Gently holding the hand of five year old Kathy Allison, John Haluska walked to the podium in the Pennsylvania State Senate.聽鈥淗ere is a little angel,鈥� he told his colleagues, 鈥渨ho according to medical science had to meet the angels soon.聽But after receiving the Hoxsey treatment in Dallas, she is going to school and is cancer free.聽And they still call Harry Hoxsey a quack.鈥澛�
Holuska鈥檚 dramatic little speech on that day in 1958 was aimed at eliciting Senate support for a cancer treatment clinic his good friend 聽planned to open in the town of Portage, Ill.聽Support was needed because for over thirty years the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been on Hoxsey鈥檚 trail attempting to throw a monkey wrench into his well-oiled 鈥渃ancer-cure鈥� machinery.聽
The trail was a long one and wound through West Virginia, Michigan, New Jersey and Texas.聽Hoxsey had set up a string of clinics where he claimed to have cured thousands of cancer patients.聽Orthodox physicians, he maintained, mutilated their patients with surgery and burned them with radiation in a futile effort to destroy cancer.聽But he had found a way to restore health with gentle, herbal treatments.聽Of course, 鈥渢he establishment鈥� had turned against him because he was destroying their business.聽 Doctors were making millions with their needless surgery and radiation and had no interest in providing cheap, effective therapies.聽Not only that, they were actually making people sick with their 鈥渃owpus鈥� vaccinations and endorsements of preservatives in foods and 鈥渞at poison鈥� (fluoride) in drinking water.聽聽
Hoxsey鈥檚 story of his rise from rags to riches and his one man struggle against powerful government forces played well to people who felt they were being harassed by excessive government interference and made miserable by corporate greed.聽His fiery rhetoric about evil monopolies, conniving Jews and dastardly communists hit home with many Americans who struggled to eke out an existence.聽A good scapegoat always comes in handy.
鈥淵ou Don鈥檛 Have to Die鈥� was the captivating title of Harry Hoxsey鈥檚 1956 autobiography.聽In it, he described how his great grandfather, a Kentucky farmer, had noted a cancerous growth on the leg of one of his stallions.聽The vet advised that the horse be put down, but farmer Hoxsey decided to put the animal out to pasture and let nature take its course.聽Remarkably, the stallion recovered!聽 Hoxsey had noted that the horse always grazed in one particular area and concluded that the plants that grew there must have been responsible for the miraculous cure.聽He then blended various parts of these plants to produce three specialized 鈥渃ancer cures.鈥� The secret formulas were handed down and eventually put to use by Harry鈥檚 father in treating cancer patients.聽While he claimed spectacular results, apparently the formula did not work for Mr. Hoxsey who developed cancer of the jaw and decided that conventional radiation was a better option.聽 Harry denied his father鈥檚 medical history and claimed to his dying day that the AMA had fabricated a false death certificate and that his father had really died of an infection.聽In any case, the elder Hoxsey passed the cancer formula to Harry on his deathbed and warned him that 鈥渢hey will persecute you, slander you and try to drive you off the face of the earth.鈥澛燗 savior was born.聽聽
The secret formula turned out to be a mixture of red clover, prickly ash, buckhorn, alfalfa and potassium iodide.聽But according to Hoxsey, it was the specific blend and amounts used that were critical.聽鈥淏unk鈥� said the AMA and filed injunction after injunction.聽Hoxsey fought back.聽He was the victim of a conspiracy he moaned.聽鈥淚s it possible to sell a 鈥榝ake鈥� cure to 10,000 people for 30 years, despite the vociferous opposition of organized medicine and still attract forty new patients a day?鈥� he asked rhetorically.聽Actually, it is.聽And it鈥檚 rather easy.聽Desperate patients will do desperate things.聽And it鈥檚 hard to blame them, especially when traditional medicine is unable to provide 鈥済uarantees鈥� as Hoxsey did.
The healer's 鈥渟uccesses鈥� can be readily explained.聽Since he or his workers did the original diagnoses, it is a good bet that many of the patients never had cancer to start with.聽Indeed, Hoxsey maintained that any man who has to resort to a biopsy lacks experience or mistrusts his own ability.鈥澛� A former patient testified that he had been diagnosed with cancer and offered a treatment for $250 and a six week recuperative stay at Hoxsey鈥檚 hospital for $360, a lot of money at the time.聽 He recovered.聽 But not from cancer.聽Actually it later turned out that he had suffered from 鈥渂arber鈥檚 itch.鈥澛營n another instance, an FDA undercover agent was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and was told he had come just in time for the cancer to be arrested.聽There was an arrest alright, but it wasn鈥檛 of the cancer.聽Some patients certainly experienced a placebo effect and others proclaimed publicly that they had been cured, probably attempting to convince themselves.聽Nobody likes to admit that they have been duped.聽As has often been said, the plural of 鈥渁necdote鈥� is not 鈥渆vidence!鈥�
Hoxsey repeatedly challenged the AMA to investigate his 鈥渃ure.鈥澛犫�淗ow can you condemn a treatment without studying it?鈥澛燨f course he himself never initiated a study despite having become immensely wealthy and certainly having the means to fund a proper controlled trial.聽The AMA accepted the challenge and twice asked Hoxsey to provide patient files.聽He did, but they were so poor and so devoid of proper medical histories and records of physical exams that they could not be evaluated.聽In 1999, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (certainly not an anti-alternative organization) examined evidence submitted by a Hoxsey clinic in Mexico (yes they still exist there) and found that of 149 patients who had been treated, only 85 could be tracked down five years later and of these only 17 were still alive.聽Such a 26% survival rate is not exactly the claimed 80% rate, and probably could be achieved by an anti-cancer diet of frog legs, snails and Mexican jumping beans.聽
Today, Hoxsey proponents wave scientific papers at skeptics with data about the anti-cancer properties of some of their plants.聽This is meaningless.聽There are thousands of plants which in laboratory studies show such properties and have no clinical relevance.聽Hoxsey himself is a testimonial to this fact.聽 He developed prostate cancer and when he failed to cure himself, he quietly underwent conventional surgery.聽And what of Kathy Allison?聽Eight months after Hoxsey鈥檚 鈥渃ure,鈥� she was dead of cancer.聽So, contrary to John Haluska鈥檚 remarks, evidence indicates that Harry Hoxsey purported to have medical knowledge that he did not actually possess.聽In other words, he was a quack.聽Which is exactly the reason the government finally managed to put him out of business by 1960.聽His legacy though lives on today in the antics of the numerous bogus cancer cure gurus who prey upon the desperate.
