The Healers by Peter Barry Chowka
The Healers
This is The Healers at http://thehealers.info. It's a new Web site as of August 2015 that will make available original and rare information and interviews by Peter Barry Chowka with people who can be considered extraordinary healers. Most of them will be medically oriented - professionals trained in the arts and sciences of healing. The definition may be expanded to include individuals who have lived and worked outside of medicine and the healing professions but who have still dedicated themselves to helping others. The site launches on August 2, 2015 with the publication of a historic feature article about Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. (1947-2015).
Latest Article
Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D., a leading clinician, researcher, and the most prominent proponent of primary nutritional cancer therapies in the United States, died suddenly on July 21, 2015 at age 67. For someone who embodied a preventive lifestyle and excellent health, his death shocked his family, friends, and patients. During twenty-eight years of clinical practice in New York City with his colleague Linda Lee Isaacs, M.D., Gonzalez amassed an impressive record of providing therapeutic benefit to his thousands of patients - many of them with otherwise untreatable, late-stage cancers. He published several books and numerous articles about his work and, in 1999, a pilot study in a scientific journal about preliminary success with patients suffering from pancreatic cancer - a form of cancer considered virtually untreatable by conventional means. Gonzalez, an articulate and appealing figure, was frequently reported on in both the mainstream and alternative media. He was a participant in a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. National Cancer Institute for a prospective clinical trial of his therapy on patients with cancer - the largest single grant of its kind by a U.S. government agency for the study of an alternative cancer therapy.
The article ahead (PDF), "One Man, Alone," about Gonzalez and his work was published in Alternative Medicine magazine in April 2002 at the high point of Gonzalez's involvement with the NCI study. The optimism of that time did not last, however, as the study devolved into a political morass and was never successfully completed. A scientific paper alleging the failure of Gonzalez's therapy based on the NCI grant and the partially completed study, but curiously without any input from Gonzalez, appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2010. In 2012, Gonzalez published a book, What Went Wrong, detailing the history of the study and its failure to confirm the validity of his treatment.
As an important piece of the historical record about Nicholas Gonzalez, the original 2002 Alternative Medicine article is being reproduced here.