In this episode, I am speaking with Dr. Patrick Vickers about Gerson Therapy for cancer.
This is a highly controversial topic, and one that I personally am conflicted over (for reasons you’ll hear in the podcast in depth), as there are many people who swear it saved their life from terminal cancer (including my grandmother) and yet, there is very little research to speak of, and Gerson Therapy is considered quackery by conventional medicine. I personally don’t have a strong opinion on it (given the paucity of data) and I tried to play somewhat of a devil’s advocate role in this interview. As always, look into things deeply, be skeptical yet open to learning new things. Enjoy the interview, and I hope it serves as food for thought.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Vickers and I discuss:
- Why Gerson Therapy has very little research to back-up its claims (and why this doesn’t mean necessarily that it isn’t effective)
- Why Dr. Vickers believes that most cancer is caused by deficiencies and toxicities (and which specific deficiencies and toxins are responsible for the proliferation of cancers we see today)
- Why Dr. Vickers believes that eating organic fruit and vegetables must be a crucial cornerstone or restoring the immune system to be able to fight against cancer (and why keto and animal products are not the right way to go, in his view)
- How Gerson therapy relates to the primacy of the mitochondria in resistance to disease
- Why your body’s pH level matters and oxygenation will dictate your health (and how to keep your diet alkaline)
- Using hyperbaric oxygen therapy, peroxide baths, coffee enemas and PEMF technology and foods like aloe vera and spirulina to beat cancer?
- What is the research on coffee enemas?
- Which type of cancers is Gerson therapy appropriate for (and for which does it do little)?
- Dr Vickers’ top 5 tips for avoiding cancer
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey there, this is Ari. Welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. With me today is a very controversial guest. He is a specialist in treating cancer using alternative methods. To be honest, cancer is a topic I touch very reluctantly. I say no to really talking about this topic, I would say, probably 90% of the time because it is largely radioactive to even discuss cancer treatment outside of the realm of conventional cancer treatments.
It’s like the V-word, the word that I dare shall not say in its level of radioactivity and how polarizing it is and the amount of people who will reach out to attack you if you say something on this topic that they think is not true or against their particular school of thinking on that topic. I have friends who are in conventional cancer research. I have friends who are in alternative cancer treatment. I have friends who are in alternative realms who are both in alternative realms, who disagree with one another on certain topics. I have from friends in conventional realms who also strongly disagree with one another on certain topics.
This is just the nature of this topic. I think the interview you’ll hear today with a guy named Dr. Patrick Vickers who runs a clinic for the use of Gerson therapy, Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic in Rosarito, Mexico. There are many claims which are controversial. There are many claims which a conventional oncologist would say, “No, that’s pseudoscience, that’s quackery.” There are many things that would be hotly debated among experts.
I encourage you to listen to this interview as a conversation, as a perspective, not necessarily as the ultimate truth or as Ari’s endorsement of this perspective as the ultimate truth. As I just said I have many friends who I greatly respect and admire who disagree on many of these topics and many of the claims that you’ll hear Dr. Vickers make in this podcast. I don’t claim to have ultimate truth on any topic but especially on the topic of cancer. I think there’s just too much that’s unknown, too much that hasn’t been studied in great depth to have very high levels of certainty.
Obviously, this is also something that is playing with life and death scenarios where decisions you make could be the difference between living and dying. Of course, in that scenario, I strongly, strongly recommend you get as many perspectives as possible from trusted experts. People who you can get referrals to vouch for their credibility and their success rates in treating cancer and who feel high integrity, trustable people who actually have a high degree of expertise.
Ultimately, obviously, in that life or death scenario where let’s say you do have cancer and it’s terminal, you need to make intelligent decisions. The only way you’re going to be able to do that is by getting as many perspectives from trusted experts as possible. I encourage you to do that and please don’t take this podcast as my endorsement of this being the one true best path or anything of that nature.
This is really just conversations. I also encourage you to listen to the podcasts I’ve done with cancer researcher Chad Macias, who is a friend of mine, as well as Dr. Nasha Winters, who also have differing perspectives on many things and who have perspectives that differ from Dr. Vickers, who you’ll hear on this episode today.
With all of that said, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Vickers. He is a 1997 graduate of New York Chiropractic College and he is considered the face of Gerson therapy worldwide. He is heavily featured in the documentary series, The Truth About Cancer: A Global Quest. His patient is also chronicled in the classic documentary, The Beautiful Truth, where the entire movie was about one of his patients. He’s personally trained by Dr. Gerson’s family and one of the few people to have studied Dr. Gerson’s handwritten files.
He continues to carry on Dr. Gerson’s legacy through his premier Advanced Gerson Therapy Clinic in Rosarito, Mexico, as well as lecturing and interviewing on various platforms around the world on the indisputable cellular science behind health disease and the Gerson therapy. That’s Dr. Vickers official bio and now with no further ado or intros and caveats from me, let’s get into the episode, enjoy.
Welcome, Dr. Vickers. Such a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Patrick Vickers: Thank you.
The Gerson Therapy Method
Ari: I want to start with telling a bit of a personal story. I have a little bit of mixed feelings about Gerson. The reason I have mixed feelings is because on the one hand as a science guy who likes to dig into the research, when I go to do that on Gerson therapy, I don’t find much. What I do find is not very flattering. There’s a lot of articles online attacking it by mainstream cancer institutes and things like that, basically saying it’s quackery, it’s pseudoscience.
Also, talking about some of the potential side effects of people who had bacterial infections because of liver injections and things like that. We can talk in detail about some of those issues but on the other hand, when I was a little kid, my grandmother was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, was given six weeks to live, this was back in the 1980s, decided to do something very radical which was go to an alternative cancer treatment clinic. She went to Gerson therapy in Mexico and she was cured of her cancer. She was originally given six weeks to live. She went on to live six years following that cancer-free, and then actually ended up dying of a brown recluse spider bite, but not from cancer.
I have some friends who are actually involved in cancer research who are similarly negative about Gerson therapy. Given my personal family history experience, it’s caused me to be somewhat open to this topic. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you some questions. I want to play Devil’s advocate at times and take the position of the mainstream authorities. I just want to have a conversation on this topic and hear your perspective.
First of all, I’m curious just to hear your thoughts on the landscape of this topic because, on the one hand, this therapy has been around for almost 100 years. Yet, when I go to Google Scholar, there’s almost no research to speak of whatsoever if I go to PubMed. There’s almost no research to speak of. Why isn’t there if this therapy is legit and it’s helping lots of people and it’s curing cancers? Particularly, my grandma did this back in the ’80s. This is like 40 years ago.
Dr. Vickers That’s exactly right.
Ari: How could there still not be some substantial research on this topic whether positive or negative, but how could that research just not even exist?
Dr. Vickers A few reasons for that and it’s really simple. First of all, Gerson was one of the most published doctors in the world until word got out that he was reversing advanced disease.
In 1946, he testified before the Senate subcommittee hearing on the Pepper – Neely Cancer bill which was designed to appropriate $100 million in funding to anyone who could show a promise in the realm of cancer research. So shocked was everybody in that Senate hearing that Senator Claude Pepper himself, who to this day is the longest-serving congressman in history and congressman and senator in US history to this day. He said, “Dr. Gerson dedicated his life to the mastery of this scourge of cancer and all should honor his great work.”
From that day forward, Dr. Gerson became a marked man. He was one of the most published doctors in the world at that point. From that point on, he became completely prohibited from publishing in all major medical journals around the world. In the last 13 years of his life from that point on, he managed to publish three or four things in rinky-dink medical magazines or publications around the world. That was it. The mainstream medical industry completely shut him out from his ability to publish at that point. If you go back beyond that point, he was one of the most published doctors in the world.
Secondly, we have the only study in medical history proving the ability to reverse advanced terminal cancer. It’s called the Gerson melanoma study. You can Google it, the Gerson melanoma study. It’s the only study in medical history proving the ability to reverse advanced terminal cancer, end of story.
Last reason, do you know how much it costs to fund a study? The amount of money it costs to fund a study is absolutely astronomical. Who has that money? The pharmaceutical industry.
Secondly, when you’re going to do a major scientific study, what is the accepted scientific study today? The randomized double-blind controlled study. That is the accepted study of the day. How do you do a randomized controlled double-blind study on the Gerson therapy? Do you hand someone a carrot juice and say, “This is a carrot juice,” and hand somebody some orange water and say, “Oh, you’re doing a carrot juice?” You can’t. You can’t possibly control the subjects in the studies that you’re looking for.
People come to our clinic for two to three weeks, like your grandmother, for example. They go home and they continue the therapy for two years. What are we supposed to do? Sequester them for the entire two years at our clinic? That’d be impossible. Then what are you supposed to do? Call them up every week and say, Mrs. Jones, are you drinking your carrot juice, your green juice? Are you doing five coffee enemas a day, all your supplements? Are you eating all your organic meals that you’re supposed to be eating or are you eating cookies, cake, and ice cream? You can’t control the subjects on a treatment protocol of this nature.
Nevertheless, there have been eight movies that have chronicled our work. No other therapy in the history of medicine can even boast about one, but eight movies have chronicled the Gerson therapy. Why? Because the evidence is fraudulent and the empirical evidence– Whatever happened to empirical evidence where here’s your diagnosis right here? Your diagnosis, you have terminal cancer. Two years later, you’re cancer-free. What’d you do? I did the Gerson therapy. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not good enough. It’s not an official randomized double controlled blind study.
Whatever happened to empirical data where terminal cancer they had, now they don’t. They didn’t do chemo and radiation. they only did the Gerson therapy. This is why eight movies have been done on our work. If people really do their research, rather than rely on the internet, which like you said, when you go on the internet, who has the money to pay to put themselves up on the front page of a Gerson search and just absolutely blaspheme it?
Do you know how many times we’ve heard, “Oh, don’t do coffee enemas. People have died from coffee enemas and they’ve gotten severe bacterial infections and died.” I’ve never seen that in 25 years. I’ve been doing at least one coffee enema per day for the last 25 years and I’ve never had an issue whatsoever. It’s just nonsense. A lot of the stuff on the internet, it’s more designed to confuse people than it is to give them the truth.
To answer your question, why isn’t the research out there and why are there bad things on the internet? Because there are bad people on the internet who want to destroy the truth and want to pad their pockets and it’s the pharmaceutical industry that is in absolute control of the information that you and I received even on the internet.
Now, if you went 5, 8, 10 pages deep on the internet, you might start to find some good things about the Gerson therapy. But the reality is this. We are reversing virtually every single degenerative disease hands down indisputable. All you got to do is do the research or come to the clinic, watch it being done, follow the patients yourself and you’ll see it.
Now, with that said, it’s getting harder and harder to cure, no doubt about it. The generation that existed when Gerson was alive compared to the generation that exists today, it is declined and it’s weaker exponentially on a constitutional level. It’s getting harder and harder today to cure than it was when Dr. Gerson was alive. That’s why we’ve taken Dr. Gerson’s therapy and we’ve added advanced protocols based on what’s come out in the scientific literature.
If you look at my clinic and what we’re doing there, everything that we do is based on the scientific literature. You will find volumes on the other things that we’re doing. That’s indisputable, but it’s volumes of science on the other things we’re doing. On a strict Gerson therapy, it’s impossible to come up with, playing devil’s advocate, what you would be looking for, right?
The main drivers of cancer in modern day
Ari: Yes, I got you. Obviously, Gerson was close to 100 years ago, but from a modern Gerson paradigm, what do you consider to be the main driving factors in why cancer has become so prevalent in society? From there, I want to segue from this paradigm, how do the Gerson methods then address or reverse some of those processes?
Dr. Vickers That’s a great question. The question is actually answered going back again to 1946 at Gerson’s testimony. He wasn’t only telling our US senators that he was reversing advanced cancer and how he was doing it, he also went on to explain why cancer was going through the roof even back in 1946. Why do you think? Because we belched every poison into our air, our water, our food. He was talking about all of that. He was exposing the very industries that are paying the politicians campaign funds.
You can imagine the red flag that went up through Washington when he’s sitting there testifying before our United States Senate. Why is cancer and why has cancer gone through the roof since the turn of the last century? In 1900, they say, 1 out of every 60 to 1 out of every 100 people got cancer. Why are we going on 1 out of every 2? Is it genetics? That’s nonsense. Anybody who knows evolutionary theory can tell you genetics takes thousands, if not millions of years, to show its ugly head. Genetics doesn’t change that rapidly in 100 years. What does change?
The mass progression of the industrial revolution that started, I don’t know, 1500, 1600, 1700. We have belched every single chemical into our air, our water, our food. There’s no mystery as to why people are getting sick today. Had you asked Charlotte Gerson, she died three years ago this month, if you ever heard her lecture and someone asked the very same question you did, what is the cause of cancer? She would tell you deficiency and toxicity.
Now, if you ever read Dr. Gerson’s classic book he wrote a year before he died, A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, if you read that book, you’ll see one word over and over and over again. That word was metabolism. He believed the ultimate breakdown on metabolism, what was a precipitating disease, and ultimately, cancer. If you asked Charlotte, the causes of that would be deficiency and toxicity. Simple as that, and we could go into that in deeper.
Ari: Yes, let’s do that. I’m curious what those specific deficiencies and toxicities are. One aside, I want to mention one thing. If you read a lot of these attack articles on Gerson on– What’s that? That quack site.
Dr. Vickers Quackwatch.
Ari: Quackwatch, there you go. There’s just a bounty of articles where that guy is just demonstrating profound levels of ignorance on the topics he’s writing. It’s not exactly and same with sciencebasedmedicine.com or .org or whatever. The writers of the sites are clearly extraordinarily biased and not promoting the scientific perspective that they purport to be. They write on many topics where they massively misrepresent and distort the literature. It’s important for people to be aware of that sites like that are a few individuals’ opinion, not some scientific consensus like they claim to be.
Having said that, some of these articles have, I think, valid criticisms of Gerson. There is the paucity of research that we talked about earlier. One claim that they often make is that they talk about these poisons, these toxins that Gerson advocates, allude to, in mocking terms like, “Oh, there no such toxins have ever been found.” These kinds of things and that perspective is very, obviously, stupid to anyone who has a basic understanding of environmental toxicants and the relationship with human health.
We now know of, first of all, we have exposure to like over 70,000 different chemicals in the environment. There’s irrefutable evidence that at least in the realm of hundreds of those, if not many thousands of them, clearly cause harm to human physiology and many of them have been labeled carcinogens. Some of these attack articles clearly display their own bias and misrepresentation of the science by mocking the idea that any poisons or toxicants could possibly contribute to cancer.
Anyway, what I wanted to get your opinion on was the deficiencies in toxicity. Tell me the paradigm around that.
Dr. Vickers Today, our food has been so depleted of nutrition on every level. Let’s look at white rice, white sugar, white flour. What’s happened in that process. When I mention those things, what are we talking about? Everything, cookies, cake, ice cream, pasta, pizza, bagels, toast, white bread. All of these things that we’re consuming on a daily basis.
Those nutrients have been stripped out and that’s why it’s called processed. If those nutrients that you needed to run those through the metabolic energy-producing cycles have been stripped out, but you are eating it, where is the body going to get the nutrients in order to run that through the energy cycles, the metabolic cycles? They’ve been stripped out. We have something in your body that actually your immune system’s reserve tank. It’s called the bone and the bone marrow. Your bone and your bone marrow are loaded with nutrition. It’s your immune system’s reserve tank.
I’m a chiropractor. If I X-ray someone today, anywhere from 55 to 75, almost everyone is showing some signs of osteoporosis. As they get older, almost across the board medium to advanced osteoporosis. Why? Because day after day after day, decade after decade. We’ve been eating these processed foods that are stripping our nutrient reserves from the bone and the bone marrow in order to run those through the body’s normal metabolic processes. The body can only do that for so long.
The average age of a person that comes into my clinic is right around the fifth decade. That’s it. The human body can only take that onslaught of nutrition for so long. Then the immune system shuts down and no longer can have the upper hand disease. I have cancer, you have cancer. We all have cancer. That’s a normal bodily process. The body’s designed to destroy that cancer and keep it in check, get rid of it on a daily basis. At what point does it reach where it no longer has that upper hand? Then you’ve got the tumor starting to form.
This is the issue. It’s right around the fifth decade that the body says,” I can’t do it anymore.” The immune system’s been drained and now it can no longer do what’s a normal bodily process and cancer takes over. Is it [inaudible 00:24:03] you wonder that the Gerson therapy is 20 pounds of organic fruits and vegetables every single day that has the mineral and vitamin content that you use, not just to destroy the disease, but now you have to completely rebuild the entire system.
If you want us to get a physical visual reality of what that means, I encourage all your listeners to watch a movie called The Beautiful Truth. In the movie The Beautiful Truth, a woman walks into the clinic who was in the movie. The Gerson Miracle in 2004. The Gerson Miracle won best film at the 2004 Beverly Hills Film Festival against 2,000 different films. She comes into that movie with six months to live. She literally looks like she has six months to live with terminal ovarian cancer. We show her four years later in the movie, The Beautiful Truth. It’s shocking. It will send shivers up and down your spine.
It’s absolutely riveting. Why? Because you see a woman who clearly looks like she’s got six months to live and you see a woman whose entire body, not just cured of her cancer, complete restoration of the human organism, as clear as day. You have to rebuild this deficiency that’s taken place over five decades. It’s getting worse now. I mean, now they’re coming in second, third decade because people are just constitutionally weaker now as they’re being born each generation because they’re coming into a more toxic world. Their parents were toxic. It is just getting worse, to be honest. That’s a deficiency aspect.
Let’s look at our conventional produce. I’m sure conventional produce, it’s only grown with three things. It’s grown with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. That is what the actual agricultural fertilizer is called. It’s called NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Where are the other 59 vitamins and minerals that make up the entire spectrum of composted material? It’s not there.
Not to mention that when they take conventional produce to market, what do they do to it? They radiate it. Why do they radiate it? Because if you can radiate something, you can shut off its enzyme activity. If you can shut off its enzyme activity, which by the way is absolutely vital to human health and to restoring disease, you can store it on shelves longer so it won’t go bad as quickly as organic produce.
It’s deficient in all of those aspects, artificial fertilizers, it’s radiated. You never should touch conventional produce. You would never touch it. Organic food, obviously, comes with all the composted vitamins and minerals. This is the issue of deficiency that we’re dealing with today. Our foods are so depleted and it’s those nutrients that maintain a healthy immune system, let alone trying to cure a sick and dying one. Now, what about toxicity? That’s simple. You mentioned it. How many chemicals? 70,000?
Ari: Yes.
Dr. Vickers I thought it was–
Ari: At least. It might have been updated since I looked at it a year or two ago.
Dr. Vickers Exactly. I thought it was 30,000. Now it’s 70,000.
Ari: Yes.
Dr. Vickers We already know that these things have an effect on our genetics, our DNA. The medical profession will tell you that these diseases are just genetic. It’s deceptive because it’s not really an issue of genetics that you’re born with it. Grandma got it. Her granny got it. Her granny got it. Therefore, you’re doomed to get it because it’s just in your genetics. What else is in families? Diet, stress levels, relationships, environmental exposure because, typically, families are living near each other.
It’s not an issue of genetics as if you’re born with it. It’s what we now know as epigenetics. It’s the effect that all these toxins have on our genetic material. You and I, we’re predisposed to get something. You might be supposed to get colon cancer. I might be predisposed to get prostate cancer based on my genetic material. When we step outside the laws of nature, it’s when those genetic predispositions become exposed. When we live within the laws of nature, eating organic food, drinking, clean water, living a stress-free life. Then those genetic predispositions are less likely, if not impossible, to become exposed and we live a long, healthy life.
It’s not genetics in the sense that you’re born with it, therefore you’re doomed. Nothing you can do. They would love for you to believe that because then there’s nothing you can do but rely on their toxic chemicals for treatment. The fact is that you can actually control that expression of disease in your body by eliminating all the top toxicity and by eating pure food and drinking pure water or pure juices, your choice.
Anyway, this is the issue of deficiency and toxicity that starts to disrupt on a grander scale. Ultimately, what Dr. Gerson mentions over and over again is the internal metabolism the body.
Metabolic function and health
Ari: What specifically does that mean? I mean, obviously, our understanding of physiology and metabolic function has increased dramatically, to say the least, in the last 100 years and there are also modern metabolic theories of cancer. In fact, there are books by that title that have been written. In fact, I’ve had Dr. Nasha Winters on this podcast to discuss that model more in-depth.
I also have cancer research friends who are very skeptical of even that work. To be honest, I actually hate touching this topic because no matter what you say or who you host, you always have some wave of people who are very angered by it. I generally consider this topic to be one of a few radioactive topics along with vaccines that I tend to stay away from, historically speaking. I’ve had to touch on that recently since COVID but that’s another story.
How do you think the way that you’re talking about, alterations and metabolic function or metabolic dysfunction, if that’s the term you would use, relate to these more modern theories of metabolic dysfunction that relate to cancer where they’re often positioning it as a glycolytic switch and how you want to switch more to a high fat, low carb diet that is ketogenic?
Dr. Vickers If I’m not mistaken, Nasha Winters probably is more in line with Gerson than she would be keto, no?
Ari: No, I think she would probably be more aligned with keto but maybe some of the philosophical underpinnings have some overlap. That’s what I was hoping to get at with this question.
Dr. Vickers Anyway, there’s absolutely no scientific evidence that the ketogenic diet has an ability to reverse advanced cancer with any consistency if ever. It’s that simple. The scientific evidence isn’t there and the clinical evidence isn’t either. In 10 years, we’re going to look at that just like we looked at the Atkins diet for weight loss. Absolutely ridiculous. The science is simple.
You said that our understanding of metabolism and physiology has increased dramatically over the last however many years. Do you know everything that I learned in biochemistry 101, the first three weeks of my education revolves around the secret as to why the Gerson therapy has been the most successful therapy in history for being able to reverse advanced disease?
Ari: What’s that?
Dr. Vickers The first three weeks. The metabolism, the mitochondrial function. Let’s define that and let’s talk about the cellular science behind that. It’s simple. It’s so simple, metabolism defined. What is it? It’s the breakdown of food into energy. That’s what it is defined. There is no other definition. It’s the breakdown of food into energy.
When you see someone who is sick and dying, what’s one of the first things you noticed. They’re lethargic. Why are they lethargic? Because they’ve lost the capacity to break food down into energy. It’s that simple. We are energetic creatures. The definition of death is the ceasing of energy production. It’s that simple. The breakdown of food into energy is everything that we do and a sick person has lost that capacity. Where does the break down a food into energy begin? In the digestive–
Ari: In the gut.
Dr. Vickers In the gut. Is it any mistake that, even in natural circles, we are taught where do 70% of your immune system dwell? In the gut. The breakdown of food into energy starts in the gut. People who are sick, their guts are so deranged, so destroyed by abuse of the foods that we’ve already talked about, the over abuse of antibiotics, stress. Stress destroys the gut. All of these things, all the toxins in our food and our air and our water destroy the gut. Pharmaceutical drugs that people are on destroy the gut. The breakdown of foods starts in the gut and we know that. You have to heal the gut.
There’s only one way to heal the gut. How do you heal the gut? Food. You can’t heal the gut with supplements. You can’t. You can only heal it with food and you supplement based on the foundation being food. That’s why they’re called supplements. They should be supplemented. To start healing the human body, you have to heal the gut so that they can break down the food.
Now, once you break down the food, where do you go from there? You now must be able to convert that food into energy because it gets absorbed into the bloodstream. The cells take that in. They take the glucose in to convert it into energy. Now, the keto people will tell you that cancer is fed by sugar and so you’ve got to cut out all fruits and vegetables, which is absolutely outrageous. I’m going to explain the science behind that. They say your body can create energy off of fats. Let me tell you something. Tumors love fat. Tumors are hormonal monsters and they will grow like mad when you give it a high-fat diet.
We have seen that perpetually, especially in Gerson’s early work. He experimented with it all. When he fed people eggs, their tumors grew out of control. Why? Because the fat in the Oak grew out of control. Once you’ve healed the gut and now the body is absorbing the food into the bloodstream, now you must convert that food into energy. That is where the other crux of the matter is and where diseases set in.
Let’s go through cellular anatomy. Here’s your cell. Around your cell, you have what? A cell membrane. You have a cell membrane. What’s that cell membrane made up of? It’s the gatekeeper. That cell membrane is the gatekeeper. It determines what can go into the cell, what can’t go into the cell and what has to go out of the cell, and what can’t go out of the cell. That is at the level of the cell membrane. What is that cell membrane made up of? Do you know what it’s made up of? It’s made up of fat.
Ari: Phospholipids.
Dr. Vickers That’s exactly right. Phospholipids. What’s lipid?
Ari: Fat.
Dr. Vickers Fat, right. What kind of fats is it made up of? Whatever fats you’re feeding it. Whatever fats you’re feeding that body, your body’s naturally going to use to make up those cell membranes. I mean, it makes sense. That’s just the way the body functions. It’s only going to use what you’re giving it in order to do what it needs to do. What kind of fats or people’s cell membranes made up of today? What kind of fats do you think? Transfat?
Ari: The average person who is eating a lot of processed foods with vegetable oils with potentially hydrogenated vegetable oils, things like that, probably not very good kinds.
Dr. Vickers How about high animal protein? That’s high in fat, right? High in fat. Milk, dairy, cheese, meat. What kind of fats are those? You said them. Saturated fats, right? It’s made up of saturated fats. People’s cell membranes today are made up with saturated fats. Now, what are fats saturated with? Do you know? Hydrogen.
Ari: Hydrogen, yes.
Dr. Vickers How many times you read a label partially hydrogenated oil? That’s just when they bubble hydrogen into the oils so they can store it on the shelf forever. Let’s talk about all the other saturated fats. Cookies, cake, ice cream, dairy, meat, high saturated fat saturated with hydrogen. When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, how many times have you heard an alkaline diet promotes health and acidic diet promotes disease? You’ve heard that, right?
Ari: Sure.
Dr. Vickers How many times we heard that? Has that ever really been explained? What does that mean? When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, what are we talking about? We’re talking about pH, right?
Ari: Yes.
Dr. Vickers What’s pH? Potential hydrogen, make sense? When we’re talking about alkalinity and acidity, we’re talking about pH. pH is potential hydrogen.
When you’re acidic, you have a buildup of hydrogen in the body particularly at the level of the cell membrane. Why is that significant in terms of causing disease? Because when you have a buildup of hydrogen at the level of the cell membrane and you’re acidic, when oxygen goes to approach the cell, the charge at the level of the cell membrane literally repels it away. It literally repels it away. If you can’t get oxygen into the cell, how can you convert sugar into energy? You can’t.
It then goes through anaerobic glycolysis and which is what? Fermentation, right? Fungal. Is it any wonder that we say cancers fermentative and fungal in nature, right? It’s because oxygen cannot get into the cells when you’re acidic. The true definition of acidity is improper utilization of oxygen by the body. The buildup of hydrogen, pH, potential hydrogen, it prevents oxygenation of cells because the charge that it gives off at the level of a cell membrane can not accept it. It literally repels oxygen away from the cell.
You want science. In 1931, Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in medicine for proving cancer, viruses, bacteria cannot survive in an environment in a body, where the cells are properly oxygenated.
He went on to describe this very thing. He went on to describe in his Nobel win how an alkaline diet is the primary factor in the body’s ability to oxygenate cells. Why? Because when you do not have a buildup of hydrogen in the body and you have the proper fats at the level of the cell membrane, which would be what kind of a fat? A polyunsaturated fat, like flax oil, Gerson tried every oil he had available to him. The only one that didn’t cause tumors to grow was flax oil. On the Gerson therapy, we bombard the body with flax oil to restore the potential, the electrical potential at the level of the cell membrane.
Do you know flax oil, it literally acts as a magnet to draw oxygen into the cell, its charge. Its magnetic charge literally draws it into the cell. It has no hydrogen bonds. When we talk about essential fatty acids, that’s an essential fatty acid. When you get rid of the saturated fats, you bombard the body with the essential fatty acids to restore the cell membrane, you are restoring metabolism because the mitochondria, you have little things in your cells called mitochondria, they convert sugar into energy, only if oxygen is present.
This is how you properly restore metabolism and this is the whole secret to the Gerson therapy. Nobel prizes have been won on this very simple principle, pH is potential hydrogen. Acidity promotes disease, a buildup of hydrogen in the body. Alkalinity promotes health because it restores the body’s ability to oxygenate tissues. The ketogenic diet, which is loaded with what? It’s loaded with saturated fats, which is exactly the Atkins diet for cancer treatment. That’s what we found with the Atkins diet.
After a year or two, people’s metabolism started to shut down. They started to shut down. Why? Because that entire year or two on the ketogenic diet or the Atkins diet, they were turning their cell membranes into nothing but saturated fat. The oxygenation that’s necessary to convert food into energy was destroyed. The way you heal the human body is through fruits and vegetables, high in sugar from fruits and vegetables, and the presence of oxygen, that is science. That is cellular science to its basic core.
That is how the Gerson therapy has functioned from day one. It is designed to restore the cellular metabolism at the level of the cell membrane, then you have to restore the internal integrity of the cell, which we’ve completely destroyed. With what? Salt. We have absolutely destroyed the internal integrity of the cell. Do you know how many patients come to my clinic and companions? By the time they leave two to three weeks later, they’ve lost anywhere from 10 to 15 pounds, mostly in water weight alone stored up in their cells. We eat so much sodium today, that salt and water are swelling up the cells and the mitochondria can’t function in that environment.
Rule number one on the Gerson therapy, no sodium, other than what’s naturally occurring in fruits and vegetables. You get enough in fruits and vegetables for optimal survival, optimal health. We bombard the body with potassium, a special potassium powder Gerson created, on top of the fruits and vegetables that have all the potassium in it. Something miraculous happens, people start dumping sodium and water, and all of a sudden their energy production starts to increase again. This is simple science like I told you in biochemistry 101. This isn’t voodoo medicine. It’s simple science.
How do you get the rest of the hydrogen out of the body? We’ve reestablished the lack of hydrogen at the level of the cell membrane. What about all the other hydrogen running through the system that’s also screwing up electrical potentials within the body? How do you neutralize that? There’s only one way, fruits, and vegetables. Why? When you drink a fruit or a vegetable or you eat a raw fruit or a vegetable, it gets broken down in the body to potassium hydroxide. Now, if you write a hydroxyl molecule chemically, it’s OH-. What is the acidic hydrogen molecule? It’s the lone positively charged hydrogen ion. That lone positively charged hydrogen ion is the destructive ion.
All of a sudden, you start taking in massive amounts of OH-, hydroxyl ions, and they start to react with the positively charged hydrogen ion, OH-, H+, reaction takes place. What do you get? Two H’s and an O. OH-, H+, 2 Hs, and an O, H2O, neutral charge. You reestablish a charge at the level of the cell membrane, level of the cell, and voila, you can start to properly oxygenate tissues again. You do the exact opposite on the ketogenic diet. It’s bogus. It’ll be thrown out of history in the next 10 years. Nobody will be able to claim a long-term cure from advanced cancer on a ketogenic diet.
The way you heal cancer, we’ve proven it over and over again for 100 years, that’s why eight movies have been done on our work. That’s why Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer called Gerson the greatest genius in medical history because you’re properly reestablishing metabolism at the level of a cell and the level of the cell membrane. It’s so simple. I could sit here with a child and explain it and understand it.
Foods and supplements used in the Gerson Method
Ari: It’s interesting that both you and the advocates of the keto approach, the metabolic theory of cancer actually start with similar conceptions of what’s going wrong metabolically but arrive at very different conclusions about what the best approach is to fixing that. I want to ask you about liver because liver, at least was as I understand, part of the Gerson protocol. I know that my grandmother was using liver. I know some more modern conceptions of the Gerson approach don’t use liver and it seems like based on everything you just said, you’re a strong advocate against consumption of animal foods. Tell me about your take on liver in the Gerson method.
Dr. Vickers Gerson, when he was alive, he used to give raw calves’ liver juice, raw calves’ liver. That was loaded with nutrition, vital enzymes. It was a very integral and important part of his therapy. Now, the liver is not that high in fat. He clearly was not worried about the fat content of the liver. That was an absolutely vital component of his therapy. However, today, and what was it, it was raw calves’ liver. Why a calf? Because a calf didn’t have a toxic liver from years of exposure to whatever an adult calf would have been most of its life. By getting a raw calves liver, he felt that that would be a vital component in its nutrient density, its Coenzyme Q10. It was loaded with CoQ10.
Why is CoQ10 so important? Because in the mitochondria, once the mitochondria has taken the glucose molecule and it’s converted it into nicotinic acid dehydrogenase, one glucose molecule gets converted into three molecules of nicotinic acid dehydrogenase and those get shuttled down the electron transport chain to the final production of energy. That electron transport chain is completely dependent on Coenzyme Q10, completely, and the liver was loaded with CoQ10. That’s one of the main reasons why he gave it.
The other reason is because how dense it was [unintelligible 00:50:01] is nutrition, and we’ve known that, our grandparents knew that. Eating liver was a very common thing. It was considered a health food, but today, unfortunately, there’s worldwide contamination of raw calves liver, and so we can’t give it. It’s contaminated with campylobacteria, so we can’t give it or we’d kill the patient. They’re already immune-compromised. You give them campylobacter. They’re dead.
Now there’s been talk of flash pasteurizing it perhaps like when they reopened the Gerson Clinic 18 years after Gerson’s death, and they couldn’t use raw calves liver, they tried to come up with a protocol for it, which was COQ 10 and desiccated liver capsules, but we can’t find desiccated organic liver capsules, so I’ve stopped the protocol. I just don’t do that part of the protocol anymore. The original protocol was the raw calves liver juice.
Ari: If you could find those pasteurized desiccated liver, would you use them? Because I used to use them.
Dr. Vickers I probably would.
Ari: I used to supplements with those frequently, and actually I still have some supplements that have those right now. Sorry, go ahead.
Dr. Vickers Were they defatted?
Ari: I doubt they are defatted. No. I think they’re just dedicated.
Dr. Vickers Yes. That would probably be really important. That it would be defatted, but anyway, regardless, that was an essential part of Gerson’s protocol when he was alive. We believe that it was actually a major contributor to his incredibly high success rates. He was arguably curing well over 50% of his advanced cases, and that’s outrageous. Anybody claiming that today, it’s just not happening. Anyone claiming that, they’re just lying through their teeth.
Today, even in the most advanced cases, if we’re getting 25%, we’re doing well. We’re hoping with the advanced protocols that we’re utilizing at the clinic that we would get more than 25%, but that remains to be seen because we’ve only been using that for maybe a handful of years. Then compliance again is the other issue, when people go home.
Ari: What kinds of advanced protocols have you added into the basic or foundational Gerson therapy method?
Dr. Vickers Yes, we’re doing a lot of different things. Just based on the simple work of Otto Warburg, when he won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1931, we’ve added oxygen therapies.
Ari: Hyperbaric.
Dr. Vickers Our patients are getting hyperbaric. They’re getting ultraviolet blood radiation with ozone intravenously. They’re getting pulse electromagnetic frequency in the form of the BEMER mat. They say that oxygenates tissues 30% greater than a chamber. They’re getting peroxide. If they want peroxide, we add a little peroxide to the enema, they can do peroxide baths, 35% hydrogen peroxide baths. They can nebulize these things as well. We just added those simple procedures to oxygenate tissues on a greater scale, since we’re preparing the body for oxygenation.
Other things that we’ve added, some really good products are out there like pure unadulterated organic aloe vera, not off the store shelf. You never buy aloe vera off a store shelf. It’s been deodorized, it’s been decolorized. It’s had preservatives added. It’s dead. It’s like a fruit or a vegetable. It starts to ferment in four to five days, even under refrigeration. We get it sent to us harvested immediately in the Dominican Republic, overnight shipped to us, and frozen, and then we keep it in the freezer in bottles, and we use it every single day as we need it in each of the 13 juices. It never ferments, it’s as raw as it possibly can be, and that’s going into each of their juices.
There’s not a more potent healer of connective tissue and epithelial tissue than pure raw aloe vera. That’s something we’ve added in the last five years, raw living spirulina. The science on spirulina and cancer and virtually every disease is, there’s a ceiling. We know that.
Ari: Yes. I’m a huge advocate of spirulina.
Dr. Vickers Exactly. You and I, until recently, how do we get our spirulina? The best spirulina you’ve been able to get is in organic powdered form. It stinks and it doesn’t taste very good. Why?
Ari: I don’t mind the taste, but some people definitely do.
Dr. Vickers Right, but it does. It stinks, and it doesn’t really taste that great, but why? Because it’s a bacteria and it’s dead, they’ve dehydrated it, or they freeze-dried it, and it’s a bacteria. It’s a living organism that’s dead. Even in that state, it’s still very powerful.
There’s a guy in Vero Beach, Florida, Tim White, who has absolutely revolutionized the production of spirulina, and he is producing raw, living spirulina. You put it under a microscope? It’s literally swimming. It’s alive. He harvests it on a Monday or Sunday, overnight ships it to us, we get it by Wednesday, and we use it over a two-week period because at the end of two weeks, it’s no good, and so we’re using it in its raw state. It’s like yogurt, you open it up, doesn’t smell, doesn’t taste bad, tastes like yogurt. That’s also what we’ve added.
We’ve added GCMAF. MAF stands for Macrophage Activating Factor. Macro means big phage, means eat. They’re the big cells in your body that eat and destroy cancer viruses and bacteria. That’s the supplement or that’s the thing that doctors have been murdered over for autism. It’s literally bringing children out of autism, GCMAF.
Ari: What is it made of?
Dr. Vickers It’s derived from human blood ultimately. Obviously, processed and sterilized and everything, but it comes from human blood. Your body naturally produces GCMAF, but cancer has an ability to send out cell signals that shut down the body’s ability to produce it, and so by injecting it into the body, you can re-stimulate that natural process and it can play a vital role in boosting up the immune system, so we’re using GCMAF, we’re using dendritic cell therapy, your own dendritics.
Dendritic cells are like generals in your body. They go out seeking threats to the system and they present that threat to the immune system and the immune system rallies the response, and so we cultivate your dendritics over a three- to four-day period, multiplying them exponentially and reintroducing them into your body. That’s another–
Ari: Via injection into the bloodstream?
Dr. Vickers Yes, that’s right. They’re your dendritics being reintroduced into your body after being multiplied exponentially with a growth factor. You can add a growth factor to your own cells and increase them, so we do dendritic.
Ari: Okay. I have I think it’s an interesting question. Hold on one second. I’m going to re-ask that when my dog is not barking. Are you okay on time to go maybe five or 10 more minutes?
Dr. Vickers I’m good.
Ari: Okay. Hold on second.
Dr. Vickers Yes.
[silence]
Ari: We’ve talked about things you’ve added to the standard Gerson method. I’m curious, as far as this realm of alternative cancer treatments, we talked about the keto approach, but are there any other aspects of the alternative cancer therapy realm that you would consider quackery that you would consider pseudoscience?
Dr. Vickers Well, there’s a lot of clinics out there and a lot of them are using hyperbaric, IV vitamin C, they’re doing infrared treatments, which is the science behind infrared now a guy wrote a book called The Medicine of Light, Nathaniel Mead, he wrote a book called The Medicine of Light what’s coming out now in the science is when you bombbard the body with chlorophyll then you hit it hard with near-infrared light specifically, it’s causing immediate cell death. Apoptosis of cancer cells, that’s the science coming out today. Some of these clinics are doing little bits of all of these things. The ones I’m familiar with, they’re doing a lot of this stuff.
The ultraviolet blood irradiation with ozone, they were doing that back in the 30s before the advent of antibiotics to kill your major staph infections. Then when antibiotics came along, they decided there was more money in antibiotics than ultraviolet blood radiation with ozone. I can’t honestly say that I know personally of any clinics doing things that are just off the cuff fraudulent.
Other healing modalities used in Gerson Therapy
Ari: Are there any therapies that you’ve experimented with personally or maybe things that you used to do many years ago that you now don’t do because you’re convinced they don’t work.
Dr. Vickers Yes. That’s great question. We used to use PNC27. PNC 27 came from a fruit fly and like a moth, two different things. They came up with their scientific studies on it, like anyone could in this day and age and it was supposed to have great effects on particularly pancreatic cell lines.
We saw people using it in massive dosages and they weren’t responding and some were having bad reactions to it, which I guess you would if it was from a fruit fly or moth. That’s probably not supposed to be in your body, but we tried for a little bit and we let it go. We didn’t do it. That’s the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.
Ari: What’s your take on, I think it’s called Amygdalin or laetrile.
Dr. Vickers We do laetrile. Look, the science behind laetrile is we’ve seen it used successfully for decades. People have been using it for decades. One lady who interviewed with me, Felicity Corbin Wheeler, she had her own TV show in Europe, she had one of the worst cases of pancreatic cancer we’d ever seen. She literally had six months to live.
We completely cured her and she did six months of laetrile. Laetrile, which comes from the apricot kernel, it’s vitamin B 17 called amygdalin, but its other name is laetrile, we use that as well at the clinic. That cyanide component that the cancer cells takes up and normal cells don’t has been known to kill cancer cells. It’s that simple.
Ari: Let me ask, I have maybe two more questions. Thank you for this very off-the-cuff improvisational style of interview. It’s conversational and we both went with the flow of each other here. What I wanted to ask you was, are there any specific types of cancer that you feel these methods are uniquely suited for or not suited for?
For example, are there certain types of cancer that you would say, “Hey, if you’ve got this and this type, our methods just don’t work for you, or if you’ve got this and this type we’ve got an extraordinary success rate?” Anything like that?
Dr. Vickers Sure of course. First of all, leukemia. Leukemia, I won’t even take them. I’ve thought about taking them because there are protocols you could use to treat leukemia, but when somebody says, are you successful with leukemia, with Gerson? No. Now there’s other protocols you might be able to use and to integrate with Gerson that might work, but we really haven’t experimented with them.
Leukemia’s not cancer. It’s a misnomer. Leukemia is a blood disorder and we’re not good with blood disorders. Multiple myeloma, again with the advanced protocols, I think we could have a greater success. With straight Gerson, not the greatest success, but I don’t know anything that’s curing those things, nothing. It’s almost like if Gerson can’t cure it, chances are nothing else will. That’s pretty much been the history of those diseases to this point.
Now on the flip side of that, melanoma and lymphoma, they’re easy. Why? Most of your cancers have the ability to put a biofilm around themselves to hide from the immune system. Well, melanoma and lymphoma, they don’t have that capacity. As soon as you boost up the immune system, the body just readily destroys the cancer.
Lymphoma’s very dramatic. Our most dramatic recoveries are lymphoma patients and melanoma, which I told you, the only study in medical history proving the ability to reverse terminal cancer is the Gerson melanoma study. Those two cancers, those are our greatest successes, but not to take away from the breasts, the pancreas, the prostate, prostate ovarian, they respond famously. The hormonal-driven cancers, particularly prostate, cervical, uterine, ovarian, and particularly prostate ovarian respond famously to the therapy.
Harder ones, maybe colon, pancreatic’s really hard, but some of our most traumatic cases are pancreatic. Felicity Corbin Wheeler who interviewed for her show a couple of times, she had advanced pancreatic, completely cured. She had to be on morphine for six months when we started treatment with her because her pain was so great.
She was able to cure herself on morphine for six months, something so toxic to the human body and we were still able to cure her, but yes, prostate ovarian, the hormonal cancers seemed to respond much better.
Why? Because the Gerson therapy rapidly balances the hormonal systems and so the cancer stops growing at such a rapid pace. Colon’s probably one of the more difficult. We have great successes with rectal cancer. Why? Because you can do a lot at the rectum. The enemas are there, you can ozonate it. You can put raw spirulina up there, raw aloe, a lot of these things because you can get right at it, but we’ve cured every cancer under the sun, but the more successful ones, like I said, are the ones I’ve mentioned.
Ari: Are there any types of cancer that you feel conventional approaches of chemo, obviously surgery is where something small enough that they can easily just excise it and that can be curative. I’m sure you don’t have much of an issue with that or maybe you do, I don’t want to speak for you, but as far as chemo and radiation approaches are concerned, are there any types of cancers where you would recommend that approach?
Dr. Vickers Yes. That’s a great question. First of all, let’s talk about surgery. Do you know how many women call me in a month that have had breast cancer and they’ve had the breast cut off. Let’s say they were stage one, stage two. That’s stage one stage two, early cancer. Had their breast cut off, did chemo, did radiation, were sent home with a clean bill of health. You’re in remission you’re good to go, go live your life. Invariably, within two to seven years, guess who they’re calling? They’re calling me.
Why? Because the cancer’s back. Well how’s your breast cancer back? You had both breasts cut off. Well now it’s in the liver, the lungs, the bone or the brain at worst. Why? Cancer’s never local. It’s never local. We already said you and I have cancer. Once tumors have exposed themselves, it’s already greatly systemic, greatly at that point because the body hasn’t been keeping it in check. Now they’ve been sent home with a clean bill of health, not told, “Hey, go home, start juicing, start doing coffee enemas, get off the salt, get off the animal products and start cleaning out your body.” Had they done that, they wouldn’t be calling me.
That happens constantly. With that said, we always tell patients, look, anytime you can get a tumor off of or out of the body, you’re going to increase your chances of survival because that tumor is robbing massive amounts of energy from the immune system. As soon as you take that tumor out of or off the body, you’ve just taken that burden off the immune system. Now, it can go and start mopping up everything else it needs to mop up. That’s where surgery can play a valuable role.
Let’s talk about chemo. We do chemo. We do insulin-potentiated chemotherapy. What is insulin-potentiated chemotherapy? We do this in very, very rare circumstances where the tumor load is so great. It’s inoperable, you have to get the upper hand on the disease. We do insulin potentiated chemotherapy. Cancer cells have exponentially more insulin receptor sites on them than normal cells. If you can take chemo and potentiate it with insulin, you can make it more specific to the cancer cell. You only need to use 10% of the standard chemo dose. It’s just as effective and obviously exponentially less toxic. You don’t have your hair fall out. You’re not nauseous and vomiting, sores aren’t breaking out, your nails aren’t falling off.
Ari: Why wouldn’t they use that? The conventional doctors who are using chemotherapy, why wouldn’t they use that approach?
Dr. Vickers You tell me. Can you not bill for as much chemo? I don’t know. There’s only a handful of hospitals I believe in the US that do it and they charge absolutely enormous amounts. It can’t be that. I don’t know. I really don’t know, but that’s what they should be using.
If you integrate that with a dietary and detoxification regimen, do you know what those chances of success would be? I’m not opposed to chemo in insulin-potentiated chemo if a patient is demanding on doing it, but standard dosage of chemotherapy? You do know what chemotherapy is made from? It’s mustard gas.
Ari: All types of chemotherapy? I’m under the impression that there’s many different chemotherapy types.
Dr. Vickers Up until recently, perhaps all your chemotherapy drugs have had their foundation in mustard gas. Google it, research it. Mustard gas is the chemical that they’re putting. How does a chemical designed to kill people in biological warfare heal the human body? That makes no sense.
That’s why it ends up killing people before the cancer. We know that. Chemotherapy kills before the cancer, in more cases than not. It’s so deadly, and it sits in your cells. When we have a chemo patient come to us, we can’t put them on the full Gersion therapy. We could kill them because we would start pulling toxins out of their cells so quickly, they would go into chemo toxic shock and they could die. You have to detox them much slower, and they’re fine, but you can’t put them on the full Gerson therapy.
You can’t give them castor oil. For example, a normal patient gets castor oil. You put a chemo patient on castor oil, you could kill them because it pulls the chemo out so quickly that’s stored up in their cells that they would go into chemo toxic shock. I wouldn’t give anyone chemo unless their tumor load was so great that it would only give us the opportunity to get the upper hand on the disease once and temporarily. It’s only temporarily because chemo, it only can kill the mature cells. It can’t kill the stem cell.
You’ve killed the immune system with the chemo, some of the mature cells, but now the stem cells are left to divide with less of a defense. So when people do chemo, their cancer comes back with vengeance because the stem cells haven’t been killed and they’re just left to divide now with no immune system left. It’s a dangerous, dangerous strategy, but sometimes it’s necessary, but the more logical way would be insulin potentiated, chemo.
Ari: Sorry, go ahead.
Dr. Vickers No, go ahead.
Radiation and chemotherapy
Ari: What’s your take on radiation? One more thing I want to mention is immunotherapy drugs. I do know of, I have at least a couple of friends that I know who have had– one young girl who’s in her thirties who had a rare type of melanoma that actually occurs normally in children. It’s very rare type of melanoma. I forget the name for it. I think she used an immunotherapy drug successfully also in combination with many, many nutritional and lifestyle and supplemental approaches.
My wife’s stepfather who’s in his 80’s has had numerous bouts of skin cancer and one quite bad one recently went on an immunotherapy drug for that and that was successful from what I understand. I think that there are other examples of those types of immunotherapy drugs, but I’d be curious on your thoughts on that, and radiation approach.
Dr. Vickers Okay. Radiation. When tumors, again, are too large and they’re impinging on vital organs, you have to do radiation and you have to do chemo actually, because you have to take the pressure off of those vital organs that they’re going to die. Again, in those cases, I don’t have a problem with it, but radiation does extensive damage to the tissue and the surrounding tissue.
So in keeping with Hippocrates theorem, first do no harm these are the things we need to consider. You only do the most radical invasive things when absolutely vitally necessary. When things like what we do don’t work, if they don’t work, then you have to consider those things, but you consider those last, not first because your chances of being cured with what we do once you’ve used those first are much less than if you didn’t do them first. That’s just logic. That’s basic common sense. Immunotherapy, great question.
What do we say? Our patients are coming in because of what? Deficiency and toxicity. Every single patient that walks through our door are extremely deficient. Now, I had the guy who developed and brought to market the immunotherapy drugs keytruda and opdivo. He was at my clinic as a companion to his wife who had cancer. Why didn’t she do immunotherapy? She’s married to the guy who developed it and brought it to market. She chose our therapy. Why? For three weeks, I sat across the table from that guy and talked pure hard science. He constantly had to admit that the immunotherapy drugs ultimately are self-limiting, which makes complete sense if you think about it.
Our patients are coming into depleted. You must restore the body’s nutrient capacity. If you hit them with these immunotherapy drugs, they do what they say they’re going to do. They boost up the immune system in most patients or many to the point where it kills the patient, because they go into a cytokine storm. Do you know? In 100% of patients, they say, there is some cytokine reaction. In some of those cases and many they die. That’s how people die at COVID. They don’t die of the virus, they die of the cytokine response, the cytokines storm.
Well that’s how immunotherapy works. The body turns on itself and destroy itself, but that’s not the most pressing issue, I believe. When you stimulate the immune system, what are you doing? That requires massive amounts of nutrients. Do you know how many nutrients are being utilized when you stimulate the immune system? That is your metabolism. That requires nutrients. You’re depleting an already depleted body. Unless you bombard the body, like the young girl you said, she did immunotherapy with nutrition, detoxification. That is a possible viable protocol.
Now I’m going to share some anecdotal evidence. I’ve had three patients do Gerson with immunotherapy. One or two had advanced rectal cancer and they did immunotherapy for six months with Gerson, completely cured today. Completely cured. They stopped immunotherapy at six months and continued with Gerson for the remaining two years. All three of those cases– and the other one was melanoma. The tumors melted off his body. He continued to do Gerson. Of those three patients, those their doctors were absolutely dumbfounded because while they were doing immunotherapy on Gerson, none of them had any side effects of the cytokine reactions, not one.
Somehow the Gerson therapy was able to regulate the immune system from turning on itself and attacking itself, which ironically, we have great success with autoimmune diseases. You would think if the Gerson therapy is designed to boost up the immune system, someone with an autoimmune condition would be contraindicated. On the contrary. We have great success with autoimmune diseases. Somehow we’re able to regulate the immune system from destroying itself and heal it and restore it. Well, in these cases of immunotherapy patients, they had no side effects from the drugs, but over time, the immunotherapy drugs are self-limiting and they’ll stop working because you completely deplete the system, the immune system, and you can’t take immunotherapy drugs forever. They don’t work. They can work for a short period of time and that girl who did them the 30-year-old, who did the nutrition and everything? Kudos.
Ari: My last question to you is what would be your top three or four things that you’d recommend for people to do to prevent cancer? If they have an interest, assuming they have an interest in preventing cancer. I think we all do.
Dr. Vickers Great question. We’ve addressed some of them already, right but let me address– I want to address the issue of salt again, real quick, right? People say, well, I don’t eat salt, I eat the good salt, right? Celtic salt, Himalayan salt. Salt’s one of the primary causes of all disease, too much salt, right? Why?
Remember we’re talking about the production of energy on a cellular level that takes place in the cell and the little mitochondria convert sugar into energy. Well, what’s the destructive molecule in salt? First, that salt is causing salt and water to enter the cell and swell up the cell and the mitochondria can’t function in that environment but what’s even more important is salt is destroying the thyroid gland.
Why? What is salt? Doesn’t matter if it’s table salt or Celtic salt, it’s sodium chloride. Now table salt is 99.9% sodium chloride. That’s why they had to iodize it when it first came out because it started destroying people’s thyroid glands. Why? Because that chloride molecule, that displaces iodine from the thyroid gland, that’s what it does so table salt’s 99.9% sodium chloride. Celtic salt, Himalayan salt, it’s 86% sodium chloride. There’s a reason why the Dead Sea is dead. It cannot support biological life because of that very principle and so sodium chloride, displaces iodine from the thyroid gland.
Why is that so important? Because the thyroid gland, do you know what its specific duty is? It produces mitochondria. That’s its role, its role is to produce the mitochondria inside your cell to produce energy.
Ari: You’re saying thyroid hormone is stimulating mitochondria to produce energy?
Dr. Vickers Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s primary role is the reproduction of mitochondria through the production of thyroid hormone, right? Okay, so is it any wonder when someone’s overweight, they’re cold all the time. They’re low energy, tired all the time. Their hair’s falling out. The sides of their eyebrows are falling off. What do we say? They’re hypothyroid. You have to cut out salt.
The human body’s need for salt is 230 milligrams on a daily basis. That’s less than a quarter of a teaspoon. You get those quantities in adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables. You don’t need it. You don’t need a lot of added salt and our foods today are loaded with sodium and even pouring in a bunch of Celtic or Himalayan’s not good. It’s a real misconception that those foods are healthy, Celtic and Himalaya and salt. There’s no such thing as good salt. There’s such thing as better salt, but there’s no such thing as good salt. Anyway, you’d have to cut out salt. I’d be eating very, very minimal, like a dash a day no more.
And then meat, saturated fats. It’s that simple. The saturated fats are shutting off the body’s ability to oxygenate tissues. It’s that simple. Getting back to the ketogenic real quick. They’re right. They’re right that sugar feeds cancer, sugar feeds cancer in an acidic body where the oxygen can’t get into the cell to break it down into energy. In an acidic body, sugar would feed cancer because that sugar would get broken down into lactic acid when oxygen isn’t present, that’s how you create wine. That’s how you create beer and that’s how you create lactic acid in the body. When sugar can’t get converted into energy, because there’s no oxygen fermentation. That’s where the keto people have it right.
But unfortunately where they have it completely wrong is that in an alkaline diet, where you restore the body’s ability to convert those calories into energy, sugar heals cancer and 120 years of the Gerson therapy has proven that because our patient are getting 3,500 to 4,000 calories a day in sugar in the form of fruits and vegetables. How is it that those same patients are losing anywhere from a quarter to one pound per day until they’re their normal weight on the Gerson therapy? If your nutritional experts are telling you can’t consume more than 1200 to 1500 calories a day if you want to lose weight because weight loss, like cancer, weight loss has nothing to do with caloric intake. It has everything to do with being able to convert those calories into energy and that’s where we do it.
Keto has it wrong in the fact that an alkaline diet, Otto Warberg 1931 Nobel prize an alkaline diet restores the body’s ability to oxygenate the cells to convert sugar into energy. You have to stay away from saturated fats. It’s that simple and we’re all eating them. We’re eating way too much. It’s destroying our electrical potentials at the level of the cell membranes. Oxygen can’t get in. Start eating flax oil. Get a–
Ari: Sorry, go ahead.
Dr. Vickers Start eating a table spoon of flax oil every day. Start to restore the charge at the level of the cell membrane. That literally sucks oxygen into the cell like a magnet.
Ari: Is there a concern over rancidity of the flax oil? Or do you recommend freshly ground flax seeds over pre-made flax oil?
Dr. Vickers At this point, when you’re trying to restore the cell membranes that have been abused for years, the saturated fats, you can eat enough flax seeds to restore that, right? The cold press companies, Barlean’s, right? Omega Nutrition that produces, they produce a really good flax oil but once you open that bottle, you have to use it within three weeks or it will go rancid. You can’t expose it to air heat or light. That’s why it comes in the opaque bottles.
Once you open that bottle, it’s good for three weeks, but then you got to throw it out because it starts to go rancid, but they produce really good flax oil and you’ll know if it’s rancid, because it’ll have a strong bitter taste rather than a smooth nutty taste.
Ari: Got it. Yes, what was I going to ask you? Oh, on saturated fats. What do you think of coconut and coconut oil, coconut yogurt, coconut products?
Dr. Vickers Well, there’s nothing help healthier than a coconut. Look, it’s nature’s perfect food, right, but we’ve taken these substances and we’ve concentrated them into very concentrated substances. Look, if I take coconut oil and I take olive oil and I take flax oil and I put them in the freezer and I freeze them overnight, I take them out. They’re all completely frozen. It’ll take me a good five to six hours to get three tablespoons of coconut oil.
Why? It’s so highly saturated, which makes it so stable at room temperature. It makes it hard at room temperature, right? That it’s so stable because of hydrogen [unintelligible 01:28:23] It’s not a health food and it’s being promoted as a health food. Hydrogen is hydrogen. It’s such a highly-saturated fat.
Olive oil, it’s a monosaturated fat. Some bonds are saturated with hydrogen, some aren’t so it’s neutral. If I take that out of the freezer, it’s going to take me a couple hours to get a good couple of tablespoons, right? Flax oil, if I take that out, in five minutes, it’s pure liquid because there’s no hydrogen bonds. Your coconut oil, coconut eat it until your heart’s content. It’s a perfect food. Coconut oil, which is probably 10,000 coconuts in one jar is highly, highly detrimental to the human body. That’s my opinion.
Ari: Okay. On a quick aside, I meant to ask you this earlier, but we floated out of it. On the topic of the hydrogens and fats, wouldn’t the hydrogens in water, in just plain H2o be of concern, given you’re consuming them in far greater volumes?
Dr. Vickers No, because they’re bonded. They’re not individual hydrogen ions running through the body with an electrical charge. Those two hydrogen bonds they carry that are bonded in the H2O, they’re neutralized. It’s a neutral charge.
Ari: You’re saying that the ones in fats are not?
Dr. Vickers No, they’re not. Ehen they’re released, they’re individual hydrogen, the charge is completely different. Water’s a neutral charge. The individual positively-charged hydrogen bond, it’s completely different. The electrical charge it’s all– Look, so we’re really not talking about biochemistry. It’s really an issue of biophysics. The charge is what determines that so an individual hydrogen ion that’s positively charged is completely different than two hydrogen bonded to an oxygen. That’s neutral. That’s the difference.
Ari: Okay. Got it. And is there any, maybe one last tip that you want to recommend for people to prevent cancer?
Dr. Vickers Well, is we addressed the issue of saturated fats, salt. I mean, look, you have to eat organic. You can’t eat nonorganic food and you need massive amounts of produce on a daily basis to maintain optimal health. I try to eat at least three pounds of fruits and vegetables every single day, raw, and that’s what we have to do today. People aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables, and obviously you stay away from all the crap, all the processed foods, doing a coffee enema every day.
People say, well, isn’t that a little extreme? I’m like, well, yes, if I was living in 1900 and I was doing a coffee every day, I’d be, probably be a nut but today we live in an extreme world. Charlotte Gerson up until her death at 98 did one to two a day for over 55, 65, 70 years so we have to cleanse. There is not a more potent way than a coffee enema to cleanse. We didn’t even get into that, the science behind that. And it is science. It’s 100% science.
So coffee enemas, organic food, cut out the animal products as much as possible. I like a burger I’m going to go have a burger from time to time, but I do it like once a month. People are doing it once a day. That’s not good.
Ari: Yes, out of curiosity– I lied that about that being my last question.
Dr. Vickers Fine.
Ari: What does your daily diet look like breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Dr. Vickers Like I just said so every morning I have oatmeal, I have oatmeal with dried fruit, with prunes and raisins and flax oil, honey, maybe maple syrup or [unintelligible 01:32:24], right? Pure unadulterated glucose sugars that haven’t had the nutrient stripped up out of them.
And then I like having spinach, asparagus and onions every night. I just, I like it and so I have that. That’s a main staple of my diet and then I have potatoes, potatoes, are staple on the Gerson therapy. Why? They’re loaded with nutrition and they’re easily digestible and converted into energy, they’re a staple so I eat a lot of potatoes. I’ll have an occasional, like Ezekiel bread or a sprouted grain bread but I won’t eat– it has to come from the frozen section. That’s easily perishable because all that other crap has preservatives and stuff in it. So yes, that’s essentially it.
Ari: What are your major protein sources? It sounds like you eat a very low protein diet.
Dr. Vickers Well, that’s funny. People say where am I getting my protein on this therapy? Where does a horse or a cow get their protein from? How do they maintain that mass? Their bodies don’t function any different than yours or mine. Their requirements are the same based on their body mass so where does a horse or a cow get their protein from? Greens are loaded with protein, greens are loaded with protein. Salads, spinach, loaded with protein. Spirulina, the perfect protein. No? You don’t need animal protein. It’s an inferior protein. Always has been, always will be.
Ari: What about nuts and seeds other than flax seeds? I haven’t heard you mention them.
Dr. Vickers Yes. That’s a great question. I didn’t mention them because on the Gerson therapy they are prohibited and why would they be prohibited? Two reasons. A lot of them are high and fat and we’re trying to reduce saturated fat and too much fat in general– even flax oil, you can’t and have too much flax soil on the Gerson therapy. It will promote tumor growth eventually.
They’re also hard to digest. I mean, they’re hard to digest for a normal human being, let alone a sick and dying one. They’re not easy to digest. Seeds were to be eaten and eliminated with poop so that a tree would grow. That’s ultimately what they were designed to do. Cashews are toxic. Did you know that? Cashews are actually toxic to the human body. Peanuts are toxic to the human body and apparently that’s not even nut or a seed, I just recently found out. It’s actually a legume so they’re not an optimal food and you also have to germinate, you have to germinate them to make them bio available. You have to germinate them.
Ari: Are legumes also prohibited?
Dr. Vickers Later on in the therapy, once you’ve healed the digestive tract, they can have like lentils, but beans are out of the question.
Ari: There’s so much positive research on consumption of many nuts and, and legumes. I mean it’s decidedly– in the research, decidedly associated with lower incidence of many cancers.
Dr. Vickers Maybe lower incidences of cancer, but once they have cancer and their digestive tracts have been destroyed, it’s not optimal. Just like it’s not optimal to put a cancer patient on an all-raw diet. Gerson was adamant that they weren’t on an-all raw diet because a cancer patient can’t handle raw carrots, raw cauliflower, raw broccoli.
If you fed that to them all day, they wouldn’t do well. Their digestive tracts can’t handle it. They can handle juice because that goes into the bloodstream almost as quickly as alcohol does without needing all the energy and the enzymes required to break it down but sitting there feeding a cancer patient, an all raw diet? Bad strategy.
Ari: Well, this has been a very interesting conversation, Dr. Vickers, thank you so much for giving me lots of extra time here and going way over our allotted hour. I really appreciate it and where can people get in contact with you or learn more about the work that you do?
Dr. Vickers Yes. Thank you. So our website is gersonclinic.com, G-E-R-S-O-N clinic.com. They can always write me at [email protected] and our contact information is on our page and also for your listeners, if they go to our website and they’ll see gift in one of the corners, I’m not sure if it’s on the right or left hand corner, they’ll see gift. If they click on gift and they put in the password podcast, all lower case, they have access to our private video section. That’s for our, paid clients that come to the clinic where it’s me lecturing.
A lot of the stuff they heard today, they’re going to hear on there, it’ll reinforce everything they’ve heard. Cellular science, the metabolic science behind what we’re doing so that’s all on there. Hours and hours of interviews and lectures by going on gift, putting in podcast all lower case, they have access to all those videos, gersonclinic.com.
Ari: One last thing, given the controversial nature of the work that you’re doing and the fact that so many mainstream cancer institutes and such are attacking Gerson therapy, do you have any words for people who are maybe interested in this, maybe have cancer and are trying to sort out what the truth is? Is there some place that you could direct them to maybe valid criticisms of Gerson and maybe some of the responses of, Gerson?
Dr. Vickers Right. Honestly, Ari, there are no valid criticisms of Gerson. There aren’t. We have been successfully reversing every single degenerative disease barring the ones I’ve mentioned for 100 to 120 years. How can there be viable criticisms of that? There aren’t. Those viable criticisms are from people who have no idea what the Gerson therapy is and have never used it one day in their life.
I don’t understand how people can say there’s viable criticisms. There’s not. And so, no. There’s nowhere I would refer them for viable criticisms of the Gerson therapy because there just isn’t. It heals. That’s what it does and that’s what it’s been doing for 120 years.
In terms of resources on learning more about the Gerson therapy? Again, I invite them to go to the website and watch all the videos where I go through the science, where I go through all of that and I’d watch the movies. These movies are some of the biggest names in medicine and in natural medicine as well, backing up our treatment. I mean these eight movies, nobody can boast that. Nobody can boast, but one on their therapy and so go watch the movies. The Gerson Miracle, Dying to have Known, The Beautiful Truth, The Truth about Cancer, a Global Quest I’m in episodes one and eight, The Food Cure, Food Matters, Food Heals. Those are the documentaries. Go watch them.
Ari: Cool. Thank you so much, Dr. Vickers. A pleasure having this conversation with you. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Dr. Vickers Thank you. It’s been great. Really.
Show Notes
The Gerson Therapy Method (05:30)
The main drivers of cancer in modern day (15:15)
Metabolic function and health (30:05)
Foods and supplements used in the Gerson Method (47:03)
Other healing modalities used in Gerson Therapy (1:00:00)
Radiation and chemotherapy (1:13:06)
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