In this presentation, Dr. Matt Kelly emphasizes a holistic, patient‑centered strategy for cancer prevention, treatment, recovery, and secondary prevention. He argues that the health of the body beyond the tumor—the “big circle”—determines how large the cancer target becomes. The talk outlines how standard therapies (radiation, chemotherapy) can shrink tumors short‑term but may promote cancer stem cell activation and later recurrences, making the tumor microenvironment (stroma) a critical battleground. To keep cancer stem cells and the stroma calm, Kelly proposes eight inter‑related health domains: (1) optimal hydration, (2) regular movement/exercise, (3) time‑restricted eating, (4) a low‑inflammatory/low‑insulin diet, (5) cellular and mitochondrial support, (6) balanced redox (oxidation‑reduction) status, (7) immune modulation through balanced signaling, and (8) patient empowerment. He stresses that the relevance and intensity of each domain shift across three phases—active therapy, recovery, and secondary prevention—requiring individualized assessment. The presentation references his co‑authored book Outside the Box Cancer Therapies (over 1,100 citations) to substantiate the integrative recommendations and highlights the importance of empowering patients, noting that empowered patients experience better outcomes and tolerate both conventional and natural therapies more effectively. The talk concludes with an invitation for questions.
Chapters
I'm actually more concerned about the part of you that doesn't have cancer than the part that does, and that might sound odd if you come in with cancer, we wanna focus on the cancer, and of course there's things we do for the cancer specifically, but really the rest of you, so the big circle is the rest of you that doesn't have cancer, the healthier we make that, the smaller the cancer target gets, and then this place in the middle, the stroma, Things that might be completely appropriate in primary prevention might not be appropriate when you're undergoing active therapy, or you just may not have time because the focus, the priorities change, and things you might do in active therapy might be very minimal compared to what you might do in recovery or in secondary prevention. So a lot of it is about timing and modulating that immune response. Now, I think that's a really important point. As a teaching tool, and it got named after me, I guess, because I was teaching it. But I would talk to students about these 8 areas and, you know, think of them— you know, this again is how much, uh, how much can we really mimic a human on a PowerPoint slide? But, uh, the sort of circle is us, right? And a lot of people, you know, we've looked at the background of that that doesn't have any labels on it is, is who we really are. You know, that's our Our core essence. But these areas inside can either be, you know, less of an issue or more of an issue. And what's interesting, because we're all individual, is the stress of cancer, the stress of treatment, the stress of just life. Some of these a bigger deal for one person and other ones a bigger deal for another person. So each of us has to be individually assessed as we go through. And remember that the big goal is always we want to heal things so that we have as balance in the body and we're a smaller target for future cancer, persistent cancer, et cetera. And I think this is the biggest thing to think of on the other side. So it's pretty obvious to think, well, I want to have therapy during, you know, my cancer journey so I feel well, so I recover from whatever treatments I had, so my cancer's minimized. Those are good, good things, targets. But the other side of what those things are doing, especially if we look at all these areas and do them correctly, is really a deeper target, and that again is this idea of the cancer stem cells. Now, it was mentioned Dr. Stengler and I wrote a book. I think it came out in 2017, somewhere around there. And right before publication, I was finishing writing one of the, you know, where does cancer come from, why does it persist chapters. And one of the things I kept seeing in kind of modern research, although we used to Think about it a long time ago, but the last 10-15 years of research, especially the last 5 to 10, is this idea that cancer stem cells are a big deal. But also, and this is something that you don't see publicized a lot, and you'll understand why in just a moment, it's very clear in the in the tumor biology research that what we do to slow down or kill daughter cell tumors in standard oncology, especially radiation and chemotherapy, have a short-term game. Gain of minimizing the cancer and killing it, but are associated now with longer-term recurrences of cancer. Can be the same cancer, can be totally different cancer. This is a very unfortunate truth, and so all of these papers— papers literally that were published, you know, one week before my writing deadline and everything, and continue to be published— they all kind of tell the same story, that yes, we get the benefit of radiation or chemo, etc., can be counterbalanced by later on a higher incidence of recurrence of same cancer or appearance of a new cancer. And they all kind of end saying, well, you know, this is not what patients need to hear. It's the truth, but it's not what they need to hear. And then most of the papers end with, well, what we can hope for is more targeted therapies that'll stop this process. And that would be wonderful if a targeted therapy existed that would do that. The problem is that the reason that the cancer stem cells are sort of emboldened by the standard cancer therapies is very complicated. The tumor biology of cancer stem cell recurrence and everything, it's thicker every day that we learn about it. But if you take a step back from it and think of that, and that's sort of a, you know, that's kind of a negative thought to have that the very thing that might've got you over your initial cancer bout might set you up for trouble later. It's a multifactorial problem. Cancer stem cells either being quiet or active, Later on. And because humans are very multifactorial, generally speaking, there's not going to be one drug that's going to go in and just shut that off like there's a key. But what can help it, and what can help this very big picture of dysfunction, is to work on all these underlying areas of health, all those 8 areas we just looked at and everything related to them. And that is the big reason why recovering from active therapy, treatment, appropriate treatment during active therapy, and then secondary prevention Prevention treatment is so important. It's because we want this process that we know that happens, and it happens without standard therapies, but it happens sometimes a little more aggressively with standard therapies. We want that process to be managed as well as it can by as healthy of a body. If we don't get the body healthy, it can't do that job. So you can kind of take a look here. And so cancer stem cells. And tumor microenvironment. If we had 5 days, we could really get into the depths of how those 2 interact. But the bottom line is, the healthier the organism is, and the more modulated, the more balanced the organism is. And again, so it's not about being, you know, upregulated or downregulated all the time. It's really about like a sine wave. It's about balance. The more balanced we are as a human, the less these 2 really care about getting active. Okay. Again, and this is basically a quote summarizing all of that data, but I've really told you that story. So everything that can help you get better, help you heal up, help you modulate better, also leads to a calm stem cell and microenvironment. This is another one of those attempts on PowerPoint to illustrate a human. So it's the best, best I could do anyway. The other thing to keep in mind is, is that Every human develops cancer cells every day, so really all cancer patients. We have an immune system in people who don't develop cancers that keeps that away. What I would always tell patients is that I'm actually more concerned about the part of you that doesn't have cancer than the part that does, and that might sound odd if you come in with cancer. We want to focus on the cancer, and of course there's things we do for the cancer specifically, But really the rest of you, so the big circle is the rest of you that doesn't have cancer. The healthier we make that, the smaller the cancer target gets. And then this place in the middle, the stroma tumor microenvironment, that's the battleground where if the big part of you that doesn't have cancer is winning in the health balance business, the stroma keeps calm and the tumor has a hard time Recruiting more of you over to the, to the bad side. If you are very unhealthy, the stroma gets set up in a direction where the tumor can then start to recruit normal cells and do other things that you really don't want. So supporters of calm, quiet cancer stem cells. So we, we really never get rid of them that we know about, but I know many people who have had durable remissions for Decades and decades, 30, 40 years, et cetera. So you can see this happen. And these are things that your grandmother might've told you were good for you. So hydration is actually new research out saying what we've said for a long time, which is both cancer therapies, but also cancer tumor biology is the immune responses improve the more hydrated you are. And I only laugh because it's just so obvious, but we had to do research to prove that. Mm-hmm. Moving your body for a billion reasons, maybe not a billion, but it keeps your lymph moving. It cycles blood through your spleen and your liver. It does all these good things for you. But also the more your body moves, and even if you're bedbound, the more you can get your muscles to do a little bit. Muscles actually send signals out that are immune modulating. They actually help with repair of core functional things. So moving your muscles is, you know, about so many things, but now we know through some modern research that moving your muscles also sends actual signals to the rest of the body to heal, to have less inflammation, etc. Time-restricted eating, very long discussion, but it's a big deal now, and that's as little as 12 or 13 hours. So basically stop after dinner, just drink a lot of water, you're sleeping for a big part of that, hopefully. And then, you know, your breakfast is a little bit later. Low inflammatory diet, which really equals a low insulin stimulating diet. So insulin we think of as a glucose receptor molecule, which it is, but insulin also has other purposes in the body and they're all very pro-inflammatory. So the less— we need just enough insulin to help us with our glucose and the rest of it is Running around, you know, inflaming us, so we can eat in ways to chill that up. Cell support, especially rebuilding our membranes, helping the mitochondria, etc. And then redox, endogenous redox is basically the balance of oxidation reduction. So again, we need oxidation. We think it's bad, but we need it, or we'd never have an immune response. We just want it balanced by reduction. And this is something I'm often teaching doctors because they get. focused on big shiny antioxidant things, which are very good and fun and important, but our body runs on a very simple water-to-fat-soluble triplet, which has vitamin C and glutathione in the water-soluble areas, and then vitamin E family, which are the tocopherols and tocotrienols are related, and they take care of your fat-soluble places like your cell membranes and all of that. So if these are working, and obviously we don't make We can't make vitamin C as humans, so we have to get it in our diet or whatever way else we get it. Glutathione we can make, we just need to have enough of the substrate aminos to make it. And then vitamin E, of course, we'd get from food and maybe supplements. Well, these together, if these are working, then when we need to oxidize, we can, and then we go back down and we reduce, and we— it's always a cycle. If these run low, which often happens, cancer therapies, et cetera, and just Chronic illness, we have a hard time modulating, getting back to that balance that we really would like to live in. So these are just conclusion things, and I think we'll just transition into looking, because I've really said all this a whole bunch, but lots and lots of ways to deal with this. But like I said in the beginning, as opposed to looking at hard and fast, you know, so if I'm in phase 2 and I just got diagnosed, I'm getting treatment, There could be literally 200, 300, 400, 500 options based on who you are as a person, what kind of cancer, how bad it is, what they're going to do with you or not do with you for treatment. In recovery, there's sometimes less options, but again, it depends how healthy or sick are you from the cancer or the treatment. And then, in secondary prevention, those big 8 areas are the focus. So, I really tried to go from the top down because your story is going It's gonna be very individual. And again, this reminder of the 8 areas. So 2 of the books, that's the Outside the Box Cancer Therapies, Dr. Tengler and I wrote. This is literally about the therapeutic interventions from the natural integrative world. And we, because the first thing that people usually hear at the oncologist is, well, there's no research about that. So we researched it and referenced it like a textbook. So this has just about 1,100 references in it. The publisher didn't know that was coming. That caused a little bit of a stir, but this way people know that, you know, these things are not just things that someone cooked up somewhere. And then kind of the counterpoint, I wrote this book because I realized in Outside the Box we talked about the mind-body connection, but really the impact that cancer has on you and your loved ones just as a diagnosis and an event is so hard on the part we need to keep operating, which is our mind and our body connection. And, uh, the bottom line is, how do you get to be an empowered patient with a horrible diagnosis? Because usually a horrible diagnosis makes you very unempowered, at least for a while. So this is really agnostic of how one treats their cancer and more about what do I do with this, or what do I do with this as I'm caring for someone or loving somebody with cancer. So So that we can become as empowered because empowered patients live longer, drugs work better on them, natural treatments work better on them, you know, everything's better when you're empowered. So that's kind of where this came from. Well, thank you very much, and we probably have some questions.
