Another Cancer Cure
* Harry Hoxsey was born in 1902, into a family which had been successfully curing cancer for several generations using herbal medicine. According to Hoxsey, the healing power of the herbs used in the family’s secret formula was discovered by his great grandfather in the nineteenth century.
* Harry Hoxsey was told the secret formula of the family’s anti-cancer preparations by his father when the older man was on his death bed. At that time, the eighteen year-old Harry Hoxsey was already skilled in the application of the powdered formula to skin cancers. He was also familiar with the dosage for the herbal tonic, having assisted his father in the unofficial cancer clinic he had held in the evenings after his work.
* Hoxsey believed that if he were to become a bona fide M.D. , he would be able to carry on the family tradition of healing cancer without fear of censure or being prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. To this end, he resolved not to treat any people with cancer until he had qualified as a doctor. However, after he was approached by an old friend of his father who had cancer, Hoxsey concluded that he couldn’t withhold a life-saving treatment from someone who needed his help. After this first unofficial patient was cured of his cancer, word spread and Hoxsey soon found his skills in demand.
* As a consequence of successfully treating cancer patients as an unqualified healer, Hoxsey found that his dream of becoming a doctor was to remain unfulfilled. The word had been put out within the community of organized medicine to blacklist the untutored young man who was treating cancer patients more successfully than the vast majority of the medical profession of the time. No medical school in the United States would accept Hoxsey as a student.
* For the rest of his working life Hoxsey, by virtue of his lack of formal qualifications, was officially employed in his own clinics as a technical assistant by other doctors who were brave enough to face AMA reprisals and work with him. Hoxsey also spent the rest of his life being harassed by the AMA, whose actions periodically forced him to close the clinics where he was successfully treating cancer, and move on to another location.
* Despite his continued persecution by the AMA, Hoxsey remained hopeful that his cancer curing formulas might eventually be accepted by the medical profession. He submitted documented case studies to various official bodies as proof of the efficacy of his treatment. He also put out a bold challenge to the medical profession: that if he were allowed to choose his own cancer cases so that he would not be faced with the impossible task of trying to treat people who were on death’s doorstep, he would guarantee that 80 percent of those people he treated would be cured.
* Organized medicine continued to persecute and prosecute Hoxsey, even though in court his enemies publicly acknowledged that his treatment had merit. Despite this admission, Hoxsey’s treatment for cancer was nonetheless driven out of the United States in 1963. Like the unconventional theory devised by Dr. Max Gerson, those doctors-and patients- who wish to use Hoxsey’s external powders and herbal formula have been forced to relocate their practice out of the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico; a long way from the hundreds of thousands of people most in need of their assistance.
NO COMMON SENSE
ANALYZE THE EXAMPLE
* Which supports and barriers were in play?
* What were the dynamics?
* Who, or what. won the Tug-of-War?
* Discuss the outcome with your friends and family.
* Use Post #4 as a reference for the dynamics and relationships between supports and barriers.
