As a native Texan of rural extraction (Born: Lubbock. Hometown: PLAINVIEW), I by nature really appreciate "B-I-G" things -- changes for the better especially. 

Ever heard of Harry Hoxsey? He was a businessman and self-taught healer of sorts who used a family legacy -- an herbal elixir -- to help folks wage war on that incipient form of death we know as cancer.  He reveled in helping people fight the good fight, but wound up in spending his entire adult life in protracted legal skirmishes with state, local and federal authorities.  He was, in fact, labeled the "worst cancer quack of the twentieth century" by the powers-that-be.  And though he won in court repeatedly, his flagship clinic in Dallas, Texas (and 17 satellite clinics located in 17 states) was finally shut down in the late 1960s by the FDA. Hoxsey's nurse Mildred Nelson (now deceased) took the treatment to Mexico where it has flourished ever since.

Among the thousands of people who achieved permanent remission using the Hoxsey elixir was my paternal great grandfather, who was diagnosed with metastatic, terminal colorectal cancer back before they had radio- or chemotherapy.  He literally sipped his way to remission on the Hoxsey herbal formula and went on to live another 20 years or so before dying of old age.

This is not to say the Hoxsey elixir is scientifically proven. It isn’t. Some critics put the most optimist remission rate of cancer patients on Hoxsey’s brew at between 6 and 11%. But as we say in Texas, if you see smoke coming out of the woodpile, there is definitely a fire ablaze. The number of remissions attributed to the Hoxsey treatment in the thousands (And this after excluding many who attributed to Hoxsey cures effected by prior chemotherapy and such), there would seem to be a fire burning in the woodpile.  

Interestingly, from roughly 1987-1997 I had an office only a few miles from where the original Dallas-based Hoxsey clinic once stood. Here I spent part of my time researching novel means of addressing cancer, a pursuit that gave rise to a body of hypotheses and novel, experimental cancer treatment regimens such as  The Revised Metabolic Oncolytic Regimen for Effecting Lysis in Solid Tumors

We Texans, I tell you -- we tend to dream big and sometimes reach for the moon (Is it any surprise one of NASA's oldest and biggest dream-factories is in Houston?) And we like to see BIG healing responses! Hoxsey did. I do. Many others share this passion. It is one wheel that seems to get reinvented endlessly -- though its expression oftentimes offends the sensibilities of those who allow for no deviance from orthodoxy. 

Anthony G. Payne, Ph.D.

HOXSEY - Patricia Ward Spain, Ph.D. - Historican Dr. Patricia Ward Spain's look at the Hoxsey saga

HOXSEY DOCUMENTARY - Award-winning video. Interestingly, I attended the premier of this documentary in Dallas. Later - during 1996 -- the National Institutes of Health (NIH) flew me to Washington, DC to attend a major conference on novel but promising non-traditional approaches to combating cancer (POMES). A body of metabolic oncology work I had been doing -- embodied in The Revised Metabolic Oncolytic Regimen for Effecting Lysis in Solid Tumors - had brought them to my doorstep. While I was at this meeting, I met and hobnobbed with Catherine Salveson, R.N., Ph.D., a professor of nursing at Oregon State University -- who was co-producer of the Hoxsey film I had seen many years earlier.  She added the story of my great grandfather's recovery from terminal cancer to her own mental collection of similar "Hoxsey tales".