As, however, the diet is the basic element on which all health, good and bad, rests it is all important that the physician and patient come to a perfect understanding as to how this is to be carried out. And remember, gentlemen, that there is no absolute or fixed time during which this diet is to be continued; or rather, there is no fixed time when it may be discontinued, and my patients are made to understand that it is at their own risk that it is stopped. For safety from recurrence a proper diet should be persisted in indefinitely or even permanently.
I recognize that it is often very difficult to persuade patients to adopt and faithfully follow out this course of procedure for a long enough time to secure perfect results, so obsessed is the medical profession and the laity with the idea that surgery offers the only hope of cancer. Numbers of patients, many of whom I have followed for some years, now entirely freed from undoubted cancer, which had been previously diagnosed as such by prominent surgeons, have told me that they had suffered much more distress from the persistent solicitations of their physician, surgeon, or friends, urging an operation, than they had from the treatment or from the disease itself, as it slowly vanished under the measures employed.
But as the true facts in regard to the ultimate results of operations are becoming known, and as it is more generally realized and accepted that the disease is amenable to rightly directed dietary and medical treatment, patients are coming more and more to the Medical Clinic for Cancer in this hospital, and adhering more and more faithfully to treatment. Thus far, however, these have been mostly recurrent cases, in which further operations were impossible, or primarily inoperative cases. To illustrate the satisfactory treatment of early cases I shall have to depend largely on those observed in private practice during the last thirty years, of whom I shall try to show you some; for as yet primary and operable cases are referred directly to the surgeons of the hospital for operation.
At first the idea of an absolutely vegetarian diet is distasteful and seemingly impossible to many patients, but when it is patiently explained, as to the reason for its employment and the real benefit to be derived from it, it is readily acquiesced in and commonly carried out very faithfully; indeed many a patient has asserted that they are more than pleased, and have no desire for animal food.
Among the poorer classes especially it has been hard to make matters clear, and to facilitate the work of our Medical Clinic for Cancer I prepared a dietary card, or folder, with a daily menu, which has now been in very satisfactory use by hundreds of patients in private and public practice. To make the whole matter of this line of treatment perfectly clear, certain statements in regard to cancer have been presented on the first page, and on the last page some directions as to diet and mode of life of a practical character, as you will see on the samples now passed around, known as the “green card diet slip.” I may say that the hospital has already used up one thousand of these sheets given to patients and to physicians making inquiries, and there have just been printed this revised edition of five thousand copies, which will be gladly furnished to those who can make good use of them for cancer patients.
New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, Second Ave. and 19th St.
DIRECTIONS FOR CANCER PATIENTS
1. Cancer is a serious disease which should receive constant medical care from the time it is first suspected.
2. “Cancer Specialists,” who advertise, should be avoided.
3. Cancer is not contagious, and there is no danger of communicating the disease to others.
4. Cancer is not a disgraceful disease, and there is no reason for being ashamed of it or hiding it.