When Healing Becomes a Crime
Kenny Ausubel, Tikkun Magazine
June 12, 2001

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11015



There is another cancer war -- against "unproven" alternative cancer
therapies. But is the medical standard of proof a double standard?


In February 2001, a federal government-sponsored report under the auspices
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was published finding
"noteworthy cases of survival" among cancer patients using the Hoxsey
herbal treatment. After seventy-five years, Uncle Sam is finally giving a
state nod to what is arguably the most notorious alternative cancer therapy
in American history.


In the 1950s at the height of organized medicine's crusade against the
Hoxsey Cancer Clinics, the American Medical Association crystallized the
medical establishment's sentiments in its supremely influential Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA). "It is fair to observe that the
American Medical Association or any other association or individual has no
need to go beyond the Hoxsey label to be convinced. Any such person who
would seriously contend that scientific medicine is under any obligation to
investigate such a mixture or its promoter is either stupid or dishonest."


The recent NIH report marks a surprising reversal in the longstanding
medical civil war between conventional and alternative approaches. After a
long exile, alternative therapies are now ascendant, riding a crest of
popular demand, scientific validation, and commercial promise. The face of
cancer treatment may soon become almost unrecognizable as valuable
alternative therapies begin to permeate mainstream practice.


If Harry Hoxsey had lived to witness this apparent sea-change in medicine,
he might likely feel very mixed emotions. He would heartily cheer the
grassroots surge propelling the movement, the same kind that once carried
his Hoxsey Cancer Clinics to unmatched heights of popularity and
validation. He would be exhilarated by the philosophical conversion of his
enemies. But he would also be cynical, suspicious that a clinging monopoly
was fighting to save face and above all keep its corner on the cancer
market. But then, Hoxsey survived decades of being "hunted like a wild
beast" only to see his clinics padlocked without the scientific test he
relentlessly sought. He died a broken man, anguished over the future he
felt was robbed from humanity. Yet the Hoxsey treatment did live on,
thriving as an underground legend, still attracting more patients today
than any of the other banished therapies, irrepressible after all.


The astonishing saga of the rise and fall and rebirth of Hoxsey provides a
classic case history of the corrosive medical politics that have long
prevented the fair investigation of promising alternative cancer therapies.
Paradoxically, this long-standing denunciation has not been based on the
objective scientific evidence that is supposed to determine the acceptance
or rejection of medical therapies. Rather, the dismissal typifies the kind
of pre-factual conclusion that has characterized "scientific" medicine's
century-long pattern of condemnation without investigation.


In fact, the unspoken reason for the renaissance of alternative cancer
therapies is sadly obvious: The medical establishment has largely lost its
celebrated "War on Cancer" based on surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
But what has remained hidden from most people is the existence of the other
cancer war: organized medicine's zealous campaign against "unorthodox"
cancer treatments and their practitioners. Over the course of the twentieth
century, innovators such as Harry Hoxsey advanced more than one hundred
alternative approaches, at least several of which have seemed to hold
significant promise. Yet rather than inviting interest and investigation
from mainstream medicine, their champions have been ridiculed, threatened
with the loss of professional licenses, harassed, prosecuted, or driven out
of the country.


The facts clearly reveal that a consortium of interests has consistently
condemned these treatments without investigation: the American Medical
Association (AMA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National
Cancer Institute (NCI), and the American Cancer Society (ACS), as well as
certain large corporations that profit from the cancer industry. It is
important to emphasize that this confederation of interests known as
organized medicine consists principally of medical politicians and business
interests, not practicing doctors. Physicians themselves have often
objected to the unscientific rejection of alternative therapies and to
restrictions on their own freedom to research or administer them.


The news blackout and disinformation campaign muffling this scandal have
been so effective that most people do not happen into the underground of
"disappeared" therapies until the fateful moment when they or their friends
or relations are diagnosed with the dread disease. Usually only while
fighting for their lives do patients discover the plethora of alternative
cancer therapies claiming to offer hope and benefit, though with little if
any scientific evidence to support the assertions. The story of Hoxsey
sheds disturbing light on the many anecdotes of "people who got well when
they weren't supposed to," as cancer surgeon Dr. Bernie Siegel terms these
remarkable remissions in the netherworld of alternative therapies.


The Hoxsey Legend


In 1840 Illinois horse farmer John Hoxsey found his prize stallion with a
malignant tumor on its right hock. As a Quaker, he couldn't bear shooting
the animal, so he put it out to pasture to die peacefully. Three weeks
later, he noticed the tumor stabilizing, and observed the animal browsing
knee-deep in a corner of the pasture with a profusion of weeds, eating
plants not part of its normal diet.


Within three months the tumor dried up and began to separate from the
healthy tissue. The farmer retreated to the barn, where he began to
experiment with these herbs revealed to him by "horse sense." He devised
three formulas: an internal tonic, an herbal-mineral red paste, and a
mineral-based yellow powder for external use. Within a year the horse was
well, and the veterinarian became locally famous for treating animals with
cancer.


The farmer's grandson John C. Hoxsey, a veterinarian in southern Illinois,
was the first to try the remedies on people, and claimed positive results.
His son Harry showed an early interest and began working with him at the
age of eight. When John suffered an untimely accident, he bequeathed the
formulas to the fifteen-year-old boy with a charge to treat poor people for
free, and to minister to all races, creeds, and religions without
prejudice. He asked that the treatment carry the Hoxsey name. Finally, he
warned the boy against the "High Priests of Medicine" who would fight him
tooth-and-nail because he was taking money out of their pockets.


Hoxsey planned to go to medical school to bring the treatment to the world,
but soon found he had been blackballed after secretly treating several
terminal patients who pled for their lives. With a local banker backing
him, he founded the first Hoxsey Cancer Clinic in 1924, championed by the
chamber of commerce and high school marching bands on Main Street.


As early word of his reputed successes spread, Hoxsey was invited to nearby
Chicago, headquarters of the newly powerful AMA, to demonstrate the
treatment. Grisly and indisputable photographic proof of the terminal case
Hoxsey treated verifies that the patient recovered, living on for twelve
years, cancer-free.


Hoxsey then claimed that a high AMA official offered him a contract for the
rights to the formulas. The alleged agreement assigned the property rights
to a consortium of doctors including Dr. Morris Fishbein, the AMA chief and
editor of the JAMA. Hoxsey himself would be required to cease any further
practice, to be awarded a small percentage of profits after ten years if
the treatment panned out. Invoking his Quaker father's deathbed charge that
poor people be treated for free and that the treatment carry the family
name, Hoxsey said the official threatened to hound him out of business
unless he acquiesced.


Whatever may have happened, that's when the battle started. The AMA first
denied the entire incident, then later acknowledged the patient's
remission, though crediting it to prior treatments by surgery and radiation.


Yet one thing was certain: Hoxsey had made a very powerful enemy. By
crossing swords with Fishbein, he alienated the most powerful figure in
medicine. The AMA promptly dubbed him the worst cancer quack of the
century, and he would be arrested more times than any other person in
medical history.


Hoxsey quickly found himself opposing Fishbein's emerging medical-corporate
complex. As late as 1900, medicine was therapeutically pluralistic and
financially unprofitable. Doctors had the highest suicide rate of any
profession owing to their extreme poverty and low social standing.
Fishbein's AMA would engineer an industrialized medical monoculture. What
radically tipped the balance of power was an arranged marriage between big
business and organized medicine. Under Fishbein's direction, the AMA sailed
into a golden harbor of prosperity fueled by surgery, radiation, drugs, and
a sprawling high-tech hospital system. The corporatization of medicine
throttled diversity. The code word for competition was quackery.


It was easy for the medical profession to paint Hoxsey as a quack: he fit
the image perfectly. Brandishing his famed tonic bottle, the ex-coal miner
arrived straight from central casting as the stereotype of the snake-oil
salesman. When the AMA coerced the pathologist who performed Hoxsey's
biopsies to cease and desist, Hoxsey could no longer verify the validity of
his reputed successes. Organized medicine quickly adopted the stance that
his alleged "cures" fell into three categories: those who never had cancer
in the first place; those who were cured by prior radiation and surgery;
and those who died. In exasperation, Hoxsey attempted an end run by
approaching the National Cancer Institute. In close collaboration with the
AMA, the federal agency refused his application for a test because his
medical records did not include all the biopsies.


Meanwhile Hoxsey struck oil in Texas and used his riches to promote his
burgeoning clinic and finance his court battles. Piqued at Hoxsey's rise,
Fishbein struck back in the public media, penning an inflammatory article
in the Hearst Sunday papers entitled "Blood Money," in a classic example of
purple prose and yellow journalism. Outraged, Hoxsey sued Fishbein. In two
consecutive trials, Hoxsey beat Fishbein, standing as the first person
labeled a "quack" to defeat the AMA in court. During the trials, Hoxsey's
lawyers revealed that Fishbein had failed anatomy in medical school, never
completed his internship, and never practiced a day of medicine in his
entire career.


By now Fishbein was mired in multiple scandals, including his effective but
unpopular obstruction of national health insurance at a time when doctors
had become the richest professionals in the country and the Journal the
most profitable publication in the world. Drug ads powered JAMA, but its
biggest single advertiser in the 1940s was Phillip Morris. (Camel
cigarettes had the largest booth at the AMA's 1948 convention, boasting in
its ads that "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.")
Enmeshed in controversy, Fishbein's stock was trading low, and, shortly
after his first loss to Hoxsey, the AMA chief was deposed in a humiliating
spectacle.


But ironically Hoxsey's stunning dark-horse victory against the "most
terrifying trade organization on Earth" only ended up bringing the house
down. He immediately faced a decade-long "quackdown" by the FDA.


By the 1950s, Hoxsey was riding what was arguably the largest
alternative-medicine movement in American history. A survey by the Chicago
Medical Society showed 85 percent of people still using "drugless healers."
Hoxsey's Dallas stronghold grew to be the world's largest privately owned
cancer center with 12,000 patients and branches spreading to seventeen
states. Congressmen, judges, and even some doctors ardently supported his
quest for an investigation. Two federal courts upheld the therapeutic value
of the treatment. Even his archenemies, the American Medical Association
and the Food and Drug Administration, admitted that the therapy does cure
certain forms of cancer. JAMA itself had published the research of a
respected physician who got results superior to surgery using a red paste
identical to Hoxsey's for skin cancers including lethal melanoma, a skin
cancer that also spreads internally.


Medical authorities escalated their quackdown in the McCarthyite wake of
the 1950s. On the heels of a California law criminalizing all cancer
treatments except surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the federal
government finally outlawed Hoxsey entirely in the United States in 1960 on
questionable technicalities. Chief nurse Mildred Nelson took the clinic to
Tijuana in 1963, abandoning any hope of operating in the United States. It
was the first alternative clinic to set up shop south of the border.
Mildred quietly treated another 30,000 patients there until her death in
1999. Like Hoxsey, she claimed a high success rate, but her contention is
unverifiable since the treatment has yet to be rigorously tested.


Hoxsey never claimed a panacea or cure-all. He maintained that the Dallas
doctors used his clinic as a "dumping ground" for hopeless cases, and that
the great majority of patients he got were terminal, having already had the
limit of surgery and radiation. He said he cured about 25 percent of those.
Of virgin cases with no prior treatment, he claimed an 80 percent success
rate. Seventy-five years after Hoxsey began, why do we still not know the
validity of his claims?


The "Unproven Treatments"


Organized medicine has systematically dismissed alternative cancer
therapies as "unproven," lacking the rigorous scientific proof of clinical
trials. But if the Hoxsey treatment is unproven, it's not disproven. Like
virtually all the "unorthodox" cancer therapies over the course of the
twentieth century, it was politically railroaded rather than medically
tested. However, over the last few decades, controlled laboratory tests
have shown all the individual herbs in the internal tonic to possess
anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties, as I documented in detail in my
recent book on Hoxsey, When Healing Becomes A Crime. Though the formula has
never been tested as a whole entity, clearly there is a credible scientific
basis for looking at it. Organized medicine has not disputed the
effectiveness of the external remedies since 1950, and the red paste (Mohs
treatment) is listed in Taber's Medical Encyclopedia as a "standard
treatment," though it is seldom used.


After all, plants are the cornerstone of pharmaceutical drugs. The very
word drug derives from the Dutch term droog, which means "to dry," since
people have historically dried plants to make medicinal preparations. It is
well proven that many botanicals possess powerful anti-cancer properties.
Numerous primary pharmaceuticals derive from plants, as do several major
chemotherapy drugs, such as Taxol from the Pacific Yew tree, Vincristine
and Vinblastine from the Madagascar periwinkle, and Camptothecin from the
wood and bark of a Chinese tree. About 30 percent of chemotherapy drugs
altogether are derived from natural substances, mainly plants. A quarter of
modern drugs still contain a plant substance, and about half are modeled on
plant chemistry.


During Hoxsey's era, surgery and radiation were primitive and excessive.
Both were solely local treatments, reflecting the profession's belief that
cancer was a local disease. As such they could address just a quarter of
all cases, claiming to cure only about a quarter of those. With the advent
of toxic chemotherapy drugs in the 1950s, organized medicine at last
acknowledged cancer as a systemic disease, which Hoxsey and the other
"unorthodox" practitioners had been asserting throughout.


Clearly, conventional cancer treatments have an important place in medicine
and save lives. But since the 1950s, evidence has steadily accumulated that
surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy are far less effective than the public
is being led to believe. Investigative journalist Daniel Greenberg, writing
in the Columbia Journalism Review in 1975, produced the first widely
reported exposé showing that cancer survival rates since the 1950s had not
progressed, and that improvements from 1930 to 1950 were mainly a
consequence of improved hospital nursing care and support systems.
Greenberg found that even the valid improvements were very, very small, and
that there had been no significant advancements in treating any of the
major forms of cancer.


By 1969, Dr. Hardin Jones had already released a shocking report on this
issue at the Science Writers Convention, sponsored by the American Cancer
Society. Jones, a respected professor of medical physics from the
University of California at Berkeley and an expert on statistics and the
effects of radiation and drugs, concluded that "the common malignancies
show a remarkably similar rate of demise, whether treated or untreated."
Joining the fray, Nobel laureate James Watson charged that the American
public had been sold a "nasty bill of goods about cancer." This eminent
co-discoverer of the DNA double helix remarked bluntly that the War on
Cancer was "a bunch of shit."


These "proven" cancer treatments are themselves largely unproven. The
standard of proof for therapeutic efficacy is in fact a double standard.
Surgery was grandfathered in as standard practice early in the twentieth
century without randomized, double-blind clinical trials, which only became
widespread in the 1960s with the advent of chemotherapy. Its dangers and
limitations have since been only superficially acknowledged or studied, and
little is known about its efficacy in relation to a baseline marker of no
treatment.


Like surgery, radiation therapy was grandfathered in without rigorous
testing. Radiation is carcinogenic and mutagenic. In the few tests
comparing radiation treatment against no treatment, according to Jones,
"Most of the time, it makes not the slightest difference if the machine is
turned on or not." Jones went even further, saying, "My studies have proved
conclusively that untreated cancer victims actually live up to four times
longer." Radiation is often combined with surgery despite the fact that
tests have generally shown it made no apparent favorable difference. A
recent study with patients with the most common form of lung cancer found
that postoperative radiation therapy, which is routinely given, actually
raises the relative risk of death by 21 percent, with its most detrimental
effects on those in the early stages of illness. Nevertheless, radiation is
used on about half of cancer patients.


It was into this disappointing setting that chemotherapy entered as the
next great hope of cancer treatment. Chemotherapy drugs are poisons that
are indiscriminate killers of cells, both healthy and malignant. The
strategy is quite literally to kill the cancer without killing the patient.
By the mid-1980s, prominent members of orthodoxy published unsettling
assessments that could no longer be dismissed. Writing in Scientific
American, Dr. John Cairns of Harvard found that chemotherapy was able to
save the lives of just 2 to 3 percent of cancer patients, mostly those with
the rarest kinds of the disease. By medicine's own standards, at best
chemotherapy is unproved against 90 percent of adult solid tumors, the huge
majority of common cancers resulting in death. Moreover, true placebo
controls have been almost abandoned in the testing of chemotherapy. Drug
regimen is tested against drug regimen, and doctors hardly ever look at
whether the drugs do better than simple good nursing care. Because
chemotherapy drugs are outright poisons, many carcinogenic, the drugs
themselves can cause "treatment deaths" and additional cancers. One study
among women surviving ovarian cancer after chemotherapy treatment showed a
one-hundred-fold greater subsequent incidence of leukemia over those not
receiving chemotherapy. In some studies, when chemotherapy and radiation
were combined, the incidence of secondary tumors was about twenty-five
times the expected rate. Nevertheless, chemotherapy is given to 80 percent
of patients


Amazingly, 85 percent of prescribed standard medical treatments across the
board lack scientific validation, according to the New York Times. Richard
Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, suggests that "this is partly
because only one percent of the articles in medical journals are
scientifically sound, and partly because many treatments have never been
assessed at all."


A hundred years from now, medicine will likely come to regard some of these
"proven" cancer treatments the way we now remember the use of mercury and
bloodletting. As Dr. Abigail Zuger recently wrote in the New York Times
contemplating the hundredth anniversary of the 1899 Merck Manual: "We have
harnessed our own set of poisons for medical treatment; in a hundred years
a discussion of cancer chemotherapy may read as chillingly as endorsements
of strychnine for tuberculosis and arsenic for diabetes do today."


The Big Business of Cancer


The medical civil war between Hoxsey and organized medicine has largely
reflected a trade war. Profitability has often been the driving force
behind the adoption of official therapeutics. At over $110 billion a year
just in the United States, cancer is big business, a whopping 10 percent of
the national health-care bill. The typical cancer patient spends upward of
$100,000 on treatment. It is estimated that each hospital admission for
cancer produces two to three times the billings of a typical non-cancer
admission. More people work in the field than die from the disease each
year. According to Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of environmental and
occupational medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago, "For
decades, the war on cancer has been dominated by powerful groups of
interlocking professional and financial interests, with the highly
profitable drug development system at its hub." Global sales of
chemotherapy drugs in 1997 were $30.9 billion, about $12 billion of it in
the United States.


Pharmaceutical companies pin the high costs of drugs on the forbidding
expense of testing and approving each new drug, now pegged at $500 million.
In fact, this prohibitive figure has served as a barrier of entry for all
but giant corporations. The entire system is founded in patents,
twenty-year exclusive licenses that provide monopoly protection. As an
herbal product, the Hoxsey tonic cannot be patented and therefore occupies
the status of an orphan drug that no company will develop. While approving
about forty highly toxic cancer drugs, the FDA has yet to approve a single
nontoxic cancer agent or one not patented by a major pharmaceutical company.


Alternative therapies are finally emerging in part because of the dramatic
cost savings they represent, and because at least some may well represent a
major new profit center. "Alternative medicine is clearly the largest
growth industry in health care today," wrote Jane Brody in the New York
Times in 1998. Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard surveyed the American public
to find 42 percent using alternative therapies in 1997. The number of
visits to alternative practitioners exceeded total visits to primary-care
physicians. Spending was conservatively estimated at $21.2 billion, with at
least $12.2 billion paid out-of-pocket by committed customers. Total
out-of-pocket expenditures for alternative therapies were comparable with
expenditures for all physician services.


The numbers are no less dramatic for cancer treatment. A national study
estimated 64 percent of cancer patients to be using alternative therapies.
A recent survey at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the world's largest with
13,000 patients, found an astounding 83 percent using alternatives.


Major corporations are already entering the alternative marketplace.
Procter & Gamble initially spent millions sponsoring the research of Dr.
Nick Gonzalez, who took up the work of Donald Kelley, a dentist who
reputedly cured himself of terminal pancreatic cancer using enzymes and
other nutritional means. A pilot study with pancreatic cancer patients
provided better results than had been seen in the history of medicine for a
disease that is 95 percent incurable. The subjects lived an average of
triple the usual survival rate, and two patients have lived for four and
five years with no detectable disease. Nestlé has also financed the work of
Dr. Gonzalez. These studies led to a $1.4 million grant to Columbia
University College of Physicians and Surgeons by the NIH's National Center
for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and supervised by the
NCI. The engagement of large corporations vaulted the formerly reviled
treatment to instant plausibility. When big companies start to take a stake
in alternative cancer therapies, it signifies the maturation of a market
and consecrates a political realignment.


Both M. D. Anderson and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have been
testing green tea, or more accurately several of its "active" ingredients,
for anti-cancer properties. Because various studies have shown that green
tea reduces the risk of colorectal, lung, esophageal, and pancreatic
cancers, Lipton tea company is also testing the substance at the University
of Arizona.


In association with the NCI, M. D. Anderson is set to evaluate shark
cartilage, which is reputed to have anti-cancer activity and is widely used
by a cancer underground in the United States and abroad. (Sadly, this
market surge is further endangering several shark species.) The University
of Toronto is testing mistletoe, a folk remedy for cancer espoused by the
Austrian spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner, originator of Waldorf
education and biodynamic farming. Mistletoe has shown anti-tumor effects in
both human and animals studies in Germany.


The release of the report on Hoxsey through the NIH's NCCAM is a harbinger
of the changes to come. As the report concludes, further investigation "is
justified not only because of the public health issue to justify the large
number of patients who seek treatment at this clinic, but also because of
the several noteworthy cases of survival." The report specifically notes a
seven-year melanoma patient who had no other treatment besides Hoxsey's
tonic and external salves. Average survival time for advanced melanoma is
seven months. If such a remarkable remission occurred using conventional
treatments, it would be front-page news worldwide.


"It's interesting to contemplate the dilemma that the National Cancer
Institute is in," conjectures Ralph Moss, an advisor to the NCCAM and NCI,
and a respected researcher and author on both alternative and conventional
cancer treatments. "If they do decide to do the tests, then there's always
that possibility -- and I think it's a damn good possibility -- that some
of these treatments are going to turn out to be quite valuable. If they
decide not to do the tests, there's going to be tremendous fury in Congress
and the public, because what then are they about? If they're not about
scientific testing, what good are they? Why are we wasting our money?


"What we're saying is: Prove them or disprove them. We've had seventy-five
years of Hoxsey. Does it work? Doesn't it work? Nobody knows. How do you
know? Short of good studies, how does one decide issues like that? We don't
want people doing something if it's not going to work for them, not in
terms of just conventional treatment, but alternative treatments as well."


"The best-case scenario," Moss speculates, "is that some tests will be
carried out with the imprimatur of NCI, NCCAM, and probably other
collaborative centers like the University of Texas and Columbia. Some of
those will show that there's no effectiveness, and some of them will
probably show that there is effectiveness in some treatments. The ones that
are shown to be effective that are funded by and based on NCI-reported
research are then going to be published in major medical journals. The
first one that validates a nontoxic treatment is the beginning of the end
of this Middle Ages that we're in. Because once one goes through the door,
then a lot of others are going through the door, and that's what they're
afraid of. They're afraid that, if a Hoxsey were proven to be effective,
the public will run to it because nobody wants the chemo drugs. If chemo is
the only choice, then they'll reluctantly take it, but the minute it's
known there is something nontoxic out there, everybody's going to want it."


The abiding truth for cancer patients is that they want unrestricted access
to all treatments. According to one analysis, only about 5 percent entirely
abandon conventional cancer care even when pursuing an alternative. What
patients seek is the best of all worlds, an expanded menu of options
supported by access to credible information. The stereotype that orthodoxy
has long put forth of poor, credulous cancer patients ripe for exploitation
by clever promoters turns out to be false. In a study by sociologist Barrie
Cassileth, the profile of patients using alternative cancer therapies
describes well-educated, middle-income, often female clients who have done
a considerable amount of due diligence to make their choice.


While physicians fought fiercely for their professional sovereignty during
the twentieth century, the greater social issue today is the sovereignty of
the patient. In a market economy, goes the old saw, the customer is always
right. The AMA's Oliver Field, an architect of the aggressive repression
against Hoxsey and myriad "quack" therapies in the 1950s, responded
surprisingly when I posed to him the polarizing question of freedom of
medical choice. "This is a free country. You pays your money and you takes
your choice. If it's wrong, you're the one who's going to suffer."


It was anomalous to hear the former head of the AMA's Bureau of
Investigation, which once boasted a rolodex of over 300,000 "quacks," echo
the words of his past nemesis. Judge William Hawley Atwell, who ruled twice
in Hoxsey's favor in federal courts and fully affirmed the therapy's value,
had stated in 1949 regarding Hoxsey's victory over Dr. Morris Fishbein: "So
I wish to say, pay your money and take your choice. Those who need a
doctor, if you think one side is the best, go and get him. If you think the
other side is best, you certainly have the right to go and get him. This is
a free country; that is what we stand for in America."


Why was the Hoxsey therapy not investigated in the first place seventy-five
years ago? The overarching truth is that it has been politically railroaded
instead of medically tested. The medical civil war has distorted cancer
from a medical question into a political issue. The many practitioners and
doctors thrust involuntarily into the front lines of the cancer wars would
surely prefer to settle the question in a clinic or laboratory, not a
courtroom. Meanwhile, cancer patients remain trapped in the crossfire,
fighting for their lives.