The Dr. Kelley Story
Part 4: Dr. Kelley's Own Experiments
Dr. Gonzalez speaking:
By now, Dr. Kelley was doing pretty well. Had his diet down, he had his enzymes down, he understood raw foods, he understood pancreatic enzymes, and he was doing well. He was nine months into his therapy, the tumor was regressing, he was working nine hours a day seeing patients. Everything was going well.
And then he started to get sick. He woke up one day feeling tired, he canceled his patients and stayed in bed. The next day he felt worse - tired, fatigue and he thought he was getting the flu. He asked his mother. His mother said, "Just stay on the diet, stay on the enzymes." His mother was a pretty tough character. She said, "You just keep doing the program." The third day he was sicker. The fourth day he started vomiting. This was a bit scary, because he would take one of his doses of fifty capsules of enzymes and would throw them up immediately.
Kelley was a tough character. He'd take the fifty pills again and he'd throw them up again. He had this big battle with his stomach, and by the end of the day, he gave up. He said, "I just have intestinal flu, I'll stay off the pills." So he stayed off the pills two or three days and he started to feel better. He said, "Okay, I can go back on my pills." And yet he was scared. He knew if he stayed off those enzymes, those tumors were going to grow. So after three or four days he felt fine, then suddenly he started getting sick again. He felt tired, then fatigued and lethargic, with fevers, chills sweats. And the fourth day on these enzymes, he started throwing up his guts.
This was kind of scary, again, because those pancreatic enzymes were his life-line and without them he was going to die. He had four young kids and if he died, they were going back to the orphanage, they had no other options. Kelley stayed off the enzymes a couple of days and felt better. But as he stayed off the pills--and remember, Kelley was lucky in a very unlucky way because he had his own tumor marker sticking out of his belly--if he stayed off the enzymes those tumors started to grow. He didn't like that too much.
On the enzymes, they'd start to shrink ,but he'd get sick. When off the enzymes, the tumors would grow, but he'd feel better. When on the enzymes, the tumors would shrink, but he'd feel sick. "This doesn't make sense," he said. "On the enzymes, the tumors are going away, I should feel better. When off the enzymes, the tumors grow, and I should feel worse. On the enzymes, when the tumors break down, I feel sicker."
He kept thinking about this, Kelley being a scientist, stayed up day after day after day. Kelley was a wonderful man. When he had a problem--I lived in his house for a year and a half and there were a lot of unsolved problems--and I can remember days when he wouldn't let me sleep because some problem had to be thought about. I need about six or seven hours a night. He got about thirty minutes, so it was a pretty difficult thing to be around him physiologically. Also, psychologically and spiritually.
Kelley was trying to figure out this problem of why he felt worse when the tumors broke down. One night, in the middle of the nigh at 3 o'clock in the morning, he finally figured it out. He said, "I know what's happening! Tumor wastes are making me sick. Tumor wastes are poisonous! That's what it is!" And a light went off. He said, "A lot of the symptoms that people are getting on chemo" --now back in 1964 we didn't have a lot of the chemotherapy agents but we certainly had chemo and people certainly got sick on it--Kelley said, "It's the darned tumor breaking down. I bet that's why people get sick from the treatment for cancer, as the tumor breaks down they get poisoned by tumor waste."
Kelley said nothing, absolutely nothing on earth is more toxic to the cancer patient than dead tumor waste. That was his statement. And it seemed to be true. When he was off the enzymes, when the tumor would be growing, he'd feel better. When on the enzymes, he'd feel sick. He had a lot of symptoms. Fevers to 103, chills, sweats, almost like a very severe anaphylactic sickness like response, muscle aches and pains. He said, "It was the tumor waste!"
Now, that led to another investigation. Kelley was looking for some way to help the body get rid of tumor waste. And he went through the medical literature. He had to find some way, because he had to increase the efficiency of the program. He had to find a way for the patient, in this case himself, to stay on those enzymes because those pills were the life-line. Well, he went through a number of medical journals and a number of medical text books and the thing that kept coming back to him was the thing that raises the eyebrows of the orthodox colleagues more than anything. And you will probably laugh when I mention it, and that's the coffee enemas.
Nothing in the history of the world has generated more controversy than coffee enemas. Kelley learned about coffee enemas ironically not from some strange esoteric health publication, but from the Merck Manual. The Merck Manual said that coffee enemas were a therapeutic tool from 1899 to 1977. Kelley learned about them right in the Merck Manual. As doctors learned during the 1920s and 1930s, when you take coffee rectally, the caffeine stimulates the liver to release its toxins, it dumps its toxins much like a dump truck. It's not surprising when you think about it. You take caffeine rectally, you can stimulate the gall bladder and the liver ducts to dump their waste.
This has been documented by very sophisticated radiographic studies--which just about 30 people have read. So coffee enemas seemed like the logical thing to do. And Kelley wasn't too happy about that, being a very neat gentleman. But he figured he didn't have any choice because he wasn't just fooling with some esoteric research project with some student or some study, he dealing with himself, and his life depended on him. So very reluctantly he went to the store. He got his local Chock-Full of Nuts coffee (he didn't use organic coffee the first time), and he bought an enema bag from the local pharmacy. Then very reluctantly and very gingerly, he made up his coffee and gave himself his first coffee enema.
Again, Kelley was a smart man. Before he took his first enema, he went on his enzymes four or five days, until he was really feeling sick, had a fever of 103, nausea, vomiting, muscle aches and pains. He really was sick. He wanted to see if these enemas would work.
He did an enema, and in half an hour his fever went from 104 to 99. His muscle aches and pains were resolved, and he felt almost normal. It was almost a miraculous occurrence in Kelley's own mind, and from that day on, he did coffee enemas and he's still doing them today. He's been doing them since that first day and hasn't missed a single day.
So that was the third part of the Kelley program: first part diet, second part pancreatic enzymes, third part coffee enemas. "Crazy" Dr. Kelley. But he got better. After about a year and a half, two years, his tumors were gone and he was back at work as an orthodontist. But when he hung up his shingle again, people didn't come to him for the straightening of their teeth. Kelley developed quite a reputation as the dentist who had cured himself of cancer through his mothers' nutritional program. And the first day he re-opened his office, he got calls from people with cancer and asthma, and multiple sclerosis, from the local out-lying towns there in West Texas. All wanting to come by and go on that diet too.
Within a couple of years, Kelley was no longer treating people with crooked teeth. He was basically treating primarily advanced cancer patients with nutritional program. He developed such an international reputation that the local medical society had him thrown in jail in 1969. They had copies of his book which he was then publishing, absconded and burned...you don't want to offend the AMA. There's nothing offends the AMA more than a dentist who cures cancer. It's not supposed to happen. It's all right. I understand. I'm an M.D., and I'm a little offended by the idea too. I mean, it kind of bothers me that Dr. Kelley did it.
So Kelley had an international reputation, he had this wonderful program: a diet of raw foods, vegetable, nuts, seeds, grains. He had the wonderful pancreatic enzymes and he added other vitamins and minerals to make the enzymes work better, with coffee enemas, and he was doing pretty well. But he wasn't doing well enough. And Kelley always said and I always say, "You don't learn from your successes, your successes make you feel arrogant and wonderful, and they please your mother. But you learn from your failures."
By about 1969-70, Kelley was probably getting about 50% of his patients well. The bad news is, he was losing about 50%. He couldn't figure out why--he was pretty pleased because most of his patients were pretty sick, but he couldn't figure out why he was losing them. He'd try out everything on a patient who was failing. He'd increase the amount of grains, decrease the amount of grains, give more juices, give less juices, change the relationship of beans to rice. But some patients, no matter what manipulation he did, they'd do badly. And one of them was the woman who was going to become his second wife.
Now Suzy's a remarkable woman. Suzy didn't have cancer, she had allergies. And when I say allergies, I mean the worse case of allergies in the history of medicine. She was so sensitive to iodine that she could not walk within ten miles of the ocean or she would suffer an anaphylactic reaction. She had to carry adrenalin with her all the time. Repeatedly, at least twice a week, she'd have anaphylactic reactions. Some bright allergist had treated her with desensitization shots and used dirty needles and then she had developed hepatitis. So know not only did she have terrible allergies, but she had chronic hepatitis, which in itself is a fatal disease in many cases. She was 24 years old, and she was dying.
There were about four foods that she could eat. She was getting worse, and she figured by the time she was down to distilled water, it was over. She knew Kelley was primarily a cancer doctor, but she figured if he was smart enough to kill cancer he could cure her allergies.
She arrived in his office very sick. Kelley put her on his wonderful diet - the raw fruits, the raw vegetables, the juices, the vitamins, the enzymes, the coffee enemas. And within three or four months she was doing really well. By six months, she was doing well enough that she could eat fish--now this is a woman who couldn't walk by the ocean because of her iodine sensitivity. After nine months she was doing so well, she married Dr. Kelley. She became his second wife and began to run his office. And she was extremely healthy.
At about a year, though, things started to change, and Suzy got a little sick. Tired, fatigue, fevers, chills, that kind of thing, nothing serious. Kelley originally thought that she just had the flu. He said, "Stay on the program, you'll get over it." But she got progressively worse. And what got a little bit frightening for Dr. Kelley and for Suzy was that she started developing allergies, after she'd been free of allergies for about a year. She began to react to every food she ate, even his wonderful raw foods and raw vegetables. It didn't make any sense. Now, he was dealing with his wife, nothing scares a doctor more than being sick himself, that's pretty scary, but when you have a family member who is sick, that's just about as scary.
Kelley did a lot of manipulations. He increased the food, he increased the vegetables, he increased the raw foods, he changed the proportions of different nutrients and did everything he knew to do to see if that would have any effect on his wife. But she got progressively worse, not better. After about two months of dietary manipulations, his wife really crashed and ended up semi-comatose in his house. Kelley was faced with a problem. If he didn't do something quick, she might die and he might have to bring her to a hospital, and admit defeat. The local newspapers would have a field day, "Crazy quack cancer doctor's wife ends up in hospital in a coma."
He thought about this a lot, and he didn't want that to happen. He thought about everything he had done. And he had done everything. He had done everything to manipulation of raw foods, raw vegetables, et cetera. The only thing he hadn't done, and suddenly it hit him like a light bulb going off, the only thing he hadn't done was give her meat. Well, he thought about it and he said “No, I'm the raw foods diet. I believe in raw foods, vegetables, meat is toxic, meat kills people, it raises cholesterol levels, it causes cancer. Human beings do not eat meat, period. It's awful, it's ugly.”
Two days later, his wife was getting worse and she was going to die. He knew that. He was a dentist, but he knew enough medicine to know his wife was dying. He said, "the only thing I haven't done is give her meat, and I'm going to give her meat." Well, he talked it over with her. She was delirious, but she could understand the word meat, and she said, "No, it's not part of the Kelley diet, you're trying to kill me Donald." He said, "You're going to eat meat whether you want to or not." And he went to the local store and got the biggest prime beef he could find. He ground it up and he wanted her to eat it raw, of course because if you cook the meat you destroy the enzymes and raw meat has enzymes. And he coaxed her and coaxed her and he finally told her, "If you don't eat the meat, you're going to the hospital."
Well, she decided to eat the meat, within two hours she was sitting up in bed. Kelley fed her meat throughout the next 24 hours. She got stronger and stronger and within two weeks she was well. Today, Suzy Kelley looks twenty years younger than she is, she eats raw red meat three times a day and is in absolutely perfect physical health. It was exhilarating but also devastating for Kelley to realize that his own wife was a meat-eater because it was contradictory to everything that he believed in. It was a two-by-four across his forehead.
Kelley always said that "when God wants to teach me a lesson He doesn't hit me with a twig, He hits me with a two-by-four. Because I'm too dumb, I never see the message otherwise." Well, almost losing his wife was a big two-by-four right across the forehead. Kelley said, "I can't believe, humble dentist from Texas that I am, that I'm the first person in the history of the world who realized that there's a sub-category of human beings that not only needs meat but thrives on it, I simply don't get it". Well, he again went to his local library and he looked and he looked and he looked and he learned about a wonderful anthropologist named Stefansson.
PART 5: Stefansson, Red Meat and the Autonomic Nervous System