History of Hoxsey Treatment

he cancer treatment practiced by Harry M. Hoxsey (1901-1974) is one of the longest-lived unconventional therapies of this century. It has retained great popular appeal, despite unrelenting opposition by the medical profession; despite 40 years of biting journalistic ridicule by such skilled AMA journalists as Arthur Cramp and Morris Fishbein; despite an unceasing stream of court actions; even despite an unprecedented "Public Warning Against Hoxsey Cancer Treatment" which the Commissioner of the FDA ordered mounted in 46,000 US post offices and substations in 1956 (Young, 1967, 387; Larrick, 1956). Since Hoxsey's death, his treatment has continued under his longtime nurse assistant, Mildred Nelson, [RN,] who currently oversees the thriving Bio-Medical Center at Tijuana, within sight of the border between Mexico and the United States. (Hoxsey himself chose this site in 1963, when his heart had begun to fail and the combined pressures of organized medicine and the FDA had finally closed down his last operation in the US [Chowka, 1984; New York Times, 1955].)

An Illinois coal miner before he began to promote himself as a healer in the 20s, the colorful, dynamic Hoxsey mixed his medicine with flamboyant public statements that skillfully contrasted his populist heritage with the growing elitism and hauteur of the American medical profession at mid-twentieth century (Young, 1967). In common with many advocates of unconventional therapies, Hoxsey considered cancer a systemic disease, however localized its manifestations might appear to be. Hence his therapy aims to restore "physiological normalcy" to a disturbed metabolism throughout the body, with emphasis on purgation, to help carry away wastes from the tumors he believed his herbal mixtures caused to necrotize (Hoxsey, 1956, 44-48, 60).

Hoxsey treated external cancers apparently with considerable success, even in the judgment of his critics, with local applications: sometimes by a red paste containing antimony sulfide, bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) and zinc chloride; sometimes by a yellow powder containing arsenic and antimony sulfides, various plant substances, talc, and what Hoxsey called yellow precipitate (JAMA, 1951, 253; Hoxsey, 1956, 47). In 1941 Frederick Mohs, a respected surgeon in Madison, Wisconsin, with the help of the Dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and several of its faculty, devised a method of surgically removing accessible cancers under complete microscopic control (Mohs, 1941). The substance which Dr. Mohs and his co-workers created for fixing the suspected tissue in situ, to enable him to excise it layer by microscopic layer, contained the same ingredients as Hoxsey's red paste. Dr. Mohs published his new method in 1941 in the ultra-respectable Archives of Surgery and in 1948 in JAMA (for later refinements, see Mohs, 1956; Phelan 1962, 1963a, and 1963b). Nonetheless, AMA spokesmen, during their accelerated onslaught on Hoxsey in the 40s and 50s, discounted the fact that Mohs' paste and Hoxsey's were identical. In condemning caustic pastes as one type of frauds and fables in 1949, the AMA implied that arsenic was the chief ingredient of Hoxsey's paste, on the basis of their own testing of a sample pirated in the 20s (JAMA, 1926, 57; Young, 1967, 365). Apparently Mohs' use of surgery (which, along with radiation, constituted the entire range of what the Council considered "established treatment") made his method, in contrast to Hoxsey's, "scientific" and acceptable. The Council failed to grasp the central fact that both men were using sanguinarine, an alkaloid of bloodroot which has potent antitumor properties described in the medical literature as early as 1829 (Young, 1967, 365; Hartwell, 1960, 23-24).

The most controversial aspect of Hoxsey's method, in the eyes of orthodox medicine, was the dark brown liquid which he used to treat internal cancer. For many years Hoxsey refused to divulge the formula for this substance, generating a frenzy of vituperation in the pages of JAMA over a period of decades. He later gave several differing accounts of its origin (Young, 1967, 362). According to his autobiography (Hoxsey, 1956, 62-64), it was his great-grandfather, a horse breeder named John Hoxsey, who developed it at mid-nineteenth century, out of grasses and flowering wild plants which John took from the pasture where a favorite stallion, afflicted with a cancerous growth, grazed daily until the growth necrotized. According to Harry, John Hoxsey reasoned that the wild plants had caused the stallion's recovery. He therefore concocted a liquid out of "red clover and alfalfa, buckthorn and prickly ash" (and other plants which John could not identify), gathered from the area where the stallion had apparently cured himself.

Click Here to read more.