People who are going to save your life tomorrow

Interview, May, 1995 by Celia Farber

The World Research Foundation is a non-profit health-information network with offices around the world and the most comprehensive medical database in existence (including a computerized library of medical articles dating back two hundred years). For a modest fee, WRF, co-founded by Steven and LaVerne Ross in 1984 and based in Sherman Oaks, California, will send you a Yellow Pages-thick packet containing all available data from all corners of the world on whatever condition you may be suffering from. The Rosses' prescription for the ailing American healthcare system? Jettison the "If I haven't heard of it, it's quackery" attitude of most U.S. doctors.

One of the things mainstream cancer treatment does best is tumor-removal surgery. Unfortunately, many surgeons take out half the body along with the tumor - the idea being, When in doubt, keep cutting. Dr. Myron Arlen, a surgical oncologist at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, has a more precise, and thus more humane, approach. One of the deftest surgeons in the country, Arlen is the doctor cancer patients turn to when they've been labeled inoperable and sent home. "When I say the patient is inoperable," he says in a gravelly voice, "then that's it. Don't anybody bother to look."

Dr. Bjorn Nordenstrom is likely to go down in medical history as the man who electrified breast-cancer treatment - literally. A highly respected radiologist at Sweden's famed Karolinska Institute, his research into the archaic field of bioelectromagnetics led him to spend years charting the human body's heretofore unknown electric circuits. Nordenstrom's technique of inserting electrodes directly into a tumor and the surrounding tissue seems to trigger tumor-fighting effects. If his theory is correct, cancer treatment in the future may be all about realigning the body's electrical currents. With typical humility, Nordenstrom insists he "simply tried something that hadn't been tried before."

Americans suffer an estimated one million heart attacks a year, resulting in 500,000 fatalities and making coronary artery disease the leading cause of death in the U.S. The revolution in cardiac treatment comes in the form of Strophanthin-G, a medication synthesized from an African herb and popularized by German physician Berthold Kern. His theory? That heart attacks result not from coronary obstruction but from an accumulation of tissue-eroding acid, a condition that responds incredibly well to the acid-reducing and purifying properties of Strophanthin-G. According to its proponents, the synthesized herb could render an estimated 95 percent of heart-bypass operations unnecessary. (Although it's not approved in the U.S., it costs Europeans - who buy it over the counter - only about thirty dollars per month.) Kern has now passed his life's work to his daughter, Dr. Waltraud Kern-Benz, who describes herself as a mainstream doctor in every respect but in her approach to coronary treatment.

Increasingly, the military model of treating AIDS - bombing the body with one or more of the toxic trio of AZT, ddl, and ddC - is being supplanted by a gentler multifaceted program combining nutrition, exercise, a positive mental outlook, and various ancient and modern remedies. Bernard Marichal, a Belgian M.D., is part of a team of three doctors who have had great success with immunotherapies. Patients are given highly diluted homeophatic remedies that, rather than directly attacking a virus or cancer, for instance, provoke the body into a more natural restoration of the immune system.