DEHRA DUN, July 10: His reported list of patients and benefactors reads like a virtual who's who. But this has not helped Vaidya Balendu Prakash in his decade-long struggle to get his ``miracle cure'' for cancer recognised by the Health Ministry.His metal therapy (Rasayana), in which he uses metal-based compounds, has won him worldwide acclaim and also gained the favour of noted personalities like Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire and father-in-law of Imran Khan, Vice-President K R Narayanan and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Salim Sherwani, claims Balendu. But the Health Ministry reportedly remains unmoved.Vice-President Narayanan, in his capacity as Union Minister for Science and Technology, is reported to have pursued his case. ``So strong is the hold of the allopathy-minded bureaucrats over the system that even a minister felt helpless in persuading them to test my ayurvedic cancer treatment,'' says 38-year-old Vaidya. Both Narayanan and Sherwani started taking an active interest in Balendu after he reportedly cured some of their friends and relatives.Balendu claims to have cured over 100 blood cancer patients with his metal therapy. His patients vouch for him. ``Balendu's successful treatment gave us a ray of hope. We brought our son to Dehra Dun and the Vaidya cured him of cancer using his Rasayana formulation,'' says Capt Farhad Sayeed Khan and his wife Nusrat. The Pakistani couple's two-and-half-year-old son Absar was suffering from acute mega karyoblastic leukaemia when he was brought to the Vaidya in '88.The couple had taken their son to a London hospital the year before. ``Doctors there told us that he would survive for a certain period if made to undergo a blood transfusion. But they also warned us that he was too weak to undergo a transfusion,'' recollect the couple. Now 12, Absar is declared to be in ``perfect health''. ``We never gave him allopathic medicines and continue to give him the vegetarian diet suggested by Vaidya,'' says Nusrat.But Balendu is not satisfied with his success. ``I want my cancer treatment to be recognised by the Government so that I will be able to get assistance from Government institutions for standardising the Rasayana formulations,'' he says. The present Rasayana formulation is crudely prepared using an old process. This may be effective for one patient while it may not affect the other, he adds.According to Balendu, the Health Ministry sent two fact-finding teams to test the efficacy of his treatment. The '96 team reportedly noted: ``After having discussed the pros and cons of the cases dealt by Vaidya Balendu Prakash, members of the committee are of the opinion that there is enough data to go ahead with the study''.Despite that encouraging note, Balendu met with little success in the Ministry. ``While one of the officials refused to recognise me as a Vaidya because I was not wearing a dhoti, another bluntly told me that I was not a scientist. Yet another top official told me to jump out of the window and commit suicide if I was so frustrated with the Government's apathy,'' he alleges.Finally, last December, he followed Narayanan's suggestion and started the Cancer Research and Pharmacological Laboratory here with the aid of funds from well-wishers. ``In the absence of the required funds, I am constrained to make metal compounds by the same crude traditional methods,'' he says.
