“It’s hard to overestimate the impact Gary has had on the field of tumor ablation or the magnitude of his contribution to cancer treatment,” said Fred Lee, Jr., M.D. Dr. Lee is a Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

“He was the one person in the world, the first person in the world, who put together the fact that these devices could be delivered to just the right place, and whatever you did could be monitored with imaging. This new technology vastly improved treatment and decreased complications”

Dr. Allan Stam calls Dr. Onik “the most innovative cancer specialist in the country” Dr. Stam is a retired professor from Harvard and Tufts Universities and an emergency medicine physician who mentored Dr. Onik when he was in college. He is also one of the first patients on which Dr. Onik used cryosurgery (freezing) for prostate cancer. “Cryosurgery is the gold standard for prostate treatment,” said Dr. Stam. “Gary always pushes the envelope. He refuses to take other people’s opinion that someone cannot be treated. He finds a way. His approach is, “What are we going to do about it?'”

David Bostwick, M.D. considers cryosurgery to be the “finest single method of destroying tissue without destroying the organ because you can control it,” and credits Dr. Onik as being the first to use it. “It’s taken a while for cryosurgery to become popular because for a long time the government wouldn’t reimburse it, and the doctors don’t get paid as much for doing it as they do for surgery,” he said. Dr. Bostwick is Associate Medical Director at Bostwick Laboratories in Orlando, Florida, and a former Professor of Pathology and Urology at the Mayo Clinic.

Writing in the July 11, 2014 issue of the Journal of Men’s Health, Dr. Onik explained that his breakthrough concept of focal therapy using cryosurgery could potentially decrease the mortality rate by 75 percent among men with prostate cancer. He describes this procedure as analogous to a lumpectomy for women with breast cancer. “Not only is this a major advance in prostate cancer control results but incontinence and potency rates are significantly improved over conventional treatments such as robotic surgery and radiation,” he wrote.

Yuman Fong, M.D. credits Dr. Onik with revolutionizing cancer treatment, calling tumor ablation one of the best therapies available for many cancers. “The proof of that is becoming very clear,” said Dr. Fong. “Ablation is an easy way to treat cancer. It’s often curative in liver cancer and is first-line therapy. The advantage is that you don’t have to cut someone open and poison them every week. Compared to other treatments, it’s easy” Dr. Fong is Chairman of the Department of Surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California, and the former Murray F. Brennan Chair in Surgery and Professorship in surgery at Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Sometimes referred to as a “Renaissance Man” and a “virtuoso,” Dr. Onik has molded a one-of-a-kind career as a radiologist/cancer specialist that has impacted multiple areas of medicine besides his chosen field: most prominently oncology, surgery, urology, and neurosurgery.

Dr. Lee calls Dr. Onik’s contributions the “fourth leg of the three-legged stool of cancer treatment”

“His pioneering work means hope for people when the other three legs of the stool have failed,” he said. “He’s the champion of sick people staring into the abyss, and that’s worth a lot”

Dr. Onik said it disturbs him to know that there are thousands of people dying needlessly of cancer who aren’t aware of the techniques and concepts he has developed “My criteria for accepting a patient is whether I believe they can walk out of the hospital cancer-free,” noted Dr. Onik, whose compassionate attitude towards patients is a hallmark.

He’s been able to do just that in numerous terminal patients with various forms of cancer including prostate, liver, skin, lung, pancreatic, and breast.

“I tailor a unique solution to each patient’s particular situation,” he explained. “Sometimes that means developing a new instrument or technique. My greatest frustration is seeing technologies I have invented not being utilized to the fullest”

Why Isn’t Tumor Ablation Widely Available?

So, then, why aren’t his technologies, all FDA approved, as widespread as one might expect, considering their lifesaving potential? Like most other issues in medicine, the answer isn’t a simple one.

One reason, Dr. Lee suggests, is the “we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” mentality. “Many old school doctors simply don’t understand the power of what Gary’s techniques do,” he explained.

Dr. Fong points out another snag – that tumor ablation requires a skill that most surgeons don’t have. “And,” he noted, “this turns upside down the paradigm that therapy means cutting the lump out. The medical profession is very resistant to new things”

Finally, in order for his hands not to be tied by the typical conservative, conventional and bogged-down bureaucracy of academia, Dr. Onik has chosen to do his work as a private practitioner. Limited resources and a low-key approach to self-promotion have resulted in much of his practice being word of mouth.

“I have always carried out my cancer work according to the highest standards of academia,” said Dr. Onik. “For example, I’ve published my work in numerous peer-reviewed journals over the past 20 years. When that did not result in the general public learning about what I was doing, I left the academic workplace to pursue my goals with fewer restraints.

“As a radiologist practicing in the field of surgical oncology and working across many organ systems, I didn’t fit into any mold that was available for a radiologist at the time,” he continued. “I realized that if I stayed in academia I would be continually fighting turf battles with closed-minded doctors and conservative committees, issues that had nothing to do with the value of the ideas I was putting forth. It was an imperfect tradeoff, since being off the academic radar screen kept me from getting the attention that would have made the promotion of my ideas more effective and given me more recognition.

“I don’t second guess the path I took,” Dr. Onik continued. “Despite its limitations, it worked out very well for me personally, but being from Sloan Kettering or MD Anderson certainly gives you credibility and access to resources that I had to scramble for.”

Dr. Onik didn’t completely disassociate himself with academia, however. He now holds an adjunct professorship in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.