35: Uncovering the Risks of Mammography with Megan Smith

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Hello and welcome back to the keeping your Breasts with Dr. Jen podcast. I'm so happy to have you here, and I have something truly special for you today. So listen in and listen up, because this is going to be amazing. Today we have Megan Smith with us, and if you don't know her, you need to know her and need to know about her because her work is tremendously important and made a really lasting impression on me. And I've been so looking forward to this discussion, to meeting her, to talking to her, to hearing why she went on this explorative journey. She has an incredible background. She is a documentary filmmaker, and we're going to hear lots about that today. She's an investigative journalist, a screenwriter. She was a Capitol Hill lobbyist and a recording artist. I'm going to ask you a lot about your movie, the War on women's breasts, but you have a new movie out that we're going to talk about as well. But first, Megan, I want to welcome you.

Thank you so much, Dr. Jen. I appreciate being here. Yeah, I'm.

I'm so happy to have you here. Talk a little bit about your journey because you went from recording artist to documentary filmmaker. So that's a circuitous path.

It was strange path. In 2007, I was diagnosed with late Lyme disease and Johns Hopkins told me I was incurable and I said, no, I don't believe that. So I went out and found a the Rife machine R I F E and my friend had a squamous cell carcinoma on his leg and at the same time. So we went through this journey together where we cured ourselves of both those diseases. With this machine. And I said, okay, there are things that cure chronic diseases out there. So two years later, about a year later, sorry, my husband contracted lung cancer. And I talked to him about this machine. He said, look, I'll use it, but I don't hold out hope for this thing. Well, three days later, his wheezing stopped. And I said, can't we just try this instead of radiation chemo? You're already stage four. You know, the writing's on the wall. And he said, megan, I can't. I don't understand this thing. And I have to follow the white coat. So he followed the white coat, and after two rounds of a cocktail of five chemo's, one was the platinum base. He. He was gone. So I stewed about that for about six years and finally said, you know, I have all these. I'm a journalist, I'm a. I was a lobbyist, you know, I. I know how I got a Washington Post article written up about the inaccuracy of Lyme disease testing. So I said, you know, all I need is a cameraman and I can just make a documentary film. And I'd seen Ty Bollinger's amazing the Truth About Cancer series. And I said, okay, this is interesting. So my cameraman and I took off for the EU about two weeks later and filmed all over there, then came back to the U.S. then went down to Mexico and, you know, 200 hours of footage later and, and eight years later, because I also made this other film on breast cancer screening. I have two documentaries out, and that's the long and short of it.

Yeah, really, really amazing. So I totally get why you did something about Lyme disease, because that's what resonated with you and that's what started you on this journey. What? Talk to me about boobs, the war on breasts. Like, what inspired that?

So I was sitting there beside my editor making this 90 minute documentary on alternative cancer therapies that actually turned into now five hours, but that's another story. And I noticed that 10 minutes of the 90 minute film was on breast cancer screening, because the more I found out about it, the more I was upset about it as a woman and having my breast radiated a number of times. And I'd run into two medical doctors who said, look, we should be doing ultrasound and thermography instead of mammograms. And then they just told me all these amazing, you know, information that's in my film. And I said, you know, this is such an amazing story, and this might be. I probably cannot Change the cancer world. You know, we might be stuck with that, but I might be able to make a dent in, in breast cancer screening for women, because I'm upset about that and I think every woman is. So I took off down a tangent and I made a documentary and got picked up by a distributor. Unfortunately, it was released during the pandemic. So I'm still pushing that film, hoping that it'll catch on through shows like yours.

And. Yeah, well, it's going to catch on. It's going to catch on. And I first I have to say that everyone needs to see boobs, the war on breasts, because it shines light in a corner of medicine that has been hiding for a very long time. And, you know, when I talk about mammograms, I say, you know, if the only problem were that we had to have our breasts smashed, women can do that. We can do hard things. We can do hard things when we know that they're for the good. But the problems with mammogram go far deeper than that. The problems with mammogram is that they are radiation. They are low energy radiation which is retained within the breast and it's delivered during a time of trauma. And so it's kind of doubly damaging. And most women are under the impression that mammograms save lives.

Right.

And.

Right. And the literature is starting to turn on that. As you know, this started a while ago, but it's, it's still turning. And people, more people are coming out saying, you know, they did a whole blanket of maybe screening in general, prostate, everything is not a good idea. We may not be saving any more lives and we're putting people through. Through heck, you know. Yeah, yeah. Mammograms, it's important to know they're not early detection, truly, because by the time you catch a mass, a solid tumor on a mammogram, it's already been there. I've been told at least 10, two to 10 years.

Yeah.

So. And it's hard to.

And if we talk about the number of cells. So mammogram has kind of a capacity to pick up a 5 millimeter lesion that's 500,000 cells. This is not. This is. No, I'm sorry. That's 500 million cells. Yeah. So this is not exactly early detection, as you were saying.

No, that's a little bit that leads women down. You know, they think it is and it's not really. And the other thing is the radiation load is a heck of a lot higher than they're letting on. And I found this out through talking to a Columbia University professor. I called him up. He was one of the authors of a paper. And I said, why do people Talk in Millise vs. Milligra? What is the difference there? I confused. He said, I. Milt is scattered radiation. That's what, what's going from the mammogram itself. It's scattering all over your other organs. Okay, that's, that's that dose. It's a lower dose. But what we're concerned with is the absorbed dose going into a breast measured a different way. That's what can give you cancer years later. And that's what they're not talking about when they say mammograms are the same. Radiation is flying over the U.S. they're spinning it. That's. That's the scattered radiation dose. It's a lot higher. And I've calculated up to 20 times as high. And if you get a 3D mammogram, know that if, if the place you go to doesn't have a soft. Certain software, and most of them don't, you're getting a 2D, the old mammogram and the 3D. So you're getting twice the amount of the radiation right off the bat. And then if you have dense breasts, they're back there cranking up the radiation to see through the dense breast tissue to differentiate between the breast cancer and the. And the white. You know, they're both white and the dense rest tissue cancer. And they don't tell you. So informed consent has already gone right out the window with that one. So, I mean, the story goes on and on about radiation. We can talk more about it, but that's it in a nutshell.

No, but I think that that's a really important point because we hear radiologists talk all the time about the fact that it's the same radiation that you would get to fly cross country. And in fact, I think Dr. Dupree said that on your documentary. So, you know, I wouldn't tell people to not fly cross country, so why would I tell them not to get a mammogram? And this thinking is pervasive. It's out there.

That's what.

But that's not what's happening at all. Right.

Yeah. No, and. And the radiologist, what I found talking to three of them, I know that's anecdotal, but still, none of them knew about radiation. I was, I came to them and I told them about this higher radiation dose, and they went running to their radiation physicists that they work with and passed it by them. And they said, yeah, she's correct. That's a, that's, it's a higher radiation load. And they came back and went, oh my God, Megan, I've been radiating the pituitary out of my, my patients. And I didn't even know it. And I said, yeah, it's upsetting, isn't it? And so this, the associations are largely at blame because doctors don't have the time, as you know, to do the literature search. So they're looking at the association literature, or maybe they're conglomerate, you know, the umbrella hospital over them. They're sending them information about standard of care or whatever. They don't have time to look into this. And why radiologists don't know the basic things about radiation is beyond me. They know how to push a button and do the scan and how to read the, you know, the scans, but they don't know about basic radiation. So, you know, it's important to know this.

So, I mean, even the doctors are uninformed and unaware of the fact that people are getting more radiation than they, they had thought. Right. And also that that radiation, that there is a profound difference between you flying cross country and having that radiation scattered and distributed throughout rather than focused down onto the tissues of the breast.

Correct. It's totally different.

Yeah. So what do you say when people say, but mammograms save lives?

The literature is turning on that now. And because of things like radiation induced cancers and plus the, you know, the compression they put on a breast is like up to £45. That's a lot. I mean, last time I had a breast mammogram, I was like, wow, this hurts. And I had no idea it was that much pressure. And that can, you know, I've seen stuff in the, you know, some, some of the people in the literature are saying, you know, that in itself could, if you had a tumor, can burst the bubble, you know, and if you've just had a biopsy, think about when we used to have an orange as a kid. We stuck a straw in it, we'd squeeze the orange and the juice would come out. Same thing if you just had a biopsy and then you do a mammogram, you're squishing it. There is a possibility that those cancer cells are spreading just from that. So this is, you can also have what's called induced cancer from trauma. And that's another thing, you know, year after year, if we're traumatizing our breasts, eventually that might catch up with you. So there's a lot of might, might, might in the literature, but you know, that slowly people are starting going, you know, common sense. This doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, but we're fighting a big machine, right? Because this. We do 37 million screening mammograms every year in the United States, and they don't do them for the screening mammograms. They do them because it's a big funnel. And a certain percentage of those, depending on where you are in the US 40 to 60% of women are called back from that initial screening study for additional views for ultrasounds, for MRIs. And we are actually creating a lot of customers there.

Right. And the standard of care, as you know, you have to fda. You know, FDA has approved. They regulate the mammogram and the ultrasound, but they say you cannot get an ultrasound. Standard of care says you have to get the mammogram first. Then you can get the ultrasound, or insurance won't pay for it. You can go and get an ultrasound on your own and pay for it. But your doctor. And I've heard a couple doctors have figured out how to get around. I don't know if it's the DSM codes or however they do it, but they have figured out how to get their. The prescription to their patients saying, ultrasound, okay, forget the mammogram. But it does not happen very often. So we're stuck going down the mammogram route, and women are really fed up with it. I've heard so many women screaming about this. So FDA needs to, you know, they had a chance to change it. They just changed the regulations again. And they could have changed them to make ultrasound a primary screening tool, which is what mammograms are. But they didn't do it.

Yeah. And I think they didn't do it because the lobby's strong. It does create a lot of customers. And, you know, unfortunately, I don't really blame the radiologists because it's. First of all, I think they're not educated. They're uninformed. Right. They were told that it's safe, and they believe it. Because why would people lie to them? Why would the people that they trust, why would the people that trained them, why would the leaders in their field lie to them?

Right. It's the same thing with oncologists. They are being told by the American Society of Clinical Oncologists that it's okay to feed sugar to a can to a cancer patient because it doesn't feed the cancer cell. Any faster than. Than a regular cell. Otto Warburg proved this back in the 1930s. He got a Nobel prize for it. And they still are turning a blind eye to a basic of do not overeat sugar. If you have cancer, you'll. You're just feeding the cancer.

Yeah. Or don't eat. We know that cancer is a metabolic disease. We also know in our society that no one needs to eat sugar. There is no clinical benefit to anyone eating sugar ever. So there is only negative effects. There are no positive effects to sugar consumption. And yet it still has a place in our diet.

Yeah, it's the, it's the additives. It's the stuff they're putting in canned foods and McDonald's and stuff we're all hooked on and Oreo cookies and. But that's the stuff you have to cut out. You know, if you eat any sugars. It should be fruit, it should be as natural as possible, non gmo, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, don't overdo anything.

Unprocessed. Right, Unprocessed. Although then I get the questions about honey all the time, and I can say with great certainty that honey is sugar. Syrup is sugar. So even though those are natural things, you should not be consuming them, especially if you are actively cancering. Because cancer is a metabolic disease and because we need to preserve our metabolic health. And metabolic health is a huge problem in our society. And upwards of 90% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. And those numbers are astounding and scary. And when you take someone who has metabolic dysfunction and then you screen them with mammogram, they're already vulnerable. They're already on their way to a cancer because their toxicity, because of everything else, they're already vulnerable.

We're not taking care of our mitochondria.

No, we're not taking care of our mitochondria. And another thing to think about along those lines is that when we consume sugar, our immune system is suppressed for five hours afterwards. So, you know, you are basically setting the stage for cancer because we all make cancer cells, from the very young to the very old and everyone in between. And when we make cancer cells, our immune system is supposed to recognize them and destroy them. But if your immune system is being hijacked by metabolic imbalance, it can't do its job. So that's how it's the. One of the ways that it sets the stage for breast cancer. Yeah.

One of my real quick, one of my big takeaways on my second film that these doctors, alternative doctors were telling me was cancer loves Sugar and it hates oxygen. So a lot of their treatments feed right into that. Again, it's about metabolic pathways, sugar, you know, cancer cells, like the anaerobic cycle, they're good with their. Efficient with it versus a normal cell that likes oxygen or aerob. Aerobic.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, okay.

Yeah. And that's exactly why when you exercise and oxygenate yourself, your outcomes are better.

Correct.

So that's why exercise is so important when you're actively cancering and trying to recover from cancer, because it oxygenates your body and your cells.

You're killing cancer cells when you do.

Killing. Exactly, exactly. So I want to go back to your film, the War on Breasts. So what do you think? Like, what would you call the, the problems with mammogram? And why do you think that we're not getting enough kind of acknowledgement and recognition? Because the truth is that most, most radiologists would not, would not agree that mammograms are harmful.

Right. And it kind of goes back to that education. Where are they getting their information? And I don't blame them either. I understand what you're saying. It's the med schools. And you know, it starts with Medicare and kind of dribbles down from there into the med, Med school curriculum. The re. Half, you know, there's two of the top five medical journals have come out. The editors have come out and said half the, about half of the literature is fraudulent.

Yep.

And you can't even trust your doctor. I mean, medicine has gone out the window. And so you kind of have to start, start from there. But the big, the big takeaway with me and what I was telling you before that we went on air is I discovered something after I did this film that was absolutely astounding. I started to look into the radiation, going back to the radiation things and I found out that the fibro glandular, which is, makes up dense breast tissue, the glandular part of that is epithelial tissues. Same thing like your thyroid gland. It's the most radiation sensitive tissue in your body. So your breast is like almost like one big gland. Right. And it is the most radiation sensitive tissue and we are pounding it with radiation year after year after year after year. And that's nowhere. I see that. You know, American Cancer Society, I believe, said that for some reason women with the higher, the, the dense breast tissue say you're in the highest level. They are more, they are up to like 6 times possibility of them getting breast cancer. And they, and we don't know why. I'm like, well, that's because when you get behind the wall, you're cranking up the radiation and it's the most radiation sensitive tissue in your body. Why can't they put these two things together?

Yeah.

And nobody's done that. I had to go into the citations of the citation of the literature and find the cell physiologist screaming, we need to stop radiating women's breasts. We are giving them cancer, most likely.

Yeah.

That was my big aha moment. I'm like, whoa, this is like, this is everything right here and nobody's talking about it.

So do you think the data is out there? It's just being buried?

Yes, because that's how I found it. I had to go into the hole, the big rabbit hole.

Yeah, I do.

I think, and I think people, unfortunately, you know, I hate to think this way, but somebody somewhere, you know, at the radio radiation associations, they don't know this then. They don't know anything about radiation and, and to, you know, tissues and of the human body, which is real. They're not working with the cell physiologists. There's a disconnect.

Yeah. Now, you interviewed the head of the American Cancer Society for your film.

I did. Otis Brawley.

Yeah. And he pretty much came out and said that mammography is dangerous and that there was no benefit to screening with mammogram.

Yeah. He was the one who kind of set me off. I had to really do some fast talking to get an interview with him. But I said, look, I've heard you say that mammograms are suboptimal. I said, don't you think that's important for women to know? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, how about if I just come in and talk to you about mostly mammograms, cancer in general, but mammograms, it's really important. He said, okay, I'll give you 45 minutes. And so the takeaway with him is he said, mammograms are a suboptimal test and we need a better test. That's the American Cancer Society. That was the head, their chief medical. He's also a medical oncologist. So he knows all about, you know, cancer. And he. That was their medical director at the time. And I was like, wow, that. What a statement that is. And then it went from there. We didn't even dive into. Because at that point I didn't know all this other information. I could have asked him about the radiation. I didn't. But yeah, just that statement alone says you Know everything.

Yeah. Yeah. So why do you think I. I think he said Hopkins now, is that correct? That's correct, yeah. Why do you think he's not talking about it? I mean, he knows.

Yeah.

I turned into the film.

Right. I tried to get him to talk about it when he was at Hopkins. I. I have his number and I bug him every now and then. He said, megan, I'm really not into that area anymore. I'm just. I think he's just overloaded, quite frankly. But I did go with him. One of the doctors in my film, Dr. Galena Migalko from LA, she was the ones who tipped me off with this. Ultrasound and thermography in conjunction is a lot better than mammograms. So I took her to some. Do some Washington, D.C. meetings, God bless her. She went and we spoke with Otis after he. Otis Raleigh, after he had left acs. And we did. She did a beautiful presentation for him. And he went, wow. Because he. He was bashing thermograms in my. In my film. You'll hear it. And he said, oh, my gosh. He said, this is amazing. He said, you know, I think this is worthy of study. And I said, can I quote you on that? And he said, yes, you may. So it's in my film. I have him on. You know, he's not at the ACS anymore, but he said he thought it was worthy of interest and worthy of study.

Yeah.

And it is. We should be studying. It's not regulated by fda. It's approved by fda. The thermogram. Yeah, but it's not regulated. So you have out there that are doing thermograms that really aren't qualified, which is scary to me.

Yeah, well, there are a number of problems with thermograms, and one of the biggest things is what you elucidated in your film, which is that it is not a standalone test and it is not a test that screens for breast cancer. It is a test that screens for inflammation. Right. But that's a different story. It has to be coupled with another study like an ultrasound.

And he agreed with that when he said it can't be done by itself. And I said, yeah, that's what the doctors are telling me, too. So just have them done at the same time. You know, neither one is very expensive overall. I mean, a mammogram is probably going to be more expensive, and mri Absolutely more expensive. Yeah, but they're not covered by insurance.

Yeah, well, ultrasound is covered by insurance, but only when you do it. The way that they propose to do it, which is to have a mammogram first. Yeah.

It's not a primary screening tool. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's a huge problem because the way that the system is designed now, it's actually designed to create customers. Right. And they are creating the very disease that they, you know, attest to, want to help with.

Right. And I know you know this better than anybody because you're a breast cancer surgeon. DCIS is one of those beasts. I mean, it's like, what, 25 to 30% of all breast cancers. And, you know, so we see about.

40,000 cases of DCIS a year and 240,000 cases of invasive cancer.

And I'm sure you probably talked to your audience about this before, but it's. It's kind of the beast. It was never discovered until they found it on a mammogram, because the calcium deposits. And they had to create a whole new category for it as a stage zero because it was a pre cancer. And now stage zero testicular cancer, they do what's called watch and wait for the man. With a woman, she hears the word carcinoma, and she goes running to her breast cancer surgeon to have it cut out of her body before it becomes invasive. I'm sure you're, you know about Laura Esserman's work, and, you know, she's trying to push for, hey, let's maybe change the nomenclature and not call it a carcinoma because it's a pre cancer. But also, let's maybe practice, watch and wait and figure out. Try and figure out which ones might become invasive and which ones aren't. But right now, we don't have that set up anywhere.

So, yeah, I mean, you know, from my perspective, I think we need to do a little more than watch and wait in that I think that we should see DCIS as an opportunity, an opportunity to take stock of what's happening in, on, and around you and look at how can my health be optimized? Because I do think that it's a warning signal. I think it's a red flag. I think it is your body telling you that you're losing that balance. You're losing that homeostasis. Your chemistry is shifting from that of joy and kind of that sympathetic state to that parasympathetic state to that sympathetic state, that fight or flight state, state that stress state. And so I think that if we used that diagnosis, first of all, I think the name has to change. Like, we can't call something carcinoma even if we're bookending it with things that imply that it's non invasive, I don't think we can use the word carcinoma without setting off major, major, major alarms in people.

Right.

I hope they didn't. And, and then I think that we use it as an opportunity. But our system currently is not designed for that. Our, our system is only designed for illness. It's not designed for health, it's not designed for wellness. Doctors don't know how to help people to be healthy and there's no motivation for them to do that because the only time that they get paid is when people are sick.

I actually like the thermogram because it can act even though it's not a perfect screening tool. There isn't one yet that I know of. It's still. We can talk about your cute.

We're close. Yes.

It. The thermogram will pick up inflammation like we talked about. And that's huge because I, my story's in that film. I didn't know I was going to be in the film, but they found an abnormality in my, in my, between the differential and my, my breast temperatures, between my left and right. And he said it might be pre cancer. You might have cancer. We don't know. And I said, what? And so I changed my lifestyle and within a year the inflammation was gone. So I liked thermography for that.

I think it's a really important tool. I just don't want. The reason that it got a bad rap is because it was advertised as a cancer screening tool. And that's not what it's screening for. It's screening for inflammation. And we as a society need to start to recognize when our inflammatory changes are happening so that we can reverse them so that we have the opportunity to change the way that we eat, think, move, sleep, all of that so that we don't have to develop disease.

Yeah, I totally agree. This is just one tool. It could be viewed as a preventative, which is, you know, wow, preventative of cancer if you reverse your, your lifestyle. So that's huge.

Yeah. So the Europeans are doing better than we are in terms of changing the way that they're screening for breast cancer. Can you talk a little bit about your experience and what you learned there.

That I wasn't talking to them that much over there about breast cancer screening. I know that they used the thermogram, but they're all doing the mammogram as well. I mean, they're, they're unfortunately the u. S. Science, the US Medicine is also. It's infiltrating the EU and actually even Mexico. I had a clinic down in Mexico say, I can't talk to you. They're watching us. And I was like, whoa, Mexico. I mean, we're losing. All the doors are starting to close. So I don't if there's something specific that you have in mind.

Well, I think that Switzerland stopped doing screening. Mammogram.

That's correct.

Yeah. Sorry.

That's what you.

Yeah, yeah. And.

And.

And I know that the studies out of Denmark have proven repeatedly that there is no benefit to screening with mammogram. And when you look at the women that screen with mammogram and compare them to the women that don't, survival is exactly the same. There's no survival benefit to screening with mammogram. Right.

They're not. They're not recommending them anymore. But the radiologist told me that they're still using them. The radiologists are still using them.

Yeah, they are. And I think that is largely because women feel like they need to do something. Women feel like they need to have some role, and they don't feel like self exam is enough.

Right. They want to be proactive.

Yeah, they want to be proactive, and they want to be actively involved, and they feel as if an imaging study is what gets them in. And for many years, you know, people feel. People feel good about themselves after they have a mammogram. I remember so many times when I would diagnose someone with cancer, they would say, but I don't understand how this happened. I get my mammogram every year. Like, they've somehow convinced women that it's part of prevention.

Yeah. Beth Dupre said that in my film also. I was like, wow, I've never heard a woman say that. But I guess. I guess I could see how people can construe it that way.

Yeah. And, you know, quite frankly, I mean, Beth was. Is very much in. In favor of. Of mammograms.

Right.

And said as much in.

In the film that I started to look into self. I started to see stuff in the literature that said, and I think American Cancer Society touched on this. They're not fully recommending with, you know, all their heart about women doing breast exams anymore. I don't understand that. Do you. Have you talked about this on your show? Have you gotten to the bottom of that? Because that. I have to. I have to do some digging. But I was like, what. What is. I don't even understand why they think that Way they said they're over diagnosing. I'm like, what are.

But yeah, the explanation that I heard was that it's anxiety provoking because women are not able to distinguish normal breast texture from something that's abnormal. To me, I think there's nothing more empowering than knowing your body. And no one is going to know your body better than you know yourself. And so only you will really be able to know and recognize when there's been a change. And how anyone could justify discouraging you from being in touch with your own body, being your own advocate, owning your own story, it's astounding to me. But. But what you say is true, that the American Cancer Society is discouraging self breast examination.

Yeah. I was wondering if it goes back to the insurance companies because women come run. I did this one time. I had. It was some gland thing or I don't know what it was, but the woman said, no, you don't. This isn't. Cancer is like a hard marble. I don't know if that's true every time, but yeah, women are running in and maybe they're getting even biopsies and I don't know if it's costing insurance more money. And they started, you know, because a lot of it starts with Medicare and dribbles down from there. Yeah.

I mean, you know, the only thing that I could see is that it would generate, you know, office visits to have examinations by your doctor. But, you know, I found that most doctors don't even know how to do a breast examination and wouldn't know what is and what isn't. And we hear stories all the time of young women who have lesions and the doctors say, oh, that's nothing, that's nothing. And that turns out to be cancer. And, and you know, older women who they, they upset them so much by saying, oh, this is going to be cancer. And then it turns out to be nothing and everything in between. Right. And so I still believe that there is absolutely no harm in self examination and in knowing yourself.

Yeah. And if, you know, if you know to look at a Dr. V, I know you know, Dr. V. That's how I found you. She has these, you know, her breast. Breast buddy or whatever it's called. And that hard marble. I had a friend of mine who had breast cancer and I felt her marble and I was like, oh, that's what they're talking about. It's like a hard marble. I again, I don't know if that's. You can answer that more than I. That you know, but at least I know what to look for now.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I say that for most people, they don't even know how to do a breast examination. So that's why I have one on my Instagram, like, pinned to the top of my Instagram, so people know. But when you do a breast examination, you're going to want to do it with your fingertips because it's the most sensitive part of your hand. And you run your hand around the breast radially, going from outside to in. And when you run your hand over the tissue, a cancer feels like a bump in the road. And it's kind of. I don't use a marble because that's very round and regular. It's more like a stone. And so, you know, it tends to be very firm. But, you know, cysts can be very firm, too, and they're nothing to worry about. So, you know, what I want people to do is not to panic, because it is what it is, and people get into, like, a frenzied rush when they find something in the breast. And I understand. I understand, because it really feels like an emergency. But breast cancer is rarely, if ever, an emergency. And whatever is going to happen, it won't matter if it's today, next week, next month. For most people, it wouldn't even matter if it was next year, because it has been there for so long. But if you are examining your breasts on a regular basis, the likelihood that something is going to go undetected by you is pretty small. And I think you looked at the numbers of things, the size of things that were picked up on mammogram and the size of things that were picked up on physical examination. Didn't you look at those numbers, and they weren't too terribly far apart?

That wasn't me.

I thought I. Well, I read then. I definitely read that somewhere. Now I have to. Now I have to check the archives of my brain and figure out where I read that. But I think that there was like a 4 millimeter difference or a 5 millimeter difference between the things that are picked up on imaging and the things that are picked up on, on physical examination by the patient. And it's not that far apart. We're talking about 4 or 5 millimeters in size. And that 4 or 5 millimeters doesn't change treatment, doesn't change outcome, you know, any of those things. And so, you know, that's another reason not to screen with mammogram. You know, at the end of the day, the biggest reason to not scream with Mammogram is because it's dangerous.

Yeah. The radiations.

Yeah, right.

I like that you talked about not rushing into treatment. If I can talk about that real quick.

Yeah.

Again, it's been there two to 10 years somewhere in there. It's not like it popped up overnight, you know, unless it's fast growing and still it's not gonna be overnight. It's been there a while. Take some time, take a breath, meditate, you know, do your research. And most people don't do their research, they just go running to the white coat and go, like you said, go into the funnel. But Ty Bollinger's got great films. I, you know, my new film on a new cancer, a new standard of care has got all kinds of information on cancer. What we're doing now, would you, you know, the alternatives and why we're not using the new, the alternative therapies and just do your, do your research before, you know, listen to people like yourself on podcasts and get informed because almost half of us now are getting cancer. We're almost to that tipping point of 50%.

Yeah, it's really scary. And that's why I wrote my book, the Smart Person's Guide to Breast Cancer is because that is the beginning of my book. Stop. Take a breath. This is not an emergency. There are very few exceptions to that rule. If someone has inflammatory breast cancer, they have inflammatory changes to their skin in addition to an underlying breast cancer. And if that is what's happening with you, you know that you have a red swollen breast that seemed to have come up overnight. So that is a very fast moving cancer, that is an emergency. If you have a fracture from your breast cancer, so your breast cancer has spread to the bones and you have a fracture, that is an emergency. And that is something that you know, you know it's very painful. And, and so that is an emergency, that's something that needs to be treated right away. And the only other emergency is if you have brainments because the skull is a fixed space and so there's no room for expansion in the skull. So that is something that is an emergency. And other than that, you have time, you have time to learn to educate yourself, to learn and understand the pathology, the disease, what's happening. You have time to get several opinions, talk to several doctors. You have time to make a team, arrange a team that has, you know, if you're going to go the conventional route, a surgeon, a medical oncologist, a radiation oncologist, if you're going to go the other route, you can meet with a naturopath or the functional medicine doctor. You know, there are so many choices and make a plan, and you have the time to do that. No one should rush into treatment, and no one should feel like they have to make a decision right now. And unfortunately, that is a lot of what happens in medicine is that they rush, rush, rush. They want to put you on the schedule for surgery. They want to get you on the schedule for report for. For chemo, for whatever it is. There's a rush to get into treatment, and it doesn't give people the time and space to think about it.

Yeah, I like that you mentioned getting a second opinion. Even Otis Brawley, American Cancer Society, said, I think it's always a good idea to do that. What I didn't know when I was talking to him how inaccurate pathology is. I thought it was almost 100%. And I'm learning, and I don't know what your experience has been, but I looked at some of the literature and I was like, wow. And I know women that have had this experience. They said, I went in, they said, I have cancer. I have to go right into treatment. And I said, whoa, I'm going to get a second opinion. They go to a different. They take their slides to a different pathologist, and they said, no, you don't have cancer. So, like, you know, I've heard that several times. I mean, anecdotal, yes, but it's not, you know. Yeah, it's not 100% that.

That I didn't have a lot of experience with in my. In my 20 years as a surgeon. I can't even think of a time when we diagnosed someone with cancer and it wasn't actually cancer. I mean, I guess it depends on where you're practicing and who's reading your studies and things like that. But, you know, I. I was at a university program, and we treated thousands of women every year for cancer. So we were very, very aware of, you know, we saw a lot of pathology. We had a lot of. We had a lot of experience and a lot of volume and that kind of thing. But you did have that whole story on in your film of that woman who was misdiagnosed and actually treated for breast cancer and didn't have breast cancer.

Yeah. And I, like, I said, I had somebody send me a note on. She did a review of my film on Amazon. The first thing she said, thank God I saw your film, because I didn't listen to the first doctor. I was like, wow, amazing. Yeah. So it happens, like you said, it might. Might depend. It's another reason to go to a good facility. But, yeah, that just. I just. A friend of mine, I also tell the story about he. He thought he had. They told him he had stage four cancer, was all over. They're ready to stick him in chemo in there. And. And he went to a better clinic down in Texas. And they said, no, you have mononucleosis. And Otis Brawley said, yeah, that happens fairly frequently. And I was like, oh, my gosh.

Wow.

Yeah, that's.

That's crazy. That's crazy. So talk to me about other things that you learned in the process of making boobs that. That were surprising to you.

You know, this whole thing has been one big journey. You know, it kind of started with Otis Brawley saying, it's a suboptimal test. We need a better test. And I was like, what are you talking about? I mean, I knew there was radiation involved. Evolved. Right. But all of this has been new information for me. This whole. And my second film was like, whoa, Big, big eye opener of what's going on. I mean, we see our friends going through the treatments. We see our family members. That's why we're scared of cancer. We're not really afraid of the cancer so much as we are the diagnosis and having to get the treatments. You know, it's a. It is a chronic disease. It's not a fun disease to have, but it's not. It's more the treatments. People think I'm going to lose my hair. I mean, that's one of the first things people think.

Yeah.

So boobs, I think. I think we've talked about. I think we've talked about all the high points. Am I missing?

Well, you know what? I just. I just found the quote from Otis Brawley that said he is aware that mammogram is inaccurate and inappropriate. I mean, wow. If that's not a quote from the. Then head of the American Cancer Society. I mean, wow. Is there discordance between the truth and what is done?

Right. And I. I talked to people on Capitol Hill for before the pandemic hit, and they were listening and, you know, they said, look, if you can get Otis Brawley to, you know, get some quotes from him. And now I've got the quotes, so I'm going to go back in and talk to him again.

Yeah. And I would actually love to come with.

Good. That's what I was gonna do.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'd love to hear about your new movie, because when is it coming out?

It's out. It is out.

What's the title?

Free on YouTube. It's called a New Standard of Care. Colon Alternative Cancer Therapies. I just wanted to call a spade a spade. And it goes through again. I had 200 hours, I had to boil down to 90 minutes and I started making the film. The first act is only 30 minutes. And that's about what we do right now to standard care. You know, cut out and poison and burn, whatever. Chemo and radiation and. Yeah, I know, I hate, I hate I shouldn't put it like that, but people do all the time.

No, I mean, listen, I, I struggle with this all of the time. And I do think that there's a time and a place and I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that there are people who are in a position where they have a tremendous amount of cancer load and they need to kind of turn that around quickly. And sometimes those are the ways to turn it around quickly. But I don't think that they can ever be done in isolation because they come at a big price. They really do damage people's health. And I actually, I had a webinar for thousands of women last night and we talked about the fact that chemotherapy, while it does kill cancer cells, it also has a significantly negative effect on regular normal cells. And that looks like first of all, shutdown of the ovaries. And we have all kinds of problems when we don't have estrogen available in our body. But you know, it directly damages the heart, it damages the microbiome, it damages the brain and sets people up for, you know, dementia. We people talk about chemo brain all the time. Brain fog, depression, anxiety. People generally gain weight when they get chemotherapy. You know, we all think about the cancer patient who's like emaciated. Most people gain weight during chemotherapy and it's because it is so inflammatory that your body is just storing, storing, storing. And it also kind of destroys your taste buds, destroys your GI tract. And people are then told to drink, boost and ensure and all this garbage. Eat ice cream, eat pizza, don't lose weight. And so it, and that is pro inflammatory in itself. It damages hair, skin, nails, nerve, nerves, right? And so people have neuropathy and they have all kinds of problems as a result of chemotherapy. Radiation, we know that that directly damages all the tissues in its wake. And so if we're talking about radiation for a left sided breast mass, we're talking about the skin, the muscle, the chest wall, the ribs, and then underneath the ribs is the heart. And while it doesn't cause damage to the blood vessels like chemotherapy does. It does damage the muscle of the heart and people end up with cardiomyopathies.

You can also get scar tissue from if you have like throat cancer. If they, I mean, I have a friend who just had a bunch of. He was stage three and they radiated the patootie out of him. And I'm afraid because I've heard this happening. It's so much scar tissue. I have a friend that passed of this. She was in my film actually. She had so much radiation she couldn't swallow.

Yeah. So it causes significant, significant disruption. Yeah. And so, you know, it's disruptive to the tissues and it causes dysfunction.

Right. And going back to chemo real quick, you are correct. Chemo does, I mean it does do what they say it can kill a cancer cell unfortunately does all this other damage. But there's a treatment called ipt. Insulation, insulin potential. Yeah, they, they offer this down in Mexico. They do over in Europe, I think if it's still, I don't know if it hasn't been outlawed yet and some places in the US.

Yeah. Dr. Kenneally is doing it and her clinic. Yeah, yeah.

But so there's still some that are doing. And you have to be certified hmd, I guess to do it. But I, I bring it up because chemotherapy used that way where you only have to use between 5 and 40% of the original dose, doesn't kill the patient. A lot of people don't even lose their hair. It's not as toxic and we should be using it that way. And when I want to talk to the National Cancer Institute about the, you know, all these alternatives, I talked to them about IPT and he said that was one of the three that we found of all the alternatives that was working, it had efficacious and it was efficacious and it was non toxic. And I said, well, what happened? He said well, it went up. That I said did go off the chain because, well, it just, I don't know if we should be talking about this. And he started to get real nervous and he said it didn't go anywhere. We decided because it was chemotherapy, it didn't belong in the alternatives area of nci. They stopped studying it. They didn't throw it to somebody else while they didn't. They don't want to cut down on the amount of chemo that they're selling.

I mean, I hate it because it's more than, it's, it more than halves the dose.

Right.

And that's and it affects their bottom line.

Right. And that's to say it. But there's no other explanation for it.

Yeah.

And same thing with homeopathy. They found out there's an, a set of Indian clinic over there and they were going to do a big study. They're going to go over to India and because they were having amazing results with just homeopathy. I met a guy who had glioblastoma and he was still alive after 15 years and he'd had some radiation and he'd had surgery and he was still alive promoting homeopathy. And they were going to go over and do a study and they said, oh, the Indian government said that they needed their PI and they started to rig and roll and then I said just bring the homeopathy over to the US and study it here. What? Why? This is a no brainer. But they didn't do it. So it just went in the hole and that was that.

Yeah, yeah.

The other one was macrobiotic diet and I didn't do a deep dive into that. So. But they said that was working but you're not going to make any money off of that.

Right. I mean it's the same thing that, you know, we, we know that Dr. Valter Longo has been studying the fasting mimicking diet in conjunction with chemotherapy and they're having enormous success. But you know, I don't think it's going to be widely adopted because there are. So first of all the medical oncologist who would kind of need to be the adopters of this. They're not educated in nutrition and that's not what they're paid to do. Right. And that would be an extra step.

Right.

And, and even, you know, the nutritionist, almost all of these cancer centers have a nutritionist there and the nutritionists are really not educated. I mean they're still counting calories and telling people not to lose weight. And you know, there's a huge disconnect and it's based on a misunderstanding of what's happening. People don't understand that cancer is a metabolic disease and that you have to restore metabolic health and you can't restore metabolic health while you're feeding people all this junk. Right.

And that's, I mean it was put to me by a medical oncologist. The reason they're not curing cancer in conventional is because they're looking at the DNA learning largely and not at the mitochondria, which is where the dysfunction starts. And now they're looking at immunotherapy but then they're just fixing one part of the immune system, and its immune system's got all these moving parts. You just fix one part, it's going to mutate around it because cancer's smart. And boom, you know, the cancer comes back. Plus, you have autoimmune diseases, and sometimes it doesn't work at all.

Yeah.

So they're going down the wrong road.

Yeah. And that's mostly because they're focused on the tumor. But the tumor is not the problem. The tumor is the symptom of the problem. And until you figure out why that shift is happening, because cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. So unless you figure out why that shift is happening, you're not changing anything in terms of the trajectory of the disease or the patient response. Right. So getting.

Getting. I thought it was interesting. I have a big story in my. In my second. Tony Menes in Mexico talks about the psyche of the cancer patient. He always talks about what happened to you two to 10 years ago that you developed this cancer. What was it? We need to get to the crux of that. You need to release. You need to forgive whatever the problem was, if you lost a son or daughter, whatever. And so there's this one woman who just. Her breast cancer would not disappear. And he did everything like he normally does, and it usually goes away. And. And he said, okay, what are you not telling? What are you not saying? And turned out she'd been abused. It was a terrible story about a whole bunch of family members. And she. As soon as she had this breakdown in front of the doctor, two weeks later, her. Just her cancer, just like it, just let go.

Yeah. And it's so important for people to understand that sometimes what you're holding on to is the very nidus for your disease, because your body wants you to process and release that. And if you're not doing that, if you're not processing and releasing it, if you're not dealing with your psychological pain, it's going to manifest into a physical symptom. Right. Because your body really is keeping score.

Right. The other thing I found is everyone who has beaten cancer that I ran into, stage four, reversing, they were all spiritual. They. All across the board. If they didn't believe in a God or whatever, a spirit before their journey, they do now.

Yeah.

And I thought that was really interesting. There was no exceptions to that.

Yeah. And Kelly Turner did a great job of showing all that in her books, Radical Remission and Radical Hope that, you know, there. There are plenty of people who have made these fundamental changes in their lives. And these, these are the commonalities that all of these people that have chronic disease, especially stage four cancer, have been able to reverse their disease. And I think that as a whole, we need to think about it that way. We need to treat cancer instead of treating it like a death sentence, we need to treat it like a chronic disease. Something that needs attention and needs attention forever. Because as many amazing miracle stories I have of people who have made permanent changes in their life and have reversed their disease, there are the cautionary tales, too. The people that said, okay, well, I'm better, I feel better, I lost weight. And then they go back to drinking and eating the way that they did before, and their cancer comes back.

Yeah, exactly. I've seen that happen a bit. One of my best friends that happened to.

Yeah. So we, we need to make sure that as we make these constitutional changes, that they're permanent.

Exactly. It's a chronic disease. You have to stay on top of it.

Yeah.

You have to.

Yeah. So what else did you learn in terms of when you were making a new standard of care? What else? What else was really groundbreaking for you?

I thought it was interesting that all the doctors I talked to, a lot of them had these commonalities in their treatments. And it kind of goes back to cancer loves sugar. Cancer hates oxygen. Because a lot of their therapies are putting oxygen, they're oxygenating the blood, they're releasing, you know, vitamin C, high dose IV is releasing oxygen. A lot of them are releasing oxygen. And then they also are teaching their. Their, you know, patients to change your diet. What are you eating? Stop eating McDonald's. You know, they teach good advice for.

Everyone across the board.

Yes, it is. You clean up your air, your water, your food supply. Non, you know, non GMO that, you know, I did. This is how I reverse my. My breast inflammation. Get the stress out of your life. Hard to do. Right now. We are all stressed out after going through the pandemic. Cancers are going crazy right now, as I'm sure you've heard. Part of that, I think, is stress related. Not just Covid and whatever. It's. It's the stress we all went through. So as much as you can meditate, you know, that's a way to reduce stress. It's not like you can get rid of stress all the time, but they had a lot of commonalities. It wasn't. And there was a couple silver bullets. There's a gentleman in Houston, Texas, I'd like to mention this Dr. Brzezinski, who he was, he's reversing brain cancers. Stage four. If you haven't had previous standard of care, maybe, maybe surgery, but not radiation, chemo, you got a good shot with him. He's reversing, like I think he said, 75% of his glioblastomas, he was reversing with his anti neoplastins. He's a brilliant researcher out of Poland and a medical doctor. And he, he. Yeah, it is. The FDA and the medical boards keep going after him. I mean, for like, I don't know, 15 years, they've been coming after him. They can't get anything to stick because he's got 30 patients behind him saying, I had GBM, glioblastoma. I had that like 20 years ago. I'm still here. I have a family now. And so the doctors and the medical board, their jaws are on the ground. They're saying, oh, my gosh, we can't take this guy's medical license away. He's curing cancer. And I. I went down to. To see the hearing and I watched the doctors and I. It was really interesting to watch them anyway, so there are some silver bullets, but most of them are protocols and, you know, and it also goes back to the psyche and everything we've talked about. But if you watch my film, I go through, you know, I don't do a deep dive on a lot of them. Dr. Gonzalez, he's now passed away, but he has the Gonzalez protocol. If you go to Gonzalez protocol.com, i think that's it. You'll find what he. He's got. They've got doctors now that are carrying on his work. And he was reversing cancer. So, yeah, it's. It's a better. I wanted to leave people with hope.

Yeah.

And fear because my husband froze like a deer in the headlights when he got that diagnosis. And of course, I did, too. I mean, it's just. You don't want your husband to get that. And we couldn't think straight. And if I'd had this information, I'd seen ties work beforehand. You know, I think that would have made all the difference of the world. So I want to leave people with hope, spend two nights to watch my film, watch Ty's work, watch your podcast, read your book. There's tons of books out there on how to eat right. The Brain Maker. I think that's one of them. A whole bunch of them out there that, you know, just do your work now.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I hope women walk away from this podcast, knowing that there is no benefit to screening with mammogram. There's no survival benefit. Women are getting breast cancer as a result of being screened with mammogram. Radiation causes cancer. If you asked any doctor if radiation causes cancer, they would all say yes. And then you ask the same doctors if mammograms cause cancer, and they say no. Actually, I love how you put it, or someone put it in the film that, you know, they gave it this nice name, they gave it mammogram instead of calling it an X ray of your breast.

Right.

And because they gave it this nice name, it has a different implication for people.

That was Dr. Galena Magalko.

Yeah, yeah. That was a brilliant way of looking at it. And it's probably true. Right? It's packaging more than anything else. But the bottom line is that it is radiation. And radiation does cause breast cancer. It does cause cancer. It causes cancer in any tissue of the body. But to your point, because the breast is primarily made up of glandular tissue, it is particularly vulnerable. And we're delivering that radiation during a mammogram, during a time when it's under compression, 45 pounds worth of compression. So we're physically damaging and traumatizing the tissue and delivering radiation to tissue that's already damaged. Right. And so it's, it's the perfect combination for the development of cancer. And we are causing the very disease that we pretend to want to help with, and it's a problem.

I think women need to follow their intuition. Patients in general, follow your intuition. And if it, if it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it's a duck.

Yeah.

A lot of times we just go, but the white coat told me this. No, follow your intuition. We are smart people. If we think about it, you know, think about common sense.

But I'm, I'm especially grateful because I know that in the next couple of years, none of this conversation is going to matter because of QT imaging. Because QT imaging is this revolutionary way to screen the breast without compression, without pain, without radiation. And it's fast and safe and affordable, and it is going to forever change the way that we image the breast. And so I'm just excited to be a part of it. And, you know, maybe if you do a follow up documentary, we can talk about QT on your documentary. But the most important thing is that people stop screening with mammogram because it's not helping, it's only hurting. And there are so many other ways to go about it. Self Examination is what I, I truly believe that no one is going to know your body better than you know yourself. And I always trust patient intuition. So, you know, when they have a feeling that something is wrong, something is usually wrong. And when they have a feeling that nothing is wrong, that's usually spot on. And so, you know, get to know yourself, get to get to know your body so that you can know when there's been a change. Thermography with ultrasound is a, is a viable plan to screen for breast cancer, not thermography alone. Which is not to say that thermography alone doesn't have value. It does pick up inflammation. It will allow you to know that you have inflammation in your body and you can use that information to make those changes like the ones that you made. And actually, I would love it if you would just talk a little bit more about that experience. Like, specifically, what did you do? What changes did you make to make that inflammation go away and over what period of time?

So when I, when they discovered this inflammation, I was in the middle of making my film. I had just been gotten back from Europe. We had been hitting the breakfast bars, breakfast bars over there.

And I, you know, maybe not your best self.

Very little exercise. If you see me in the film, which I am in the film, you'll see I've got like a double chin and I'm like, I look terrible. And so I lost about 15, 20 pounds. I was on three prescription drugs. One of them was because I had a side effect from another drug. And I was like, what is going on? I don't want to be on 10 medications by the time I'm 6.

But that's what happens, happens.

I know. And so I went to a good naturopath. She put me on supplement. She didn't say, I'm going to get you off the meds, but the meds, I didn't need them. And so I'm off all three meds.

Yay.

Yes. A ton of supplements. I exercise again. I went to non gmo. I cleaned up my, my air, my water. I'm very cognitive of all that. I cut down on sugar. I really, I don't drink any more Cokes, you know, and within a year, like I said, my, my thermogram was back to normal. So it can. That was. I wasn't sure what to. I was going to expect, you know, I had no idea. And it, I was like, oh, my gosh, that's fantastic. So I'll put it in the film.

Yeah, yeah, amazing. And, and so I want Everyone to make sure that they see boobs, the war on breasts. And where can they see that?

So that's at my. That's being distributed by Cinema Libra and it's at boobs doc b O-O-B-S doc-o c.com as in documentary boobs doc.com I also don't just.

Don't just put in boobs because you won't like what comes up. Exactly.

And I also have a blog. I want to put this interview on there and I want to. I'm sure you have a whole podcast on the QT imaging.

Probably I do.

So my blog is that good. So I have a blog on boobs B O B s dot com that has all the information in my film, but I go into a deeper dive on all the subjects and I'm going to do one on QT Therapy now that you've brought that up.

Okay, awesome. I'm so glad to hear that.

And then my second film is a new standard of care.com that'll take you to my website. So if YouTube takes it down for whatever reason, you'll always be able to find the platform that it's on. It's a new standard of care dot com.

Awesome. So, Megan, it was so wonderful to have you here today. And I know you gave us the two sites. What if people want to find you, get in touch with you? How do they do that?

If they go to, I think any of their sites will, there'll be something that'll say contact us. But you can also go to waymark productions.com and that that has a contact me button.

Terrific. It was wonderful to have you here and I am. I'm just so grateful for you, for the work that you do and I know that we'll have many, many more conversations between us.

Great. Thank you. Look forward.

Yeah, me too. It's Dr. Jen and I'm gonna say bye for now.

Foreign.

Thank you for joining me on this.

Episode of the Keeping abreast podcast with Dr. Jen. I hope you found the discussion informative and empowering. Remember, breast health is health. So by staying informed and taking proactive steps, you have the power to optimize your well being. My team and I encourage you to apply the knowledge gained from today's episode to make positive changes in your life and share what you've learned with others. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback and support mean the world to us and help us to reach more people who can benefit from these conversations. Stay connected with me on social media where I share additional resources, advice, updates and announcements related to breast health. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube @ Dr. Jen Simmons. And remember, my Jen has two N's, so until next time, remember to stay proactive, informed and confident in your breast health journey. The key to your health is you.