In Defense of the Sawbone
D., Dr. John D. King, M.
"In Defense of the Sawbone" Rebuttal to North In Defense of the Sawbone Dr. John D. King, M.D. T HE ALTERNATIVE of January carries an article by Gary North entitled Natural Foods vs. The Synthetic A Priori, which is...
...It was later established that 10 patients were dead at the time and that all had either definitely or probably died of cancer...
...Nelson's concern, I do not fashion his despair...
...One might as well try to understand the nature of God by listing his attributes...
...How is it that in 40 out of the 50 states, M.D.'s are not even compelled to belong to the AMA...
...Oswald Spengler, B.F...
...But that's another subject...
...When confronted with the matter later, Dr...
...Permit just one sample, to give you the flavor of the thing...
...Pick's death from cancer because nobody in the audience had asked him about it...
...In this way, as in a few others, Hegel was the conservative and not the radical Utopian...
...Yes, we can intuit a general direct ion of present history...
...Consider the galaxy of major scientists: Boyle, van Leeuwenhoek, Newton, Franklin, Cavendish, Priestley, Lavoisier, Volta, Faraday, Mendel, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Darwin, Roentgen, Michelson, Edison, Thomson, Einstein, Planck, Curie, Fleming, Bohr, Fermi, Burnet...
...it musl be apprehended as an organism...
...Admittedly intolerance exists in that the scientific method is still hotly defended...
...The Alternative has permitted itself to be used in a shabby cause indeed...
...They are both used to testlty on behalf of every cause, exploited by The Alternative April 1972 13...
...In our curiously superstitious age, a surprising number of people are willing to believe they are being covertly malnourished and poisoned by the supermarket, but there is very little, if any, evidence to support such ideas...
...Above all, do no harm...
...This judgment by Ortega was reserved for Oswald Spengler and every other intellectual contemporary who, because of vanity and despair, chose Ultimate Theories and other exciting but inadequate formulas to explain the direction of hislory...
...19r Quite a number of doctors did use krebiozen, the great majority of them on only one or two patients, which is significant in itself since these doctors were at liberty to have continued using the material on additional cancer patients for years had they so desired...
...It does seem like a hell of a way to run a monopoly...
...Who among them was martyred by his fellow-intellectuals...
...to point to such phenomena as the rise of democracy and the invention of hard whiskey as manifestations of our demise is intellectually sloppy...
...Before his book, everyone was talking of this matter, and as is well known, the success ol his book was due to the 1act that the suspicion was already existing in people's minds, in ways and for reasons most lueterogeneous...
...Rebuttal to Nelson You Won't Have Civilization to Kick Around Anymore R. Fredrick Docksai There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the decadence of Europe...
...Another interesting sidelight is the wealth amassed by Ivy and the Durovics during krebiozen's heyday...
...Great men are not immune to great errors in judgment...
...Holland, The Krebiozen Story: Is Cancer Quackery Dead...
...In fact, there was little or only transient organized resistance to the ideas of either man, and both were generally acclaimed by scientists and laymen alike within a few years of their discoveries...
...Then we are served up the Passion of Dr...
...I will not detail my low opinio n of the currently fashionable food fads and will he content to remark that they are very poorly documented...
...Even the most elementary concepts of scientific thinking get squashed in North's anti-establishment tirade...
...The public may be thankful that doctors recall this maxim as often as they do...
...Jose Ortega y Gasser (1932) p ETROLEUM JELLY for chafed minds...
...The Synthetic A Priori, which is so replete with misstatements as to deserve a rebuttal...
...It is only if he openly declares his hypothesis to be a proven and established law in tlie face of "'recalcitrant facts" that he earns the obloquy of his colleagues-especially so when human lives are at stake...
...Skinner and Herbert Marcuse have many differences...
...But as for likenesses, they'succeeded in misreading Hegel and using his historical method to do what Hegel would never do: draw an incontrovertible assumption te.g., the West is on a steady road of decline) and use it to construct our incontrovertible conclusion...
...By the way, the reader is invited to compare any orthodox medical journal with any "'health food" publication, to see which presents detailed and specific evidence and which doesn't...
...the medical trust) strikes the editors as serving libertarian ends...
...The article begins by crediting the mavericks and "invaders" for all the big breakthroughs in science...
...The very volume of medical literature now poses its own crisis, and doctors are hard put to keep up with the flood of new information made available to them...
...That such an article would be published by The Alternative puzzled me at first--and still does, in fact...
...Almost any stick will serve to beat the doctors...
...Only the fresh-brewed article was considered effective, by the way, and instant coffee was found to lack cancer-controlling properties (W.S...
...article is as incongruously naive and obscurantist one to appear in a journal ordinarily devoted to sensible and honorable causes...
...Ivy stated essentially he had felt no obligation to mention Mrs...
...But the chief villains of the piece are the AMA and its running dogs...
...The irony of most of today's public health flaps is that they are so often concerned with far-fetched dangers to health, such as the supersonic transport, DDT and soda pop cyclamate...
...Scientists," he asserts, "need confidence in their theories, even in the face of recalcitrant facts," and that "faith in an intuition" is basic to scientific advances...
...A revealing look at the krebiozen promotion is provided by G.D...
...The easy and rapid dissemination of new ideas has long been an attribute of the medical community...
...Max Gerson, whose claim was to cure tuberculosis and cancer by dietary and other means...
...Ivy and the Drs...
...the brochure commented on this dead woman's condition: "much improvement...
...Using the state as an example for analysis, Hegel observes, "By listing attributes, etc., no progress can be made in assessing the nature of the state...
...In the Gerson case, the AMA's sinister power extended to the successful intimidation of the world's foremost book publishers, an awesome achievement without question...
...Hegel was not only (or should I say merely) a social critic but a brilliant historian: He was too familiar with the complex and too often inexplicable landscape of history to draw te!eological laws which contained neatly packaged directional signals and a forseeable goal...
...J.F...
...Durovic...
...He who makes unsupported claims just because he is richly supplied with faith has abandoned the scientific method and fully deserves the professional ostracism that will be his lot...
...A careful study of patient records supplied by the Krebiozen Foundation to the FDA and the National Cancer Institute showed that krebiozen had not the slightest effect on cancers...
...One of his other measures for treatment of cancer, for some reason omitted from North's medical expose, was copious enemas of coffee...
...We can approximate our 'paradigm of essences.' But to write as particularly as Spengler does and draw the conclusion that civilization is doomed...
...But it is that, and not some mythical barrier to original ideas, that actually incommodes the cultists who are rejected by organized medicine...
...We learn that the major scientific advances of the past 350 years were "universall~ met with hysterical resistance from the organized intellectual guilds...
...Jenner and Pasteur are hauled out of the past dressed up as victims of medical cabals...
...North's gullability, which is a very Mariana Trench, leads him to tout the even more bizarre teachings of Dr...
...First, there are some corrections to be made...
...Stoddard in "Krebiozen": The Great Cancer Mystery, Beacon Press, 1955...
...Ivy in the krebiozen venture...
...Galileo was severely suppressed by the Church, which, if an intellectual guild, has rarely been considered a scientific one...
...Preparation of the _9 curative vegetable and fruit juices was so exacting and difficult that Gerson helped out by offering for sale to his customers a special juicer for $150...
...Conjecture, hypothesis or speculation are what might have been intended...
...Dight of these patients were tabulated as dead, but not from cancer...
...These notions are an amalgam of nonsense and nonsequitur...
...Their ideas may have stirred controversy, but conspiracies against them in the scientific community are little better than imaginary...
...Stevan Durovic skipped the country, in fact, under indictment for income tax evasion to the tune of more than $900,000...
...The krebiozen story at every turn has been featured by false information and concealment of data by its advocates...
...Suffice it to say that the North...
...Furthermore, an investigator may pursue whatever lawful research his fancy may inspire and do unsuccessful experiments by the hundred, with no worse penalties than the wrath of his billpayers or the private derision of his friends...
...Pick, a close associate of Dr...
...The AMA is losing members now, perhaps chiefly because of its penchant for appeasing those who make political hay out of moaning about the health crisis in America...
...The original announcement of krebiozen by its promoters, via a news conference at t h e Drake Hotel in Chicago in 1951, concerned 22 patients treated with the drug...
...No matter...
...Far worse than any of this is the enticement of people to false and disastrous hopes in an hour of real danger...
...Proceedings of the Third Nation12 The Alternative April 1972 al Congress on Medical Quackery, Chicago...
...I am glad to oblige, because though I share Mr...
...Intuition is by definition devoid of conscious reasoning and has no valid application to science...
...The charge of excessive caution can sometimes be made to stick...
...The editor of America's most important magazine has asked me to comment of Brent Nelson's review of Spengler's Selected Essays...
...Did hysterical resistance greet the laws of electromagnetism, or the cell doctrine in biology, or anesthetics, or the telephone, or the electric light, or the airplane, or radio, or moving pictures, or x-rays, or radioisotopes, or blood transfusions, or antibiotics, or any of a dozen other important things you can quickly add to the list...
...Doctors and other scientists do, of course, make mistakes...
...The AMA has never had the right to license doctors in any state...
...The intellectual-professional establishment, by contrast is accused of resisting progress at every turn...
...Even the ancient practice of bleeding is denounced, though its relevance to the present or to the conspiratorial version of medical history is a bit obscure...
...As to the AMA's monopoly power, how is it that the public has such a wide choice among the healing arts and that upon feeling poorly, one may take himself to an osteopath, a chiropractor, a naturopath, a Christian Science reader, or the closest Zen den or health food store...
...Yet, such errors of conservatism in medicine are born of a valuable precept: primum non nocere...
...The absurdity of the charge that the medical profession is "thoroughly organized for resistance to new ideas" should be made obvious by a moment's reflection on the differences in the level of medical science now and that of a mere 30 years ago...
...One of the two concealed decedents was the wife of Dr...
...This notion may~ have the makings of good theater, but it is bad history...
...I say used, because King Frederick is tQ Germans what, proverbially, Thomas Jefferson is to Americans...
...Regarding the socio-political aspects of organized medicine, the foolishness of the article is again full measure and running over...
...I would ask people not to be so simpleminded as to think of Spengler immediately after the decadence of Europe or the West is mentioned...
...Convincing proof" is said to have been repeatedly offered on behalf of krebiozen, which is simply not true...
...Ross, The Climate is Hope, Prentice-Hall, 1965...
...1) In his article, Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Grosse) is once again used unfairly...
...My best theory is that defending the Individual (even though he has the earmarks of a charlatan) against Collective Power (e.g...
Vol. 5 • April 1972 • No. 7
