Who is this Homeopath from Calcutta that has the National Cancer Institute in Maryland interested in his methods and techniques of treatments of tumors in the brain, breast, stomach, lung and esophagus? Is he selling pipe dreams? Why should modern scientists and physicians pay close attention to his work? Should more research be done to verify the nature and causes of the cures with his non invasive methods, the medicinal costs of which are between twenty dollars and the price of a today's cell phone? In order to fully appreciate these questions one has to visit Dr. Prasanta Banerji in India with a population of a billion plus, a great majority of whom cannot afford going to a hospital.

Picture a red brick house of modest size in the forever crowded city of Calcutta which this morning, like every other mornings, is surrounded by almost 800 poorest of the poor bringing their sick and dying relatives with one last ray of hope that there is a man in that house that might be able to help them. They wait their turn in silence and in a disciplined line, not normally seen anywhere in the city. They also know that, like hundreds of thousands before them, they may find the medical help they cannot afford and their treatments will not cost them a cent. These are the patients of a legendary homeopath by the name of Prasanta Banerji who started practicing his trade from 1960.

The ailments are many and Banerji's team of physician assistants see each of them and in meticulous details create their individualized charts. Those with common ailments or continuing patients are given free medicine and those that are diagnosed with items more complicated such as cancer, gall bladder stones are asked to come back later after they have had a blood test, X-ray, CAT Scan or, MRI, the costs of which are borne by Dr. Banerji's Charitable organization.

Homeopathy was started in Germany by Samuel Christian Frederich Hannehmann. It went to India with the German missionaries who treated the poor for free and converted many to Christianity. About Mid 1800, Bengal had a renaissance of art, literature and culture and great intellectuals like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya, Abnindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Raja Radha Kanta Deb Bahadur, helped transform the Indian civilization to great heights and awakened the Indian Freedom movement with their writings, speeches and debates.

These intellectuals were also the beneficiaries of the early homeopathic medicinal treatments brought to India. Vidyasagar suffered from intense migraine headaches and Raja Deb Bahadur had a gangrenous ulcer of the foot that available modern medicines of the times could not cure. They were treated in Calcutta by homeopathic medicines prescribed by Babu Rajen Dutta, an aristocrat who studied homeopathy from the Germans and the French, following Hannehmann's treatise and techniques.

Vidyasagar was so impressed by the results that he and his brother, Ishaan Chandra, took up the learning of homeopathy and treated the very poor of their villages for free. Ishaan Chandra's son, Pareshnath, also took up this line as his profession and continued to treat the poor and all who sought his help. His patients included such notable names like Presidents Rajendra Prasad, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Prime Minister Jawharlal Nehru. The fame of Pareshnath spread throughout India and the neighboring countries. His son, Prasanta Banerji, followed his father's footsteps and became the third generation Banerji Homeopaths of Bengal.

The long family experience with millions of clinical trials and the use of modern diagnostic tools such as detailed blood examinations, X-rays, CATScans, MRI techniques further helped the treatments of Prasanta Banerji. He standardized the techniques and medicinal applications for particular ailments with fixed ingredients and doses and started keeping detailed records of the patients and their treatments. He found very positive results in the cure and remission of brain, stomach and esophagus tumors with homeopathic treatments without any invasive process such as surgery.

Dr. Banerji presented case study documentations of numerous patients with clearly visible intracranial and stomach tumors, which completely disappeared within the span of a year of his homeopathic treatments, without surgery and without the effects of debilitating chemo or, radiation therapy.

In 1995 Prasanta Banerji, presented his findings at the Fifth International Oncological Conference in Corfu, Greece. Present in this conference was the eminent geneticist and researcher from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Dr. Sen Pathak and his colleague, Dr. Subrato Sen. The connection between Banerji's Homeopathy and Twentieth century modern molecular research was made on that fateful day. Dr. Pathak started the research on Banerji's treatments of brain tumor by minute doses of extract from an innocuous plant called the Ruta graveolens along with Calcium Phosphate.

Ruta, Rue or, commonly known as Jackman's Blue, is a powerful herb of ancient pedigree, once used for a wide assortment of medicinal purposes, but now grown mainly as a decorative plant. The shrubs make handsome bushy plants with dense but dainty metallic blue-green ornamental foliage which are rather like that of maidenhair ferns, with a soft yellow blooms.

Dr. Pathak's six year research on cancer cell lines has established on a cellular and molecular level the reasons why and how Dr. Banerji's Ruta extracts work in putting the intracranial glioma tumors into remission. The primary effect of this particularly diluted solution is to immediately strengthen the chromosomal DNA segments called the Telomeres.

Pathak explains that the Telomeric portions act like the gate keepers or, body guards of the Chromosomal DNA, to which they are normally attached like end-caps. If these Telomeres are weakened by intrinsic or, other extraneous harmful causes, they can no longer protect the chromosomes. These weakened and broken chromosomes then abnormally join with each other, thus, forming new types abnormal cells which either die or, start to multiply. The later event gives rise to tumors and cancerous growths. These cancerous cells are usually treated with removal surgery and followed by Chemo and Radiation therapies by modern oncologists in a hospital environment.

Unlike Chemo and Radiation therapies which indiscriminately kill normal cells, bone marrow cells along with the cancer cells, the Ruta treatment acts quite differently. Once the Telomeres cells are strengthened by the Ruta the body's own defense mechanism takes over and attacks not only the anomalous intracranial glioma growths but seems also to induce healthy cell divisions in the normal blood. This makes the patients recover their strength and feel healthier very quickly. While this technique showed various grades of positive in-vitro (In test tubes) results on many other types of human and mouse cancers, according to Pathak, the best results were seen on the human intracranial glioma.

Banerji claims an in-vivo (in the body) success ratio of seventy percent near or, complete remission of such tumors. He has also claimed remarkable success with breast, throat, lung and stomach cancers with other homeopathic ingredients. Dr. Subrato Sen of Houston is conducting similar research to explain Dr. Banerji's cure for breast cancers. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) of Bethesda, Maryland, is in the process of funding the research on lung cancers by Banerji's methods.

Very interestingly, the NCI website has a rather detailed review of Cancer treatments by mistletoe extracts, and there are a lot of similarities between the Ruta and the Mistletoe extract effects on cancer. Mistletoe extracts, which are given as subcutaneous injections, are commercially available in Europe but not in the US.

What make the modern physicians and scientists cringe with horror at the mention of homeopathic treatments and homeopaths are the profusion of charlatans and non experts who. having read or heard of Hannehmann's book on Homeopathy, pass themselves off as qualified experts. Homeopathy is banned in Israel and not practiced in the US, and rightly so, since very few treatments have been backed by detailed present day scientific research.

Even under this scenario of suspicions and derision by modern medicine providers, Homeopathic treatments, as practiced by the Banerjis, may yet have useful clues to the treatment and cure of many ailments including cancer. Their main assets have been the thousands of clinical trials of products, unregulated by any governing body in India. With their hit and miss methods, combined with experience of many generations of treating millions of patients, it may just be possible that they have stumbled on to certain actual legitimate curative properties of plant and other extracts for certain diseases.

It should be up to modern science and researchers to prove the efficacies of these unusual treatments, as Dr. Sen Pathak has done with Banerji's Ruta Plant extracts. Ignoring these or, doing nothing will be like ostriches with their heads in the sand and great opportunities for furthering the cause of medications and eradication of cancer may be lost. It is only logical that Dr. Banerji's claims must be respected while the scientific community must encourage more research to verify these innovative curative techniques. Until then Homeopathy will remain a mystery. Only by the involvement of modern science and research can homeopathy be taken out of the hands of quacks and put in its proper place in the hierarchy of alternative medicines.

It shall benefit all if alternative cancer treatments are available and which are affordable by the poor. After all, there are more poor people in the world than the rich. The cost savings by these techniques, if validated, are astounding and should interest all patients, providers and the cash strapped health systems all over the world.

Dr. Banerji also treats the rich and famous all around the globe for high fees which pay for the treatments of those poor expectant patients around the red brick house in Calcutta.