Declan Hammond writes in the current issue of SPEKTRUM: “Completely regardless of the prognosis or of the medical improbability of a fatal outcome – as soon as the word ‘cancer’ is mentioned, the patient thinks of their mortality.” Not only is the patient confronted with their own finitude, but so are doctors, family and friends. Cancer treatment is therefore not only a medical but also a human and personal challenge.
SPEKTRUM shows an impressive range of complementary and individual treatment options that give hope. Jean-Lionel Bagot seeks to relieve the suffering caused by the diagnosis, the disease and the side-effects of therapy; his approach is palliative. Anne Schadde, by contrast, focuses on the inner transformation that can make healing or at least “temporary miracles” possible. Sujit Chatterjee and Sunirmal Sarkar concentrate on the current symptoms and treat layer by layer. Alok and Aditya Pareek consistently follow Hahnemann’s guidelines for the treatment of chronic diseases even in cancer. Dietmar Payrhuber and Christiane Kernstock are guided to the homeopathic remedy by the psychodynamics of cancer patients, by life themes and by personality structure.
In many cases patients seek homeopathic help alongside conventional treatment with surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and radiotherapy. Besides treating side-effects, the aim is to strengthen the vital force, which is equally weakened by disease and therapy. Here homeopathy can compensate for the inherent deficits of modern oncology. Our authors show in many examples how to proceed in such cases, and they emphasise the importance of distinguishing between this complementary approach and an exclusively homeopathic treatment. The latter often comes into play only when patients are considered 'out of options' by conventional medicine. A number of case reports on very different types of cancer demonstrate the effectiveness of homeopathy even in seemingly hopeless situations. That this is not the rule, however, Jens Wurster knows after 15 years of inpatient treatment of cancer patients at the Swiss Clinica Santa Croce. He realistically describes his personal development towards an individual, stage-appropriate treatment free from theoretical constructs. Acute or organotropic remedies are often Wurster’s starting point today, before he reaches the constitutional level.
Similarly pragmatic approaches are described by many authors, encouraging colleagues who have so far been reluctant to treat cancer patients in their homeopathic practice. For hardly any other diagnosis are so many different methods of homeopathy applied simultaneously or in succession. Precisely because – despite established indications for certain cancers – there is no standard homeopathic therapy, SPEKTRUM with this issue aims to present diverse suggestions for an individual approach to the subject.
