Can Raw Medicinal Foods Transform Our Ailing Health Care System?

It wasn’t as if Susan Barnhill had had no warning signs: the hard lump in her breast; the pain that knifed through her left arm, barely allowing her to close the front door of her Jessup, Md., home. If there was any surprise, it was the extent to which the cancer had already spread — to her ribs, spine, left hip, the soft tissue in her stomach, the lymph nodes under both arms, her neck, chest and even her brain.

The prognosis seemed grimmer than even her doctor’s expression. But a lifetime of nursing had prepared Barnhill for any eventually. So when the doctor recommended estrogen blockers and other standard therapies as a kind of "hail Mary," she didn’t hesitate. She told him "no."

Barnhill’s decision to abstain from conventional treatment stems from what she saw as the spotty track record of many standard therapies, particularly involving carcinogens. Then President Richard Nixon proclaimed in 1971 that, if we can land a man on the moon, then we should be able to defeat cancer. After Nixon declared "war on cancer," more than $39 billion was poured into cancer research during the next two decades, but in that period cancer-caused deaths actually rose from 220,000 to 560,000. The rise of obesity, autism and other disorders in recent years only intensified her skepticism.

Today, critics claim we shell out more for health care than any other industrialized country but seem to get relatively little return on our money. "Particularly acute" is how an April 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation report described the state of health care in the U.S., citing per capita cost of $7,538 that "does not achieve better outcomes on many important health measures."

Obamacare aspires to make medical treatment available to every citizen, Barnhill believes. But what will that get us at a time when the perception of the U.S. health care system as the best in the world is increasingly exposed as a myth while the cost of maintaining it is through the roof, she asks?

Susan Barnhill fears that speaking out could jeopardize her job, and asked that her real name not be used. But she is far from alone. Pessimism about treatment protocols is prompting many Americans to take back control of their health care, mainly by relying on preventive measures.

Because of widespread belief that what we eat compounds and even creates illness and obesity, skeptics often opt to avoid processed, preserved food produced by factory farms in favor of organic, locally grown products, which might cost twice as much but, they believe, will reap huge dividends down the road, both in terms of personal health and the health of our nation’s economy.

And many who fall ill are increasingly open to exploring alternative treatments. "Standard cancer therapy generally kills cancers, but it also kills the patients, or leaves them severely debilitated," Barnhill believes. "Most patients who find out they have cancer get scared and just go along with whatever their doctor recommends. I didn’t want to follow the usual Western approach cut, poison and burn. I wanted a more holistic approach that would enable me to build up my immune system and allow my body to heal."

The 34 years that Barnhill, 59, spent as a nurse caring for cancer patients in hospitals and hospices, plus her interest in integrative medicine, suggested that alternative therapies merited a closer look. One of the main weapon’s in her defense arsenal was juicing raw medicinal “super foods,” which first gained attention in the 1930s. But ever since the U.S. medical establishment settled on radiation and surgery for treating cancer around that same time, it had been marginalized.

To expand her personal journey, Barnhill sought guidance from nutritionist Lisa Wilson, founder of the Raw Food Institute in Washington, DC, who believes that society’s reliance on pesticide- and hormone-riddled, preserved, processed and genetically modified foods (which have made us part of "one big scientific experiment") are at the root of our health problems. The rise of diseases in defiance of advances in medical science makes that clear, Wilson said. "Our health as a nation has deteriorated to the point where for the first time in our history my generation is expected to live longer lives than those my children."

The daughter of two smokers who owned Dairy Queens, Wilson, 43, maintains the restorative power that comes from juicing raw, organic vegetables and herbs enables diseased victims to heal. At the same time, she concedes that "it’s harder to change one’s eating habits than one’s religion," especially because of generations of school children influenced by "the Four Food Groups," guidelines authorized by revolving-door regulators at the USDA and FDA who have touted diets rich in meat, dairy and breads/cereals as best-suited to a child’s nutritional needs.

The Four Food Groups has been revised four times since being introduced in 1956. The latest incarnation, My Plate, recommends "protein," which includes beans rather than just meat. But this does not go nearly far enough to satisfy Wilson and other critics because it regards hamburgers, as one example, a viable form of protein. "Your average burger has 51 different ingredients — mostly chemical preservatives — instead of just one."

To demonstrate how hard it is for the body to break down all those chemicals, she displays in her office a six-year-old perfectly preserved McDonald’s hamburger. "We have our eating priorities upside down and inside out," she said."How did we get to a place in society where putting a bunch of harmful chemicals in your mouth is considered normal and eating a salad is weird? The problem isn’t just the obesity that this causes but the disease that comes with it."

During a week-long immersion session, Wilson handed out enemas for Barnhill and other clients to purge themselves of accumulated toxins while helping their transition to a "cleansing" diet of raw, organic vegetables and other "superfoods" such as wheat grass juice, which she calls "the most medicinal food on the planet."

She conceived the program in 2003 after years of noticing that clients who switched to all-raw diets of sprouted super& foods (while scaling back and sometimes eliminating Western medications and treatments) dramatically improved their health.

Mung bean sprouts, wheat grass juice, seaweed, and other "medicinal" foods — some of them purportedly 30 times richer in nutrients — are the building blocks of good health, Wilson maintains, in stark contrast to the "pill for every ill" orientation of most conventional practitioners of American medicine, who typically attend medical schools that offer little or no preventive education and which are heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies.

It is no wonder, she said, that doctors generally fail to recommend let alone take seriously alternative treatments that have been around for thousands of years.

Wilson’s program has its roots in the pioneering work of Dr. Max Gerson, who in the late 1920s and ’30s proved during a carefully monitored clinical trial in Germany that a nutritional diet of juiced vegetables cured 446 of 459 skin tuberculosis patients.

Gerson later successfully applied his dietary therapy to heart disease, kidney failure, cancer and other killers, including the Type II diabetes that afflicted noble laureate Albert Schweitzer.

After he fled Nazi persecution, Dr. Gerson’s success in treating cancer patients at his New York clinic stunned the medical community, foreshadowing his appearance along with five recovered patients and the medical records of five other recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Committee in 1946.

Gerson testified he had cured patients the medical establishment had "sent home to die."

As a result of the hearings, Raymond Gram Swing, a prominent journalist, declared on his nationwide radio broadcast that Dr. Gerson had found an effective cancer treatment. Calls overwhelmed ABC’s switchboard. But two weeks later Swing was fired from the position he had held for 30 years.

Dr. Gerson was later investigated multiple times and marginalized. In 1958, as he neared completion of "Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer," he became inexplicably ill, discovering upon his recovery that his manuscript had mysteriously vanished. He spent the next year reconstructing the book. When he died shortly after its completion in 1959, arsenic was found in his blood, according to his daughter, Charlotte, now 86, who today runs Gerson clinics in San Diego and Mexico.

In recent years, Gerson therapy has gained followers throughout the world, especially in Japan (genetically modified food is banned there), where eminent physician and medical professor Takaho Watayo has reported recoveries in about 50 percent of the "terminal" patients he has treated with juicing.

Other doctors in Europe have reported similar success using the Gerson treatment, and two well-received documentaries by film-maker Steve Krochel allude to thousands of other cures.

Today, peer-reviewed journals and allopathic doctors in the U.S. generally remain dismissive of the Gerson therapy, pointing to a lack of double-blind studies while refusing to acknowledge that widely accepted medical procedures such as radiation treatment or vaccines cannot be subjected to such protocols any more than the hundreds of variables in raw medicinal vegetable juice therapy.

Members of the American medical establishment often still refer to Gerson as a quack. But not those who have benefited from the Gerson treatment. After being cured of his diabetes, Albert Schweitzer eulogized Gerson as "one of the eminent geniuses in the history of medicine."

In her raw food treatment program, Wilson is careful to avoid the word "cure," citing government intimidation, de-licensing and even incarceration of doctors and others in the medical field who question the cozy relationship between government regulators and Big Pharma, or who include alternative remedies in their treatment regimens, most famously Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston physician who was harassed with years of FDA court filings after he developed a verified cure for terminal brain cancer that has no side effects.

Instead, she invites clients who have rid themselves of cancer and other diseases by using an all-raw organic vegan diets to do the talking for her. Recent graduates include a sufferer of Lyme disease, a diabetic airline pilot, a heart patient, a woman afflicted with lupus and an asthmatic anesthesiologist who shuns the standard Western diet — for health reasons.

Tracey Crider, Correspondence Analyst, Homeland Security

After a lifetime of bad eating habits, compounded by several bad marriages, Tracey Crider tipped the scales at 280 pounds. "There is something that happens to me when I eat sugar and preservatives that causes my body to just go haywire," said Crider, 54.

But the raw food diet she adopted changed her life for good, scaling back her weight by 104 pounds, with another 40 to go.

Crider’s progress has been confirmed by her blood work, which she described as "phenomenal." Her meals these days are mainly simple, organic, and uncooked. She has no intention of going back to processed food.

Dr. Frank Suotoni, Anesthesiologist

Over time, Frank Suatoni’s fastidious eating habits slackened and eventually resulted in irritable bowel syndrome, which he managed to dramatically improve along with his asthma on a diet of raw foods. This led him to believe that other disorders could also be reduced or eliminated by simply loading up on nutrients and "getting as far away from the American medical complex as possible" because "that’s the best possible approach to health." Eating this way "can help eradicate cancer better than chemotherapy," said Suatoni, 73. "Why aren’t more people aware? If you cured cancer tomorrow, 10 million people would find themselves out of work."

Brenda Buskirk, Accountant

After being diagnosed in 2007 with Type 2 diabetes, Baltimore native Brenda Buskirk felt herself "spiraling downward." At the time, the 53-year-old accountant weighed 225 pounds. She received prescriptions for five different medications, which would have cost $1,500 a month and caused troubling side effects. "I was, like, we’re not doing this."

By switching to a raw diet, she was able to get off all of those medications and "detox" about 12 pounds from her body. To avoid relapsing, she eats only "green smoothies" and organic vegetables. "They are expensive, but a lot less expensive than all that medicine would have cost."

Darice Stephenson, FDA Program Specialist

After being diagnosed with lupus in 1998, Darice Stephenson, 42, began juicing and eating an all raw diet, which eventually overcame the disease. The diet also worked for her 21-year-old son, Jamal, a high school athlete who became so weak from rheumatoid arthritis that he could barely brush his teeth. Instead of the year or two that doctors said it would take to recover, Jamal experienced dramatic improvements in just a couple of months. "And all I did was change his diet, eliminating meat, cheese and dairy," she said. "They wanted us both to keep on our meds, but we both stopped taking them. "Now, we’re both disease free."

Elliott Fiedler, Consultant

"I was a smoker for 25 years, a junk-food junkie and a meat-and-potatoes guy who started putting on weight in my twenties and wolfed down sweets by the truckload," said Fiedler, 65, of Silver Spring, Md.

Down time from a back injury and bad eating habits combined to send his bad cholesterol soaring into the 240-250 range, "practically matching my weight, even though I stand just 5’9."

This resulted in a quadruple bypass, and a long recovery. Skeptical at first about a raw food diet, Fiedler said that "it became my salvation."

Recently, he fell in love with a woman from Australia, and went kayaking in Alaska.

Peter Gauthier, Airline Pilot

Gauthier’s glucose numbers had been climbing higher than the transatlantic jets he flies, and he had been warned during one of his periodic checkups that they would likely ground him for good. Rather than relying on standard airline fare during long hauls across the Atlantic, Gauthier hired raw food chefs to prepare specialized lunches that he could consume during trips. A month after enrolling in R.F.I.’s immersion program, his readings dropped dramatically — startling the re-examining doctor who declared that such a sudden improvement just wasn’t possible. Gauthier remains in the cockpit, while his glucose levels are back down to earth.

Gail M. Davis, Dentist

"Before, I always ate a lot of junk food, and had food allergies, leaky gut syndrome, thyroid issues, and was headed toward cancer if I didn’t get to my act together," said Davis, 50. "Eating raw food turned that around, gave me more energy, erased my fatigue and enabled me to focus much better."

"Let’s face it, mentioning „root canal,“ creates fear in the patient, and I have to react to that. Now, I’m on an even keel all day long. Now, I no longer get brain fog. My emotions are calm and I don’t get frustrated with patients."

Susan Barnhill, Nurse

During her 21-day stay at the Rubio Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, Susan Barnhill received five kinds of vaccine therapies (custom-made from her white blood cells), detox therapies, enemas and bathtubs soaks, "Rife" machine treatments, IV chelation and foot baths, in addition to customized chemo doses that were about one-tenth the strength of doses administered in the United States.

Hyperbaric oxygen, pancreatic enzymes, infrared and various supplements also became part of her recovery regimen, along with spirituality and positive affirmation, all of which she believes are critical to the healing process.

But the main weapon in her arsenal, she says, has been juicing and consuming a raw diet of mostly vegetable wraps that include coleslaw, kimchi, sprouts, raw almond butter, etc. and smoothies that she makes in her blender using green powders, aloe juice, celery juice, cucumbers and green apples.

The payoff has been in her scans, which show that she is cancer-free, with the exception of a small pocket of cancer cells clustered around her ribs. "I feel hopeful that I will beat this disease, and come out the better for it. Other victims of cancer can do the same thing I did, and I encourage that. But it requires lots of discipline and determination."

The most difficult part of her recovery has been raising enough funds to finance it, mainly because insurance covers only a tiny fraction of the costs, causing her to curtail part of her treatment plan and never allowing her to take time off the job. People at work didn’t even realize that she was sick. "If I had more funding, I might be completely better by now. The alternative route is expensive, but my only other option was death."