In this segment, the speaker argues that standard chemotherapy and radiation, while effective initially, can set the stage for later recurrence unless the patient’s immune system and overall physiology are concurrently supported. He outlines three foundational lifestyle pillars—targeted diet, regular physical activity, and mind‑body health—as the base for any integrative protocol. Building on that base, he describes "global" body‑wide therapies such as hyperthermia, hyperbaric oxygen, and photodynamic light treatments, emphasizing their ability to re‑direct immune signaling and synergize with other modalities. He then moves to botanical immunomodulators (mistletoe, curcumin, EGCG, boswellia, resveratrol, etc.), explaining that these agents modulate rather than simply stimulate immunity, which is crucial for slowing metastatic drivers that ultimately cause mortality. The speaker shares a case series of high‑dose intravenous curcumin in stage‑4 patients, noting radiologic responses that mimicked chemotherapy, and explains why that formulation is no longer available. From this experience he proposes a next‑generation approach: lower‑dose combinations of two to four botanicals, sequenced and potentiated by hyperthermia, hyperbaric oxygen, or photodynamic therapy. He concludes that the future of cancer care lies in multi‑directional, personalized protocols that integrate lifestyle, global physical therapies, and targeted botanical agents to keep the immune system balanced and the metastatic process quiet.
Chapters
You know, none of the things I'm going to talk about here are really technically new, but I think they're newer in the way that we think about putting them together with respect to helping a cancer patient and helping to see some change. There have been a number of publications in the oncology world about standard of care chemotherapy and radiation being very good on the front end, but then setting your body up to have a recurrence later. And that's really very worn— borne out in the data. And I think we were the first book to ever summarize that data and actually put that in that, you know, yes, there are some benefits on the front end of standard of care, but if we don't do anything with your body and your immune system to keep the cancer stem cells calm and quiet, long-term, we might be buying more problems. So, Like I said, it's never either or. It's what do we do to take the best of something and make it optimal over time? Yeah, I think when it comes to therapies, another thing that I kind of realized, I kind of knew it, you know, but sometimes you look back over a number of years and you really see the, you see patterns emerge. So all of the therapies, the more interventional things work better when a person's taking care of, or a person and their providers are taking care of 3 kind of foundational parts of their body. The first one is around their diet, and I think we've all seen that where the more focused the diet changes are, the more focused the diet is on immune function and surviving cancer, the better. The other is the physical body, you know, what are we doing to keep the physical body, you know, moving and metabolizing appropriately, etc., and then The third kind of foundational pillar is, is the brain and the mind-body connection, but also what are we letting come into our mind, you know, from the outside? Uh, there's a lot of negative things that can change your mind-body function and immunity. So those are always a base. And if we get those, then all of the other things become much more, um, I think impactful long-term. So the areas where I see, you know, none of the things I'm going to talk about here are really technically new, but I think they're Newer in the way that we think about putting them together with respect to helping a cancer patient and helping to see some change. So you have what I would call global therapies in the body, such as hyperthermia, heat therapies, very commonly used in Europe and Asia, less commonly here, a little bit in North America. There's studies going on currently in North America, thankfully, but a lot of the people that I trained with and I've worked with in regard to hyperthermia were, you know, standard, say, radiation oncologists from Europe, and it's just part of what they do in radiation or medical oncology to do hyperthermia. So hyperthermia is something I think that's so very potent and helpful. Another one that I consider kind of a body-wide treatment is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and up until 2012, it was kind of believed that maybe Hyperbaric might make cancer worse, and then in 2012 and 2016, there were two very pivotal papers published showing that that actually is not the case. And it's a real deep well to go into why in the tumor biology of hyperbaric oxygen. But again, not not as something you know where you would only do one treatment, but as a synergistic therapy, hyperbaric can synergize almost any of the other immune therapies that we do. It also can help people recover from. from the damage of, say, chemotherapy or surgery or radiation, which is very useful as well. And we use it a lot to synergize oxidative therapies as well. So hyperthermia, hyperbaric, you know, like I say, there's sort of body-wide— they don't really so much care what's wrong in the body. They try and get the immune signaling system to go back in the right direction. So I think those are major synergists. Another one which is both global and specific in therapy would be photodynamic therapies. And so you might have a global photodynamic therapy where you're using a specific wavelength generator on maybe the whole body or maybe the brain or maybe a particular organ system externally. And those again are commonly used in Other parts of the world, a lot of photodynamic therapy is relegated in North America to dermatology and a couple other things, although it's certainly known about. But again, I see that as another another way into the immune system that's very just like heat or hyperbaric. It's it's a very elegant way, and it it's really forces from nature. If you think about light, that we already you know we we know now interact with our cells and interact with our immune system. So I said photodynamic. Dynamic can kind of be a global or a specific therapy. So, you know, uh, light beds and light arrays and, you know, light helmets and other specific superficial things, that's sort of the global. Um, and then there are things that, uh, for example, you know, you and I were at a conference recently about more specific internal, you know, endolaser applications and, and using the uh, endolaser to bioactivate, uh, either a natural substance or maybe even a drug, et cetera. So I think photodynamic therapies are another really big synergistic layer that we can add on. Um, and then, you know, there's sort of an interplay between immunomodulating substances, which most of the plant world is, you know, we think sometimes people say, well, it's an immune stimulant or, you know, something is an immune suppressant. In most cases with plants, they're more modulating. They may have an initial stimulation and then modulation. So even something which we think of as an immune stimulator, like viscum mistletoe therapy, it sort of has that upswing, but more of it is immunomodulation. A lot of the other herbal and botanical treatments, whether it's curcumin or boswellia or EGCG or resveratrol, etc., those are also modulating different parts of immunity. And people will often think, well, if I have cancer, don't I want my immune system just upregulated so it like goes and, you know, beats up the cancer? And to a degree, you want some of that. But one of the things that we miss sometimes is that what keeps us alive when we have a, you know, stage 3 or 4 cancer— how well does the body manage the downstream drivers of metastasizing cancer? Well, it turns out that most of the drivers that drive metastasizing cancer, which is what will kill you, are are slowed or sometimes stopped by immunomodulation. And so, you know, there there are synergistic therapies we've done over time, and we just sort of observe that those people lived longer even with stage four cancer. And it turns out that biologically what those therapies did probably more had to do yes, they had a little initial part of kicking the immune system up, but their longer term effect was. Modulating the immune system so the metastases, what we called metastatic drive, was slowed down. That's what keeps you alive longer. So, I really think that, you know, when you get past the global things like hyperthermia, hyperbaric oxygen, and photodynamic, which is a little more specific, then you get into botanical types of interventions, whether it's mistletoe or one of the many other botanical interventions. then you're moving towards, yes, we're going to make your immune system, you know, spunky and active, but really what we want to do is take away the drivers of the cancer so it can be calm and quiet. And what I would say— and, and then I'll stop talking so you can tell me where we want to go next— but what I would say is— Perfect. Okay, good. Um, what I see now, and I think where we're coming to, although You know, many people have been already doing this, but I think we're getting to a more, maybe a little more wisdom around the way to implement these things is sometimes what we see. And I'll just take the case of botanical therapies. I think that what we see is you certainly can have like a lot of one botanical therapy and it can do things, but I think a better way to go for many people would be lower amounts of maybe 2 or 3 or 4 botanical approaches that are sequenced as a therapy and maybe then activated by, you know, photodynamic therapy or something, or synergized by heat or hyperbaric. Um, I think that that's really the next step that we're moving into. It's not that we don't do that. It's more knowing what's the most appropriate to put together. For example, could I do a lower dose of say curcumin and EGCG and, you know, maybe Boswellia or some of the other agents, and they would all kind of come at the problem from a different place, but I wouldn't have to use so much of the therapy. And one of the things that led me to that actually was necessity. Back, you mentioned the cancer interventional research. My part was all the injection IV therapies, things like that. Um, and, and the, the whole clinic was doing everything, you know, diet, and if they wanted acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and we had psychology, we had mind-body, everything going on, um, and botanicals and stuff. Well, one of the things that we, um, were researching was extremely high doses of intravenous curcumin. But in order to do that, you have to very— have very particular type of intravenous curcumin, which unfortunately, is not available anymore for a number of reasons. What we saw in about a group of 15 people with— they had to get into this group, they had to have stage 4 cancer, it had to have failed all other therapies including natural therapies, and so they had no other options. And so we did extremely high doses of intravenous curcumin, and in the first few patients we did, they would go get, you know, an imaging study CT scan, MRI, something, because it was part of their follow-up. And the radiologist would think that they were on a chemotherapy agent. And so, they would say that, well, there's positive chemotherapy effect where the metastases stopped growing, or in some cases, they reversed in the bones, et cetera. And that really got our attention. But in order to do that, we had to put so much curcumin into that person. It was kind of like marinating them in order to get it to all the cells. And it obviously worked real well. Um, when that form of curcumin became unavailable, the other forms, it's just not practical and not safe to do those high doses. Can't do it. So that led us to the next phase of, well, is there another way into the same effect? And that would be maybe lower doses, but with different, um, basically medicines made from botanical, uh, you know, chemicals, extracts. And, and that's kind of what we're seeing. And then the next step after that— you got to keep in mind this all started 10 years ago, so we have time to work on it— um, but the next step after that is, could I do those things, and then would hyperthermia make that work better? Would hyperbaric sequence then make that work better, or any of the other things? And, and that indeed, I believe, is what we're seeing. And I think that's really, that's really the frontier, is not so much things we don't know about, but the elegant application of those things mixed together. Yeah, kind of like you, you mentioned the beginning of the interview, you know, looking for that one thing. And, uh, this— Yeah, and I, I think that, you know, sometimes patients know this and sometimes they, they— you can lose sight of this, even at whether it's a standard oncology treatment or integrative or both. Cancer is a Very, very wily or you know informed process biologically. And so if you keep hammering it down in one direction, you might gain, which is fine. But there's ten or a hundred or a thousand other directions that can kind of come back up because it it has that ability to use its tumor biology and switch it. You know, which is why I feel like we see much better outcomes when we have multiple. Points of the compass covered, you know, and like we talked about, that includes dietary things, that includes lifestyle things, etc. And then these other therapies, I think, you know, maybe we might want to do like a lot of something on the front end, maybe a lot of mistletoe or a lot of oxidative therapy, etc. But then as we gain ground, we want to look at what's going to keep all the other doors that might open up, you know, closed for it. So I really think that's that's really the. The direction that I see us, you know, refining in the coming years.
