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https://gerson.org/gerpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Biological-Basis-of-the-Gerson-Therapy.pdf
BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE GERSON THERAPY:
Salt and Water Management and Tissue Damage Syndrome
From a lecture by Gar Hildenbrand, 1990.
The Gerson Therapy is a salt and water management. There is a whole chunk of the
medical literature on salt and water management: and that salt and water management
also means hormone manipulation, and manipulation of the energy production and the
integrity of the human cell. What that meant to the average person who’s trying to get his
or her body to work better is that, when one controls the types of salts that are found in the
individual cell – the building blocks of our lives – and when one controls the water content –
how much water there is in the cell – one can affect the way that the cell functions: the
health of the cell, the energy production capabilities of the cell, the ability of the cell to stay
alive and to stay normal.
We yield and lose the barrier between ourselves and the environment when we are
poisoned. For example, when the toxic air and the toxic water are too much, or when we
come into contact with industrial materials that are toxic, these environmental factors will
pollute us.
The same is true with the individual cell. Freeman Cope, M.D., a pioneering
physician, physicist and researcher, found that when cells are poisoned, there is a unifying
set of occurrences, whether the damage occurs by oxygen starvation, by trauma, by any
type of insult such as poisoning or malnutrition. The same responses may occur in cells
throughout any part of the body, no matter what the tissue of origin. First the cell will lose
potassium, second the cell will accept sodium, and third, the cell will swell with too much
water. Such cell swelling is called cellular edema. No matter what tissue in the body, and no
matter what the cause of injury, the unifying set of occurrences in the tissue damage
syndrome are 1) loss of potassium, 2) acceptance of sodium, 3) swelling with excess water
to create cellular edema, and 4) loss of cell energy production.
What happens to a cell that has swollen with too much water? Inside the cell, the
environment becomes inappropriate for the manufacture of energy. You will notice, when
you study Gerson’s book that he talked about increasing free energy; that was one of his
goals. Free energy, in a medical dictionary, translates to ATP, a compound – adenosine
triphosphate – that is manufactured by most cells in the body. It is the energy storage
compound of the body, the energy currency of the body.
ATP is the cellular product of burning sugar through oxidation, and it is made and
broken, remade, and re-broken in order to liberate bursts of energy. Essentially, it is an
adenosine molecule with three phosphate bonds. It is the immediate source of energy for
most energy-requiring functions of the body at the cellular level. Without ATP the cell dies.
Without ATP we die. When the cell has swollen with too much water, cellular burning of
sugars is inhibited; ATP production is inhibited, along with the protein synthesis and lipid
metabolism. Inside every cell are small organelles, tiny factories in the cell. They are
microscopic filaments called mitochondria.
In our mitochondria, we have the ability to burn sugar with oxygen. Otto Warburg,
who won the Nobel Prize twice in medicine, advanced a theory of cancer that held that
cancer was a fermentative disease. The Warburg generalization is probably not correct,
although the observations that led Warburg to the generalization are most likely correct.
What Warburg contributed was an understanding and a description of both the oxygen and
the hydrogen shuttling enzyme systems of mitochondria that burn sugar with oxygen to
make our cellular energy in the form of ATP.
Gerson’s therapy is aimed at increasing free energy production; making more ATP
available in the cell. In order to do that, Gerson attempted to manipulate the tissue damage
syndrome that, although Cope did not describe it until 1977, was known clinically to Gerson
in the 1920’s; and he was active and correct in his management of it. What Gerson did was
to eliminate sodium from the diet, to supplement a high potassium diet with an additional
potassium, and to find ways to remove toxins from the bloodstream that inhibit normal
cellular enzyme functions, metabolism and respiration.
Gerson was a neatly packaged genius, a low-tech genius. What he did was very low
tech, but it can be measured with very high tech means to prove that it is, in fact, doing
what he said it was doing. Gerson provided a way for a damaged cell to be confronted with
less sodium so that it would have an opportunity to bind some potassium, to improve its
hydration by lowering its water content, and to improve its mitochondrial function.
In order to ensure that the mitochondria would function, Gerson gave thyroid, and
he gave it in pretty high doses. Thyroid is, very simply speaking, an amino acid iodinated
and oxygenated by the thyroid gland which, when administered in significant dosages, first
signals cellular mitochondria to replicate, which they do independent of the cell because
they have their own DNA and RNA, and second tells mitochondria to make more energy in
the form of ATP by burning sugars fast.
Just as a note, if you think of the cell as a planet, the mitochondria are the industrial
cities. They are the cities of industry. And when a cell has lost potassium and gained sodium
and swollen with water, the sewers back up, the industrial cities are shut down in their
function, and energy cannot be made to clean out the sewers. That is the problem with
tissue damage syndrome.
Around every tumor and around every arthritic joint and in most chronic viral
conditions, our tissues that have lost potassium have gained sodium and have swollen with
too much water. As early as 1957, Christine Waterhouse and Albert Craig, working on a
National Cancer Institute grant, were able to measure water retention in cancer patients,
which was a general systemic edema, not visible, not discernible clinically, but measurable.
Let me quote them from the article “Body-composition and changes in patients with
advanced cancer” which was published in the American Cancer Society’s journal Cancer 11
(6), November-December 1957.
“Recent communications from this laboratory have emphasized that gross-weight
changes in patients with advanced cancer may be minimal even when large amounts of
body fat are being lost. Under these conditions it has been shown that there may be a great
gain of total body water even though there may be no detectable edema.”
In an earlier article, Waterhouse admitted to inadvertently killing a third of her
advanced cancer patients in an experimental high fat – double the normal calorie intake –
force-feeding trial. I’m quoting her from an article she co-authored with Raymond Terepka
called, “Metabolic observations during the forced feeding of patients with cancer,” which was
published in the American Journal of Medicine, February, 1956.
“Our data do not warrant any direct analysis of these changes, but if one assumes
that the calculated caloric discrepancy is approximately correct and that this is all made up
by body fat stores, in every instance a gain in weight as a result of forced (fat) feeding was
due almost entirely to a gain in intracellular fluids.” These are the changes of tissue damage
syndrome stemming from advanced disease, a great gain of total body water, a gain in
intercellular fluid, cellular edema; and what Gerson did was to work against this.