Chemotherapy prevents 2 to 3 percent of cancer deaths. That figure comes from John Cairns at the Harvard School of Public Health, published in the November 1985 Scientific American, and it has never been meaningfully disputed. Ulrich Abel, the West German biostatistician who produced in 1990 the most comprehensive meta-analysis ever undertaken on cancer chemotherapy, concluded there is no evidence that the drugs exert any positive influence on survival or quality of life in patients with advanced disease, and the advanced cancers he examined account for over 80 percent of cancer deaths in Western industrial countries. Hardin Jones, after twenty-five years analyzing survival statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, told the American Cancer Society in 1969 that untreated patients do not die sooner than treated ones and in many cases live longer. Three independent studies confirmed the finding. None of this has been publicly refuted. Richard Walters’ Options: The Alternative Cancer Therapy Book, published by Avery in 1993, is built on the premise that if the central treatments offered to cancer patients do not work, the question of what else exists stops being a fringe curiosity. It becomes the question.
Walters is not a physician and does not claim to be. Nearly every chapter of his book was read by one or more medical doctors for accuracy, and the catalog of twenty-eight distinct therapies is organized with the care of someone who has interviewed the practitioners, read the clinical papers, tracked the court records, and verified the case histories himself. His role is that of the patient’s advocate rather than the clinician: he lays out what each therapy involves, who developed it, what evidence stands behind it, what patients can expect, and what the medical establishment has done to each practitioner who refused to abandon their work. The book makes no recommendation about which therapy any particular patient should choose. It assumes the reader is capable of that judgment once the material is in front of them.
When Options appeared, the cancer death rate in the United States had risen by 5 percent since the war on cancer was officially declared. The common killers (lung, colon, breast, prostate, pancreas, ovary) had seen their survival figures unchanged across fifty years of intensive research funding. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel laureate, had publicly described the war on cancer as “largely a fraud.” James Watson, codiscoverer of the DNA double helix and former member of the National Cancer Advisory Board, had been more direct still. The National Academy of Sciences had reversed itself in 1982 and conceded that diet drives roughly 60 percent of cancers in women and 30 to 40 percent in men, a finding the establishment had dismissed as “food faddism” for decades. The 1953 Fitzgerald Report to Congress had already documented the American Medical Association, Food and Drug Administration, and National Cancer Institute conspiring to suppress Harry Hoxsey’s herbal clinic. The 1910 Flexner Report had already destroyed the homeopathic medical school system that had outperformed allopathy during the cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid of the nineteenth century. The pattern Walters was documenting in 1992 was not new. It was simply unspoken.
Options belongs in the canon alongside Ralph Moss’s The Cancer Industry and Barry Lynes’ The Healing of Cancer as one of the three essential volumes documenting what has been built, what has been buried, and who built the burying. The full summary traces William Donald Kelley’s protocol for pancreatic cancer, which Nicholas Gonzalez investigated in 1987 and found a 100 percent remission rate among the five patients who followed it in full, against a 67-day median survival for those who did not; the Dutch Ministry of Health’s 1989 confirmation that 35 percent of 350 patients on Cornelius Moerman’s eight-nutrient diet were certified in remission, including terminal cases sent home by orthodox doctors; the 1934 clinic at the University of Southern California at which Royal Raymond Rife’s three-minute electromagnetic treatment cured fourteen of sixteen terminal cancer patients, supervised by five physicians and a pathologist, before the American Medical Association systematically dismantled his technology and arranged the arson of the New Jersey laboratory independently verifying his results. The pattern repeats across twenty-eight therapies and ninety years. The treatments exist. Patients recovered on them. Each of the doctors who provided the care was jailed, blacklisted, bankrupted, bugged, or driven across the Mexican border, and the records of what they achieved sit in files that very few Americans have ever been shown.
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