The Budwig Protocol

A friend recently pointed me at a post on healthnutnews (which reads a bit like an offshoot of mercola.com – this, it turns out, is hardly surprising). It's been a while since I've read anything so full of total nonsense – well, a few days, anyway!

The post, by one Erin Elizabeth, is a paean to someone called Johanna Budwig and her ‘life-saving cancer protocol'. I hadn't heard of this particular person before, and according to Erin, this is because all knowledge of her work has been censored by the evil Western medical establishment, along with Big Pharma and the nuclear industry, all of whom would be, like, totally out of a job if everyone followed Budwig's advice. Being curious, I thought I'd check – surely there'd be time for a search before the men in black arrived...

To my complete surprise (I was shocked! Shocked, I say!!!), typing ‘budwig protocol' into Google brought up 142,000 results. Some, like Cancer Research UK, are obviously trying to repress knowledge of the dietary protocol (or at least, advising that It Doesn't Work); but an awful lot of the others provide recipes, advice, and testimonials about miracle cures.

Not a lot of repression going on there, then.

In fact, the entire post is a concatenation of quackery, woo, and mythinformation. Plus an appeal to authority:

This German doctor was nominated six times for the Nobel Prize for medicine, which means that it would be wise to take her health work seriously.

Really? Nominations are secret and by invitation, and nominees need to have a fairly solid body of research under their belt. However, a quick pubmed search didn't come up with anything by Budwig, but did give a number of papers whose authors had looked into this and similarly restrictive dietary protocols and concluded that It Doesn't Work (see here, and here, for example).

What else do we have?

“Cancer is ... a modern man-made epidemic”?

Apparently so, evidence from antiquity notwithstanding: in the world according to Erin, the reason ancient Eyptians suffered from cancer, for example, was mass heavy-metal poisoning.

“Medicine is the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States”? Well, that one's easy to check, and it's not correct – you'll find the list here.

“Surveys show that most oncologists would refuse their own treatments if they had a cancer themselves?” Nope. This is cherry-picking, pure and simple. A 1985 survey about the then-new drug cisplatin, which has significant side-effects, did find about 67% of the oncologists surveyed would be reluctant to use it.

A follow-up survey in 1997 found a significant reversal: 64% would now use the drug if they needed it. And why? Because science-based medicine moves on and those side-effects can now be minimised or better controlled, or different drugs may be available.

There's also a misrepresentation of Otto Warburg's work around tumour formation and physiology (work for which he really did receive a Nobel Prize), and the rather startling statement that “The secret to beating cancer is that lifegiving breath of God: oxygen.”

Apparently all that is needed to cure cancer – any cancer – is to provide cells with sufficient oxygen again. My immediate response was, so why is lung cancer so common, then?

And how do you get your tissues back into that oxygenrich state? With a rather complicated and restrictive diet, of course!

At least Budwig's patients were spared coffee enemas, but they did get flaxseed oil via the back passage if too far gone to take it by mouth. And champagne was on the list of OK things to ingest!

Frankly, the only reason to repress this nonsense would be to reduce the harm done to people gullible enough, and desperate enough, to invest time and money into following it.

Was that a knock at the door ... ?