Dr Yogesh Bendale, founder of Rasayu Cancer Clinic (Express)Ayurveda is often seen only as herbal medicine or simply useful for general ailments and not advisable for serious or critical illnesses. But in a first, the case of one of the successfully treated cancer patients at Pune’s Rasayu Cancer Clinic has been recently published in an international peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Case Reports. According to the founder of the clinic, Dr Yogesh Bendale, a 51-year woman was cured of blood cancer with exclusive Ayurveda rasayana treatment and her case was published in the journal.
Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) is a fast-growing, aggressive form of cancer called Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and is often fatal if left untreated. Sometimes, high-grade lymphomas are also called aggressive lymphomas with limited survival and about 40 in 100 people die within five years after diagnosis even after rigorous treatments. This patient was diagnosed in June 2018 with an advanced spread of NHL-DLBCL and she decided to go for Ayurveda treatment due to her reluctance to opt for any conventional cancer therapies, Bendale said.
He said that his team initially tried to achieve a reduction in the size of the tumour. The treatment duration of two years saw the patient being regularly monitored for the safety of the rasayana therapy using blood investigations (haematological and biochemical parameters) and the efficacy was evaluated using periodic PET (positron emission tomography) scans, he said. Like all patients in Rasayu Cancer Clinic, the quality of life in this patient was checked using the globally validated quality of life questionnaire. At the end of one-and-a-half years after diagnosis, investigations were carried out in January 2020 – in which no evidence of lymphoma was seen in the PET scan and the patient had a good quality of life, he said.
“She is free of cancer and no adverse effects were seen throughout the treatment duration. This finding indicates the safety of Ayurveda therapy,” Bendale said.
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“The treatment protocol has been developed after intensive research over two decades. The documentation of each cancer patient as per globally acclaimed international guidelines has been maintained and discussed widely at international conferences,” he said.
Practitioners of modern medicines, including several oncologists, while describing it as a “positive development”, have stressed that anecdotal cases of patients with any type of cancer treated with other systems of medicine need to be compared with the standard treatment of care and validated in a proper clinical trial.
“It has to be compared with the present standard of care and then proven to be statistically better. Relapse in patients is known to happen up to three to ten years,” Dr Vijay Ramanan, director of clinical haematology, bone marrow and stem cell transplant at Ruby Hall Clinic, told The Indian Express. Dr Ramanan has treated more than 10,000 patients of thalassaemia, leukaemia and other blood clotting disorders.
Dr Sameer Melinkiri, clinical haematologist at Deenanath Mangeshkar hospital, pointed out that DLBCL is curable in 70 per cent patients with regular chemotherapy sessions as well. Even if cancer does relapse, he/she can be treated with bone marrow transplant. “We are not against Ayurveda but a one-off case treated by this system does not mean this is the standard of care. There has to be a statistically significant clinical trial,” Dr Melinkiri said.
Rasayana therapy is more patient-centric than a disease/drug-centric one, Bendale said. The treatment protocol is based on the principle of rasayana therapy which aims towards the establishment of normal physiology and immune response at the cellular level of each tissue (called dhatu in Ayurveda), he added.
“We selected rasayana formulations which help restore normal physiology and cell cycle besides modulating the deranged immune response in cancer patients,” added Dr Bendale, who is a member of the Central Council of Research in Ayurveda and Siddha.
“Rasayana is one of the eight main branches of Ayurveda dealing with anti-ageing and the potential to treat diseases. We have developed a software to include each detail of cancer patients and its safety and efficacy assessment as per globally-defined parameters. The data is analysed by artificial intelligence and during the Covid-19 pandemic, we were able to reach out to cancer patients at distant locations with the help of telemedicine,” he said.
With treatment catering to around 3,500 cancer patients each year, Dr Bendale firmly believes that Ayurveda therapies can withstand any global scrutiny if the data is kept in a very scientific and rational way.
“The quality education of Ayurveda is mainly based on original texts and critically maintained patients’ data as per global norms can only bring acceptance of Ayurveda and such evidence in the public domain can act as a source of inspiration and information for other physicians. This was one of the main reasons that this case was submitted for peer review and publication in one of the globally-respected journals of conventional medical science so that it creates awareness about the potential of Ayurveda in the scientific community,” said Dr Bendale, who is also a member of international organisations like American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) and Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC).
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