The latest poster child in the tangled web of American-style cancer care is Abraham Cherrix (full name, Starchild Abraham Cherrix), a mature 16-year-old struggling with Hodgkin's disease. Abraham's parents supported his choice against a second round of chemotherapy last February when they learned his cancer had returned, and then accompanied him to Mexico for treatment with a batch of Harry Hoxsey herbs. For their efforts, Mr. and Mrs. Cherrix found themselves battling in court to retain custody of their son. A social worker told the court the treatment was neglect and the mainstream press reported on it thinly, using such characterizations as "an alternative doctor in Tijuana, Mexico" and "an herbal remedy four times a day and an organic diet."
But the Hoxsey herbal formula is more than a few ragged weeds pulled, chopped, and boiled into a 21st-century technobrew. It was born out of traditional folk medicine of the sort handed down for generations from healer to healer, preserving a knowledge of the curative properties of teas, poultices, and foods. It has a generations-old history.
In the 19th century, herbs were used everywhere in the Western medical world, with empiricist doctors consulting materia medica books listing plants' medicinal properties. It was during that period, in 1840, that Harry Hoxsey's great-grandfather, John Hoxsey, a Quaker farmer in Illinois, discovered that a prized stallion of his had a cancerous tumor on its leg. Rather than put the horse down, Hoxsey yielded to nature's ways, letting the animal graze until its time was over.
But after several weeks the horse's leg looked better; several months later the tumor appeared "to dry up," separate from the leg, and fall off. The horse completely recovered. Hoxsey had observed the horse munching on different plants than usual while in the pasture; he collected those and combined them with herbs known for healing properties at the time to create a tonic. He used the mixture to treat other farm animals and shared it with neighbors. The precise formula was kept a family secret and willed from one Hoxsey generation to the next, with two caveats: The exact formula must never be revealed (simple plants couldn't be patented), and it must be given free to those who couldn't afford to buy it.
Two generations later, in 1924, great-grandson Harry Hoxsey founded the first clinic to treat cancer patients with the formula. Simplified versions of his story note that Harry partnered with physicians, asked clients to bring their medical records, eventually opened clinics in 17 states, and had thousands of patients credit him with "curing" their cancers. But there is much more to this story. Dr. Morris Fishbein, chief of the American Medical Association at the time, courted Hoxsey for the rights to his formula. But, says Hoxsey in his autobiography You Don't Have to Die, the AMA wanted out of the family pledge to give the treatment free of charge to those who couldn't afford it. On that point, Hoxsey refused to sell.
Unknowingly, Harry Hoxsey had just goaded Dr. Fishbein into firing the first shot in the acrid medical civil war between himself and the AMA. Fishbein set out to systematically discredit Hoxsey and his herbal tonic as quackery and to dismantle the clinics. Thirty-five years of lawsuits, instigated by the AMA and directed by the federal government, ensued. Hoxsey brought hundreds of witnesses to tell their own success stories with the herbal tonic, whom the AMA attorneys tried to disqualify since "they weren't doctors." During this protracted period of attack, Hoxsey also endured injunctions, got divorced, and went broke from court costs. Even though two federal courts did uphold the therapeutic value of Hoxsey's formula, the government finally got him in 1960 on a technicality: He wasn't a doctor, and therefore couldn't supervise doctors administering treatment. Hoxsey's clinics were shut down.