Coffey-Humber Test

Cancer, second worst killer in the U. S. (heart disease is first), is on the increase. Its cause is undetermined, its cure possible only when the disease is attacked in its early stages by surgery, X-rays or radium. In its advanced stages the specialist can only make the patient more comfortable while he slowly, painfully dies. Two California doctors, Walter Bernard Coffey and John Davis Humber, think they have found a palliative or cure in an extract made from part of the adrenal cortex of sheep. They patented their extract, have been running a free clinic in San Francisco since 1930. When they sought to start an Eastern clinic, on Mrs. Grace Hammond Conners' $1,000,000 Long Island estate, "The Monastery," they were refused a State license (TIME, June 1, et ante). They went back to California, sure that in time the New York State Department of Social Welfare would see its mistake.

They decided that the pain of cancer is transmitted by sympathetic nerve fibres threading the walls of the blood vessels. Taking only cases rejected as hopeless by at least two reputable doctors, they claimed: 1) that they had eliminated pain in 71% of the cases treated with their extract; 2) that in all cases where the patient did not die the cancer became necrotic, ceased to smell, sloughed off leaving a clean hole. For study 415 patients were sent to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation at Los Angeles, there given Coffey-Humber injections by Coffey-Humber representatives, the effects watched by physicians of the Foundation. Last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association Dr. Rowland H. Harris published the results of that study. Conclusions:

"1) The benefits of the use of the suprarenal cortex extract experienced by patients with malignant tumors in relation to gain in weight and relief from pain did not occur uniformly or in the majority of the patients observed by us.

"2) The extract administered to these patients had no selective influence on the growth, necrosis or sloughing of malignant tumors.

"3) Necrosis and sloughing were not beneficial but were detrimental to these patients, producing hemorrhage, anemia, distressing fistulas, perforation with abscess or peritonitis, and other serious consequences.

"4) Cure of malignant disease in patients with advanced carcinoma or sarcoma (cancer), in view of the experience of the patients of this series, cannot reasonably be expected to occur as a result of the use of the suprarenal cortex extract.

"5) The benefits to be expected from use of the ... extract lie principally in improved appetite, improved muscle tone and bettered feeling of general well being of patients who are ambulatory or are not too far advanced toward a fatal termination of the disease."

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