Another opponent was Assistant District Attorney Al Templeton, who arrested Hoxsey more than 100 times in Dallas over a two-year period. Then, in 1939, Templeton's younger brother, Mike, developed cancer. He had a colostomy, but the cancer continued to spread; his doctors told him nothing more could be done for him. When Mike secretly went to Hoxsey and was cured, Al Templeton had a change of heart. The once-hostile prosecutor became Hoxsey's lawyer.

Esquire magazine sent reporter James Burke to Texas in 1939 with the aim of doing an expose that would discredit Hoxsey as a worth less, dangerous quack. Burke stayed six weeks, became a strong supporter of Hoxsey and later his publicist, and filed a story entitled "The Quack Who Cures Cancer." Esquire never published it.

In 1949, Morris Fishbein, longtime editor of the Joumal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), wrote an attack on Hoxsey that was published in the Hearst papers' Sunday magazine supplement, read by 20 million people. In the piece, entitled "Blood Money," Fishbein, the influential "voice of American medicine," portrayed Hoxsey as a malevolent charlatan and repeated many of the unsubstantiated charges that he had been printing for years in JAMA.

Hoxsey sued Fishbein and the Hearst newspaper empire for libel and slander. It seemed a hopeless David-versus~-Goliath contest, but Hoxsey won. Although his monetary award was just two dollars, he achieved a stunning moral victory. Fifty of his patients testified on his behalf. The judge found Fishbein's statements to be "false, slanderous and libelous." And Fishbein made astonishing admissions during the trial, such as that he had failed anatomy in medical school and had never treated a patient or practiced a day of medicine in his entire career. Even more shocking, Dr. Fishbein admitted in court that Hoxsey's supposedly "brutal" pastes actually did cure external cancer.

The leader of America's "quack attack" was now on the defensive. Critics charged the AMA with being a doctor's trade union, setting national medical policy to further its own selfish interests. The United States Supreme Court agreed that the AMA had conspired in restraint of trade. Dr. Fishbein was forced to resign.

In 1953, the Fitzgerald Report, commissioned by a United States Senate committee, concluded that organized medicine had "conspired" to suppress the Hoxsey therapy and at least a dozen other promising cancer treatments. The proponents of these unconventional methods were mostly respected doctors and scientists who had developed nutritional or immunological approaches. Panels of surgeons and radiation therapists had dismissed the therapies as quackery, and these promising treatments were banned without a serious investigation. They all remain to this day on the American Cancer Society's blacklist of "Unproven Methods of Cancer Management."

By this time, the Hoxsey clinic in Dallas had 12,000 patients and Harry Hoxsey was contemplating running for governor of Texas, a post that would enable him to appoint the state medical board and thereby get an impartial investigation into his therapy. Hordes of Hoxsey's patients flooded Washington, D.C., demanding medical freedom of choice. Hoxsey threatened to picket the White House with 25,000 cured patients. But the FDA and other federal agencies mounted a massive legal and paralegal assault. A therapy with the potential to help cancer sufferers was hounded out of the country.