00:00Let's move on now.
00:01Comedian Rahul Dua is in news for his comments on chemotherapy.
00:06And the entire medical fraternity is not amused.
00:09They are not laughing.
00:11And before I get into his comments, everything,
00:13we need to understand this,
00:14that we are not saying at any point,
00:16or we are not supporting cancer culture,
00:18but somebody's personal experience with cancer treatment
00:22with what worked for their body,
00:24well, that's theirs.
00:25It's individual.
00:26It doesn't scale.
00:27It was never meant to.
00:30Having understood that,
00:31let me just tell you what the entire controversy is all about.
00:35The exact problem with what Rahul Dua put out is this.
00:39He took something that sits in his personal experience bucket
00:42and sold it like universal truth.
00:44That's the line.
00:45And once you cross it on a subject like cancer,
00:49doctor verified stops being optional.
00:51So today we are not doing outrage or even outrage sake.
00:54We are doing a fact check that he himself had skipped.
00:57Claim number one.
00:59Let's talk about that.
01:00That is made by Dua.
01:01Dua frames immunotherapy as a better farmer suppressed alternative to chemo.
01:06He says it's cheap, ignored and a 50 rupees fix companies won't push
01:11because there's no money in it.
01:14Now, what exactly is he talking about?
01:16Here's the actual medicine.
01:17Immunotherapy and chemotherapy aren't rivals.
01:20They're different tools for different jobs.
01:22Chemo kills faster, dividing cells directly.
01:25Immunotherapy trains the patient's own immune system to go after the cancer cell.
01:29Immunotherapy isn't universally better, remember.
01:32It works well for maybe 15 to 20% of patients who get it
01:35and it's approval for specific cancers,
01:38certain lung, skin, blood, kidney, bladder, head to neck kind of cancers.
01:42It is not approved or effective for most cases of prostate, colon or even breast cancer,
01:48some of the most common cancers that there are.
01:50Then there is the eligibility issue.
01:52Eligibility depends on cancer type, the stage, the biomarker testing,
01:56all of that, kidney function, even genetics.
01:59There is no in medicine.
02:02There is no one size fits all.
02:05Better option, oncologists choose per patient, not per the ideology.
02:10Then there was the claim about the 50 rupee cure buried by the farmer,
02:15framing it as the oldest trick in the misinformation book.
02:18It doesn't require Dua to prove anything really.
02:21It just requires you to distrust the system and that's not medicine,
02:24that's just narrative device.
02:26And this is the part that should worry you, honestly, because it's not new.
02:29It's a recycled myth with a body count of bad decisions behind it.
02:33The drug in question over here is Fen-Bendozile,
02:38a veterinary anti-parasite, sold for drops and, you know, sold for cattle, horses, dogs as well.
02:46The story traces back to one man and we dug it up.
02:50Joe Tepins, the American with small cell lung cancer,
02:54who in 2019 claimed that the dog D. Verma cured him.
02:57It went viral, especially in South Korea,
03:00where patients started self-medicating with it.
03:03Now, what actually happened is a story that most people have never heard about.
03:07While this man was taking this deworming tablet,
03:12he was also simultaneously enrolled in a clinical trial for Keytruda,
03:17a real approved immunotherapy drug known to produce traumatic remissions in lung cancer.
03:24Nobody can separate what the deworm, you know, did from what the actual cancer drug did.
03:30And that's not the cure story.
03:32That's a confound.
03:34Since then, no completed human clinical trials exist for this particular deworming tablet
03:41to prove that it has any link in helping cancer treatment.
03:44Lap, dishes, mice is, yes.
03:47Some anti-cancer activity also, yes.
03:49But in humans, zero control data.
03:52The U.S. National Cancer Institute has said it has no evidence supporting the claim
03:56and the FDA has never approved it for this use.
03:58So when Doha repeats a version of this, saying it's cheap, it's hidden,
04:03they don't want you to know he's not, you know, being edgy or contrarian.
04:09He's reheating a five-year-old piece of health misinformation
04:12that has already caused real patients to self-medicate with veterinary drugs
04:16instead of alongside actual oncology care.
04:20And, you know, that's where things begin to get really tricky
04:23because unlike the dewormer, there's real kernel of science buried in it.
04:28And that's exactly what makes it dangerous when it gets oversimplified.
04:32The internet is not happy.
04:33Doctors are not happy with the comments of Doha.
04:37Abby Phillips, known as Liver Doc, went online,
04:41mocked Doha's version of it directly, paraphrasing his logic
04:43as something like, sulphur binds it, kills it.
04:46There was a full footage that went viral.
04:49Some garbled diet explanation, he says,
04:51for how food supposedly takes out cancer cells.
04:56And here's where things get really complicated
05:00because in the same podcast,
05:02Doha went on to talk about certain vegetables
05:06that help in cancer cure.
05:10And this is where it's actually real
05:13and when it stops being, you know,
05:15just some information floating around
05:17because yes, there are certain vegetables
05:20like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts
05:23that do contain sulphur-based components
05:26and even compounds which break down into things like sulphate
05:30and sort of, you know, when you chop it or chew them,
05:34all of these compounds genuinely have been studied
05:37for anti-cancer activity.
05:40But in animal models,
05:42some population studies link higher intake of these vegetables
05:45to modestly lower risk of certain cancers,
05:48particularly colon, lung and prostate.
05:50Now, that's chemo prevention research, not a cure.
05:56Very important to get the difference between the two.
05:58It's about long-term risk reduction in general population
06:02at the Population Study Devil.
06:04It is not evidence that eating broccoli treats
06:07or reverses cancer someone already has.
06:10Bodies like cancer research in UK,
06:12US National Cancer Institute explicitly say on this
06:15that no food, you can call it super or whatever,
06:19or otherwise, treats cancer on its own.
06:22And there's no clinical trial showing a particular vegetable,
06:25sulphur diet substitute for oncology care.
06:29It is the same pattern, if you'll remember,
06:31as Navjot Singh seduced turmeric, neem, lemon water claim
06:33for his wife's cancer last year.
06:36A real anti-inflammation ingredient.
06:37Yes, stretched for maybe help as part of a balanced diet,
06:42not beat cancer.
06:44There's a difference.
06:46Tata Memorial Oncologist,
06:47who actually treated her in this entire story,
06:49had publicly corrected her on this one.
06:52So the honest version for this segment is this.
06:55Dua over here is not making it up from nothing.
06:59He's taking a real published area of nutrition research,
07:01skipping the 15 qualifiers,
07:03and that say it's separate shows, promise in lab studies,
07:07from will treat your tumour.
07:08That gap is exactly where people get hurt.
07:11Someone delays or maybe skips real treatment
07:13because they think the diet alone is doing the job.
07:16So this is the problem that we have with the story.
07:19And we really hope Dua does rectify it
07:21because all three of these things that he said put together,
07:26it's not that Dua as a comedian
07:30should not be talking about cancer.
07:32Of course he can.
07:32Comedians can talk about anything.
07:34It's that he wrapped a personal anecdote structure
07:37around claims he pitched as suppressed medical truth.
07:40That's the exact inversion of what doctor verified content
07:44is supposed to really protect against.
07:46And we really hope that not just him,
07:49celebrities all over who propagate a certain diet,
07:52a certain drug, a certain doctor,
07:55or perhaps in certain cases a cure,
07:57a magic cure or a superfood cure,
07:59are really able to differentiate between what is personal,
08:03what works for everybody,
08:03and take responsibility for the space
08:06and the influence that they command.
