Max B. Gerson, M.D.

individual · Bielefeld, Germany (early practice); Vienna, then France, then London (1933-1936, after fleeing Nazi Germany); New York City, USA (Park Avenue practice, from 1938 until his death)

lived:1881–1959

active:1928–1959

type:individual

role:promoter

location:Bielefeld, Germany (early practice); Vienna, then France, then London (1933-1936, after fleeing Nazi Germany); New York City, USA (Park Avenue practice, from 1938 until his death)

eventual status:publicly disconfirmed

FINANCIAL CONFLICTS

Gerson originated the regimen, selected the fifty case histories presented as evidence in his 1958 book, and authored the book that promoted them; no source reviewed quantifies what he personally charged patients or earned from the book. The present-day Gerson Institute maintains the therapy's licensing and practitioner-certification program. Its federal filing for the fiscal year ending June 2025 reported program-service revenue, royalties, and net inventory sales alongside an overall net loss.

INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED

Gerson Therapy

NOTES

Max B. Gerson was born 18 October 1881 in Wongrowitz, Province of Posen, in the German Empire (now Wagrowiec, Poland), the third of nine children. He studied medicine in Breslau, Wurzburg, and Berlin, graduating from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 1909, and began practicing internal medicine in Bielefeld. In the 1920s he developed a low-sodium, high-potassium dietary regimen originally intended to treat his own migraines and, from around 1927, skin tuberculosis; in 1928 he began applying the same dietary approach to cancer patients. When the Nazis took power in 1933 he fled first to Vienna, then France in 1935, then London in 1936, before settling in New York City in 1938, where he passed New York’s medical boards, opened a private practice on Park Avenue, and became a U.S. citizen in 1942. His malpractice insurance was discontinued in 1953, and following society-appointed investigations that began in 1947, he was suspended for two years from the New York County Medical Society in 1958 for advertising his treatment on a radio talk show. That same year he published A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, presenting his own selected case histories as proof the regimen cured advanced cancer. He died of pneumonia in New York City on 8 March 1959, a year after the book’s publication. His daughter, Charlotte Gerson, carried the therapy forward and founded the nonprofit Gerson Institute in the late 1970s, which today licenses the therapy’s name and training to independently operated clinics in Mexico, Hungary, and China.