Eleonore Thun-Hohenstein WHO’S AFRAID OF A CURE FOR CANCER?
Congresses, Successes and Dirty Tricks
Parallel to all the harassment good news was also coming in. The news that cancer patients reacted surprisingly well to Ukrain had slowly begun to spread through international specialist circles. As a result, Nowicky was invited more and more frequently to relevant medical congresses.
The first time he spoke in front of international cancer specialists was at the 13th International Chemotherapy Congress in Vienna in 1983. It was not, however, at the request of the Vienna medical community but at the invitation of the World Health Organization (WHO), the sponsor of the congress. Nowicky was nominated as a speaker and subsequently invited to a world congress in Cairo the following year.
In May 1984, at the invitation of the president of the Italian Pharmacological Society, Nowicky spoke in front of 500 cancer researchers from all over the world about cancer cases in which sometimes spectacular cures had been achieved. Nowicky was promptly invited to an enormous congress with 4,000 participants on Rhodes in October of the same year by the president of the Greek Chemotherapy Society, George K. Daikos.
In the meantime, there
were now hundreds of case reports from
In order to put a stop to the numerous ‘spontaneous cures’ in Austria, in 1986 the Ministry of Health began sending out edicts forbidding the use of Ukrain in order to intimidate doctors who were prepared to use it.
At the suggestion of Professor Ingeborg Eichler, Dr. Werner Brüller from the Federal Institute of Experimental Pharmacology investigated the effect of Ukrain on oxygen consumption in cancer cells and confirmed what was already known – that Ukrain causes a significant increase in oxygen consumption and thereby brings about the death of cancer cells. He was initially enthusiastic and then, as Nowicky noticed, suddenly lost interest. Later, however, the Ministry of Science persuaded him to deliver a report for a special edition of ‘Drugs Under Research’ sponsored by the research department. There he also wrote that further tests should be undertaken to confirm the destructive effect of Ukrain on cancer cells while leaving healthy cells undamaged. His contribution concluded, ‘No toxic symptoms have been found in normal cells after Ukrain administration, not even at doses around one thousand times higher than the normal dose.’
It was thereby confirmed by an independent specialist that Ukrain had no kind of toxic side effects. However, proof of this was still demanded by the registration authorities as grounds for refusing registration.
Professor Eichler, the predecessor of official expert witness Pittner, who submitted negative reports on Ukrain to the ministry, wanted to test cell cultures very early on but then, as Nowicky remembers today, she ‘suddenly had difficulties’ and gave up.
In a conversation on 1 April 1998, she could no longer remember this. Only that Nowicky was extremely difficult and mistrustful and that he did not make it easy even for people who wanted to help him. Nowicky also says now that it was she who gave him the advice to register Ukrain as a homeopathic drug because the step to conventional medicine was easier from there. However, today Eichler believes it was extremely unlikely that she gave him this advice and that Nowicky must have misunderstood.
Whatever: ‘It was very good advice. I only understood that later,’ is Nowicky’s comment.
In the following period it seemed that a secret ban had been put on Ukrain, that even research into its mechanism of action should be stopped. It also did not help much that a particularly interesting case found its way to the then Minister of Science and later speaker of the Austrian parliament, Heinz Fischer. It was a patient suffering from a melanoma, a specially malignant fast-growing form of cancer, who was in the Rudolfinerhaus hospital in Vienna and who doctors had given only a few weeks to live since melanin had already been found in his urine, a sign that the cancer was far advanced. No remissions had been heard of at this stage.
Professor Peter Wodnianski, who had been brought in as a skin specialist, was so impressed with the results of Ukrain treatment that in June 1984 he wrote to the Minister of Science. After the introductory case report he wrote:
‘During the course of the following nine months I saw Mr. R.I. several times and examined him. He gives the impression of being healthy – or cured. This extraordinary result – life expectancy of melanoma patients who excrete melanin in their urine can rarely be counted in months – has impressed me so much that I wish to support the application for further funding.’
The ‘postoperative record without pathological findings’ from the hospital on 13 June 1984 stated coolly:
‘The cyst growth described at the last examination on 13 March 1984 could not be seen at today’s examination.’
The fact that, thanks to Ukrain, an initially inoperable tumour became operable and no metastases could be detected and particularly that a moribund patient who had been given up by the doctors gave the impression of being ‘healthy’ or ‘cured’ had no influence on the ban or prevention of Ukrain.
At that time, it had already been proven that Ukrain accumulates between healthy and malignant tissue and that its autofluorescence allows the limits of a tumour and surrounding healthy tissue to be seen.
Furthermore, it had also been demonstrated that Ukrain caused a reduction in tumour tissue and metastases without all those disadvantages for patients caused by the side effects of conventional cytostatica. One did not have to be afraid of damage to normal cells or mucous membrane or of hair loss. There was also no intolerance. Various reports from researchers abroad had confirmed that under the influence of Ukrain the oxygen consumption of cells increased significantly but that it returned to normal levels in healthy cells within fifteen minutes but that cancer cells stopped ‘breathing’ during this time and died.
Was that not exactly what so many researchers had been looking for? In the documentation supplied to the Ministry of Science this fact was emphasised: ‘This specific pharmacological effect on malignant cells has not been described for any other substance in the literature.’
This documentation was, of course, also known at the Ministry of Health and in the best local tradition of the playwright Nestroy, was ‘not even ignored’.
Dr. Norbert Rozsenich, head of the research department at the Ministry of Trade was the only person interested in promoting the promising new cancer drug and did not leave the researcher in the lurch and smoothed paths for him as far as possible. However, the Ministry of Health was solely responsible for the registration of the drug and, until now, their strategy had been merely defensive.
When my second article on Ukrain was published in the Wochenpresse on 27 November 1984, the Austrian medical association reacted by initiating disciplinary proceedings against doctors named in the article. However, it was interesting that this was only against general practitioners. This ‘representative organization’ did not dare to attack Professor Wodnianski. Finally agreement was reached between the doctors and the disciplinary committee that the general practitioners could not have known that statements made to me during my research would appear in print. A logical twist that one would not expect of the university-educated. The only point of decisive significance would have been to investigate why Ukrain was effective with some patients, a fact that could be ascertained after the first injections, and why it had no effect on other patients.
The Viennese general practitioner, Dr. Thomas Kroiss, who treated ‘mainly patients in advanced stages of disease where conventional medicine had been unsuccessful’, had already confirmed this phenomenon at the time with half of his patients, but also that remissions were achieved even in such advanced cases. Professor Wodnianski emphasized that a precise investigation would only be possible at the University Clinic.
However, this was a closed door from the beginning.
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