Dr. Kelley Gets Cancer
by Dr. Gonzalez:
I'm going to talk about cancer today, particularly about William Donald
Kelley. Now for Dr. Kelley, cancer began with eye problems. He
was riding down the road in his antique Cadillac he called "Twinkles,"
and he noticed he was having trouble seeing street signs. He was 35
years old and had perfect vision up to that point. He didn't pay
much attention to it.
But over the ensuing months, his vision got progressively worse.
He went to his ophthalmologist, who said, "Look, you're 35 years old,
you're nearsighted, you need glasses." Well, that wasn't too big
a deal, but about three months later, he noticed as he was working on
his patients (Kelley was an orthodontist, he did a lot of close work in
patients' mouths), and he noticed that he had trouble seeing the teeth
clearly in his patients and doing the intricate work with pliers.
So he went back to his ophthalmologist, who said, "This is kind of
interesting, you need bifocals." Now, this didn't sit too kindly
on Kelley's soul, he thought 35 years old was too young for bifocals,
but he wore them. And they seemed to work well for about three months,
and then he noticed that with bifocals he could see the far distance
well and he could read, and he could do his intricate work in his
patients' mouths, but the intermediate distances were getting kind of
fuzzy.
This was unusual, so he went back to his ophthalmologist, who said,
"You need trifocals. This is the first time I've ever had a patient who
needed trifocals." This was a blow to Dr. Kelley. Just about the time
he needed trifocals, he started developing muscle cramps.
Initially, they weren't too serious. They were in his arms, and he
figured this was because he was spending twelve hours a day working
hunched over his patients. But the pains got progressively worse.
They were like severe charley-horses in his arms. Then they evolved to
his legs, and pretty soon he was getting terrible chest pains-- in
fact, he ended up in the local emergency room three times with terrible
chest pains, thinking it was a heart attack. But his EKGs were normal,
so he went to his local doctor, who just suggested that he was working
too hard and needed to take some time off. Kelley did that, but
the pains didn't get any better.
And
just about the time that he was having trouble with his muscle pains,
his hair started to fall out. Kelley had a thick head of hair and
baldness did not run in his family, so at age 35 when his hair started
to fall out, this was serious. So he went back to his doctor, and the
doctor said, "Well, this is just stress and aging, there's nothing you
can do about it."
Now, about the time his hair started to fall out, Kelley developed a
severe, cataclysmic depression. Now, Kelley had never been
depressed a day in his life. This was a man who worked 14 hours a
day as an orthodontist, loved his work, had a wonderful family, four
kids - all adopted and he loved dearly, a good wife, he was very active
in community affairs, he just wasn't a depressed type. He had never
been depressed, and now suddenly he would wake up in the morning with
crying spells.
Kelley wasn't interested in his work, wasn't interested in his family,
he thought about chucking orthodonture to go live in the mountains of
Colorado. This is very unusual for him. He went to his doctor and
begged for anti-depressants, but the doctor said “No, you're just
working too hard, you have to take some more time off”. So, Kelley took
more time off, and the depression got worse. Just about the time
he was starting to feel suicidal, his belly suddenly expanded
overnight, and he went to his doctor, who said, "You have to go into
the hospital."
Dr. Kelley was very well known in the Texas community where he lived,
and they called in all the local surgeons and gastroenterologists, and
the surgeon took one look at this man and said, "This guy's got
terminal cancer."
This was about 1964 and in those days, they didn't have sophisticated
CAT-scans or ultrasounds. They just had simple ultrasound and X-ray
equipment. They did a whole series of X-rays and found that there were
lesions in his lungs that looked like metastatic disease - a huge tumor
in his right hip and his liver was three times its normal size.
It appeared that he had a pancreatic tumor that had metastasized very
quickly. The surgeon said he was too sick for surgery. The
doctors told his wife Kelley had four to six to eight weeks to live.
That was the bad news, but the news got even worse. His wife
handled this sudden occurrence by packing up and leaving. Leaving Dr.
Kelley with four young kids and dying of cancer. Now, Dr. Kelley
did what any sane man would do in a circumstance like that. He
called his mother.
Dr. Kelley's mother, Velma, is an unusual character, and I've talked
about her before in my other lectures. You'd have to meet Mama
Kelley to really appreciate her. She raised three sons on a
dirt poor, Kansas farm, 80 acres, during the Depression. Her
husband died of a heart attack leaving her with three kids, and she got
them through college and graduate school. Kelley's older brother
is a very famous dental surgeon, and his younger brother is an expert
on Robert Browning the poet, in fact Professor Kelley runs the Browning
Foundation and is world renowned for his work. And of course, then
there's this "crazy" Dr. Kelley the cancer doctor.
Kelley called his mother and said, "Look, I have a problem," and she
said, "What's the problem?" and he said, "Well, I've just been told I
have six weeks to live, I've got four young kids and my wife left
me. What am I going to do?"
Well, his mother got very angry with him. She said, "What you're
going to do is you're going to get over your cancer. Those kids are
adopted. If you die, those kids are going back to the orphanage.
I'm not going to take them, I've already raised three kids, so you're
going to get well."
Kelley
said to his mother, "That's absolutely and totally impossible.
I've had the best doctors in Texas tell me I have four to six to eight
weeks to live with terminal pancreatic cancer." His mother said,
"Nonsense." That day she got on a plane and flew down to Texas
and walked into Kelley's house to get him well.
Now how did Mama Kelley approach Dr. Kelly's terminal prognosis?
Well, the first thing she did was take all the food in his cupboards
and throw it away. Kelley was probably the preeminent connoisseur
of junk food that I ever knew. He knew the ingredients of every
brand of chocolate bar, and he basically lived on Fritos and chocolate
bars for years. So it wasn't too surprising that at the age of 36 he
would develop terminal cancer. His mother was a very wise
woman. She'd grown up on the land, had grown up on the farm, had
raised farm animals and raised her kids according to very natural
principals and good healthy food.
The first thing she did was go to the local health food store and load
up on fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, no
animal protein. And from that day she put her son on a very
rigorous diet, a complete vegetarian diet, a complete raw foods diet,
consisting of nothing but fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds,
grains, beans, sprouted beans, that sort of thing. Absolutely no
animal protein, no fish, no poultry, no red meat, no dairy products, no
nothing.
This was a very difficult diet for Dr. Kelley to follow, because he
liked Big Macs, he loved Hershey bars, he loved Fritos, but his mother
wouldn't allow those things in the house, so he had no choice but to do
it. To his absolute total astonishment, two weeks passed and then
four weeks passed, and he felt a little stronger. Six weeks passed,
eight months passed and he didn't die. Three months passed and his
mother walked into his bedroom one morning and said, "Okay, three
months have passed, you're getting better, it's time for you to go back
to work."
He said, "Now, wait a minute, I have terminal pancreatic cancer."
She said, "You've got four kids who've got to eat, and your wife
emptied out your bank account. So, you're going to work whether you
want to or not," and from that day he started seeing his patients
again. He'd see a patient, sleep for about fifteen minutes, see a
patient, then sleep for about fifteen minutes. The miracle was
first that he wasn't dead, and secondly, that he really was getting
better.
Now Dr. Kelley is a true scientist in the tradition of true
scientists. Scientists are different from the rest of us because
they ask questions that the rest of us would be too lazy or too crazy
to ask. He said, "I cannot believe that my mother is the first
person in the history of the world who figured out that a diet of raw
foods, nuts and grains, as horrible as it is, can stabilize cancer.” He
said, “I can't believe that she's that smart.” So he went to his
local library, he was feeling kind of feisty, so he went to the library
to see what he could find.
Fortunately, Dr. Kelley's local library had a copy of Max Gerson's 1959
book called FIFTY CASES. Gerson was an interesting character in
medical history. He was a very prominent German physician who during
the forties and fifties developed his own personal approach to
degenerative diseases involving primarily a diet of raw foods, nuts,
seeds, grains, and lots of fresh vegetables juices: 8- 10 glasses
a day. With this approach, Gerson had great success with a whole
range of degenerative diseases, including cancer. During the
thirties with the advent of Nazism, Gerson, being Jewish, left Germany
and came to New York and set up his own clinic where for about a twenty
year period he continued to have a fair amount of success using this
particular diet.
Gerson hypothesized that meat was somehow toxic to the human body and
toxic to the liver, and raw fruits and raw vegetables helped the body
clean out, stimulated the liver and made the immune system work better.
He wasn't too sure of the science, but he did know that the results
were good. He published this information in 1959. Kelley
was a little ecstatic about this because it provided confirmation that
the diet he was on really did have the possibility to work.
Kelley got progressively stronger over a three to six month period, but
he had stabilized. He was lucky, as I like to say, he was lucky
in a very unlucky way. He was unlucky, of course, because he had
pancreatic cancer. But he was lucky in that he had such bad
cancer that the tumors protruded from his liver and he could feel them,
so he could really monitor his own progress. He knew that when he
got lazy on the diet, which he occasionally did, that his tumors would
grow within days. And he knew that if he stuck to the diet religiously,
those tumors would regress. So he had his own 'tumor marker'
sitting right there on his belly since he could feel these
tumors. This was very fortunate. But about during the
sixth, seventh month, those tumors didn't shrink any more. And
just about the time those tumors stopped shrinking, Kelley developed
severe digestive problems.
The problem with pancreatic cancer is that it destroys the
pancreas. Well, we know that the pancreas does: it produces
insulin and it produces digestive enzymes. Without those
digestive enzymes, you can't digest food. One of the most common
serious problems with patients with any kind of pancreatic disease,
whether it be cancer or pancreatitis, is severe digestive problem:
bloating, gas, nausea, vomiting, the dumping syndrome,
constipation--they just can't digest and utilize their nutrients
properly.
Kelley figured there had to be a simple solution to this so he went to
his local pharmacy and talked to the druggist who was a good friend of
his, who said, "That's no big deal, just use some pancreatic
enzymes." He pulled out a bottle of vibrant pancreatic enzymes,
we're talking 1964, he said, “Take these, they'll provide the enzymes
that your own pancreas isn't producing, a very simple solution, it'll
take care of the gas and the bloating.” Kelley, if nothing else,
was a man of excess, and if he was going to buy one bottle of the
pancreatic enzymes, he was going to buy a hundred. So he bought about
ten cases of these enzymes, and that day he started taking them.
He started taking three with meals then four with meals then five with
meals and after about three days, he was taking about fifty capsules of
pancreatic enzymes with each meal. And he noticed that something
began to happen in his gut. Every time he took a dose of enzymes,
there was a twinge of pain in the areas of the tumor in his
liver. After a couple of weeks on these enzymes, he began to
notice that these tumors seemed to actually be softening. In
fact, he began to believe that after this period of the stabilization
on the diet, they were actually shrinking, and dissolving. He
said, "This doesn't make any sense. I take these enzymes, and
within half an hour of taking them I feel some pain, some gnawing,
something going on in these areas of tumor, but those enzymes are
destroyed in the gut. I can't conceive how this is possible. I don't
see what these pancreatic enzymes would have to do with those tumors in
my liver."
Kelley went back to his local library. Again, Kelley being a
scientist, he was never satisfied without finding an answer. He
looked up pancreatic enzymes by doing a literature search. And he was
fortunate to find a name in the literature, Dr. John Beard, probably
one of the most eminent men of the twentieth century and one of the
least known men of the twentieth century. John Beard was an
eminent embryologist working out of the University of Edinburgh in the
1880s, 1890s and around the turn of the century.
Dr. Beard, like Kelley, started out with no interest in cancer
whatsoever. He was an embryologist, who was interested in
comparative embryology, particularly in the placenta. His area of
expertise was the placenta. Now we know what the placenta
is. After fertilization in the mammal, the embryo produces an
organ called the placenta which literally eats into the mother's
uterus. It serves as an anchor to the growing fetus and it also
serves as the connection between the blood supply of the mother which
means nutrients to the baby. and the waste products to the baby.
There's a point of connection between the blood supplies of the baby
and the mother. That's how the baby is fed and that's how the baby gets
rid of its waste materials.
Beard was a smart man and he noticed that in the mammalian species that
he studied, and he studied dozens, that the placenta would grow into
the uterus and would grow and grow and grow and at a particular time in
every species, it would suddenly stop growing. In mice it was ten
days, in humans 56 days, in every human embryo, virtually to the day,
56 days and that placenta would stop growing, in elephants it was
something like 300 days.
Beard was particularly interested in this because he realized something
unusual about the placenta, and he was the first person to make this
observation, but not the last. He saw the placenta as kind of
like a tumor, because indeed it does behave like a tumor. The
placenta is a piece of tissue that invades the mother's uterus, much as
a tumor would invade the mothers' uterus. Now usually, the
placenta reaches a certain point of growth, and stops. But
sometimes it doesn't, and in women where the placenta doesn't stop
growing, they develop a very serious cancer called chorliocarcinoma
that used to be one of the most aggressive cancers around. Fortunately,
there is a chemotherapeutic agent, methotrexate, that really does knock
it out and now 80 to 90% of these women can be cured. Prior to
the advent of methotrexate, it was a very, very deadly disease.
So, there was a tradition of the placenta behaving like a tumor, and
Beard was aware of this. And he made the connection in his own mind. He
said, "If I could figure out why the placenta stops growing at a
certain point, 56 days in a mother, maybe I could figure out a way to
stop tumors from growing." It was a great leap of faith, and it
led to ten years of research. What he did is, in a variety of
animal studies, he investigated the growth and development of every
organ system there was - the tissue of the organs, trying to find some
connection between the development in the embryo and the cessation of
growth in the placenta.
It took him ten years before he hit upon the fact that the only
connection that existed, the only thing that changed, for example, day
56 in humans, 10 in the mice, day 300 in the elephants, was the day the
placenta stopped growing, the embryonic pancreas started to work.
There was no other connection. That's kind of an interesting
concept, because embryos don't really need a pancreas. They get
all the nutrition they need from their mother's blood supply. They
don't need digestive enzymes, they get them for free right from the
mother's blood supply. They don't have to chew it or digest it in fact,
their digestive system really does not function. It is not needed until
the day they're born, and they start eating through their mouths. Again
on day 56, which is pretty [rare] in embryonic development, the
placenta started working - it started producing pancreatic enzymes.
Beard said, “Listen, what possible function could these pancreatic
enzymes have other than to stop the placenta from growing? And if
indeed they do stop the placenta from growing perhaps, they could stop
tumors from growing! “
In November of 1904, Beard presented his hypothesis that pancreatic
enzymes represent the main defense against cancer, not the immune
system or any other system. He presented it before the Edinburgh
Scientific Society. He was almost universally laughed at, and I said
almost universally laughed at because there was one very bright army
surgeon in the audience who was a cancer specialist. Of course in 1904
there was no cancer therapy other than surgery, and this guy had seen a
lot of his patients die. He was willing to listen to anybody, even this
crazy embryologist out of Edinburgh who proposed that pancreatic
enzymes could cure cancer.
After the lecture, and all the booing and the throwing of tomatoes,
this army surgeon went up to see Beard, and said, "I'd like to try your
therapy. So Beard and the army surgeon developed some injectable
pancreatic enzymes. The first case documented in the medical
literature was metastatic laryngeal cancer. Now even today,
laryngeal cancer is a really nasty disease. It doesn't have a
real good prognosis. This patient had metastatic disease where he
had a huge tumor sitting in his throat. The Army Captain injected
the enzymes with Beard's assistance over a period of two weeks, and in
two weeks that tumor was just thrown up by this patient. They
documented it, and it was dead.
This was the first documented case of a patient apparently cured by the
use of injectable pancreatic enzymes. It was published in the
British Medical Journal and caused an enormous controversy. The
usual controversy - the patient didn't have cancer, the results were
faked, that wasn't really a tumor, the same things that we hear
today. A number of doctors, however, did get interested in
Beard's work and over the following years about thirty or fifty papers
were published in medical journals, both in the U.S. and in Europe
documenting the regression of tumors and in fact some cures, with the
use of injectable pancreatic enzymes.
Now you say “that's wonderful but why didn't Beard's work take hold it
if was so wonderful?” In fact, in 1911, Beard published a book
called "The Enzyme Theory of Cancer," and I think that only about 15
people ever bothered to read it. The reason is that just about the time
he published his book, Madame Curie announced that radiation was a
safe, non-toxic cure for virtually all cancer.
Madame Curie had a fabulous reputation...and had done wonderful work
with radiation. She proposed at that time that radiation was perfectly
safe. It would take a generation of radiation oncologists to die
from leukemia before we realized that it wasn't as safe as she thought
it was. She also was mistaken to believe it would be useful
against virtually all cancer. There are very few cancers that are
radiation sensitive for any prolonged period of time.
However, Madame Curie sold her work in the world's press that this was
the answer to cancer. Thus Beard's work was forgotten, and then
he died in about 1920, he died in obscurity. His enzyme therapy was
forgotten until Dr. Kelley in 1964 because of the use of pancreatic
enzymes given to him by his local pharmacist began to suspect that
those enzymes were getting rid of that tumor in his gut.
Kelley realized that there was one problem - Beard said the enzymes had
to be injected, that they would be destroyed in the gut. In fact,
every medical and dental student who has ever gone through dental or
medical school in the U.S. or any other country was taught that all
ingested pancreatic enzymes are wonderful digestive aids, but they're
destroyed in the gut. They are not absorbed active and intact in the
gut - that doesn't happen. Kelley was taking the enzymes orally, and he
said, “Wait a minute. Beard said they have to be injected.
I'm taking them orally and I know something is going on here.”
Kelley went back to the literature. Lo and behold, in the 1930
and 1940s, there were a whole series of wonderful experiments
documenting that oral ingested pancreatic enzyme in both human and
animal studies are absorbed active and intact in the gut and do serve
wider physiological functions. The easiest way to document this
is with a 24 hour urine collection. Feed a patient a huge amount
of pancreatic enzymes then collect urine for 24 hours, and you can see
how much of those enzymes are going to be excreted in the urine.
It turns out that virtually 100% of what you take orally comes out in
the urine, not in the intestinal tract, which means they have to be
absorbed. With that problem resolved, Kelley began to think about
the raw diet he'd been on.
Now remember, his Kelley's therapy began with his mother's vegetarian
diet: fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, all raw, lots of
juices. He said," I wonder why that diet stabilized me
initially?" He was kind of taken by this idea of Beard's enzyme
theory, he said, "You know, raw food is a wonderful thing, it's got
lots of vitamins and minerals and trace elements and it's loaded with
nutrients, and this of course is widely recognized." He said,
'When you cook food", and his mother insisted that the food had to be
raw, "when you cook food, you don't really destroy too many of the
vitamins and minerals and trace elements - most vitamins and minerals
and trace elements are not sensitive to heat."
So Kelley said, “Why does this diet have to be a raw diet? Why
did Max Gerson use a raw diet? What is it about raw food that
helps cancer patients?” And he kept thinking and thinking and
thinking and thinking, and he said, well the vitamins and minerals and
trace elements are not destroyed by heat. What is destroyed by
heat? The only thing destroyed by heat are enzymes. Raw
food is loaded with enzymes; it's just packed with enzymes. Every
cell in everybody has at least 50 thousand enzymes, so when you eat raw
food, you're getting a load of enzymes. When you cook food, you
get nothing. Enzymes are heat sensitive. They're destroyed
and inactivated at about 118 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, when we cook food, we don't destroy the vitamins and minerals, but
you destroy every enzyme in every cell in that food. It's an important
concept when you think about. We're the only species in the
history of the world--you know, one billion years of life and
evolution-- that cooks its food. Every other species of animal
eats raw food except for us. We're so bright that we decided that
cooking food is better. We decided that--some anthropologists will tell
you that 50,000 years ago, some say a couple of hundred thousand years
ago, we started to cook food. It tastes better when you cook
it. If you give a dog some raw food or cooked food, it's going to
eat the cooked food. But if you eat cooked food, you don't get
any enzymes. Kelley was thinking about this, and he said, "You
know, I just can't believe that I'm the only person in the history of
the world who ever thought about the fact that when you cook food you
do something profound like destroy all the enzymes and that might have
an effect on health."
So, he went back to the library. Lo and behold, he learned about
the work of Edward Howell. Howell was a doctor who graduated from
the University of Illinois Medical School in about 1920. A brilliant
doctor, great career, except for one thing--he was sick as a
dog. I guess maybe if he were alive today, he'd be
diagnosed as having chronic fatigue syndrome. He was depressed, he was
weak and dizzy, he couldn't get out of bed. No interest in his
work. He was fatigued, he had fevers, chills and sweats.
Now when a doctor's sick, it's scary. Doctors always go to the
best doctor and try to find out the best answer for what they've got.
So, he went everywhere, from Columbia to Presbyterian to the Mayo
Clinic. And they told him, "There's nothing wrong with you, you're just
too stressed, you don't really want to be a doctor, you need a
psychiatrist." Even in 1920, they were telling people that.
He didn't like that answer, he'd spent his whole life learning to be a
doctor. Here he was 24 years old with a medical degree and unable to
function. Out of desperation--believe me, nobody ever goes to the
natural therapists as first choice, they go out of desperation--Howell
ended up in a spa run by a naturopath. The naturopath took one
look at Howell and said, “You're going on a diet of raw foods.
Raw foods meaning vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and grains.”
And now Kelley learned about three different people coming up with the
same diet.
Howell was too sick to ask questions. He wasn't thinking very
clearly. He went on the diet because he was desperate, and in
three months he was virtually completely well. As he got better,
he felt strong enough to ask questions, and he asked this wonderful old
naturopath, "What is it about raw food that got me well?" And the guy
gave him one answer: Enzymes.
In 1920, we didn't know too much about enzymes. We knew
some. Enzymes are catalysts. They enable reactions to occur
in biological systems with a minimum input of energy. You know,
there are reactions that occur in the human cell that if it weren't for
enzymes would require 1-2 thousand degrees Centigrade: we would
disappear in a puff of smoke. Enzymes allow reactions to occur
with a minimum amount of heat and energy input. They increase the
efficiency of both biological and nonbiological chemical
reactions. "When you cook food", this naturopath said, "you don't
destroy the vitamins and the minerals and the trace elements, you don't
destroy the fat and the protein: there's as much fat in a cooked
McDonald's as there is in raw beef. But you destroy the
enzymes."
He told Howell what was known, that all biological enzymes are
inactivated above 118 degrees. Well, that struck Howell as a
pretty profound concept, and he made the same connection that Kelley
made forty years later - that we were the only species of animal
in the history of the world that cooks its food, and that might have a
profound effect on our health. We all know about the vitamins,
minerals, trace elements, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. We never
think about the enzymes in food. Howell perceived, and so did his
naturopath, and so did Kelley forty years later, that the enzymes in
food may be the single most important nutrient in food: the nutrients
being required for repairing or rebuilding the damaged tissue, for
preventing disease--after all it was enzymes that are the metabolic
machinery. And those enzymes may be used in the body for repair
and rebuilding.
Certainly, Gerson’s work and Kelley's own diet that he was following
courtesy of his mother, prove that there was something in raw food that
could lead to health. And it had to be the enzymes. Howell
spent fifty years of his life documenting the effects of raw foods on
human health. His studies are absolutely profound. He's
probably like Beard, one of the most brilliant men of the 20th Century,
and like Beard probably one of the least well known because he was
outside the orthodoxy and nobody paid any attention to him.
By now, Dr. Kelley was doing pretty well. Had his diet down, he
had his enzymes down, he understood raw foods, he understood pancreatic
enzymes, and he was doing well. He was nine months into his
therapy, the tumor was regressing, he was working nine hours a day
seeing patients. Everything was going well.
And then he started to get sick. He woke up one day feeling
tired, he canceled his patients and stayed in bed. The next day
he felt worse - tired, fatigue and he thought he was getting the
flu. He asked his mother. His mother said, "Just stay on the
diet, stay on the enzymes." His mother was a pretty tough character.
She said, "You just keep doing the program." The third day he was
sicker. The fourth day he started vomiting. This was a bit
scary, because he would take one of his doses of fifty capsules of
enzymes and would throw them up immediately.
Kelley was a tough character. He'd take the fifty pills again and
he'd throw them up again. He had this big battle with his stomach, and
by the end of the day, he gave up. He said, "I just have
intestinal flu, I'll stay off the pills." So he stayed off the
pills two or three days and he started to feel better. He said,
"Okay, I can go back on my pills." And yet he was scared. He knew
if he stayed off those enzymes, those tumors were going to grow.
So after three or four days he felt fine, then suddenly he started
getting sick again. He felt tired, then fatigued and lethargic,
with fevers, chills sweats. And the fourth day on these enzymes,
he started throwing up his guts.
This was kind of scary, again, because those pancreatic enzymes were
his life-line and without them he was going to die. He had four
young kids and if he died, they were going back to the orphanage, they
had no other options. Kelley stayed off the enzymes a couple of
days and felt better. But as he stayed off the pills--and
remember, Kelley was lucky in a very unlucky way because he had his own
tumor marker sticking out of his belly--if he stayed off the enzymes
those tumors started to grow. He didn't like that too much.
On the enzymes, they'd start to shrink ,but he'd get sick. When off the
enzymes, the tumors would grow, but he'd feel better. When on the
enzymes, the tumors would shrink, but he'd feel sick. "This
doesn't make sense," he said. "On the enzymes, the tumors are
going away, I should feel better. When off the enzymes, the
tumors grow, and I should feel worse. On the enzymes, when the
tumors break down, I feel sicker."
He kept thinking about this, Kelley being a scientist, stayed up day
after day after day. Kelley was a wonderful man. When he
had a problem--I lived in his house for a year and a half and there
were a lot of unsolved problems--and I can remember days when he
wouldn't let me sleep because some problem had to be thought
about. I need about six or seven hours a night. He got
about thirty minutes, so it was a pretty difficult thing to be around
him physiologically. Also, psychologically and spiritually.
Kelley was trying to figure out this problem of why he felt worse when
the tumors broke down. One night, in the middle of the nigh at 3
o'clock in the morning, he finally figured it out. He said, "I
know what's happening! Tumor wastes are making me sick.
Tumor wastes are poisonous! That's what it is!" And a light
went off. He said, "A lot of the symptoms that people are getting
on chemo" --now back in 1964 we didn't have a lot of the chemotherapy
agents but we certainly had chemo and people certainly got sick on
it--Kelley said, "It's the darned tumor breaking down. I bet that's why
people get sick from the treatment for cancer, as the tumor breaks down
they get poisoned by tumor waste."
Kelley said nothing, absolutely nothing on earth is more toxic to the
cancer patient than dead tumor waste. That was his
statement. And it seemed to be true. When he was off the
enzymes, when the tumor would be growing, he'd feel better. When
on the enzymes, he'd feel sick. He had a lot of symptoms.
Fevers to 103, chills, sweats, almost like a very severe anaphylactic
sickness like response, muscle aches and pains. He said, "It was the
tumor waste!"
Now, that led to another investigation. Kelley was looking for
some way to help the body get rid of tumor waste. And he went
through the medical literature. He had to find some way, because he had
to increase the efficiency of the program. He had to find a way for the
patient, in this case himself, to stay on those enzymes because those
pills were the life-line. Well, he went through a number of medical
journals and a number of medical text books and the thing that kept
coming back to him was the thing that raises the eyebrows of the
orthodox colleagues more than anything. And you will probably laugh
when I mention it, and that's the coffee enemas.
Nothing in the history of the world has generated more controversy than
coffee enemas. Kelley learned about coffee enemas ironically not from
some strange esoteric health publication, but from the Merck Manual.
The Merck Manual said that coffee enemas were a therapeutic tool from
1899 to 1977. Kelley learned about them right in the Merck
Manual. As doctors learned during the 1920s and 1930s, when you
take coffee rectally, the caffeine stimulates the liver to release its
toxins, it dumps its toxins much like a dump truck. It's not
surprising when you think about it. You take caffeine rectally, you can
stimulate the gall bladder and the liver ducts to dump their waste.
This has been documented by very sophisticated radiographic
studies--which just about 30 people have read. So coffee enemas seemed
like the logical thing to do. And Kelley wasn't too happy about that,
being a very neat gentleman. But he figured he didn't have any choice
because he wasn't just fooling with some esoteric research project with
some student or some study, he dealing with himself, and his life
depended on him. So very reluctantly he went to the store. He got
his local Chock-Full of Nuts coffee (he didn't use organic coffee the
first time), and he bought an enema bag from the local pharmacy. Then
very reluctantly and very gingerly, he made up his coffee and gave
himself his first coffee enema.
Again, Kelley was a smart man. Before he took his first enema, he
went on his enzymes four or five days, until he was really feeling
sick, had a fever of 103, nausea, vomiting, muscle aches and pains. He
really was sick. He wanted to see if these enemas would work.
He did an enema, and in half an hour his fever went from 104 to 99. His
muscle aches and pains were resolved, and he felt almost normal.
It was almost a miraculous occurrence in Kelley's own mind, and from
that day on, he did coffee enemas and he's still doing them today. He's
been doing them since that first day and hasn't missed a single day.
So that was the third part of the Kelley program: first part diet,
second part pancreatic enzymes, third part coffee enemas. "Crazy"
Dr. Kelley. But he got better. After about a year and a
half, two years, his tumors were gone and he was back at work as an
orthodontist. But when he hung up his shingle again, people
didn't come to him for the straightening of their teeth. Kelley
developed quite a reputation as the dentist who had cured himself of
cancer through his mothers' nutritional program. And the first
day he re-opened his office, he got calls from people with cancer and
asthma, and multiple sclerosis, from the local out-lying towns there in
West Texas. All wanting to come by and go on that diet too.
Within a couple of years, Kelley was no longer treating people with
crooked teeth. He was basically treating primarily advanced cancer
patients with nutritional program. He developed such an
international reputation that the local medical society had him thrown
in jail in 1969. They had copies of his book which he was then
publishing, absconded and burned...you don't want to offend the
AMA. There's nothing offends the AMA more than a dentist who
cures cancer. It's not supposed to happen. It's all right.
I understand. I'm an M.D., and I'm a little offended by the idea
too. I mean, it kind of bothers me that Dr. Kelley did it.
So Kelley had an international reputation, he had this wonderful
program: a diet of raw foods, vegetable, nuts, seeds, grains. He
had the wonderful pancreatic enzymes and he added other vitamins and
minerals to make the enzymes work better, with coffee enemas, and he
was doing pretty well. But he wasn't doing well enough. And
Kelley always said and I always say, "You don't learn from your
successes, your successes make you feel arrogant and wonderful, and
they please your mother. But you learn from your failures."
By about 1969-70, Kelley was probably getting about 50% of his patients
well. The bad news is, he was losing about 50%. He
couldn't figure out why--he was pretty pleased because most of his
patients were pretty sick, but he couldn't figure out why he was losing
them. He'd try out everything on a patient who was failing. He'd
increase the amount of grains, decrease the amount of grains, give more
juices, give less juices, change the relationship of beans to rice. But
some patients, no matter what manipulation he did, they'd do
badly. And one of them was the woman who was going to become his
second wife.
Now Suzy's a remarkable woman. Suzy didn't have cancer, she had
allergies. And when I say allergies, I mean the worse case of
allergies in the history of medicine. She was so sensitive to
iodine that she could not walk within ten miles of the ocean or she
would suffer an anaphylactic reaction. She had to carry adrenalin
with her all the time. Repeatedly, at least twice a week, she'd have
anaphylactic reactions. Some bright allergist had treated her
with desensitization shots and used dirty needles and then she had
developed hepatitis. So know not only did she have terrible allergies,
but she had chronic hepatitis, which in itself is a fatal disease in
many cases. She was 24 years old, and she was dying.
There were about four foods that she could eat. She was getting worse,
and she figured by the time she was down to distilled water, it was
over. She knew Kelley was primarily a cancer doctor, but she
figured if he was smart enough to kill cancer he could cure her
allergies.
She
arrived in his office very sick. Kelley put her on his wonderful
diet - the raw fruits, the raw vegetables, the juices, the vitamins,
the enzymes, the coffee enemas. And within three or four months
she was doing really well. By six months, she was doing well
enough that she could eat fish--now this is a woman who couldn't walk
by the ocean because of her iodine sensitivity. After nine months
she was doing so well, she married Dr. Kelley. She became his
second wife and began to run his office. And she was extremely
healthy.
At about a year, though, things started to change, and Suzy got a
little sick. Tired, fatigue, fevers, chills, that kind of thing,
nothing serious. Kelley originally thought that she just had the
flu. He said, "Stay on the program, you'll get over it."
But she got progressively worse. And what got a little bit
frightening for Dr. Kelley and for Suzy was that she started developing
allergies, after she'd been free of allergies for about a year.
She began to react to every food she ate, even his wonderful raw foods
and raw vegetables. It didn't make any sense. Now, he was
dealing with his wife, nothing scares a doctor more than being sick
himself, that's pretty scary, but when you have a family member who is
sick, that's just about as scary.
Kelley did a lot of manipulations. He increased the food, he
increased the vegetables, he increased the raw foods, he changed the
proportions of different nutrients and did everything he knew to do to
see if that would have any effect on his wife. But she got
progressively worse, not better. After about two months of
dietary manipulations, his wife really crashed and ended up
semi-comatose in his house. Kelley was faced with a problem. If he
didn't do something quick, she might die and he might have to bring her
to a hospital, and admit defeat. The local newspapers would have
a field day, "Crazy quack cancer doctor's wife ends up in hospital in a
coma."
He thought about this a lot, and he didn't want that to happen. He
thought about everything he had done. And he had done everything. He
had done everything to manipulation of raw foods, raw vegetables, et
cetera. The only thing he hadn't done, and suddenly it hit him
like a light bulb going off, the only thing he hadn't done was give her
meat. Well, he thought about it and he said “No, I'm the raw
foods diet. I believe in raw foods, vegetables, meat is toxic, meat
kills people, it raises cholesterol levels, it causes cancer.
Human beings do not eat meat, period. It's awful, it's ugly.”
Two days later, his wife was getting worse and she was going to die. He
knew that. He was a dentist, but he knew enough medicine to know his
wife was dying. He said, "the only thing I haven't done is give
her meat, and I'm going to give her meat." Well, he talked it
over with her. She was delirious, but she could understand the word
meat, and she said, "No, it's not part of the Kelley diet, you're
trying to kill me Donald." He said, "You're going to eat
meat whether you want to or not." And he went to the local store
and got the biggest prime beef he could find. He ground it up and he
wanted her to eat it raw, of course because if you cook the meat you
destroy the enzymes and raw meat has enzymes. And he coaxed her
and coaxed her and he finally told her, "If you don't eat the meat,
you're going to the hospital."
Well, she decided to eat the meat, within two hours she was sitting up
in bed. Kelley fed her meat throughout the next 24 hours. She got
stronger and stronger and within two weeks she was well. Today, Suzy
Kelley looks twenty years younger than she is, she eats raw red meat
three times a day and is in absolutely perfect physical health.
It was exhilarating but also devastating for Kelley to realize that his
own wife was a meat-eater because it was contradictory to everything
that he believed in. It was a two-by-four across his forehead.
Kelley always said that "when God wants to teach me a lesson He doesn't
hit me with a twig, He hits me with a two-by-four. Because
I'm too dumb, I never see the message otherwise." Well, almost
losing his wife was a big two-by-four right across the forehead. Kelley
said, "I can't believe, humble dentist from Texas that I am, that I'm
the first person in the history of the world who realized that there's
a sub-category of human beings that not only needs meat but thrives on
it, I simply don't get it". Well, he again went to his local
library and he looked and he looked and he looked and he learned about
a wonderful anthropologist named Stefansson.
By now, Dr. Kelley was doing pretty well. Had his diet down, he
had his enzymes down, he understood raw foods, he understood pancreatic
enzymes, and he was doing well. He was nine months into his
therapy, the tumor was regressing, he was working nine hours a day
seeing patients. Everything was going well.
And then he started to get sick. He woke up one day feeling
tired, he canceled his patients and stayed in bed. The next day
he felt worse - tired, fatigue and he thought he was getting the
flu. He asked his mother. His mother said, "Just stay on the
diet, stay on the enzymes." His mother was a pretty tough character.
She said, "You just keep doing the program." The third day he was
sicker. The fourth day he started vomiting. This was a bit
scary, because he would take one of his doses of fifty capsules of
enzymes and would throw them up immediately.
Kelley was a tough character. He'd take the fifty pills again and
he'd throw them up again. He had this big battle with his stomach, and
by the end of the day, he gave up. He said, "I just have
intestinal flu, I'll stay off the pills." So he stayed off the
pills two or three days and he started to feel better. He said,
"Okay, I can go back on my pills." And yet he was scared. He knew
if he stayed off those enzymes, those tumors were going to grow.
So after three or four days he felt fine, then suddenly he started
getting sick again. He felt tired, then fatigued and lethargic,
with fevers, chills sweats. And the fourth day on these enzymes,
he started throwing up his guts.
This was kind of scary, again, because those pancreatic enzymes were
his life-line and without them he was going to die. He had four
young kids and if he died, they were going back to the orphanage, they
had no other options. Kelley stayed off the enzymes a couple of
days and felt better. But as he stayed off the pills--and
remember, Kelley was lucky in a very unlucky way because he had his own
tumor marker sticking out of his belly--if he stayed off the enzymes
those tumors started to grow. He didn't like that too much.
On the enzymes, they'd start to shrink ,but he'd get sick. When off the
enzymes, the tumors would grow, but he'd feel better. When on the
enzymes, the tumors would shrink, but he'd feel sick. "This
doesn't make sense," he said. "On the enzymes, the tumors are
going away, I should feel better. When off the enzymes, the
tumors grow, and I should feel worse. On the enzymes, when the
tumors break down, I feel sicker."
He kept thinking about this, Kelley being a scientist, stayed up day
after day after day. Kelley was a wonderful man. When he
had a problem--I lived in his house for a year and a half and there
were a lot of unsolved problems--and I can remember days when he
wouldn't let me sleep because some problem had to be thought
about. I need about six or seven hours a night. He got
about thirty minutes, so it was a pretty difficult thing to be around
him physiologically. Also, psychologically and spiritually.
Kelley was trying to figure out this problem of why he felt worse when
the tumors broke down. One night, in the middle of the nigh at 3
o'clock in the morning, he finally figured it out. He said, "I
know what's happening! Tumor wastes are making me sick.
Tumor wastes are poisonous! That's what it is!" And a light
went off. He said, "A lot of the symptoms that people are getting
on chemo" --now back in 1964 we didn't have a lot of the chemotherapy
agents but we certainly had chemo and people certainly got sick on
it--Kelley said, "It's the darned tumor breaking down. I bet that's why
people get sick from the treatment for cancer, as the tumor breaks down
they get poisoned by tumor waste."
Kelley said nothing, absolutely nothing on earth is more toxic to the
cancer patient than dead tumor waste. That was his
statement. And it seemed to be true. When he was off the
enzymes, when the tumor would be growing, he'd feel better. When
on the enzymes, he'd feel sick. He had a lot of symptoms.
Fevers to 103, chills, sweats, almost like a very severe anaphylactic
sickness like response, muscle aches and pains. He said, "It was the
tumor waste!"
Now, that led to another investigation. Kelley was looking for
some way to help the body get rid of tumor waste. And he went
through the medical literature. He had to find some way, because he had
to increase the efficiency of the program. He had to find a way for the
patient, in this case himself, to stay on those enzymes because those
pills were the life-line. Well, he went through a number of medical
journals and a number of medical text books and the thing that kept
coming back to him was the thing that raises the eyebrows of the
orthodox colleagues more than anything. And you will probably laugh
when I mention it, and that's the coffee enemas.
Nothing in the history of the world has generated more controversy than
coffee enemas. Kelley learned about coffee enemas ironically not from
some strange esoteric health publication, but from the Merck Manual.
The Merck Manual said that coffee enemas were a therapeutic tool from
1899 to 1977. Kelley learned about them right in the Merck
Manual. As doctors learned during the 1920s and 1930s, when you
take coffee rectally, the caffeine stimulates the liver to release its
toxins, it dumps its toxins much like a dump truck. It's not
surprising when you think about it. You take caffeine rectally, you can
stimulate the gall bladder and the liver ducts to dump their waste.
This has been documented by very sophisticated radiographic
studies--which just about 30 people have read. So coffee enemas seemed
like the logical thing to do. And Kelley wasn't too happy about that,
being a very neat gentleman. But he figured he didn't have any choice
because he wasn't just fooling with some esoteric research project with
some student or some study, he dealing with himself, and his life
depended on him. So very reluctantly he went to the store. He got
his local Chock-Full of Nuts coffee (he didn't use organic coffee the
first time), and he bought an enema bag from the local pharmacy. Then
very reluctantly and very gingerly, he made up his coffee and gave
himself his first coffee enema.
Again, Kelley was a smart man. Before he took his first enema, he
went on his enzymes four or five days, until he was really feeling
sick, had a fever of 103, nausea, vomiting, muscle aches and pains. He
really was sick. He wanted to see if these enemas would work.
He did an enema, and in half an hour his fever went from 104 to 99. His
muscle aches and pains were resolved, and he felt almost normal.
It was almost a miraculous occurrence in Kelley's own mind, and from
that day on, he did coffee enemas and he's still doing them today. He's
been doing them since that first day and hasn't missed a single day.
So that was the third part of the Kelley program: first part diet,
second part pancreatic enzymes, third part coffee enemas. "Crazy"
Dr. Kelley. But he got better. After about a year and a
half, two years, his tumors were gone and he was back at work as an
orthodontist. But when he hung up his shingle again, people
didn't come to him for the straightening of their teeth. Kelley
developed quite a reputation as the dentist who had cured himself of
cancer through his mothers' nutritional program. And the first
day he re-opened his office, he got calls from people with cancer and
asthma, and multiple sclerosis, from the local out-lying towns there in
West Texas. All wanting to come by and go on that diet too.
Within a couple of years, Kelley was no longer treating people with
crooked teeth. He was basically treating primarily advanced cancer
patients with nutritional program. He developed such an
international reputation that the local medical society had him thrown
in jail in 1969. They had copies of his book which he was then
publishing, absconded and burned...you don't want to offend the
AMA. There's nothing offends the AMA more than a dentist who
cures cancer. It's not supposed to happen. It's all right.
I understand. I'm an M.D., and I'm a little offended by the idea
too. I mean, it kind of bothers me that Dr. Kelley did it.
So Kelley had an international reputation, he had this wonderful
program: a diet of raw foods, vegetable, nuts, seeds, grains. He
had the wonderful pancreatic enzymes and he added other vitamins and
minerals to make the enzymes work better, with coffee enemas, and he
was doing pretty well. But he wasn't doing well enough. And
Kelley always said and I always say, "You don't learn from your
successes, your successes make you feel arrogant and wonderful, and
they please your mother. But you learn from your failures."
By about 1969-70, Kelley was probably getting about 50% of his patients
well. The bad news is, he was losing about 50%. He
couldn't figure out why--he was pretty pleased because most of his
patients were pretty sick, but he couldn't figure out why he was losing
them. He'd try out everything on a patient who was failing. He'd
increase the amount of grains, decrease the amount of grains, give more
juices, give less juices, change the relationship of beans to rice. But
some patients, no matter what manipulation he did, they'd do
badly. And one of them was the woman who was going to become his
second wife.
Now Suzy's a remarkable woman. Suzy didn't have cancer, she had
allergies. And when I say allergies, I mean the worse case of
allergies in the history of medicine. She was so sensitive to
iodine that she could not walk within ten miles of the ocean or she
would suffer an anaphylactic reaction. She had to carry adrenalin
with her all the time. Repeatedly, at least twice a week, she'd have
anaphylactic reactions. Some bright allergist had treated her
with desensitization shots and used dirty needles and then she had
developed hepatitis. So know not only did she have terrible allergies,
but she had chronic hepatitis, which in itself is a fatal disease in
many cases. She was 24 years old, and she was dying.
There were about four foods that she could eat. She was getting worse,
and she figured by the time she was down to distilled water, it was
over. She knew Kelley was primarily a cancer doctor, but she
figured if he was smart enough to kill cancer he could cure her
allergies.
She arrived in his office very sick. Kelley put her on his
wonderful diet - the raw fruits, the raw vegetables, the juices, the
vitamins, the enzymes, the coffee enemas. And within three or
four months she was doing really well. By six months, she was
doing well enough that she could eat fish--now this is a woman who
couldn't walk by the ocean because of her iodine sensitivity.
After nine months she was doing so well, she married Dr. Kelley.
She became his second wife and began to run his office. And she
was extremely healthy.
At about a year, though, things started to change, and Suzy got a
little sick. Tired, fatigue, fevers, chills, that kind of thing,
nothing serious. Kelley originally thought that she just had the
flu. He said, "Stay on the program, you'll get over it."
But she got progressively worse. And what got a little bit
frightening for Dr. Kelley and for Suzy was that she started developing
allergies, after she'd been free of allergies for about a year.
She began to react to every food she ate, even his wonderful raw foods
and raw vegetables. It didn't make any sense. Now, he was
dealing with his wife, nothing scares a doctor more than being sick
himself, that's pretty scary, but when you have a family member who is
sick, that's just about as scary.
Kelley did a lot of manipulations. He increased the food, he
increased the vegetables, he increased the raw foods, he changed the
proportions of different nutrients and did everything he knew to do to
see if that would have any effect on his wife. But she got
progressively worse, not better. After about two months of
dietary manipulations, his wife really crashed and ended up
semi-comatose in his house. Kelley was faced with a problem. If he
didn't do something quick, she might die and he might have to bring her
to a hospital, and admit defeat. The local newspapers would have
a field day, "Crazy quack cancer doctor's wife ends up in hospital in a
coma."
He thought about this a lot, and he didn't want that to happen. He
thought about everything he had done. And he had done everything. He
had done everything to manipulation of raw foods, raw vegetables, et
cetera. The only thing he hadn't done, and suddenly it hit him
like a light bulb going off, the only thing he hadn't done was give her
meat. Well, he thought about it and he said “No, I'm the raw
foods diet. I believe in raw foods, vegetables, meat is toxic, meat
kills people, it raises cholesterol levels, it causes cancer.
Human beings do not eat meat, period. It's awful, it's ugly.”
Two days later, his wife was getting worse and she was going to die. He
knew that. He was a dentist, but he knew enough medicine to know his
wife was dying. He said, "the only thing I haven't done is give
her meat, and I'm going to give her meat." Well, he talked it
over with her. She was delirious, but she could understand the word
meat, and she said, "No, it's not part of the Kelley diet, you're
trying to kill me Donald." He said, "You're going to eat
meat whether you want to or not." And he went to the local store
and got the biggest prime beef he could find. He ground it up and he
wanted her to eat it raw, of course because if you cook the meat you
destroy the enzymes and raw meat has enzymes. And he coaxed her
and coaxed her and he finally told her, "If you don't eat the meat,
you're going to the hospital."
Well, she decided to eat the meat, within two hours she was sitting up
in bed. Kelley fed her meat throughout the next 24 hours. She got
stronger and stronger and within two weeks she was well. Today, Suzy
Kelley looks twenty years younger than she is, she eats raw red meat
three times a day and is in absolutely perfect physical health.
It was exhilarating but also devastating for Kelley to realize that his
own wife was a meat-eater because it was contradictory to everything
that he believed in. It was a two-by-four across his forehead.
Kelley always said that "when God wants to teach me a lesson He doesn't
hit me with a twig, He hits me with a two-by-four. Because
I'm too dumb, I never see the message otherwise." Well, almost
losing his wife was a big two-by-four right across the forehead. Kelley
said, "I can't believe, humble dentist from Texas that I am, that I'm
the first person in the history of the world who realized that there's
a sub-category of human beings that not only needs meat but thrives on
it, I simply don't get it". Well, he again went to his local
library and he looked and he looked and he looked and he learned about
a wonderful anthropologist named Stefansson.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was one man I wish I could have met, but he's
been dead for a while. Stefansson was an American who was trained at
Harvard in anthropology. He got tired of hanging around Cambridge
trying to decide what to do with his life and one day packed up and
went up to the most remote regions of the Arctic Circle to study
Eskimos. Up to that point, no white man had ever lived with the
Eskimos. Now Stefansson did not believe in armchair
anthropology. He lived with the Eskimos, he took an Eskimo wife,
he studied their culture, their life-style, their hunting techniques,
and he studied particularly their diet. Now the Eskimo diet
stunned Stefansson. It shouldn't have when you think about it,
when you think about what the Arctic Circle is really like, because the
Eskimo diet is nothing except a meat diet. It's a two month
summer which is not much of a summer. There are no fruits, no
vegetables. There is no soil, just tundra. No vegetarian foods at all.
All there are are lichens, and humans can't digest lichens. All
there is is fatty red meat - caribou, seal, polar bear, whale, fish,
salmon. There's nothing else. If humans were going to live up in
the Arctic Circle, prior to all the junk food shipped in, all that was
available was meat. All the Eskimos could eat was meat.
Stefansson thought about this, because he knew enough biology to know
at that time, it was believed that humans could not live on meat and
even then believed that meat was one of the three great evils of
humankind. So he looked at this very carefully, and he said,
"Here is this whole group of people who are not only eating meat, but
are thriving on it." And they were among the healthiest people
that Stephenson had ever observed. They had no cancer, no heart
disease, no diabetes, no obesity, they didn't even had a word for
depression in their vocabulary because they didn't know what it was.
They seemed to be universally happy people.
Stefansson discussed this diet with his biochemist friends at Harvard.
It was determined that the all meat diet that the Eskimos were
following was 80% saturated fat. Now there are Executives at the
American Heart Society who would drop dead of a heart attack if you
suggested a diet of 80% saturated fat. The normal American diet
is about 30% - 40% and the American Heart Association recommends 20 -
30%. Here was a whole group of people thriving on a diet that's
80% saturated fat!
Stefansson spent ten years there, and when he came back to the U.S., he
lived in New York. He wrote a series of ten books documenting his
experiences. Several of those books specifically dealt with the
Eskimo diet. When those particular books were published, dealing
with the diet, a controversy erupted. It was deemed absolutely
impossible that human beings could live on meat. Meat was ugly,
unhealthy, caused heart disease, caused all kinds of toxic
reactions. Stefansson was called a fraud. You know,
logically, you think, what the heck were they going to live on?
There is nothing else up in the Arctic Circle but meat anyway. But
people didn't put two and two together. I guess they figured they had
some magical source of vegetables and fruit but all they lived on were
meats. This controversy raged for five years. There were front
page articles in the New York Times. Because Stephenson was a
very well known figure at that time. He was this wonderful romantic
anthropologist who'd disappeared in the Arctic Circle for ten years and
married an Eskimo, and the newspapers carried front page articles for
years on this controversy about meat.
Finally Stefansson dared the New York City Medical Society. He
said, "I'll go into a locked ward at Bellevue Hospital for a year and
you feed me nothing but red meat. 80% saturated fat, I'll
guarantee I'll come out healthier than I went in." The eminent
Professor Tolstoy at my alma mater, Cornell University Medical College,
said "Let's do it." So for a year, Stefansson lived in a locked
room at Bellevue Hospital with one of his explorer colleagues, and the
two of them lived on nothing but raw meat, 80% saturated fat. At the
end of that experiment Stefansson's cholesterol levels had dropped
several points. He was in excellent health, his weight had dropped, his
triglycerides were virtually non-existent, and nobody could figure out
what had happened. There were a series of about 15 articles in
the medical journals discussing this experiment. About thirty people
read those.
Even in those days, it didn't agree with what people wanted to
believe. When Kelley read Stefansson's work, he said, “My wife
isn't an Eskimo, why should she need to be on red meat?" He said, "I
can understand an isolated group of people who need to be on red meat,
living up in the Arctic Circle, but Suzy's not an Eskimo.” And
then he thought and he thought and he thought, and he went back to the
library. Being a genius is hard work, you have to keep going back to
the library.
So he went back to library, and he realized that about 20,000 years ago
there was an ice age. It came down to about to the level of New
York City. Long Island is the terminal murrain for the last ice age,
that's a pretty low latitude to come down. There are lots of
people who are Europeans who essentially were living in Arctic-Circle
-like conditions 20,000 years ago. If you're from Northern Europe, your
ancestors had nothing to eat but large fatty animals, because the
Arctic Circle was moved down several thousand miles, and the
off-spring, many of us from European areas, are people who survived
because they could utilize meats very efficiently.
His wife Suzy was of Northern European descent. Her ancestors, some
15,000 years ago, survived because, like the Eskimos, they could live
on 80% saturated fat. And that's the diet Suzy thrives on today,
even though she's not an Eskimo. So we have to think about
geologic history when you make determinations about dietary selection.
Now Kelley had his two diets - his vegetarian diet and his meat diet.
And very quickly he realized that there was a third category.
Eventually he had ten subcategories, 90 variations of the sub-types, so
it got very complicated. But he realized very quickly that there
were three general categories of people. Vegetarian types -
people who do very well with fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains,
and do terribly with animal proteins. Carnivore types - people
who do extremely well with meat, particularly fatty meat, red meat,
beef, lamb, pork, some poultry, some fatty fish like swordfish, they
always need fat, the carnivores do extremely well on fat. They
enjoy other foods like root vegetables, and other certain vegetable
products. But they do absolutely terrible if they eat salads. If
you see somebody at a dinner table who you serve them a green salad and
they gag, you can presume that genetically they're a carnivore, because
their body is telling them that's not the right food for them.
Diets for balanced people are somewhere in between. There again,
three basic types. Kelley was a very observant man--now this was a very
big observation, to realize that there are three types of people,
general basic types, I mean three types of diet. Then he realized that
each one of those types were susceptible to a particular type of cancer.
Kelley had a wonderful laboratory - it was his office, he was seeing
thousands of patients with all types of cancer, so he had a wide
patient base on which to base his observations. He noticed that
the vegetarian types, the people who did well with the fruit, vegetable
green diet, tended to get the hard tumors. These are the very
traditional tumors of the lung, liver, the pancreas, the colon and the
breast and the brain. Hard tumors. The carnivore types
tended to get the blood tumors: the lymphomas, the leukemias, the
melanoma. Melanoma, though its not a blood tumor, almost
invariably occurred, in Kelley's observations, among people who did
well on the meat diet. Balanced people were somewhere in between,
somewhat susceptible to either the hard tumors or soft tumors.
Now Kelley thought and he thought and he thought, he said, "This is a
particularly important observation, that certain types of people who do
well on certain types of diets develop certain types of cancer and
don't develop other types." And he wondered if there was anything
physiological that might explain this, he said, "If I can figure out
what it was, I might learn something fundamental about cancer."
And he thought and he thought and he thought, and he observed and went
through the records of all his thousands of patients, and he wondered
if there were certain tendencies.
He noticed that there were certain vegetarian patients, there were
certain qualities that seemed to be almost universally
distinctive. These patients tended to have a fast pulse.
They tended to need only a little bit of sleep, only four or five hours
of sleep. They tended to be very irritable emotionally.
They tended to do very well in the mornings, less well at night, they
tended to have a very strong endocrine system.
The carnivores were the opposite. They tended to be a little more
lethargic and laconic, and seemed to need about eight to ten hours of
sleep. They did terribly in the morning because they didn't start
waking up until about one or two in the afternoon. They tended to
have a slow pulse, they tended to have very good digestion.
Balanced people were somewhere in between. Normal pulse, six to
eight hours of sleep, did well at any time of day. He noticed
that there were different psychological and physical and physiological
correlates with each type, and he kept thinking and thinking and
thinking about the possibility that if something biological could
explain this, he might understand cancer a little bit better.
So he did what he always did, he went back to the library, and he
learned about the work of Melvin Page. Now Dr. Melvin Page was an
eccentric dentist who worked out of St. Petersburg Florida. Page,
during the forties and fifties, like Kelley, had determined that
different types of people need different diets. And his
explanation was in autonomic physiology.
Now I'm not going to get technical, but the nervous system can be
divided into two basic--we need to have a little background right here.
The easiest way to divide it is into the conscious nervous system and
the unconscious nervous system. Now the conscious nervous system
is the nervous system you use when you to drive a car, do your
crossword puzzle or a math problem. The unconscious nervous
system is the nervous system that controls physiological processes
about which we don't have to think: heart rate, secretion of enzymes,
secretion of hormones, digestion processes. We don't have to think
about digestion, we don't have to think when we digest food, it just
happens, it is automatic. Traditionally, scientists thought that
the unconscious processes-- the physiological processes of secretion,
digestion and heart rate--were beyond conscious control. Of
course, we know now through biofeedback experiences that this is not
true, but in general it's a good useful dichotomy.
The unconscious nervous system in physiology is known as the autonomic
nervous system. It in itself can be divided into two parts, the
sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Again, I'm not going to get too
technical but we have to know these terms. The sympathetic and
the parasympathetic nervous system tend to work in opposition.
The sympathetic nervous system, for example, tends to speed up heart
rate, the parasympathetic tends to turn it down. The sympathetic
system tends to block secretion, pancreatic enzymes, the
parasympathetic system tends to decrease them. The sympathetic
system blocks parastalysis in the intestinal tract, the parasympathetic
tends to decrease them. The sympathetic system tends to activate
the endocrine system, the parasympathetic tends to turn it down.
These two systems work in opposition, and every second of our lives to
keep our physiology exactly where it should be, and to do the process
that's necessary for that moment. Now Melvin Page suggested that
there were certain people whose sympathetic nervous system was overly
developed and overreactive. And in those people the
parasympathetic nervous system was correspondingly weak. In other
people, the parasympathetic system was strong, but the sympathetic
system was weak. In the third group, the two systems were equally
balanced. Kelley immediately recognized that these were his
vegetarians, carnivores, and balanced people.
Vegetarians tend to have a very strong sympathetic nervous system and a
very weak parasympathetic nervous system. Carnivores, the meat
eaters, have a very strong parasympathetic system, but a very weak
sympathetic system, and balanced people are somewhere in between.
So you may say, so what, it all sounds very fancy, it sounds like a
science lecture. But, it really is important to understand this
and how it relates to three important minerals. Calcium,
magnesium and potassium.
In the vegetarian diets that a sympathetic system patients were loaded
with potassium magnesium, these are very alkalinizing nutrients and we
now know, through orthodox neurophysiology that potassium tends to
stimulate the parasympathetic nerves and magnesium tends to block
sympathetic function. So if you're dealing with a vegetarian who
has a very strong sympathetic system and a weak parasympathetic system,
a vegetarian diet would tend to tone down the strong system and build
up the weak system and bring them into balance.
Meat is very acid forming. We'll talk about carnivores for a
second. Meat tends to produce acids in the body, meat is
loaded with sulfates and phosphates. In the body, as any second
year medical student knows, sulphates and phosphates turn into
sulphuric acid and phosphoric acid. There's an enormous load of
free acid in a meat meal. Now this had been measured, and it's an
extreme load on the body. The quickest way to acidify the
bloodstream is to eat red meat. Red meat is very acidifying.
Kelley said, “what does that have to do with autonomic physiology?” We
now know from studies in emergency rooms that sympathetic and
parasympathetic function is very cued to the Ph balance. We know
this from experiences with medical residents. I think of some
experiences when I was a resident, the traditional therapy for a
patient who walks in with a heart attack is to fill him up with calcium
and fill them up with bi-carbon, you load him with bi-carbon, heart
attack patients go into acidosis, acidosis does awful things, we
thought, you've got block the acidosis and fill them up with
bicarbonate. The only problem is, a lot of patients were dying
from heart attacks. I can remember some from my own internship,
patients were dying because we used too much bicarbonate. When
you use too much bicarbonate, you turn off the sympathetic nervous
system. This is the stress nervous system, the one system you
want functioning in a period of stress like a heart attack, is the
sympathetic nervous system. When you block its function, patients
can go into fatal arrhythmias, fibrillation and can die within
seconds. And it took thousands of patients to die from
overzealous interns pushing bicarbonate before we realized that this
was not an ideal therapy. You want the Ph slightly acid because
if you get it too alkaline and the sympathetic turns off, and you can
lose your patient.
This has been documented in the literature, and Kelley, even back in
the sixties and seventies when he was doing his research, realized that
rudimentary physiology was dependent on Ph. In an acid
environment ,the sympathetic nervous system is turned on.
Parasympathetic system turns off. Carnivores, remember, and I
know it gets a little confusing sometimes, had a strong parasympathetic
system and a weak sympathetic system. If you eat red meat, you
stimulate the body acids, you stimulate the sympathetic system and turn
down the parasympathetic system and you restore balance.
Kelley began to realize as he studied thousands of his patients that
when he brought the autonomic nervous system into balance, which is
what he was doing with his diet, the tumors would go away. It was
that simple. When he tuned down the sympathetic system and
brought up the parasympathetic system in a hard tumor patient, the
tumor sometimes would go away in days. Similarly, if you have a patient
with leukemia or lymphoma and you put them on a red meat diet, you
acidify the blood stream and you're speeding up the sympathetic system
and tuning down the parasympathetic system, and the tumors would go
away. He saw this in his own practice. And then often he'd
treat a patient for months and months and months and get no progress at
all, and then one day the tumor starts shrinking as if it were melting
away like an ice cube on a hot day. And he said, it's always
autonomic physiology.
Calcium is the key element in all this. Calcium has live applications
for anybody practicing any kind of oncology. Although my protocol
is nutritional and the Kelley Program is nutritional, it applies to
chemotherapy or immunotherapy or any of the therapies.
Think about calcium. It has a lot of functions. We know it
is the main cement for the bones, but it also is a very metabolically
active. It almost acts like a hormone in the body. It's
what's called a second messenger in cells. It is one way the
neurotransmitters transmit the information into the nucleus.
Calcium functions as a carrier of information, and as a stimulator of
information systems in the cell. Calcium is also primarily and
fundamentally the main cement of cellular membranes, and this has often
been overlooked because we tend to think about protein and fats in cell
membranes and not think too much about calcium. But calcium
really holds the cell membranes together, and this has been well
documented.
Now, when the sympathetic nervous system is very strong and active in
producing lots of adrenaline, which is one of its main hormones, some
membranes seem to get very tight. If you inject adrenaline into
somebody, the muscles tend to get tense with a twitching in the mouth,
and in their jaws, the jaws will tense up. Cell membranes tighten
virtually every tissue in the body. What happens is with
sympathetic discharge, calcium goes into the cell membranes and
tightens up the membranes.
In an alkaline environment, when the sympathetic nervous system is
turned off, membranes get very weak and the calcium leaches out and
membranes leak all kinds of junk. Kelley tried to relate this to
cancer. He began to realize that with hard tumor patients, the main
problem is the sympathetic system was too strong and the membranes were
too tight. And when the membranes of the tumors were too tight, his
patients own immune system and the patients own pancreatic enzymes
couldn't get at that tumor. On his raw foods diet with all his
juices and extra pancreatic enzymes, nutrition would turn a little more
alkaline and the sympathetic nervous system would weaken. Calcium would
leach out of the membranes and the membranes would get leaky, and
WHAMMO! The enzymes could get to that tumor very easily. The patients
own immune system could get at that tumor very easily. Chemotherapy
could get at that tumor very easily. Chemotherapeutic drugs could
get at that tumor very easily. One of the most interesting things
you can find in oncology is that you can have two patients with tumors
in the same place, colon tumor metastatic to the liver, and one will
respond beautifully with total resolution of the tumor, and the other
won't respond at all. It's pH autonomic balance, if you believe
Kelley's hypothesis. And I have come to believe it.
One patient may have a very strong sympathetic system and you give them
chemotherapeutic agents and those cell membranes are so tight nothing
is going to get in. Enzymes won't get into the tumors, chemo
won't get into the tumors, immune system products won't get into the
tumors, and those patients die and the tumors grow. If you
alkalinize the body, if you loosen those cell membranes,
chemotherapeutic agents, immune system products, pancreatic enzymes can
attack those tumors and dissolve them very, very quickly.
With parasympathetic tumors - the tumors of the blood, leukemia,
lymphoma, myeloma and melanoma - you're dealing with the opposite
situation. What I have found in my own research, is these
patients tend to be too alkaline and their cell membranes tend to be
too leaky. Now when cell membranes are too leaky and too
alkaline, this tends to stimulate cellular reproduction. This is
one of the observations that I am still trying to figure out through
genetic evaluations. But when they're too alkaline, the
parasympathetic system is too strong, the cell membranes are too leaky,
things happen very quickly. Cells in every tissue in the body
tend to reproduce very, very quickly. And the problem with these
tumors is they reproduce so quickly that whatever therapeutic agent you
use, you're running a race as to whether you can break them down faster
than they are reproducing.
Now, when you use a red meat diet, for example, and the other nutrients
which stimulate sympathetic function and tone down parasympathetic
function, you get the patients more acid and the sympathetic system
turns on and the cell membranes get a little tighter. Cell
reproduction slows, reproduction in the tumors tends to slow
down. That allows for and gives you time, that gives some you
leeway. Interestingly enough, acute lymphocytic leukemia where
the tumors that tend to occur in parasympathetic dominance, in the meat
eaters, these are alkaline people. They tend to be very aggressive
tumors.
I've seen in my own training people whose white blood count will go
from 2000 to a million in a period of weeks. I've seen patients
diagnosed with acute lymphocytic die within two weeks of their
diagnosis. These are very aggressive tumors, they grow very, very
fast. And the reason is leaky cell membranes, alkaline
environment, parasympathetic dominance. A too weak sympathetic
system. Stimulates cellular growth. You push those people
acid, you slow down growth, you give them a therapeutic agent--whether
chemotherapy, immunotherapy or my enzyme therapy, time to work.
So when you're treating a cancer patient, you have to think about
autonomic physiology, whether you're using nutrition or chemotherapy.
Now it's very interesting to treat patients with diet and see the
mistakes you make. I'm going to talk about one or two of my
mistakes, because you learn from your mistakes, you don't learn from
your failures. I'd like to get up here and tell you I don't have any
mistakes, but boy, do I have some mistakes.
I have a patient, referred from Pat McGrady, my wonderful friend who is
out in the audience. He referred a patient with lung cancer, a
psychology professor from the Midwest. I said, "Lung
cancer. I love lung cancer. It's a challenge. I like a challenge,
I like to get people well so I can laugh at the orthodox people. So I
put this patient on a vegetarian diet. She had a hard tumor. I put her
on the supplements, large dose of pancreatic enzymes, the coffee
enemas, and initially there was no response. The tumor didn't
grow, but it didn't shrink.
Well, I'm a little smart. I had studied Kelley's stuff for ten years,
so I knew what the problem was, she wasn't alkaline enough. The
sympathetic system was too strong, calcium was staying in the cell
membranes, the membranes were too tight, those enzymes that I was
feeding her by the pound were not getting to that tumor, the membranes
were too tight. So I increased magnesium and potassium.
Magnesium and potassium are the ultimate alkalinizes of the body, they
depress sympathetic flow, increase parasympathetic flow, and it worked
wonderfully, the tumor started to dissolve, the tumor markers were
going down. I was real proud of myself, until one day, a Saturday
morning, this patient called me hysterical. She'd developed
terrible fluid effusions, she had edema in her leg, her belly had
bloated up, and it sounded like she was about to die. I was pretty
upset. I was upset with myself. I couldn't believe this was
happening. And I thought and I thought and I thought and I
thought, for three days, and I didn't sleep much, and I realized what
I'd done.
I'd pushed her alkaline. I'd turned off the sympathetic system and
turned on the parasympathetic system. Calcium was leaking out of the
membranes, I'd pushed her so alkaline that her tumors were exploding
and every cell in her body was leaking fluid because the membranes were
so leaky. When I realized what I'd done, I called her up and put
her on large doses of calcium and gave her certain supplements that are
used to acidify the body. Within three days, the membranes were tighter
than they were, the tumors stopped growing and all the fluids started
to absorb. I have that patient now exactly where I want her:
slightly alkaline, slightly leaky, the membranes are slightly leaky,
but not too much so.
When you realize how important or how easy it is to manipulate the body
using Kelley's theory, you begin to appreciate the importance of
nutrition. As I said earlier, it doesn't matter which therapy you
use, whether you use chemotherapy or immunotherapy or my enzyme
therapy, if you know how to manipulate the body with dietary products
you can get your patient exactly where you want to get them. Exactly
where you want to get them, and you can get the therapeutic outcome
you're looking for. Now all this theory is wonderful, but people
always ask me, “What's your success rate, how great is it?”
I spent five years going through 10,000 of Kelley's records. I
put it all together in a five hundred page manuscript (One Man Alone)
that I couldn't get published at the time. People told me that
there are two reasons why I couldn't get published. One reason is
the results are too good, the other reason is the results are too
bad. So I don't know, I suppose the truth is somewhere in
between. One doctor told me there is no way these results could
be so good. After going through 10,000 of Dr. Kelley's records, I found
that patients who were complying on the program and doing the program
properly, which of course they have to do, about 70% of them get well.
It doesn't matter what kind of cancer or how advanced it was. Of
course, this was a retrospective study and evaluations of Kelley's
patients treated in the past under noncontrolled circumstances, so it
doesn't prove anything by the orthodox standards of proving
things. I don't know whether the orthodox standards of proving
things are valid or not, but it certainly doesn't meet that criterion
and I'm the first one to admit it.
But in one particular study, and I’m going to mention it here because I
always mention it in my lectures, is Kelley's study of pancreatic
cases, because it's pretty impressive. Dr. Robert Good, the
man I was working under, one of the eminent immunologists of our time
and under whom I did my immunology fellowship, suggested that we needed
a numerator/ denominator study to make sense out of Kelley's success
rate.
Now what did he mean by that? I mean, it's okay to find
occasional patients who get well, but how many get well? And to
do that you have to track down all the patients treated with the
therapy and find out what their outcome was. We decided to concentrate
on one kind of cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Why pancreatic
cancer? Because pancreatic cancer is the worst cancer known to
man. It has a mean survival of about four to six months, no one
has cured this disease in orthodox medicine. We chose pancreatic cancer
because if any patients were alive five or ten years later, no one
could argue that this was the normal history the disease. It couldn't
be the normal, natural history of the disease, because nobody with
pancreatic cancer (except rarely, those few patients who are treated
early with surgery) get cured, virtually...I think the two year
survival rate is about 5%, five year survival is less than 1%.
So I knew if I could find a bunch of pancreatic cancer patients,
properly diagnosed, treated by Kelley nutritionally, alive five to ten
years later, this would be a significant finding. Well
arbitrarily, I decided to track down every patient treated by Kelley
between the years of 1974 and 1982. I found 23. These are
patients who may or may not have gone into therapy, who may or may not
have taken a single pill.
I found, and I did extensive interviews with family members and doctors
who made the diagnosis, that a first group of ten of these patients
turned to Kelley once, decided he was a quack, never did the program,
and the median survival rate was six days after seeing Kelley, which is
pretty standard for pancreatic cancer, two months, the mean survival
was about two months.
There was a second group of about seven patients who went on the
program partially and eventually gave up, largely because of physician
pressure that Kelley was a quack, and even those patients who did the
program partially had a higher mean of survival, about 300 days, which
is significant and significantly higher than the usual median for
pancreatic cancer.
The third group of six patients did the program completely and totally,
the mean of survival was eight and one-half years, most of those
patients are still alive, though one died of Alzheimers. And as I
always say at every lecture, if you have your pancreatic cancer
patients dying of old age and Alzheimers, you have succeeded as a
physician. So, mean survival eight and a half years and
growing. Well, that's wonderful, that's Kelley's success rate, in
that particular series of patients, every patient who followed the
program did well. Yes, it's a small group, it's only six, but science
always begin with observations, anecdotal observations, and small
groups of patients. They don't begin with double blind clinical trials.
They begin with simple observations. It was a simple observation,
maybe it did not prove Kelley was a genius, but his program
worked. Sometimes if you have enough scar tissue from previous
operations, you can't get the therapeutic agents to the site of the
tumors, and the tumors will grow. I've had that happen in
patients who have had three or four operations.
The third reason why Dr. Kelley said people don't get well, and this
one is hard for me to accept because I was trained as an orthodox
immunologist and I believed that everything will reduce to science. But
Kelley always said that the main reason patients don't get well is a
lack of faith. Now, I'm not going to go into a big thing on that, but
patients who really don't believe what they're doing, whatever the
therapy is, they're not going to get well. We'll let Bernie Siegel and
Norman Cousins talk about that. What Kelley did, and what we
tried to do, was figure out what the physiological correlation to faith
means.
Believe me, I've seen patients in my office who had no faith in what I
do. Most of the patients who come to me figure that if I was any
good, I'd be the head of Sloan Kettering. If I was any good, I wouldn't
be doing this crazy nutrition. Believe me, most patients who come into
my office are not happy about coffee enemas or carrot juice or
vegetarian diets or even eating meat. They think the whole thing
is crazy. They come because they're scared. Because everything else has
failed, and because I’m their last hope. They're not there
because they want to be there.
A lot of patients come in without faith. Some of them get it as
they do better, some of them never get it and even if they do the
program perfectly, if they have no faith in what they do, they
die. I've never seen a patient who has absolutely no faith in the
program--even if they do it completely--who lives.
An interesting problem, now why should that be? Well, if you
don't have faith, it creates anxiety. Lack of faith equals
anxiety. When you have anxiety, what happens? When you have
anxiety, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system. When you
have no faith that things are going to go well, you have to live in a
state of vigilance. When we live in a state of vigilance, the
sympathetic nervous system fires constantly. When the sympathetic
nervous system fires constantly, you get way too acid, cell membranes
get way too tight, nutrients and enzymes can't get to the site of the
tumor, and the lack of faith in physiological channels leads to death,
period. It happens all the time. Now interestingly enough, with
the soft tumor patients, the patients who have the leukemia, lymphomas,
myelomas and melanomas, sometimes lack of faith is a good thing, and
I'll tell you what I mean by that.
In 1982 Kelley was working on a leukemia patient and I happened to be
in his office. A six year old girl, treated at Stanford University, had
acute lymphocytic leukemia, failed chemotherapy. Now acute lymphocytic
leukemia is the pride and joy of orthodox oncology because it’s one of
the very few cancers that can be treated successfully with
chemotherapy. This young lady, age six, was not doing well at
all. And she and her mother decided to come see this quack
dentist Kelley and start his program. She wasn't doing well with Kelley
either, and I said, "Kelley, what's going on?"
He said, “Okay, Gonzalez, I'm going to teach you about medicine.”
So I got on the phone, the girl's mother was on the phone, a very sweet
woman, kind of Northern California, into meditation. She started to
talk about what she was doing with her daughter, she said," I take my
daughter down to the beach, and I have her think positive thoughts and
I have her draw white cells on the sand and think about them attacking
the tumor. I've read all the meditation and raw food diet books",
and Kelley said -- this is the first time I've ever heard him get
angry--he said, "You take those books and you throw them in the
garbage, and you go out to the 7-11 or the local K-Mart and buy that
girl electronic games and have her start watching six hours a day of
violent cartoon shows on TV."
Well, I thought this was a big joke, and I started to get off the
phone. I thought he's having a nervous breakdown, right in front of me,
but he wasn't kidding. One had thing I learned about Kelley, when you
got a tongue-lashing, you listen and you listen carefully. You don't
ask why until later. Now, he had that woman in tears. He said,
"No meditation, no white cells drawn in the sand, no thinking positive
thoughts". He said, "I want your daughter to get so mean and
nasty that instead of loving her brother, she kicks him in the shins."
Now Dr. Kelley got off the phone and I said, “Kelley, what the hell are
you doing, you're crazy”. He said, “I'm not crazy, I'm trying to
save that girl's life. Would you rather have her die?” I said,
“Well, what are you doing?” He said, “She's a leukemia patient,
she's too alkaline, her sympathetic system is too weak, she's already
in this very alkaline state and meditation, relaxation and positive
thinking pushes her more alkaline. It turns off the sympathetic system
- the whole point in biofeedback and meditation is to tone down
sympathetic function. There are dozens of studies in orthodox
literature documenting that. That's wonderful if you have a
strong sympathetic system, but if your sympathetic system is too weak
and you tone it down, you could die.”
That girl was dying because her sympathetic system was too weak and the
parasympathetic system was too strong. Her mother was putting her on
all these different things that she'd learned about, which was further
weakening her sympathetic system, the cell membranes were getting
leakier and leakier, the cells were reproducing faster and faster, so
even Kelley couldn't get her well.
Well, that mother had enough sense to listen to Dr. Kelley. She went
out and bought electronic games, even though it was against everything
she believed in. She had her daughter watch aggressive cartoons, six
hours a day and within two weeks, her white count stopped increasing
and within four weeks, it started to drop. When I saw that - and
I wouldn't believe it if you told me this story - I don't expect you to
believe it. But it shows you how complicated cancer therapy can be and
how easy it can be, how easily it can be explained, if you start
thinking about nutrition, and I'm going to stop this lecture right
there.
