Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Body and Soul | Wed, May 19 2010, 9:11 AM

Body And Soul News

The underdogs, people who have nothing to lose, tend to rise up and become dark horses.

In the battle against cancer, social welfare worker Ala Sulistyono and businessman Murray Clapham would have been considered the underdogs, with doctors estimating they had 6 to 8 months to live. 

Ala, who was diagnosed with stage 3 liver cancer on August 2008, said that the only available choice of treatment was chemotherapy, “Not as a cure. It was palliative, to help extend my life”. Meanwhile, Clapham, who has suffered from cancer for 12 years, was in a bad condition last year and confined to a wheelchair.

Having nothing to lose made them more open and willing to shift from the mainstream Western cancer treatment of chemotherapy. 

“I did not want to go down that road [chemotherapy] because I have witnessed a friend who had chemo and experienced horrendous side effects and who in the end, died,” 59-year-old Ala said in an email interview.

She then tried the balur treatment, developed by a doctor named Greta Zahar based in East Jakarta. 

According to balur.com, the balur method is a detoxifying process that reduced harmful mercury and metal particles in the body into nano-sized particles using specially treated cigarettes called “divine” cigarettes. The cigarettes, according to bimolecular scientist who has researched the cigarettes Sutiman B. Sumitro, can make mercury radicals undetectable and the smoke is milder, odorless, deodorant and safe.

The patient’s skin is rubbed to open the pores. The body is then covered in smoke so it enters the pores. Patients also smoke during treatment. 

Ala said that she was skeptical at the beginning. Her first reaction to the alternative method was: “Yeah right, cigarette smoke!”

Ala, quit smoking 23 years ago and did not want to smoke again. However, she said, “At that time I was in a very, very bad way and I really did not think that I had much to lose by following this ‘strange’ therapy”.

“Initially the therapy was rather overwhelming, not very pleasant but without side effects and I heavily relied on my family,” she said. 

Ala said that her health slowly improved. “Over the past 21 months, I have had regular blood tests and CT scans to both monitor the effectiveness of balur therapy and for documentation. My results have been very good and to see me today, you would never guess that I am fighting cancer,” she said. 

Ala said that Clapham heard about her progress and decided to undergo the therapy.

“I have improved a lot. I would not say I’m cured. I am much, much better than I was and many things that were wrong with me have been cured,” Clapham said recently.

Ever since his treatment and improved health, Clapham has been an advocate for “healthy smoking”. An opinion piece he wrote published in this paper evoked a flurry of responses, one was suspicious it was smoking propaganda. 

Clapham said that the idea was easily crushed. He said that its science had a lot of linear logic. “Doctor Greta’s practice is a factory of new ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid of new ideas,” he said.

“The clinic here in Jakarta where I went, remarkable as it is, has not received much recognition,” he said. Clapham said that the people who rub patients’ body were not skilled physicians.

Greta herself, he said, was eccentric and she might not be able to present the idea in a way that people would respond. 

Ala said that when she first began treatment her friends thought that she was crazy. However, when friends saw results they were impressed, she said.

“A couple of friends came from Australia to see me after I was diagnosed and now, even though they are anti-smoking, they were amazed at the results. Now when people ask me about balur I tell them my journey. Their reaction is of surprise, probably disbelief, but they see the results so they eventually say, ‘whatever works’,” she said. 

Ala said that there has been much conflicting information, even regarding medical research, and people still did not know the answers. “I am a testament to that,” she said.

Ala said that she was responsible for the decisions she made concerning her health.

“It has been important for me to monitor the results with blood tests and CT scans. I have continued with balur because I have had positive, measurable results. The therapy is working.”

Ever since his treatment and improved health, Clapham has been an advocate for “healthy smoking”.

See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/05/19/improved-health-cancer-sufferer-testament-balur-treatment.html#sthash.HjbSCfJy.dpuf

Improved health in cancer
sufferer testament to balur
treatment

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Body and Soul | Wed, May 19 2010, 9:11 AM

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The underdogs, people who have nothing to lose, tend to rise up and become dark horses.
In the battle against cancer, social welfare worker Ala Sulistyono and businessman Murray Clapham would have been considered the underdogs, with doctors estimating they had 6 to 8 months to live.
Ala, who was diagnosed with stage 3 liver cancer on August 2008, said that the only available choice of treatment was chemotherapy, “Not as a cure. It was palliative, to help extend my life”. Meanwhile, Clapham, who has suffered from cancer for 12 years, was in a bad condition last year and confined to a wheelchair.
Having nothing to lose made them more open and willing to shift from the mainstream Western cancer treatment of chemotherapy.
“I did not want to go down that road [chemotherapy] because I have witnessed a friend who had chemo and experienced horrendous side effects and who in the end, died,” 59-year-old Ala said in an email interview.
She then tried the balur treatment, developed by a doctor named Greta Zahar based in East Jakarta.
According to balur.com, the balur method is a detoxifying process that reduced harmful mercury and metal particles in the body into nano-sized particles using specially treated cigarettes called “divine” cigarettes. The cigarettes, according to bimolecular scientist who has researched the cigarettes Sutiman B. Sumitro, can make mercury radicals undetectable and the smoke is milder, odorless, deodorant and safe.
The patient’s skin is rubbed to open the pores. The body is then covered in smoke so it enters the pores. Patients also smoke during treatment.
Ala said that she was skeptical at the beginning. Her first reaction to the alternative method was: “Yeah right, cigarette smoke!”
Ala, quit smoking 23 years ago and did not want to smoke again. However, she said, “At that time I was in a very, very bad way and I really did not think that I had much to lose by following this ‘strange’ therapy”.
“Initially the therapy was rather overwhelming, not very pleasant but without side effects and I heavily relied on my family,” she said.
Ala said that her health slowly improved. “Over the past 21 months, I have had regular blood tests and CT scans to both monitor the effectiveness of balur therapy and for documentation. My results have been very good and to see me today, you would never guess that I am fighting cancer,” she said.
Ala said that Clapham heard about her progress and decided to undergo the therapy.
“I have improved a lot. I would not say I’m cured. I am much, much better than I was and many things that were wrong with me have been cured,” Clapham said recently.
Ever since his treatment and improved health, Clapham has been an advocate for “healthy smoking”. An opinion piece he wrote published in this paper evoked a flurry of responses, one was suspicious it was smoking propaganda.
Clapham said that the idea was easily crushed. He said that its science had a lot of linear logic. “Doctor Greta’s practice is a factory of new ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid of new ideas,” he said.
“The clinic here in Jakarta where I went, remarkable as it is, has not received much recognition,” he said. Clapham said that the people who rub patients’ body were not skilled physicians.
Greta herself, he said, was eccentric and she might not be able to present the idea in a way that people would respond.
Ala said that when she first began treatment her friends thought that she was crazy. However, when friends saw results they were impressed, she said.
“A couple of friends came from Australia to see me after I was diagnosed and now, even though they are anti-smoking, they were amazed at the results. Now when people ask me about balur I tell them my journey. Their reaction is of surprise, probably disbelief, but they see the results so they eventually say, ‘whatever works’,” she said.
Ala said that there has been much conflicting information, even regarding medical research, and people still did not know the answers. “I am a testament to that,” she said.
Ala said that she was responsible for the decisions she made concerning her health.
“It has been important for me to monitor the results with blood tests and CT scans. I have continued with balur because I have had positive, measurable results. The therapy is working.”
Ever since his treatment and improved health, Clapham has been an advocate for “healthy smoking”.

- See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/05/19/improved-health-cancer-sufferer-testament-balur-treatment.html#sthash.HjbSCfJy.dpuf

Researcher Pumps Tobacco Smoke Onto Child's Skin

MALANG, Indonesia , Sept 7, 2011 By JON MEYERSOHN via 20/20

 

At a clinic in East Java, a 3-year-old boy named Satrio lies on a medical table, squirming. His father holds him and his mother looks on as a technician blows tobacco smoke through a small tube onto the boy's skin.

Satrio, whose parents say he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is part of a controversial study by Sutiman Bambang Sumitro, a molecular biology professor at the University of Brawijaya in Malang, Indonesia. 

Sutiman and his colleagues believe that tobacco can be manipulated to treat illnesses, including cancer.

It has been decades since anyone in the U.S. proclaimed any possible health benefits from smoking. Thousands of international studies show tobacco is addictive and harmful to health. The World Health Organization says tobacco kills about half its users, or more than 5 million people annually. Even tobacco manufacturers have admitted smoking is dangerous and addictive. 

But visit Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, and it can often seem like stepping into a time warp. In this sprawling archipelago of more than 245 million, there are an estimated 60 million smokers, and the number has been rising in recent years, including among those under the age of 15. An estimated 60 percent of men in Indonesia smoke. 

"20/20" visited Sutiman's headquarters, a spare laboratory on the University of Brawijaya's campus and watched as he conducted an experiment. His lab assistants pumped cigarette smoke into a small glass tank containing about a half dozen white mice. The mice breathed in the smoke, their bodies shaking until they appear to pass out. The process would be repeated again and again over several months. The purpose: to gauge the possible healing effects of the smoke on the mice. 

If proven successful, Sutiman and several colleagues believe that the cigarettes they use, called "Divine Cigarettes," will actually have the ability to heal certain diseases in human beings. Divine Cigarettes are cigarettes made with tobacco and filters that are specially designed by the doctor and his colleagues.

Sutiman and his colleagues believe that through nanotechnology -- essentially manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale -- the harmful elements in tobacco smoke can be eliminated and the healing powers of smoke isolated. 

"Toxins can be modified to benefit health," said Sutiman. "It also is possible to eliminate free radicals to reduce health risks to smokers and passive smokers."

Dr. Gretha Zahar, an early proponent of Divine Cigarettes, has Ph.D in biochemistry. She has said that cigarette smoke helps remove mercury, which she says is the cause of cancer and other illnesses.

"Mercury is the cause of all illnesses. In my [Divine] cigarettes , there are scavengers that extract the mercury from the body," she said. 

Their work makes Western scientists like Jin Zhang cringe.

"There is not a lot of science here. It is very scary…one would never be able to do this in the U.S.," said Zhang, a professor of chemistry at the University of Washington.

Zhang said he could not conceive of any way that nanotechnology could render cigarette smoke harmless, much less enable it to cure disease.

And he dismisses Greta's claims about mercury filtering. He says mercury inside the body is "not just sitting there in the body" for to be flushed out. He said no nanotech filter can accomplish what they Sutiman and his colleagues are claiming. 

see more :  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/researcher-pumps-smoke-childs-skin/story?id=14450288

Divine cigarettes used to treat cancer

 

Many in the medical field might raise an eyebrow upon hearing that cigarette smoke can be good for one’s health, given the numerous findings relating tobacco use to an increase in  the risk of cancer.

Yet an Indonesian nanochemistry scientist is treating thousands of cancer patients in her clinic with modified cigarettes.

Seventy-one-year-old Greta Zahar, who holds a PhD in nanochemistry from the Bandung-based University of Padjadjaran, has been researching and developing specially treated cigarettes and cigarette filters, which she dubs the Divine Cigarette and Divine Filter, for more than a decade. She developed a detoxification process called balur (smear) treatment, which uses smoke from Divine Cigarettes as a conduit to capture and extract poisonous metal such as mercury from the body – a process she believes can be beneficial in treating cancer and several other diseases. 

Her clinic, Griya Balur, in East Jakarta, has treated more than 30,000 patients, mostly stage three-to-four cancer sufferers, since 1998, she said. Not all patients can be helped and not all complete the full treatment. However, there are several outstanding cases in which patients in the late stages of cancer have significantly recovered after going on the treatment.

Her findings and treatment method were noted by Malang-based molecular biologist Sutiman B. Sumitro and GP Saraswati Subagjo.

The two changed from skeptics to proponents of Divine Cigarettes and the balur treatment when their spouses recovered from cancer after undergoing treatment with Greta. Since then, they have been working on bringing the science behind the Divine Cigarette and balur treatment up to date, by founding the Free Radical Disintegration Research Center. Saraswati also opened her own balur treatment clinic called Rumah Sehat (Healthy House) in 2007 in Malang.
   

***

As expected, it is difficult to take the idea of cigarettes as medical treatment into public discourse, Sutiman said. The idea contradicted the mainstream belief that tobacco use is detrimental to health, he said. Sutiman, a non-smoker, said he needed a super computer to do the research to provide solid evidence. Research funds, however, were lacking, he said.

When Australian businessman and former diplomat Murray Clapham underwent the treatment, he wrote an opinion piece in The Jakarta Post about the possibility of specially treated cigarettes as beneficial to health.

His op-ed received a flurry of comments, mostly disagreeing with his claim and assuming that Clapham was a tobacco lobbyist. In his piece, he related Greta’s findings without specifically elaborating on them. Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald newspaper also picked up the “bizarre” claim as news.

***

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tobacco use is the single most important factor in the risk of cancer. It is responsible for 1.8 million cancer deaths per year. WHO also states that lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer – a trend that is expected to continue until 2030, unless efforts to control global tobacco are greatly intensified.

In Indonesia, a country ranked as one of the top three cigarette consumers in the world with a booming tobacco industry, around 70 percent of Indonesian men older than 20 smoke and 400,000 Indonesians die each year from smoking-related illnesses, according to the WHO. Given the harmful effects of smoking, Muhammadiyah, one of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organizations, released an edict that smoking was haram (prohibited).
 

***

The scientists explained they were not challenging the claim that commercial cigarettes were toxic.

They said they were challenging the notion that nicotine and tar had detrimental effects to people’s health. Their hypothesis is that commercial cigarettes are dangerous as they contain traces of mercury, a highly toxic metal.

Using biradical theory, Greta developed Divine Cigarettes and Divine Filters by inserting aromatic “scavengers” – substances that react with and remove particular molecules, radicals, in this case mercury. She produces her own cigarettes and filters for her clinic and has developed 38 types of cigarettes.

Greta said that mercury was safe as long as it remained in the ground, but as mining activities boomed in the 1970s more mercury rose into the air. Mercury, combined with pollution and ozone layer destruction – which creates harsher UV sunrays – becomes dangerously radioactive, she said.

Greta said that amalgam tooth fillings, containing elements of mercury, and vaccines with mercury-based thimerosal preservatives, were important factors in the risk of cancer and autism in children.

WHO has confirmed that mercury contained in dental amalgam is the greatest source of mercury vapor in non-industrialized settings, exposing the population to mercury levels significantly exceeding those set for food and air. There are two opposing views from scientists on whether mercury exposure from amalgam fillings causes health problems. One side says that there is not enough evidence to prove it and the other says it does have detrimental effects.

On thimerosal, the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety, concluded that there was currently no evidence of mercury toxicity in infants, children or adults exposed to thimerosal in vaccines.

***

The balur treatment seeks to detoxify the body of mercury, Greta said. Patients lie down on a copper table. Two clinical assistants apply oil solutions to the skin with rubbing and smacking motions to open up the pores. The assistants then fill a large rubber syringe with cigarette smoke, then cover the whole body with smoke. Then they wrap the patient in aluminum foil.

“Usually after three months of treatment, their condition significantly improves. But they still have to be careful,” she said.
 

***

At her clinic, Greta demonstrated how the smoke entered the body. She filled the rubber syringe with smoke, positioned it on her head and pushed out the smoke so it covered the skin, entering the pores.

She repeated the process on the forearm of patient Ala Sulistyono. The smoke entered Ala’s forearm and left a flaky brown residue.

Nicotine is a chemical compound that is miscible with water and easily penetrates the skin. She said that the smoke could reduce the amount of toxins inside the body into nanoscale and extract them from the body.

***

Ala, who was diagnosed with stage three liver cancer in 2008 and was given around six to eight months to live, said that her health had significantly improved after following the treatment. It has been 21 months since her diagnosis, Ala said.

She added that the process was not pleasant, but that it worked for her. She continues to have blood tests and CT scans to document her improvement and she sends the results to Sutiman in Malang.

***

Lung specialist from the University of Indonesia Ahmad Hudoyo said that new breakthroughs in medical treatment should undergo evidence-based research. He said that they needed to be experimented with on animals and cell cultures before being tried on humans. “If there is no evidence, doctors cannot suggest it,” he said. “What’s important is the research should be transparent and be reviewed by other scientists,” he said. 
 

Sutiman aims to undertake more research on Divine Cigarettes and its possible health benefits, as well as seek funding. He said that long and thorough research, as well as much more evidence was needed before they could publish their findings in international science journals for peer-review. 

Greta, however, was not interested in seeking acknowledgment from international scientists. She said the findings in her 13-year PhD research on bi-radical development had not been given any consideration.

“I say that’s a waste of time [seeking acknowledgement from international scientists],” she said. “What’s my purpose? I want to help people. Do I need to announce that everywhere?

“Do we need proof from abroad that this country is special? If people consider you as tempeh, that’s good enough,” she said, lashing out on the Western medical sector’s perception of Indonesian scientists.

“Pak [Su]Timan has assumed a role the international community will accept,” she said of Sutiman’s approach. She said that she only laughed when she heard Clapham wrote an op-ed that provoked many comments. “I say to him, ‘Take that!’ but I also say ‘I am proud of you because you’re brave to set a fire.’”

(Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Feature | Wed, May 19 2010, 8:54 AM)

- See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/05/19/divine-cigarettes-used-treat-cancer.html#sthash.xoP4xWda.dpuf

Benefits of Writing and Historical Life

Civilizations come and learn civilization, of what is written by the past and can be read by the later. Science, both kasbiy (acquired knowledge) or ladunniy (perennial), can not be achieved without reading first in the broadest sense (Quraish Shihab, 95:17).

Quraish Shihab statement above, at least be one of the important reasons why we should write. Easy of access to the knowledge gained in the past by reading the writings of his day. In other words, if we want to facilitate access to knowledge grandchildren in the present, write. If you want, name and our existence historically, write.

In a workshop authorship, Asma Nadia said, that almost all the jobs in the world, if you want to be the best, requires the ability to write. Writing skills will add value to any profession or position you! (Think of a profession that does not require writing?)

Another advantage is writing can change the perspective of people. Even in history, bad writing can make a big change in the world, such as Darwin's thesis that humans came from apes. Or God is dead by Friedrich Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zaratustra a major influence on the anti-God that other philosophers. If the bad writing just a big impact, moreover if we write a good thing.

Polemics through writing will be an impact, each of which can be carefully examined and look for the source of the argument, and tend to be open to input. Reducing the things that are emotional and uncontrolled, also through writing.

Hopefully the opinion of Dr. Pennebaker wrote the following about the benefits, the more convinced us to write: writing can clear the mind, overcoming trauma, help acquire and remember new information, solve problems, and write freely help us when forced to write.

And so do feminist from Morocco, said "try to write every day. Undoubtedly, your skin will be refreshed due to the content of its incredible! ". Happy reading and writing. Hopefully more and be useful for fellow beings. Ameen.

* taken from Paper the Seminar and Workshop Authorship National Language in the Hall MAN Model Makassar, presented on January 15, 2011, organized by the CEC in order Anniversary-5.