The Metabolism-Cancer Connection & How to Treat It – Dr. Charles Meakin with Dave Asprey : 801

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about cancer, but some things you probably haven't heard about cancer. Our guest today is chief medical officer for care Oncology Clinic Dr. Charles Meekin, and he works on metabolic strategies for curing cancer. I got really good feedback on the Last podcast with Dr. Jason Fung about cancer and his great book about it. And I think you're going to hear some new things that work very well with Jason's line of thinking as well from Dr. Meeken. He looks at alternative and holistic treatment strategies and he founded actually a charity about this called Coach It Forward Chuck Charity. And he actually does charity coaching for cancer as well as working on his main clinic, care oncology@careoncology.com and we'll talk personalized strategies. But very specifically, some of the drugs that we take for anti aging are very interesting for cancer, including stuff that is a little bit shocking to me, even something like statins. So we're going to get into that. And if you're interested in metabolism, this show is for you. And if you're interested in not dying of one of the leaders of the four killers that I wrote about this, this is for you. So there's prevention as well as what do you do in early stages here. And if you have a loved one or if you're dealing with cancer yourself, you definitely want this episode. So Dr. Meekin, welcome to the show.

Dave, thank you and it's an honor to be here. And I want to say thanks to Darcy, Cameron and Chris and everybody on the team that helps put this platform together. It's great education, it's provocative inquiry and it fosters critical thinking. And so you've done a great service for us for the last 15 years.

I always like to know when I, when I talk with a doctor, Some doctors like, oh, my parents made me do it, but there's usually a reason. What made you get into medicine in the first place?

Well, my father worked in business so I sort of, that's why I was a pre med major and economics major at Notre Dame. But once I, you know, I like to fix things and I wanted to be of a service. I had an early calling to have a mission in life to maybe impact, you know, for the greater good. I flirted with maybe going into the missionary or priesthood to work in mission work. But when I started helping out a hospital my second year of college at Notre Dame, St. Joe's Hospital, it really Touched me. And I knew without a doubt I wanted to go that route and really never have looked back ever since.

And of all the things you could have done, radiation oncologists is pretty much that's the burn it out strategy.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, in med school, you sort of, you have maybe some people had some thoughts on what they want to do. Usually that's not a good idea. You want to be open minded. But I in general, wanted to work in something that was. I don't want to say anything's irrelevant, but something that was very relevant. You know, I'd studied martial arts and studied, you know, philosophies and wanted to look at something where the body was sort of pitted against the all, you know, inclusive, you know, foe, where they had to mount, you know, spiritual and not just physical, but emotional strategies to help fix it. And it was always curious to me why some, you know, some got through it and successfully and some didn't with the same cancer, same stage and whatnot. And so that was a very, you know, that was an important drawing card for me. And then I tried surgical oncology, medical oncology and radiation oncology. I was good with math and physics, and I knew I could get home at night, so that became the field of choice.

Did your vision loss have anything to do with your path through medicine?

Yes, it did. And, you know, that's one of the always. It's always one of the paradoxes in life where what looks like it might be an obstruction ends up being the path. And to explain that, you know, I. I didn't really know I had retinitis pigmentosa until maybe my mid to late 30s. Of course, at that point it was because an older cousin had it and we all kind of looked into it and. And, you know, but as I started losing my eyesight and knowing that that was sort of something marching forward in my life actually fostered this, you know, this amazing interest in general health and wellness strategies, which I then applied to cancer care. So in an ironic way, you know, my loss of eyesight, it probably gave me some vision that has really changed the path in my. My life. And I think for the best.

And the good news now is you can still see everything in the middle of your vision, but your peripheral vision is pretty much gone.

Yeah. You know, you know, as we were talking about, I can. I'm one of the only 61 year olds that can read a menu these days without glasses. And I still have 2020 central vision, but if you drop a dime on the floor. It's going to take me a while to find it. So it's sort of an, you know, most people don't really understand it, but it did foster my retirement at the beginning of 2019 from my 35 years of oncology care. But then I kind of redirected into this metabolic oncology, which has been a pure joy.

You use a ton of biohacking stuff within your holistic practice, which I find really impressive, especially given that you came from the, I'm going to call it the hardest core you have. The radiation guys and the chemo guys are sort of the most western of the western cancer treatments. What did you find when you started doing things like exercise bands and oxygen therapy and these other things? What did you find in your patients and in yourself when you added these ends?

So yeah, I generally like yourself and many tested it on myself and I've always been curious and I've always wanted to bring simple, accessible, low cost, safe strategies to the clinic and see how we can marry those. And unfortunately, in allopathic and western medicine, frequently they look at it like either or. I call it the tyranny of dichotomy. You know, there's the loss of integration. Maybe we could have both. And care oncology is trying to change the science by working within it and not from the edges. So we bring what we think is sort of metabolic strategies and doing testing and science based papers. But for myself, I kind of verified things would work, looked at the data and then for those that were appropriate, would, would offer those as options. And to this day I see tremendous opportunities in that. In fact, you know, I think, you know, after I did my Bulletproof coaching In 2016, I was organized to put together what I called a cancer rehab or cancer reboot center. And then I heard about integrative labs and thought, well, Dave's going to do it and his team and that looks like a good path. But I've always wanted to bring some of these strategies to the cancer clinic.

Well, I'm really happy that you're doing that because really upgrade labs is about recovery and I don't mean cancer recovery, I just mean being more resilient because we all have stress and it, it seems like cancer and cancer treatments are generally really stressful. So if you could, you know, do. Even if it, even if it does require chemo or does require radiation. And by the way, guys, listening, there are times when that is the right strategy for cancer and it's okay, it just shouldn't be your first line strategy. But I've known too many people who said, I'm just going to treat it naturally, and they're riddled with tumors and it's not okay. So if you go natural, you know, monitor the, monitor the crap out of it and work with an oncologist anyway, just. Anything I'm saying wrong there?

No, no. And that's, you know, we have five lovely oncologists and six oncology nurses that quite frankly, are probably smarter than all of doctors. They're brilliant. We're all survivors and veteran in our, in our, in our fields. And most of the time where we do talk people back to the fold and say, hey, you got a simple, you know, vetted treatment here, that if we combine with metabolic strategies, there's a great synergy. So consider it. And we've, we've had a lot of wins like that. And I'm sure a lot of local oncologists have been appreciative of just having a, another voice kind of emphasize that you need to get back on this. And usually that option is successful, especially with metabolic blockade or management with it.

That is, that's cool. What's changed in the last 10 years about what we know about cancer?

So. Yeah, yeah. So stepping back a little further, it might help to explain, you know, you've mentioned the name Otto Warburg on your podcast from the 30s. Otto won a Nobel pea, Nobel prize for his elucidation of how cancer cells have a disrupted metabolism and actually they burn glucose in the presence of oxygen. It's called aerobic glycolysis. And that disrupted metabolism leads to failures and sort of the trans transcription of new DNA and translation of MRNA to make proteins. And so that was, you know, I was pitched by him and ultimately sort of buried in the 50s after his passing. And we then adopted 1971, the war on cancer with Richard Nixon. The somatic mutation theory of cancer, which is generally the premise that we inherit some genes that become cancerous or viral insults or environmental exposures, and then those mutant genes just kind of grow in a clone and that we can then fix that by a targeting strategy. Well, that predominant theory has been going on since, you know, 1971. We know about the war on cancer and it hasn't worked out real well. You know, cancer hits 1 in 2 men, 4 in 10 women, and we spend a lot of money on it, and it's still not fixing it. Metabolic therapy, therapy, theory and therapy has kind of reemerged. In fact, there's a famous set of authors Weinberg and Hanahan they wrote the six hallmarks of cancer and then in 2011 they added to, they added that one of the seventh and eighth is re engineering of cancer. Metabolism is one of the hallmarks and the other one is loss of tumor or cellular immunity. And so those two new additions were added. So I think there's more awareness that metabolic issues is a big factor. And so there's also a lot of work on this. Avoidance of immune destruction and some of the targeted therapies are working on that. But metabolic disruption is common to virtually all cancers and our four repurposed drugs address that issue.

Now, when you say metabolic disruption, you mean fat.

Well, there is a link there. You know, smoking related cancers have sort of leveled off and gone down. And those cancers might be lung and a few others. You know, cancer is about to be the number one cause of death in the US and it's mainly because of metabolic or obesity or as you said, fat related cancers. And that's metabolic disruption. And there's, you know, all the hormone related cancers are on, are on the rise. And as I mentioned earlier, 4 in 10 women, 5 and 10 half men get it in their lifetime. And so yes, there are small improvements and iterations that have been championed by sort of somatic mutation theory. But in general we're failing in my mind on the war on cancer. And that's why I jumped in with care oncology because I really feel great alignment with where they're going. I spoke to a patient this week who has failed in three years. He's had colorectal cancer, stage four, and he was young when he got it. He has spent or not? He has, but the insurance company has spent $1.5 million. And he's had a lot of out of pocket and missed opportunity. He and his wife hadn't been able to work. He's, you know, and he's kind of the perfect example of sort of, sort of the four or five issues with cancer care today in general. At times I felt like I was in the theater of the absurd, if you could say it that way. You know, most cancer therapies are fairly aggressive and fail more than half the time. And it's quite expensive. It's the number one cause of medical bankruptcy. It's always inconvenient. You know, you go there and wait and you always have a caregiver with you or someone with you and miss work. And it, you know, the treatments, as you said earlier, can disrupt other health conditions and put you at risk for other diseases and chronic and second cancers as well. Then at the end of it, you know, you're kind of sitting there frozen with fear and you get sort of every three months scanning that have, you know, deleterious effects to the body with a radiation dose. And you know, you know, three to five or three to four out of people that get cured are at risk for a second cancer. So, you know, I feel our platform sort of addresses all of those. And when I heard about it and learned more about it, I said, I need to be a part of this.

One of the things you've done that I found just really intriguing is you sent me a bunch of papers about repurposing these four drugs. Can you tell me about what is drug repurposing and then tell me about these four drugs and how they caught your interest?

Yeah, so repurposing of drugs is, is sort of a, you know, it's kind of under the carpet, but it's, it's there and it's a, what I find, what I feel is sort of the unidentified pearls that are floating around. Most, most drugs have four to six molecular pathways of activity. And like minoxidil was a blood pressure medicine, but they serendipitously found that it grew hair on people's heads. So now it's, you know, part of Rogaine and there's many examples of that. So like most things in life, it starts with a story of love and pain. And Robin Bannister, our founder, who's still with us back In England in 2013, his wife had stage four breast cancer. And over there she'd gone through the common treatments at that time, was offered hospice. She was in her young 50s and that was unacceptable. And he's Robin, who had already worked in drug repurposing to sort of look through the literature and identify things that might have opportunities with other maladies, said, honey, I think I can help you in this. This is sort of my, my job. I'm a PhD pharmacist, I've already done this. She said, robin, only if we do it for a purpose bigger than myself. So they formed the metrics trial. She ended up living for four and a half years with her breast cancer and died in 2017. But during that time they, to get traction, really prove that this worked. They tested it against glioblastoma, the formidable brain tumor that in my 35 year career generally had about a nine month median survival. And that's what Harvey Cushion identified 90 years ago when he first wrote about it. And, and so they did a trial where people got standard of care along with these four drugs. These four drugs that you know, are inexpensive and easy to tolerate and they had to really petition the Medical Health Research Council of England or the FDA like organization. But they got it passed and they did the four drugs along with standard of care and instead of seeing what would be the best in the literature results of 13 to 14 month median survival, they could a strong signal 28 month median survival and just under 60% 2 year survival. And now we have 350 people in that cohort. And we've republished again at the Metabolic Health Conference this past year. The original paper was published in 2019. And to give everybody sort of a sense of it, Everybody remembers John McCain and Ted Kennedy. They didn't agree on much politically, but they would agree that the diagnosis of glioblastoma was a difficult one and they had the best access to care and were pretty vigorous when they got it. And I think John lived 13 months and Ted lived 14 months. And now I have four patients, three that have never had a recurrence and they're all out. One of the longest is like 33 months. The youngest is, I mean not the youngest, but the least far out was about 28 months. One's a teacher at Pepperdine, one's a mother of three young boys in Wisconsin. The other is a podcaster artist out in la. Then I had a patient that started with us two years into his path. He's pretty much not progressed since he joined us. And I know a lot of my partners have other cases and my oncology teammates in England have many cases like this. So I'm seeing, you know, a really strong signal that things are working. And we also treat other types of cancers as well. I mean we treat all types of cancers as well.

I've got to ask, since we're on glioblastoma, the brain cancer, have you ever used oxaloacetate with them?

I've paid attention to that data. I've steered in my normal original practice, a few patients toward that, especially when they are progressing. But I personally haven't managed anybody for that. And once again I, I believe that works in a metabolic way against the glioblastoma, the glial cell. And so those are the exciting things that I see out there.

Okay.

That will hopefully make a difference.

The reason I'm asking is oxaloacetate is a natural compound found in the cells. It's a mitochondrial stimulant. I've written about it in my anti aging books having nothing to do with cancer. But there's some intriguing data out there about it in cancer as well. And I been looking to find someone in oncology who's actually tried it out on someone with cancer because it's one of my favorite supplements. And it's, you know, I was going.

To say I've used your supplement that incorporates that.

Got it. But we haven't tried it or haven't tried that compound at least in the US for cancer that I'm aware of. I've released studies in Europe, but. Okay, what are the four drugs?

Yeah, so as I said, Robin looked through like 200 drugs and then weaned it down to 100 to 10. Nobody can take 10 extra medicines. So he ultimately chose four. And generally people used two all the time and two in alternation. And these four drugs were picked because they had non overlapping mechanisms of action. They were well vetted and safe and been out in the literature and you know, use for more than 30 years. So the side effects had been well verified. And as well as they were available, they were genetic and, excuse me, generic and easy to access. And so metformin, which is one of the, as you said, one of the darlings of the anti aging longevity crowd, Atorvastatin, it's a lipophilic statin. It's the number two most common drug use in adults in America. Metformin is number four.

So this is like a generically available diabetes drug that's pennies. And then the statin drug, is that affordable? I don't mess with statins.

It's very affordable. And then doxycycline, the 113th most common used drug, that is an unusual antibiotic that it works by being cytostatic. It doesn't. It's absorbed in the upper GI tract, so it doesn't, you know, crater the gut biome. Like a lot of antibiotics, it also blocks protein production and that's really important. Therefore it's not as deleterious to the gut biome. And cancer stem cells are like, you know, villains that hang out in the closet and they're stopped dividing but are around to continue to propagate once the chemotherapy or radiation or standard therapies are done. Well, by blocking protein production, doxy is able to cripple them and help, you know, foster their, you know, pathway through apoptosis. And then the final drug is mebendazole. It's the human form of a antiviral, excuse me, anti parasite medication that works on all parasites. And that drug is less used in the United States. And was made very expensive, kind of like, like the EpiPen by a company. So we, we compound that to provide it to our patients at a low cost. We, we don't sell any of these drugs. We use two partnership pharmacies that work with us closely. They independently vet through consumer labs the quality and lack of tenuance in the drugs and they get them to their doorstep once again, the convenience in two to three days, usually within 10 days of first contacting our web website platform. And you know, the cost is generally about 150 to $170 for three months supply of the medications. And it's spelled out very clearly.

Now there are people out there who say, you know, cancer is bacterial, cancer is viral, cancer is fungal. What do you say to those people?

Well, you know, the literature would say that, you know, about a third of the time when you have a cancer diagnosis, there is some sort of chronic bacterial, fungal, viral, parasitical infection brewing in the background that's sort of churning inflammation that makes it harder for your own body to identify those tumor cells through your T cell mediated immunity and sort of get a hold on it. We make aberrant cells all the time. The good news is most of the time, virtually all the time, we sort of deactivate them and let them get, you know, break down through autophagy and things like that. I mean, apoptosis and things like that. But so, so yes, that's maybe one of the ways in which these two drugs work. The doxycycline and the mebendazole.

Mebendazole is a drug that I am personally grateful for. A few years ago, I picked up an exotic amoeba in a salad in Phoenix. And I spent about four months feeling like I had an overdose of MCT oil. I mean, it was like 10 times a day.

Disaster pants.

Disaster pants times 10. And I had several different, you know, tests and no one could figure out what it was. And I finally went to this kind of old master of infectious diseases in New York who, who figured out what it was with a scope. And he put me on Mebendazole. And eight days later I'm like, finally I'm free of my turbo disaster pants there. But it wasn't a drug that I was familiar with.

Yeah, it's exciting. And if you go to clinicaltrials.gov there's six trials, one is ours with Mebendazole, our metrics trial from England. And then there's, you know, for the, for statins, there's, there's over 30 of them. There's 36 trials in place for Med. For metformin, there's over 204 doxy. There's over 26 trials going on. So for the. As far as the doctor who says, I don't know anything about that, I think that's, you know, that's, you know, mumbo jumbo. You know, there's a lot of work going on in this area and usually with these drugs individually. But we feel that the combination is the important thing there. And the bendazole is. One of the current researchers is looking at it. He believes that it actually competitively inhibits with the uptake of glutamine, one of the amino acids. That may be sort of an escape route. When those nimble cancer cells figure out how to, you know, if the sugar burning route is sort of shut down or mitigated, that may be one way they continue to make energy. And so blocking glutamine may be a strategy. And mebendazole is being researched for that right now. It also works in immobilizing the microtubules, similar to taxanes and vincristine, similar chemotherapy agents, but without the side effects. And so it blocks mitosis, anaphase and mitosis keeps those cancer cells from dividing and then go down the path of, as I said, apoptosis.

Now, I'm going to ask you a question that will probably raise your hackles.

That's okay.

What would happen if a person said, you know what, for two weeks this year, I am going to take metformin. I'm going to take the statin, I'm going to, I'm going to take my bendazole and maybe even doxycycline, although that seems kind of dumb. Just, you know, I. I want to, I want to keep my metabolism strong and healthy. Just like we would do an intermittent fast. You know, we would sometimes do high intensity interval training. You know, should you push all those pathways every now and then just to make sure that nothing bad's happening at stage zero? Stage one?

Yes, yes and yes.

Really? Okay. That doesn't even scare you?

No, no. I mean, you know, you do it, I do it. Intermittent fasting, it's, you know, hormetic effect, but it, you know, it helps with apoptosis. It helps those in autophagy where it helps normal cells create resiliency and cells that are. Are flawed. It kind of fosters and accelerates their demise. In the same way, pharmaceutical fasting through these four medications, if that's sort of a generalized Statement they work in a place trophic away in many ways, but in fact we are working with a company that I can't mention the name of. But our ultimate goal is a paradigm shift to not just let cancer develop and then try to jump on it in our current ways once it's done, but to work in a better way with prevention and earlier identification. We believe the tentative name will be alert and avert. And we want to use these four drugs for two weeks. Strangely you said that in a lighter dose and then couple that with some metabolic nutritional training and couple that as well with after two weeks, take five supplements that they would do for another 10 weeks and then repeat that 12 week cycle four times a year. We roll this out for the high risk individuals like the genetic risk, BRCA1, BRCA2 and then pilots and firemen and people with higher levels of cancer in their family. The beauty of this as well is our partner, our potential partner, we're working out in a sprint way. The agreement now has a blood test, a blood biopsy, more or less that works on looking at MRNA pathways and what the body's doing internally with eight, eight markers. And these eight markers predict for sort of a, you know, green light, very low risk, you're sort of in balance and doing things well versus an amber light, which might be some things are at risk, versus red light, which means, you know, you need to repeat your basic screening because something is going on. And then we would do that at the beginning of the year and then at the end of the year and verify which this combination of supplements and medications should self correct these metabolic abnormalities and get them back on track. And we anticipate this might be able to reduce cancer risk from 25 to 50%.

Wow. So this is, is it test first, then go on the supplements or just do the supplements every now and then?

No, it'd be do the blood test and then do the two weeks of the four drugs under, you know, you know, a physician oversight because we do want to test, you know, a few blood tests that you know, would want to make sure are normal and then do the five supplements then total of 12 weeks and then repeat that. And we, we would do this for people. I mean there's 14 million people walking around who've been treated for a cancer who are sort of in limbo, not, not sure if it's going to come back or not. Kind of probably holding off on life decisions. This blood test will greatly help them. And then for those people we treat with the metabolic treatment, we usually do that intensely for, you know, 18 to 24 months and then we walk back from it. We would go to more of this remission or prevention protocol because you're right, you don't want to push on the brakes with proliferation too hard for too long. Because we need proliferation. We have, we need to keep our immune system strong. We need to keep our, you know, we need to activate MTOR occasionally, keep our muscles strong and there's a balance.

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Well, they say in 2021 there's going to be two or three sort of blood biopsies and they're based on different. We're our partners looking at mRNA, but there's also a group looking at methylation patterns and that prediction for cancer. There's also others looking at protein breakdown products in the blood that may reflect cancer. And then there's other looking at, you know, nucleic acid or DNA breakdown products. And they all have variable specificity and sensitivities. Right now that's, that work is not totally sound. When we roll ours out, we're hoping that, you know, it's going to be in a. We're working with the FDA now with a clinical research group to have an FDA path so that when we generate data on this, we'll be able to, you know, publish results in a peer reviewed journal.

There's also the gut bacteria. Viome is doing some really interesting work on that as well. And it, it seems to me that there's definitely a fungal connection with cancer because I know all the environmental mold raises your risk, eating mold raises your risk. And some cancer according to some guests may be fungal in origin, but other guests absolutely say that's BS what's your take on the fact like a sac fungus and some cancer just being misdiagnosed fungal infections?

Well, it's interesting that a lot of the treatments resemble antibiotics. Adriamycin, some of the, you know, ketoconazole is a, you know, is a, is a treatment for prostate cancer. And so a lot of this overlaps and part of it is that, you know, our mitochondria as you know, develop from a bacterium. And so some of the treatments attack the, if they're effective, the mitochondrial or energy generating component of the cancer cell. And so, you know, it goes back to what I think I mentioned earlier, the dichotomy of either or. Or the, you know, the, you know, the. Excuse me, the tyranny of either or. Or the, you know, tyranny of dichotomy. You know, most people try to go down one path or another. It's probably a blend of both. And I think, you know, a lot of times with the, you know, with the right risk factors, with a indwelling, you know, fungal infection or parasitical infection, you are driving proliferation and that ride sort of the protective mechanisms. And so I know that in my background, when a person has a chronic infection, it's almost impossible to eradicate that cancer in the patient. And it's. You need to spend time trying to fix the infection.

I appreciate that nuanced approach. Thank you. And I've had one guy on the show a while back saying, oh, cancer is genetic and we're going to have it cured in a couple years. And what percentage of cancer do you think is purely genetic and not epigenetic?

I think the common number I Keep hearing is 5 to 7%. And when people debate that, I kind of remind them that if you do a biopsy of a metastatic deposit in the liver of a breast cancer patient, you will get more than 200 mutations. And most of them are downstream mutations or not driver mutations. What I mean there is, these are just the byproduct of reckless division by the chromosomes, sort of, you know, in a rogue way, making. Making stuff. Very few of them are targetable, where if you could fix that mutation, you're going to change the course of the cancer. That goes back to the somatic mutation theory versus the, you know, the metabolic theory. And that's what, you know, Thomas Segfried and Dominic d' Agostino and some of these wonderful predecessors that we're learning from have identified. And. And so I see more of a return to some of this metabolic theory of cancer and hopefully using every tool we have in the toolbox, not just targeted therapies or chemotherapy, radiation that block, you know, cellular division.

Okay. When it comes to cancer, what's different for men and women?

From my observation, I would say that men tend to be diagnosed later because they're generally headstrong and sort of ignore symptoms. The common cancers in women are different than those in men. Some are overlap as well. I think women are more willing to consider the various options, the integrative approach, as opposed to the this way or, you know, my way or the highway or one way is the only way. So I think, you know, we use the wisdom of women to kind of use their heart and their gut to kind of, you know, read the BS meter and usually get to the right answer quicker.

You talk about something called the big six that every cancer patient has. What are the big six?

So, yeah, Dave. And once again, I was always in my group. I was a little bit on the fringe, but, you know, I practiced good standard of care medicine that, you know, in care. I trained at stanford, But I always tried to bring simple, accessible, safe, easy things to the cancer clinic. And it boiled down to, you know, some basics. And I use the acronym the big six because people could remember that. I wrote it down on my board in my office after the clinical exam, in the room. I invited it into my. My hospital home, my office, so they could see me as a real person, and we could, you know, we'd walk them out like you would somebody in your house. But the big six is a simple acronym. B is for breath. To effectively manage your cancer, you need to stay in parasympathetic balance. Your immune system does not work when you're running from the line if your cortisol levels are high. We've proven that. There's so much data now to say, you know, if you put a mouse under stress or give them exogenous steroids or. Or disrupt their dinal rhythm, like, you know, cancer, the chemotherapy doesn't work, or they, you know, develop cancers at a greater rate or die at a greater rate. So my first suggestion is to teach them about nostril breathing. It's the foundation of meditation and. And yoga and all that. The. The I in the big six is stands for ingest Serious hydration. Ingest real food. Serious hydration is, in my terms, you know, 18 to 24 ounces of a good flush in the morning of filtered water to kind of get rid of the metabolic sludge from the night. You got to clean the deck for things to work. I usually encourage them to put some. Maybe some. Some sea salt in it and maybe some aloe vera to help heal the insides. Most people have disrupted GI tracts from chemotherapy. And then the second thing for ingestrial food, the kind of food that our grandmothers would recognize Food, food that is not made in a factory, food that doesn't have labeling in it. And that's an easy thing for people to understand. And then I started teasing in. Generally low carbs, beware of fruit. Fruit is mainly, you know, fructose and water. And fruit is, you know, fructose is the number one favorite food of cancer. So we kind of got to back people off the standard American diet for that. And then, of course, we can talk more about, you know, intermittent fasting and sort of low carb strategies. The G and big is for get moving. A body in motion stays in motion. And I kind of get them to think of, hey, you got to do today to verify that you can continue doing what you did yesterday. And the body has this rule of adaption where it will get stronger, stronger if you ask it to. And cancer patients so often are told to rest and do nothing. And of course, at the end of their treatment, they're just weak as jello. And so. And so it's really important for them to maintain that. I remind them that exercise is almost like a little intermittent, you know, a small fast. It does everything good for the body, and what it does for the brain is remarkable. And then the S is for sleep is king. And I kind of use your. I think it came from one of your podcasts. There's a reason that in our evolutionary development that we dedicate one third of our time to sleep. And we weren't seeking food or avoiding perdition or seeking a mate during that time. And it's because it's critically important for our healing and for our brain function. So I get people back on a, you know, normal diurnal rhythm and better sleep. And then the second I in big six is for intention, setting an intention. And I kind of give people a little bit of a recipe, and anybody can do it, you know, the way they want. But I encourage people to make a movie of them doing things they love with people they love in the future, looking strong and vital for a purpose bigger than themselves. And they kind of make that movie in their head and pull it into their heart so that as they transition to sleep, they have a little card there to remind them to do it. They pull it into their heart and really set that intention and maybe. And maybe repeat that again in the morning. And in that way, they kind of anchor an intention that they're almost falling forward to in the future. And it helps them to vaccinate against negative thoughts, those automatic negative thoughts that we have, those ants. And it really helps them have a. Have a toolbox or tool they can use in the toolbox to set intentions. And then the final the X is for extreme love. And I use a metaphor of looking for those yellow cars. If you buy a yellow car, you start seeing them everywhere. They say pregnant women wants to become. Maybe Dr. Lana noticed this. When you become pregnant, you start noticing pregnant women everywhere. And in the same way.

And they're like mushrooms. They just pop up all over the place.

Yeah.

You suddenly can see them Right, Yeah, you notice them.

And so in the same way, if we look for generosity and beauty and kindness and love in our fellow human beings, strangers and family and friends, we start to see it. And the more we see it, the more we percolate it up and reflect it and echo it, you can really feel it. And then when you really feel it, you want to sort of metaphorically grab it and pull it into your heart and link it to your own healing once again, for a purpose bigger than yourself. As I said, you want to pull it in and link it to your own healing. And those are kind of non western strategies that you don't hear about too much. In fact, there's a book by Kelly Turner, it's called Radical Remission. And she brilliantly and in a novel way looked at not, you know, the standard outcome. She looked at the outliers that really broke the code and survived a long time with impossible cancers. And she found more than 100 of them. And she listed nine things that were unique and common characteristics. Believe it or not, the fifth through nine, five of the nine were all emotional, intentional and spiritual. And so that's, you know, these tools don't get pulled out of the toolbox. And in our system we try to emphasize those.

That's, that's beautiful mindset seems to affect healing from everything, even cancer.

Oh yeah.

How much do you worry about prostate cancer in older men?

You know, I should. My dad, I'm 61, my dad had like stage 4 Gleason 9, you know, high grade prostate cancer at 59. And he was a very vital guy. And he was sort of out of the box thinker, an entrepreneur. And he passed away in five years. Didn't tell anybody he had it because he didn't want anybody to start the conversation with, you know, oh my goodness, you know, how you doing? In fact, it was kind of tough keeping that secret for four years. I was the only sibling of one of five, and my mom knew about it as well as his doctors. And so I don't really worry about it. First of all, I do the standard stuff, a PSA. I live, you know, for the last 20 years. I've sort of thought about things and been very curious and try to target strategies that will prevent it. Intermittent fasting, you know, sort of a low carbohydrate diet. You know, I haven't eaten since last night now. And I've kind of a, you know, fat burning strategies as well as I pulse metformin and, and atorvastatin. And then I use A range of supplements as well. But stepping back from that, you know, as far as our own mortality, you know, I've been able to come to sort of a reckoning with it. And I do it not because I ready to go or anything like that. I just, you know, find that. And I encourage this with patients to come to a reckoning with the possibility, the probability, 100% probability of death at some point, as well as come to terms with liking yourself. Kind of, you get those two issues resolved. It kind of liberates you to do what's really important and kind of live in the moment and not worry about it. And I tried to climb a mountain every year that was scary and pushed me to do some aggressive training. And, you know, of course, walking in the dark at night for a, you know, a blind guy or partially blind guy is always a little bit of a challenge. And that was my way to sort of go through a crucible, to kind of, you know, reinvigorate the comfort level with, you know, whatever's ahead for me and then bring it back to the clinic. And I always felt more liberated and more resilient after doing that.

That idea of equanimity that says, you know what? We are all going to die. And even if you're a radical immortalist, like a James Clements has been on the show who has a really good book on mtor and things like that. And I first met him 20 something years ago at the Life Extension, their little headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. And I mentioned we're all going to die, and he was, like, visibly offended at the thought. And I'm like, look, even if we kind of live forever, the universe will collapse in on itself at some point, like death is. We may outlive the universe, right? But most people really, you know, there's somebody probably hung up on the podcast listening right now just because the idea is so abhorrent. You deal with death a lot in your practice because cancer kills people, despite our best efforts some of the time. And you've clearly reached it for yourself. But as a caregiver, it's harder when you're dealing with people who. Who pass more often than, you know, a general practitioner. How do you come to grips with that?

Well, even years ago, I, you know, I felt that, you know, death was inevitable. But my job is offer the best of what I can bring to the table with humility and kindness. And obviously, if death is inevitable from the cancer, you can create opportunities where you can help people sort of release baggage, help help people address the fact that, you know, they're on that path. But also they can, you know, create an opportunity to teach their grandchildren how to live with courage. You know, when you're in pain and you got a, you know, a short Runway, there is always opportunities that you can, you can pull in. And once people find meaning in their suffering, they can do some amazing things. And, and so sometimes you just gotta open the, you know, clear the glass so they can see that. But yeah, there are some patients that have been hard to lose and you know, the. I had a 12 year old guy with a brainstem tumor early in my career when I was out in the Bay Area working and he took a part of me his first day. He showed up with a Notre Dame hat on his head, not knowing I was avid fan of Notre Dame and whatnot. And he had a rocky course. We did the best we could. We treated him on a UCSF trial, but probably treat him a little different today. But sometimes they take a piece of you with you. But that's okay. That's okay. You know, Corda, this is my mission and I'm good with it.

Well, it's, it's really rough. I've, I've talked with people who work with hospice and lately it seems like psychedelic mushroom therapy just to let people get more relaxed about the fact that the end will come at some point. And those of us who aren't expecting to die, like me, you do a little bit of plant medicine, a little bit of the right altered states from esoteric practices and you just get comfortable with the fact that it's all temporary and then your fear levels drop. Are you seeing anything with the, the legal trials of MDMA or mushrooms or ketamine or any of those things that's helping in cancer therapy?

I saw that just last week that there was a published trial that showed that they had a significant reduction in anxiety and all the metrics of sort of what happens in a hospice patient compared to best therapy. And I think this was the one partially sponsored by Tim Ferriss's group. So I certainly applauded it. He did a GoFundMe to help raise that money. So I see that moving back in and so I'm optimistic that that's going to make a big difference because I do feel like euthanasia or sort of the doctor assisted euthanasia that exists here is a dangerous path. Because, you know, I've talked to a lot of those people and a lot of people can have a bad day and if they had a lever they could pull down they would have. But then like in my dad's case, he had beautiful things that happened, you know, in the final three months of his life. In my mom's case, she's been in hospice now for a year and a half. That's why we're down here in Florida. So many nieces and nephews have come down here and like had to step up and do difficult care. My two sisters and I do the nights and so there's been some blessings from it and sometimes you miss those things out, miss out on those things. If you, you try to just, you know, stop things immediately, there's opportunities there.

That'S such a nuanced and, and wise view on death. So thank you for sharing that. And it's, it's always a rough conversation to have because no one wants to think about that on a regular basis. In fact, it's the number one thing that pushes our buttons is something that might kill us. You should run away. Yeah, and it's that sitting and feeling safe thing and that's, that's a big topic in fast this way. My, my new book, not necessarily death, but just, you know, fasting is going without. And, and the fear of going without food for me was a really big scary thing when I weighed 300 pounds because I knew, you know, I would crash. And just to learn how to sit with loneliness or sit with fear or sit, you know, without a substance you're addicted to, whether it's food or something else, all of those have the same mindset in there. And it's one that I don't think they teach anything about that in medical school even to this day, do they? I mean to your knowledge?

Not to my knowledge. And thank you for taking this 300 pound body and you know, going to save your ass university and figuring it out.

I didn't have much choice about it. Right.

I mean all the downstream echoes that you've created to help people and you know, I was in school last year with 56 lovely 20 year olds and you know, there was a one year program in entrepreneurial work at Notre Dame. It's, they have one of the best undergrad business schools and they're trying to do, have great engineering schools. They're trying to keep more companies there. So one of the things that I had fun with was teaching these brilliant, mainly engineer and computer science and biology background students, you know, some basics about living. And we did Wim Hof. We did, you know, breath hold strategies to sort of maximize parasympathetic balance. We did, we did A run around the lakes, which is our lady of the Lakes. The two lakes there. The last day before December break, I think it was December 8th or 9th. Everybody had to come. Like they'd run in the, in July. And, and then we did a Wim Hof looking at the dome. We, wow. We had, you know, at first was like, you're crazy. And then I said, anybody who gets there, I'll give a Santa hat too. We end up getting like 30 kids. And, and so they, they did the cold immersion. Well, we didn't. Weren't allowed to run jump in the lake. They did, you know, just cold exposure. And then, you know, I had a. I called the Friday Fitness Fools, where I. Every Friday at 7am probably about six or seven kids would come and do a workout with me. And that was a day we didn't have class. So that's why I called Fitness Fools. And there was so much great learning and opportunities that went with that.

Well, it's refreshing to hear a cancer doctor doing just the broad spectrum stuff that on its face has nothing to do with cancer care, just living a better life. Do you believe that living a better, happier, more fulfilling life reduces your odds of getting cancer?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And there's, there's so much. I mean, there's kind of, you know, I did a course up at Notre Dame. It was kind of an elective called Hallmarks of Cancer and Metabolism of Cancer. So it was, it was like a candy store for a guy like me. And there's interesting ways. And I worked with lovely Dr. Lori Littlepage, who's a big cancer researcher, has nine PhDs. But they, they unfortunately would take mice and induce stress by like putting them in with bully mice. And that mice then would propagate with cancer much faster or get cancers from a, you know, a cellular transplant. In addition, if they put them in little tubes where they couldn't move, that kind of simulates some of the, you know, the treadmills that many of us are on or many people are on, they would then get cancer quicker. Or if you gave them exogenous steroids, which is still unfortunately a routine practice with our cancer patients to sort of mitigate nausea.

And so now you're talking about like prednisone steroids, not testosterone. Okay.

Yeah. And I mean, it will save your life if you're having an anaphylactic reaction, but if you, you know, use it a lot, it can. We know it raises risk of multiple cancers. So. So yeah, and there's all this data with you know, having a spiritual side and it goes back to, I think, cortisol levels and being more at peace and equanimity, as you said.

Wow. I love it that you're willing to go out there and say that because there are very few oncologists will say it lowers risk because most of them say there are no studies or more research is needed and you're not there. You're like straight up. That's how it is.

Yeah. I mean, Larry Dossey wrote books, Spirituality and Medicine and logged so many trials where, you know, people, this was in San Francisco would, would vote, would pray for like every odd number in the icu. And those people, you know, were in there for serious cardiac events and they followed them and on, on average the people in the odd rooms who got prayed for, who didn't know they were being, it was double blinded, didn't know they're being prayed for. And the people praying didn't know the names of people they were praying for. Just the number those people had less complications and got out of the hospital earlier.

Wow.

So the data is all over the map. You just got to look for it.

Impressive. Well, Dr. Meekin, I appreciate you coming out and just talking about the whole world of this. Bringing low cost things that are very likely to lower cancer risk and you're not afraid to mix supplements and pharmaceuticals to get exactly the results you want. That is exactly the middle path where you're not dogmatic on either side of it and with your background to not be dogmatic. Kudos. Thank you.

Thank you. I have a slide in one of my talks and it said, you know, there are some moonshots and we're trying to be the earthshot so we can have a prevention protocol that everybody could afford. In fact, insurance company is going to want to buy it for you because it's going to save them downstream costs in, know, something very reasonable. And so, you know, that's why I'm doing this in my retirement. That's why our 20 plus people at Care Oncology work so hard every day. We don't know weekends, we don't know nights. And because it's what I call metabolic movement. And we, we, we, we joke around and it's a lot. Some of our letterhead, it's like, you know, Care Oncology because metabolism matters and that's just the basic fundamental of living a healthy life. And it's certainly a fundamental of managing cancer.

Well, I hope you come out with a book sometime about all of this. And I know you've written some medical papers and chapters and books and things like that, but I think you've accumulated enough knowledge here that the world could use a book like that. In the meantime, careoncology.com is a URL where people can go to learn more about you and your work.

Yes, that would be a good spot. I have a charity coaching site as well that I started right after I retired. But you can finally@careoncology.com we have all our white papers there, our published papers and some good information. Some beautiful patient stories too. And I could have gone into incredible stories. The common link is that people say, gee doc, I know I still I have cancer, or you know, I have a threat of cancer coming back, but I am so much healthier now than I was a year before the diagnosis. And so that's the most common thing we hear all the time.

Wonderful. Have an awesome day and I look forward to chatting again.

Dave, thank you. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you Darcy, thank you Chris, thank you. All the people have, you know, put this together and keep spreading the good word. Keep us thinking. Stay curious.

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