From the Archive · Television · Hulda Clark
Answering Hulda Clark on PBS: The Tony Brown Rebuttal
Tony Brown's Journal gave Hulda Clark two programs to explain how parasites cause cancer and how her machines find and kill them. Viewers complained, and Tony Brown invited three of them to reply: Dr. Stephen Barrett, Dr. Leslie Bernstein and Dr. Terry Polevoy. The result was a two-part rebuttal, broadcast on PBS. This is what was said.
The disclaimer
Each part opened with a statement from Brown that was longer than most of the answers that followed. The guests, he said, disagreed with Clark on matters of science, but neither they nor the program claimed she had done anything illegal, unethical or harmful. The word “quack” would be used in Barrett's sense: over-promotion in health, “regardless of the sincerity of their promoters”, with “fraud” reserved for deliberate deception. Clark, Brown said, believed her ideas were true and part of experimental science, so on that definition she could not be accused of fraud.
Viewers who had watched Clark and “came to your own conclusions”, he said, were now invited to hear the other side.
Part one: “The cure rate for cancer that you don't have”
Barrett opened by saying Clark had come across as warm, concerned and scientific. He had analysed her book and its case reports. She claimed that parasites were involved in every cancer, that a machine could find a cancer and say where it was, and that she could cure people, sometimes in hours. Cancer cure, he said, is measured in years: the usual yardstick is five-year survival. Reviewing her hundred-odd case reports as he would a journal submission, he concluded that most of the patients had never been shown to have cancer: “Now, the cure rate for cancer that you don't have is 100%.”
Bernstein had emailed Brown after watching the Clark programs. A teacher of doctors all his career, he offered instead his rules for training a quack:
- Find desperate people: people with cancer and other diseases that cannot yet be cured.
- Sound scientific, “even if you bring them in wrong”: blame Dirofilaria, the dog heartworm, which does not infect humans, or Fasciolopsis buski, an intestinal fluke with a very limited range.
- Make the treatment easy. Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are hard; promise something that does not hurt and does not cost much at first.
Polevoy said his interest was personal. In the early 1990s he had watched someone close to him, whose cancer had come back after eleven years, turn to alternative treatment. What struck him was that some of the practitioners they met were themselves physicians, retired academic surgeons with distinguished careers, drawing patients from Austria, Australia and small farming towns. He wanted to understand why people make that journey.
Brown said he had received testimonials from sincere people who believed Clark had cured them. Could she have “lucked up”? Were they delusional? “No, they're misled,” said Barrett. Many of the people she saw were the “worried well”: given a diagnosis, then a cure, they felt better and became her foot soldiers.
Polevoy described Clark's demonstration of her Syncrometer in Toronto that March, before about 1,200 people, who gave her a standing ovation and roses. He and the people with him were verbally attacked by her supporters. She had no right, he said, to come to Canada with her machines and sell them at an expo. Brown replied that if no one in Canada had charged her, she had broken no law.
Free speech and the format
Brown defended putting Clark on television. He had said in the disclaimer, he argued, that most doctors disagreed with her. Barrett's rule was simple: on a serious health question, he would not put someone with a possibly senseless theory on unopposed. “She's not unopposed,” Brown said. “You're unopposed on this program.” He was not qualified to debate either side, he said, which is why he had asked them to come.
The machine
Barrett explained that Clark's device was a galvanometer, measuring a tiny current through a circuit completed by the patient's body. Brown asked whether, as Clark said, parasites vibrate at different frequencies and can be killed by a 9-volt current. “They have no frequency,” said Bernstein. “Absolutely impossible.” Polevoy added that the same kind of device was being used by a garage mechanic near him, from the back of a pickup truck, to sell vitamins and herbs to farmers, and by people at health-show booths and library rooms selling multi-level products.
Bernstein closed part one with a short history: Hoxsey in the 1950s; Krebiozen in the 1960s, which took in the eminent physiologist Andrew Ivy; Lawrence Burton's immuno-augmentative therapy in the 1970s (“who by the way is my cousin. He was born Lawrence Bernstein”); laetrile in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and in the 1990s, parasites.
Part two: the demonstration
Barrett brought an electrodiagnostic device, one of about twenty brands that work the same way, and demonstrated it on camera. The practitioner touches a probe to points on the patient's hand, and each point supposedly represents an organ. The reading, he showed, depended not on where he touched but on how hard he pressed. Remedies “tested” by placing a sealed glass vial in the circuit could do nothing, because glass does not conduct electricity. His advice: if a practitioner uses one, leave; if you paid, ask for your money back and complain to your state attorney general. Clark's device had a different name and slightly different circuitry, he said, but was basically the same thing.
Polevoy described the Canadian position as he saw it then. Naturopaths and chiropractors were trained on such machines, and about two dozen Ontario physicians used them. One, he said, had spent $800,000 defending himself against the College of Physicians and Surgeons over eleven years, and had been found wanting in his care, yet was still allowed to use the device. He did not name him on air. A device could be sold in Canada for thousands of dollars to people with no medical training. Neither Health Canada, the federal competition authority nor the advertising standards body would act. “If it's a bad beer commercial, they'll come and yank it right off the air. But if it's a health device, they won't touch it.”
The program then ran a clip of Clark describing her Syncrometer as an instrument that “can analyze your tissues without going into you”, unlike anything ever invented.
The parasites
Bernstein, who said he had wide experience in parasitology, took Clark's claims in turn:
- Roundworms and asthma: Ascaris was disappearing from city children while asthma was rising, and a large study had found no relationship between them.
- Heart disease and the dog heartworm: Dirofilaria immitis is spread by mosquitoes, produces microfilariae rather than the eggs Clark described, and dies in a human host.
- Pets: Ascaris does not come from cats and dogs. Their roundworms are Toxocara, which are dangerous to children in a different way.
- Liver flukes and diabetes: the flukes she named are rare, need particular snails and grazing animals, and shed millions of eggs that no laboratory could miss.
- The herbal cleanse: of wormwood, black walnut hulls and cloves, wormwood, the source of absinthe, was the one that might do harm.
“Don't forget that harm is not just physical,” Barrett added. “There's harm that's financial, and then there's harm that you've bet on the wrong horse.”
Polevoy described the glass slides of dead parasites Clark held up in Toronto, and a man in one of her videotapes selling hundreds of them. When Brown observed that doctors charge fees too, Polevoy answered: “We don't sell products.”
A child, and the question of freedom
Polevoy raised the case of a 13-year-old Canadian boy with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer with a cure rate he put at 65 to 70 per cent with proper treatment, whose family had been steered to a Tijuana clinic. Courts and ethicists became involved. What disturbed him as a pediatrician, he said, was that the state was allowing it. He did not name the boy on air. It was Tyrell Dueck, 13, of Saskatchewan, who died of osteosarcoma in 1999.
Brown asked whether free speech could have two standards. Barrett's closing plea was to talk-show producers. Most people who talk about health on radio and television, he said, are far outside medical science, often for commercial reasons, and the imbalance was about 100 to one. Balancing programs, he argued, would not be difficult.
The program ended on colon cleansing. Bernstein traced auto-intoxication from Metchnikoff to Sir Arbuthnot Lane and said colonoscopy showed none of the encrusted food or clinging flukes the brochures described. Brown asked whether his own paunch was accumulated waste. It was, Bernstein said, mostly the abdominal muscles losing tone with age. “Here I thought that was a little bit of extra fat,” said Barrett.
What became of it
Clark moved her practice to Tijuana; Mexican authorities closed her clinic in 2001, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued over the zapper in 2003. She died on 3 September 2009; her death certificate lists multiple myeloma, a bone-marrow cancer, as a contributing condition. Her patients' stories are on this site's Hulda Clark patients page.
Both of Brown's Clark programs are still listed on the Tony Brown's Journal website, with summaries of her claims and no mention of the critics. As of October 2026 the rebuttal programs are not listed there. Tony Brown died in June 2026.
Related on QuackeryWatch
Sources
- Tony Brown's Journal, “Hulda Clark Rebuttal, Part 1” and “Part 2”. Tony Brown Productions / PBS, broadcast May–June 2000. Transcripts of the program audio, QuackeryWatch archive. Quotations are short excerpts.
- “Self-Health: Killing Parasites and Cleansing the Body” and “Do Pollutants & Parasites Cause All Disease?” Tony Brown's Journal website, consulted October 2026.
- News report on Dr. Jozef Krop's discipline case and planned appeal. CMAJ 1999;161(11):1431.
- Richard Prince. “Tony Brown, Black-Media Legend, Dies at 93.” Journal-isms, June 2026.
Statements by the guests are reported as they were made on air in 2000 and reflect the situation at that time. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.