Overview
The father of dietary and detoxification therapies for treating chronic disease and promoting good health, Dr. Max Gerson was born in Germany, where he practiced medicine until 1933 when he fled Nazi persecution to the United States. In Germany, he developed his dietary therapy for treating tuberculosis and attracted the attention of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, curing his wife's lung tuberculosis. In the United States, Dr. Gerson turned his attention to the connection between nutrition and cancer, publishing in 1958 his seminal study, A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, which has now gone into a 6th edition, which over 350,000 copies in print. The Gerson dietary therapy became highly controversial when attacked by the medical and pharmaceutical establishment then in the process of championing chemical and radiation therapies for cancer. Dr. Gerson was also a pioneering medical ecologist, making the connection between poor health and environmental pollution, developing therapies for detoxifying the body, including his highly effective coffee enema treatment.
Despite unrelenting attacks from the medical community Dr. Gerson's daughter Charlotte founded the Gerson Institute, including a clinic in Mexico, where adherents to the Gerson Therapy, not only for cancer but also for other illness, can be treated. Thousands of patients following the Gerson Therapy have been cured of chronic illness, many of whom had been given no hope for recovery by the medical establishment.
This life story of Dr. Max Gerson and account of his therapies will take a place beside biographies of such other influential health-care pioneers as Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer in the history of medicine.