Lapis Magazine

When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel

Nobody better exemplified the struggle between the medical establishment and the proponents of alternative cancer treatments than Harry Hoxsey. Part showman, part noble pioneer, he endured countless attacks in the decades long before herbal medicine became fashionable.

Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and social entrepreneur specializing in health and environment. He founded and produces the Bioneers Conference, an annual gathering of biological pioneers, and co-founded Seeds of Change, a leading biodiversity seed company.

From When Healing Becomes a Crime, The Amazing Story of the Hoxsey Cancer Clinics and the Return of Alternative Therapies by Kenny Ausubel, published by Inner Traditions International, One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767. (c) 2000 by Kenny Ausubel.

"My fight against cancer includes chemotherapy, Swedish massage, and relaxing to the muffled rhythms of Tibetan drums." This advertising tag line, floating above the close-up of a smiling middle-aged woman wearing an artsy bandana to hide her hair loss, looks at first glance like a feel-good promotion for a holistic California clinic. Expensively placed in the New York Times, instead it heralds the opening of the new Integrative Medicine Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the bulwark of the cancer establishment that has historically abhorred such alternative influences — until 1999, that is.

Although this shift appears sudden, it actually marks the surprising reversal in a centuries-long power struggle, a bitter medical civil war between conventional and alternative approaches. After a long exile, these alternative therapies are now ascendant, thriving in a crest of popular demand, scientific validation, and commercial promise. Actually, the tide is just starting to turn, and the face of cancer treatment will soon become almost unrecognizable as valuable alternative therapies permeate mainstream practice.

If Harry Hoxsey had lived to witness this apparent sea change in medicine, he would likely feel very mixed emotions. He would heartily cheer the grass-roots 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. He died a broken man, anguished over the future he felt was robbed from him and his patients. The Hoxsey treatment did live on, 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 the Hoxsey Cancer Clinics provides a classic case history of the corrosive medical politics that have long prevented the fair investigation of promising alternative cancer therapies, practices whose ultimate acceptance now seems inevitable. When the government's Office of Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, recently commissioned a preliminary scientific review of Hoxsey, it signaled a radical departure, a seeming cease-fire in organized medicine's nearly seventy-five-year crusade against this reputed "cancer quackery." The government was giving a state nod to what is arguably the most notorious alternative cancer therapy in American history.

Often called the wildest story in medical history, Hoxsey is worth the telling sheerly as a great yarn. Beginning with the treatment's reputed discovery by a horse, it is a chestnut of Americana that might have sprung from the pen of Mark Twain. Were it presented as fiction, no one would believe it.

For over thirty-five years, Harry Hoxsey doggedly sought a scientific test of his herbal cancer remedies while organized medicine systematically blocked him. Though largely forgotten today, Hoxsey's quest ignited a cancer war that blazed across the national stage from the 1920s through the 1950s. Against all odds, he won a formidable series of victories, especially against his medical nemesis: AMA chief Dr. Morris Fishbein, the "Voice of American Medicine" for twenty-five years. These two figures came to personify the acrimonious schism dividing medicine.

In the McCarthyite wake of the 1950s, Hoxsey ultimately lost the war when the treatment was forced out of the country to Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first alternative clinic to set up shop south of the border. Hoxsey's successor, nurse Mildred Nelson, has quietly treated patients there ever since. Like Hoxsey, she has continued to claim a success rate as high as eighty percent, but her contention is unverifiable since the treatment has yet to be rigorously tested.

Harry Hoxsey was either a fabulist of epic dimensions leading credulous cancer patients to a certain death, or an effective healer persecuted by a medical trust. His powerful arch enemy, the American Medical Association, had previously 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."

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 cavalier dismissal typifies the kind of prefactual conclusion that has characterized "scientific" medicine's century-long pattern of condemnation without investigation.

Today, substantial laboratory data indicates that the Hoxsey herbal tonic could have genuine value against cancer. Thousands of patients believe it saved their lives. There is no dispute that the Hoxsey remedies for external cancer are effective. Over the course of this century, numerous prominent figures including senators, congressmen, judges, and even doctors have affirmed Hoxsey's reputed cures and repeatedly called for an investigation. Why then has it taken so long?

The answer is buried in medical politics. It revolves around a fierce trade war fought over money as well as a fundamental conflict of medical opinion. Its consequence has been the exclusion and outright suppression of Hoxsey as well as numerous other promising cancer therapies.

In fact, that war is subsiding at the precise moment when yesterday's "quackery" is repeatedly emerging as tomorrow's medicine. As the preeminent herbal cancer therapy, Hoxsey is now revisiting a therapeutic terrain dramatically expanding to embrace botanical and natural medicine. Its reemergence symbolizes a much larger social transformation.

By exploring the unorthodox careers of renegade healers Harry Hoxsey and Mildred Nelson, we hold a mirror to the turbulent social and economic forces shaping medicine across the rich arc of the twentieth century. The story provides a perfect miniature of modem cancer politics as well as unearthing its ancient roots. It helps decode the arcane legacy of retrograde public policies still haunting us today while illuminating the emerging path to a future that is meaningfully inclusive of natural medicine.

This journey through the shadow side of medicine does raise very disturbing questions. If there were effective "unorthodox" treatments for cancer, would doctors even know about them? By refusing to investigate, has organized medicine denied countless people access to potentially lifesaving therapies? And who has the ultimate right to determine the healthcare choices of patients, especially people facing life-threatening illnesses for which conventional medicine has little to offer?

I began my odyssey into the Hoxsey story as a filmmaker and journalist in 1983, launching my own personal investigation into the treatment and its amazing history. Collaborating with public health nurse Catherine Salveson, I produced a documentary film on Hoxsey, and we both subsequently stepped through the lens to become players in the upside-down world of cancer politics during an era of dramatic flux.

Catherine and I bore witness to the creation of the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) in 1991, which grew directly from years of extreme public pressure mobilized by the large, highly organized alternative medicine community. In particular, the effort was led by the ardent constituency demanding the fair evaluation of unconventional cancer treatments. Congress firmly set the OAM's mission: to "investigate and validate" alternative therapies, with a priority on cancer. As early as 1987, national polls showed Congress that over half the American public favored the complete legalization of alternative cancer treatments.

The tacit reason for such widespread and passionate popular interest in alternatives is glaringly obvious: the medical establishment has largely lost its celebrated "War on Cancer" using surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But what has remained hidden from most people is the existence of another cancer war: the zealous campaign against unconventional cancer treatments and their practitioners. Over the course of the twentieth century, innovators such as Harry Hoxsey advanced over one hundred alternative approaches, at least several of which seem to show 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 repeatedly condemned these treatments without investigation: The American Medical Association (AMA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Cancer Institute (NCI), and American Cancer Society (ACS), as well as certain large corporations which profit from the cancer industry. It is important to emphasize that this confederation of interests known as organized medicine consists principally of medical politicians, 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 muffling this scandal has 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. It is usually while fighting for their lives that patients discover the plethora of alternative cancer therapies claiming to offer hope and benefit, though with little if any scientific evidence to support their assertions.

The campaign against unconventional cancer therapies has continued to boil, and the story of Hoxsey remains acutely relevant because it vividly illustrates how this struggle is nothing new. Where just a hundred years ago medicine was a rich grove teeming with diverse practices, it has been supplanted over the course of the twentieth century by a medical monoculture. How did this happen?

What radically tipped the balance of power was the arranged marriage between organized medicine and big business. Only since 1900 has medicine transformed itself into a vastly lucrative industry. Intent on eliminating economic competition, this medical-industrial complex has ballooned into today's $1 trillion medical-corporate state, within which cancer treatment is very big business. It has often been profitability that has driven the adoption of official therapeutics, and, as we shall see, organized medicine has been far more successful at controlling the cancer industry than at controlling cancer itself.

Along with economic competition, at the heart of the conflict is also a pronounced polarity of medical philosophies. In truth, both traditions, known as the allopathic and empiric schools, have made important contributions. Yet patients facing a life-threatening illness often poorly treated by conventional means have been denied access to all but the allopathic brand of cancer treatment.

Medical politics aside, Hoxsey may well represent a valuable cancer therapy. The underground of cancer patients who appear to have recovered using Hoxsey's "snake oil" bespeaks the contemporary renewal and validation of herbal and folk medicine. It marks the return to a rich materia medica empirically gleaned by keen clinical observers and intuitive healers throughout the ages.

Ironically, actual snake oil, the favorite archetype of medical charlatanism, seems to have gotten a bad rap after all. Contemporary research has found it to have important therapeutic value, possibly even against cancer. It contains the same omega-3 essential fatty acids which have elevated fish oil to a highly prized therapeutic agent. Recent studies have demonstrated that natural compounds in these same fish oils increase immune response and prolong survival among cancer patients. Snake oil has a long history of medical usage which continues today in China, where it is successfully employed to treat arthritis and skin disorders. How did Chinese healers know? How is it that folk-medicine traditions have consistently prefigured and predated innumerable scientific "discoveries?"

Empiricism is a way of knowing based on direct observation and experience. Outcomes are its first measure of success, emphasizing pragmatic results over theory or understanding. To the contrary, allopathic rationalism has asserted that practice must be the application of preexisting theory, not of therapeutic experience. The heritage of this conflict between allopathic and empiric philosophy is sharply expressed in Webster's definition of empiric: "One who enters a practice without a professional education and the proper experience; a quack."

In 1927 Dr. Morris Fishbein, whose overarching influence would guide orthodox medicine for the rest of the century, wrote, "Obviously a system of therapeutics that depends on ancient empiricism in its use of drugs cannot hope to be permanent in the present system of scientific medicine." Clearly he never got to Chinatown, much less to China.

When all the tangled politics are cut away, Hoxsey is really about plant medicine. Herbal medicine is today enjoying a boisterous renaissance and the Hoxsey tonic epitomizes the bountiful botanical legacy that is the cornerstone of modern pharmacy. The very word drug derives from the Dutch term droog, which means "to dry," since people have historically dried plants to make medicinal preparations. Whether the Hoxsey herbal tonic does successfully treat cancer remains an open question, but it is well proven that many botanicals possess powerful anticancer properties. Several major chemotherapy drugs derive from plants, as do numerous primary pharmaceuticals.
The tragedy framing this story is that cancer has reached epidemic proportions. Cancer incidence in the United States has risen by sixty percent just since 1950, and by twenty-seven times since 1900. Each year, a staggering 1.2 million Americans — one in two men and one in three women — develop some form of internal cancer.

The cancer death rate has also climbed precipitously. Where in 1899 the disease killed 30,000 people, in 1999 over 560,000 died, a fifteen-fold increase in one century. Cancer is poised to become the top killer in the United States, making cancer treatment the "dominant specialty" of American medicine. This most feared affliction has become the very emblem of modern civilization.

Yet outside a small handful of success stories, the cure rate using conventional cancer treatments has hardly improved since the 1950s. Then as now, despite $30 billion spent on the "War on Cancer" since 1971, over half of cancer patients die — every year, more than twice as many Americans as were killed in all of World War ll. As we shall see, credible critics say that even these poor success rates may be doctored to appear more favorable than they really are.

Although organized medicine has summarily rejected unconventional therapies as unproven, we shall see that conventional cancer treatments are themselves largely unproven according to standard scientific protocols or the treatments' disappointing results. There are few major breakthroughs on the horizon, and even respected mainstream oncologists are calling for new directions. A shockingly high proportion of cancer is preventable, which is not a medical problem but a political one.

The bottom line is that ever growing numbers of patients are turning to unconventional therapies, with or without the approval of their physicians. Varying estimates suggest that as many as sixty four percent of cancer patients are now using alternatives, a shocking figure suggesting the depth of desperation. Their footprints are easily tracked to places like Tijuana, the Bahamas, and Europe. Patients are seeking alternative options despite organized medicine's opposition, the lack of insurance coverage, and the fact that most doctors can provide little or no information about them.

This runaway popular demand is triggering tectonic shifts in the orientations of medical practice, government policy, insurance coverage, and the mass media. Alternative cancer therapies are gaining dramatically heightened prominence and some are already starting to enter the repertoire of mainstream medicine.

Yet even now, terminally ill cancer patients whose doctors have given them up to die are compelled to cross international borders in search of potentially life-saving therapies. These basic human rights issues are echoing loudly through the halls of Congress, where a relentless movement of cancer patients and activists seeking medical civil rights is steadily influencing public policy to allow more options for both patients and doctors.

What we may be witnessing at last is a rapprochement between these polarized camps, a long-overdue truce in the cancer wars. Conventional medicine is approaching alternatives with a tentative handshake, though only time will tell whether the gesture is sincere or just a temporary concession in the winner-take-all game that has dominated U.S. medical politics for so long.

But what we are unequivocally witnessing is a marked increase in formal research on alternative cancer therapies. The government's creation of the Office of Alternative Medicine inaugurated a new openness, giving society permission to probe these taboo treatments through unbiased research and discussion. The OAM has recently been elevated to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine with increased funding, and other federal agencies including the National Cancer Institute are expanding their research into alternatives. Among the participants are top mainstream medical institutions, universities including Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, as well as elite cancer centers such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering and MD Anderson.

Because some of these alternative therapies could represent the cutting edge of cancer treatment, a gold rush mentality is kicking in. Corporate medicine sees a sizable market and large companies are taking a stake. Ironically, the underlying commercial motive which has long worked against the acceptance of alternative medicine is now spurring its rapid growth. This economic imperative is accelerating its legitimization and relaxing the political polarization.

There is a profound healing taking place within medicine. This mending embodies a reintegration of the tragic split that has cleaved it in two, separating allopath from empiric, doctor from patient, technology from nature, mind from body, body from spirit. That healing is beginning to knit together the fractures of what in the end is one body that would do well to have all its parts joined.

There are many questions and challenges ahead, and the sorry history of the cancer wars gives ample pause to remain circumspect. We are balanced on the cusp of a transformation in medicine, a tenuous bridge to what could be one of the most vibrant and fertile eras in the history of medical discovery.

Ending the medical civil war is bound to result in a greater menu of choices for patients, and what is best for the patient surely ought to be the first consideration. We have the unique opportunity to create an authentically collaborative medicine embracing the best from all worlds. How many treatments can we explore? How many lives can we save?