Chapter 16: Radium as a Cure for Cancer
Many physicians have asked my opinion concerning the curative effects of radium on cancer. This remedy was at one time lauded as a specific for cancer. Some doctors claimed great things from the local use of this remedy in this disease. A good many cases of cancer have come under my observation where radium had been tried and proved a failure. Our Homeopathic friends are testing it in health and disease to find the real piece for it in their materia medica and therapeutics. When they give us a clear cut indication for the remedy in the internal treatment of cancer, we shall come to a better understanding of what this medicine will absolutely do in cancer. Personally I want to test the remedy in my own way. I want to find out the true indications for its use in cancer (if it has any). I want to test it in a variety of cases to find out what particular form of cancer it is best adapted to. All this will take time. So far I have not been greatly impressed with its curative effect as an internal remedy for cancer. Later on I shall be better able to give a decided opinion as to what I think it will actually do for cancer.
Some of our doctors, when they find that a certain remedy seems to cure one or two cases of cancer, rush into print and tell us in the Medical Journals that they have found a cure for cancer. If they knew anything at all about the treatment of cancer they would know that there can never be found a specific cure for cancer in ALL its forms; such a thing would be impossible and the worst form of quackery is for any doctor to pretend that he has found such a remedy. Cancer in different parts of the body requires a different remedy and treatment. The rational treatment of cancer is to be able to adapt your remedies to the disease in each particular patient, wherever you may find it existing in the human body. When you can do that, clear reader, you can cure cancer.
Every day, almost, we read in startling headlines in the daily press of some doctor (heretofore unknown to fame) who has discovered a cure for cancer. Truly a wonderful discovery! But do not get excited over it, for I remember that over ONE HUNDRED remedies have been EXPLOITED as a cure for cancer, within the last forty years; they are now obsolete and numbered among the "has beens."
As long as the regular school stick to that old chestnut that cancer is a local disease they will never find a cure for cancer. Meanwhile I am curing eighty per cent of my cases of cancer by treating it as the local manifestation of a constitutional disease, as I was taught to do forty-five years ago.
