In this Q&A‑style discussion, the speaker outlines a pragmatic framework for integrating conventional oncology with immune‑focused, integrative therapies. He emphasizes that when standard‑of‑care (SOC) treatments have very high cure rates, they should be pursued and supported with adjunctive measures to aid recovery. Conversely, when SOC offers low probability of success and high toxicity, integrative approaches become central. The core of modern integrative oncology, he argues, is therapeutic synergy—layering multiple modalities (high‑dose IV vitamin C, hyperbaric oxygen, photodynamic therapy, ketogenic diet, repurposed drugs, oxidative/antioxidative agents) in a patient‑specific manner. Critical to this is assessing each patient’s vitality and immune function, deciding whether to first rehabilitate the immune system before adding aggressive treatments, or to combine supportive and immune‑stimulating interventions in a “push‑pull” schedule. Timing relative to conventional therapies (e.g., giving immunotherapies before chemo/radiation that damage immunity) is highlighted, as is the need to tailor strategies based on cancer type, stage, and the patient’s overall health. The speaker provides illustrative examples of alternating weekly regimens—nutrient and hyperbaric sessions early in the week followed by oxidative treatments later—to illustrate how aggressive yet supportive care can be coordinated. Ultimately, the discussion presents a decision‑making matrix that balances SOC success probabilities, side‑effect burdens, patient immune status, and time constraints to craft individualized, synergistic treatment plans.
Chapters
There are some standard of care oncology treatments that have over 90%, nearing 100% success rates. And so if I had a cancer that had that sort of success rate with a standard treatment, I would do the standard treatment and I would do everything I know of in, in our world to support it and support me and heal from it. Yeah, I think that's a really wonderful direction to go because honestly, after doing this as long as I have, and now with really working with a lot of other clinicians and what they're doing with people who have cancer, what I've seen for a long time and kind of what I had a feeling of, but has been more evidence when we were collecting data and doing trials, things like that, is the direction I think that the integrative oncology world is in and is moving more into is Therapeutic synergy, and so you know back if you go back 25 or more years ago when there really weren't very many people doing any integrative type oncology, there were some but not very many. There were a few things you know that we all did. We did the best we could to help people with side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, help them recover from surgery. Many people were doing like. me, high-dose vitamin C and other IV therapies. And then there were a lot of other, you know, botanical medicine, et cetera. And I think that, you know, if, if we go back to 25+ years ago, our thought was if we just could find that one thing, you know, that would push cancer into a corner, uh, or that one thing that would maybe minimize the cancer activity and maximize the immune system activity of the patient. We might have sort of a universal treatment, and while there are certain treatments that are very universal in in the nature of many people have benefits such as high dose vitamin C and other treatments. What we found over time and what we kind of crystallized when we were doing that trial with cancer patients in a very integrative fashion was there's not a clear cause and effect between this therapy is always good for this type of cancer, and I always had this feeling. Because that was what we saw clinically. But a single therapy has to work within the patient. And one of the things I'll tell patients is, for the most part, when we do integrative therapies with you, it's different from, say, chemotherapy, where chemotherapy, if I put it into 100 people, it's gonna have a kind of a predictable effect in the body because it's not working. Generally speaking, some of the new ones maybe yes, but the traditional chemotherapy doesn't work with your body or your immune system. It kills what it kills. It harms the Bad cells and the good cells the way we know. And so that's more of sort of a universal type treatment. If I give you a natural immunotherapy or an oxidative therapy or an antioxidative therapy, it completely depends on what your body's immune system is doing and what its status is. Do you have any immune system left, et cetera? So you could have 10 people with colon cancer and they may have 10 different reactions to the same sort of a treatment plan. So I think that what that led to then, if you, you know, we go back about 10 years, was a really sort of the, the, I guess the advancement of truly integrating therapies so that you get synergy. And what I see is the way we're going, and hopefully the direction we go in the future, is the more synergy we can bring to the patient and the more we have a respect for meeting them where their body is, with meeting them where their immune system is, et cetera, then we can layer the synergy of the treatments in, in a very holistic manner. And I think what I see personally and what I see in speaking to other clinicians is that's where we get better and better responses with people with cancer. And so I really think that's the, you know, as a big picture, that's the direction that we've been going and that's getting even more, I think, a deeper understanding of that is synergy and synergistic therapies. Again, keeping their own patient's body and, you know, where it is in mind. Yeah, I think, I think that's really the core question. And, you know, it really gets back to more of the art of practicing medicine in, in regard to being able to assess each individual patient and say, well, we have, you know, we have this patient here who's had very few other therapies. Their immune system is very robust. Everything's going well. their vitality is very well, well, they probably have a number of things that they are going to respond to that are going to be, you know, very, very well received by the body. Now, you might still have to go through a few iterations of treatment plans and things, but generally speaking, that person with a stronger vitality and less damaged immune system is going to do better with more things. If, on the other hand, the patient's had, say, surgery, and maybe some local radiation therapy and then some chemotherapy. Their immune system is a totally different immune system than the other patient I described, and they may actually need more treatment on the front end to bring their immune system back into actually working and into play so that then these other therapies can work. So a lot of it is, like I say, that art of medical assessment and It can go back to, you know, you mentioned, say, for, for example, repurposed drugs. They can be kind of good across the board for many people because of the way that they work, but they still are going to, uh, go further or, you know, less far based on what kind of— because they're mostly manipulating the person's immune system. If my immune system can't operate or has, you know, been beat up real bad, uh, by the disease or by the therapies, um, Immune-focused therapies, which most integrative therapies are, are going to have a harder time kind of reaching in and doing anything. Um, and although I would say this is not a big— at least not what I've heard anyway in the more standard world of oncology— there are people who have published, very well-respected people in the standard oncology world, in regard to immunotherapies and saying, you know, we've kind of been doing immunotherapies backwards with our cancer patients in saying, well, this is a 3rd or 4th or 5th line treatment, so we're going to do The immune-damaging therapies like chemo and radiation first, and they will come with these conclusions saying, you know, if we're going to give a therapy that works with the immune system, maybe we should give it before we ruin the immune system. They've actually published this and, you know, said this to their colleagues. So, I think in our case, it's kind of that same calculus is we've all seen this where we get somebody maybe whose body is a little less touched by the system and they You know, we, for example, have a lot of examples of more elderly patients where the oncologists say we're not going to give you any therapy because it's you're you're too old for it and it would hurt you. They have sort of a blank, you know, slate with the immune system, and a lot of our therapies work faster in those folks. You get somebody who's had surgery, radiation, chemo, or some combination of those, and we may have to work for a month just to get them sort of repaired and you know back online before we can start doing all this. So I really think a lot of it is about finding out what the patient's been through, assessing their immune function and their vitality to the degree that you can, and then sometimes almost rehabilitating them before you put them into, you know, more of the advanced therapies that we're going to talk about. But I really think that's the clinical— like, that's the crux of the clinical decision-making that is very much more of the medical art really than science, although it's involved with both, uh, is, is that sort of discernment with the patient. And, and, you know, there are times where you have maybe a very rapidly progressing cancer, um, one of the ones that's poorly survivable, such as a high-stage, high-grade pancreatic cancer or something, where you, you kind of have to meet with the patient and say, look, we, we have maybe one chance to intervene here. You've had a lot of treatment, uh, you've had chemo, your system's beat down, so we're gonna have to do a lot of things kind of at the same time. So in In a case like that, that's the other part of the calculation is how much time do I really have? How much, you know, runway or lead time do I have with this particular cancer? So, with the patient in mind, you always want to be considering, you know, kind of these two, you know, almost like the angel and the devil on the shoulders of we have to make you strong enough for the therapies, but on the other hand, we have to be aggressive enough to meet your disease where it is. So, In some of those cases, what I have found is, especially if the patient will engage in dietary changes that are maybe, you know, a little more aggressive than they were thinking of, whether it's getting them, you know, into a full ketogenic diet plan or something similar. And maybe what we would do would be alternate treatments. So they might come, you know, on Monday or Tuesday and get a very, you know, I would call it like a happy therapeutic combination. So, we do nutrients to help rebuild the body and hyperbaric oxygen and maybe some photodynamic therapy, and then they might come back on, you know, Thursday or Friday when they're, they're doing all the stuff at home, of course, diet and supplements, etc., and then on the end of the week we might do more of an oxidative type treatment because we got a little bit of a boost. So, it's not like you always have to wait, you know, 4, 6, 8 weeks for them to build up. Sometimes you can do a push-pull where the beginning of the week we strengthen you and then we do a really maybe more aggressive immune stimulating treatment. And then, you know, I always just tell patients, well, how we do that, how close together, how much we do of that, your body will tell us. Your body's the only thing that knows how this is going to be received. But even in very frail people, I've had them where maybe they had a, you know, Cancer, it's nothing slowing it down. You know, you don't have a whole lot of time. In that case, I'll usually do that where the same week we're building up and then also, you know, hitting the system pretty hard. In somebody with maybe a slower growing or more, you know, more factors to consider, like a lot of, you know, advanced prostate cancer where there's many other places you need to treat the patient, but they're probably You know, they're not in as dire straits as somebody with advanced pancreatic cancer. We might set something up where we're doing a lot of things to build them up and then treat the other areas, and then we work into the cancer therapy over time. So, so that's another factor. How much time do you think you have? Um, and all of it, I think, as long as the patient knows that all of it actually is going to be quite aggressive compared to not doing anything. So they're gonna really feel like they're getting a lot of things done. Anyway, yeah, I think that that's another, you know, piece hopefully early on in the communication with a patient. The way I try to break that down so that the patient gets the picture is there are some standard-of-care oncology treatments that have over 90%, nearing 100% success rates, and so if I had a cancer that had that sort of success rate with a standard treatment, I would do the standard treatment and I would do everything I know of in, in our world to support it and support me and heal from it because it's, it's never, uh, it's never only 2 choices. There's, um, you know, what you're doing and maybe with standard of care treatments, but then there's all the things you need to do to heal from those standard of care treatments and keep your things like cancer stem cells calm, et cetera, for survivability. So I, I will contrast that with patients. I'll say, so on one end you've got that where you've got a real high cure rate. That still means that what we do in the integrative world can make that even better and your body survive it better and heal better afterwards. On the other end of the spectrum, you have standard of care treatments where I've heard a lot of oncologists tell patients, look, if I had your cancer at this stage you have, I would not do the standard of care oncology treatment because it's got less than 5% chance of doing anything and it's got about 100% chance of side effects. Now, there's every shade of gray in between. But certainly, if you are on one or the other end of the spectrum, it's kind of easy to make the calculation of, gee, I got a 90+% chance here with standard of care, and then I can do integrative care, you know, to do better on the back end and heal up. Great. Over here, I've got less than 10% chance of a positive outcome, less than 5%, but I got a, you know, 90% chance of very bad side effects. That's maybe a pretty easy calculation to make on that side. It's when you get into the middle where these things can get a little bit muddy, and you really— and that's one of the problems is, you know, sometimes people will write a paper, you know, about the efficacy of chemotherapy, etc., and you really can't do that because the efficacy of chemotherapy is based on the tumor type and how advanced the tumor is, and to some degree other factors like gender and, you know, age and things like that. So, I think that's the first question that has to be answered. You certainly, you know, wouldn't want somebody with, say, you know, testicular cancer— close to 100% cure rate, and there's so many things we can do to get them through on the other side— you wouldn't want a person with that kind of a cure rate to not do that treatment because the cancer will progress. On the other hand, You know, advanced pancreatic cancer, usually your success rates are under 10%, usually under 5%, and 90% likelihood of side effects. That's a little easier calculation to make. Those are ones where I often hear the oncologists say, you know, if it was me, I wouldn't— I would not do the standard treatment because it's just too low yield. So, I really think that's another thing on the front end. You know, you've got this big piece of assessing where the vitality and the, you know, person is, but also you've got, what are my chances with standard treatments? Just because I do a standard treatment or I don't do it doesn't mean that there's not all these other things we can do to support that. Those discussions are easier if the person's already failed standard treatment, you know, we get a lot of those patients where, you know, they tried and the cancer is progressing anyway, so that's, you know, that's sort of a third category.
