Rethinking Breast Cancer – The Holistic Truth Doctors Don’t Tell You with Dr. Jen Simmons

So this week's episode is incredibly near and dear to my heart because most all of us know someone or personally, our lives have been touched by breast cancer. And I am so excited to announce Dr. Jen Simmons, who is a pioneering force in the world of breast cancer care. She was once a world renowned breast cancer surgeon, and she ended up transforming her practice after her own journey as a patient, becoming an integrative oncologist with a mission to revolutionize breast cancer diagnosis, screening, and treatment. Let's dig in.

I am so excited to have this conversation. I've been excited for it for months. You have an incredibly powerful message that I am delighted and honored to share with my people. Before we kind of dig in to the heavier content, the bulk of what we're going to talk about today, I would love to hear your story about your shift from, like, conventional breast surgery to a more functional medicine approach in this realm.

Yeah, it was a big leap. Let me just start with that. And one that, incidentally, was not welcomed by my family. Like, my husband and I went head to head on this one. And my best friend, I mean, this was it. That was by far. And I've done a lot of hard things. That was the hardest thing I ever did because I had everyone around me who I know and love and respect and rely on, on say that I couldn't do it. So let me just take you back long, long ago, because I didn't get into the breast cancer space by accident. It wasn't like something that I just chose later on in my career. It was absolutely, positively what I was put on this earth for. I don't remember a time in my life where I didn't know about breast cancer. It was part of the tapestry of my family. Like, I come from a very big family, and every woman in my family gets breast cancer with the exception of my mother, who got colon cancer. So growing up, I had a first cousin. I'm much older than you are, so this story is not going to resonate so much with you. But I had a first cousin who was a singer songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. She was brilliant, beautiful, larger than life, the queen of Motown sound in Philadelphia. She wrote all the music for the Spinners and the stylistics. She wrote 54 hits in all. And her most famous song, I know, right? Like, jaw dropping. Like, my cousin was literally a rock star. Some people, like, figuratively use that term. Oh, you're a rock star. Such a rock star. This one's a rock star. She was literally a rock star. So her most famous song that she ever wrote was the Greatest Love of All. And she wrote that song in 1977 as the title track to the movie the Greatest, starring Muhammad Ali. But it really didn't receive its acclaim till March of 1986, when Whitney Houston would record that song and release it to the world. And at that time, there was nary a person alive who didn't know that song. And the legacy of that song lasted decades until today, really. But my cousin Linda would never know that because she died of metastatic breast cancer one month after Whitney released that song. I was 16 years old and my hero died. And her life, and ultimately her death, gave birth to my life's purpose. Because I never wanted another woman, another family, another community to have to suffer the way that mine suffered. And so I did the only thing I knew how to do. I became a doctor, the first doctor in my family. I became a surgeon. I became the first fellowship trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia. I became the first oncoplastic surgeon in Pennsylvania. And I did that really well and for a really long time. And I did it long enough for my aunt to be diagnosed and long enough for my mother to be diagnosed. And with all the writing on the walls, I'm about 15 years into my career and arguably at the top of my career, and I'm running the cancer program for my hospital, I'm running the breast surgery program. And I'm a wife and a mother and an author and an athlete, a philanthropist. And I have like all of these balls in the air thinking that I'm an expert juggler and invincible until the day when, like, everything comes crashing down and I go from being one of the most high functioning people you've ever met to I can't walk across the room because I don't have the breath in my body. And I go through this three day, really intensive workup and at the end of those three days find myself sitting in the office of my friend and colleague and physician. And he tells me that I need surgery and chemo and radiation and I'm going to be on lifelong medication. And believe me, I appreciate the irony. And despite the fact that these are things that I said all day, every day, without hesitation or reservation, I can assure you when those words are coming at you, they have different meaning.

And.

I can still be transported right back to that place, I bet, right back to that time and space. And I'll tell you that even though I knew what he was saying to me was standard of care, even though I knew that these Were things that I said to women all day, every day. The only thing that I could hear in that time and space. And you can call it God, you can call it universe, you can call it whatever you want to call it. I couldn't quiet this voice in my head that said, there's something more. Go find it. Now, I was a completely conventionally trained surgeon running a completely conventional cancer program, right? Like I'm running an NIH accredited cancer program. I did not know of anything else. Anything else didn't exist to me. So this voice that I was hearing, this message that was downloading to me, it made no sense. But I went on that journey because for the first time, I was asking the questions why? And the answer that. That I was getting, which is the same answer that I was giving everyone. It's just something that happens. It's bad luck. Right? That was suddenly, absolutely, positively unacceptable. And I was not having surgery and having radiation and having chemotherapy without knowing why this happened. And so I refused treatment and went on this journey. And my doctor told me the same thing that I had told thousands of women before. What will happen if I don't treat. And he told. He said, jen, you're gonna die. But I couldn't quiet this voice. There's something more. Go find it. So God is good. And in very short order, I find myself in a lecture hall listening to a bunch of speakers. And this tall, lanky guy walks on stage, big toothy grin, introduces himself as a functional medicine physician. Now, I am still my snooty booty self. I am still not a believer. I'm not a convert because I don't even know what to convert to yet. Right? Right. And all I can think about is, I'm a doctor for 20 years. There's no such thing as a functional medicine physician. What is this quack talking about? Right. Right. And then I remember that I'm sick, and I'm there for a reason. So I check my ego at the door, and I tune in, and thank God I did. Because over the next two hours, I would learn more than I learned in my lifetime thus far.

Wow.

Because not only would I learn how I was going to heal myself, not only would I learn what my future held and what my real true purpose was, but I figured out exactly why I got sick. I got sick so that I could be in that room at that time, listening to this man talk. Because the quack, as it turns out, is Dr. Mark Hyman.

I was wondering. Yeah, I love it.

And what I learned was that we're completely focused on the wrong thing. And especially in the world of cancer, all our focus is on the tumor. But the tumor is not the problem. The tumor is the symptom of the problem. And unless we're asking why, why is it there? What do we have that we don't need? What do we need that we don't have? What led us to here? What is causing our imbalance? What is leading to this chronic inflammation? Unless we're asking those questions and answering them, we're not helping anyone. And I certainly wasn't helping anyone by cutting out their tumor and sending them to the medical oncologist and the radiation oncologist. Like, no one ever got healthier with a surgery and burning and drugging. No one ever. And so I get really excited about things. I'm an early adopter and I'm a quick start. So I immediately enroll in the Institute for Functional Medicine and I spend the next three years just really submerged, immersed in the study of functional medicine. And I come out on the other side. Thankfully, I was able to heal. I got a lot sicker before I got better. I didn't ask for help and should have. But in any event, I got to the place where I needed to get to. And I also got to the place where you can't unring that bell and once you can unsee it. And I couldn't continue to be part of a system that is so very broken that the only thing that is rewarded in our system currently is failure. Right. Your patient has to fail before you get paid.

Right.

And the only thing that is rewarded in our system now is sickness.

Right.

That's it. Our doctors are not taught how to heal. They are not taught how to restore health. They are not taught how to reverse disease. They are not taught how to create health or not. It's not any part of the algorithm. And I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to be unhealthy and I didn't want to keep people unhealthy. And that's what our whole system is designed to do, unfortunately, and I want to be very clear, doctors are very good, well intentioned people doing very well intentioned things that are not good.

Right. It's the system that's failing.

Both. It's the system that's failing and the doctors are unknowing pawns of that system.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I left and I put my shingle out and I created Real Health md, which is a functional medicine oasis for women with a breast cancer diagnosis to Help them to restore their health and capture the health that they probably have never had before in their life.

Yeah.

And it was quite revolutionary when I did it. And it was not met with great reception from my family. It was a lot, because I wasn't the sole breadwinner, but I was a breadwinner. And it was going to mean a lot of sacrifice and a lot of change. And there was a lot of fear around it. Not my fear, because I was filled with certainty that I was doing the right thing. I was filled with certainty that God put me on this earth for something so much bigger than that one on one operating space. And I just knew that this was what I was supposed to do. But I can understand how my family and friends weren't filled with that same confidence. First of all, none of them had ever heard of functional medicine. It's not big in Philadelphia.

Yeah.

And so it just felt like the same thing that I felt when I first met Dr. Hyman.

Right.

It felt like quackery to them. Right. And like, how is one of the world's top surgeons suddenly leaving and practicing quackery? They didn't get it.

I fully expected for you to say, look, my colleagues, other people in the medical sphere, in my circles, I totally hadn't thought about the family friends dynamic. And that is heavy, heavy to carry and make that decision.

But think about even now, like, because it's so many years later now, it's almost 10 years. Think about even now when people get a cancer diagnosis and they want to go see someone integrative. Think about how their family comes down on them for not using the conventional medical system. So imagine that 10 years ago.

Right?

Yeah, that's right.

Because now integrative medicine is so out there now. People know about it, people know it exists, people are choosing it. But then, Right. It was for sure quackery. And they couldn't understand how someone who was held in the highest regard would leave that position. For quackery. Yeah. For what they perceived to be as quackery. Now we all know, right? Like, now the blinders are off. And even my colleagues, I went from being the smartest person in the room to suddenly I was, I don't know, lost. I lost my skills, I lost my mind. Now they're coming around to me. I have a great story of a woman who went to Penn to be treated for her breast cancer. The medical oncologist who she was seeing, she said to her medical oncologist, is there anything else I could be or should be doing? And she's like, kind of like on the sly, on the down low, said, well, if it were me, I would just make sure that I was seeing Jen Simmons.

I love that.

And it's like, she's obviously not going to advertise that. But if it were me, which is so important.

Is so important, and that's even important to have a provider that looks at you through that lens, because that means they're actually connecting to you as another human being, you know, which is.

Yeah. Sacred. And I want to say that I'm not throwing a baby out with a bath water. And there's a time and a place for conventional medicine, for sure, and certainly for acute care medicine, you know, like if you fall and break your leg or have a ruptured appendix or something along those lines, our system works great. We're great at that. But when you have cancer, when you have diabetes, when you have heart disease, when you have dementia, when you have high blood pressure, when you have any of those things, our system is very broken. It does not do well in the area of chronic disease, because it doesn't understand chronic disease.

Right. I mean, ultimately, it's. It's the. What you touched on initially, it's. There's a acute difference between solving a problem or a sickness and making people healthy. And so far, we are in the business of solving problems and illness, not creating health or longevity for people, but.

Exactly.

That's why people like us exist, to shift that or at least adjunctively offer help to. To make people healthier.

Yes, but we're also, unfortunately, I mean, not you and I, but the system collectively is about creating disease and looking for disease that isn't really there and making it worse. So, like, did you read over Diagnosed by Gilbert Welt?

No. I will, though.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not a new book. I think he wrote that in, like, 2014. It talks about all of the kind of opportunistic places in our medical system that they're really taking advantage of people because we keep lowering the criteria for diagnoses and then giving an intervention which only creates another disease state. So, like you think about, they kept lowering the threshold for PSA, and then they used to do, like, six samples, and then they did eight samples, and then they did 12 samples, and then they did 16 samples. The harder you look, the more disease you're going to find.

You know, what's so fascinating about that is in the world of thyroid, the opposite is happening. Like, they are creating a lot of leeway before diagnosing, which is making people sick. Like they're trying to push now boundaries of TSH for treatment to 20. A few years ago it was pushed to 10. So don't treat anyone unless their TSH is above 10. Don't treat anyone unless their TSH Is above 20. Well, by the time it's 20, they have diabetes, they have heart disease, they're basically on disability.

Okay, so you just answered your own question.

Right?

Right.

It's about creating more disease.

Right. Isn't that crazy?

Because you get a lot more disease that way.

Absolutely.

And multiple systems fail, as you very well know. So that's what that's about. Isn't that nice? It is. But think about like the cholesterol story and lowering that threshold to 200 so that you treat more people with statin so that you get more diabetes. Right. Because lest anyone think otherwise, the cholesterol story is that we're just creating drug users. When you put someone on a statin, you're not decreasing the, the cardiovascular event rate, the cardiac event rate. So you're not saving people from heart attacks. By doing that, you are lowering a laboratory value.

Right.

But also increasing the risk of diabetes by 63%.

Right.

Or it might be 68%. I always get that confused in any. It's not good. Right. And we can say that about a number of disease states. Specifically in the world of breast cancer, the more stuff you investigate that you find on mammogram, the more diagnoses that you're going to make. And we have that borne out in the literature time and time and time again. And it also creates a lot of business for the system. So to start, 80% of the breast biopsies that we do are non cancerous. So that means that 80% of the time when we're biopsying someone, we're doing it unnecessarily.

Wow.

Yeah. Right? 80%. That's despicable. Okay. And then the rest of the time, when you look at using mammogram as a criteria for breast cancer screening. Right. So first of all, it violates screening principles. Principles to start. Because you should never be using a test that causes cancer to screen for cancer.

Right.

The other thing is that if you are screening, truly screening, you are talking about the healthy population who you have no reason to believe has the disease. Because if you have a reason to believe they have the disease, they have a breast lump or they have a symptom or something like that, that's a diagnostic test that's no longer screening. So when we're talking about the screening population we are talking about women who are truly healthy. How can with integrity expose a woman who is allegedly healthy to radiation for the purposes of screening? How can we ethically do that? We shouldn't be doing it.

Right.

So we were doing it under the guise that mammograms save lives. Right. I'm sure you've heard this. Mammograms save lives. And it's been said so many times that people just assume it's true. And no one's asking for the data. But the data, the data has been there for decades and here it is. When you look at population studies, mammograms do not save lives. The Swedish trials, 600,000 women. So we're not talking about small numbers. And because they have universal health care, everyone has the same access to care, everyone has the same level of care, right? So level playing field. 300,000 screen with mammogram. 300,000 just have physical examination. The same number of women die of breast cancer in both groups. No difference in mortality from breast cancer. Here's the only difference. If you screen with mammogram, you are 20 to 30% more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. There's an increase in breast cancer diagnosis in the group that screens by 20.

Even compared to people who are screened in other ways. Right. Physical exam or ultrasound, etc, they're still.

Being screened 20 to 30% more.

Now.

Some of them develop breast cancer because of this screening, because it's radiation. And some of them are just getting diagnosed with subclinical disease, disease that would have never presented, because if it would have presented, it would have presented in the non mammogram screening group. Right? So this is disease that would have never become clinically relevant, never would have affected that woman's lifespan. And yet once you get a diagnosis of breast cancer and get treated for breast cancer, those treatments do affect your lifespan. Because if you're treated for breast cancer, you have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease two to three times. You have an increased risk of osteoporosis, of bone loss, and lest we forget, the same exact number of women who die of breast cancer every year die of a complication of a fracture. So osteoporosis is, is something to worry about, Right? This is a real issue. And you have an increased risk of neurodegenerative disease. So if we are creating this disease for people and then increasing their risk of the other chronic diseases, and cardiovascular disease is by far and away exponentially the threat to a woman's life, well beyond breast cancer, in Every decade of her life past 30, and we're increasing her risk of that disease by two to three times. What are we doing? What are we doing now? If you want to call that study a one off, okay, then let's look at the Canadian breast cancer screening trial. So same thing. They have universal health care there. So everyone has the same access to care, and everyone has the same kind of care. 90,000 women, 45,000 screen with mammogram, 45,000 self examination, and they're seeing their doctor for a professional breast examination. Same exact number of women die of breast cancer in each group. The group that screens with mammogram has a 23% increase in breast cancer diagnoses. Same exact data in this group. Now, the difference in this group is this group is young women. Because we have this theory that, okay, maybe mammogram doesn't save lives for everyone, but it's important for young women. Right. There's a whole push to screen young women now. Well, those women were 40 to 59 years old. To me, that's young.

Absolutely, it's young.

So we know that it also doesn't save lives in young women. So mammograms do not save lives. They don't save lives, and in fact, they end up costing lives. Because if you factor in that, we're over diagnosing about 25%, let's call it. We're over diagnosing, and these women are going to have accelerated heart disease, accelerated bone disease, and accelerated brain disease. We're hurting these women by screening with mammogram now.

Yeah. You know what I find fascinating is so I've gone for a mammogram after finding something on self breast examination. It is so fascinating to me that we start with a mammogram invasive in terms of radiation, et cetera. They find something, and then you know what they do? They send you for ultrasound to get clarity where there's no radiation. I'm just like, this makes no sense.

Well, it might not make sense, but it makes a lot of dollars.

It sure does.

Yeah.

And that leads me to the next thing. And the reason why they're doing mammogram, even though they present it differently, but the whole mammographic screening program was built on this promise that mammograms would save lives and save breasts. Right. And people really, really, really bought into that. Yeah. That mammograms would be responsible for early detection and people would have less treatment as a result because they would find cancers earlier and people would need less treatment. And so let's look at the data. Has screening with mammogram translated into less mastectomies? Because that's the less treatment, right? Yeah. And in fact, screening with mammogram has increased, not decreased, the mastectomy rate by 20%. So we're not saving lives, we're not saving breasts. What are we doing using this archaic tool? Right. And I say this all the time. And they keep putting lipstick on that pig. They're saying like, oh, it's less radiation. Oh, it's less compression. Oh, it's less, it's less. People don't want less radiation. They want no radiation. People want less compression. They want no compression. We should not have to suffer. For the purposes of screening for breast cancer. It shouldn't have to hurt. It shouldn't have to hurt physically, and it shouldn't have to hurt our health screen for breast cancer. And that's really why I'm on my mission to open up perfection imagings all over the country so that people have an option. I want every single woman who wants to screen without pain, without trauma and without danger to be able to do that. And we have the technology now.

Right. I want you to tell listeners about perfection imaging because some of them might not be familiar. And it is. It's like you've gone back to first principle thinking and medicine gets stuck in this hamster wheel of, oh, we're just going to make this one mechanism better. We're just going to improve it a little bit by little bit, as opposed to what you've done is completely revolutionize breast imaging and create something novel, safe and unique. So I want you to tell us about that and give us some basic information.

Yeah, I'm happy to. I want to be clear that it is part of a bigger picture, because I'm not just using imaging to screen, because that's just one piece of the puzzle, and we are holistic intelligence.