Since 1983, the Gerson clinic has offered ozone therapy as an adjunct to its basic protocol. Available in many countries for cancer treatment but officially barred in the United States, ozone therapy has been shown to shrink tumors. (For a further discussion, see page 229.)

Max Gerson's nutritional treatment for cancer might never have come into being if not for his migraines. A brilliant medical graduate of the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 1909, Dr. Gerson was disabled by recurrent migraines for which his own doctors had no cure. By the early 1920s, Gerson had cured himself by devising a diet very high in fresh fruits and vegetables and very low in fats. He then prescribed his diet for migraine sufferers who came to him as patients. Their headaches disappeared. Next, using a slightly modified version of his diet, he cured patients with lupus vulgaris, a form of skin tuberculosis then considered incurable.

Gerson's success brought an invitation in 1924 from eminent German surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D., to test Gerson's diet in a lupus clinic at the University of Munich. Over a three-year period, the two doctors treated 450 lupus patients with the diet; 446 of them recovered, according to Sauerbruch in his autobiography Master Surgeon. Gerson extended his therapeutic system to other forms of tuberculosis. In 1928, he reluctantly accepted his first cancer patient, at the insistence of the patient-a woman who had undergone unsuccessful surgery for cancer of the bile duct that had spread to the liver. Within six months, the woman seemed fully recovered. Gerson's next two patients, both with inoperable stomach cancer, had the same good results.

After the rise of Hitler forced him to leave Germany, Gerson lived in Vienna and Paris, moving to the United States in 1936. He got his New York medical license in 1938 and was soon attracting more and more cancer patients, obtaining remissions even in far-advanced cases.

In 1946, Gerson testified before a Senate subcommittee along with five of his patients, all of whom had recovered from advanced cancer. One of the five was fourteen-year-old Alice Hirsch, whose orthodox doctors had predicted would be paralyzed by the end of 1945 due to an inoperable spinal cord tumor that would quickly kill her. Also testifying was George Miley, M.D., professor of medicine and medical director of Gotham Hospital, where Gerson was treating patients. Dr. Miley called the Gerson therapy "a highly encouraging approach." He presented the committee with signed statements from five other doctors who said that they had observed advanced cancer reversed by the Gerson regime.

After Gerson's congressional appearance, his anticancer diet surged in credibility and prestige. But it was just at this time that chemotherapy was seeking public acceptance, soon to become a gigantic money-making operation for the medical-pharmaceutical industry. Within five months of Gerson's Senate hearing, the American Medical Association launched a vehement campaign intended to discredit his therapy. Gerson was attacked in the pages of JAMA, the association's prestigious journal, for treating cancer patients with diet and for warning against cigarettes. In the same issues, JAMA ran ad copy in praise of cigarettes: "Many leading nose and throat specialists suggest, 'Change to Philip Morris,'" read a typical ad. Cigarette maker Philip Morris was the main source of advertising dollars for JAMA during the years of its assault on Max Gerson. The marriage of medicine and the tobacco industry, which helped addict hundreds of thousands to cancer-causing cigarettes, was "one of the most outrageous alliances in the history of medicine," says Gar Hildenbrand of the Gerson Institute.