Three years ago, Asha Gupta
(name changed) and her family were devastated when she was diagnosed with Stage
IV breast cancer. Today she is in remission. An alternate treatment,
Immunotherapy, helped her fight and survive Invasive Ductal Carcinoma.
Immunotherapy, also called biologic therapy, is a type of cancer
treatment that works by boosting the body's immune system to destroy cancerous
cells.
Cancer Healing Centre, where Gupta's received her treatment, has
treated over 4,000 cancer patients through Immunotherapy over the last 19 years
at its centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur. It's an
option oncologists around the world are increasingly showing interest in.
Gupta's treating doctors, Delhi couple Dr Deepika and Dr Tarang
Krishna say a considerable number of their patients come to them in the last
stages of cancer.
There are several types of immunotherapy; at the Cancer Healing
Centre, they practice with herbal medicines. “These medicines are targetted at
cancer cells and work by first developing a shield around the cancerous tumor
to arrest further spreading. The immune system is then strengthened to
recognise and attack the cancer cells systematically,” explains Dr Tarang, an
MD in Homeopathy with PhD in Oncology from the United Kingdom.
Dr Deepika, also a homeopath, says they have seen results in,
“Cases of leukemia, brain tumour, and even ovarian cancer. The success rate in
case of gastrointestinal cancer, considered the most complicated cancer, has
been 60 to 80 per cent.” The duration of treatment depends on the condition of
the patient and could take anywhere between six to nine months. The cost also
varies case to case and is Rs 18000 a month and upwards.
“The therapy does not harm or kill the healthy body cells, thus
no side effects either. There is no loss of weight, appetite, or hair in
patients,” says Dr Tarang, who also received the Rajiv Gandhi Excellence Award
for ‘Innovative Therapy in Cancer Healing' in 2012.
Though immunotherapy came to India in 1996, it picked up pace
only in the last 10 years. Mainstream medicine is also showing interest in the
treatment. Dr Shripad Banavali, Head, Paediatric Oncology, Tata Memorial
Hospital, Mumbai, says, “Immunotherapy could work in conjunction with other
therapies to treat cancer. We kill cancer cells directly through chemotherapy.
But in Immunotherapy, we change and modulate the environment in which cancer
grows, by decreasing the tumor load, and gradually let the body's immunity take
over. Two or three private laboratories in India practice it. However, there is
lack of standardised data on big randomised trials for its efficacy in the
country. There is data from the West, but India needs to conduct more
research.”
Source: DNA-10th-December-2016
