Ayurveda looks to metals for ancient cures

New Delhi, June 13: The Vaidya Chandra Prakash Cancer Research Foundation in Dehradun appears, at first sight, like yet another nondescript hospital practising traditional medicine.

But for the 10 or 12 patients who suffer from various kinds of cancer and arrive at the centre every day, it offers a ray of hope with its metal-based drugs that have cured several dozen people afflicted by the killer disease in the last 16 years.

The drugs, says Vaidya Balendu Prakash who runs the centre -- set in sprawling farm lands at the foothills of the Himalayas -- are not a wonder invention but a discovery based on one of the eight clinical specialities known as "Rasa Shastra" or metal therapy.

"Metals have a very important role to play in the prevention and cure of cancer," Prakash told Reuters. "But when we say metals we are not talking of their metallic form but the ionised form which can be absorbed by the human body."

Metal therapy, according to Ayurvedic texts which are thousands of years old, is based on the premise that human body tissues contain different metals in various degrees.

Any imbalance in the content of these metals, caused by natural or self-inflicted methods such as substance abuse, disturbs the body and triggers ailments. The patients can be treated with metal-based drugs that replace the balance.

OMNIBUS THERAPY

Metal therapy rests on the belief that all ailments can be treated with metal-based drugs if they are diagnosed correctly and in time. All metals -- including gold, silver, mercury, arsenic, iron, copper, lead, tin and zinc -- and their alloys and some wastes are used to make the drugs.

"The same metal can be mixed with different herbs and processed to treat different diseases," Dr. R. M. Anand, an assistant director at state-run Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha (CCRAS), said.

He said metals are first purified in herbal decoctions, oxidised, subjected to heat and crushed several hundred times till they are converted into a non-metallic, non-toxic form that can be absorbed by the body. The drugs are either in the form of tablets or powders.

Prakash says his cancer drugs take two to three years to be manufactured, cost about 80 rupees ($1.7) for a day's dosage and have to be administered to the patient for at least a year.

Chemotherapy and radiation treatment under the modern Allopathy system of medicine in the country, on the other hand, costs a few hundred thousand rupees and is out of the reach of a large section of the one billion population.

FIGHTING SCEPTICS

The drugs made at the Dehradun centre, named after Prakash's Ayurved doctor father, have been used to treat various forms of the disease including cancer of the pancreas, bladder, colon and non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.

But Prakash, who is the Ayurvedic physician to the Indian president, says it is his silver-based drug that has proved most successful in treating cases of Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia (APML) -- a serious type of blood cancer -- with a success rate of nearly 100 percent.

Sceptics, mostly doctors practising the Allopathy system of medicine in India and abroad, have questioned Prakash's treatment and express fears about the drugs as they also use poisonous metals such as mercury and arsenic.

A year-long study of the treatment conducted by a panel appointed by the federal Ministry of Health and Family Welfare -- which included Allopathic doctors -- was however convinced of the effectiveness of Prakash's formulation for APML.

Dr. D.K. Mishra, another assistant director at the CCRAS and a member of the panel, said the panel suggested the formulation of a standard method for the manufacture of the drug and treatment of the cancer.

"The irony of the situation is that the success has to be measured by experts from another system...how will they accept our success?" asks Mishra.

Prakash says his discovery of the cancer drugs is in some ways similar to the invention of the first flying machine by the Wright brothers.

"They didn't build the jumbo jet. They just showed that a machine could fly," said Prakash. "It is for the medical community to do extensive studies and build on what I have discovered." (Reuters)