How To Treat Cancer With Chinese Medicine: What Happened When Chinese Herbologist Roger Drummer Got An "Incurable" Cancer.

Hey, I've done it again. My website, if I don't say so myself, @BenGreenfieldFitness.com has a repository. I think that's a word. I think that word is not the same thing as suppository. I think I could be wrong. Repository of some of the most mind blowing cancer oriented podcasts that exist. I've been able, been fortunate and blessed enough to be able to tap the mind of people who have cured themselves of cancer using very unique methods. And if you're a PubMed researcher, you work for a pharmaceutical company, you probably want to jump through this podcast microphone and throttle me. But I'm just saying, some of my cancer episodes, they're practical, actionable advice that I send people to all the time when they ask me about what I would do if I had cancer. And today is no different. I'm talking with my friend Roger Drummer, who cured himself of incurable, quote, incurable unquote, prostate cancer. So we're gonna talk with him in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

You know, because of my background in Chinese herbs and how I got involved with it, I instantly felt that it's, that it was a spiritual issue. When I got on the Internet to look up bladder cancer, the New York Times was running a special on this new immunotherapy they were using for bladder cancer. And within six months, all of them had cancer again somewhere else. And I said to my wife, I said, hon, I said, who would have thought having cancer could be this much fun?

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Hey, folks, my guest on today's show is Roger Drummer. And Roger is not only a diplomat of Chinese herbology, but he holds patents on growing these, these different forms of biologically active, what are called anthocyanin rich medicinal mushrooms. And he's been doing this for 27, literally formulating tonic herbs and nutritional programs all based on Chinese herbology. He's also studied a ton of different healing modalities like pranic healing and Jinshinjitsu and Riki and Jinshin do and shiatsu. And he happens to make also a couple of herbal supplements that you may have heard me talk about before. One called Tian Qi, one of the most potent little packets of Chinese herbs I've ever had in my life when it comes to, like, energy and then inner peace, which is kind of similar, but one that can be used for napping or sleeping. He's such an interesting guy. He's actually been on the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast three times. We did an interview on how adaptogens work. We did an interview on how to boost your brain power with herbology, and we also did one on food labels and Chinese medicine. Kind of talked about a whole bunch of different things in that episode. And if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger Drummer, I'll link to all the previous episodes I did with Roger, and it's spelled Drummer D R U M M E R. So go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger Drummer if you find Roger interesting like I do and you want to hear more of him anyways, though. So Roger and I email sometimes. In our last email correspondence, Roger told me that last summer he had stage three bladder cancer. And that required bladder and prostate removal, along with cutting of the colon to make a new bladder bag. And that's a protocol that has, I believe, like a 20% survival rate. And he was highlighting to me what he went through and also how he managed and eliminated his cancer with. With some different and very unique modalities that I thought would be fascinating to delve into on this show, because he had a. He had. He had a pretty significant amount of healing occur. Shocking amount of healing, really. Confirmed in two different biopsies that I know he had done to make sure it was gone. So this promises to be yet another one of our very interesting episodes on cancer. So, Roger, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, good to be here.

Yeah, yeah. So last time we talked, you were. You were churning out Chinese herbs in. In your. In your mad scientist laboratory in. You're. You're in. In Portland now, right?

No, I'm in Henderson, Nevada.

That's right, Henderson. Yeah. For a while. Weren't you in Oregon?

No, no, not at all.

I have no clue why I thought that. All right. Completely confuse you with somebody else, apparently. So, Jared, you're down in Henderson and tell me about what happened.

Well, you know, I was given a lecture on the phone on a Thursday night. It's actually the weekend of Memorial Day. And by the way, if you're ever going to have a crisis, never do it on the weekend of Memorial Day because nobody's around. So anyway, I got done with my phone call and went in to go to the bathroom and just urinated. Pure blood. I mean, it didn't look like it was tinted. It was. Just looked like I was bleeding and I was passing clots and. And I really had no warning of anything other than being a couple days before that, getting extremely tired. And so once I saw the clotting and it. And it spooked me so much that I started drinking a lot of water because I didn't know exactly what was going on. And I figured, clots, I better keep it moving. So I ended up going home and I was up every 20 minutes, bleeding and passing clots until the next morning when I made it into a medical center and started this series of tests. And they couldn't even do a urinalysis because there's too much blood in it.

Holy cow. Now, now for a guy, by the way. And I don't, to my knowledge, ever remember having passed a clot, but does the clot literally, like, come out your. Your urethra?

Yes.

That's gotta hurt.

No, it actually didn't hurt so much as. It just felt weird. It was. It was like. It was like you're shooting something out of a gun. But I mean, it's just so strange of a feeling. You can feel it coming and then it moves all the way along and then shoots out into the bathroom, you know.

Wow.

It's an odd feeling.

Wow. Okay, so. So you're passing class and you're bleeding.

So I'm up, I make it to the medical center and. And now it's 3 o' clock by the time I get the CAT scan done. And the guy comes out, he goes, look, he goes, I saw something in your system. You're gonna have to get an appointment with a urologist. And I said, is there someone I can see right now? And he goes, right now? He goes, oh, no, you're gonna have to wait till Tuesday. I said, Tuesday? I said, look, I've been. I've been bleeding, passing blood for almost 20 hours now. And the guy looks at me, he says, oh, don't worry, you shouldn't bleed out by Tuesday.

Oh my gosh.

So, I mean, that was my advice I got. So he gave me an antibiotic, which was a pretty potent one.

Gave you an antibiotic and told you you'd have enough blood to where you weren't going to die by two.

I wouldn't. Shouldn't die by Tuesday. So I went home and I took it and it did work. It stopped my bleeding about 8 o' clock that night. And then I had to sit around until Tuesday to go in and get a test and get some other tests done. But that's when I found out. The guy says, well, you have stage three bladder cancer. And he explained the whole thing to me and basically, he basically told me, stage three, in case people aren't familiar with that, is where the tumors have grown through the fatty layer around your bladder. And so what makes it so terrible is that it's right in the position to go all over your system because it's made it through the wall, it's now in the fatty tissue, and it could express itself all over your body at any moment. And so he explained to me that there's really only one treatment for that that is removing your bladder, your prostate, and making a bag out of your intestines to urinate in. And so I'm looking at him and I mean, literally, you're in shock because it's kind of hard to describe what the feeling is, to be told you have cancer and then to have one that's so advanced where they're gonna take your body parts out, you're gonna pee it in a bag the rest of your life. So. And luckily for me, my doctor had actually had cancer himself before. So he told me, he goes, right, now I know you can't think of anything. You heard the word cancer and you've gone brain dead. He goes, so I want you to go home and think about what I'm telling you and we'll schedule a surgery, Right? Yeah. So I did that. I was in complete shock. And we set up a surgery and luckily for me, the first surgery was just to do a, what they call a resection, where they scrape the tumors out and then set you up for the next big thing where they're gonna do all the reconstructive surgery. And so I did that, and he confirmed it was stage three. And I got through that process and went home. And pretty much when I, when I first found out about it, I didn't know what to do. And plus, I was in shock, you know, from the stress of it. And so. And then there's that other part of it, you know, where the thing is, how in the hell did it happen to me? I've been eating an anti cancer diet for 30 years.

Yeah, that's. I mean, you've, you've been super healthy and taking all these Chinese herbs. So that's what I'm curious about was this like genetics or bad luck or do you have any idea?

You know, I really thought as I got into the process and thinking about it is that. And this is something I read in a book that Carolyn Mace wrote, and she has some great books on energy and healing. And she basically said the mistake almost everybody makes is trying to completely figure out why you got a disease because it'll never happen. You know, these things are. A lot of them have much more to do with things than just what your brain can figure out. So it's better just to drop it and look for healing, you know, and look at how you can figure out how to get rid of it. So. But I think, I think, I still think that part of it was exposure to a lot of pesticides. When I was 19 and 20 years old. I remember when it happened, I got a couple toxic exposures when I was around 19. I was working on some farms, doing farm work then. And I remember thinking at the time, God, I'll probably get cancer from this.

Yeah.

You know, so. And what I asked my doctor, he said, you know, basically you could have been forming this for the last 40 years and it finally manifested the fact that you ate so healthy and the last 30 years and you've been doing all this stuff, it probably just took it that long to develop. But it could, you know, we don't know, it could be related to the cigarettes you smoked when you were 19 or the pesticides. He goes, but. But this is the only treatment. And so. So I went home and, you know, but I have to be honest with you, when I got was told that I had cancer, the first thing that came to my mind besides the pesticides was that it was a spiritual issue. I really thought I had messed up and there was something I was doing that was wrong that allowed energetically allowed the environment for this to actually happen.

I want to hear a little bit more about. About what you thought regarding that. But I did want to comment regarding the pesticides that I'm aware of a few studies that have looked into pesticide exposure and the buildup of what are called. I don't know if you've heard of these before, beta glucuronidases, and those are significantly associated with bladder cancer. And so I would certainly say that if you were exposed to pesticides and herbicides heavily while growing up or early on in the day, it could certainly increase your risk. From what I've seen, just from a pure chemical standpoint, you do any research.

On bladder cancer and it's really related to chemical exposure. People that work for paint companies, all these things that the amount of bladder cancer is just off the charts. So there is a part of that, but because of my background in Chinese herbs and how I got involved with it, I instantly felt that it was a spiritual issue, and it didn't take me long to figure out what I thought it was related to and I needed to correct it. And so that that was not expressing myself creatively and having to do with, you know, and how that affects a certain chakra in your body which is related to your bladder.

Are you talking about like, like not practicing enough yin and being too yang?

No, no. I mean, just having certain projects that I wanted to do for, oh, probably 15 to 20 years and just not doing it because there was a part of me that just was afraid of expressing myself that way and putting myself out there that way.

Projects like what?

Writing? I had an amazing herb book which I'm now going to publish on Chinese herbs. And the whole process by which I learned Chinese herbs, because it almost reads like a fantasy, it was so completely like an altered reality to me. The way that I learned Chinese, her biology, and all the different experiences I had, it's almost something you'd read in some sort of science fiction fairy tale. But it was my real life, and I got into Chinese herbs because I had spiritual experiences. Most people get into Chinese medicine and realize there's a spiritual side. I really just studied Chinese herbs because I had just altering, mind altering experiences that I couldn't explain. So I ended up being at an herb shop just to be in the environment, to try and figure out what was happening to me.

Okay.

And then that took me on the path to learning Reiki and studying chronic healing and all these different healing modalities and massage and all this stuff to learn about energetics. And I honestly think I learned more about how Chinese herbs work from studying Reiki, pranic healing, kundalini, yoga, all these different modalities I got involved with.

Interesting. Okay, so the reason I asked you about the yin and the. And the Yang deficiency was because I did a podcast recently with Paul Check, who is a holistic health practitioner, and he talked a lot with me about my own need to express yin more. And one of the things that he had actually brought up, I believe, was kidney health and how not expressing enough of your yin, creative, almost more feminine side can be associated with yin deficiency and yang elevation and lead to blood stagnation and kidney issues.

Yeah, you know, the. The kidney energy is all about Second chakra, bladder, kidney, reproductive system. Yeah, there's a part of that and, and expressing your creativity is more of a yang thing. But the whole process of building it up and energetic buildup of that and then the, the creation of it is. It's all yin and yang activity. And, you know, I had chronic fatigue when I got into Chinese herbs, so my kidneys were pretty much depleted of both yin and.

Wow.

So it kind of all leads back to that. And it's probably been building up for a long time. But, you know, for me, I had this book that I started writing and I just happened to have an incredible agent that I was dealing with who would publish five or six bestsellers. And she read it and thought it was amazing. And then I got turned down at the last stage by a book company and I threw it in a drawer and never got it out for 15 years.

Wow.

So it was really crazy. But that just kind of fed into that part of me that thinks I'm. I just wasn't good enough or new enough to put it out. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so I just kind of shut off that creative channel that I had and just didn't do anything about it.

So. So what did you wind up doing at that point once you, you had kind of. So had you actually had your surgery when you had figured that out?

Well, I had my first biopsy.

Okay.

Where they scraped the tumors out. And the guy wanted me to come back in 30 days to do another kind of pre op so he could show me how bad it had grown back, and then scheduled the final surgery to do everything right. And so I put that off because I wanted a chance to do my own therapy. And so I put it off until September 21st instead of doing it in the middle or the beginning of August. And so what I really did, I went home and I realized because it was a spiritual issue, but I wasn't going to ignore science and figuring out how to deal with it that way too. But I wanted to combine all of it. And so I started out. The first thing I did before I even got a plan together was I started just juicing and I had this drink that came from Edgar Cayce. You familiar with Edgar Cayce?

No.

Edgar Cayce is a psychic healer from around the 1900s, is very famous in the United States. And so I started drinking this juice. You know, a lot of people go, well, geez, he started drinking the juice from a, some, you know, psychic healer from 100 years ago. And what sense does that make? But, but if you look at it and you study all the research now on angiogenesis, you know what foods are all anti angiogenesis, which is the growing how a cancer tumor grows new blood pathways to feed itself. Well, everything in my juice from that guy actually fit into that program of angiogenesis. So it was designed to cut off the blood supply to tumors. But I really didn't have much confidence in it, even though I drank it for a month, because I thought, you know, why would that make a big difference for me? I've been on a diet that's basically like that or similar to it for 30 years. So what big difference would that make for me? And I didn't have much confidence in it. But the big turning point really in my whole therapy of what I was doing, besides the fact that I was going to try and change my meditation, all this other stuff was surprisingly, almost by accident. I just started taking inner Peace, the product I make. I was so stressed out and I took five of them one day and it was like my brain just flipped. I got out of the dread and I got out of the feeling of just, you know, being helpless. And I just started to get into researching stuff. It just made me feel completely. My brain just got out of fight or flight and I just started researching stuff. And surprisingly, which was really fascinating at the time, when I got on the Internet to look up bladder cancer, the New York Times was running a special on this new immunotherapy they were using for bladder cancer or this new chemo immunotherapy. And they had three people they were doing articles on that were all had my exact disease and they all had their bladder and everything removed. And within six months, all of them had cancer again somewhere else. And I'm sitting there thinking, why would I want to go through that process if all these people have cancer again? And the one guy was saying how lucky he was to get this new immuno chemotherapy and how it was only going to cost him about $75,000 a year to do it. And I'm thinking, I don't know, something about this picture doesn't make sense to me. And then they showed a picture of him and his doctor and they're both sitting there drinking soda pop. I'm thinking, this just isn't the path I'm gonna go down.

Right, right, right. Main mainlining angiogenic fructose into their bloodstream.

Yeah. So I really started, you know, once I started on the inner peace, I started to just change the way I looked at things. I really started looking into it. And, you know, I didn't have very many people that thought I could do anything about it. In fact, I talked to a couple doctor friends of mine because I thought they were into alternatives and they would give me a different approach. And both of them told me, said, look, just go have it done. You don't even want to know what's going to happen to you if you don't have your bladder removed and all that stuff done. I was in shock from that. Right. So. But once I started doing some research, and then the luckiest thing that happened to me is I have a friend named John who was on the ketogenic diet. And John had had a brain cancer five years before that, that he was sent home and basically told within three to six months he was, you know, about all the time he had and that he needed to get his affairs in order. And they had done surgery on him and removed 65% of his tumor. But, you know, obviously they left 35% in his brain. And he did chemo and radiation. They basically just sent him home. So he discovered the ketogenic diet on the Internet, went on it, and three months later went back in for a scan and his tumor was gone.

Yeah, yeah, and we've. We've talked about that on the show before, about this metabolic approach to cancer and the idea that, that cancer can be a state in many cases in which the cells go into a state of lactic acid accumulation and net acidosis due to kind of like out of control glucose utilization and glycolysis. And I believe it's termed the Warburg theory, I believe, of cancer. And this idea that as is outlined really, really well in this book, tripping over the truth, that what you do is you kind of like cut off a lot of the glucose supply to cancer cells via like ketosis.

And that's exactly what it is. And you know, John had had success. In fact, he told me the meter to buy, and then he just sent me a packet of 30 or 40 strips of glucose strips and ketone strips and told me to order. Tripping over the truth. And I read it, and you know what it impressed with me is that this was something I could do, that I could measure a response. It wasn't like juicing where I was just hoping something would happen, but here's a meter I could take, and every day I could measure three or four times a day and know exactly where I was. So it gave me a feeling that I was now controlling something. And so it also, I came to the realization right away that I'm not going to worry about the amount of nutrition I get in my system. I'm not going to worry about if I eat so many vegetables a day or whether they're all anti cancerous or whatever. But I'm going to just look at getting into the, what I call the zone where you're the glucose ketone index of one, which is what the, you know, most of the research, the guy that wrote the book Cancer as a metabolic disease, who does most of the medical research, says you have to get into this state where your glucose is a certain number balanced by your ketones. And that's the glucose ketone index of what they call the number one.

Okay, and what does that number actually reflect?

The number one that number reflects if you take your glucose and you divide it by 18 to get the metric number because that's the numbers they usually use. So let's say your glucose is 72, your glucose reading. So you divide that by 18 and you get a 4. So you measure your ketones. You got to have at least a level of 4 on your ketones to divide that into your other number and then you come out with a one.

That makes sense.

So yeah, and so that's what it was. And that's on every day. And I didn't have any problem with that. Within a day or so I was right into ketosis because I've been on a high fat diet anyway and I'm not overweight, so it was real easy for me to just flip over into it. And so my ketones were anywhere from five to six and a half most of the time. And I learned pretty easily how to keep my blood sugar around 72, 75. And then, you know, so I was, it was easy to be in that range. Whereas you know, when you read Tripping over the Truth back in the 60s when they tried to do this with people, they almost starved them to death. You know, they did 600 calories a day trying to get their sugar down to 60 so their body would naturally do it. Well, today we have so much, so many more tools to do it. MCT oil, all these different things you can take that naturally raise your ketones and so you could go into the zone much easier. And I, and I was still eating probably 1800 calories at least a day, you know, doing the drinks, doing all the herb program I came up with and the, and the MCT oil and eating two meals a day. And, and so I was right in that zone and not feeling bad. At all. I was intermittent fasting from 6pm until around 11 or 12 the next day, every single day. Never missed a time on it. So I was doing it to the max. Right. And along with that, I got in and started doing research and found a whole slew of herbs that have all been shown to kill cancer stem cells. And so I started researching the own herbs. And you know what? Adaptogens are amazing for that too. I mean, ashwagandha is an amazing herb for anti cancer killing stem cells. So all these things are part of my inner peace, but I was adding extra ashwagandha to it, and I had a program of about 10 herbs that I was taking three times a day. And so you're, you know, and I'm talking probably a hundred capsules of stuff a day, you know, so it's. It was a pretty.

And were you still taking that inner peace stuff too?

Oh, yeah.

Okay. And by the way, for those people who aren't familiar with inner peace, you should listen to some previous podcasts I've done with Roger. But correct me if I'm wrong, Roger, the. The idea behind that is it's a blend of like mushroom fruiting bodies and spores like Rishi combined with, you know, ashwagandha and a whole bunch of different Chinese adaptogenic herbs.

Yeah, it's the herb blend of Tian Qi by itself. Just for stress.

Right.

Lowering. Lowering your amount of cortisol, opening up your brain energetically to move out of fight or flight up into the frontal lobe, where you're all about creativity, seeing the big picture, that type of thing. So I was taking that every day along with the hundred, some pills of other program that I came up with.

A hundred sounds like a lot. Uh, you, you're just swallowing those pills all at once?

Oh, yeah, it's not a problem. Um, you dump about 30 or so of them in your hand and drink it with a glass of water, and that's about it.

How'd you choose all these? I mean, and, and were you concerned about, I. I guess, like interplay between each of the different, like 100 different things that you were taking?

No, not at all. I really wasn't worried about it at all. I have a, you know, I have an unbelievable love of herbs and I, I often tell this to people and they all laugh at me. But I have a personal relationship with herbs. I don't look at them as just being substances. I buy. I, I'm. I think I've been an herbalist in many lifetimes and I have a relationship with Plants. And I totally believe if you take the right ones, that magical things will happen.

Okay.

And so I worked out a program that was based on research from PubMed and from. Mostly from Green Med Info. I. In fact, I went to Green Med Info. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but.

Yeah, that's. That's Sire G's website, right? Yeah, that's a really great website.

Yeah, I punched in bladder cancer, and they gave me 57 different reports on herbs that are in studies done on bladder cancer with herbs. And so taking that information and then. And then I had this other book called Adaptogens and Medical Herbalism by Donnie Yance, who special. He's one of the few herbalists who specializes in cancer, and he uses a lot of adaptogenic herbs. And so I had that book and I had Green Med info, and I came up with a program of about 10 things and that I was going to take three times a day, all designed to kill cancer stem cells, to also kill circulating tumor cells, because, you know, once you scrape your bladder out, you have tumor cells that are released and floating around your system. And so that's basically the program I went on. And then I just started changing my meditation.

Now, before we get into meditation, what were some of these things you were taking? Because I know people are going to want to know.

Oh, well, mainly I was taking something called berberine, I don't know if you're familiar. Berberine.

Oh, yeah, that's great. Also for blood sugar control.

Oh, yeah. That's why it fits so perfect in my cancer program, because taking it kills cancer stem cells and circulating tumor cells, but it also helps regulate your sugar. So it fits right into the ketogenic diet and the whole program. So I was doing curcumin, green tea, resveratrol, genistein, which is an isoflavone from soy, boswellia, oregano oil, milk thistle acid, nac. You know. N acetylcysteine.

Yeah.

A little bit of garlic and some quercetin and ashwagandha. And basically that was the basis of my program was those. Was that list of things all in different amounts and different forms.

And those are about 10 things. But you're taking a hundred things.

No, no, A hundred caps.

Oh, 100 caps.

Okay, so you said 100 things.

All right, so. So you said. Because I'm actually write these down for the show notes for people. You said Berber tutorine, curcumin, green tea extract, boswellia, milk thistle, N acetylcysteine, ashwagandha and there are a couple others I may have missed.

Resveratrol.

Okay.

And genistein, which is an isoflavone from soy. And I think you got R. Lipoic acid. Quercetin.

Yep.

And that's basically it. You know, that was the meat of my program. And the reason I had so many caps is like, I love and have a great experience with phytosomes. It's a form of taking your, you know, an active ingredient in an herb and mixing it with a fat. And so I was doing a curcumin phytosome and a green tea phytosome and a curcumin phytosome. I was probably taking 24 caps of just that one herb a day.

Wow.

And so the green tea, I was taking 6 to 10, you know, depending on how I felt that day. So that, you know, that's a lot of herb of one particular type. But, you know, half of that cap or so or even more is lecithin that it's bound with. So I'm taking a lot of caps at one time.

Now, where were you sourcing these from? Were you just kind of like ordering from Amazon or do you have special sources, being an herbologist?

No, no, I was just ordering them off Vitacost website or Amazon. But, you know, I know the manufacturers of most things because I make products, so I can look at a product and then go to the ingredient label. And I know what company it came from a lot of times. So it doesn't matter what brand you buy if it's coming from a company, you know, in Italy or something like that. And that's the way it is with the phytosomes. The green tea is the same green tea I use in Tian Xi and Inner Peace. So I just got a kilo of that from the warehouse and cap my own.

Okay.

Same way with resveratrol, we use a 98% pure organic resveratrol. So I just got a half kilo of that when I was mixing things and making caps. And then the rest of it, I just got off the Internet in the form that I was real comfortable with, and that's how I took it.

Wow. Amazing. Okay. And by the way, for those of you listening in, I'm. I'm taking notes, and you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger Drummer, if you want to kind of get a list of the different notes and the books that. That Roger just listed off. So, Roger, you were just starting to get into meditation. You said you changed up your meditation as well. What was your meditation strategy?

Well, normally I do Kriya yoga every morning and. And I still continue to do that.

What's it called?

Kriya Yoga.

How do you spell that?

K, R, I, Y, A.

Okay, what is that?

Kriya yoga is a type of yoga that was. That's mainly promoted by the SRF foundation and Paramahansa Yogananda. And so I'm a follower of Paramahansa Yogananda and that's the energetic meditation technique that they teach. And so I was doing that every morning and I didn't change that part of my program, but I started researching the energetics of that. And also because I'm into quantum physics and, you know, I've studied Daoism and all these things, which really in the end all turn out to be about the exact same thing. So. But basically the energetics of what I wanted to do, and I was even reading a book that I got out, a book that I read a long time before called Changing Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza. And I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he, he writes a lot of books on changing your brain. And, and he was also in that, you know, in a movie that was all about, you know, how you project how to become rich. And what was that, what was that movie?

He was like the Think and Grow Rich, like that kind of thing?

No, it wasn't. It was kind of like that, only it was a. It was a different movie that was very famous in the, in the New age circles. You know, I'll think of it a little later.

In the, in the meantime, you. You read a book by him called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

Being Yourself. Okay. Basically, it's breaking your patterns and your habits of who you think you are.

Okay.

And the way that it fit into what I was doing was that whole idea of instead of praying for something to happen, just assume that it's happening. Just act like it's happened already. So that was. And then because I studied quantum physics and I also studied the Bhagavad Gita, which is probably the. One of the oldest textbook, and there was a, there was a copy of that called God Talks to Arjuna, which was written by Paramahansa Yogananda. And so I got that out and they have a great description in that book of your soul energy and the five different, what they call energetic bodies of your soul and how it interrelates to everything that happens to you. And Then I also was reading Quantum the Quantum Doctor by Amit Goswami, which. He's a theoretical quantum physicist, and he wrote a book that describes your five layers of energy of your body, and it's right out of the Bhagavad Gita, only he puts it more in quantum physics terms. But basically, what it all comes down to is that you have your physical body. You have an energy field around that that he calls the vital body, and that is like the blueprint for everything that goes on in your physical body. It's an energy field that has been there since you were conceived, and your body follows that blueprint to build a human being, basically.

What's the name of that book?

Quantum Doctor by Amit Goswami.

That sounds fascinating.

Oh, it's a. It's an amazing book, and it's based on information out of the Bhagavad Gita, which is, you know, 5,000 years old. So.

Yeah. The other person you just brought up was Paramahansa Yogananda.

Yes.

I'm actually reading a book by him right now called Autobiography of a Yogi, because I had reached out to a few of my friends to ask them about, like, what the ties would be between. Between Christianity and yoga and Christianity and energy medicine, and Christianity and plant medicine. And one of them brought up this idea that Jesus Christ, at one point during his life, I think between the ages of 13 and 32 or something like that, may have very likely traveled to India and had many of his. I guess his teachings influenced by some of the Eastern practices that he discovered over there. And this book is obviously about a lot more than that. But because of that recommendations, I'm actually about a quarter of the way through that book, Autobiography of a Yogi. But this book specifically regarding cancer, this Quantum Doctor, this sounds fascinating. It sounds right up the alley of the kind of stuff I'm personally looking into when it comes to energy medicine and physics and consciousness and healing the body.

Oh, you'll love Amit's stuff. It's just amazing.

Sending to Kendall after this podcast and so.

And so, you know, right on with your. Your friend's theory about living in India. There's records of him at a temple in India. There's records of him spending five or ten years in a. In a monastery in Tibet. I mean, they have all kinds of written stories about it. So what I loved about Paramahansa Yogananda was that, you know, I had studied Taoism and Buddhism and Zen and everything known to man. I was on a spiritual path when I was learning Chinese herbs. And what I realized when I found his stuff was that he was blending yoga and Christianity and showing you that it was the same thing, that it really was just different points of view of how things happen. In fact, he's got a book, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is so fascinating. He just explains the Gospels from a point of view of a guru and having students. It's just very fascinating stuff. And I realized that all the things I had against Jesus had nothing to do with him. It had to do with the way they teach you. So I became a lover of Christ from reading, from studying with Paramahansa Yogananda. It was just a fascinating way of looking at things. But in Amit's book and in the Bhagavad Gita, they talk about these five layers. So the vital bodies around your physical body, your next ones called the mental emotional body, where you store. It's an energy field where you store all your past hurts and emotions. And it heavily influences how your vital body connects with your physical body. And this is something that you can even look at in Chinese medicine, they talk about how all energy flow and movement is interrupted by something and it's usually your emotions. So it fits right into this thing. It's stored emotions block the flow of energy and vital qi around your body. So the. But the next body is called your supra mental. And then above that's the bliss body, full bliss consciousness of God. So but according to Amit Goswami, spontaneous healing happens when you make it into supramental body of your soul. So, you know, I had read this in the Bhagavad Gita. I'd studied a lot and I knew that I had to get in my meditation into a space to where I transcended my mental emotions about everything that was going on and just got into super mental or bliss. And I didn't think it was impossible because, you know, all the years I was studying energy medicine, I probably have been popped into the bliss state at least a half a dozen times, sometimes lasting for months at a time. What's the bliss state where you're just. Everything is just pure joy and happiness and it's really hard to stay connected to what's going on in real life.

Almost like what a lot of people get when they've, when they've done like really intense holotropic breath work or Ayahuasca or DMT or something like that.

Yeah, I don't know if I can compare it to a Drug, because it was. It's a state that, I don't know, it just doesn't compare to any drug feeling. You're just into a altered consciousness of pure love and bliss. And it can go on for a day or can go on for weeks and months. And I knew I could do that because I'd done it before, but now I had to do it. So that's the part of it that really seemed daunting to me because what had happened to me before, it wasn't something I was looking for, it just happened. I was doing so many things energetically. I used to get up in the morning at 2 o' clock every morning and take an ice cold shower and then do yoga and meditate for three hours in my living room. And. And I did this every single day. And so I would get popped into altered states quite easily. And I was taking herbs to kind of enhance that. Anyway, I don't even need to do.

All that stuff to be an altered state. If I get up at 4am every morning after about a week of that, I'm in a pretty altered state.

And so. And so I just. But I tried to kind of do what I could do. I kept doing my Kriya yoga and. But every day I would just be grateful that I was healing from cancer. I was so grateful that it was going away and so happy that I had this experience. I kept telling myself, I'm so happy to have this experience of cancer so that I could get over it. And I know it's going away. Thank you for getting rid of it. I was just experiencing and expressing gratitude before. I did my yoga every morning and. And then one day I was, you know, I got on my herb program and I was into it about five weeks and I was in perfect ketosis and doing the diet and everything. Blood sugar. And I even came up with a drink because you know Dr. Jonathan, right? You've had him on your show.

Dr. Jonathan who?

Dr. Jonathan Edwards. You had him, I think.

Yeah, he has been on my show. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, he's a friend of mine. And so in this process I was talking to him about some beta hydroxybutyrate. So I formulated him a product to raise your ketones. So I was having so much fun, you know, I was formulating this for him, you know, that he now sells to his cycling buddies and stuff. And it was helping raise my ketones even higher. And I was doing all these experiments with new products and taking all the herbs. And one day I was in my living room and it was about five weeks into it, and I got blissed out. All of a sudden, I got so happy and so. And I could tell it was happening because I had it happen before, and I was just ecstatic. And I walked out in the kitchen and this was like the 1st of September or so. And I said to my wife, I said, hon, I said, who would have thought having cancer could be this much fun? And my wife looks at me with the strangest look on her face. She goes, what in the hell are you talking about? You could die. I said, oh, no, I'm done with it. I've moved on. She goes, you moved on? I said, yeah, I've moved on. I'm done with it. It's gone. She goes, okay. And then she didn't look at me. And then I just happened to get a phone call from my sister. And she goes, well, your surgery's in three weeks. Are you worried? Are you. Are you worried about what's going to happen? Do you know what you're going to do? And I said, oh, no, I've moved on. She goes, you moved on? I said, yeah, I'm done with it. I'm not even going to think about it anymore. She goes, why don't you call me back? Hung up on me. And I was so high. I just, I just. In the next three weeks, I was just in this blissed out state. I was still taking my stuff, still doing everything, and my wife was driving me to the hospital to have my surgery. And she goes, now are you worried? Are you, you know, I'm going to be there and said, oh, no, I'm not worried about anything. She goes, what do you mean? I said, well, I got rid of my cancer three weeks ago. I'm just going in to confirm it so the doctor knows that I'm done with it, right?

Yeah.

So, I mean, everybody just looks at me so strange. But I'm telling you, I was so blissed out in the hospital at least three times in the, in the prep for surgery, I had to tell myself, stop smiling. Stop acting like you're having so much fun, because people are going to think you took drugs before you came in the hospital, right? So I'm dealing with all these nurses and having the greatest time. We're just laughing and having a great old time, right? I go in and have surgery. I come out, I feel fantastic. The guy comes down, he goes, well, the doctor, he says, well, I got to send this to the lab. He goes, but I couldn't find anything. He goes, I just I'm just in shock. I don't know what to tell you, but I just didn't see anything.

Wow.

You know, So I went to his office three days later, and he told me, there's. There's nothing there. You come back, there's just nothing at all. So. And I just kind of laughed. I said, yeah, I knew that before I came in. And so then he made me schedule another one three months down the road, because it just didn't make any sense to him that what it had happened. He's never seen this before. Right. And so I did another biopsy three months later in the same hospital, and he came out and says, you know, you just don't have anything. He goes, there's just nothing there. He goes, it's. I don't know what. What to even tell you. He goes. And this is the funny part. He says to me, he goes, but I did call my friend who's the head of bladder cancer research at the University of Southern California, and he's an expert in this, and he told me, even though you're clear, he would suggest that you get 15 radiation treatments on your prostate.

They still wanted you to do that.

Yeah. And so. And then. And I just sat there and looked at him, and then he smiled and he leaned in. He goes, I got a funny feeling you're not going to do that one.

Yeah, no kidding.

I said, no kidding. And so then I just. He made me agree to come back for four more biopsies the next year. And I agreed just to get out of the office, but I knew I wasn't going to come back, so I went into his office and just had a cystoscopy in June. And he told me, you're so clear. He goes, don't even bother to come back and see me ever. He goes, you're just done. And so when I was leaving, he goes, you know, you ought to write a book. He goes, I got all your pictures if you need them. That's what he told me. And that was basically the end of it. I've had a couple of scans that I paid for myself just to check things out, and I don't have a single thing going on anywhere.

Wow. Wow. Now, what about one thing I wanted to ask you about? You brought up Dr. Jonathan Edwards, and he actually wrote a couple of articles for BenGreenfieldFitness.com about oxygen therapy, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and some of these things that you might consider to be like. Like techy biohacks. Did you mess around with like that. Like, you know, I've had people on the show talk about ozone therapy and hyperbaric oxygen, some of these type of things. Did you incorporate anything like that, or were you just doing the hundred pills a day?

You know, I did not. I looked into it, and, you know, I have a really highly developed intuition for meditating. And it's always been something that's been with me the whole time I've been an herbalist, and it just didn't sit with me. It just didn't seem like it was appropriate or that I actually needed it. The herbs I picked out, they all seemed to resonate with me, and I just felt so comfortable going on that program. And again, I can't stress enough how important I think the ketogenic diet was in it, because literally, you're starving your cancer to death. It can't eat. There's nothing for it there to run on. And I had changed my metabolism completely over to where I literally was in a state of ketosis, I think, every single moment of the day. You know, if you read those books, a cancer cell requires 18 times more glucose than a normal cell. And when you completely shut off your glucose response, like my. My level of insulin fasting, insulin is below 2 normally. And so. And then my ketones are always between 5 and 6, and my blood sugar is somewhere between 60 and 72 all the time. And when you do that every day, I'd almost chuckle when I'm taking my herbs and I take my. My little readings, and I just go, oh, it's starving to death. And I'd laugh. I'm killing it and I laugh. Right? And that was part of the whole mental process to get the bliss. Anyway, I was laughing because of what I was doing to my cancer. I knew I was killing it because it was starving to death.

You know, the other idea I should mention, when you're talking about this metabolic theory of cancer and limiting the fuel available for cellular fermentation, specifically glucose. The other idea is that glutamine can also contribute to this fermentation. And a lot of people see success starving cancer cells, also with protein restriction. Were you doing protein restriction as well?

I was. Because on that diet, what I found out is if I overate protein. Protein. I. It usually just turned to sugar. And then I'd have an issue with my sugar, and I could always trace it back to, yeah, I ate more protein the day before. My sugar is a little bit higher. I, you know, I go into this process and I eliminate it. So I only ate protein Twice a day I kept it to 25 grams a meal. So I was getting probably 50 some grams. Once in a while I'd have some cheese and that would figure in, but, you know, and I'd have some extra protein and some nuts that I ate. But as far as a strict protein food, I kept it to 50 grams. So I might have got an extra 20 grams, 15 grams on certain days from other foods. But still, that's not a lot of protein.

Yeah.

And. And the rest was basically fat. Fat and vegetables. Ate a lot of greens. You know, just in fact, when I sat down and had my two meals day, I really ate a lot of food. You know, it seemed like a lot. I would get stuff that I'd have to force myself to eat the rest of my meal because I knew I'd lose weight if I didn't. Right.

Yeah.

So, you know, I probably had five servings of greens at least a meal. And with my protein and a bunch of fat, and that's basically what I ate all the time.

There's a lot of interesting research on the ketogenic diet in cancer that I think some people might be aware of, you know, in terms of a lot of it being in mice. But really, really interesting in terms of. I know one showed that a ketogenic diet reduced tumor growth by up to 65% and doubled survival time. And there was another one that looked at actual patients, and I believe they had like some kind of a cancer of the digestive tract. And what they showed was not only did the ketogenic diet cause a decrease in tumor growth response by a significant amount, but as soon as they started them back onto carbohydrates, it increased. So there was actually kind of like a dose response effect of carbohydrate feeding in terms of the growth of cancer. And then I know they combined a ketogenic diet with chemo and found that those who did a ketogenic diet plus chemo, they had complete remission. And then the disease started progressing after they stopped the ketogenic diet. And the people who dropped out of the study and kept doing chemo without the ketogenic diet. But then one study that I found, and I'll link to all these in the show notes for those of you who want to. Want to dig into this. And this is why I asked you about the hyperbaric oxygen. Roger, I don't know if you saw this one, but there was a study, again, this one was in mice, admittedly, but they tested a ketogenic diet with and Then also without this use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And they found that adding in the hyperbaric oxygen increased the mean survival to 78% versus the increase in mean survival was still increased with the ketogenic diet. It was increased by about 56%, but it got like 20% higher just by adding in hyperbaric oxygen. Which is. That's one of the reasons I asked you about that was because I've seen some really good studies as far as like adding that into a ketogenic approach as well.

Yeah, I read a lot of that. But again, I just didn't feel like I needed it. I just felt like I was on a great program and I was killing, killing it every day.

Obviously what you did worked.

Yeah, you know, I, I'm amazed. And I've done a lot of reading on the. The combining chemo and radiation with ketogenic diet. And there's something fascinating I read, I think it was that fact that most cancer cells use an active glutathione within the cell to protect it from chemotherapy and radiation. But when you're on a ketogenic diet for a week before the treatment, it actually shuts off that glutathione. It makes it inactive. And so the cells are more responsive to chemotherapy and radiation. So it's a great plus. You know, one of the things, one of the things I watched was an interview with the doctor who. Tom, I think it's Seafriel or Seyfield.

Thomas. I think it's Seafried. Seygried.

Yeah. Yeah. The cancer is a metabolic disease. And in his video he says if you have stage three cancer or above, you have to do chemo and radiation. You just can't do the ketogenic diet. And I'm sitting there watching it going, God, I'm glad mine is gone now, before I saw this video because, you know, you don't need anything like, you know, that's kind of fear based stuff. But I just kind of just got into a space and I was blissed out for probably eight weeks after my initial just getting blissed. I mean, I was just. Everything was just pure love and joy for about eight weeks. And the only thing that brought me out of it was I got an allergy, attacked some ragweed here in Nevada. I started sneezing all the time and that kind of ruined it for me. But. But it was just an amazing experience. I look back on it now as one of the like, great things that ever happened to me.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it completely kind of changed the trajectory of now, I shouldn't say your career, but like, almost like the things that you're doing with your life. So. And you're writing this book now as well, right?

Yeah, I'm going to write a book on cancer, you know, and the whole experience of it and give people, you know.

Well, you should say, based off of what you've just, you've just highlighted me, you should say, I have written a book on cancer. Right.

I have written, I have written a book on cancer and I have written a book on herbs. Right. So I'm getting all that, you know, processed and I'm going to move forward. My creative, my creative, expressive self.

Yeah, I love it. Well, I've taken some pretty copious notes during our discussion. I mean, you've mentioned tons of books that'll be. It's hard being a podcaster, Roger, because I talk to all these fascinating people and I really do. Now I read a book a day as a result of my podcasting habit and because I'm talking to an interesting guy like you every day for like an hour to an hour and a half and reading a book a day. The information fire hose is dizzying, but I love it and hopefully other people are going to get something out of this. I will also, in the show notes, I'll link to some of those studies that I mentioned, all the books that you mentioned, and then also I willi'll hunt down some good resources for all thethe supplements that you talked about as well. We've talked about your formulations likelike inner peace and Tian Qi before on previous episodes. So I don't think we need to take a deep dive into those. But what I'll do for those is I'llI'll putput links to my previous podcast with Roger about some of his specific formulations as well. And by the way, Roger, I was going to ask you, are you still taking both the Tian Qi and the inner peace as well?

Well, right now I do both formulas. I have changed because during my cancer, I actually stopped taking Tian Qi and just did inner peace. And the reason for that really was that I just didn't think I could fit that much more herb in my program.

Yeah, that's a lot of herb.

And the inner peace flipped my brain. It really put me into a space where I was just feeling fantastic from it. I needed that extra just straight anti stress function. Right. And so, but now I take them both and I take, I especially love Tian Qi when I work out and I'm probably taking that Five times a week. And I'm, you know, I do inner peace different times during the day. Kind of my recovery thing to keep my brain in a certain spot. And the other problem with me though is that I'm a product formulator. So I'm doing experiments with three different things right now. So besides, I'm on a cancer maintenance program, meaning that I've cut my stuff down to just two little doses that I do a day, but it's still part of my cancer program I'm going to be on for a year or so, right. And then I'm doing experiments with two or three different things. Like a different company wants me to do this thing and I'm doing an experiment with nitric oxide and I'm. And so I've got things to take like six, seven times a day.

I run into the same thing. Dude, Even right now I'm not using inner peace or Tian Qi because I'm doing a gong right now, 100 days of Tai chi in the morning and completely eliminating coffee and doing green tea instead during that period of time. So I'm trying to pay attention to basically my, my body very intensively. So I've eliminated a lot of, of anything even closely resembling like, like a stimulant or anything like that, aside from the green tea. And then I'm also experimenting right now with, with these, these different series of vape pens for cannabidiol. And so I started to kind of use those, you know, during the evening or during nap time when I'd normally take inner peace. So, so yeah, when you're experimenting, like, you know, guys like you and I do sometimes you'reyouour kinda taking one thing for 30 days and trying something else. But ultimately that's, that's how we get the word out to people and turn ourselves into little, little self experimental guinea pigs.

I'm impressed if you're not drinking coffee because I thought that was just part of your DNA.

It kind of is like growing up, my dad was a coffee roaster. I mean like my company is developing a coffee, I freaking love coffee. But at the same time it's like, you know, you gotta, gotta try some of these other things out. And myone of my clients is a, is a chef back in New York City and he's like a French Japanese chef and he goes out in the mountains of Japan every year and connects with these farmers and brings back like these, these bags of tea, these tiny bags of green tea, like $200 a bag. And he sends these to me. So I have a pretty good stock of amazing green teas, so. So life isn't too bad with it. It's the type of green tea where you can literally eat the. The stem and the leaf after you've drank the cup of tea, and it just tastes amazing.

Wow.

The. The umami flavor is out of sight. So life could be a lot worse on the no coffee thing.

Wow. You know, I never drank coffee until I got cancer.

Oh, wow.

And the only reason I started doing it was to get MCT into my system. So I started doing my own version of the bulletproof thing. And mainly to get a large amount of fat with a couple doses of herbs, because I know the fat helps with a lot of the flavonoids and herbs and active ingredients to absorb better. So that's how I started doing it. And having to regulate the caffeine of it a little bit because I'm just not used to taking stuff like that.

Yeah, well, when it comes to liver cancer, I mean, there's some pretty good evidence for coffee reducing the risk of liver cancer.

Oh, no, no, it works. It can be part of a great health program. I have no doubt about it. You know, I used to think when I was an herbalist in LA that, you know, everybody had to get off coffee. And then I realized one day, I think I've talked to 20,000 people, and they've all had pretty good responses to herbs, and none of them quit drinking coffee. You know, everybody drinks coffee.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's what it is. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I am still a fan of coffee, I gotta admit. But you've got a whole bunch of other resources, Resources that you've given us. So I'm just going to link to all this stuff in the show, Notes for folks. And again, you can access those over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger Drummer. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger drummer. Along with all of the other. All the other resources that Roger mentioned during this show, I should also highlight the fact that I talked about yin and yang early on in this podcast. Roger. One of the reasons also that I switched to a less stimulating drink in the morning, aside from coffee, was this idea of really just eliminating a lot of the kind of the fire in my life. I did a podcast with Paul check about this, and kind of he's got this thing called It's Not a Medicine Wheel. He's got this wheel where he goes over fire and water and earth and how I need less fire and more water in my life. And Part of that comes down, down to, like, more yin foods and less yang foods. So I've actually been really careful with things like coffee and chocolate and focusing more on, like, you know, green tea and squash and, you know, cooling raw vegetables and things like that.

Or you are definitely are a yang guy.

Yeah. Oh, totally.

Yeah. That's easy. Easy to see that you're a very expressive, physical, active type. And you, you know, one of the earliest things I learned about yin, which I never forgot, is you have to look at it as almost like the wood in a fireplace. You can have a roaring fire, but it's going to burn out really quick unless you keep stoking the wood. And the wood is the end. It's the fuel.

Yeah.

It's the substance that you burn. And so you're someone that probably needs to always be stoking the substance and keeping the. The fuel there because you're always going to be expressing yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Well, you and I speak the same language, Roger, and as usual, I really dig all the things that you're up to. So thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Oh, it was. It was a great time, as always.

Awesome. Well, folks, I hope you got a lot out of this again. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Roger Drummer is where you can access the show notes, leave your comments, leave your questions as usual, we also transcribe all the episodes. You can get access to the transcription usually within about a week or two after the podcast gets released. And Roger, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

All right, thanks for having me, Ben.

Folks, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Roger Drummer signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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

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