Homeopathy : Beyond the boundaries of treating disease

 

Dr Parulkar moderating the talk

Dr Shreepad Khadekar with IAS Presient Dilip Dalal

Today Indo American Society, Bombay  invited Dr. Shreepad Khedekar  for a talk on homeopathay.  Dr Khedekar  is MD in homeopathy and he has done  significant research in the field.  Khedekar’s talk   was significant because it was moderated by renowned heart specialist Dr Parulkar, who had been Director of KEM Hospital as well as Medical Council.

Khedekar runs a chain of homeopathy clinics under umbrella of Imperial Clinics. Initially, the thought of curing people around the world, especially using Homeopathy, had not occurred to him while he sat in awe listening to commentators compare the skills of Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. But as they say, life works in mysterious ways and Khadeker experienced this at medical school, when he found himself awed by a wholesome science called Homeopathy. 

He started his private practice soon after his Master’s degree. But that wasn’t nearly enough to satiate his hunger for knowledge. A new path soon led him into the world of research. He worked  to understand Homeopathy’s relation to genetics. The result was his first book, ‘ACSOTROM: a comparative study of the rubrics of MIND’ a compilation of all the mind rubrics from repertory with their most indicated remedies and their comparison. A second book, RUBRICS AND MIASMS followed shortly. Dr. Khedekhar has also authored two other books - NUCLEUS OF GENETIC CONSTITUTION and NUCLEUS focusing on the genetics from the perspective of homeopathy.

But he always thought to himself, “What good is knowledge if it isn’t freely shared with the world?” Sure, seminars help. Sure, talks and workshops help. But to his mind, what practitioners needed was a school that would groom them for the real world. A school that would help them tackle any medical case – from the known to the unknown. From the diagnosed to the undiagnosed. From the curable to the so called incurable. 

According to Khedekar, Genes influence a person’s appearance, characteristics and their susceptibility to disease. They can even help archaeologists identify long lost kings. Rapid advances in DNA sequencing are providing scientists with the ability to explore the human genome, or genetic code, in more detail. This is leading to new discoveries about the genetic causes of human disease and new ways to improve our health.

Khedekar says that in 1948, the World Health Organization  defined Health as ‘A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. But when you think about it, most physicians today have barely begun to understand this definition, much less put it into practice.  Because the healthcare sector’s focus still remains physical wellbeing. Which in turn means that doctors only treat physical symptoms. And that remains a far cry from ‘curing’ an illness.

As far back as 1796, a man named Samuel Hahnemann who was MD in Allopathy,  came up with concept of Homeopathy. He had a vision of a medicinal world that would not just curb and control illnesses, but cure them completely. At the heart of the homeopathic philosophy lies a simple interpretation:  Diseases occurwhen the body’s internal ‘life force’ or vital energy is disturbed. In other words, a negative state of mind attracts negative energies into the body and produces symptoms of diseases. How then does homeopathy cure these diseases? How does it help the body’s internal energy get back on track? By using animal, plant, mineral and other substances in its remedies. These substances are then diluted with distilled water and sent through a process called ‘succussion’. This process activates the vital energies trapped in the substances. With the consumption of these medicines, a patient’s mind and body absorb the vital energies and get on to the path of recovery. With no side effects. With no harmful chemicals. And with remedies that eradicate the illness altogether.

Dr Khedekar feels that the focus of research in medical science should now be about  genome and protein .

 Most cells of the body contain the same genome, but they assume different functional roles because of the genes they transcribe. Gene transcription in each cell is controlled by the epigenome, and each cell type contains a different epigenome. Two talks discussed what information transcription factors use to determine which genes they regulate  and how the three-dimensional architecture of the genome determines which genes can interact   Other talks described changes in DNA methylation patterns that were dependent on factors such as age, tissue, disease states such as cancer, and the location within the three-dimensional architecture of the genome. In many cases, the effects of these changes on gene expression were unclear. However, in some cases the changes had unambiguous consequences for gene expression and could therefore be predictive of, for example, cancer phenotypes.

Cancer is unlike most other diseases in that the genome itself is dynamic and changes during disease progression. Genomics can provide a window on the clonality of cancer lineages and the heterogeneity within tumors . These intensive genomics and systems biology efforts are also being applied in the treatment of cancer. Genome-wide methods were used to identify the right target, choose the right drug, and will ultimately be used to find the right patients (those with compatible genetics). A critical component of these efforts was the assay system. In developing inhibitors to the oncoprotein NRAS in melanoma, Lynda Chin of Anderson Cancer Center, USA, took the perspective that cells in a real tumor behave quite differently from cells in a culture dish or xenograft. The most informative pre-clinical assays need to recapitulate the many facets of cancer in a person, such as a mouse model in which tumors arise endogenously from an inducible NRas gene. There are other researchers  who used cancer cell lines, but a lot of them. Nine hundred cell lines that had been carefully characterized genetically and transcriptionally were assayed to identify factors controlling their susceptibility or resistance to 480 chemical compounds at 16 different concentrations. A subset of interesting cases was further screened against a library of 30,000 compounds. From these studies emerged a wealth of provocative hypotheses. Genomic information could be used not just to understand or diagnose disease but to actually improve upon the treatments of today, truly moving us towards the goals that lie beyond the genome. 

So it is a very exciting area in which Dr Khedekar has started working !