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...
...Intuition is by definition devoid of conscious reasoning and has no valid application to science...
...Yes, we can intuit a general direct ion of present history...
...We can approximate our 'paradigm of essences.' But to write as particularly as Spengler does and draw the conclusion that civilization is doomed...
...Convincing proof" is said to have been repeatedly offered on behalf of krebiozen, which is simply not true...
...This notion may~ have the makings of good theater, but it is bad history...
...Another interesting sidelight is the wealth amassed by Ivy and the Durovics during krebiozen's heyday...
...Jose Ortega y Gasser (1932) p ETROLEUM JELLY for chafed minds...
...Ivy and the Drs...
...Who among them was martyred by his fellow-intellectuals...
...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...
...Conjecture, hypothesis or speculation are what might have been intended...
...Yet, such errors of conservatism in medicine are born of a valuable precept: primum non nocere...
...The public may be thankful that doctors recall this maxim as often as they do...
...I am glad to oblige, because though I share Mr...
...Ross, The Climate is Hope, Prentice-Hall, 1965...
...Their ideas may have stirred controversy, but conspiracies against them in the scientific community are little better than imaginary...
...Dight of these patients were tabulated as dead, but not from cancer...
...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...
...I say used, because King Frederick is tQ Germans what, proverbially, Thomas Jefferson is to Americans...
...But that's another subject...
...These notions are an amalgam of nonsense and nonsequitur...
...In this way, as in a few others, Hegel was the conservative and not the radical Utopian...
...Holland, The Krebiozen Story: Is Cancer Quackery Dead...
...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...
...the medical trust) strikes the editors as serving libertarian ends...
...Max Gerson, whose claim was to cure tuberculosis and cancer by dietary and other means...
...Then we are served up the Passion of Dr...
...The intellectual-professional establishment, by contrast is accused of resisting progress at every turn...
...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...
...No matter...
...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...
...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...
...How is it that in 40 out of the 50 states, M.D.'s are not even compelled to belong to the AMA...
...Almost any stick will serve to beat the doctors...
...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...
...Only the fresh-brewed article was considered effective, by the way, and instant coffee was found to lack cancer-controlling properties (W.S...
...One of his other measures for treatment of cancer, for some reason omitted from North's medical expose, was copious enemas of coffee...
...Nelson's concern, I do not fashion his despair...
...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...
...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...
...Pick, a close associate of Dr...
...Durovic...
...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...
...But it is that, and not some mythical barrier to original ideas, that actually incommodes the cultists who are rejected by organized medicine...
...Above all, do no harm...
...The editor of America's most important magazine has asked me to comment of Brent Nelson's review of Spengler's Selected Essays...
...First, there are some corrections to be made...
...A revealing look at the krebiozen promotion is provided by G.D...
...My best theory is that defending the Individual (even though he has the earmarks of a charlatan) against Collective Power (e.g...
...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...
...Regarding the socio-political aspects of organized medicine, the foolishness of the article is again full measure and running over...
...But the chief villains of the piece are the AMA and its running dogs...
...to point to such phenomena as the rise of democracy and the invention of hard whiskey as manifestations of our demise is intellectually sloppy...
...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...
...The krebiozen story at every turn has been featured by false information and concealment of data by its advocates...
...When confronted with the matter later, Dr...
...Far worse than any of this is the enticement of people to false and disastrous hopes in an hour of real danger...
...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...
...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...
...Proceedings of the Third Nation12 The Alternative April 1972 al Congress on Medical Quackery, Chicago...
...It does seem like a hell of a way to run a monopoly...
...The AMA has never had the right to license doctors in any state...
...One of the two concealed decedents was the wife of Dr...
...Stevan Durovic skipped the country, in fact, under indictment for income tax evasion to the tune of more than $900,000...
...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...
...article is as incongruously naive and obscurantist one to appear in a journal ordinarily devoted to sensible and honorable causes...
...Galileo was severely suppressed by the Church, which, if an intellectual guild, has rarely been considered a scientific one...
...Ivy stated essentially he had felt no obligation to mention Mrs...
...They are both used to testlty on behalf of every cause, exploited by The Alternative April 1972 13...
...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...
...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...
...Even the most elementary concepts of scientific thinking get squashed in North's anti-establishment tirade...
...We learn that the major scientific advances of the past 350 years were "universall~ met with hysterical resistance from the organized intellectual guilds...
...it musl be apprehended as an organism...
...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...
...Ivy in the krebiozen venture...
...One might as well try to understand the nature of God by listing his attributes...
...J.F...
...Admittedly intolerance exists in that the scientific method is still hotly defended...
...Pick's death from cancer because nobody in the audience had asked him about it...
...Skinner and Herbert Marcuse have many differences...
...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 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...
...1) In his article, Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Grosse) is once again used unfairly...
...Doctors and other scientists do, of course, make mistakes...
...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...
...Great men are not immune to great errors in judgment...
...Oswald Spengler, B.F...
...The easy and rapid dissemination of new ideas has long been an attribute of the medical community...
...North's gullability, which is a very Mariana Trench, leads him to tout the even more bizarre teachings of Dr...
...The charge of excessive caution can sometimes be made to stick...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Stoddard in "Krebiozen": The Great Cancer Mystery, Beacon Press, 1955...
...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...
...The Synthetic A Priori, which is so replete with misstatements as to deserve a rebuttal...
...The Alternative has permitted itself to be used in a shabby cause indeed...
...the brochure commented on this dead woman's condition: "much improvement...
...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...
...The article begins by crediting the mavericks and "invaders" for all the big breakthroughs in science...
...Permit just one sample, to give you the flavor of the thing...
...It was later established that 10 patients were dead at the time and that all had either definitely or probably died of cancer...
...That such an article would be published by The Alternative puzzled me at first--and still does, in fact...
...Suffice it to say that the North...
...Jenner and Pasteur are hauled out of the past dressed up as victims of medical cabals...
Vol. 5 • April 1972 • No. 7
