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Dr Philip Binzel entered a family practice in Ohio after finishing medical school and internship. In the 1970’s he became interested in the role of nutrition in human disorders and incorporated that knowledge into his medical practice.

His treatment plan consisted of three parts, a) vitamins and enzymes, b) nitrilosides (laetrile and amygdalin) and c) diet.

He collected statistics on patients he treated for cancer between 1974 and 1991. The results are divided into those patients with primary cancer, being cancer confined to a single area with perhaps a few adjacent lymph nodes involved, and metastatic cancer, that is, a primary cancer that has spread to other distant areas of the body.

He only treated patients who had been diagnosed with cancer by another physician and where the diagnosis had been confirmed by a pathology report.

Primary cancer.

It is Dr Binzel’s belief that it takes up to 6 months for the body’s defence mechanism to respond to nutritional therapy. Therefore patients who died within the first 6 months of treatment were excluded from the statistics. Secondly, he included only those patients he had been able to follow up for at least 2 years.

180 patients were studied representing 30 different types of cancer.

The results were that between 1974 and 1991 a total of 42 of them had died, of whom 23 (12.7%) died from causes related to their cancer. A further 7 had died from causes unknown. As he had had contact with those 7 less than 2 months prior to their deaths and all were doing well, cancer was unlikely to have been the cause.

However even if these 7 were placed with the group who had died from cancer, the result is that 150 (83.3%) of the group did not die as a result of their cancer.

Even though a minimum of 2 years follow-up contact was a prerequisite for inclusion, Dr Binzel in fact had continuing contact with 58 patients for 2 to 4 years and 80 patients for 5 to 18 years.

To put these figures into some degree of perspective the recent article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by G. Morgan and others finds that the overall 5 year life expectancy of persons suffering from one of the 22 major cancers is in the order of 62%.

Metastatic cancer.

Dr Binzel believed that it takes up to a year for nutritional therapy to have effect here and for this reason patients who died within one year were excluded from the study. As previously, only those patients with whom there had been at least 2 years follow up were included.

108 patients were studied representing 23 types of cancer.

The results were that between 1974 and 1991, 47 of them had died, of whom 32 (29.6%) had died from their cancer. A further 9 had died form causes unknown defined in the same way as previously.

Therefore even if the 9 were placed with the deaths from cancer, 67 (62.1%) did not die from their cancer.

Of this group 30 were followed up for between 2 and 4 years and 31 had contact for between 5 and 18 years.

Dr Binzel added 21 case histories to the statistical picture.

A 59 year old woman had one breast removed and told that her chances of survival were slim. She declined chemotherapy and radiation and was placed on the nutritional programme. She was aged 79 at the time of writing and had had no recurrence. She noted that none of the people she had known who had gone on the chemotherapy programme had lived more than one and a half years.

A 59 year old man had carcinoma of the right lung. He had 5 radiation treatments followed by one chemotherapy treatment which made him so ill he discontinued the entire programme. He went on the nutritional programme and at last contact with Dr Binzel after 12 years, he was doing well. “The doctor I had at the hospital said it was the 5 radiation treatments I had. They just don’t want to admit it was the Amygdalin, I guess.”

A 43 year old woman had a carcinoma of the descending colon with 7 positive lymph nodes. She had no radiation or chemotherapy. After 13 years of nutritional therapy she has had no recurrence and leads a normal life. At that time the odds of surviving 5 years with cancer of the colon with metastases were one in a thousand.

“I hope you include in your book how we feel, and just how difficult it is for those of us who were supposed to die, when the medical profession and well meaning, intelligent people make the suggestion that the only reason we are alive is because it was a mis-diagnosis or the disease had gone into a ‘spontaneous remission’.”

Dr Binzel’s book includes discussion of the quality of life and makes the point, with case examples, that a person following his nutritional therapy generally leads a normal life compared to persons on chemotherapy who often suffer from debilitating side effects.

He makes the further point that consideration of the quality of life does not easily lend itself to statistical analysis.