Cancer Treatment on Trial

The treatment, "714X," is blacklisted by the FDA, which has banned any import of the drug into this country. Like many other alternative treatments, the ban was imposed without any experimental evaluation of possible health benefits.

But last October armed agents from the FDA raided Pixley's office, dismantling computers and removing files.

The U.S. Assistant Attorney representing the FDA stated that the agency is not questioning whether the treatment works or not, they are "prosecuting the introduction of an unapproved substance into interstate commerce."

Pixley claims he never distributed the medicine himself, only promoted its value and maintained records of the results of its use in the treatment of cancer, AIDS and other chronic immune diseases.

But distribution is not the key issue in the case. Although the FDA was created in the l930's to protect citizens from impure food and drugs, critics point out that it does not have the right to withhold potentially effective treatments from patients who choose to use them to overcome a fatal disease, yet behaves as if it does have that right. Pixley is challenging that assumption of power by a government agency without public consent.

Jury selection began April 10th and the trial is expected to be lengthy, in what could be an historic case.

But Naessens work is not without critics. His research was not well-received in his native France and he fled to Canada, where he was later brought to trial by the husband of one of his patients, a woman who had come to him with advanced breast cancer and later died. Naessens was found not guilty; the story is amply told in the book, "The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens," by Christopher Bird.

Naessens' treatment evolved from his discovery of the somatid, a subcellular electromagnetic body which goes into a prolonged abnormal cycle when the immune system is compromised. Naessens has studied the somatid cycle for 20 years with the use of a dark-field microscope which he invented and which permits the clinician to look at live blood.

Another reason Naessens and his research have become a lightning rod is because he believes, in the tradition of l9th-century scientist Antoine Bechamp, that disease is created within the biological terrain of the afflicted organism. Bechamp's work was obscured by Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease, which has been adopted as the medical model for treatment of most diseases.