Florida health spa’s cancer claims under fire, Brian Clement points to a wooden carving of a woman on Hippocrates Health Institute’s lush campus.
“She was on the diet but it didn’t work,” he says, with a belly laugh, motioning to the stout wooden carving that bristles with metal leaves.
It’s a macabre joke given those who have gone to the facility full of hope that the raw vegan diet taught there would “reverse” their cancer, as Clement says “thousands and thousands” have.
Clement, who is the co-director of Florida’s Hippocrates Health Institute along with his wife, Anna Maria Gahns-Clement, has been in the spotlight in Canada recently after two aboriginal girls, one of whom died last month, abandoned chemotherapy in favour of natural remedies.
The Star travelled to Florida to tour the institute and investigate claims, made in speeches and interviews published online, that the well-travelled Clement makes about Hippocrates’ ability to cure illness.
The institute has been a magnet for controversy: medical and nutritional experts interviewed say there is no scientific evidence the diet Clement advocates can reverse cancer; former staff members and a doctor are also suing Hippocrates over allegations they were fired when they raised concerns about Clement and Gahns-Clement practising medicine without a licence.
“We have the longest history on the planet Earth, the highest success rate on the planet Earth, of people healing cancer,” Clement told a Hamilton audience in 2012, captured in a YouTube video.
In a video posted in 2011 by VeganNewsNet, Clement is asked by an interviewer: “What ailments have you cured by putting your patients on a vegan diet?”
“Every known disease,” he responds. “Of course, we’re most notable for all of the people that have healed cancer.”
In a Hippocrates promotional video, Clement says through positive thinking and eating a raw, plant-based, organic diet, “we’ve seen thousands and thousand of people reverse stage-four catastrophic cancer.”
“You have taken these statements out of context,” wrote Vicki Johnson, a senior vice-president at Sachs Media Group, in an email Thursday. “As (Clement) has repeatedly emphasized, what Hippocrates does is educate people about the benefits of raw foods and exercise, and how a healthy lifestyle arms the body to fend off disease and in many cases heal itself.”
Hippocrates teaches that a raw vegan diet consisting of sprouted foods, algae and frequent wheat grass juice consumption, both orally and rectally, strengthens the immune system, which then fights cancer.
Stephanie O’Halloran was a 23-year-old Irish woman with advanced metastatic breast cancer.
“When I went to see (Clement) he offered me hope that was not offered here, and in a horrible situation you cling to whatever hope is given,” she told the Limerick Leader newspaper. “After speaking to him, I made the decision that I was going to come off all conventional medicine, and go out there to give me the best shot I have.
“Dr. Clement has helped people to reverse stage-four brain cancer; the evidence is there to back it up. If you follow the program that they set out for you, the evidence is there that you are on line towards reversing your symptoms.”
That hope fuelled a fundraising effort that saw O’Halloran raise nearly 30,000 euros from people in Limerick. She died May 29, 2014, according to her obituary, months after completing the Hippocrates program.
“ ... From a one-hour lecture in Dublin, this woman decided that I could heal her? That’s not even realistic when you think about that,” said Clement said in an interview in his Florida office.
Clement told the Star most patients at Hippocrates are also taking conventional medicine.
Testimonials from guests posted on the Hippocrates website under the heading “Success Stories” credit the centre with healing, but there are no updates when those who wrote them die.
William Comfort, a 77-year-old man from Maryland with multiple myeloma, wrote in March 2010: “We made many lifelong friends at Hippocrates and six weeks later I was able to walk out of the institute on my own two feet — with no walker! Shirley and I are adhering to the Hippocrates lifestyle and we are both making steady progress.” Comfort died on Dec. 21, 2011.
Annalisa Cummings, a 46-year-old Florida woman, wrote a testimonial printed in the 2007 edition of the institute’s magazine: “After many months on the program my lung collapsed and I ended up in the hospital. I believe this happened because the cancer was slowly healing. My lung eventually had to be removed, but because of my strong immune system, I was able to heal faster than anyone expected. My disease was now in check.” She died in 2009.
“To the extent that people’s quality of life has improved for any period of time, we believe those are successes,” wrote Johnson.
The cases of the two aboriginal girls touched off a firestorm of controversy around aboriginal rights and the duty to protect children. The court judgment in the case of J.J., whose name is under a publication ban, enshrined her mother’s aboriginal right to use traditional healing methods. J.J. is still alive.
The other girl, Makayla Sault, 11, who refused chemotherapy, died of a stroke in January.
In a video posted to the Hippocrates Facebook page, J.J. glances at a rack of growing sprouts in the background, and the girl’s mother tells her that her bone marrow and spinal fluid tested negative for cancer cells. Oncologists have told the Star her remission was likely caused by the 10 days of chemotherapy she received in August, and is likely to be short-lived without further chemotherapy.
Between the talks and the testimonials, people could be forgiven for thinking Clement’s institute has the ability to cure cancer, but experts say there is no proof it does.
“There really is no evidence that a raw vegan diet or a wheat grass diet can cure cancers. I wish,” said Gillian Bromfield, director of cancer control policy with the Canadian Cancer Society. “There has been some investigation as to whether some types of diets can help change the course of cancers, but there really is no evidence to support that.”
“Making a blanket statement that eating X is going to change your immune system and reduce cancer right now is impossible,” said Dr. Steven Clinton, the John B. and Jane T. McCoy Chair in Cancer Research at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and a national expert in cancer-fighting foods. “The immune system, if you’re going to pick a system in our body that’s complicated, that’s the one,” Clinton added.
Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit and managing editor of the website Science-Based Medicine, says testimonials suggesting people healed their cancer at the institute are misleading.
“That is what I like to call misinformed consent, because if you believe that, you are being misinformed,” said Gorski. “One, we know what he’s doing can’t do that. Number two, let’s say that he’s discovered something amazing that really could do that — he’s certainly shown no evidence to support such claims.
“You’re not doing a terminally ill patient any favours to make grandiose promises that you can’t fulfil,” said Gorski. “Hope is a good thing, but it has to be tempered by a realistic assessment of a patient’s condition.”
The Hippocrates diet revolves around wheat grass, which the institute calls its “signature elixir.” A silhouette of the grass adorns the institute’s logo.
“What’s amazing . . . is two ounces of (wheat grass juice) is equivalent to five pounds — two kilos — of green leafy vegetables,” Clement told the Star during a tour of the juicing room, which smells like fresh-cut grass.
This information is unsubstantiated, according to Christy Brissette, a registered dietitian at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto.
“I’ve heard of this before but I haven’t been able to find anything that confirms that,” Brissette said. “Oftentimes, by sprouting different foods, you can double or triple the amount of certain nutrients that are in them, but to say a couple ounces of wheat grass is the same as five pounds, that’s stretching it a little bit.”
Between the lecture hall and the juicing room, a guest stops Clement on the path.
“I left you my blood test,” says the guest. Brian laughs his deep staccato silence filler that has punctuated the orchestrated tour of the campus.
“Our medical team will look at it,” he responds.
Clement is not a licensed medical practitioner and cannot diagnose and prescribe under Florida law. He is being sued by several former employees and a doctor over allegations they were fired when they raised concerns about Clement and others practising medicine without a licence.
The defence statements filed in the lawsuits deny the claims.
“Almost every single patient there, the majority of patients, got an appointment with Anna Maria and/or Brian to go over their medical history, their labs, blood work, their disease process or just their wellness process and they would recommend treatment,” alleges Steven Pugh, Hippocrates’ former director of nursing and one of the ex-employees suing the facility.
Johnson offered a written response on Thursday to Pugh’s statement: “All blood tests are administered by a medical professional and reviewed by the medical director. As nutritionists, the Clements review the guests’ entire health history, which includes the blood tests, with a view toward nutritional recommendations. . . . The medical director is responsible for all medical decisions of any kind.”
Hippocrates, which houses as many as 100 people at a time, has one licensed medical doctor working for the facility — Dr. Paul Kotturan.
Pugh says guests often complained about extra charges. He said the IV therapies that he administered cost between $120 and $300 per dose, and the doctor could prescribe a regimen of vitamins or minerals costing up to $2,000. He said the average bill of someone attending the Life Transformation Program could double from the base price of $5,664.
“I would have patients sitting in the IV chair, calling other family members, saying I’m gonna be here another two weeks, I need this kind of money, can you help me out?” said Pugh. “It was an emotional roller-coaster for many of them.”
Hippocrates offers a host of unproven treatments in its Vida building. The Star was not permitted inside it.
One of the treatments often mentioned by Clement in videos is Cyber Scan — a machine that claims to read your “bio-frequency” and tells which diseases you have or are at risk for. The machine then spits out a magnetized card — similar to a debit card — that contains the “morphogenetic footprint” of whoever put their hand on the device.
For Pugh, the most surreal treatment moment came when he saw a man blowing a long alpenhorn on the feet of a guest at the centre. The man claimed to be removing “toxins,” Pugh said.
The institute also sells its own line of supplements, called LifeGive, as well as a store stocked with everything from $400 amulets that claim to block electromagnetic waves to a stool designed to angle one’s feet while on the toilet that is said to promote “more complete bowel evacuation.”
“The issue is that businesses like this really take advantage of people when they’re at a vulnerable point in their lives. For a person who’s facing a cancer diagnosis, they really need to have a lengthy discussion with their doctor ... who’s diagnosed them ... so that they understand why that course of treatment has been demonstrated to have been effective,” said Bromfield.
Michael Berganzi was in charge of growing sprouts at Hippocrates from 2001 until 2011. He has since started his own health retreat in Michigan.
“(Hippocrates) has gone crazy. For me ... it just became a little bit more of a sales pitch business where they really weren’t doing it for heart any more, they were doing it because it was a business,” said Berganzi.
The raw food diet “was never supposed to be some kind of miracle — just an oil change,” said Berganzi.
“These different (treatments) were costing people a lot of money and these people were on their deathbeds and they just were believing in something, and I get that you have to believe in something, but he just ended up turning more into the dark side, and just, let’s get as much money as we possibly can,” Berganzi alleged.
“Mr. Clement denies this statement in its entirety,” wrote Johnson in an email. “He has dedicated his life to the health and well-being of his guests ... Hippocrates grants thousands of dollars worth of scholarships to guests on an annual basis.”
The Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for investigating fraudulent claims of cancer cures, would not say if it is investigating Hippocrates.
“While we are concerned with deceptive claims, especially when they could have negative impacts on people with serious health problems, I can’t comment on any particular organization,” said Mitchell Katz, spokesman for the FTC.
The facility is registered as an educational not-for-profit and it is licensed as a massage parlour, not a medical facility. Clement is licensed as a nutritional counsellor in Florida.
Clement has a PhD in nutrition from the University of Sciences, Arts and Technology — a school licensed by the government of Montserrat, an island in the Caribbean with a population of about 5,000.
When asked if he’s giving false hope, Clement says “there’s no such thing as false hope.”
When confronted with the testimonials people wrote — testimonials full of hope, that have not been updated to indicate those who later died — Clement says:
“That’s not false hope. I’m going to die. Do you realize that? You’re going to die,” he says. “I have hope that I’ll become a multi-billionaire some day and be able to change the world. Is it going to happen?
“I would never tell somebody don’t do chemotherapy. I’m not a medical doctor, nor do I believe I should tell them to do that ... I’m going to die; they’re going to die. Does it mean that I did something wrong because they came here? Maybe they were very, very sick at some point and they went home and eventually died? What do I have to do with that? Explain, what does Hippocrates have to do with that?” said Clement.
“She was on the diet but it didn’t work,” he says, with a belly laugh, motioning to the stout wooden carving that bristles with metal leaves.
It’s a macabre joke given those who have gone to the facility full of hope that the raw vegan diet taught there would “reverse” their cancer, as Clement says “thousands and thousands” have.
Clement, who is the co-director of Florida’s Hippocrates Health Institute along with his wife, Anna Maria Gahns-Clement, has been in the spotlight in Canada recently after two aboriginal girls, one of whom died last month, abandoned chemotherapy in favour of natural remedies.
The Star travelled to Florida to tour the institute and investigate claims, made in speeches and interviews published online, that the well-travelled Clement makes about Hippocrates’ ability to cure illness.
The institute has been a magnet for controversy: medical and nutritional experts interviewed say there is no scientific evidence the diet Clement advocates can reverse cancer; former staff members and a doctor are also suing Hippocrates over allegations they were fired when they raised concerns about Clement and Gahns-Clement practising medicine without a licence.
“We have the longest history on the planet Earth, the highest success rate on the planet Earth, of people healing cancer,” Clement told a Hamilton audience in 2012, captured in a YouTube video.
In a video posted in 2011 by VeganNewsNet, Clement is asked by an interviewer: “What ailments have you cured by putting your patients on a vegan diet?”
“Every known disease,” he responds. “Of course, we’re most notable for all of the people that have healed cancer.”
In a Hippocrates promotional video, Clement says through positive thinking and eating a raw, plant-based, organic diet, “we’ve seen thousands and thousand of people reverse stage-four catastrophic cancer.”
“You have taken these statements out of context,” wrote Vicki Johnson, a senior vice-president at Sachs Media Group, in an email Thursday. “As (Clement) has repeatedly emphasized, what Hippocrates does is educate people about the benefits of raw foods and exercise, and how a healthy lifestyle arms the body to fend off disease and in many cases heal itself.”
Hippocrates teaches that a raw vegan diet consisting of sprouted foods, algae and frequent wheat grass juice consumption, both orally and rectally, strengthens the immune system, which then fights cancer.
Stephanie O’Halloran was a 23-year-old Irish woman with advanced metastatic breast cancer.
“When I went to see (Clement) he offered me hope that was not offered here, and in a horrible situation you cling to whatever hope is given,” she told the Limerick Leader newspaper. “After speaking to him, I made the decision that I was going to come off all conventional medicine, and go out there to give me the best shot I have.
“Dr. Clement has helped people to reverse stage-four brain cancer; the evidence is there to back it up. If you follow the program that they set out for you, the evidence is there that you are on line towards reversing your symptoms.”
That hope fuelled a fundraising effort that saw O’Halloran raise nearly 30,000 euros from people in Limerick. She died May 29, 2014, according to her obituary, months after completing the Hippocrates program.
“ ... From a one-hour lecture in Dublin, this woman decided that I could heal her? That’s not even realistic when you think about that,” said Clement said in an interview in his Florida office.
Clement told the Star most patients at Hippocrates are also taking conventional medicine.
Testimonials from guests posted on the Hippocrates website under the heading “Success Stories” credit the centre with healing, but there are no updates when those who wrote them die.
William Comfort, a 77-year-old man from Maryland with multiple myeloma, wrote in March 2010: “We made many lifelong friends at Hippocrates and six weeks later I was able to walk out of the institute on my own two feet — with no walker! Shirley and I are adhering to the Hippocrates lifestyle and we are both making steady progress.” Comfort died on Dec. 21, 2011.
Annalisa Cummings, a 46-year-old Florida woman, wrote a testimonial printed in the 2007 edition of the institute’s magazine: “After many months on the program my lung collapsed and I ended up in the hospital. I believe this happened because the cancer was slowly healing. My lung eventually had to be removed, but because of my strong immune system, I was able to heal faster than anyone expected. My disease was now in check.” She died in 2009.
“To the extent that people’s quality of life has improved for any period of time, we believe those are successes,” wrote Johnson.
The cases of the two aboriginal girls touched off a firestorm of controversy around aboriginal rights and the duty to protect children. The court judgment in the case of J.J., whose name is under a publication ban, enshrined her mother’s aboriginal right to use traditional healing methods. J.J. is still alive.
The other girl, Makayla Sault, 11, who refused chemotherapy, died of a stroke in January.
In a video posted to the Hippocrates Facebook page, J.J. glances at a rack of growing sprouts in the background, and the girl’s mother tells her that her bone marrow and spinal fluid tested negative for cancer cells. Oncologists have told the Star her remission was likely caused by the 10 days of chemotherapy she received in August, and is likely to be short-lived without further chemotherapy.
Between the talks and the testimonials, people could be forgiven for thinking Clement’s institute has the ability to cure cancer, but experts say there is no proof it does.
“There really is no evidence that a raw vegan diet or a wheat grass diet can cure cancers. I wish,” said Gillian Bromfield, director of cancer control policy with the Canadian Cancer Society. “There has been some investigation as to whether some types of diets can help change the course of cancers, but there really is no evidence to support that.”
“Making a blanket statement that eating X is going to change your immune system and reduce cancer right now is impossible,” said Dr. Steven Clinton, the John B. and Jane T. McCoy Chair in Cancer Research at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and a national expert in cancer-fighting foods. “The immune system, if you’re going to pick a system in our body that’s complicated, that’s the one,” Clinton added.
Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit and managing editor of the website Science-Based Medicine, says testimonials suggesting people healed their cancer at the institute are misleading.
“That is what I like to call misinformed consent, because if you believe that, you are being misinformed,” said Gorski. “One, we know what he’s doing can’t do that. Number two, let’s say that he’s discovered something amazing that really could do that — he’s certainly shown no evidence to support such claims.
“You’re not doing a terminally ill patient any favours to make grandiose promises that you can’t fulfil,” said Gorski. “Hope is a good thing, but it has to be tempered by a realistic assessment of a patient’s condition.”
The Hippocrates diet revolves around wheat grass, which the institute calls its “signature elixir.” A silhouette of the grass adorns the institute’s logo.
“What’s amazing . . . is two ounces of (wheat grass juice) is equivalent to five pounds — two kilos — of green leafy vegetables,” Clement told the Star during a tour of the juicing room, which smells like fresh-cut grass.
This information is unsubstantiated, according to Christy Brissette, a registered dietitian at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto.
“I’ve heard of this before but I haven’t been able to find anything that confirms that,” Brissette said. “Oftentimes, by sprouting different foods, you can double or triple the amount of certain nutrients that are in them, but to say a couple ounces of wheat grass is the same as five pounds, that’s stretching it a little bit.”
Between the lecture hall and the juicing room, a guest stops Clement on the path.
“I left you my blood test,” says the guest. Brian laughs his deep staccato silence filler that has punctuated the orchestrated tour of the campus.
“Our medical team will look at it,” he responds.
Clement is not a licensed medical practitioner and cannot diagnose and prescribe under Florida law. He is being sued by several former employees and a doctor over allegations they were fired when they raised concerns about Clement and others practising medicine without a licence.
The defence statements filed in the lawsuits deny the claims.
“Almost every single patient there, the majority of patients, got an appointment with Anna Maria and/or Brian to go over their medical history, their labs, blood work, their disease process or just their wellness process and they would recommend treatment,” alleges Steven Pugh, Hippocrates’ former director of nursing and one of the ex-employees suing the facility.
Johnson offered a written response on Thursday to Pugh’s statement: “All blood tests are administered by a medical professional and reviewed by the medical director. As nutritionists, the Clements review the guests’ entire health history, which includes the blood tests, with a view toward nutritional recommendations. . . . The medical director is responsible for all medical decisions of any kind.”
Hippocrates, which houses as many as 100 people at a time, has one licensed medical doctor working for the facility — Dr. Paul Kotturan.
Pugh says guests often complained about extra charges. He said the IV therapies that he administered cost between $120 and $300 per dose, and the doctor could prescribe a regimen of vitamins or minerals costing up to $2,000. He said the average bill of someone attending the Life Transformation Program could double from the base price of $5,664.
“I would have patients sitting in the IV chair, calling other family members, saying I’m gonna be here another two weeks, I need this kind of money, can you help me out?” said Pugh. “It was an emotional roller-coaster for many of them.”
Hippocrates offers a host of unproven treatments in its Vida building. The Star was not permitted inside it.
One of the treatments often mentioned by Clement in videos is Cyber Scan — a machine that claims to read your “bio-frequency” and tells which diseases you have or are at risk for. The machine then spits out a magnetized card — similar to a debit card — that contains the “morphogenetic footprint” of whoever put their hand on the device.
For Pugh, the most surreal treatment moment came when he saw a man blowing a long alpenhorn on the feet of a guest at the centre. The man claimed to be removing “toxins,” Pugh said.
The institute also sells its own line of supplements, called LifeGive, as well as a store stocked with everything from $400 amulets that claim to block electromagnetic waves to a stool designed to angle one’s feet while on the toilet that is said to promote “more complete bowel evacuation.”
“The issue is that businesses like this really take advantage of people when they’re at a vulnerable point in their lives. For a person who’s facing a cancer diagnosis, they really need to have a lengthy discussion with their doctor ... who’s diagnosed them ... so that they understand why that course of treatment has been demonstrated to have been effective,” said Bromfield.
Michael Berganzi was in charge of growing sprouts at Hippocrates from 2001 until 2011. He has since started his own health retreat in Michigan.
“(Hippocrates) has gone crazy. For me ... it just became a little bit more of a sales pitch business where they really weren’t doing it for heart any more, they were doing it because it was a business,” said Berganzi.
The raw food diet “was never supposed to be some kind of miracle — just an oil change,” said Berganzi.
“These different (treatments) were costing people a lot of money and these people were on their deathbeds and they just were believing in something, and I get that you have to believe in something, but he just ended up turning more into the dark side, and just, let’s get as much money as we possibly can,” Berganzi alleged.
“Mr. Clement denies this statement in its entirety,” wrote Johnson in an email. “He has dedicated his life to the health and well-being of his guests ... Hippocrates grants thousands of dollars worth of scholarships to guests on an annual basis.”
The Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for investigating fraudulent claims of cancer cures, would not say if it is investigating Hippocrates.
“While we are concerned with deceptive claims, especially when they could have negative impacts on people with serious health problems, I can’t comment on any particular organization,” said Mitchell Katz, spokesman for the FTC.
The facility is registered as an educational not-for-profit and it is licensed as a massage parlour, not a medical facility. Clement is licensed as a nutritional counsellor in Florida.
Clement has a PhD in nutrition from the University of Sciences, Arts and Technology — a school licensed by the government of Montserrat, an island in the Caribbean with a population of about 5,000.
When asked if he’s giving false hope, Clement says “there’s no such thing as false hope.”
When confronted with the testimonials people wrote — testimonials full of hope, that have not been updated to indicate those who later died — Clement says:
“That’s not false hope. I’m going to die. Do you realize that? You’re going to die,” he says. “I have hope that I’ll become a multi-billionaire some day and be able to change the world. Is it going to happen?
“I would never tell somebody don’t do chemotherapy. I’m not a medical doctor, nor do I believe I should tell them to do that ... I’m going to die; they’re going to die. Does it mean that I did something wrong because they came here? Maybe they were very, very sick at some point and they went home and eventually died? What do I have to do with that? Explain, what does Hippocrates have to do with that?” said Clement.
