Chapter Sixteen
PART FOUR
Mainstream Nutritional Science and the Unconventional Nutritional Cancer Therapies
Chapter Sixteen
Virginia C. Livingston–Integrating Diet, Nutritional Supplements, and Immunotherapy
The story of Virginia C. Livingston, a physician who died in her late eighties in 1990, is at once dramatic and prototypical of those who venture off the path of mainstream cancer medicine. After undertaking some exacting research, she claimed that she had discovered a microbe that caused cancer and then developed a vaccine that she claimed would help control that microbe. Whether or not her claim has any validity has not yet been fully evaluated, although it has been categorically dismissed by mainstream medicine.
In addition to her vaccine, Livingston also developed a multifaceted nutritional, medical, and immunosupportive program, which can be traced back in part to the German naturopathic tradition of Max Gerson and Josef Issels. She can therefore be considered a “second-generation” nutritional cancer therapist, especially since fully half of her program is nutritional in content. Livingston’s treatment is still being offered at the Livingston Clinic in San Diego.1
Livingston’s Biography
Virginia Livingston started her medical career as one of the pioneering women physicians of her time. Her great-uncle and father were both physicians, and her father was one of the early members of the American College of Physicians. She was one of only four women to receive her M.D. from New York University in 1936 and was appointed the first woman resident physician at a New York hospital–the prison hospital for venereally infected prostitutes.2
While at the prison hospital, she became interested in tuberculosis and leprosy, which were being treated in nearby infectious disease units. As a school physician a few years later, she became interested in scleroderma, a degenerative disease of the skin and tissue that Livingston came to see as related etiologically to tuberculosis, leprosy, and cancer. Livingston found that a red dye staining technique revealed numerous “acid-fast” organisms (organisms that stained when exposed to the diagnostic dye) in scleroderma. These organisms, she believed, were similar to those found in leprosy and tuberculosis. Because she saw scleroderma as similar to cancer, she began to wonder whether she might not find similar organisms in cancer tissue. “At this point,” she writes, “I reasoned that perhaps scleroderma was a kind of slow cancer. I decided to begin examining cancer tissues with the same method. … Upon examining all kinds of cancerous tissues … I found that a similar microorganism was present in all of them.”3
Livingston then made contact with Eleanor Alexander-Jackson, M.D., of Cornell University, who had found that the tubercle bacillus undergoes many changes in shape, and hence is “pleomorphic” (able to change shape and size.) At that time, cancer was thought to be caused by a virus, and the technique for differentiating a virus from a bacillus was to see whether it passed through a special filter; viruses are much smaller than bacilli and could pass through the filter. Her association with Alexander-Jackson led Livingston to conceive of the acid-fast organisms she saw in scleroderma, leprosy, tuberculosis, and cancer as a family of pleomorphic organisms that sometimes assumed very small forms similar to viruses and at other times had large forms similar to bacilli.4
Against considerable odds, Livingston was able to develop a research program to explore this world-class research hypothesis: a family of microbes–able to change dramatically in size and shape–were responsible for the development of cancer, tuberculosis, leprosy, and scleroderma. At a time when women physicians were scarcely welcome in leading roles in cancer research–much less as champions of major breakthrough concepts–she created the Rutgers-Presbyterian Hospital Laboratory for the Study of Proliferative Diseases associated with the Bureau of Biological Research of Rutgers University. She received funds from the American Cancer Society and an impressive group of foundations and medical laboratories. “The next few years at Rutgers,” Livingston writes, “were to be the most significant period of my work in cancer research. Our research team was enthusiastic that our work would prove once and for all that the Progenitor cryptocides [or PC, the name she would later give the organism she believed she had discovered] microbe was the cause of cancer and that a vaccine could be made to defend against it.”5
Alexander-Jackson left Cornell to work with Livingston at the new laboratory, and they built a small research team. In 1950, she and Alexander-Jackson published a paper in the American Journal of Medical Sciences, which was co-authored by four others including James Hillier, developer of the electron microscope and head of electron microscopy at RCA Victor Laboratories in Princeton, and John Anderson, head of the department of bacteriology at Rutgers and a noted histologist and pathologist. In this paper, they described how Koch’s postulates (“the accepted foolproof method of proving the cause of a disease”) could be satisfied in the case of P. cryptocides. Pure P. cryptocides cultures were obtained from both human and animal cancers and injected into animals capable of being infected. Disease areas then developed resembling those from which cultures were taken. Pure cultures were then reisolated from the infected animals. “Koch’s postulates,” Livingston writes, “were fulfilled to the satisfaction of our entire group and to that of our biology superiors at Rutgers.”6
Livingston had thus demonstrated to her own satisfaction, and to that of some colleagues, that she had isolated a microorganism that caused cancer in both animals and humans. Needless to say, for Livingston and anyone who credited her discovery, this was a historic accomplishment. “The next step,” she says,
was to prove that the cancerous growth was not the whole disease. For more than one hundred years people like Rudolf Virchow thought that cancer cells themselves were parasites within the body. He did not understand that the small coccuslike granules he saw dividing in the cancers were not the development of daughter cells within mother cells, but instead they represented the true intracellular parasite that was the causative agent. … The whole truth may be that the parasite within the cancer cell transforms the normal cell into a sick cell that cannot mature by normal cell growth processes. In other words, the tumor is not the disease.7
Her claims did not, however, find approval in the medical community. In 1953, a spokesman for the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Iago Gladston, discounted her claims, echoing the attitude of most of the medical community. “This is an old story,” he said, “and it has not stood up under investigation. Microorganisms found in malignant tumors have been found to be secondary invaders and not the primary cause of malignancy.”8
That Livingston’s bold thesis did not find approval in the medical community is not surprising, but the strong opposition to allowing her to continue her efforts to develop and defend her thesis was scientifically unconscionable. As a result, Livingston’s laboratory in New Jersey was forced to close in 1953 due, according to her, to the efforts of leading researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York opposed to her research.9 Deeply disappointed, Livingston moved to California to live near her family. But in Europe, and within a small faction of the microbiology research community in the United States, interest in theories similar to hers continued to develop.
Livingston became an Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of California in San Diego to continue her research. In 1969, she and Alexander-Jackson and their colleagues presented a group of papers at a New York Academy of Sciences meeting on “microorganisms associated with malignancy.” Some of the articles were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.10
Livingston viewed P. cryptocides as what she called an “obligate symbiont”: an organism necessarily present in all human cells, in fact one that plays a vital role in all reproductive life, including fertilization and pregnancy and the development of the cancer cell.11 But this obligate symbiont is susceptible to a malignant transformation and proliferation in disease states, especially those that depress normal immune function. She saw cancer as an immunodeficiency condition caused by environmental toxins and inadequate diet.12
In other words, in the classic dispute between researchers who give primary importance to the infectious agent in a disease and researchers who believe that the infectious agent only takes hold in an organism weakened by poor nutrition, toxins, or other stressors, Livingston came down in the middle. The agent did, she believed, play a critical role: it could be isolated and a vaccine effective for the prevention of cancer and modulation of existing cancer could be developed. But the weakened terrain of the organism was also critical, for it provided the depleted environment in which the infectious agent took on pathological shape and multiplied out of control.
In 1990, the Office of Technology Assessment summarized the prevailing attitude about Livingston’s work within the research establishment:
[Dr. Livingston has] little support, outside of a few researchers, for her belief that the different microbes observed in the tissue and blood of cancer patients are actually different forms of the same microbe. At present, no independent evidence exists to corroborate her contention that the microbial forms are related to each other as different forms of a single, pleomorphic organism. Evidence does show that the bacterial culture Livingston isolated is not a new and unique species as claimed: P. cryptocides supplied by Livingston were identified as different species of the genus Staphylococcus and Streptococcus. The issue of isolating bacteria of any kind from tumor tissue and urine of cancer patients, however, is generally not disputed, since many groups of researchers have reported isolating various species and strains of bacteria from such sources. Some of these bacteria have also been showed to undergo morphogenic alterations characteristic of cell wall deficient (or pleomorphic) bacteria.13
The Livingston Cancer Treatment Program
In 1965, a friend convinced Livingston to try to help her husband, a physician with a malignant lymphoma of the thymus gland. She “treated him with an autogenous vaccine as a nonspecific immune stimulation, mild antibiotics, and diet. He died only recently, of a heart attack, after living almost twenty additional years.”14
In 1968 she founded what was to become the Livingston-Wheeler Medical Clinic. Over the 22 years from 1968 until Dr. Livingston’s death in 1990, the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic became one of the landmark alternative therapy clinics in the United States and one of the treatment centers of choice for many cancer patients seeking other options. It is still in operation, essentially providing the same treatment originally designed by Livingston. The program is complex and sophisticated. It includes:
A primarily vegetarian whole-foods diet, with a major emphasis on elimination of poultry products and a prohibition on smoking, alcohol, coffee, refined sugars, and processed foods. “Microbes love sugar, iron and copper. Iron deficiency in a cancer patient is a defense mechanism and a sign that something else is wrong, not a disease in itself.”15
Fresh, whole-blood transfusions from a young, healthy person–preferably a family member–and gamma globulin (often of placental origin) as a source of antibodies.
Splenic extract to “increase the white blood count [and] enhance immunogenic systems.”
A variety of vaccines, including an autogenous vaccine prepared from the patient’s own blood, BCG vaccine (an attenuated bovine tuberculosis bacillus vaccine that Livingston describes as “a close relative of Progenitor cryptocides”) to stimulate immune function, and other nonspecific vaccines.
A supplement program that includes vitamins B6, B12, liver, multiple vitamins, and sometimes intravenous vitamin C. “We believe that vitamins A, C, and E are effective anti-cancer agents.”16 Trace minerals, especially organic iodine (such as that found in kelp), are prescribed, since “iodine is essential to the metabolism of thyroid, the oxidative hormone. Additional thyroid is also given whenever tolerated.”17 [Note the research evidence cited in chapter 12 that vitamin B12 can sometimes promote tumor growth.]
Antibiotics, which Livingston reports can sometimes shrink tumors but which more generally reduce the number of P. cryptocides (the cancer microbe) organisms circulating in the blood.
A program to acidify the blood, “since an imbalance toward the alkaline side is known to exist in tumor patients. Hydrochloric acid in various forms can be given.”18
Attention to dental hygiene with a view to eliminating dental, tonsillar, and sinus infections that may diminish immune function (an emphasis she shared with the German cancer therapist Josef Issels).19
A program of frequent baths in a hot tub with one cup of white vinegar to help “eliminate toxins through the skin,” along with “purging and enemas,” which Livingston believed reduced the P.êcryptocides population and contributed to detoxification.20
Enemas, including coffee enemas, and sometimes high colonics, for detoxification.21
A selective approach to conventional therapies. To affect the course of the disease, Livingston postulated, “two courses of action are possible: One is to destroy the cancer cells in any way possible and the other is to build immunity in the host to resist the inroads of the infecting agent, the PC. The well known destructive route is to employ surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. The first, surgery, is probably the most useful of the three methods because it removes physically as many cancer cells as possible so that the immunological drain on the patient is lessened.”
Livingston believed that radiation destroyed immunity but had limited usefulness for localized bone lesions. She thought radiation was also useful in early treatment of some solitary cancers, in some minute metastatic lesions, and in some early lymphomas. The role of chemotherapy, she maintained, was difficult to evaluate, but generally ran counter to the immunological treatment of the disease. She cited acute leukemia, premenopausal breast cancer, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, Wilms’s tumor in children, and chorioepithelioma as cancers in which chemotherapy had a role, though often a restricted one. “Even when chemotherapy is used,” she said, “immunization should also be instituted at the same time or at intervals between short courses of chemotherapy. However, it must clearly be understood that the patient will eventually survive only because of the stimulation of a potentially intact immune system. Everything else is of secondary importance.”22
The Diet
Livingston subtitled her book, The Conquest of Cancer, with the words Vaccines and Diet. Diet played a critical role in her therapy as a way of supporting the renewal of the compromised immune system. She devised three diets for her patients: one for acutely ill patients, one for recuperating patients, and one for patients on a maintenance program.
The strict diet (for acutely ill patients) included at least 50% raw foods (some patients were given completely raw foods diets for up to a year) and included up to a quart of fresh carrot juice a day, other fresh vegetable juices, whole-grain breads, whole-grain cereals, fresh fruits, nuts, baked or boiled potatoes, salads, homemade soups, and raw or freshly cooked vegetables.23 The diet was based around the fresh juices, which, in addition to pure carrot juice, included carrot juice mixed with apple juice, spinach juice, cabbage juice, cucumber juice, beet juice, or tomato juice.24 To a large degree, the Livingston diet is strikingly similar to Gerson’s diet, but considerably more permissive.
Vitamin Therapy
Livingston summarizes her view of megavitamin therapy in her Physician’s Handbook.25
We use megavitamins in our program because it is not feasible to attempt to determine what individual deficiencies may exist. We find from experience that high dosage gets the best results. … We use only natural oils for vitamin A. Many mucous membrane and skin lesions respond to high dose vitamin A. We advocate megadoses of vitamin C and relatively high doses of vitamin E. In general, these dosages are well tolerated, but if an idiosyncrasy develops to any one of them, the dose can be lowered or a substitution made. … The dosage should be individually adjusted by the physician [emphasis added]. We often give vitamins by injection, particularly in the paraneoplastic syndrome and after chemotherapy when there is pain along nerve roots and peripheral nerves. B12, liver, and B complex without folic acid can relieve pain in many cases. Abscisic acid, an analog of vitamin A, appears to have an inhibitory effect on tumor growth. Unfortunately, it is very expensive and in short supply so we recommend foodstuffs which contain it in large amounts such as the nuts, seeds and root vegetables as well as mature leaves and vegetables, but definitely avoid green sprouts and green juices which contain growth factors for tumor.26
We should note again the research cited in chapter 12 that vitamin B12, which Livingston recommends, may promote tumor growth.
Livingston’s Shortcomings
One of Livingston’s striking defects as a cancer researcher was the poor job she did in documenting the effects of her treatment on cancer patients, as opposed to her apparently rigorous work in the laboratory.
In The Conquest of Cancer, Livingston presented some data on 100 cases that, she said, were selected at random from the clinic files. After excluding noncancer patients, those who did not follow the program, and recent arrivals, the researcher was left with 62 charts, of which 17 were of patients officially diagnosed as terminal. The 62 cases included 21 breast cancer patients of various types, 5 lung cancer patients, 3 uterine cancer, 3 ovarian cancer, 6 colon cancer, 6 melanoma, 2 basal cell skin cancer, 3 prostate cancer, 2 kidney cancer, 1 pancreatic cancer, 1 pelvic cancer, 1 esophageal cancer, 1 larynx cancer, and 6 Hodgkin’s disease patients. In summarizing these cases, Livingston claimed, “an examination of the sixty-two random cases shows that our success rate has been 82%. Considering the patients we called inconclusive but for whom we were able to be of some help, it is over 90%.” She concluded by saying,
With the approval of the patient, we will provide access to photocopies of any patient’s chart to any licensed physician or qualified researcher. Also with patient approval, we will put such qualified investigators in touch with the patient for personal interviews. The clinic is open for inspection or educational visit to any physician, prospective patient, or representative of an accredited institution. As always, we invite any member of the American Cancer Society or the National Cancer Institute to make a careful investigation of our clinic, our program and our results with cancer patients.27
For a scientist, Livingston’s cursory description of her “success rate” as being “82%” is stunningly imprecise. A great deal of positive anecdotal evidence does come from patients who have been helped at the Livingston Clinic. I have had some well-informed friends who went there and who saw patients with serious prognoses who have done well. Others, of course, were not visibly helped.
In the meantime, two independent researchers in Virginia have developed preliminary data that is supportive of some of Dr. Livingston’s claims. Vincent Speckhart, M.D., is Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Hampton Roads, East Virginia Medical School, and Alva Johnson, Ph.D., is Professor of Microbiology at the same institution. According to Dr. Speckhart, they have isolated a pleomorphic organism that fits Livingston’s description in some regards. In work with 40 patients, Speckhart has found that the autogenous vaccine made according to Livingston’s instructions is useful in reversing immunosuppression in cancer patients.28
Speckhart reports a complete response in three patients with minimal disease who used the vaccine–a chronic lymphocytic leukemia patient, a malignant lymphoma patient, and a breast cancer patient. He also reports a partial response in a malignant melanoma patient.29 Speckhart and Johnson are currently using the autogenous vaccine in a prospective clinical trial.30 AnthonyêStrelkauskas, M.D., of the University of South Carolina, is presently studying the immune response of breast cancer patients to the autogenous vaccine.31
Livingston’s vaccine also bears a strong resemblance to the Maruyama vaccine from Japan, which is perhaps the most widely used Japanese alternative cancer therapy. The Maruyama vaccine is like BCG but is derived from human tuberculosis rather than bovine tuberculosis. I know of no one who has published a study of the relationship between the Maruyama vaccine and Livingston’s autogenous vaccine based on P. cryptocides. Nor are there, unfortunately, any controlled clinical trials of the Maruyama vaccine in Japan, which might give us some baseline for comparative assessment of the Livingston vaccine.
Cassileth’s Case-Control Study of Livingston’s Therapy
One of the most credible researchers among mainstream observers of unconventional cancer therapies has ventured the opinion that Livingston probably did “about as well as the oncologists do” in the treatment of advanced metastatic cancer. The first systematic evaluation of this proposition was a study by Barrie Cassileth and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania that appeared in the April 25, 1991 New England Journal of Medicine.32 The study of Cassileth et al. found that there was no difference in survival between a group of patients with metastatic cancer and poor prognoses who were treated at the Livingston Clinic and a similar group treated with conventional therapy atêthe University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center. But, interestingly (and ambiguously), the study found quality of life to be lower for those at the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic than for those at the University of Pennsylvania from enrollment on. The patients studied were people with Dukes’ stage D or recurrent unresectable colon or rectal cancer, metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, disseminated melanoma, and unresectable adenocarcinoma of the pancreas.
Barrie Cassileth is, in my judgment, a conservative but fair researcher assessing unconventional cancer therapies, although some proponents of these therapies regard her as seriously prejudiced against them. The rhetoric at the beginning of the study sets up the authors’ position as inclined to be unfavorable to unconventional treatments. But the study is a fascinating political as well as scientific document. Take the essential conclusion: “For this sample of patients with extensive disease and for this particular unorthodox treatment regimen, conventional and unorthodox treatments produced similar results.” That is actually a very striking finding. “We hypothesized that survival time would not differ between the two groups on the basis of the assumption that the unproved remedy would be no more effective with end-stage disease than conventional care, itself largely ineffective” [emphasis added].32
One way to read this finding is that patients should not waste their time and money on this alternative treatment. Another way to read the finding is that conventional treatments are equally dubious: “Our findings suggest that conventional therapy for the kinds of diseases studied here should be measured against a no-treatment alternative involving only palliative care.”
A third possibility, not mentioned in the study, is that both the conventional and alternative therapies studied here were somewhat beneficial for these groups, either for their placebo value or because they were both modestly biologically effective. This could only be assessed if both types of therapy were measured against a no-treatment, palliative care group. Thus, in terms of life extension, if any, this study suggests that, with selected serious metastatic cancers, cancer patients can do just as well at the Livingston Clinic as they can with ongoing chemotherapy and radiation. “The conventional and unproved treatments studied were similar in efficacy.” Cassileth et al. continue: “This study explored only one unorthodox therapy, the regimen of the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic, and it involved only patients with diagnoses and stages of disease for which there is no effective conventional treatment. Therefore, the results cannot be generalized to patients with less advanced stages of disease or to other treatment regimens.”
The second research hypothesis in the study was that quality of life would be better in patients at the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic. “This hypothesis was based on the benefits that patients are thought to receive from the various aspects of unorthodox therapy, especially its self-care components, and on the absence of the toxicity often associated with chemotherapy.” Popular media reports have suggested that the surprise in the study was that quality of life was worse for Livingston’s patients. In fact, a close reading shows that the study explicitly found that quality of life was better for University of Pennsylvania patients “at all times including enrollment,” and that “quality of life deteriorated at an equal rate in the two patient groups.”
The fact that quality of life was significantly better from the start for patients on conventional treatments raises the question of whether the Livingston patients were in fact significantly sicker from the start, despite the best efforts of the researchers to obtain fair matches for all patients. If a reanalysis of the data in this study were to find that the difference in quality of life reflected the fact that the Livingston patients were in fact significantly sicker from the start–purely a hypothetical possibility–then the fact that they lived as long as the University of Pennsylvania patients would suggest that the Livingston regimen was slightly more efficacious than conventional therapy for patients with these diagnoses and stages of disease.
On the other hand, the Livingston study adds another small but significant piece of evidence to the increasingly numerous studies that suggest no dramatic benefit from the nutritionally based unconventional cancer treatments for patients with advanced metastatic disease–at least no benefit unless one focuses (as the studies have not) on patients who pursue the therapies vigorously and consistently.
What all of this suggests is that, in nutritional (as well as psychological) studies of adjunctive therapies, there seems to be little alternative to controlled clinical trials to assess the efficacy of these therapies. We will not know until someone conducts a controlled clinical trial what the effects of nutritional interventions on cancer are, nor will we know whether the combined effects of psychological and nutritional interventions are greater (or lesser) than the sum of the parts. But we do know that clear-cut “cures” do not show up frequently in the available case studies of nutritional cancer therapies and that the case-control studies–for all their methodological difficulties–certainly do not show dramatic survival benefits for everyone who undertakes the nutritional therapies. Whether a study of those who intensively follow the nutritional programs would show better outcomes we do not know.
Conclusion
In evaluating Livingston’s work, we should ask the following questions:
Does her autogenous vaccine based on P. cryptocides work empirically?
If it does, does it work for the reasons she believed, or for other reasons?
Has she identified a microbe that causes cancer and, if so, is she correct in describing it as pleomorphic and as functioning as she claimed?
How many other components of her therapy contribute to her clinical outcomes? Did the diet, vitamins, enemas, and selective use of conventional therapies play a major role, either separately or in combination?
Did she, in fact, achieve the levels of clinical success that she reports?
I remain agnostic about Livingston’s claim that she found a cancer microbe. It is an interesting hypothesis which should be scientifically evaluated. As I mentioned, a small but identifiable international coterie of physicians and researchers is currently investigating pleomorphic organisms and cell wall-deficient bacteria, so the ideas are unlikely to go away. Whether or not someone will do a rigorous, independent evaluation to test Livingston’s claims remains unclear.
While her claims in regard to her “cancer microbe” and her vaccine are an unresolved issue of high science, it is easy to overlook the comprehensive nature of the immunosupportive and nutritional program she designed around her vaccine. Livingston was both a brilliant researcher (whether or not she was correct) and an inspired pragmatic clinician who took ideas that made sense to her where she found them and wove them into her treatment program. Livingston was a careful observer of the methods of others, including the Gerson program and other nutritional-metabolic programs in the San Diego-Tijuana area, which is one of the hotbeds of alternative cancer therapies in North America. She often attended conferences at which practitioners from these clinics spoke. She was also a good friend of Josef Issels, a pioneering nutritional-metabolic practitioner from Germany, and drew on his work. So her nutritional-metabolic program is an example of a coherent program that can readily be replicated by others with a genuine research interest in her results.
But Livingston’s claimed 82% success rate is entirely noncredible to me, similar in its exaggeration to Max Gerson’s claim of a 50% success rate with advanced cancers and the claims made by many of the other alternative cancer clinics in the San Diego-Tijuana area. These grossly overstated claims of success are, it is true, endemic among alternative cancer therapists. These claims greatly diminish their credibility. Livingston, as a physician and research scientist, should have known better than to publish these claims. Her poor judgement helps account for her marginalization in the scientific and medical communities.
Yet Livingston is certainly one of the best examples of an ethical, credentialed, research-oriented practitioner who made her rationale for treating cancer and her treatment protocols explicit, and who welcomed outside evaluation. If she erred in failing to do careful clinical research on her work, it is a common failing among clinicians. The possibility that her work may, in retrospect, appear historically significant–either as a result of her microbiology research and her vaccine or as a result of her nutritional and immunosupportive treatment protocol–is still open.
Notes and References
1 Virginia Livingston was also known for many years as Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, and her clinic was known as the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic. I have used her unhyphenated name at her family’s request.
2 Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, The Conquest of Cancer: Vaccines and Diet (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 55-6.
3 Ibid., 57.
4 Ibid., 57-8.
5 Ibid., 59.
6 Ibid., 63.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 87.
9 Ibid., 88.
10 Ibid., 98-9.
11 Ibid., 129.
12 U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, Unconventional Cancer Treatments (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, September 1990), 109.
13 Ibid., 108.
14 Ibid., 97.
15 Livingston-Wheeler, The Conquest of Cancer, 24.
16 Ibid., 127.
17 Ibid., 128.
18 Ibid., 125-30.
19 Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, Physician’s Handbook: The Livingston-Wheeler Medical Clinic (San Diego: Livingston-Wheeler Clinic, 1980), 5.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Office of Technology Assessment, Unconventional Cancer Treatments, 110.
22 Livingston-Wheeler, Physician’s Handbook, 3-4.
23 Livingston-Wheeler, Conquest of Cancer, 153-4.
24 Ibid., 162.
25 The Physician’s Handbook is no longer in print and some aspects of the therapy it describes are no longer in use. However, it does describe the megavitamin therapy that Livingston employed.
26 Livingston-Wheeler, The Microbiology of Cancer: Physician’s Handbook (San Diego: Livingston-Wheeler Medical Clinic) 14.
27 Ibid., 15-38.
28 As measured by reversing antigenic response to skin tests from negative to positive.
29 Vincent Speckhart, M.D., personal communication with author, 1990.
30 Office of Technology Assessment, Unconventional Cancer Treatments, 111.
31 Ibid.
32 Barrie R. Cassileth et al., “Survival and Quality of Life Among Patients Receiving Unproven as Compared with Conventional Cancer Therapy,” New England Journal of Medicine 325:1180-5 (1991).