Calcutta, Feb. 26 :    Calcutta, Feb. 26:  'I saw my mother undergo chemotherapy... That's the last thing I will go through.' Driven by this fear, a young nurse at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, insisted on a 'precautionary mastectomy' to shut out the possibility of suffering breast cancer like her mother... 'He is like a vegetable... The entire family used to revolve around him, but now we've lost everything. We don't know where the next meal will come from.' That's how the 14-year-old son in a south Calcutta home summed up the fate of a family, where the sole bread-earner is afflicted with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy... These images of deep despair - 'caused as much by the nature of the disease as that of the prescribed cure' - have haunted two doctors in two parts of the world. Prasanta Banerji, a third-generation homoeopath, who has been treating cancer patients in his south Calcutta chamber for the past four decades. Sen Pathak, a geneticist and professor of cancer biology and laboratory medicine in the US, has been working with the 'largest cancer centre in the world' for the past 30 years. Now, the two are ready to make public 'a novel treatment for human brain cancer', with the 'homoeopathic means' used by Banerji having been given a 'scientific method' by Sen Pathak and his team, led by Dr Asha S. Multani at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. The conclusion, after extensive laboratory research over two years covering 15 case-studies, is that 'unlike the popular chemotherapy, which induces death of both cancerous and normal cells, the homoeopathic medicine induces cell deaths in brain cancer cells and proliferation in normal peripheral blood lymphocytes'. The summation of the work to be published this summer - either in a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research or the British Journal of Cancer - is that 'Ruta 6' (isolated from the perennial plant Ruta graveolens) has been found to show regression in brain cancers while not causing damage to live and normal cells'. 'Dr Banerji's treatment, which has now found a scientific mechanism, could well present us with the first real alternative to chemotherapy that we all have been waiting for. This could have a tremendous impact... I have seen the effect of chemotherapy for years. It's so painful for a doctor to put a patient through all that,' says Sen Pathak. Going by the yet-to-be-publicised findings, of the seven patients with glioma treated by Dr Banerji, 'six showed complete regression and the other showed partial regression; of two patients with astrocytoma, both showed complete regression; of three patients with meningioma, two showed prolonged arrest of their tumours and the third, complete regression. One patient each with crainiopharyngioma and pituitary tumours showed complete regression and the only patient with neurinoma is in prolonged arrest of her tumour'. Although the number of cases chosen for the laboratory tests was relatively small, the 'outcome of homoeopathic treatment was highly significant', says Sen Pathak, who met the homoeopath from Calcutta in 1995 at the Fifth International Oncological Conference in Corfu, Greece, where Banerji presented a paper on brain cancer. 'I was inspired by his work and realised that what this alternative method of medicine required was a scientific method which we were happy to provide,' recounts Sen Pathak. Banerji, backed by son Pratip, feels this could be a defining moment in the growth of 'homoeopathic science'. 'We have been treating around 200 cases of brain cancer every year, for the past 30 years. Now, with laboratory tests at MD Anderson vindicating our clinical results and the National Cancer Institute and the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the US expressing keen interest, the use of homoeopathy in cancer cure should spread far and wide.' The point, says the doctor duo, is giving a cancer patient 'the legitimate choice to lead a normal life'.