We didn’t see them cured there, because a cure has to have a five year :period, and you don’t see them for five years when you’re staying in the clinic over a period of months.
There was another factor that was involved in Dr. Gerson’s therapy. Everybody, everybody, I think who went into this type of therapy in the initial six weeks had a fantastic improvement. And, unfortunately, when one starts improving, one immediately says, “Oh, this is ,so great, this has to be the cure.” This is not true, because you can give a person pep pills and they feel improved. Or you can give them heroin or marijuana. They’re going to feel tremendously improved. This is not quite a fair comparison, because Gerson’s patients definitely did improve. You could see tumors going away, tumors regress and everything else. But I don’t necessarily believe this is a good enough answer because what I also found is that during the second six-weeks period, there was a leveling off. Like a plateau. An immediate improvement and then a plateau.
I don’t believe that you can give any kind of chemical that devitalizes a human body and improve the vitality of the system. Any time that you use anything that is not a food, anything that has not come from the soil and was synthesized by root cells into living nutrients and left in that state, cannot possibly revitalize a human body.
Therefore, when you’re taking injectibles as in the Gerson method, you have to, in order to inject the liver extract, destroy enzymes, proteins, and other things, or you couldn’t possibly inject the material into the human body. And, you cannot use large doses of chemicals in the form of synthetic vitamins without sooner or later depriving your body of some enzymes.
I believe in the 20 years since, that we have found out a great deal more about how a cancer therapy has to be done. First of all, I would never ever apply the Gerson therapy to Lriy. of my patients in the way it was originally taught,
but I will never forget the ideas and the genius that was in back of those ideas, and I will keep trying to find other ways and means of adding the wholistic to the entire picture. I use natural food concentrates in place of the s synthetic vitamins he used. I do not use potassium salts except in the beginning. I do not use a lot of other factors he used, and I believe that with the amount of knowledge that’s available we can learn a tremendous amount about what the human body does require. You can add this knowledge to a great number of therapies and to the Gerson therapy and complete it in a way in which the wholistic approach to cancer makes sense. This is where I am in accord with the Gerson therapy today. This is what I believe and will continue to believe.
Now, on the nutritional and rebuilding aspects of the Gerson therapy,he possibly may have been the first one to point out the important role of the liver the tremendous importance of very intensive therapy to the thyroid gland, and the intensive role of enzymes. Enzymes, of course, come from raw juices. However, you can now get enzyme tablets which have far more life force than these juices will ever have and which include many enzymes. As an example, we were talking yesterday about the Spring Green products, a total living product. Dr. E. E. Pfeiffer, who did testing on the electric growth patterns, found out that you could test the life forces of foods by the way in which the electricity drove the molecules from one point to the other. He could tell if the vitamins were alive, if the food was alive, and how much life force there was in it. He told Victor Earl Irons, the manufacturer of Spring Green, one day, “In twenty years I have been looking for a product that would even come close to the life force that is in your product.”
I believe that you can take liver extract in a vital form that would be better, than the liver extract that Gerson used. But for now, let’s go on to the other half of the program: the detoxification program.
Now, I believe that Gerson was a genius in detoxification and I have nothing but praise for the fantastic importance he placed on it. Most natural healers over the centuries have been using enemas and detoxification methods, but I don’t know of anyone who ever realized how important it was to detoxify, to detoxify completely.
You never settle until your body tells you, “Yes, I have now gotten rid of all my poisons.” In this respect Dr. Gerson listened to the body far more than he ever listened to any theory. If a person needed 18 or 25 enemas, he or she got it. He never told a patient how many enemas to take. He says, “You keep taking them until your body is comfortable.”
I believe that when he told patients that they must have four bowel movements a day for a minimum of two years when they had cancer, this was a radical, severe law and I agree he was right. If you use common sense, any animal or any child that is healthy will always have three bowel movements a day, one for every meal. What goes in has to come out. That’s a terribly difficult philosophical concept to accept. I appreciate that fact, but most of us don’t live it. If that is true for a healthy body, it is far more so than if you’ve got a body that’s loaded with poisons; loaded with emotional poisons, poisons from water, poisons from food we take, and every breath of air we take. On top of all this most people have an inadequate elimination, so we keep on accumulating body residues, and then 20, 30, 40 years later, we go to the doctor and say, “Why am I sick?” Then the minimum has to be: if it takes three movements a day to clear out a normal body, then it requires a minimum of four movements a day to at least clear out some of the surplus residue when you are sick.” It’s so simple and such common sense. Why can’t we all think this way? Why can’t doctors, with all the great, big scientific minds we’ve got, accept these simple little things? If you build up extreme levels of toxicity, then you take as many enemas, as you need, to clear out whatever residues have been building up. This may mean 5, 10, 15 or 20 enemas a day. Now Dr. Gerson used this detoxification regime strenuously. There are times when I believe he forbade the use of colonics; however, I have talked to many colonic specialists and they claim that their use of colonics has cured many cancer cases, and I believe that there is nothing, no therapy anywhere, that should not be used in each person sometimes, under some circumstances. For instance, I have talked about vitamins being wrong. Vitamins are wrong for building up health, because they can’t do that. But vitamins, even in mega-vitamin doses, can be used as temporary drugs and must be used at times when the only other alternative is a drug, because it’ll do almost in many cases what any drug could do but it’ll do it with a far lower price tag. You use mega-vitamins; you use processed vitamins; you use processed minerals; you use anything and everything under the sun when the occasion demands it. A crisis condition and an acute condition always demand something that is acute in a crisis type therapy. But when the crisis recedes, don’t use crisis therapy. Health is a balance and you use those things that are in balance with the body.
Rene Caisse, had a method which I think you would like to hear. She would use, not so much colonics or enemas, as what she called “the oil retention enema.” This is a beautiful little tool for those of you who are not aware of it-You take one cup of oil, it could be any good quality oil-olive, soy or sunflower, etc. You fill a baby enema syringe, which has the content of one cap, and you merely insert it into the rectum, deposit the oil and leave it there over night. Many, many people can get 3 or 4 bowel movements a day merely by lubricating the intestines without going in there and clearing out the residues of all the bacteria in the intestines which are terribly important for health. So, if there are 3 or 4 methods of detoxifying, Gerson had a great one, Caisse had a great one, and there are others that are very valuable. These should all be considered, and one should not conclude, “Hey, the Gerson method says this is the only thing that can be done, the only way to do it.” I don’t believe that. It is a great way; it is an early way.
Dr. Gerson realized, what most of us know about avoiding chemicals and pollution and this sort of thing. I know that he never bothered using distilled water very much, yet those of us who use distilled water realize that this can be pretty valuable for eliminating toxins especially in those states where every drop of water you take is polluted. It’s pretty hard to keep putting that poison into your system without realizing that there is a price tag.
One of the most important factors in modern research is the fantastic wisdom evolved around trace minerals and enzymes. Until we start thinking in terms of the whole picture, and the trace minerals, and the enzymes, we are all practicing faddism. We are not going to produce health, not if you’re trying to detoxify. During detoxification, you don’t worry whether you are losing
something in the body because the emergency requires that you get rid of the cause, which would be the poisons, so you use distilled water. It would be better, when you are making coffee enemas to use distilled water rather than ordinary tap water or spring water. There are all kinds of refinements that can be added into the Gerson therapy.
When you come from a country like Canada where 75 to 80 percent of all the drinking water in the whole world is there, one gets rather prejudiced against seeing people damage themselves with polluted water. You should come up and see the millions of lakes we’ve got in Ontario so crystal clear that you can drink out of them, it’s fantastic. We’re fortunate.
I’m going over things in my mind. I’ve given you a lot of material. I could go on and on for days I think, which would only complicate matters and create all kinds of confusion possibly too many ideas. I don’t want to give you mental indigestion.
I think I’m going to stop here and recap with the fact that there is genius in every system. There are faults in every system. There’s nobody that knows it all. Gerson didn’t. I don’t. Nobody else that I know does. There’s no expert in any field. There’s nobody that can possibly know more than a small amount of the requirements of the human body. We always start off any health regime for any individual, you or anybody else, with you, not the system; not from anybody’s knowledge. From that starting point, we have to get a total knowledge of you. We have to then figure out which system, which remedy, is best adapted to you. I’m looking forward to the day when we will know enough about the biochemistry of laetrile and all the different herbs and all the different remedies that existed in the past to say, “Now we know the complete physiology of each one of these remedies. Now we can take a human being and study the physiology and everything that’s going on in that body and say: Ah, you have this type of physiology. If you were to take this particular remedy, you would get this response to your problem. Now, we’re going to have a cure in your case on condition it is completed.”
The life force, the individuality of you and the joy of living, to me, is as great an answer to cancer as anything that I know.
Now, we’ll have some questions and answers.
Q. There’s so much conflicting information around. I’m thinking of one issue now where some people say, “You’re eating all raw foods,” for instance, “but don’t eat raw asparagus.” Then the Times says that the cauliflower and broccoli family has indole which can cure cancer while other people say cancer patient’s shouldn’t eat cauliflower. Do you have any opinion on this?
A. Yes, but there’s no general categorical answer. The main thing is that you get the availability of what is in the food. That is the purpose of cooking or for the rawness. The only way that you’ll get the life force is when you do not destroy the food. Cooked food does not necessarily mean food to which heat has been applied. For example Chinese food is not cooked. A rare steak is not cooked. A soft boiled egg is not cooked. A potato that is still crisp and firm after it has been baked for awhile is not cooked. Cooking means when it has changed from its original state to another state. Then you’ve got cooked food. When you have changed so the only thing you do is destroy it.
The greatest enemy of mankind is not drugs. It is not the medical profession or the drug profession. It is not the communist. The greatest destroyer of mankind in the world is your stove.
Stop and think about it, throughout all the centuries, we didn’t have a lot of the problems we have now until this century when we invented the electric, gas and high heat stoves. Previously, everything was cooked at a low heat. It took all day to cook a roast. We didn’t destroy much food until this century. We’re blaming all of our ills on the chemicals and the microwaves and civilization and everything else but it’s not all true.
There are times when you do have to apply a considerable amount of heat to certain foods in order to make available the minerals that are in those foods and, as I mentioned, the minerals are part of your enzyme systems. For instance, particularly in grains, if you eat cereals that are not cooked, in other words if, some heat has not been applied to them, the minerals remain bound to the proteins and are unavailable. Therefore, you’re not getting the life forces out of them. Now, in other foods where the binding is not as intense, it is far better to eat them raw, or fresh, or just very slightly heated. Heating speeds up the chemistry of digestion and you can get a more ready availability of your foods. If your stomach or your body is run down and you have a lot of illness, you cannot digest food as well unless you are taking huge doses of enzymes
and people are not always doing that, so there are times when it is better to have some cooking.
Q. You said that Dr. Gerson all through his life was changing his system and modifying it. I wonder if he ever changed his theory that one of the major causes of cancer is the loss of potassium from the cells and sodium going in instead and the need to get iodine in to kill the cancer cells? What do you think about this theory now?
A. Yes, I’m glad you brought that point up because I did not want to get into particulars but perhaps with that one I should have. Of course, any chemistry book, any physiologist knows that this is true. We all know (everybody who has ever done any study of the human body at all knows) that if you have the balance of chemicals inside the cells and what is outside is particularly controlled by sodium and potassium. The potassium maintains the integrity in the cells and sodium the integrity outside the cells. This is what keeps them separated and the way it should be. When the body loses life force it loses potassium. Potassium is the normalizer of growth in the body. It is the way that the body keeps the alkalinity inside the cell; it normalizes the electrical patterns. Everything in the body plays numerous roles and the sodium/potassium balance is extremely important just like every other balance is important.
If you go into the trace minerals, you find out that you have to have an exact balance between all of your trace minerals whether it’s cobalt, magnesium, iodine etc. everyone of them has to be in balance. The balance basically has to be that of sea water. The formula of all mineral combinations and fluids in all living cells is that of sea water. The main difference being the difference in proportions. One will differ maybe 1%, another type of strata of life will differ by 2%; this sort of balance. Sea water and body water is all the same and that concentration has to be in the blood of the body fluids at all times. The inside of the cell changes within the potassium up to a point and this is to keep everything in balance. The one thing I disagree with and I do feel that cell research will bear me out on this, is that the only chemicals that can get inside of those cells are chemical nutrients that have come from the soil, passed through living cells, and combined by living cells into living nutrients. You cannot take potassium iodine or potassium in any chemical form and expect that it is going to go into the cells. Now, that’s right and that’s wrong. In an emergency when the body is in a crisis, it will adapt to anything. It will use all kinds of potassium, any chemical, any drug. It will use anything to normalize itself. But when it gets beyond the crisis stage, it will not. So to get you out of a crisis, to save your life, I am sure that Dr. Gerson was right in using his potassium salts in the early stage and this is why he got these radical, fantastic improvements in the first 6 weeks.
Then the body starts to balance off and says, “Look, what I need now is not to save my life but to get healthy and I need everything in balance and I can’t get that by getting one mineral. I’ve got to get the sum total of the hundreds of minerals, and you can’t get that except in food. So I believe that if you want to continue on the program and not deplete your adrenal glands and not deplete the vitality of your cells, you have to switch from your potassium salts to a food concentrate form of potassium.
Q. What about the iodine, I asked about that too.
A. Same thing; no difference.
Q. Is it necessary?
A. Lugol solution is as toxic as hell, I use the word advisedly. In the beginning Lugol is so toxic and the potassium iodide is so toxic that it is like rendering a blow on the head. You want to protect yourself. You’re not trying to kill anything. And this was the same way for instance with radiation in the beginning. When they used radiation it was always in very, very minute doses and it would sort of knock the vitality force of those cancer cells to very very low levels so that the health of the other cells of the body could take over. Now you can do this in dozens of ways. You can do it with x-rays. You can do it with Lugol solution. You can do it with all kinds of chemicals, but that is not bringing back health. That is only making a contribution to the body’s ability to resist temporarily the cancer cells until the life force can be restored. Q. What about enzymes the string be.an enzyme from Mr. Irons? You mentioned something about it being a very potent enzyme. What is this?
Q. What about enzymes, the string bean enzyme from Mr. Irons? You mentioned something about it being a very potent enzyme. What is this?
A. Every single chemical in the world requires its own specific enzymes and every bond that keeps chemicals together and every food requires its enzymes. There may be half, a million enzymes required in the body metabolism, we
don’t even know yet. All we know is that all we can do is take all living foods in a wide variety and the likelihood is that the body will get all of the half million possible enzymes we need. This is not just referring to pancreatic enzymes or stomach enzymes. We need an enzyme to break down sugar; every vitamin needs its team of enzymes; every mineral needs its team of enzymes; every protein needs it; every trace mineral, everything in the body needs its team of enzymes.
Q. You mentioned the enzymes of Mr. Earl Irons? .
A. Well, what I’m saying is that Earl Irons has a complete food concentrate, it therefore contains all your enzymes. They are sold under the label SONNE or_WEICO1 which are the initials of (Victor Earl Irons Co I’m not trying to promote a product but believe me that after 25 years, this one, I believe, deserves a little special consideration over some other products on the market.
Q. You said, doctor, that the Lugol is very toxic. Now when one has a deficient thyroid and has taken Lugol over a long period of time, what could be substituted for it? .
A. I prefer to use a food form of iodine. You can get it in kelp although the kelp that you buy in tablet form from health food stores is not adequate because when you put minerals and enzymes and this sort of thing in tablet form, you destroy a great deal because they’re heated.
The best form would be the food form of kelp or dulse. The only other product that I know, where it is in a food form that is alive is from Standard Process Laboratories which is either organic iodine or iodomere. These are two very concentrated forms of food iodine.
Q. What is your opinion about Dr. Linus Pauling’s claim that vitamin C will help cancer?
A. I’ve had that one about 6 times in the last day. Linus Pauling is a chemist. We are talking about cell physiology. We are talking about two things: a theory and the application of that theory to the human body. Ascorbic acid plays a tremendous role in the blood stream. It is the anti-oxidant which prevents the water soluble nutrients in the body from being burned up by the oxygen in your bloodstream.
Just stop and Think. We breathe in roughly 1500 lbs of air day. We use about 10%, which is about 150 lbs. About 20% of that is oxygen. We’re talking roughly about 30 lbs. of pure oxygen going through our bloodstream in a day. Now you’ve got about a quarter of an ounce of vitamins contacting 30 lbs of oxygen. Anybody knows that this could probably last a matter of seconds. It would be totally oxidized and disintegrated instantly in that particular circumstance. But the body has its own ingenuity. It has a protective mechanism so these water soluble substances will not be broken down. The water soluble substances are protected by ascorbic acid; the oil soluble ones by alpha tocopherol. They play a big role in the bloodstream. But, what I said before still applies. All these things play tremendous roles in the blood and in the body fluids. The only products that get inside the cells and create health are the food and food concentrates. Linus Pauling is not talking food concentrates. He’s not talking physiology. He is talking biochemistry. He’s talking about detoxification of the bloodstream and anything that will preserve the oxygen from breaking down foods will then be able to attack the toxins in the blood. Linus Pauling is absolutely right about Vitamin C as a chemical. As a nutrient, Linus Pauling is way out of his field and may do as much harm to the health field as he will ever do good. Now, I have the proof of this. I have patients who have been taking ascorbic acid for 10, 11 and 12 years and when that ascorbic acid burns out all the enzymes that have to be there in order for that ascorbic acid to be used by the body, you are in trouble. If you’re going to feel better, you’re going to detoxify. You’re going to put wonderful food in the body. You’re also going to produce damage any time you use anything that is out of balance in the body. It doesn’t matter whether these are drugs, pep pills, .foods that are stale and oxidized or ascorbic acid pills. There’s a price tag on all of them.
Q. Would you speak about pancreatic enzymes?
A. Every food has to digest itself. Enzymes work outside of the body in the form of rotting of the food. Brown spots indicate enzymatic activity. Digestion occurs inside the body. It is done by the enzymes in that food. When you add the digestive enzymes of the stomach and the pancreas, you are now shifting the direction of digestion of the food and making it possible for it to stop rotting and going into compost. You are transforming it instead into material available to living cells. This is what the digestive enzymes do and what the body does. It makes the nutrients available to the body. The food will digest one way or another if the enzymes are there. Now, if your food is stale or processed or if your vitamins are processed, your minerals won’t have enzymes and your proteins won’t have enzymes. It doesn’t matter if you put tons of pancreatic enzymes in your body, those foods will not digest themselves and will not turn into a product that can then be utilized by the digestion and pancreatic enzymes, therefore, they’re useless. I’m glad you brought that question up because it is a key in the whole problem of nutrition.
Q. Regarding excessive colonics, are they harmful? And, if so, what can be done to make a repair?
A. Well, the only thing that I know that can be harmful is that there are definite bacterial flora in the intestines, and if you take those out of the body, it’s like taking air out of the tire of a brand new Mercedes Benz. If you do, it’s not going to go very far. The enemas are needed, but when they remove these essential bacteria, you must replace them in some way. Now, you could possibly dehydrate a little bit by taking too many enemas. Maybe, maybe not, depending on the individual. But mainly, the only hazard in these enemas is removing the bacteria in the colon. If you don’t feel good after an enema, don’t take it. Always listen to your body before you ever listen to a doctor. Maybe I can put it this way. Before you listen to Dr. Gerson or anyone, listen to your body.
Q. When taking coffee enemas, if you were to take them for preventive measures, to detoxify the liver, would you take a potassium supplement as Charlotte Straus has told me personally to take? She’ said to take the potassium solution so that, as I was taking the coffee enemas, I would not deplete my body of potassium. Also, when you are taking enemas, would not an acidopholus or wheat grass implant replace the bacteria in the colon?
A. I’m not too sure whether that isn’t a personal answer she is giving you. Coffee does contain some potassium. However, probably, the big thing is that coffee here is used, not as a healing agent, but as an emergency measure, as a drug, as a whip. But it’s a simple drug. It’s an herbal form of the drug so that you don’t have to pay the high price of a very serious drug. That caffeine gets into the liver and will increase the metabolism of the liver to the point where you’ll start draining out many, many more poisons. But it is also a stimulant and its action probably won’t be totally restricted to the liver. When you whip up the metabolism, you’re going to immediately whip up the reaction of the adrenal glands which will make you lose some potassium. So there is wisdom in taking some potassium but I would not take the potassium except in a food form because you are not talking about an emergency at this point.
Q. What do you think of the role of protein in cancer? I understand that Dr. Gerson tried to eliminate protein as much as possible in his patients. Do you agree with that?
A. Yes I do, but you’re talking here about a general health rule and he was dealing with a person that was in an emergency a crisis condition. In the crisis condition you have huge levels of abnormal proteins sitting in a tumor or metastasis. What he was trying to do was digest it out. Now, the amount of pancreatic enzymes required to digest is pretty immense. So what he was trying to do was save all of that enzyme action. Instead of using food that required these protein-digesting enzymes, one put as much digesting enzyme in as you could and as little protein as one could into the system. The excess of that enzyme automatically acted on the tumors and digested them. This was his way of killing off a tumor. Now, this does not apply when there are no tumors. If the tumor is excised or you have gotten over the cancer to the point where all you have are the causes but no excess abnormal protein or tumors, you would not use this principle.
I had a little experience that I think you’d like that will give you an illustration of something that was really a shocker to me. Several years ago I went out for Christmas dinner to some friends of mine. And this illustrates a point beautifully, I think. When it comes a time for celebrating, I celebrate. Food is not just meant for the health of the body, food is meant for the health of morale and the mind, and when you go out and celebrate, you use those foods which give you the greatest amount of celebration and I go all out. I will make sure to fast the next day or take something some enzymes to clear out any garbage that’s there but I enjoy myself and believe the enjoyment of living is a most important thing. So I enjoyed myself that night. After a turkey dinner, I could feel myself pretty full, and said, “Oh, oh, just above the limit. But I think maybe there’s just a little bit more space left. They, came on with a nice plum pudding and a great big thick hard icing and I said, “I don’t know about this one. I haven’t had anything like this for months and maybe years, but let’s celebrate.” I took it on, everything, and immediately everything blew up which basically meant that it was not digesting. So I put up with it for the evening but by the time I got home I was in pain, real pain. So I started taking pancreatic enzymes. It took 18 very strong pancreatic enzyme tablets to handle that one little excess. Now, when one has that kind of experience, just once in your lifetime, you realize, “think of all the poisons I’ve been putting in for years. How many desserts I’ve been having week after week, and burning up these tremendous amounts of pancreatic enzymes.” Now we start to appreciate why one has to use huge amounts of pancreatic enzymes when one has cancer.
*The preceding article is a transcript of a tape recording made at the annual CANCER/ NUTRITION CONVENTION of the Foundation for Alternative Cancer Therapies held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City in May 1979.
The material has been edited to make it more readable and to fit into the alloted space. Hopefully it has not changed Dr. Roy’s intent.
