Dora followed a strict Gerson regimen for seven years. Her husband assisted with the food preparation and gave Dora her liver-extract and vitamin injections as required. "My mother has a tremendous will to live, and once she decided to go on the Gerson diet, she never once cheated or went off it," recalls Diane Rosen, Dora's daughter. After seven years of strict adherence to the protocol, Dora gradually did go off it and has remained in good health. Two CAT scans in 1980 showed her brain, bones, and pituitary completely cancer-free.

Gregory Grover, at age fifty-six, was diagnosed by X-rays in October 1966 with an advanced, aggressive tumor in the bladder. The tumor, rated Stage III to IV, was removed, but doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles advised him to have his bladder removed also. They told him that even if the operation went well, he had only a 50 percent chance of survival, and that if the bladder was not removed, he had a 5 percent chance of survival.

Refusing further surgery, Grover started the Gerson therapy in January 1967. "I followed it 100 percent, by the book, with no deviations through the end of 1968." After he had been on the program one year, he had a cystoscopy performed at UCLA. According to Grover, the urologist was amazed to discover that his patient was completely cancer-free. "'How do we account for this?' the assisting physician whispered to the urologist as he did the cystoscopy," recalls Grover, who is now in his eighties, still in remission, and quite active.

Almost all types of cancer are said to respond to the treatment. The types that respond particularly well, according to personnel at the Gerson Institute, are melanoma and lymphoma. The Gerson therapy has not been effective in leukemia, in the opinion of various alternative therapists. Chemotherapy gives at least a 50 percent five-year survival rate with leukemia.

During his lifetime, Max Gerson claimed a 30 percent rate of remission in his terminal patients. The current patient literature states that "the Gerson Therapy is able to achieve almost routine recoveries in early to intermediate cancers. Even when the disease is advanced and incurable by conventional standards (i.e., involves the liver or pancreas or multiple internal sites) excellent results are possible." The patient literature also claims that for cancer patients with additional afflictions (for example, arthritis, heart disease, or diabetes), the treatment "usually heals the body of all diseases simultaneously." Norman Fritz, vice president of the Gerson Institute, stated in "Cancer? Think Curable! The Gerson Therapy," by S. J. Haught (see Resources), that the Gerson treatment "can save about 50 percent or more of advanced 'hopeless' cancer patients" and that "the percentage who recover can exceed 90 percent for early cancers and some 'early terminal' cancers."

These claims should be taken with great skepticism, as should all such claims in the alternative cancer field. (A figure of 80 percent or greater for five-year survival seems to be a favorite among alternative practitioners.) The reality appears to be that remission remains the exception rather than the rule with Gerson patients, according to Michael Lerner in his study Varieties of Integral Cancer Therapy.1 Lerner cites a resident of a Gerson halfway house in the San Diego area who reported that during her stay of several months, she observed one of the approximately twenty patients in residence make a significant recovery. This story, of course, is anecdotal, but even if roughly accurate, the 5 percent recovery rate is a far cry from the claims made by the Gerson clinic.