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Divine cigarettes used to treat cancer
Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 05/19/2010 8:54 AM | Feature
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.

Tested: Australian businessman and former diplomat Murray Clapham (left) holds a bag of “divine filters” while researcher Saraswati looks on. JP/Nurhayati
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).


Divine smoking: Two packages of “Divine Filter” used to heal cancer patients. JP/R. Berto Wedhatama
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.

Comment of the article
By : SAMSUL RAMLI (1209204113) PBI C/II
In my opinion, I think it’s a good invention in medical world. As we had known that cigarettes are one of the most affect cancer, but beside that, cigarettes also can treat cancer. It’s seemed so impossible to be believed. We have to give praise to Greta Zahar who had found an advantage of cigarettes.
He can make the dangerous thing of causes of cancer ill to be treating the illness, and he just use the simple method to do this.And I am so amused to hear this news,
And I think it is an informative article ("Divine cigarettes used to treat cancer"), but there is no critical evaluation of the claims made. Looks like a lot of unbelievable pseudo science helped along by a tobacco industry lobbyist. Given that mercury accumulates throughout the body, especially in the kidneys and the brain, there is little chance that mercury can be removed via the skin, with or without the "Divine" cigarettes.
The good news is that provided the original source of mercury ingestion is removed, inorganic mercury will be excreted from the body anyway even without any treatment. The tragedy is that some cancer sufferers will believe this nonsense about so called "Divine" cigarettes.
Although that, the fact told that there are had been found that the main causes of toxins in cigarettes is mercury. Properties that make mercury compounds into free radicals circumference difficult to detect because it is sensitive to light, and measuring tools are always based ray. In addition, strong dwelling mercury in the bermetal faction nicotine alkaloids in tobacco leaves.
I hope that will be continued to make all of the cigarettes is not dangerous but have to make the smoker will be more health as Greta Zahar has been found. And I think it could be real at the future, when the scientist and technology more advanced. Because there is too difficult to stop the smoker in this world.
But it’s not mean that the cigarettes is good for our health, there is too much disadvantages than the advantages, and we have to know that in the fact, the most smoker is poor class in economical class, its mean that the cause of someone to smoke is that they not know about how long the dangerous of cigarettes?
We also knew that Cigarettes are big revenue for the Indonesian nation. Since ancient times our ancestors all smokers. That is why Indonesia became the world's second exporter of tobacco. Approximately 80% of Indonesian men, had smoked since junior school but almost nobody in the village of chronic pain because they never patched his teeth with amalgams only revoked.
And the Indonesian government also makes some law about prohibition smoking in the public places, and as long as we know that those law is being ignored by the smoker. And I hope this article ("Divine cigarettes used to treat cancer") would not been used as a reason to still smoking.
In addition of the health and economical factor, the religion also forbids smoking especially Islam religion. And one of the Islamic ideologies of Islam, Muhammadiyah has been forbid the cigarettes.
Before I end this comment of the article, I want to forgive if in my comment there is not relationship with the article, because I’m not so understand to understand this article well known.