THE Oct 21, 1991 issue of the Time Magazine carries a research report entitled, “Using Cancer to Fight Cancer”. The research, being conducted by Dr. Steven Rosenberg and his team at the National Center Institute, Maryland, U.S.A., aims at treating the terminal cancer patients by injecting into their bodies the tumor cells of their own cancer after genetically altering them.

The report expresses the hope that this would immunize the patient against his own cancer. The method differs from the classical vaccine strategy only in that a vaccine is meant to immunize a person against a certain disease, e.g., measles, small pox, etc. but in this case the doctors are engaged in attempts to actually treat a patient with advanced cancer.

How far will the research be successful is hard to predict but the idea of treating the patients by using the products of their own diseased parts is not new. If we care to look at homoeopathic literature, we find that there are a number of remedies that are prepared from the diseased parts of the body. Such remedies are called Nosodes in homoeopathy; for example, Tuberculinum is prepared from the tubercular abscess, Psorinum from the scabies vesicles, etc.

Through a special method of remedy preparation, which involves repeated process of mixing, shaking and diluting, the Nosodes are reduced to such a greater degree that not even  a small particle of the original Nosodes can be traced in the resultant suspension on chemical examination and yet the remedy safely works when given to the patient! Although a number of hypotheses have been advanced, it is not yet precisely known, how the homoeopathic remedies work in absence (?) of the least possible quantity of the original substance.

The object of the above mentioned research “to rally the immune system of cancer patients” comes very close to the homoeopathic philosophy of cure which revolves around the central concept that each person, each organism possesses on a deep level the will and the wisdom to be healthy and that the wisdom of the organism should be enlisted in effecting a cure.

Dr. Rosenberg seems to have studied some classical works on homoeopathy, particularly “The Organon of Medicine” by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann and “The Materia Medica of the Nosodes” by Dr. H. C. Allen

Daily Dawn, October 27, 1991