In this YouTube monologue, Dr. A—a veteran integrative and naturopathic oncology practitioner—provides a concise overview of several supportive therapies commonly used alongside conventional cancer treatments. He frames the discussion as a response to frequent patient questions, emphasizing the goal of keeping the body as healthy as possible, whether during active treatment, remission, or stable disease. The video covers (1) intravenous vitamin C (both high‑dose for potential anti‑cancer effects and low‑dose for quality‑of‑life improvement), explaining why IV delivery bypasses oral absorption limits; (2) a selection of botanical medicines—milk thistle (liver support and chemosensitization), Boswellia (anti‑inflammatory and CNS cancer immunomodulation), curcumin (high‑dose immunomodulatory effects and tumor microenvironment calming); (3) medicinal mushroom extracts (turkey tail, maitake, shiitake, white button) highlighted for their immunomodulatory rather than purely immune‑stimulating properties; (4) the importance of proper hydration in influencing tumor microenvironment and overall cellular health; (5) broader lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise (referenced but not detailed); and (6) the use of repurposed/off‑label drugs aimed at enhancing immune function and creating a less favorable environment for cancer cells. Dr. A also mentions his continuing education (CE) webinars and resources for practitioners. The tone is conversational yet instructional, with an overall supportive and cautiously optimistic stance toward integrating these modalities into cancer care.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to the YouTube channel. I've been teaching and researching in the integrative and naturopathic community for 30+ years at this point, been practicing a long time seeing patients. And I use this channel to answer questions that I get because one concentration area in my practice is the world of integrative oncology. I get lots of questions about what we do and why we do it and all of that business. So rather than go into the big picture of integrative and naturopathic oncology and what that is, I wanted to break down a few things around supportive therapies that we get lots of questions about and just take a brief time to kind of give the big picture of each one. So these are some cancer support treatments, cancer support areas that we do with people who are dealing with cancer anywhere along their journey to help support their system to be as healthy as possible, help to be synergistic with other therapies they're doing, possibly help them to recover from other therapies they're doing. And then a big area that we work with is people who are in remission or in stable disease who just want to keep things going that way, stay as healthy as possible. So these are just some common areas that we involve with our integrative oncology treatment. These are not everything. There could be a list of, you know, 1,000 things. I'm just going to pick some of the top ones, describe them a little bit, and try and answer a couple of questions I got. So the first one, and these aren't in any particular order, but the first one comes up commonly in discussions because this is something I was involved in some research, human research with, and I've been doing it with patients for a long time, and that is intravenous vitamin C therapy. Now, normally we think of intravenous vitamin C therapy as high-dose intravenous vitamin C, which is certainly very common in cancer care. There's also lower-dose intravenous vitamin C that is done for quality of life measures and other things in cancer care. So overall though, intravenous vitamin C is given as a way to increase the amount of vitamin C in the blood, in your plasma, and so that can be delivered Delivered to cells, and it does a number of things biologically when it does that. The intravenous part is done so that you're bypassing the oral route, because at a certain point, if you take enough vitamin C by mouth, you reach what's called bowel tolerance, and you'll get diarrhea, and your body won't absorb any more of it. Putting it in an IV goes around that circuit. What are things intravenous vitamin C might help with? Well, there's research showing that your quality of life improves even in advanced cancer with various doses of intravenous vitamin C. There's research that's both older and newer that shows that there is synergy with other cancer treatments and intravenous vitamin C. There are definitely benefits to quality of life throughout cancer care, and there's a number of other things, but intravenous vitamin C is certainly one of the things we use. Quick plug here, if you're a healthcare practitioner working with patients with these issues, I have a CE website and I do webinars on this topic and others. So we're going to put a link in the description below to the CE website link and the Then there are supportive botanical medicines, herbal medicines from the plant world, and there could be literally hundreds of these that I list. I'm just going to talk about some of the common ones. One is milk thistle, and a lot of people think of milk thistle being used for liver support, which certainly it is, but also milk thistle is in some cases a chemotherapy chemosensitizer. It can be useful in protecting your liver during other types of treatments, and it has other Benefits that really are not often talked about, like immunomodulation. The more you immunomodulate, the more helpful it is during the cancer process. Another herb botanical medicine is Boswellia. Boswellia is commonly thought of not in the outside of cancer realm as maybe an anti-inflammatory, or you take it for pain or something. Certainly works that way. But we use Boswellia a lot in cancers, especially of the central nervous system, for its immunomodulatory effects and other effects. One probably everyone's heard of. Is curcumin, turmeric. Curcumin comes from turmeric and curcumin is used a lot. We've done research with extremely high dose curcumin and moderate doses of curcumin. Curcumin's another sort of big high-level immunomodulatory botanical. It can help with some side effects of cancer treatment. It can help with calming down the tumor microenvironment, which is very important, and a number of other things. And then the other category of botanical or plant medicines are the mushroom category. So this could be large number of different mushrooms that are used for immunologic reasons. Generally speaking, although a lot of people think of mushrooms as an immune stimulant because we use them for infections and stuff like that, really mushroom— mushrooms and mushroom extracts are more used as immunomodulators. And so these might be things such as the turkey tail type mushrooms. It literally looks like a turkey tail. See, it's stuck on logs and stuff. Turkey tail is used, got research in cancer. Things like maitake mushroom, shiitake mushroom, even the infamous white button mushroom. People think, oh, they don't have that much effect. There's actually decent immunology research on white button mushrooms, which you can certainly get in your diet like the other ones. There's also extracts that'd be given, et cetera. That's just some of the botanicals. Again, there's hundreds of those. Another one from a big picture point of view, we talk a lot about diet in cancer. We have lots of content on that and things like exercise and movement, but also hydration. We talk about diet and lifestyle. Hydration actually has made its way into tumor biology research. And what they find is, is that the tumor microenvironment And the removal of junk around tumors and in your normal cells, which the less junk, the healthier the cell, is promoted by having proper cellular hydration. So hydration is something that we think of, oh yeah, hydration. But actually one of the things we see with our advanced cancer patients is very hard to stay hydrated because of the treatments and the underlying health and everything. But it's also just generally with people who don't have cancer, a lot of people are chronically dehydrated. So hydration actually helps on a number of levels. And then something we'll have other content on, but something we do in integrative cancer support are repurposed drugs using off-label drugs to try and help the body's immune system, help the cellular milieu to oppose cancer. So one of the concepts with integrative cancer care is trying to make you a small target for cancer. Even if cancer's already around, we want to keep that cancer as slow-growing, marginalized, in remission, whatever we're doing with it as possible. Well, in the world of immunomodulation, like all of those botanicals I just mentioned, they're repurposed. Drugs that are used in cancer, that can be very helpful as a synergy along with that. All right, we could talk for hours and hours about cancer care, cancer support, etc. But I just thought I'd go through some common cancer supports, why we might use them, and things that you may see that might be related to those when you're looking up other cancer therapies. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thanks for listening to the channel. Like, share, subscribe. We really appreciate all you guys listening. I'll be back on the next video.
