HPV Treatment Options: The 6 Key Pillars of an HPV Treatment Protocol

Hi, I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and welcome to How Humans Heal. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about treatment for the HPV virus. Now, really There are over 150 different strains of the HPV virus. But I'm particularly interested in the high risk strains that are associated with cancer risk. That's cervical cancer risk, vaginal, vulvar, anal, as well as for men, oral and penile cancer. So this is a real risk associated with this virus. And we didn't always know that. It's in more recent research that they put together that it's actually the HPV virus that's triggering these cancer cells. And more and more people are finding out, men and women, that they are having having cancer caused by HPV virus. Now for women, usually they find out because they go in for their annual Pap exam, or sometimes women are going less often for their Pap exam. And now more often, practitioners are also testing for HPV at the time of the Pap test. And so more women are finding out that they're positive. Now, there's not screening for men. So men usually don't know that they have HPV virus, although both men and women definitely have the virus and are exposed to it. In fact, studies show that most all of us are exposed to this virus by age 50. So this is not a rare thing. This is a virus that is in our environment and that we're all exposed to through sexual activity. And of course, most humans are sexually active. Even with a single partner, you can be exposed to HPV virus. Now the other important thing to know is that the human body can protect us from this virus. The human immune system knows how to fend off this virus. And that's why for most people, the majority of people exposed to this virus, the immune system fights it off, it goes away and there's no cancer risk. Right? So that's what we all want. We all want our body to protect us from the HPV virus so that it goes to testing negative. What happens is now with more advanced testing, we can actually test the viral load so we can see if the viral load is high. Then we know the virus is active and potentially could cause abnormal cells. If the viral load is beyond below the detected level, the then it's considered negative and there's no risk and it cannot be spread to another person. So that's our goal. We want HPV to test negative. And in the future, I hope also that there's more screening available for men so that they can be proactive because unfortunately, right now, men only find out that they had HPV positive when they find out that they have cancer. So if there's men watching, I encourage you to keep listening because there's a lot of what I'm going to be talking about here that applies to men and women. Okay, so let's get into thinking about what we can do about this because unfortunately, women are going to the gynecologist. Well, it's good. They're going to the gynecologist and getting a pap and getting tested to find out if there's abnormal cells or cancer. Because if there is abnormal cells, especially highly risk, high risk abnormal cells or leading toward cancer cells, we need to get those cells addressed. So definitely that's the important thing about the gynecologist is they can help you with the abnormal cells and they can help you with diagnosing this. The thing is that conventional medicine doesn't have a way to treat the virus. So what is happening is women are going in, getting the Pap, getting a biopsy. If there's abnormal cells, they're removed, whether through a LEEP procedure, which is a laser procedure, or a surgery to remove part of their body, the cervix, the uterus, even part of the vulva. In some cases, if the virus is going after the vulva, which is the outside of the woman's body.

They can do the surgery. But the surgery does not kill the virus. So it can happen again and again. So women are going through torture, turmoil, destroying their lives, dealing with this virus. Because sometimes the virus doesn't just go away. Their bodies are not fighting it off. And so what I do as a naturopathic doctor, midwife, clinical nutritionist, who, and I've been specializing in women's health and specializing in helping women with HPV for over 23 years. At this point, what I do is I come in and I say, based on all the information I have and all of my experience and background in nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy and system medicine, balancing hormones and so on, what can I bring to the table? And what I see over and over again is when I bring my naturopathic approach to this problem of hpv, there's so much we can do to apply to actually help the body protect women and men from this virus because again, the human body can fend it off. And you may have. There's many myths out there about not being able to protect ourselves from it and not being able to get rid of it. And I encourage you to watch one of my other videos about the myths associated with hpv, because unfortunately these myths and misconceptions are leading to so much confusion and women are left in the dark thinking there's nothing they can do. And I'm really upset about that because there I see how much can be done. And it's not just what I'm seeing clinically, it's also in the research. So let's break down how to think about the treatment of hpv. And I'm proposing this here and I'm hoping that more and more practitioners are listening and going to be integrating this into their practices because we need to change this for women. We, we seriously can decrease the risk of cancers of, of all the HPV related cancers if we can only help women to know that there's so much they can do to actually treat the virus. And so I'm going to be going into the key aspects of the treatment protocol that I've developed and I am in the process of creating a training program for practitioners so that I can teach them how to, how to implement this treatment protocol for their patients again so we can change what's happening related to HPV for women around the world. So one of the first key aspects, I'm gonna cover six key aspects of the treatment for hpv. The first has to do with self care and self prioritization. What tends to happen with women who have HPV that's considered chronic or persistent? It's not going away after a year or two years, it's continuing to and cause issues in those cases. What I find consistently is that women are having a hard time prioritizing themselves and their own self care. Of course, women in most cultures have been taught to care for everyone else. So women are most of most often in a role of caretaker. So they're taking care of others but not taking care of themselves. Sometimes they're taking care of children or parents or spouses or partners or pets, or maybe they're care providers, like as in a nurse or a doctor, medical care provider. Anyway, overall they're taking care of everyone else and not so much having time to take care of themselves. And they've been taught for many years that they're not supposed to, they're supposed to be self. If they take care of themselves, it's selfish. And they're supposed to be selfless and take care of others before themselves. And so because women have been taught this and many cultural ways, even religious ways, it means that women have a hard time prioritizing themselves. And so one of the key aspects of addressing HPV is for women to learn how to prioritize themselves, sometimes in very small ways, even like making sure that they have food that's nutritious for them to eat throughout the day, making sure they get to drink water and take breaks and actually do the things that they need, like exercise and stress recovery activities like spending time in nature or meditation or journaling. And a lot of times women are racing through the day and not learning how to prioritize themselves in these ways. And so I find that this is essential because to the degree that we are not prioritizing ourselves, it means that we are getting depleted and more and more depleted by the demands of life. And depleted nutrient wise, depleted in terms of sleep, our stress levels are high and we end up in burnout. And this ends up making us susceptible to hpv. So I absolutely find that one of the key aspects of treating HPV that makes a huge difference in my patients and my program participants is teaching self care and self prioritization, as well as self love. Number two, the second aspect is has to do with nutrients. And this again, can you can look at it as coming from my background in clinical nutrition. What are we going to do? We're going to look for nutrient deficiencies, right? With any health issue, we're going to look for nutrient deficiencies, but absolutely, with HPV and chronic HPV or abnormal cells, we have to look for which nutrients are deficient. And it's not the same for every person. There's some that are very common, and I have a video that talks about five most common nutrient deficiencies that I identify. So I encourage you to look at that one. But it's important to be individualized and find out for this particular person which nutrients are deficient. And when women come to see me, I often find that their practitioners have not yet looked for nutrient deficiencies and not even iron and vitamin D. And those are the two most common, iron and vitamin D. So these are tests that can easily be done in standard blood work covered under insurance. And when iron and vitamin D are low, which they often are for women, we need to be addressing that because that does have an impact in her ability to protect herself from hpv, let alone many other nutrients. The B vitamins and the B vitamins require specific testing that most practitioners are not doing. It's not okay to just do a B12 and folate level. We need homocysteine and methylmalonic acid to really determine whether a person is low in folate and B12, which are essential nutrients for making healthy cells. And Preventing cancer. So these are really important blood tests that can be done in the standard blood lab. Also the, all the other nutrients I look at and not only do we need to identify nutrient deficiencies, but we need to use clinical doses. So the difference is that there's the standard, right. Standard doses that we all need as humans that have been determined as sort of a standard quantity of vitamins and minerals that we each need each day and amino acids. And a lot of times women are not getting even their basic level of nutrients, especially if they're not eating healthy and taking a multivitamin and eating enough protein. Because when we, when we're not getting enough proteins, but usually animal protein is the best way to get B vitamins and iron and minerals and amino acids. And so if women are following a plant based diet, oftentimes they're low in these nutrients. I know how scary it is to test positive for HPV virus. And I know it's even more concerning when your gynecologist tells you that all you can do is wait and see if it continues and if it causes abnormal cells. That's exactly why as a naturopathic doctor and midwife that I feel so passionate about helping women to be proactive about protecting themselves from HPV virus. I've been helping thousands of women for the past 23 years to do exactly that and to get HPV to negative and stay negative. And that's why I developed the say Goodbye to HPV online program where you can get access to my pro proven protocol from wherever you are in the world. So I hope you will come check out the say Goodbye to HPV program, review the success cases and see if this is going to be a good fit to help you get your life back from hpv. And then on top of just having the base level of nutrients, we can look at clinical doses. Clinical doses is called clinical nutrition. And there's many clinical nutrition specialists who are certified around the United States and around the world. And in clinical nutrition what we do is we look at how we can use specific nutrients at a higher than this dietetic daily and allowance. We can use a higher dose, not at a toxic dose, but it's a clinical dose of certain nutrients that have clinical benefit. So you're using nutrients in a clinical manner and this is true for everything from vitamin C, for example, there's a standard human need for vitamin C and then there's a clinical quantity of vitamin C that we can use that has increased value for supporting the immune system, for example, so the immune system can better protect us from infections like hpv. And that's true for all of the nutrients. Whether you're thinking of selenium and zinc and other antioxidants, as well as the fat soluble vitamins, including vitamin A and folate. We can use clinical doses, but the important thing is that you work with a clinical nutritionist or naturopathic doctor who has the knowledge, who's done the training, done the board exams, and knows how to implement clinical doses of nutrients so that you can get the right benefit without the risk. I don't recommend that you try to do this on your own because sometimes you, first of all, you might not be even able to access the clinical doses of those nutrients unless you're working with a practitioner. And second of all, you wouldn't want to push it too much and overdo any of these doses. It's important to know the parameters. And that's why I recommend working with a practitioner with appropriate training to guide you. And that's what I do with my patients and in my, with my program participants is guide them to how to use nutrients in clinical doses and to help them get their immune system to fend off this virus, but not only that, to correct other imbalances in their bodies. So we have to address nutrient deficiencies and we also need to use clinical doses effectively to be able to address hpv. Okay, number three, number three is we can support the immunity, we can support the human immune system because we know that when we're under a lot of stress and not getting enough self care and not getting enough nutrients, we end up having our immune system under functioning. Now it doesn't necessarily show always on blood work as under functioning, but we know because the HPV is hanging around too long, then we know your immune system is under functioning. And so we can support the immune system with many natural products and there's so many that it can be overwhelming. So we have, you have to have someone who can help you prioritize. And we can use everything from nutrients, those that I just mentioned, as well as herbs, herbs that are antiviral herbs that are specifically supporting the immune system. Mushrooms and mushroom extracts, there's many of the mushrooms are very supportive to the immune system. From shiitake mushroom, coriolis mushroom, as well as reishi mushroom come to mind for me that I use regularly with patients and program participants. We can also use homeopathy, very powerful for helping the human immune system to protect us from infections as well as peptides. And so these are some of the tools that I use When I'm thinking, how am I going to help support this person's immune system to protect them from this virus? And oftentimes women who are coming positive of hpv, they also have other infections. They might be dealing with bladder infections, other vaginal infections, like yeast infections, they might be getting sinus infections, infections on their skin. So you start to see the pattern. The immune system is susceptible. They might also have autoimmunity, which is another possibility when the immune system is under stress and not functioning optimally as we end up seeing autoimmunity. And the thing is, is it's possible to address all of that at the same time using natural approaches again, that are well established in textbooks and research studies to be effective at helping with this. But it's important to work with a practitioner to help you prioritize and be efficient. Get high quality products at the right doses so that you can actually see results. I see so many people who have been trying different aspects and different herbs and different mushrooms, and they're not getting anywhere because it's, it's, they're just guessing and they don't have the person to guide them. And this is why I'm so glad to be able to guide women, because when they work with me and I give them the right doses and, and the right products, then they can much more quickly get this virus to go to negative and leave them alone. Okay, number four is we have to address the microbiome. Now, when I say microbiome, I'm talking about the vaginal microbiome as well as the gut microbiome. Studies are now really demonstrating what I've noticed over the years, which is that the gut and vagina are completely interrelated with each other. And actually not just the microbiome, but the whole environment. It's called the cervical vaginal environment, and I would call it the cervical. So it's the cervix, the vagina and the gut, the cervical, vaginal gut biome. And this is because there's a communication that's happening between the vagina and the gut. And, and we observed it for more than two decades. But now the research is really showing it that when women have disruption in their healthy bacteria in the gut, it can then disrupt the healthy balance of bacteria in the vagina and vice versa. And not only the bacteria, but also inflammation. So if there's inflammation in the gut and if there's leaky gut, which is when the intestinal cells are not as healthy as they could be, then that's correlated with vaginal inflammation, and even not as healthy cells vaginally as they should be. So we have to be addressing this whole connection between vagina and the gut health. And so I absolutely emphasize how important and what a difference I see it makes when I help women to heal their gut. Not only digest their food, absorb their nutrients, not react to the nutrients, decrease inflammation, heal the leaky gut, balance the microbiome, and we do the same vaginally. How do we get the vaginal bacteria working again to protect you? And in doing so, then your body can help protect you from HPV as well as other infections and health issues. Number five is to balance all the hormones and neurotransmitters. So here's the thing is a very often I find that women are experiencing various different hormone imbalances. When HPV is testing positive, they could be having high blood sugar and insulin issues. They may also be having estrogen and progesterone variations or imbalances, whether that's because of a natural change like pregnancy or perimenopause or menopause, where estrogen and progesterone levels are shifting. It can also be that they're having thyroid hormone imbalances or cortisol. Very often I find cortisol levels are too high or too low. And these are all different hormones in the body, and they all communicate with each other. So if one of them is too high or too low, it affects the others, especially cortisol. And cortisol is our main stress hormone. So again, when we're under a lot of stress, disrupts our cortisol. That disrupts not only our gut health and our microbiome, but it also in our immune system. But it also disrupts our hormones and our neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are, for example, serotonin, gaba, dopamine, adrenaline. These are the messengers in the nervous system. Which is why I find that so many women who are testing positive for hpv, yes, they're feeling anxious because they have a virus that's associated with cancer. But they're also feeling anxious because their neurotransmitters are depleted. They don't have enough calming neurotransmitters like serotonin and gaba. And they often have high adrenaline levels, which is making them feel even more anxious on top of the anxiety of dealing with this virus. So all of these things can be balanced. This is what I do in my practice all the time. So I know how much of a difference that makes for a person to have balanced hormones balanced. Blood sugar, optimal cortisol levels, optimal neurotransmitter levels. Not only do you feel better, but the virus cannot survive when we have balanced hormones and balanced neurotransmitters and now recovery from stress. Which brings me to aspect number six of treatment for hpv. And that has to do with recovery from stress. But not only stress, but we also need to help women recover from shame and abuse. It's shown that very often women who have are testing positive for HPV virus have a history of abuse of some type, whether it's emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or all of the above earlier in their life or sometimes currently in their lives. And it's because this exposure to stress, trauma and abuse leaves us susceptible to hpv. And I've mentioned a lot of the reasons already, because the stress and the trauma disrupts our cortisol, our stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. And that then has a cascade into all of these other susceptibilities of nutrient deficiencies and digestive issues and microbiome and hormone issues. Of course HPV can survive because the human system is depleted. And so this is where, why my argument and my philosophy is that it's so important to help women to actually recover from the stress and trauma they've been through. And it's absolutely possible we can. There's so many tools available, including therapy, as well as meditation and guided imagery and vagus nerve retraining. There's so many tools we can use to help women recover from stress and trauma and abuse history as well as rebalancing cortisol, adrenaline and neurotransmitters and eliminating and erasing all of the traces of stress in their system. This is what I find leads my patients to be able to get to HPV negative. So I hope this has been helpful for you. I know I covered a ton of information, but I really want you to be able to understand that this is a comprehensive treatment protocol. It's not just I'm going to take one mushroom extract, it's not just I'm going to make one dietary change. It has to be that we really fully look at your whole system and understand where the imbalances are that are leaving you susceptible. And it's only when we really truly do that that not only do we get the virus to go away, but we transform your health and your on a physical, emotional and even energetic or spiritual level so that you no longer are susceptible to this virus. And what I find is women, even if they're re exposed to the virus in the future. Their body now knows how to protect them because they have their defenses working. Their system knows what to do to protect them and to prevent cancer from happening from HPV virus. So I hope this is helpful. I welcome you to reach out to me. If you have more questions or would like help to address HPV and preventing it from causing cancer for you or your loved ones. You can always email or call my office and I will put a link below to where you can learn more from me about how I integrate these treatment strategies into my protocol and my programs. Thanks again for joining me today on How Humans Heal. I'd love to hear if there's any other topics that are of interest to you in particular about HPV or anything else, and I look forward to seeing you at the next episode of How Humans Heal. Thank you very much.

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