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A Moneychanger Interview:
DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ
Not Good:
The NCI Study of Nutritional Cancer Therapy
Dr. Nicholas
Gonzalez practices medicine in New York City, treating primarily
cancer patients with a nutritional approach developed by a Texas
dentist named Kelley (d. 2005) and a Scottish biologist named Beard
(d. 1927). Many call it the “Kelley Therapy.”
In August, 1991 I
interviewed Dr. Gonzalez for the first time. At that time about 67%
of the cancer patients who followed Dr. Gonzalez’ therapy were
either cured of their cancer or responded positively. Meanwhile,
mainstream medicine uses chemotherapeutic agents that have as low as
a 6% response, let alone cure, rate. Statistics show that patients
with prostate cancer, for example, have even chances of survival
with or without radioactive seed implantation. Considering that
most of Dr. Gonzalez’ patients only came to him as a last resort
after mainstream cancer therapy had left them at death’s door, that
is an amazing success rate.
Shortly after that
1991 interview I learned that my elder sister had breast cancer.
After she had surgery she became much, much sicker, & in October,
1991 she went to see Dr. Gonzalez. She told me that she began to
feel better as soon as she began the treatment. She recovered from
that cancer but passed away in 2003 from an unrelated cause. You
can find our 1995 interview with Dr. Gonzalez at
http://www.the-moneychanger.com/articles_files/health/dr_nicholas_gonzalez.phtml,
or we will send subscribers a copy when you send us a large (9x12)
SASE with 83¢.
When I saw that Dr.
Gonzalez was scheduled to speak at the Weston A. Price Foundation
Conference we attended on November 13, I asked him for an
interview. In 1999 he began a controlled research study of his
therapy under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute, and I
wanted to find out how that was progressing. He very kindly gave us
this interview on November 17, 2005.
Unfortunately, his
experience has not been good. This is a tragic story I have seen
repeated over and over in the last 25 years. Mainstream medicine
refuses to accept discoveries that work, and usually persecutes the
discoverers. Why? Many think that big pharmaceutical companies
fight against any treatment they can’t patent. After all, a cheap,
safe treatment for cancer or a non-patentable vitamin treatment that
would prevent Alzheimer’s wouldn’t make them any money. Others
believe that the opposition arises from sheer incompetence. Either
way, human beings die needlessly while bureaucrats persecute
innovators.
Writing to another
medical pioneer recently, I said, “I am not, however, in the least
pessimistic, in part because people like you keep on popping up,
despite government/business' best efforts to suppress you. I
remember in 1989 meeting for the first time the great chelation
pioneer Dr. Evers from Georgia. He fought for his patients (and
chelation) through the federal courts in the 1950s, where,
predictably they mauled him. He moved to Alabama where he opened a
clinic. In the late 1980s they attacked him again, shut down his
big clinic, and stole his money. At age 81 , he stooped down,
picked up his broken tools, moved to Mexico, and started all over.
“When I heard him he
was he was addressing a group, and at some point in recounting his
history, this old man’s eyes filled with tears and his voice broke.
Yet, for all the government beat on him, he won. He never stopped
serving the truth, until the day he died.
“How could I be
pessimistic, when God continues to raise up such men?”
Dr. Gonzalez’s
office is located at 36 East 36th Street, Suite 204, New York, New
York 10016, his telephone number is (212) 213-3337, & his
website address is www.dr-gonzalez.com.
PUBLISHER’S
WARNING & DISCLAIMER: By publishing this material, neither The
Moneychanger nor Dr. Gonzalez recommends nor endorses any
specific treatment or therapy for any physical condition or disease,
including cancer. This interview is offered for information &
research purposes only, & the reader should receive it as such.
Neither The Moneychanger nor Dr. Gonzalez guarantees or
warrants any results from any treatment discussed. Neither The
Moneychanger nor Dr. Gonzalez assumes any express or implied
liability for any use to which this information is put. By this
interview Dr. Gonzalez does not prescribe any treatment whatsoever
for anyone who is not his patient.
Moneychanger
How are the National Cancer Institute
tests going?
Dr. Gonzalez Well, we started in
1999. It hasn’t really gone well because the people involved have
not risen to the occasion to make it work. I wish I could report
enthusiastically that we have entered a new era where a government
agency is working co-operatively with promising alternatives, but I
don’t see that happening at all.
Moneychanger Has the therapy not
worked or the people?
Dr. Gonzalez The therapy works just
fine. Right now the study is meaningless because it wasn’t done
appropriately.
Moneychanger The National Institute
of Health (NIH) is over the National Cancer Institute (NCI)?
Dr. Gonzalez The NIH oversees the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and NCI
and FDA even though they are separate groups. All those fall under
the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services, but
the NIH oversees them.
Moneychanger Why won’t they give the
therapy a fair chance? What about the Hippocratic oath ever
physician takes? “I swear … I will prescribe regimens for the good
of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do
harm to anyone. To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor
give advice which may cause his death.” I can’t understand why
anyone involved with the study would oppose it. If the people chose
the treatment of their own free will and perhaps you have
something that works, why would they oppose it?
Dr. Gonzalez Nothing is more
frightening to a scientist than a new idea.
We believe that science should be the place and scientists should be
the people that are open and receptive to new ideas, but that is an
idealistic mythology for Friday night television, not the real
world.
Dr. Barry Marshall won the Nobel Prize in
medicine about a month ago for proving that an infectious agent
called Helicobacter pylori actually causes 90% of all
ulcers. He was a gastroenterologist working at a small university
in Western Australia, totally outside the mainstream of US academic
northeast corridor/California medical centers. When he first
presented his work in the early 1980s, he was lambasted, called
every name.
My good friend, J.P. Jones, who was vice
president in charge of research for Proctor & Gamble, learned about
Marshall’s work and his problems in the early 1980’s. He convinced
P & G to support Marshall financially and intellectually.
Otherwise, Marshall would have ended up totally discredited, but
with Proctor behind him he was offered a professorship at the
University of Virginia Medical School. They supported his research
and were able to prove that his work was valid. Jones tells me that
at some of the gastroenterology conferences he attended with
Marshall, the anger was so great that he feared for Marshall’s
physical safety. That’s how badly a new idea offended the
gastroenterology community.
Speaking specifically about the National
Institutes of Health in a New York Times interview about
three weeks ago, Marshall said something very interesting: creative
work is not coming out of there. They are just bureaucracies who
exist to maintain the status quo, without any interest in new
ideas. In fact, they oppose new ideas. He said if it weren't for
working in a small university in the middle of nowhere before moving
to the U.S. medical academic complex, he would have never completed
his work. It would have been either wrecked or he would have
marched to the appropriate tune. He wouldn’t have been able to do
creative work.
Governmental institutions are not the place you
are going to see creative work.
Moneychanger Even though I have heard
this story over and over I still have to ask, Why do these doctors
do this? It completely contradicts their duty and their public
image.
Dr. Gonzalez They have very good
public relations. All patients think that all doctors, in
particular scientists, are there to find the truth for the benefit
of mankind. However, that is rarely the case, and I’ve
worked with some really top flight scientists.
For example, Robert Good, my first mentor when I
was a medical student, was the most published author in the history
of medicine. He wrote over 2000 articles. Ernst Wynder, also one
of my mentors, first proved cigarette smoking was linked to cancer.
They both had enormous career problems. Good was forced out of
Sloan Kettering after ten years, fired and forced to leave the same
day. In 1969, Dr. Wynder was forced out of Sloan because his
research offended the President of the Institute at the time, a
heavy smoker who was receiving tobacco industry research funding.
They treat each other brutally. It’s all about
ego and trying to get ahead and looking smarter than your
colleagues. Is someone smarter than you and doing better work? Your
envy demands that you discredit his work.
Scientists generally think, “If I get an
idea, it is because of my brilliant insight and my careful science,
my thoughtful deliberation, my weighing of the evidence, my
unprejudiced and unbiased evaluation of the data. If you get
a good idea, it’s because you are a fraud and a quack or you’ve
stolen it.”
Recently a friend of mine put it this way. The
trouble with NIH is that it is filled with people who were the best
& smartest people in their junior high school class. Their mothers
loved them. Suddenly they find themselves in an institution with
10,000 other people, all of whom were the smartest in their junior
high school class, and most of whom after 30 years really haven’t
done very much. How many great ideas can you name right now coming
out of the NIH, despite their tens of billions of dollars a year
budget and their thousands of scientists? Bitterness and anger
builds up in all these guys or girls, once the smartest in their
junior high school class, now doing mediocre work and not winning a
Nobel Prize. Occasionally one might win, but for the most part they
won’t. They become professional government welfare scientists.
They live off the tax dollar and have no incentive to work.
We have run into this over and over with the
NCI. We get middle level bureaucrats who haven’t done anything in
their own careers, work a 9 to 5 day without seeming to do anything,
and we can’t even get them on the phone half the time. What are
they doing? After the problems with our study I don’t know why
taxpayers support them,
The NIH people assiduously court Congress and
every year they keep throwing money into the NIH. Their budget just
went up another couple of billion dollars. I think the NIH should
be shut down -- based not on my opinion, because I am just
some punky guy that does coffee enemas, but based on Barry
Marshall. He just won the Nobel Prize four weeks ago and he said
the NIH was the last place you will ever see creative work. That
alone should tell Congress that it’s time to shut the place down.
Extraordinary developments in science often come
from the least likely places. Gregor Mendel was a monk living in
Moravia in eastern Europe, totally removed, like Barry Marshall,
from the scientific community. He wasn’t even trained as a
scientist, yet he did work that no one at Oxford or Cambridge or
Harvard or Dartmouth could imagine. He developed the theory of
genetics that underlies all contemporary microbiology. The whole
underpinning of modern infectious disease biology came from Louis
Pasteur, who was a wine chemist – not a physician or medical
researcher, but an agricultural chemist. Unlike Mendel he had
scientific training, but the extraordinary inventor Thomas Edison
dropped out of high school.
When you study those people’s lives you find that
they haven’t gone through the appropriate, prestigious academic
institutions that train them to think in one direction only. Once
they have undergone that training, then rarely do they have
the capacity to think differently. Creative new work always requires
that you think differently. That’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché that
is often forgotten and rarely implemented in practice.
If Gregor Mendel had been a professor at the
Sorbonne, he would have been teaching the same dull stuff that he
had learned and would never have had an idea in his life but would
have been living on the French taxpayers. Instead he was on his own,
with no one to answer to, so he diddled in his little peapatch and
discovered the theory of genetics. What were the professors at
Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford and all the world institutions doing?
They were twiddling their thumbs, chasing pretty girls, etc.
I don’t know what they were doing, but they sure weren’t coming up
with the theory of genetics.
It’s true even in geography. We all learned in
the second grade that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed in three
little ships. All the professors of physics and geography in all
the major European institutions taught that the world was flat.
Columbus was some two-bit merchant trying to make a fortune, and he
proved the world was round. It wasn’t some geographer or scientist
that did it. They all had written textbooks showing the world was
flat, and they went to their graves thinking Columbus just hadn’t
gone far enough. If he had kept going he would have fallen off the
edge. So a two-bit merchant trying to make a fortune, who had a
nothing life, outsmarted all the faculties of the major European
institutions. It tells you something about institutional thinking.
Rarely is it a source of creative and new ideas.
Moneychanger The tragedy here is that
people are dying because these people are viciously suppressing the
truth.
Dr. Gonzalez That’s right. The
tragedy with Kelley’s work and Beard’s work is that people are dying
for lack of it. I always tell people that no one can’t say, “Well,
it’s Gonzalez’ work so he is obsessed with it.” I didn’t develop
this. Beard developed it. Kelley developed it. Kelley was as loony
as they come. So what? That doesn’t mean he’s stupid, just weird.
It’s not my work. Anyone can do what I do. Anyone can go through
Beard’s records. I don’t think in six years that anyone at the NCI
has bothered to look at Beard’s work. I never heard anyone that
I’ve dealt with there talk with any interest. They glaze over.
In our private practice we continue to have
enormous success with pancreatic cancer [a particularly virulent
and fast moving cancer.]. Every three months we are required to
have these sessions with the groups from the government. I was
asked to put together a series of some of our private practice
patients who are still alive ten, even thirteen or fourteen years
after diagnosis with a biopsy proven pancreatic disease. The people
at NCI seem to be annoyed that I had the audacity even to
think that this therapy can work and I had the audacity to waste
their time presenting cases. They have absolutely no interest. And
that’s the tragedy. I guess I was so stupid that I thought all
these collegial people were working together for the benefit of the
patients and science, but that was just the last remnants of my
adolescent idealism.
Moneychanger But you’re are still in
practice and you are still doing it. This therapy works in what
percentage of your patients?
Dr. Gonzalez Over two-thirds of our
compliant cases do well. Today I am seeing one of my first patients
I took after I left research on in December 6, 1987, 18 years ago.
She had metastatic breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer, which
is the worst and most aggressive form. She developed metastases
while she was getting aggressive chemo. Her oncologist just
threw his hands in the air and didn’t know what to do. With cancer
in multiple bones, she came to me with a terminal prognosis.
Eighteen years later she is still alive with no evidence of
disease. That’s what pancreatic enzymes can do. It’s not magic,
it’s not witchcraft, and it’s not that the patient wasn’t properly
diagnosed.
It’s funny; when the NCI has one patient
that responds to a bone marrow transplant they hold a press
conference. Steven Rosenberg is a very smart guy. He runs the
immunology lab at the NCI and in 1986 he was on Time’s cover
with the cure for cancer, interleukin-2. Every few years the
Institute has to come up with some remarkable cure to warrant the
continued increase in funding.
Over the years the NCI has put millions of
dollars into Interleukin-2 research. In 1990, based on the
flimsiest data, the FDA approved the substance for treatment of
cancer, before there were controlled clinical trials. Finally
they did a controlled trial in the late 1990s, years after it had
been approved and used in thousands of patients around the world.
They studied kidney cancer -- one tumor where it was supposed to
work really well -- but they found that it only worked as well as
placebo (“An inactive substance or preparation used as a control
in an experiment or test to determine the effectiveness of a
medicinal drug”). 6% of the patients responded with placebo and
6% responded with Interleukin-2. When added to interferon, there
was a slight improvement to 13% response, but nothing compared to
what was initially expected and proclaimed. And it was extremely
expensive, very toxic, and after all the press conferences did next
to nothing. A course of Interleukin-2 can cost a couple of hundred
thousand dollars.
This was science by press conference, on the
cover of Time magazine before there was any solid data. Then
more than ten years later they finally published, after the
FDA approved it in 1990 without any evidence that it really
worked. When they did the controlled study, they found it
worked as well as a sugar pill, for all the millions spent
researching it.
But here’s an example that when the NCI thinks it
has something, they pour tens of millions of dollars into it and
stage press conferences and have specials on NBC and CBS to promote
their latest theory. But it has to come from them. If it
has to do with nutrition -- nutrition to them is some kind of yucky
thing -- it’s not real therapy. If it’s not poison, deadly,
and synthetic, it’s not real. Chemo is real science. That’s real
science.
Moneychanger Don’t they use chemo
agents that work only 25% of the time?
Dr. Gonzalez Yes, and they use
Interleukin-2 and it didn’t work at all, on thousands and thousands
of patients.
Gemzar was approved to treat pancreatic cancer
based on a 1997 - 1998 study where the median survival in non-Gemzar
patients was 4½ months versus 5½ months those on Gemzar. It was
approved for a one month average improvement in survival. It
improved quality of life in 29% of patients -- they needed less pain
medication temporarily. There were no cures and no one was
left alive after nineteen months, but the FDA approved it. It is a
billion dollar a year industry and even with all that support from
the drug companies, they still couldn’t get anyone to live longer
than nineteen months.
Moneychanger You’d think that people
who have spent their lives in cancer research would throw up their
hands and start dancing when you walked into the room and said you
had something that would work.
Dr. Gonzalez Only if you still
maintain a kind of adolescent idealism about the way science works,
but it doesn’t work that way. The academic scientific community is
made up of the smartest kids in junior high school, all of them
angry because they are no longer the smartest kid on the block.
They are with 10,000 people equally as smart and none of them are
doing much of anything.
Moneychanger Nick, thanks very much
for your time. [End of interview]
© 2005, Reprinted from
the November, 2005
The Moneychanger
P.O. Box 178
Westpoint, Tenn. 38486
(888) 218-9226
www.the-moneychanger.com
Permission to reprint granted
provided no changes
or additions made
and full source credit given.
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