Fringe Medicine, Blood Ozone, Water Fasting, Hyperthermia & More: What Does Europe Know About Medicine & Cancer That Americans Don’t?

Hey, this is Ben Greenfield. Let's begin today's podcast episode by addressing the elephant in the room. The fact that you're about to hear my guest, Robin Openshaw and I talk about this crazy fringe Swiss healing retreat off in the mountains of the Italian quarter of Switzerland. This amazing healing Eastern medicine and biological medicine Swiss retreat in this episode of the Ben Group I'm Fitness Show.

There is a lot of cancer in us on any given day, if it gets the upper hand and it starts to compromise organ function, that's where it usually comes to our attention. And that's where the way you eat, the way you're living your life has everything to do with allowing your immune system to stay on top. I consider it one of the greatest things I've ever discovered in my life. And I'm really pleased that we've been able to send a lot of sick people there to get well. I know a bunch of people who went there with advanced stage cancers who are years past their diagnosis, feeling amazing.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I think the last time that I was physically in person with today's podcast guest, we were dancing at an 80s party. I think, if I remember correctly, Was it an 80s party, or am I wrong? Was it 60s or 70s?

I'm trying to think if I've seen you since then, but it was definitely an 80s party and it was definitely super fun. And you're like the last guy at the party, and so. And I'm always the last one there, too.

Gotta, gotta be dancing, yeah, you got, you got to dance the night away. This was at our friend JJ Virgin's Mindshare Summit down in San Diego. And yeah, danced and danced, and then I haven't seen you since. I'm glad you survived the evening.

There will be many more.

Well, today's guest, for those of you who don't know her or don't recognize her voice, is the great Robin Openshaw. She's also known as the green smoothie girl, so you can just call her the gsg. Robin and I, I think we first hit it off because she, like me, is a. She's a tennis nerd. She's a competitive tennis player who lives down in Utah, and she skis and she's a mom to four children. But more impressively, she is a former psychotherapist university professor. She's lectured in over 450 cities in the six years that have gone by since she launched her incredibly popular site, GRE Smoothie Girl. And I actually have green smoothie in my teeth as I say that. I've got some spirulina in my teeth.

Robin, that's good. You've been initiated.

I have been very much initiated. I used to do too many greens in my smoothie. There is such a thing as too many greens in your smoothie, isn't there?

Yeah, I think it's hard to do, but if anybody could do it, it would probably be you.

Yeah. What I find is that the human colon is not like the colon of, say, a gorilla. And in terms of its fermentation capabilities. And so I got to the point where I was putting probably the equivalent of a giant Ziploc bag full of dandelion and nettle and mint and kale and parsley and just any greens I could get my hand on or my hands on in my morning smoothie. And inevitably around like two or three o' clock in the afternoon, I was pretty much relegated to the toilet for long periods of time with way, way too much bulk in my large intestine.

Well, I'll tell you, I don't do all the experiments on myself that you do. I do some, but not, not, not anything to hold a candle to the amazing Ben Greenfield. But I try to push it on the greens. I do a lot of greens. Sometimes I drink a whole half gallon of green smoothie with very little fruit and just superfoods and greens. But you're just. You just listed, like, the most detoxifying greens, so not that surprised.

Well, what I've discovered now is that I just need, like, a pinch. So now I just do bone broth with some, like, a really good tasty protein. And I' some other things in there, like cinnamon and sea salt and stuff, but I do, like, a pinch of greens, you know, like a, like a small, sane handful of any of those, rather than kind of going big or going home and winding up, you know, wasting my afternoon on the squatty potty.

That does seem like a really bad use of an afternoon.

It does. There are so much better things to do like nap. Anyways, though, you. You were telling me about something I didn't know about you. Everybody talks to you about smoothies, and smoothies are a sexy topic, but let's face it, a lot of people kind of talk about smoothies. And I wanted to talk to you instead about the fact that you spent, I believe, over three years globetrotting the planet and traveling to over a dozen different natural medical clinics and interviewing a ton of doctors on four different continents on this health quest. How exactly did that start and what got you into that?

Yeah, it's a strange story. Some people bury their head in the sand about cancer because of their family experience. And for whatever reason, my own family experience with cancer has made me obsessed with it for 25 years. And so I sort of think of myself as a cancer researcher as well as, you know, going out on the road. And, yeah, three and a half years, I went to 19 different clinics because I wanted to. I wanted to figure out what people do to treat cancer outside of standard of care. What happened in my family is that when I was in high school, my grandmother and one of her sons were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. My uncle was 31, and he was diagnosed with a stage one Hodgkin's, which is actually one of the four types of cancer that standard of care actually does fairly well with. Like, if I personally had cancer, even with everything that I know, that's maybe something that I would consider.

When you say standard of care, you mean chemo?

Yeah, I'm talking about my grandmother, who was the one who chose the holistic path, called it the cut burn poison method. And that sounds really judgmental. That's how she felt about it. But you've got surgery, you've got chemotherapy, and you've got radiation.

And. So Hodgkin's was what ran in your family?

No, because he's the only one who had it. But he had it at 31, and he chose standard of care, which is how I refer to surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, which is. That's all they do in standard of care, which is what your insurance pays for, which is Medicaid and Medicare pays for, which is really, you know, very much, you know, standard of care. Medicine is very much influenced by, even controlled by, pharmaceutical industry. But there are people treating cancer outside of those modalities, and they look at cancer completely differently. But just to finish the backstory, my uncle, diagnosed at 31 with a stage one super treatable cancer, went down the road of chemo and radiation at the same time. My grandmother's diagnosed in her early 50s with a metastatic melanoma. And now we know that melanoma isn't really a skin cancer. It usually has tentacles all the way to your lungs and your. Hers was metastasized to her breasts and her lymphatic system by the time they caught it and she was told she had a year to live and they wanted her to do chemo and radiation and she said no. She said no to the chemo and radiation and instead she did like the Gerson protocol. She went to Mexico. She stopped eating any animal products or sugar or processed food. She turned orange from all the carrot juice she drank. The point is, I watched my uncle die of chemotherapy and I watched my grandmother live of this weird stuff she did to, to rebuild her immune system. And she, she lived under 20 years. She was there when all four of my babies were born. So it just influenced me. That's, that's the answer to your question is watching what my family went through. I have been sort of insanely preoccupied with cancer and, and what, what's exactly wrong? What, where do we go wrong? Why have we lost the war against cancer? Why have we made no gains since Nixon declared war on cancer in 1974? And what, what are people doing that works out there that is non toxic and efficacious?

So what brought you over to Europe? Why Europe versus, say, Mexico or Tijuana?

Well, I went to Tijuana. I went to Tijuana then and I, you know, there's, there's one really sort of world class, beautiful place there. And there are other places that are nicer than you would think right across the border. And I wouldn't dismiss a clinic just because it's in Tijuana, because a lot of times they are North American doctors who don't want the persecution of, you know, the governing boards, who really want everybody doing only chemo, radiation and surgery. And so, you know, sometimes, you know, my old inclination would be to think if you're practicing in Mexico and you're an American doctor, you must have graduated bottom of your class, right? Yeah, but not always the case. I mean, sometimes there are really brilliant doctors who. One of the many doctors I studied with was Tom Thomas Lody. He's a Columbia trained md and he just got very, very frustrated with the success rate, the unacceptable level of toxicity. I mean, I think there's like 40% rate of leukemia after, after chemo. If you live long enough, you're going to eventually have, you know, a secondary leukemia or other cancer from the treatment, not the disease. So there are plenty of really good, sophisticated, outside the box thinkers who want to treat cancer differently. And it really comes down to how they see cancer. And here's the fundamental difference. If I can be really grossly over simplistic, here is that standard of care. Medicine sees cancer as an invader, something to be destroyed. And you see people every single day on facebook or wherever you are, you see people talking about their fight against cancer.

Right.

That's not how a holistic or in Europe, to go to your question about why Europe, that's not how the foundations of biological medicine, which is rooted in european traditions and thought, that's not how they see cancer. And the two things that I found that all of these clinics worldwide, the good ones, and I'm not saying that all 19 of these clinics were good ones. Just because somebody hangs out a shingle and says, hey, I'm a functional practitioner, I'm a holistic practitioner, I'm a biological medicine doc, does not mean I would send my own child there or my own parent there. There's plenty of bad medicine being practiced within those worlds, too. But in Europe, there hasn't been this huge divide where a medical doctor is going to face a lot of censure from his peers, criticism from his colleagues, loss of license. They can kind of cross those boundaries more fluidly. And so I think it has created a climate of more willingness, openness to cross the lines and take a look at what else is out there. And the two things that all these clinics had in common, Ben, is that, first of all, they see cancer as a fundamental failure of the immune system.

The immune system, yes. Okay.

Because your body's metabolizing cancer cells every day, the average human beings producing 50,000 cancer cells a day, and your immune system is gobbling them up and metabolizing them, breaking them down, eliminating them as waste every single day. And so one thing that was fascinating to me in my really extensive research, which for that three and a half years, I took it way beyond the boundaries of reading and reading and reading, is that a lot of these practitioners will tell you that a cancer has been growing for probably about eight years on average before it's detectable, before it's developed itself into a mass where there's a vascular system and where it's feeding itself, and it's detectable by our methods and would be, you know, now it's getting closer to being a crisis situation, which you could actually make the argument of, hey, when an oncologist tells you you have Cancer and wants you in chemo on Monday. Let's take a breath here, because so many people, so many people in my travels and people who constantly contact me because I've blogged over 200 times on my cancer research, they'll contact me and they'll be like, they want me in there having surgery in two days. And an interesting thing happens because they're in the fear machine. The oncologist's office is a fear machine like nothing I've really ever experienced. And I've not been a cancer patient. But just from watching it up close and personal for a number of people and hearing about it and asking a lot of questions and interviewing hundreds of people, now it's a thing. And many, many, many people have come to me and said, I really wish that I had not done that. I really wish that I had explored other options first. Now I understand what those other options are and why they can be really highly efficacious. So you have some time. Like if this cancer has been growing for an average of eight years. And another statistic that they told me, a number of these doctors told me, is that the average person probably has a detectable cancer mass four times in a lifetime. And the body does its work, the body metabolizes it.

How do they know that? Do they detect it and then see it go away? Or how can they make a claim like that?

You know, it's pretty theoretical, and I certainly can't prove it. And I for sure ask them those questions and they'll cite various data points. But, you know, one of them is there's an interesting study that a couple these doctors told me about where autopsy patients from car accidents were cut open. And 40% of the females, and I'm talking about females under 40 who died in car accidents, 40% of them had detectable breast cancer.

Wow.

And there's lots of other data points out there, and people have made this case better than I'm going to be able to right here on the fly of pointing to that.

So to interrupt, basically that means a whole bunch of us could have cancer, but be asymptomatic or be in a situation where the body's natural innate immune system is fighting it off. We don't know about it, and it just goes away on its own.

Right? And that's exactly right. And cancer is actually part of us. And so part of the shift in thinking that functional doctors here in the US the good ones, the ones who have deep, deep knowledge, especially about cancer and biological medicine docs in Europe, because my Favorite of the clinics that I found. And you can share with your audience my favorite of those 19 clinics. Because you probably get asked, like I do, hey, my mom has cancer. Where would you send her? And that's what sent me on this quest is, you know, with the traffic we have on my blog and people following my cancer research, they want to know where to go. And it's like a serious question, you know, you don't want to. Some people are taking out a second mortgage on their house, spending everything they have as a Hail Mary when, you know, medicine writes them off and they've been through three rounds of chemo and they're like, now what? Or, or if a person is diagnosed with cancer or other, I mean, they do really, really, really well at this Swiss clinic with neurodegenerative diseases. They do really well with diseases like als, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's that even functional medicine in the US is really stymied by. So there is a lot of cancer in us on any given day, if it gets the upper hand and it starts to compromise organ function, that's where it usually comes to our attention. And that's where the way you eat, the way you're living your life has everything to do with allowing your immune system to stay on top, not over taxing it on a regular basis. With toxicity, with overworking, with not managing our stress, with eating crappy GMO foods, with overeating animal products, and under eating plant foods. All these things, they all have an impact. But bottom line is a biological medicine doctor in Europe.

Biological medicine is what you call it.

Yup, that's what they, that's sort of how they organize themselves. Whereas the last 10 years, like American doctors have really been as, you know, organizing around this concept of functional medicine, very, very similar movements. They see cancer as a failure of the immune system. And the other thing that I saw that all 19 of these clinics had in common, they didn't all exactly have the same treatments and the same approaches exactly, but they all worked to rehabilitate the broken immune system, and they all worked to identify the crises or toxicity that likely led to the cancer, identifying it and then detoxifying the person from whatever their big exposure was.

Hmm. Okay. So biological medicine, just to backpedal a minute, and then I want to ask you about this idea of cancer being an immune based issue, because we haven't really delved into that too much on the show before. Biological medicine versus functional medicine, is it actually different?

It's actually pretty political. But biological medicine predates the whole functional Medicine, movement. I mean, what we're seeing here in the US that they're using that word more is, okay, let's all get together, all those of us who don't really want to be stuck in standard of care, billing the insurance codes, over prescribing the drugs, pretending that drugs are ever going to make anybody healthy or make anybody well or make anybody whole. Those guys, they're all coming together and they're like, what can we all agree on? And holistic wasn't really working. And so functional medicine is what Americans are calling it. But biological medicine in Europe is, you know, foundationally honors the whole organism, does not dissect the organism to its parts and treat each organ system differently. It's the same concept, basically, which is, let's look at the whole organism and the whole upstream, downstream psychic stress. The whole organism that is both is physical, emotional, spiritual, and all those things impact each other.

So in terms of the treatments that you would get at a biological medicine clinic, I want to dive into those. But first, as I know you're aware of, Robin, a lot of people in the health industry right now are discussing this concept presented by Dr. Thomas Seyfried, for example, of cancer being a mitochondrial disease, an issue of the cell going into rampant glycolysis, producing lots of lactic acid and essentially being shut off from normal aerobic metabolism due to deficient mitochondria. Is the immune hypothesis for cancer that you're presenting here similar to that? Is it another name for it or is this something completely different?

Well, they're all, they're all part and parcel, right? What's going on in the mitochondria is like the genesis of it all. It's where it all starts. And so that is all a fascinating part of how I think we will move forward on multiple continents. Dr. Thomas Rao, probably the most famous of the biological medicine doctors over in Europe, he was the founder of the two Swiss clinics called Paracelsus. I really like one of them. He's actually sold both clinics. The one I have grown very, very attached to and go to every summer now for three weeks and take people there and send any sick person I know, including those close to me there. He's the founder of them. And the one in the south has a remarkable story. Make sure you ask me about it because I actually think it's like the eighth wonder of the world. And oh, wow, I've sent. I've sent people. It's. It was completely undiscovered by Americans. It was literally one of the most Exciting finds of my life. I think Green smoothie girl has four patients right there, right now, having an amazing experience and writing us about it. We follow up with them, we learn the experience they're having. Biological medicine has a lot of different treatments and a lot of different theories, but mitochondrial dysfunction is one of them. It is not one thing. You got the guys out there saying it's all mold. You got the guys out there saying it's all bacteria. You've got the guys out there who are saying you just need to take 200 enzyme pills a day. And it can all be very overwhelming and very confusing.

Yeah, I think the way that I would. When I think about the immune system in cancer, the way you're talking about it is, is, you know, I read an article about this, it was a while back in Scientific American where they talked about how when a cell is faced with an environmental threat like radiation, for example, that the cell reverts into a safe mode, a pre programmed safe mode. And when that happens, the cells go into some type of metabolism in which they're burning more sugar as energy in which they're unable to engage in normal beta O and they kind of go into glycolysis and lactic acid production. But the initial impetus for them to do that is some type of immune system assailant. So it sounds to me like in terms of the immune system, basically what it is is the immune system kind of starts things off. And then in a situation where the mitochondria is unhealthy or more vulnerable, at that point the cancer is able to grow.

Yeah, there's that. There's also discovery of. And you know, radiation is one of the reasons it's so terrifying is that once the burning is, you know, treatment is done, those, there's cells, there's healthy cells that are burning and burning and burning for years after that treatment, which is of course mutating cells, which is actually causing cancer. And so that's a really problematic strategy in general to burn the crap out of the cancer. And I kind of understand where it came from and what that idea is. But to me, when we have the ability to then heal the body and your oncologist isn't going to give you anything to heal the body. I mean, they'll send you home with a can of Ensure. But they have absolutely no training in rehabbing immune function. But you also, Ben, at the cellular level have the discoveries of Otto Warburg, where sugars, processed sugars, are going to feed cancer. And medicine doesn't train people in that they don't train their patients, hey, you know what? How about don't eat any processed sugar. But they know it. They know it because that's how they light up. A PET scan is, you know, that sugar injection and dye. Well, the dye and then the sugar goes right to the spots where the dye is in the PET scan because a cancer cell has, I think, 18 insulin receptors. And so it gobbles up sugar and causes more growth of cancer than it does of normal cells. And so.

Right. Which, which is, which is why some type of ketotic approach combined with something like hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, where you're presenting the cell with enough oxygen to, where it doesn't have to engage in rampant, you know, anaerobic glycolysis, produce a lot of lactic acid. It instead does not have sugar to fuel that state, has to rely upon ketones, and is given a high oxygen state. And actually, this is kind of fascinating. And then I do, I know we're kind of going down a rabbit hole here. And what I really want to go into is some of the fascinating treatments you did at this biological medicine clinic yourself and that you send people to do. But, but the idea here that I was talking about with the guy who's the CEO of Quest, he and I happened to be at a dinner a couple of nights ago, and he was explaining how not only is a lack of oxygen one of the things that can contribute to the proliferation of cancer, but in fact, it's also a lack of what we deem, in many cases, metabolic waste, carbon dioxide. And the idea is that when you have high levels of carbon dioxide simultaneous to high levels of oxygen, it shifts. There's this thing called the Bohr curve. Normally, oxygen isn't going to let go of the red blood cell very readily unless there's a lot of carbon dioxide present. And so some of the things that would increase carbon dioxide and allow oxygen to saturate tissue more readily would be things like deep nasal breathing, mouth taping. There are different forms of exercise with oxygen therapy. Hyperbaric might enhance this effect a little bit from the oxygen standpoint, but it's very fascinating. I'm actually doing some research on this right now, and I'm planning on either interviewing Ron or doing a podcast on it in the future. But the idea is you maintain both high levels of carbon dioxide and high levels of oxygen, and you're able to keep the cell from going into thatthat glycolytic acid producing state. Soit was a fascinating conversation. It's Kinda hot on my mind right now while I'm talking to you.

Yeah, that is interesting. And a lot of the treatments that you'll find at these clinics, practicing outside the box and trying to help people get back on top of the cancer so their body can do the work. So they're body can in many cases metabolize cancerous growths is going to increase oxygenation because cancer can't really. Cancer can't live in the presence of oxygen. So a lot of the treatments really do go to that of increasing oxygenation in the blood supply. In the blood as well as to the organs.

Yeah, exactly. The book he recommended to me was I gotta find it. What I'll do is I'll find the book and I'll put it in the show notes. It's very similar to Patrick McCown's book the Oxygen Advantage, but it's a little bit more clinical. So I'll find that book and get it in the show notes for you guys. Actually I have it here on a post it note on my desk. Normal Breathing the Key to Vital Health is the name of this book that he recommended to kind of wrap your head around the oxygen carbon dioxide issue with cancer. It's like a $70 book on Amazon. It's one of those books where it's really hard to find. But it's is one that I've already ordered and I'm waiting with bated breath for it to arrive. So speaking of waiting with bated breath, Robin, I want to know now some of the things that you did at this particularly I think it was a clinic in Switzerland, right?

Yeah, the one in Switzerland that sort of was this miraculous find because there's literally no English about it on the Internet. When I found it, whenever this was, I want to say eight years ago. But just side note to your point about there's a lot of different ways to oxygenate and I just told you that I don't do these hardcore experiments like you do. So I'm going to make a liar out of myself. But Saturday I fly to this ashram in Texas. This is related to what you asked and it's all related to what I learned about cancer. And Thomas Lody, who's the Columbia train MD I told you about, who had a clinic in Arizona and he's recently retired now and left the country. But he taught me this and gave me a whole bibliography. But I am getting on a plane Saturday and I'm going to do my fourth long term water fast. Fourth one in the last two years and Nine days of no eating, just water. And please don't do this at home, please don't hear what I'm saying and think that you should do a long term water fast. Because honestly, I think that most people are too sick and too toxic. But I've done so many things like this that I'm not super worried about it for me. But some of these doctors feel like water fasting is one of the most powerful things that you can do against cancer. And you talk about ketosis and that's all the talk right now and all the rage. But I'm probably way more interested in what else happens when we fast. And that is autophagy. You know what that is, doctor?

I do, because I just interviewed Naomi Whittell on it and we had a friend, fascinating discussion about protein cycling and intermittent fasting and a host of things that she found in her book Glo 15, which is all about cellular autophagy. So yeah, absolutely, there's way more to things than just say ketosis when it comes to normal pre programmed cell death. So that's fascinating. So your fast that you're doing is a nine day?

Yeah, and this time I'm doing it for nine days. But in the last two years I've done a seven day, another nine day and a 12 day water f. I actually just interviewed Valter Longo. Have you met him yet?

No, I've read his book, but I haven't met him.

Okay, well, I'll totally introduce you, but I just interviewed him yesterday and I've heard him on multiple other podcasts and I just read his book too and he just talks about how, you know, the body, think of the body is like a wood burning train where, you know, if you're not going to get to the next destination, you're not going to have the fuel you need. You scavenge broken chairs on the train, you throw them in the fire to get to the next station. But then when you get to the next station, this is the cool thing about fasting that people don't think about. When you get to the station, then you rebuild the chairs that are now missing on the train. And so it's partly in the refeeding after fasting that's so powerful for cancer because when we stop eating, and that's why water fasting is one of those powerful anti cancer preventative things you can do. Maybe the most powerful thing you can do is that when your body's not putting 65% of its energy into metabolism, it can then go after aberrant cells and growths and it goes after them with a vengeance. And people are like, oh no, it's going to break down my muscles. I'm going to lose muscle mass. Well, actually, you're going to do a little bit of breaking down of muscle. You're going to actually lose more belly fat than muscle because it's going to go after unneeded fat deposits, but it's going to go after aberrant growth.

Right. And there's actually some indication, and this is in Naomi's book, that a certain amount of protein restriction, a certain amount of fasting may actually in a very ironic way increase muscle protein synthesis. And I remember seeing a study, I think it was at University of California way back in 2008, where. Way back, it was so long ago in 2008, where they restricted calories to as low as 800 calories. And in the presence of weight training, people still gained muscle. So it's kind of interesting how good the body does at staying in an anabolic state, or at least a muscle maintenance state, even in the absence of calories and high amounts of protein and some of those things we would think that the body would need to maintain muscle. I think it's fascinating.

It does. And then consider that when you stop fasting, your body is now rebuilding. Now the chain is at the station and it's rebuilding and it's rebuilding out of better parts. And you know, there's a lot of Valter Longo talks in his book the Longevity Diet about some of his research and others research that shows that, you know, you can kind of rebuild the pancreas and restore and you can restore function as lots of laser hands function in the pancreas by doing a fast and that the benefits are actually pretty long term. So I want to just mention that as a side note that while that isn't the primary treatment at these clinics of biological medicine, there are some of them who really want to get a cancer patient on fasting. And Longo, who also has an oncology and longevity clinic, thinks that fasting while doing chemotherapy is highly protective against many of the toxic effects of the chemo and makes it work better.

Yeah, it's actually one of the things that frustrates me most, and I know I sound like a. Like I've got a pretty serious first world problem going on here is racing as a pro athlete and the constant amount of training that I need to be in fasting is very difficult for me in terms of these longer periods of time, 16 to 18 hours plus up to three, five, you know, you're doing the nine day when you see a huge amount of cellular autophagy or you see a lot of the benefits that, you know, everyone from, you know, traditional cultures that implemented long periods of time fasting, to Gandhi to Jesus, to all these folks who we know had fasting as a pretty strict part of their spiritual regimen and even we could argue their health regimen. That's not something that at this point in my life I've taken a deep dive into. And I find all the research on it fascinating. I understand it. A lot of my clients do more fasting than I do. But it's tough for me personally to do the three or the five or the seven, seven day fast at this point in my life. Although I recognize the value and I know I'm probably not as healthy as I could be if I were to actually fast a bit. I am going to steer this ship in the direction of this Swiss clinic, though, because I know from like live blood cell analysis to like hyperbaric chambers that I mentioned hyperthermia, nutrient infusions, all these things that you get done in a biological medicine clinic. I want to dive into what you did when you were on this quest over in Europe and especially at the Swiss Clinic, Robin. So can you fill me in?

Yeah, I will. Most of the clinics that I went to have two types of treatments and I have become pretty cynical. I actually went out to do this research thinking that I would write a book about what's working and haven't written the book. That's a whole side topic, but a lot. I sort of categorize all the treatments out there. And so if you're out there shopping for where you want to go for treatment for a neurodegenerative disease or cancer or, or something like that out there outside of standard of care medicine, there's spa treatments and then there's legitimate detoxifying and immune building treatments. And so definitely put your critical thinking skills hat on when you're looking at these places because some of the stuff that they offer out there is, you know, kind of like to fill the time between your real treatments. But I wrote a blog post and Ben, you can link to it in your show notes of the 10 treatments that I want to see if I'm going to send my parent or own child.

This is perfect. This is what I want to hear.

Yeah, yeah. And one of them that I really, really like is ozonating the blood and they at this Swiss clinic that I now take people to every summer and I spend three weeks there, just, you know, I get the needle in my arm, I'm getting the nutrient IVs. That's one of them. I think that they're very powerful. A lot of insurance companies will now pay for vitamin C IVs because they're so very clearly proven to be anti cancer that even standard of care has had to acknowledge it.

But not, but not in Europe. Right. They'd pay for treatments in the us.

I doubt that this clinic, I doubt that European and Mexican clinics will even deal with your insurance company.

Right. But they're cheaper anyways. It's like medical tourism. It's like if I'm gonna go get invaginated, I'm gonna go to Thailand because it'll cost me a third of the, of the price of changing my sex here in America, should I ever want to, to go do that. So yeah, medical, medical tourism is huge. This vitamin C injection though, I mean, I just got it done. I just got 100 grams down in Pocatello, Idaho at Dr. Jason West's clinic down there. Fascinating clinic where he does like procaine injections. And he reset my nervous system and I sat in an IV bag for a couple of hours and I wasn't aware that this type of high dose vitamin C is used as a cancer treatment, but it sounds like that's one of the key treatments at the biological medicine place in Switzerland you went to.

Yep. And not just vitamin C. Jason west is a good friend. He's my mom's doctor.

No way. Small world.

Yeah. Drives like three, three hours each direction to go to him, but yeah, yeah. So not just vitamin C, but you know, sometimes. So there's a number of different nutrient infusions that you can get there and it's going to be dependent on the testing you get. So you're also getting diagnostics that aren't really available from your regular physician here in the US One of them that I really like is the oligoscan, which is going to tell you the level of your heavy metals systemically. Those are serious toxins. Highly, highly correlated to cancer risk. Because if you can get at that, you can figure out what's going on with heavy metals. You may be able to actually get out what is one of the possible causes of the cancer.

What's an oligo scan?

Oligoscan is non invasive testing for heavy metals. And when they invested in it like three years ago, I was like, whoa, tell me about this. I said, did you test this against the gold standard, which is urine challenge testing and they said we did and we found a correlation pretty one to one. Now when people go to Switzerland, it's a European developed technology that tells you not just the levels of your heavy metals, which are bad guys, but also the levels of all of your minerals. And I find that looking at test results because they don't have HIPAA laws over there. And so in Switzerland they'll like show me a lot of patient records if I ask. And I find that just about everybody is low in zinc, so they usually attack the zinc deficiency. That's a lot of times being pulled out. They will do heavy metals chelations over there where you sit there with an IV drip and there are chelator agents in your IV that have an affinity for specific heavy metals that are highly toxic and that we have exposure to through a variety of things, whether it's, you know, amalgam fillings or, you know, lots of pollution or sushi that you. Raw sushi that you eat. So you can do heavy metals chelation there and a variety of things to help fix that imbalance. If you have lots of heavy metals.

Toxicity and this oligo scan, just to clarify it is non invasive. You're simply testing with specific points on your body.

Yep.

And it's an electronic scan.

Yep.

Wow. And it, and it identifies minerals, vitamins, you're deficient in metals, all of that?

Yeah, yeah. Really, really powerful. And they can give you like a 3, 4 page printout of your results. It gives you really good indication of where you're at nutritionally as well as with heavy metals.

I'll admit I'm skeptical, but at the same time I interviewed, you know, Dr. Wendy Myers who, who is into energy medicine and had me try this NES scanner. NES scanner. And that thing identified just about every single blood or organ issue that I've identified through more allopathic techniques. Right. Like by going to Quest Labs or LabCorp or you know, going to get things, you know, palpated by a bodywork practitioner. It just identified everything that was going on with me to the T. So I'm skeptical. But at the same time I understand that these things actually work. So you've got an oligoscan. You did like high dose vitamin C injections. What were some of the other things?

Yeah, more like IVs because you're going to be there for an hour or two. And one of those is a diagnostic, one of those is a treatment. They also have, they have full body hyperthermia where you're being, you're being monitored by rectal thermometer you have a nurse there giving you fluids, you're on IV fluids and you are for several hours brought to an artificial fever up to like 102, 104 degrees if we're talking Fahrenheit. And I do it, I do it every single year when I'm there. And it's not my favorite thing. You know, you're in a pretty small space. But you know, again, when you know, people know that their, their optimized temperature and all the cells in your body are optimized. Is it what I always forget?

98, 98.6.

98.6. Thank you. But the exception to that is your immune cells, your white blood cells and T cell killer T cells. A lot of your immune cells are optimized at 104 degrees. And so of course in America when we have a fever, we think something's wrong, we must have a Tylenol deficiency. So we, so we nuke it. But you know, when you are in a fever state, you are again, you are burning out cancer cells and you are burning out bacterial and viral cells.

Hyperthermia is fascinating. I looked into this because I got this thing from Korea called a biomat that I now use every day. But the literature that came with it claimed that it could kill cancer cells. And it turns out that on the, on the US government's website for cancer@cancer.gov, you can actually see hyperthermia listed as a clinically proven method to kill cancer cells and to damage proteins within cancer cells and to shrink tumors. And you know, I, I don't think I, I believe that you have to get the body pretty high like you mentioned, like you gotta get, you know, we're normally 98.6 way up into the hundreds. And the highest that I've gotten just measuring with this, this Oura ring that I wear for skin temperature is 105. Laying on that biomat and you actually have to, if you want to get true hyperthermia with it, you have to wrap it, you turn it into almost like a lay down sauna. You wrap it with these Mylar silver blankets. But, but I can approximate hyperthermia at home. But it sounds to me like they're using kind of like that on steroids at the Swiss clinic.

Yeah, I mean your infrared sauna is going to get you some, some benefits. But this is like they're cooking from the inside. You're like a turkey. You've got a rectal thermometer and your core temperature is really the, is the thing to measure and Just to give you an idea, since we're bringing up hyperthermia, this was pioneered in Germany, and the doctors who run this Swiss clinic are actually from Germany. They grew up behind the Berlin Wall, didn't speak English until they were older than 20. And so they're very interesting people. But in Germany, where hyperthermia is totally within standard of care and many research studies come out of the hospitals and the university institutions, it's very mainstream to use hyperthermia, not necessarily instead of chemotherapy, but as an adjunctive to it. I mean, Germany's dishing out the chemo in just as high rates as the US Is, but as an adjunctive to chemo, which we're not doing here in the US Just goes just as an example of how far behind we are in thinking more biologically. Hyperthermia is used by regular medical doctors to improve the outcomes and effects of chemotherapy in Europe.

Wow. Okay. So hyperthermia is another one. Some of this stuff's fascinating because we can almost, in my opinion, kind of keep cancer at bay, so to speak. And this is completely unfounded and unresearched. It's just the hypothesis of mine. By regularly doing things that push our body into some of these zones at lesser amounts, right? Like doing a sauna a few times a week, or working up a sweat, or getting low dose uva, uvb, near and far infrared from sun, or doing something, you know, like. Like I lay on my biomat when I take a nap every day, or when it comes to something like hyperbaric oxygen, you know, exercising and infusing the body with oxygen through exercise, you know, a lot of these things that we do on a daily basis for general health seem to be things that are simply approximated at much higher, more concentrated amounts in a clinic like this.

Well, that's exactly it. And so you're doing some sort of home version of these things. And that's why I kind of talk about, like, I don't know if I would put an infrared sauna on the spa treatment side or on the, like, serious clinical intervention side. But hyperbaric oxygen, since you brought that up, this clinic in Switzerland, I've seen a lot of different versions of it, and one clinic that will remain unnamed because I put myself into these treatments and then asked lots of questions and interviewed all these doctors. In one American clinic, he withdrew a syringe full of blood from my hip, shook in some ozone, and then injected it back into my hip. And that's just not even close to good enough. In the Swiss clinic, about three Years ago, they got this technology I think is really cool, and it probably gets the job done better than anything I've seen in terms of hyperbaric oxygen is that you have a needle in your vein and you sit there and squeeze the little squeezy ball and your blood leaves your arm and it goes into a container where they then shake ozone into it. Ozone being O3, there's an extra oxygen molecule. Ozone is used in hundreds of industrial applications. It's. It's what lightning creates in the atmosphere. It's highly cleansing, and so it's killing. It's killing pathogens in the blood. Then they reverse the direction and you. And the blood goes back into your arm. Then it leaves again. Shake some ozone into it again. There's a nurse saying they're doing this, and she does it in one hour, one hour of treatment. It's very painless. They are shaking ozone into my blood 10 different times and putting it back into my body. And I felt like that is like. Seems so much more likely to be clinically effective than the little, hey, bend over and let me take a little bit of blood out of your hip. I got pretty cynical because I was in so many places and heard a lot of different claims. And a lot of times these doctors, honestly, here's another thing I really want people to know if they're thinking, like, where do I want to send my dad, who's suffering with something, and I want him to go someplace he's going to get a lot of great treatment outside of getting nuked with chemicals and burning rays, is if you stay off site, it makes such a huge difference in a bad way. There's very few places where you stay on site. They're feeding you a really healing, super clean, organic, great detoxifying diet. And that's one of the places that. One of the things I loved most about this place in the south of Switzerland, not only is the facility spectacular, but you stay on site, you know, when a person is sick. And these, these doctors of biological medicine say, hey, don't send people to us if they're sick unless they can stay for three weeks. And I absolutely agree with that. Our mutual friend, I'm sure Tom O', Brien, has a book that's something like, in three weeks, I can work a miracle. And the MDs at this, this clinic in the southern Swiss Alps say the exact same thing. They're like, give me three weeks and I can really turn around functioning in the body at a cellular level, at an organ level. And so that's not to make any kind of disease cure claims, but I really feel like people need to be realistic and say, okay, three full weeks of treatment if you're really ill can be powerful and it's really a minimum.

Tom's a smart guy. He has a new book too, doesn't he? A book on autoimmunity or something like that.

Oh, yeah, I know he had a docu series out.

Yeah, I think he has something going on in audio which might be relevant to this discussion. I believe it came across my radar this morning. I think Dave Asprey just interviewed him over on the Bulletproof podcast. So I'll link to that one if you guys want to learn more about Dr. Tom O'. Brien. But he's another brilliant guy when it comes to this stuff and a mutual friend of Robin and I, he actually.

Is leading three weeks of liver detox retreats right after I do. So I've got three sold out retreats. They're one week of liver liver detox. And I really just like people to go there so that more Americans know about this place. And then Tom has three weeks that he's leading. All of them are sold out. But the good news is, if you're going to tell people about this place is that you can go for a three week stay anytime.

So could I put together like a group of people to go to Switzerland to do this for three weeks?

I would love to help you go do three back to back weeks of retreat. I will absolutely 100% help you do that.

I would love to put a 2019 trip together to bring folks listening in who want to do that. Because I Personally, I mentioned Dr. Jason west and I just went to Salt Lake City and kind of did a little health quest down there where I went to West Clinic and I went to Dr. Craig Bueller's clinic for manual therapy and then did some umbilical and amniotic stem cell injections at Dr. Reagan Archibald's clinic there. But in, in looking over the list of things that you did at this Swiss clinic, I mean, this is off the charts compared to that.

Yeah, I've seen, you know, every time I talk about this, like some online or whatever, I'll get functional doctors piping in and they'll be like, oh, we do hyperbaric ozone at our clinic and. Or, oh, we have saunas at our clinic. I mean, there's hundreds of clinics who have a little this and a little of that. But part of the problem here, what's so daunting for these practitioners and this is why the fact that this $24 million facility came into the possession of these two mother, daughter, you know, medical doctors trained in biological medicine. Why I think it's such a miracle and why I am really motivated for more Americans to know about it. Because they acquired it for 3 million bucks. Like it was built in $1984 for 24 million dol. And they acquired it for $3 million, which makes it, you know, makes it affordable. Like Switzerland is the most expensive country in the world. And it was, Ben, it was the best price I found worldwide and the best treatment. And I'm comparing it to four different Tijuana clinics.

I want to ask you about a couple more treatments that you did, but what we can do is Robin lets you and I talk after the show. What I'd like for any of you listening in to do is just go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com GreenSmoothieGirl and I really hadn't planned on this until now, but this is very, very interesting to me as a potential for a 2019 adventure. I could lead people on over there in Switzerland. So just leave a comment if you're interested, if you're game, so to speak. And then what I can do is I can scroll through those comments and kind of reach out to you and contact you if it's something that we wind up putting together. Just go to BenGreenFitness.com GreenSmoothieGirl and I'll put it all over there.

I'll tell you that. Because I've been talking about this and showing pictures from this spectacular place like it is. Like every room that you stay in on site has a view of the Swiss Alps. You can walk out the front door on the other side of the building and go hiking. And it's like you're in.

I love stuff like that.

It's like you're in a movie. Plus, you're getting this just amazing treatment by some of the most compassionate and knowledgeable doctors I've ever known. But I will tell you right now, Ben, that when you go to do this and I'll help you. Like, I have a slideshow where I show pictures of the place and the treatments that we get and me getting the treatments. Tom sold out his three weeks in two days. So your people really should raise their hand and say, tell me about this when you're gonna do this in 2019. Mine sold out in like, like four days this year.

Wow. So, okay, so, so when you say sell out, basically all we would have to do is connect with this Swiss clinic and I can, I can send people who. And honestly, if you're listening in, just in case I don't go do the comments thing, just, just go to my website, subscribe to the newsletter, because once Robin and I get on the same page, I'll just send out a newsletter about this and we'll make it happen. A lot of things are not hell yeses for me, but this should be a hell yes after, after talking about, talking to Robin about this. Okay. A few other things, Robin, just because I have some questions. What's liver hyperthermia? I saw that you did liver hyperthermia.

Well, hyperthermia is a commitment and it costs extra. It doesn't come with the one week liver detox. But one of the things that our liver detoxers do get every year is that they can locally localize heating up the liver. And so they're using sonogram technology in the gel, which you're familiar with in many medical applications, and they can really heat up the liver to help it detoxify because, you know, I mean, and I think that this is a significant, while painless, you know, 30, 45 minute example of what you're getting over there if you go for a one week liver detox. And that's why if you do a retreat over there, which, like I said, I'm happy to help you do, this is the kind of thing that you'll do. They'll also get a professional colonic by a colon hydrotherapist. The coffee enema, that's a whole other thing. And by the way, that's optional if that freaks you out. But it's really amazing.

I did one about three hours ago.

Really?

Yeah, I do two a week right now.

I don't sell you on it.

No, you don't have to sell much my audience on it either. They're pretty accustomed to the idea of sticking tubes up your butt to clean your body out. So. Yeah, and I'm a fan of that as well. As a matter of fact, I was talking about going to Salt Lake city and seeing Dr. Craig Buehler. And he palpated my liver and gallbladder and there were some tender points there. And so immediately, and this was three weeks ago, I started doing, I had kind of neglected my coffee enemas for a couple months. I started doing them and already, because I've been palpating that same spot, the tenderness is almost completely gone. It's almost like it's just flushing out the liver and the gallbladder. And I know that those of you who are listening in, who are white lab coat wearing, allopathic western medical enthusiasts are raising an eyebrow at this. But I'm telling you, if you're skeptical, just go stick coffee up your butt and see what happens. Use yourself as an N equals one.

Yeah. You're going to have the massive glutathione production which is going to be so helpful in clearing a lot of junk out. But you're also, you know that caffeine is taken up by the hemorrhoidal vein. It's not going through your digestive tract and it's opening up liver and kidney, it's opening up bile ducts. And you are just dumping all kinds of stuff out of that liver that circulates your, filters your whole blood system every four minutes and you're able to dump it out. So it's not recirculating, it's heading on out of the body. And it's a weird miraculous thing. And it's just one of many things that we do when we take people for a one week liver detox. But my point in taking people there is that they send their sister in law when their sister in law gets cancer or they take their child when they're struggling with major heavy metals toxicity issue or whatever. Like Americans need to discover this place because they are overpaying for she care.

Yeah.

In, in North America. Hate to say it. And, and south and Central America.

Right, right, exactly. Although you are kind of getting shitty care over there if you include the coffee enemas. It is a form of shitty care. One other question about the treatments. A neural therapy. What's neural therapy?

Well, Dr. Petra, because who is the mother? The daughter is an internist and it will be her heir apparent. They live, they live on site and she, that is a lot of her genius is neural therapy. She's using needles. I can't. I think it's about a 25 to 30 year old science again pioneered in Europe, highly unusual in the US even in functional medicine. But I have taken two different people there who have lifelong back or nerve pain and she takes them in and does whatever she does with her needles. And they were, their jaw was on the floor and they were pain free, these two different gentlemen for the first time in years or decades. And it's not, it's not that neural therapy is going to miraculously solve everything, but it involves the energy meridians of the body. And she, I mean like, like I said she, she isn't looking at Disease the same way an allopathic doctor is. Even though she is a medical doctor and she has all that training, she's also a genius at live blood microscopy. And you are going to see one drop of blood under a high powered microscope that tells you I'm sure you've had this done. It is mind blowing. What she can tell you about the state of your overall systemic health and disease risk from one drop of your.

Blood, that it's pretty fascinating as a matter of fact, I had that done recently and there were little clusters of Candida in my bloodstream. There are what were called ghost cells, indications that I might, and this is related to the liver and the gallbladder, have some amount of fat malabsorption that is limiting my ability to create cell membranes properly. I also had, if you look very closely at some of the cell walls, like almost cracks, like a dry desert indicating some, some phosphorus and mineral deficiencies. There's a host of data you can get from these red blood cell analyses that again allopathic medicine frowns upon. But once you delve into the research, it's actually, it's pretty incredible as far as how much research there is especially in Europe and in some of these biological medicine sectors on this stuff. So you can pretty much just go there and do the full meal deal. Everything that we just talked about, this.

Swiss clinic, well not only that, but you're staying on site. There's a Michelin rated chef who has worked there for 18 years who's serving you three multi course meals. Some of them are multi course meals, beautifully plated and it's all organic detox food. I mean I took them a Blendtec, had to get one that's made for Europe and I said all right, I want more green smoothies here. But besides that they have a gluten free of course or Tom wouldn't be there. Whole foods, mostly plant based. It's the koi diet which is another part of biological medicine the US hasn't seen yet, but I think you would approve. And they are dead serious about it being an EMF free zone. Like you can't take your cell phone or your tablet in any of the treatment areas. You can have in your room. That's it. But it is an incredible healing zone and lots of great treatments, lots of great care and incredible, incredible just climate of healing. But go there for if you know someone who is very ill, help spread the word that this is, this is a find, this is a rare jewel. I consider it one of the greatest things I've ever discovered in my life. And I'm really pleased that we've been able to send a lot of sick people there to get well. I know this is not a claim, this is not a prediction, but I know a bunch of people who went there with advanced stage cancers who are, you know, out doing 10Ks and years past their diagnosis, feeling amazing. And so it's a great place to go for significant illness.

Wow, my mind is blown. Like, I really, really, truly want to go and check this place out. And obviously it being in Switzerland makes it all, all the more appealing. So what I'm gonna do is for everybody listening in, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com GreenSmoothieGirl I'll put a link to a lot of the therapies that Robin and I talked about, along with a lot of the books that kind of came up, like the one Ron Penna recommended to me on Oxygen and also Naomi Whittell's book on cellular autophagy. And also what I'll do for you is I've got about 12 other podcasts that I have done on cancer. I will link to all of those for you in the show. Notes if you're personally on on a cancer quest. For me, my purpose is for going to a clinic like this would be to go from good to great, to just feel amazing. Because like I mentioned, when I went to a clinic like, you know, west and Buellers down in Salt Lake City, I felt great. They fixed my back completely with, with Prolozone and, and things like this, neural therapy and procaine injections, B12, some adjustments. I mean, it's, it's pretty amazing. And I'll put all that over@BenGreenful Fitness.com GreenSmoothieGirl near the resources section, I'll put a place where you could sign up to my newsletter if you want to stay tuned for the actual date when Robin and I plan this, because I'm serious, I'm a man of my word and I will put something together with Robin for 2019. And then the other thing is if you leave a comment over there, you can ask Robin and I question, but you can also just comment and say, hey, I'm game, I want to go. And I'll start to get some folks together and create a list of people who are interested for sure for once I launch this thing. Um, Robin, this is super fascinating. Uh, this is super fascinating. Thanks for opening our eyes to this stuff and coming on the show.

Oh, it's my pleasure. And I would be really excited if you took some of your followers over there because they'll get some good. They'll get some good bend time and they'll get to pick your brain because you'll eat three meals together and you'll go on the most spectacular hikes in the morning. The husband of the older doctor there will take you on some unbelievable hikes, which I know you'll totally jam on. But you too, even though you'll be there with your peeps, you will actually have a lot of R and R. I mean, you leave your room, you go up to one of the treatment rooms and you go back to your room, chill out and look at the Alps and read a book. It's really, really lovely experience. So I'd be excited if you went.

Wow, me and all my buddies could do coffee, enemas side by side and amazing Swiss retreat looking out over the mountains. Cool. I'm game. All right, Robin, well, thanks so much for coming on the show again. I'll put all the links and the resources over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com GreenSmoothieGirl Even though we didn't talk about smoothies much at all, she is the green smoothie girl, after all. And I'll link to Robin's website and some of the other amazing things that she has. And in the meantime, Robin, thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Robin Openshaw signing out from Ben Greenfield. Have an amazing week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam. Sa.