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Not that Glenn wasn't kept busy. He was in his office at 6 a.m., saw patients till 10 p.m., read the medical literature till 2 a.m., and somehow slept. The crowded waiting room in his suite at 901 Boren in Seattle was testimony to his tendency to spend too much time with his patients.  

The pastor officiating at Glenn's recent (November 16, 2000) memorial service at the Washington Cathedral in Redmond, Washington, noted that Glenn participated in a number of the Church's activities, including the TLC group, which is what you might think it is, and the Business Club.  

Business Club?? Glenn?? This doctor would have to have been the black hole in the business club.  He was the target for any hard-luck story; every con artist; every cockamamie scheme purporting to advance medicine and humanity.   Thousands disappeared in personal loans to down-and-outers, lousy investments, and go-nowhere dream-schemes.  

His bad taste for investment was in sharp contrast for his vanguard diagnostic sensibility.  He was a genius in finding alternatives for the otherwise refractory patient whose condition defied the various cookbooks.  For the most part, clinical oncology is an idiot's exercise in recipe collection. Glenn had the misfortune to use BCG for early-stage bladder cancer too soon.  A full decade or two before FDA approval.  

Years before his colleagues, he prescribed tamoxifen instead of the chemotherapy protocols.  (Tamoxifen has probably saved more breast cancer patients' than any other remedy.)  He used biological response modifiers such as the interferons and interleukins and vaccines early on, too.  So early on that a powerful clique at the University of Washington condemned immunotherapy as nonsense and set out to disenfranchise him by prodding the then State Medical Disciplinary Board (now the oxymoronic Medical Quality Assurance Commission [MQAC]) to remove his license.  

Dr. Warner sensed that there was more to improving the lot of the cancer patient than by killing cancer cells.  He felt that beyond those cells was a human being who needed help with his or her stresses, who could benefit from religion, Eastern meditation, immune system stimulation, proper nutrition, exercise, and a positive attitude.  He found he could use hormonal agents, such as depo provera, instead of toxic chemotherapy for the gynecologic neoplasms, and obtain far longer survivals.  He sensed that an otherwise healthy organism would be better armed to battle with the disease.  And, in the end, live longer and better.  

The estimated 1400 surviving cancer patients at the time of his disenfranchisement in 1996 testified to the success of his holistic approach.  It did not seem to concern the State that patients resistant to the conventional therapies began to die when deprived of his extraordinary care.  In fact, according to his widow, Helen, the State appeared to have an uncanny knowledge of those who called Glenn on the telephone.  The kibitzing agents of the State seemed to be watching for any sign that he might, God forbid, be giving advice to a patient.  Be it Kitty Nordstrom, J. T. Quigg or John Q. Public.  

As a junior at Ellensburg (WA) high school he met his future wife, Helen, with whom he spent the next 56 years.  After graduation from Central Washington College of Education, he did a two-year stint as medical corpsman with the United States Marines and then got his medical degree from George Washington University in the District of Columbia.  He did a surgical residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, followed by a pathology residency at the Tumor Institute of the Swedish Hospital. Feeling the urge to be with actual patients, he gravitated from pathology slides to the patients themselves and eventually headed the immunotherapy department of the Tumor Institute under Orliss Wildermuth, M.D.     

In contemplating his loss of license at the end of an illustrious career, one is reminded of the case of the late Emanuel Revici, M.D.  The State of New York decided that Revici's record keeping left to be desired and that therefore, he should be punished.  The pattern is the same.  If a doctor puts the patients' survival and quality of life ahead of the sanctity of the conventional (and quickly obsolete) protocols, you're fair game for bureaucratic attack. 

Glenn was a warm, caring man of medicine, who somehow pulled patients through the disease whose reputation was not to give up so easily.  This is the man of whom MQAC's Beverly Goetz said that his patients were "incapable" and "unqualified" to know whether they were getting appropriate care or not. Only a body of experts such as the Commission, she stated, were so qualified. (Never mind that there was not a single cancer specialist on that commission).  

Glenn's disenfranchisement was more than the separation of a doctor from his license.  It removed his patients from the care that had spared their very lives.  It put the citizens of Washington State on notice that deviation from the cancer cookbook, no matter how useless, was not permissible.  The only problem was that recipes, rife with high-dose radiation and aggressive chemotherapies, are notoriously unsuccessful.  Never mind:  They were also quite reimbursable.  (In late stage cancer patients, chemotherapy is acknowledged to have a 2 to 5 percent success rate).  

As a board-certified radiation oncologist, Glenn knew what radiation could and could not do.  A prodigious reader of the scientific and medical literature, Glenn understood the possibilities and the improbabilities, the risks and the opportunities.  

For the past 17 years, I have operated a cancer patient information and treatment referral service out of Port Ludlow.  I am not a doctor.  For every patient/client, I need the best possible information as to what can work and what doesn't work, and who does the best.  I hounded Glenn Warner several times weekly for his precious counsel.  He never turned me down.  I have a vast data bank of information on patient care.  They include his understanding of how to use hormonal therapy instead of chemotherapy, of how to use immunotherapy instead of toxic junk. He also knew when to use the toxic junk to arrest the progression of disease.  

He was not an "alternative therapist", he said, but a complementary therapist.  He was a healer who knew how to use all of the cut-burn-and-poison modalities, the gamut of pharmacopoeia, the phytochemicals and herbals, and how to lessen the psychic burdens of his patients, how patients could make the most of their religion or spirituality.  In a world flush with self-styled healers, he was a man who knew truly how to heal.  And heal he did.  

As his intimates put it so cogently, "Glenn died of a broken heart."  He followed the dictates of his oath and his God and was punished for so doing.  The State declined to reconsider.  We could not persuade the Governor of this State to listen to an appeal, nor to read the sampling of 350 letters from among the many hundreds of his patients who claimed that they owed their very lives to Glenn Warner.  

This was a most egregious case of a bureaucracy gone haywire.  They took the best, the brightest, the most successful oncologist and disenfranchised him from his license and his patients.  

No one is more qualified to understand what constitutes appropriate care than the patient. Certainly not that lot of Commission members. In fact, the Commission's display of its ignorance on cancer matters over the years of hearings has been nothing short of astonishing.  

Probably no other cancer doctor in the Seattle community can claim to match Dr. Warner's more than 1400 surviving cancer patients. The Commission cited just 6 complaints, several of them malpractice lawsuits, from among the 20,000 cancer patients that Dr. Warner had treated for over 40 years. The most recent charge was over 8 years old! Noteworthy is a present-day tendency to interpret innocent mistakes as malpractice and to use a "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" approach for targeting one of several doctors the patient may have seen.  

Paradoxically, in the eight years prior to his disenfranchisement, not a single charge of wrongdoing, error, or malpractice attributable to Dr. Warner had been noted by the Commission.  

Clearly, the Commission has engaged in a most vicious vendetta against a holistic physician, knowledgeable in both conventional medicine and its alternatives. This despite all the evidence showing excellent results from his distinctive, compassionate approach. Even the official Tumor Registry, which was given access to every one of his patient files, determined that his survivals in this dread disease were at least as good as the others in the 13 county area surveyed. (They also commented informally that the quality of life claimed by his patients was vastly superior!)  

When charges were first filed against Dr. Warner by this commission, more than 350 patients wrote individual letters protesting against this attack. In the ensuing months, hundreds more letters were written by patients in his behalf.  

The nonsensical allegation by the State of Washington's medical 'experts' that a patient is simply unable to know whether he or she is being properly cared for could not be farther off the mark. Cancer patients are eminently qualified to know: 

* Whether they are alive or dead. 

* Whether they are in pain or not. 

* How many years they have survived a disease that often kills within a year or two. 

* How long and poorly their relatives and friends survived on conventional treatments. 

* How much time Dr. Warner devoted to each patient individually, how well he listened, and how clearly and painstakingly he explained his methods. 

* That they had free access to him personally at the open support group he attended every Wednesday night.    

The administrative law judge said that, despite his worry about the possible jeopardy to the patients' welfare, he felt compelled to accept the Commission's finding because their charges failed the test of being labeled 'frivolous.'  Their charges, however, passed with flying colors the tests of monumental stupidity, viciousness, and cruelty. They are also an insult to common sense.  

Kafka is alive and well.  Warner is dead.  And every last one of us, who knew him, will miss him.  As so many of his patients expressed it:  He gave us hope.
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