By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this scathing correspondence to the editors of Collier’s magazine, Dr. Royal Lee takes the periodical to task for an article it published in its May 26, 1951, issue titled “Cancer Quacks,” which appears to have been influenced by insidious forces within the medical industry. Chief among Dr. Lee’s criticisms is the magazine’s failure to mention that one of the “quacks” it spotlighted had been acquitted and cleared of any wrongdoing by the Federal Trade Commission. 1951.
[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]Letter to Collier’s Weekly Magazine[spacer height=”20px”]
Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research
Laboratories and Research Division
Brookfield, Wisconsin
Reply to Executive Office:
2023 West Wisconsin Ave.
Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin
May 31, 1951
Collier’s Weekly
640 Fifth Avenue
New York 19, New York
Gentleman:
We are wondering what influence is responsible for the article on cancer quacks that you published this week? It has all the earmarks of criminal libel, because you state only such facts as serve to distort the picture and smear the people involved. Here a few things you omitted to say:
1. Dr. Frederick Koch successfully defended himself against a Federal Trade Commission [FTC] complaint after six months of testimony by doctors and their patients who had used his product. The FTC dismissed the complaint, thereby completely exonerating Dr. Koch, if my understanding of FTC procedures is correct.
This is about as much of a victory for Dr. Koch as if he were acquitted in Soviet Russia of making disparaging remarks about Stalin, for the FTC, by law, needs no preponderance of evidence to convict anybody. They only need some evidence. My opinion is that the testimony of Dr. Koch’s witnesses was so dramatically convincing that the FTC decided to dismiss the case as the only way to keep the recorded transcript from becoming public property. (In such a dismissal, the record is impounded and cannot be published—the secret proceedings of our totalitarian despots in Washington [at work].)
When the leading toxicologists of this country were quoted in a similar FTC case to the effect that aluminum salts are poisonous—for the same reasons that lead salts are poisonous—and that they can cause nerve cell degeneration, particularly of the lower cranial nerves, spinal cord, and brain medulla, as well as constipation, loss of weight, anesthesia of the mouth, lessened sensation all over the body, fatty degeneration of the kidney and liver, albuminuria, and paralysis of the central nervous system (FTC docket 540), a similar dismissal occurred, and the public to this day cannot get access to this damning evidence of the dangers of aluminum contamination of foods. Rather, the FTC goes out of its way to issue orders to lecturers on hygiene to desist from making any comment on the possible toxicity of aluminum.
So do we have free speech? Does the public deserve to hear both sides of controversial questions of life or death? Or do they not? Certainly not, when a disinterested party can be fined $10,000 for telling the truth. If Collier’s wants to get a real story of quacks in government pay—quacks who are obviously protecting somebody’s business interests at the expense of human life and health—why not write up this story? We have bulging files of incontrovertible evidence, evidence that has been suppressed by our “U.S. Gestapo” for years.
2. When a man has been acquitted by a jury and, in addition, the FTC has dismissed a similar case after a six-month hearing of evidence, what kind of reporting is it to still claim him guilty without making an honest effort to report both sides of the case? Does it not convict you of the same kind of quackery you are proposing to condemn? It does, unless I have lost my mind. It is exactly the kind of railroading of prejudged victims that cause the poor devils in Russia to lose their minds.
3. Did you know that Dr. William J. Hale, Director of Organic Research of Dow Chemical Company, an internationally known authority on organic chemistry, endorses Dr. Koch and his treatment? You might refresh your minds by reading what Dr. Hale says of Dr. Koch’s [cancer therapeutic] glyoxylide in his book Farmers Victorious, pages 158–162 (Coward-McCann, 1949).
4. You make much of the fact that many persons still died of cancer after receiving Dr. Koch’s treatment. Is it fair to do this without making some effort to find out what the percentage of recoveries are among the total treated, instead implying that there have been no recoveries? Qualified physicians who are experienced in the use of the Koch treatment tell me that if they can control the diet of the patient and see that he gets proper care, they get remission of all symptoms in 75 percent of cases of cancer. They blame their failures on previous exposure of the patient to real quackery such as X-ray burning, ill-advised surgery, and failure to get the patient off carcinogenic foods soon enough.
Why not make more of the incontrovertible fact that cancer only exists among races who eat white flour, refined sugar, synthetic glucose, and all the candy, soft drinks, and ices that carry these concoctions? Certainly, advertising these facts is tough on many advertisers in your journal, but the use of these counterfeit foods is tough not only on the human race but on a lot of good friends of mine also.
5. Was it a deliberate smear attempt to say that most of Dr. Koch’s doctor customers were not blessed with medical degrees? Certainly, it is also fair to tell that the animosity against Dr. Koch is so great in the political circles that manage “organized medicine” that any physician who uses the Koch treatment has his malpractice insurance revoked—despite the fact that glyoxylide is supposed to be as harmless as distilled water?
If these doctors are licensed to practice, to use such treatments as this, why imply that there is anything irregular about it? It is common to sneer at [healthcare practitioners] other than medical doctors as followers of “cults.” The worst cult, in my mind, is the poison cult, who use poisons [i.e., pharmaceutical drugs] where foods, enzymes, hormones, or trace minerals are the physiological remedy required. The next most heinous cultist is the razor-happy follower of the surgical cult, who has a trick remedy for every disorder, and whose victims leave behind them a trail of spare parts, until they are unable to proceed further. Just as an example, read this month’s Reader’s Digest (May 1951), page 20—tonsil removal is now officially considered a barbarous practice, as bad as chopping out ovaries, or bloodletting.
You probably are not aware that the same squeeze is put on every cancer specialist who tells his patients that they had better change their eating habits if they desire to avoid a recurrence after an operation of the removal of the malignant growth. I can list several internationally known cancer surgeons who were professionally destroyed for this heinous offense according to “all the evidence available.”
One of Canada’s leading heart specialists is right now being given this treatment for daring to use the wheat vitamin (E) to cure patients dying of heart disease. This despite the unquestioned fact that half of a group of cattle dropped dead within three years after being put on a diet as devoid of that vitamin as are commercial cereal products, bread, etc. This despite the fact that some forms of that vitamin relieve angina pectoris pains within a few minutes; despite the fact that any cardiographic recording shows phenomenal benefits in a few minutes after ingesting the wheat germ vitamins; and despite the fact that the phony, synthetic vitamins used to “enrich” bread have the opposite effect when checked by the cardiograph (or by observing the survival period of test animals on such “food”).
6. Did you know that Dr. Morris Fishbein in 1925 proposed and apparently consummated a deal with the organized baking and milling industry to propagandize the doctors and general public against the growing impression that white bread is unfit for food—putting himself in the saddle as the mouthpiece and chief hangman of the racket? If you want a photostatic copy of this bloodcurdling document, as engrossed by Fishbein’s stooge, Dr. Cramp, just ask me for it. [Click here to view a transcript of Dr. Cramp’s letter.]
7. Did you know that this stinker, Fishbein, though supposedly “sent to the sticks,” is still in a position to carry on his function of keeping an iron curtain around the medical profession—barring all knowledge he might feel is bad for his partners in crime? His job is editor-in-chief of the Index Medicus, so if an article happens to get by the editorial screen of the hundreds of medical journals, he can, if he desires, index it or fail to index it, in order to keep it in the dark.
I can also give you a list of cheap but effective remedies that can be gotten in every drugstore at a few cents an ounce the he fails deliberately to recognize at any time. (Possibly because it might hurt the sale of five-dollar shots of “wonder drugs” and vitamins of synthetic source?) One is hydrochloric acid. A penny is all it costs to give an injection of this remedy, and there are reams of references where it has been shown to do what cortisone is now being sold for. But if you want a list of these references, you must go to the index of medical literature prepared for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon General’s Office at Washington—evidently [the armed forces] do not trust Fishbein.
8. At this point why not renew your study of the definition of quack? Do you not feel proud of your own gullibility? You might also read your article in that same issue of Collier’s about Karl Gruber, who put the welfare of his people above political expediency. Where are your guts and conscience?
9. Why did you attack Philip Drosnes and Lillian Lazenby without any attempt to get the facts? Do you not know that the hundreds of patients [were] treated free (during the time that Drosnes and Lazenby operated that clinic, not one cent was accepted for the medication)? And that every one was required to bring a certified report proving they were victims of incurable cancer. (This was done to forestall the common dodge of official quacks to claim that when there is a remission of symptoms, the patient had been improperly diagnosed and never could have had cancer.)
And [did you not know] that the great majority of these supposedly hopeless cases have had very definite relief, remission of symptoms, and in many cases an apparent complete loss of evidence of cancer? Why not check on this record? One is attached [view here]. Do you think he is a quack too? Or just a reporter trying to tell the truth? Where does that put you? Frank Edwards has made various reports, completely unbiased, of this clinic over the radio.
10. Did you not know that the expense of this free clinic was borne by a Catholic congregation, who raised the cash every month to pay the rent and other expenses of the clinic, while Mr. Drosnes and Mrs. Lazenby donated their time and supported themselves on their own resources meanwhile?
11. Since the product [of Mr. Drosnes and Mrs. Lazenby] was made by inoculating whole wheat flour with a specially made culture of fungus—from which the extract was isolated—if any contamination of insect fragments existed, it must have been in the wheat. They had no desire to be secretive about their product. They freely gave samples of the crude culture of fungus in the wheat meal as well as of the finished extract. You can find just as disgusting stuff in most whole wheat products if you want to look for it—just as ordinary, “pasteurized” milk is rotten with 30,000,000 or so bacteria of highly assorted pedigrees per cubic centimeter. (If the farmer took the trouble to properly wash the muck off the cow before applying the milking machine, this number would drop to 200 per cubic centimeter. That is what I found at a country school recently, where the pupils milked the cows themselves knowing that the milk was to be put on their own table.) Your report was one of a number made by organizations affiliated with Fishbein’s racket after [they requested] samples from the Drosnes-Lazenby Clinic. [Sadly, the clinic’s] people thought that the requests were honest efforts to find the truth.
***
Furthermore, these smear artists of organized medical racketry and their partners in crime in the Federal Food and Drug Gestapo never seem to hesitate in misrepresenting the facts in order to railroad their victims. They will swear, in trying to justify a criminal charge for which there is no actual basis, that a vitamin deficiency is incapable of causing disease—that it is incapable of [even] causing a perceptible symptom of disorder—by saying that it “cannot cause a functional disturbance.”
They will use a transcript of testimony in an appealed case that was so altered by juggling words that the appeal judges can be made to believe that the original witness said the opposite of what he really did and thereby deprive their victim of a fair judicial review.
They will visit the patient of a doctor who uses products they are gunning for and viciously slander the doctor by calling him a quack for using the product in question—all before any court has had the opportunity to pass on the merits of the dispute.
They will make seizures in as many places as possible for foods or drugs they do not like in the deliberate effort to destroy the business of a defendant, without offering him an opportunity to be heard in court.
All these crooked and vicious practices are in the main brought to bear against special food products designed to save the lives of patients who have been victimized by inadvertent use of bleached flour, refined sugar, synthetic glucose, imitation butter, and other counterfeit foods sold under the false pretense that they can support life.
Just who is behind this horrible conspiracy?
Why does Collier’s freely offer the propaganda power of its pages to further this murderous program?
Is Collier’s being inadvertently used in this campaign? Or does Collier’s want it that way?
Very truly yours,
Royal Lee, President
Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research
