Dr. Gerson's medical privileges at Gotham Hospital were revoked, and he was unable to secure an affiliation with any other hospital. In 1953, he was denied malpractice insurance because his therapy was not "accepted practice." Refusing to give up, he opened a sanatorium of his own. However, laboratories used by Dr. Gerson were threatened with economic ruin if they continued to provide services to him. In 1958, the New York Medical Society suspended him for "advertising." He died a year later.

A modified version of the Gerson therapy was tested, beginning in 1984, by Dr. Peter Lechner at the Krankenhaus in Graz, Austria. Lechner's program excluded niacin and liver juice and used thyroid supplements only in hypothyroid patients. In addition, it limited coffee enemas to two per day because the four enemas per day originally recommended by Gerson led to colitis (inflammation of the large intestine) in three patients at the very beginning of the project.

Lechner's study involved sixty post-operative cancer patients using this modified Gerson regimen as an adjunct, often with chemotherapy or radiation, over a four-year period. In several forms of cancer, the Gerson-derived therapy made an impressive difference in comparison to a control group of sixty cancer patients who chose not to try it. For example, breast cancer patients with liver metastases who received the Gerson-based treatment tolerated chemotherapy better, and one of three was reported in a steady state for more than a year. (The remaining five patients died.) Patients with brain metastases on the modified Gerson treatment experienced decreased edema and lived four months longer than their counterparts in the control group.7

In a highly suggestive 1988 study of cancer patients who underwent so-called spontaneous regressions, Harold Foster, Ph.D., of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, presented data on 200 recovered patients who had used various alternative treatments, including the Gerson therapy, Hoxsey's herbs, Kelley dietary approach, macrobiotics, Moerman diet, and Jason Winters Herbal Tea.8 Over half of the group had used some form of detoxification, such as coffee enemas, castor-oil enemas, saunas, colonies, or fasting. In addition, 88 percent of the patients had made major dietary changes, usually switching to a strictly vegetarian diet. A total of 65 percent of the patients had taken mineral supplements, potassium and iodine being by far the most frequently used. Niacin, digestive enzymes, bioflavonoids, red clover, and vitamins A, Bl2, and C were also taken frequently.

Foster noted that the "spontaneous" cancer regressions "tended to occur most frequently in vegetarian non-smokers, who did not use table salt, white flour, or sugar and who avoided canned, smoked, or frozen foods. Typically such individuals eschewed alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, and cocoa, but instead drank freshly pressed fruit and/or vegetable juices. Many took vitamin and mineral supplements together with various herbs. The time spent by patients eating such special diets varied from one month to 15 years, the median time period being 41 months."

Foster pointed out that "there is really no such process as spontaneous regression" since there must always be a cause for the regression. The data, in his judgment, support the view that many dramatic remissions occurred "in association with major dietary changes, which must inevitably have resulted in alterations in the availability of bulk and trace elements to both the immune system and to tumors."