Is Chemotherapy a Scam?

Chemo kills, but here's the danger. It can also wipe out the body's defense team. The biggest risk of chemo is it can cause the immune system to be destroyed and worse, cause mutations. So doctors call this myelosuppression, where you have low white blood cells, low platelets, low red blood cells, and that means you had high risk for infections. You have fatigue, bleeding, all these other complications that chemo can cause. But today we're going to talk about how to get around these chemotherapy issues and actually turn it into an advantage. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of Envita Medical Centers. 25 years, we've helped people overcome chemotherapy problems where they've become resistant or not respond well or didn't have the right targets and matches. In this episode, we're going to walk through exactly how to make chemo smarter, both in the selection of chemotherapy, dosing, delivery, recovery, so we can fight cancer without breaking the immunity and harming key organs like the nervous system. Not even losing hair, being energetic, feeling good, no matter what stage of cancer they're in. So let's talk about the differences here. When we're talking about high dose chemotherapy or standard chemotherapy, patients get what's called maximum therapeutic dose. And this is often way too high and it's not targeted correctly. We'll go into that in a moment. What we're talking about here is metronomic or fractionated low dose chemo, which is around 10 to 15%. We call it genetically targeted fractionated chemotherapy in practice because we get the targets and now we don't need the high doses because we know we're on the right targets. So here's the key. Don't treat averages. Because when you look at standard chemotherapy, you're looking at averages that are based on double blind placebo clinical trials where everybody was treated the same with same type and stage of cancer. And then based on that, they're giving a treatment regimen or protocol, and you're not an average by any means. And many cancers are unique and different. Not all tumors are the same. And so what we want to really explain here is something called tumor heterogeneousity. Two, breast cancer, same type and stage, have totally different markers because we're looking at a thousand different markers, not just a few that you get from a biopsy, tumor marker and imaging according to NPG precision oncology guidelines that you see in NCCNN or the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, which is what all your doctors are using no matter what hospital you're in, no matter how great the Cancer center is this is what they use. They build this based on population trial. It's great in that sense, but it's not specific. It's not like giving you the exact markers that you really want. So it's designed for large populations, not for you. And NCCNN gives us categories like category one, saying this is more evidence based 2A, 2B. And many of these recommendations fall below category one. So according to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network process and JAMA Network open analysis, we have this issue. And so we have to. Are we picking chemotherapy based on your exact tumor's genomics? Transcriptomics, which is. Genomics is your DNA next generation sequencing. Transcriptomics is your rna, your immune profile, your micro environment of the tumor, the spatial biology. Because we get better targets with this information and we get better matches for you. And this equals lower dose chemotherapy and better care. And there's a lot of reasons why this is important for clinical care. Okay. And I want to go into this. So when you add chemotherapy in high doses and you, you don't even have the right targets on top of it, you start getting immune system problems. And that's a big deal because your immune system, if you've seen anything with immunotherapy, it is the key as we're going forward to solving cancer. You'll see a lot of drugs developed in the immunotherapy space. But imagine if your chemotherapy is actually wiping out your immune system and doing it in a way that's not allowing you to recover. So it becomes really part of the key of giving chemotherapy is understanding its relationship to the immune system. And so high doses, like maximum therapeutic dose, can wipe out the immune system and cause problems. High isn't always the best and isn't the wisest way to go. Standard chemo is often given at this maximum tolerated dose. And yes, it can hit the cancer harder, but it can also crash your immune system. And there's another strategy here that we're going to talk about. When we say low dose, we mean metronomic fractionated chemotherapy. These lower doses are given more often. They aim to control not only the cancer growth, starve the blood supply. The tumor patients have energy. They don't typically lose their hair. But the most important thing is it's an immune centric protocol, meaning it keeps the immune system front and center because that's what you need for longer term emissions according to frontiers in cell and development biology. This is something that's absolutely critical when we use low dose. It keeps the immune system strong. So is a metronomic and fractionated plan better for you? Well, it depends. Do you have the right targets or not? So if you don't have the right targets and you don't know what to give, you know, it may not actually make that much of a difference. You're just harming the body more with higher doses. So if you want to keep your energy, your hair and your immune system, this micro dosing is important. So let me get into this a little bit here. With the immune system I'm going to go through one aspect of immunity which is so overlook critically important. These are called damps damage associated molecular patterns. These are like endogenous molecules that are released from dying stress cancer cells and they signal your immune system on what to do. It activates the immune system. These DAMPs bind to receptors like toll receptors on the immune system signaling and the presence of danger activating your immune system. Because remember, your immune system is the first and last defense against cancer. It needs to recognize these tumors so it can go find it. So it's an immuno if you will immunogenetic components of cell death. When certain anti cancer treat damps and slow in microdosing, it makes the damps available for the immune system to do its work. If it's too much like maximum therapeutic dose, you can get inflammation and this can attract the wrong cells. These can attract suppressive cells from the bone marrow and actually cause immune suppression, inflammation, growth and mutation. So it's a two edged sword. So if you kill too much without the right targets, you're going to weaken the immune system, cause mutation and resistance. And if you can give the right doses at micro dosing, where you feel better, have more energy, your immune system is responding and this allows your immune system to activate, get right to the tumor and help you fight the cancer longer. So these tumor promoting roles of these damps is done when there's these super high doses. And sometimes what they'll do is they push progression, they push metastasis and chronic inflammation. A lot of us have heard of that, what that really means. If you were looking around a tumor and you could see at its micro environment, you'd get M2 macrophages and Milo derived suppressor cells, these MDSCs and these will all shift the balance of the immune system to become resistant and push inflammation. And you can see that in cancers where people just stop responding, their immune system has been destroyed and inflammation is being pushed because of the chemotherapy selection where if you have the right targets, the lower dose chemotherapy in our clinical experience can allow for an induced controlled form of cell death where we're killing the cancer cells, we're keeping the immune system strong, and we're teaching the immune system to do this. So these dams, they release like calriculin and adenosine triphosphate in the sequences that actively alert the immune system of dying tumor cells. This controlled release is crucial for priming the anti tumor immune response and it leads to activation of these antigens. These are so these cells called dendritic cells and they move around and they grab information from the tumor and they hand it to your natural killer cells. And your natural killer cells really are designed to do two things in the body. Kill cancer cells and viruses. So as soon as it has that fingerprint from the antigen, it can do its work. And that's why these damps are so important. Because your natural killer cells are one of your most important soldiers in the fight against cancer. And you don't want to destroy those with the high dose toxic doses of chemotherapy. Now imagine what I said earlier where it wasn't typed correctly. You just used averages, you used NCCNN most really all oncology centers use and you're using high dose. Now you, you realize you may not have the right targets. Our data showed us that 90% of our patients were on the wrong chemotherapy before arriving and doing testing. Because they weren't looking at the genetics, they weren't looking at DNA, rna, immune profiling. They were just essentially giving standard treatment protocols. And this can destroy the immune system. This mode is not what we want for cancer treatment. The mode of cell death we want is where the chemotherapy hits the targets and releases these damps, this damage associated molecular patterns. Nice and slow, it stops the chron chronic inflammation activates the immune anti tumor response. And now we're getting momentum. It's very, very powerful. So this is one of the things I'm spending some time on because I want you to understand immunity is critical to tumor progression, metastasis and overcoming chemo resistance. You want to overcome these things because you have good targeting, good dosing. So most of the drugs may not even match the tumor. And the hard truth is in solid tumors, even when we do get all these treatments, right, a very small amount if we're doing IV gets to the tumor. So another effect with chemo is you get IV chemotherapy with May 0.7% in some of the studies like nature's review, up to maybe 2%, let's say 5% of the IV gets to the tumor. A lot of people don't know that. Where's all the medicine going 95% is going to your healthy organs, tissue, central nervous system, immune system, weakening you. That's why having the right targets is so absolutely critical. And understanding that sometimes IV dosing isn't the best way to deliver the chemotherapy. One of the techniques that is being used more is interventional radiology oncology where you're using guided imagery. You go in with a catheter, very small, the size of a hair goes into the tumor. This is 100% of the chemotherapy into the tumor. And the reason you need this is because some tumors particularly are more fibrous. We can see this with special testing. There's more desmoplasia, they're more resistant. That means it pushes the chemo out. So by delivering the chemotherapy right into the tumor and then sealing the blood supply, you're getting 100% where you want. And now you're getting the damps and the immune system release right there at that tumor. So it can go out to the rest of the body and get the immune system to go after other cancer cells at the same time avoiding the toxicity to the rest of the body because it's delivered right to the tumor. It's intelligent, it's precision, it's by design and I think it makes a big difference. So these targeted deliveries are really important. And we see some of this happening in like in standard oncology with liver disease where you have metastasis to the liver and you'll use chemo immuno precision injections or a form of taste trans arterial chemoembolization where they'll deliver a chemotherapy with beads and seal it. But some of the problem with that is it's not targeted, it's a general treatment. So imagine getting a general treatment of chemotherapy that's not even targeted to you directly into your tumor. That's not, not ideal. Ideally you want genetic targets, immunotherapy targets, you want everything working in your best response. So these approaches can really raise the concentration of the chemotherapy at the tumor where you want it, spare it in the healthy part of the body and get 100% or close to 100% of the tumor. So now we're getting the kill where we want it, we're getting the immune system response where we want it. And this is the power of precision oncology. So let's now shift over to chemotherapy recovery, rebuilding your immune system. I know a lot of patients are told by their doctors, do not take any vitamins, do not take any antioxidants, because your going to block the chemo and they're right. But there's something more to the story. You actually need those nutrients because each chemotherapy has a half life. That means how long it's working in the body. So let's say it's working in the body for, let's say three hours. Each drug has a half life. At the end of those three hours, you want to start healing and repairing the body. And you do need high physiological doses of nutrition. You also need good diet where you're eating high protein meals, you're eating good nutrients that are highly nutrient dense. But you also need intravenous nutrients as well because they help to hydrate, they help to rehelp the immune system so it doesn't get so run down and helps with recovery, but it has to be targeted as well. You can't just give standard IV supplements or standard oral supplements. They need to be typed with your chemotherapy. So as you're testing, when we do DNA, RNA immune profiling, which is genomics, transcriptomics and immunoprofiling, we also are looking at what are the phytotherapeutic plants, the immune modulating nutrients and all of these things, and what are the timing and dosing. So it's not just only getting the right targets, it's the dosing. So if we're giving a medicine at this time, at this moment, we're giving the nutrient and we're combining these things in this manner. And now when you start adding phytotherapeutics and you start looking at algorithms, these are very complex molecular profiling maps. Because you don't want to cancel out the chemotherapy. If you just start giving nutrients at the wrong time, you're going to cancel the benefit of the chemo. So if you use it correctly and your oncologist is trained to do that, and unfortunately most aren't, unless they're integrative doctors, they have some knowledge of this. You really have a disadvantage. But if you can combine, here's when we recover, here's when we treat, here's how we combine these therapies to work in our best, best potential. We're going to get the best outcome we want. And so sometimes when we combined a chemotherapy with a phytotherapeutic, we get one plus one equals five, meaning it's working so much better to overcome drug resistance, help that person's overall response, immunity. So this is how we kind of take it to the next level. So when we're doing this testing for chemotherapy, we're looking at on label, which is FDA Approved chemotherapy drugs. We're looking at off label medications that are being repurposed. And then we're looking at natural agents, integrative phytotherapeutics and other things that can be used along with the treatments to help. So you see a lot of people will reach out and they're saying they're taking menbendazole, ivermectin or methylene blue, or ozone therapy, high dose vitamin C or quercetin, curcumin, all these different great things. But which ones are right for you? Which ones are what your body needs and at what time? And what doses does it have to be iv? Can it be oral? Which chemotherapy is right for you? So this combinations are so important. This is the power, precision. So patients are always told, stay away from nutrients, antioxidants or vitamins. Do the testing to give you the right timing and targeting, which is the key to you getting an incredible result. Having energy, I look at our patients, you should have energy, you shouldn't lose your hair, you should be able to hike, you should have, you know, feel good, you should feel like you're getting healthier. And that's because the timing and the dosing is so important. Instead of just giving really high doses of chemotherapy all at once and squashing the immune system, pushing inflammation, weakening the body, this is not ideal in our clinical experience. So the good question to ask is what are the right combinations? Timing, choice, coordinating. Talk to your oncologist about these things. Some of them are doing the best they can with the training they have and the institutions are in. They obviously many of them aren't trained in integrative medicine. Many of them are against integrative medicine. That's okay, that's their opinion, that's where they are. But you need a comprehensive approach in my clinical experience to get extraordinary results, the ones that we like to see with our patients. So the mechanism of action of the chemotherapy, you want to ask them, how did you select this drug for me? What are the targets you use? Did you check DNA, rna, immune profiling? How is my chemo going to work? What other agents are you using to support, for example, There were just some recent studies, those small, interesting in pancreatic cancer, where high dose vitamin C could help double the quality and length of life. Just giving high dose vitamin C, a very simple agent we've been using for two decades. But is it the right target for you? How is it combined with the right chemotherapy, with the right phytotherapeutics? This is the question you have to Ask how are you going to overcome drug resistance and what's your plan B if the treatment isn't working? And I always like to ask the doctor this question, how are you monitoring me? Are you going to wait for tumor markers and imaging or do you have anything else? Are you using methylation scores, are using ctc. Circulating tumor cells are using CT free DNA. What are you using to know my response so that we can get ahead of the curve and have always our planning adapted to our care. That's important. So if you look at a lot of these organizations, the American Cancer Society and asco and you know they'll tell you be careful in taking any nutrients because it'll affect your chemotherapy. But it's important to know your window, know your half life, have everything planned and targeted because knowing to give the right agents at the right time makes all the difference. I'm going to recap this with the four M's Map it deep molecular profiling. Know your targets from the chemo, integrative, natural, all the combinations. Number two, modulate it. Use only the doses the body needs that your body can metabolize. Then build it so that it protects your immune system and strengthens each therapy building on each other. Three, move it smarter. Explore the combinations that need to be given in the ways they need to be given. How you deliver the chemo in what areas and regions depending on the type of cancer you have. And then four mend it which is now the nutritional healing and the planning you need on that end. Because mending is a is a multi step process. It's not just helping the body recover and heal, it's helping your immune system recover and heal. It's helping your body get all the information that it needs. So when you're working with your oncologist, make sure you're asking the right questions. Did we use genomics and transcriptomics, immunoprofiling spatial biology to choose my chemotherapy or was it just a standard one size fits all protocol that isn't specific for me. Could metronomic dosing work better for me? Ask your doctor. Can we go lower dose? Can we go really like maybe 10, 15%? Because we need, the more targeting we have, the lower dose we can go, which means we can preserve all of this immunity and still get a fantastic clinical benefit. Is interventional radiology right for me? Can we deliver this chemotherapy directly to the tumor and avoid collateral damage to the tissue, particularly with cancers that may be breast and pancreatic and prostate and colon that have difficult areas to treat? Can we plan to rebuild my immune system after treatment? And do we have a targeted plan to do that? And can we build a custom immunotherapy that's designed just for me to help me with my cancer? When we look at all these things, we deliver smarter, we recover faster, and we reduce chemo's biggest risks. We get rid of them, the ones that are hurting you, and we focus on the right ones to help you win. It's not about being biased. It's what's using the best of what's needed for you. Being unbiased, letting the data guide. Because when we have better data, we have better precision. And so I just encourage you ask better questions, target better, and live better. I hope this was helpful. And may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.