The first point, therefore, is to remove from the intake of food everything which furnishes an excess, or even such a modicum, of nitrogenous matter as is found by laboratory means to be badly metabolized. The second step is to eliminate effete nitrogenous elements from the system, including the cancerous mass, and the third step is to restore the system to a proper tone by remedies and measures which improve the blood and nutrition. It may happen, therefore, that in treating a cancer patient over the long time necessary to effect a cure, the greatest number and variety of remedies may be employed from time to time, as intelligent observation and experience may indicate, to restore and hold the metabolism and nutrition in a perfectly normal state: the erroneous action of certain individual body cells which in the aggregate we call cancer, will then cease to exist, as is seen in cured cases.
As, however, the diet is the basic element on which all health, good and bad, rests it is all important that the physician and patient come to a perfect understanding as to how this is to be carried out. And remember, gentlemen, that there is no absolute or fixed time during which this diet is to be continued; or rather, there is no fixed time when it may be discontinued, and my patients are made to understand that it is at their own risk that it is stopped. For safety from recurrence a proper diet should be persisted in indefinitely or even permanently.
I recognize that it is often very difficult to persuade patients to adopt and faithfully follow out this course of procedure for a long enough time to secure perfect results, so obsessed is the medical profession and the laity with the idea that surgery offers the only hope of cancer. Numbers of patients, many of whom I have followed for some years, now entirely freed from undoubted cancer, which had been previously diagnosed as such by prominent surgeons, have told me that they had suffered much more distress from the persistent solicitations of their physician, surgeon, or friends, urging an operation, than they had from the treatment or from the disease itself, as it slowly vanished under the measures employed.
But as the true facts in regard to the ultimate results of operations are becoming known, and as it is more generally realized and accepted that the disease is amenable to rightly directed dietary and medical treatment, patients are coming more and more to the Medical Clinic for Cancer in this hospital, and adhering more and more faithfully to treatment. Thus far, however, these have been mostly recurrent cases, in which further operations were impossible, or primarily inoperative cases. To illustrate the satisfactory treatment of early cases I shall have to depend largely on those observed in private practice during the last thirty years, of whom I shall try to show you some; for as yet primary and operable cases are referred directly to the surgeons of the hospital for operation.