This Man Was Jailed for Curing People with Herbs – Harry Hoxsey

In 1924, Hoxsey opened his first clinic in Taylorville, Illinois to provide his treatment to the public. Almost immediately, he found himself in trouble with state authorities, repeatedly arrested and fined for practicing medicine without a license, despite amazing results amongst his first patients. Because of this, he would move his operations to Detroit, Michigan, then Wheeling, West Virginia, then Atlantic City, New Jersey, harassed by authorities at every stop.

Eventually, he settled in Dallas, Texas in 1936. There, he was arrested more than 100 times over the next three years, until finally he obtained an honorary degree as a Doctor of Naturopathy, which, according to Texas state law, would allow him to provide his treatment.

Despite staunch opposition, Hoxsey’s Dallas clinic would rapidly grow to become one of the largest privately owned cancer centers in the world. The simple fact was, Hoxsey Therapy appeared to work, so people kept coming to him for treatment.

So why, if he really was providing something so groundbreaking as a treatment for cancer, was Hoxsey so staunchly opposed by authorities?

He had an answer.

Shortly after he’d opened his first clinic in Illinois in 1924, Hoxsey had been visited by representatives of the American Medical Association, known as the AMA. They seemed excited about his treatment, and asked Hoxsey to give a demonstration to AMA higher-ups.

Among these higher-ups was a man named Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the AMA, and, through this position, de facto head of the entire organization, since the journal generated most of the money that allowed the AMA to operate.

The day after Hoxsey’s demonstration, a congregation of AMA representatives led by Fishbein came to Hoxsey and offered to buy his herbal formula. Hoxsey was open to the idea, but first, he asked if they would provide treatment to those unable to pay, as he had been doing. When they seemed offended by the suggestion, telling Hoxsey he would have no say in it once he sold, Hoxsey refused to sell his formula.

From that moment, he was set in opposition to the powerful AMA, those whom his father had described as “the high priests of medicine.” In short order, he would find out why his father had said, “they will persecute you, slander you and try to drive you off the face of the earth.”

At first, opposition manifested itself in the form of arrests and fines. But once Hoxsey had legally established his clinic in Dallas, the AMA began to openly attack him. The Journal of the AMA, led by Morris Fishbein, published articles calling him a “quack,” and presented all sorts of totally-made-up facts about his treatment, such as that the herbal mixture ate into the blood vessels of patients and killed them, or that his biggest supporter was his local undertaker.

By 1949, Hoxsey had had enough, and he sued both the AMA and Morris Fishbein for libel and slander.

The case went to trial in 1952. During the course of proceedings, Hoxsey brought more than 50 witnesses who testified that they had been cured of cancer by Hoxsey Therapy, many with before and after photos of their condition. Fishbein and the AMA, on the other hand, could not bring so much as one former patient to testify against Hoxsey, not one witness to say that they had been scammed, that Hoxsey was a quack.

At the conclusion of the trial, the judge ruled in Hoxsey’s favor. Even though he was awarded only a token amount of money in the decision, the judge believing Hoxsey’s momentous victory to be worth enough money to him in and of itself, Hoxsey still became the first person to ever bring a case against Fishbein and the AMA and win. He had beaten the “high priests of medicine.”

And yet, even a stunning and public victory did not help Harry Hoxsey.

At the same time as trial proceedings were taking place, Hoxsey submitted 77 patient case histories to the National Cancer Institute for examination, “fully documented with clinical records and pathological reports.” The NCI responded that the histories didn’t have enough information. They wouldn’t even look at them.

Then, US Senator William Langer introduced a resolution in congress calling for a government sub-committee to be formed to investigate Hoxsey Therapy, but the resolution was struck down. Again, they wouldn’t even look into it.

Hoxsey publicly challenged the powers that be, writing,

“All I want is for them to come here, the AMA, the Food and Drug (FDA), the Federal Government, anybody? Come here and make an investigation. And if I don’t prove to them beyond any question of a doubt that our treatment is superior to radium, x-ray, and surgery, then I will lock the doors of this institution forever.”

But still they would not come.

After Hoxsey’s victory at the trial, things got even worse.

Far from being chastened by their humiliating defeat in court, the Journal of the AMA published yet another article about Hoxsey in 1954. It declared,

“Any person possessing any modicum of knowledge of them pharmacological action of drugs should know that any combination of ingredients listed on the current label of the Hoxsey Tonic […] is without any therapeutic merit in the treatment of cancer.”

“Any such person who would seriously contend that scientific medicine is under any obligation to investigate such a mixture or its promoter is either stupid or dishonest.”

It’s not that Hoxsey’s treatment had been disproven or debunked, it was that they found it offensive that they’d even be asked to do such a thing.

Two years later, in 1956, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) jumped into the mix. First, they published a warning in the Federal Register claiming that scientists had found Hoxsey’s treatment to be worthless, despite the fact that mainstream science had refused to even look into it, and asserting that FDA scientists had not found “a single verified cure,” despite the fact that they had refused to even look at Hoxsey’s detailed case histories. It was the first time the agency had every publicly denounced a cancer treatment. The next year, the FDA took things even further by actually putting up posters in post offices across the country warning people to “Beware” of Hoxsey Therapy.

In 1960, the sale and marketing of Hoxsey Therapy was officially banned in the US. Hoxsey was forced to close his clinic and live out the rest of his life as a scientific pariah, before dying in 1974.

By the 1980s, Harry Hoxsey’s memory had mostly been scrubbed from American medicine, and may indeed have been forgotten altogether if not for one man.

James Duke was a renowned botanist and pharmacognosist – the practice of developing medicine from natural sources – the author of more than 20 books and hundreds of scientific articles. In the 1970s and 80s, Duke worked for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he founded a world-class database on plant medicine, and collaborated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) on a government program for drug discovery from natural products which screened about 10% of the plant species in the world.

Sufficed to say, there were few greater experts on the medicinal properties of plants at this time than James Duke.

In the mid-80s, the long-suppressed Hoxsey Therapy was brought to his attention, and he decided to look deeper into the plants used in the treatment. To do so, he would use the results of his work with the NCI, alongside a book titled Plants Against Cancer, a cross-reference of global traditions of anti-cancer plants written by one of the early leaders of the NCI in between 1967 and 1971.

First, Duke found that all of Hoxsey’s plants were listed in Plants Against Cancer, each earning between three and thirty citations, which he noted was very impressive. Moreover, each of Hoxsey’s plants had been studied by the NCI project and shown themselves to be “of considerable interest” in the treatment of cancer. As James Duke detailed in an article published in 1988, eight of the nine plants in Hoxsey’s formula had shown anticancer activity in animal lab tests, five had shown antioxidant properties as protectants against cancer, and all had shown antimicrobial properties against viral and bacterial infections.

In other words, Hoxsey’s ingredients did in fact show significant chemical and biological anticancer activity.

By 1998, Duke had cross-referenced everything with the extensive USDA database he’d founded, putting together even more evidence on the anticancer properties of the plants in Hoxsey Therapy. And yet, since then, no further official investigations have been conducted on Hoxsey Therapy. The FDA has not revised its position, and neither has mainstream science ventured to conduct new tests. It is still banned, still referred to as worthless, discredited, dangerous.