Challenging the Status Quo: Cancer Research, COVID-19, and Emerging Therapies with Dr. William Makis

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at about my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here. I am joined today by Dr. William Makis. He is a radiologist, oncologist, and researcher, cancer researcher in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Makis.

Thank you very much for having me.

So I like to start by asking people what their origin story is. Where were you born and how did you become a physician?

Certainly. I was born in communist Czechoslovakia. I fled communism with my family in 1988 through a United Nations refugee camp. We ended up staying at a refugee camp for one year. I had no idea where we were going to end up. We had options to go to Canada, United States, or Australia. So my parents picked Canada. So we came to Canada in 1989. I had no idea that the Berlin Wall was going to fall later that year.

How old were you at the time?

I was 9 years old.

Yeah.

What was your— what were your memories from the Eastern Bloc?

So for me, um, communism seemed normal because that's what I grew up in, right? But I do remember, uh, I do remember standing in breadlines. I do remember my parents talking about things that they would say, don't say in school, that, you know, we talk about this or that, or that, you know, we listen to this kind of, you know, broadcast and so on. Um, I think it was Radio Free Europe at the time. And, and, and so, uh, and I was aware that, you know, we weren't allowed to travel to certain places Uh, so you kind of— you are aware as a kid, but you don't understand the full, I guess, the implications of, of, um, of communism, right? Right. And so I grew up in Toronto, grew up in Toronto, Ontario, um, went— I won the Governor General's Medal in, uh, in high school, and then I went to University of Toronto on scholarship in immunology. So my, my undergrad degree is in immunology. And then I went to medical school at McGill University in Montreal and then did a 5-year specialization, medical specialization in nuclear medicine, radiology, and oncology. And it's funny, people, when they attack me, they always give me grief and they say, well, you're not an oncologist and you're not this and that. And it's funny because there's different types of oncology. There's medical oncology, there's radiation oncology, there's surgical. Oncology, and there's nuclear oncology as well. And so that's, that's my 5-year specialization is nuclear medicine, radiology, and oncology. And so I've practiced— my practice has been mainly cancer. And ever since I started practicing, I've also been a cancer researcher. I have over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals. The vast majority of those are in cancer diagnostics and treatments. Uh, in fact, the most recent publication, uh, that I have was about a couple weeks ago when we published the first protocol, uh, of using ivermectin in the treatment of cancer. That's sort of the first ever suggested protocol with dosing, uh, in sort of combination therapy. Uh, so that's been, uh, that's been pretty exciting.

I always like asking doctors why they decided they wanted to go into medicine, and then what was the sequence of events that landed you in that particular niche or specialty?

That's interesting. So my dad's a mathematician, and I was actually— I was doing a lot of math competitions, and I had won the Canadian math competition in grade 9. I got on the honor roll of the American math competitions, and I'd even won a small international math competition. And so I was heading in that direction, and then I wasn't a huge fan of math. And, and then we did a dissection. I think it was in grade 10 biology. We did a dissection of a frog, and that sort of sealed medicine for me as a, as a choice. I, I really enjoyed it. I actually thought I was going to be a surgeon. Uh, turned out I wasn't a huge fan of surgery either, but, um, you know, once you get to medicine, you change your mind, uh, many times.

Why were you not a fan of surgery?

Yeah, why not surgery? You know, it's very interesting. I think it was just my, my experience during my rotations. I didn't like the OR and I thought for whatever— I don't know what the reason was. I just, I didn't like being in the OR and I thought if I don't like being in the OR, I'm going to be miserable, you know? So it was one of those things where you in medicine, you have to enjoy what you do. Otherwise it's going to be a, it's going to be a struggle. Right. I know, I know some classmates of mine who, you know, who ended up choosing specialties that they didn't like or didn't particularly enjoy because, let's say, it's what, it's what their parents wanted, or it had more money, or whatever it was, and they were just absolutely miserable. So I really enjoyed, uh, I really enjoyed physics, chemistry. I, I enjoyed working with computers. I enjoyed patterns, and, and that naturally led me to sort of the field of radiology and specifically nuclear medicine.

Can you define nuclear medicine?

But I also enjoyed oncology as well. So I sort of ended up—

Yeah, briefly for people who don't know what it is, I find that most people don't know what it is. Yeah, that's true.

It does confuse a lot of people. Nuclear medicine is a branch of radiology. That's, that's the easiest way to think of it. It's, it's a, it's a subgenre of radiology, but it's not diagnostic only. It's both diagnostic and therapeutic. You're working with radiation, but you're not working with what I would refer to as external radiation. You are working with radiation that's injected into you. And when radiation is injected to you, these radioactive particles, you know, they'll travel to different parts of the body and you can use them either to image with particularly specific and sensitive cameras, or you can use radiation to treat. If you're using beta particle emitting radiation, for example, then you can use radiation to treat as well, to conduct systemic treatments. And so that's, that's the entire specialty. It's 5 years specialization of learning how to read scans that are, you know, obtained using radiation, using injected radiation, but also to treat cancer patients as well.

Got it. And so that landed you— because the reason I found out about you, of course, is that you write a great Substack, which everyone should go check out, subscribe to, particularly if you or anyone you know is, is dealing with cancer. How did you go from what I imagine was, you know, academic nuclear medicine oncology research I'm sure that you did a heavy, heavy research bent to your days and your weeks given the 100 publications that you've got. Uh, and you know, if you're, if you were 9 in 1988, you are, you know, 44. So 100 papers by 44 is actually pretty, pretty well published. Not that many people with more, um, at least, and certainly not that many people with more that are of high quality, right? Because anyone can publish a lot of fluff, but it's very hard to generate fluff in nuclear medicine because it's not a very fluffy specialty. Anyway, how did you go from there to writing a Substack about things like ivermectin and fenbendazole?

That's a very, uh, interesting journey and a complicated journey, but, but really, to sort of summarize it in, in maybe one minute I had a very large clinical trial and a large cancer program that I ran. It was a Phase 2 clinical trial of targeted radionuclide therapy sponsored by Health Canada, and we were the referral center for neuroendocrine tumors that were treated with radiation, targeted therapy, and referral center for, for all of Canada. And my cancer program was sabotaged was sabotaged by the health authorities, by the local health authorities. As soon as Justin Trudeau was elected, uh, basically there was all kinds of sabotage that happened throughout the country as the Liberal Party, which is the governing party of Canada, consolidated their control of various, uh, um, I would say various technologies in the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, they went around consolidating and sabotaging throughout the country and really monopolizing certain, I would say, cutting-edge treatments, if you will. And mine was one of them. I was just at the wrong place. I was the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time. And because I had the, the biggest cancer program of its type that the liberals targeted, I was sabotaged. It was a multimillion-dollar sabotage process. I was offered about $500,000 in cash and a nondisclosure agreement to go away. I refused to sign it, uh, and that's when they came after my medical license and my family, started threatening my family, started threatening my children, saying we're going to punish your family. And, um, it became a massive lawsuit. It turned into a $13 and $22 million lawsuits, the, the largest scandal in, in Alberta history, uh, because they spent really the next 7, 8 years trying to bankrupt me and destroy me, destroy my career, destroy my reputation. They've held my license hostage for 7 years. They took my license within 6 hours of me refusing that $500,000 money offer that was on the table. And so I learned about corruption in the Canadian healthcare system very quickly. And of course, now they're rebuilding my cancer program in Vancouver, British Columbia. Trudeau is very proud of it. They call themselves global leaders in medical isotopes. So when you look up, you know, medical isotopes and the Canadian government, That's me they sabotaged and they poured over $300 million into building huge, friendly to the Trudeau regime. And so you've got involvement of University of British Columbia, BC Cancer Agency, and I believe TRIUMPH, which is the— Canada, one of Canada's largest physics laboratories. They are building cyclotrons to produce medical isotopes locally. They've got private clinics that are going up all over the place tied to this. And so it's a big— it's a big operation. Now, the Trudeau government, what's interesting, and some people know about it, some people don't, the Trudeau government got into pharmaceuticals very heavily from the get-go, from as soon as he was elected, they were ready to go.

Can you unpack for us the perverse incentives here? How are they making money on this? What's the motive behind all this? I assume it's money, but enlighten me.

Uh, you know, I mean, money is a huge motive. It's a huge motive because, uh, obviously cancer is a big moneymaker. And, uh, now the other thing they got into was, was mRNA vaccines, which I think would be something that more people are familiar with. It's the Trudeau government that, you know, has this mRNA factory that's being built in, in Quebec. Um, but it really is money. And, and what they're, what they're doing, and a lot of it is illegal but it's difficult to prove, is they're using— they're using taxpayer money, they're using public money to build facilities that are either then used to generate private companies or they're used to generate private clinics. And so a lot of the members of the Liberal Party are heavily invested personally in pharmaceuticals. No one knows about it. No one talks about it. But they are deeply and heavily invested in pharmaceuticals in various ways. They sit on boards of companies, they've got shares and all this kind of stuff, but they use public money to build the infrastructure. And on the surface, they make it look like, you know, they'll, they'll throw the public a little bit of a bone. They'll say, okay, well, we'll, you know, we'll put you in a little clinical trial and maybe a couple of Canadians will get access to the technology. But in reality, what they're building is a pharmaceutical empire. For themselves. In fact, it's been sort of relayed to me that, uh, they want to— they wanted to turn British Columbia, and I, and I guess Vancouver and, and, and Surrey, uh, into what they call the Silicon Valley of healthcare in the north. Now, I don't know how successful they've been. They've been working on this basically ever since Trudeau came to power. Um, but like I said, there's numerous spin-off companies that have really spun off research that was paid for by the public, paid for taxpayers, using facilities that were built by taxpayers, built by taxpayers. When we have journalists who will do the digging and find out, you know, what the Trudeau government has truly been investing themselves into. But it's huge money. It's in the billions of dollars. I mean, in terms of medical isotopes, I think that's an area in terms of diagnostics and treatment that's been estimated, you know, it was just a few billion dollars, the global market, you know, a few years ago. And now it's something like $20 to $30 billion. It's growing exponentially. And so, you know, that, that, that's something unfortunately that I kind of was just the wrong person in the, in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I got completely steamrolled by the friends of Trudeau, who was Rachel Notley, who was the leftist leader in Alberta at the time. And all her bureaucrats just came after me with all the, the money at their disposal. So they spent millions of dollars. They, they bribed the judges. I mean, they bribed everyone they could to try to really smear me and destroy me. So I fired physician because I refused a money offer that was offered to me, you know, for my sabotaged cancer trial. And on top of that, they had taken me to court at the start of the pandemic with an emergency injunction application trying to get the court to shut down my social media accounts so that I would not be speaking about— not COVID-19 or the vaccines, that came later— but so that I wouldn't be speaking about the corruption and crime that took place with my cancer program that they sabotaged. And so they— I was one of the first court cases really to suspend my Charter rights to freedom of expression. And they lost that case. It got thrown out. Back in, in April of 2020. So at that point, I considered myself completely hands, you know, untied to pursue speaking out on social media. And I think that's why I've been so outspoken on social media about the pandemic, about the vaccines, about the masks, about the lockdown. I think I consider myself one of the most outspoken. I'm able to do that, in my opinion. Is because I have a court— I have a court decision backing me in being able to do that. No other Canadian physician has that. And if you notice, Canadian physicians, some of them are speaking out, but the ones who are speaking out have lost their medical license for doing so.

Right. No, it's very chilling. We've been very fortunate here, those of us who spoke out in the United States. Most of us, as far as I know, have not lost our licenses or have not even been taken before medical boards. But I know a few have. Simone Gold, who's a friend of mine and another local to Naples, Florida, she did hard time in a federal prison, not a Martha Stewart style resort, white collar penitentiary, but a real prison in Miami. So it's chilling what's going on. I can only imagine how profound it must seem to have gone from the Eastern Bloc under communism to, you know, liberal Canada and seen it transform from a very free, you know, pro-free speech place. I'm sure it was when you, when you arrived there. I mean, I know, you know, I'm 36, so I was born the year you left the Eastern Bloc. Uh, so, you know, I remember growing up, there, there wasn't anywhere near the animus, uh, and the, the desire to censor physicians. On the other hand, I have mentors and friends who are in their 40s and 50s who had, you know, incredible court battles that they went through to keep their licenses for using medications off-label or using therapies that were not in the mainstream, very alternative. So what was your— because I, I'm very curious to hear this because you, you didn't have like an integrative, holistic, natural, functional, whatever you want to call it, background, which is where a lot of the dissidents in COVID came out from that camp and the naturopaths and chiropractors and so on. You had a very conventional medical background and training. You obviously had been, let's just say, quite well-educated on corruption in medicine. You were no stranger to the fact that people were willing to do horrible things for money. I'm really curious, when you started to see the literature coming out about COVID in the news, When did you say this doesn't make sense? What was the moment, the month, even if the day, if you can remember, when you thought this narrative does not line up and something is very, very wrong here?

I think I was very fortunate in, in, in the sense that I was completely outside of the medical system. And, and so I really didn't have any, uh, any influence, any peer pressure, um, you know, the information that I got wasn't filtered, uh, and, and so, and I didn't really sort of have discussions with you looking for information like everybody else. I was looking, what is this novel virus? Who is it affecting? You know, who's getting sick from it? How are they doing? And so on. And really, all the information seemed to point to the fact that this this was— this thing was fairly mild. It had a very, very low case fatality rate, and the at-risk groups were individuals who were over the age of 70 in long-term care settings, and, and, and individuals who had numerous comorbidities, uh, severe vitamin D deficiency, or whether it was, uh, obesity, whatever the conditions were. Those, those were sort of the main two at-risk groups. So I've— I, I identify very early on that, let's say, me and my wife and my kids, we were not at risk for severe coronavirus infection at all. And I think— and I, and I saw the, you know, the, uh, the approach by the media as, as, as very, um, overblown in terms of— and I think I recognized a lot of the propaganda. And this is— you're gonna find this a lot of people from, from the former Eastern Bloc countries could recognize the propaganda right away. You know, two weeks to flatten the curve, we're all in this together, and then of course safe and effective being, you know, the big, the big slogans, right? And I'm sure there were more, but you could, you could smell the propaganda. You could see the propaganda from a mile away. And so that automatically raises red flags. And, and I had— what I had seen was The people who had sabotaged— these are very, very corrupt bureaucrats. These are basically criminals. And now they've been entrusted with running the, um, the pandemic response, um, which again was very shocking to me. And I realized later on that these people, these types of people, the, the healthcare bureaucrats, they're put in specific positions for a reason. And when it came to the pandemic, it seems like they had already been of power across the board, across Canada. Didn't matter the province, didn't matter if it was a Conservative province or a Liberal-run province. You had these corrupt bureaucrats in positions where they would then go in lockstep with whatever the government-approved narrative was. And you saw it— not a single individual in health, in any position of power in healthcare stood up to the propaganda, to the lies, to the masking, to the lockdowns, and of course the vaccines. Everyone went in lockstep. Who isn't afraid to basically go in a completely different direction than all the other minions are? You know, the CDC, uh, minions are kind of going in, right? Um, we have none of that in Canada, and so I saw, okay, corrupt people are running the pandemic response, uh, but I still thought it was, you know, one of these things that was just going to blow over, um, in 2020. And so I actually, I wasn't speaking up in 2020. I was still busy, and I would be over by the end of 2020. And then there was the talk of the vaccines, and when I looked into the vaccines, there were many red flags for me when it came to the vaccines, especially, especially the type of tech technology they were using, which was again, you know, the lipid nanoparticles and the mRNA. To me, that— those were huge red flags because I was familiar a little bit with those technologies and really cancer technologies. Lipid nanoparticles, of course, I think there were attempts to load lipid nanoparticles with chemotherapy and other sort of therapeutic agents in cancer, and it just never worked. It caused all kinds of problems. Um, and as I dug into, you know, what the vaccines are or what they were going to be, I made a, I made a decision very early on to basically not participate. I guess every physician must have had some kind of an awakening process, and of course a lot of physicians haven't started theirs. Um, but I think those of us who who have been awakened during the pandemic, it's been a process. You know, it's not just like a light switch goes off and then suddenly you see all the problems, whether it's the vaccines or, or, or, or, you know, masks or everything else. It's a process, you know, it's a gradual process. And, and for me, it was a gradual awakening process. I thought they were going to use our population and then the kids. So that was just an absolute shock for me in the first half of 2021, I could not believe they were rolling this out in the entire population. And then, of course, you know, they started pushing the booster shots. And that, that, that's about the time I started speaking out, was in the summer of 2021. I was— I really wasn't going to pursue any kind of a social media presence or in others and, and to warn people, to warn, you know, other physicians and so on. And I think by the summer of 2021, I just, I couldn't stay silent anymore.

Absolutely. That's what happened for me. I, I had an interview that went viral in the fall of 2020 when they started talking about mandatory vaccination in my home state of Virginia. And then the minute I heard mandatory vaccination, I received an email from a, you know, a vaccine awareness group who were the Freedom Keepers. They have state chapters. They were very instrumental in preventing, um, vaccine mandates for as long as they, you know, did anyway in California. A lot of those people from California have fled to Tennessee and Florida, among other states. But I heard about a rally from them, and I said, this is insane.

This is a—

if this is a supposed therapeutic that doesn't even exist yet, And we're being told that they're going to mandate it. What planet are these people on? Under any other circumstances, this would be something that we would wait 10 years to roll out because we know that the potential risk is catastrophic. And you may not be able to substantiate the risk. And then I got, as a result of all this, I ended up getting very interested in pharmacovigilance, which I didn't even know the term before I got into this. And just started to really think, how do we even know that what we do not only works but doesn't have side effects? And then I started to look more and more into the system, and I realized that it was set up to not detect problems. If the signals were large enough to be detected in the pharmacovigilance databases, something was truly, truly wrong. I'll allow that there may be noise from time to time, but man, they just want to avoid creating a system that actually would hold these people accountable. So that went viral, and then I was pretty active. You know, I could have been more active, but there was a certain— I found that I had a certain, uh, I hate to say hopelessness, but it was hard to be as active as some of my friends and colleagues were because it just was so hard to believe that people couldn't see what a bad idea this was.

You know, I'll tell you where I got frustrated. It was when, um, when I saw that they were mandating it in healthcare, and they were mandating it for every doctor, every nurse, every healthcare worker. And I mean, I couldn't believe that that was taking place. But then, then when I noticed when the doctor— okay, now you've, you've literally just mandated these shots Now, uh, you know, these healthcare workers who've been mandated to take 2 shots, now you've rolled out a third shot, and now, you know, we start seeing these sudden deaths of, of Canadian doctors. And I, and I really raised a big alarm about the sudden deaths of, of Canadian doctors, and, and I think that's kind of what sort of brought me more to international attention. Workers were dropping dead after taking these shots. No one was talking about that. Of course, we knew about the athletes. We could see the athletes collapsing on the field. You know, people knew about the myocarditis in young people. I think that was fairly obvious. And of course, the, you know, the blood clots when it came to especially AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson. But I think the blood clotting issue was also a serious problem for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as well, but it was— there were doctors themselves who were pushing the shots were collapsing, and these were young doctors in their 40s and 50s. Eventually we would see medical students collapsing in their 20s and 30s after taking the shots, uh, and that was just so frustrating because, uh, you know, that's when they came after the kids I tried to warn about vaccinating kids, and that's when my entire sort of social media— with, um, about the vaccines and kids— and I lost my account. And really, that was it for me. I had no social media access or presence at all at that point. In fact, I was contemplating just quitting social media entirely and kind of just living my life quietly, um, you know, avoiding this thing as much as I could. Avoiding the vaccines, of course. But, and then, then my wife sort of talked me into continuing, and I really continued. I was fringe social media platforms, very few followers, you know, no social media exposure at all. But, uh, eventually I did get my Twitter account back in early 2023 once Elon Musk took over Twitter, and then everything sort of just started building from that. I mean, that's the reason I started my Substack was because I was actually delayed in getting my Twitter account back. So Dr. Malhotra and the Canadian Liberals had made phone calls to Twitter to make sure that I wouldn't get my account back. But eventually I did get it back and I was probably one of the last, one of the last doctors to get it back. But because it didn't look like I was going to, that's actually why I started my Substack.

Which is how I found out about you. And I'd love for you to take people through how you, it sounds like, got back into clinical practice. And I'd love to get your— because we've only got about 15, 20 minutes left— I'd love to get your, your thoughts on modern cancer care, cancer treatment. We see so many people struggling with this. We hear constantly from people of diagnoses in friends and family, and people are always asking me, you know, what can I do? What's— what should I pursue? Where should I go for information? And frankly, there's not— I mean, even if, even if all doctors who were outside the mainstream suddenly started specializing in cancer, I don't think there would be enough of us to meet the demand, let alone, you know, then you end up in the fee-for-service world, and people I know are, you know, spending their whole life savings on their integrative natural cancer care in the hopes of getting well. And obviously not all of them are getting a complete remission. So I'm curious what your thoughts are now that you're in this very different world from the one that you were in just, what, 5 years ago? This is quite the saga for you, isn't it?

It really is. I could have never predicted the journey that I would end up on and the destination that I've landed on when I started. For me, to share my views on the pandemic and really to start looking into things that, you know, as a physician, I would have either had— wouldn't have time to look into, or I would be probably pressured to avoid. And so I did look, you know, obviously it— I think I started with documenting the sudden deaths., and document for 10. And what I saw was I saw a lot of injuries and deaths in the areas that were subjected to the vaccine mandates. And so of course healthcare, doctors, nurses, but also police officers, firefighters, the military. Teachers is another big area. Uh, teachers just have taken a huge hit to their health after the mandates rolled out. And so I was, I was documenting in 2022 and 2023 the, the vaccine injuries and sudden deaths. And it's interesting that the pattern of injury has shifted over time. Initially, when I was documenting the injuries on Substack, it was a lot, a lot of cardiac actually most of it was cardiac. And there was, of course, a small percentage of blood clots. We started to see the autoimmune diseases. We started to see neurological or all kinds of fascinating, really 2023 is when the, the term turbo cancer really, I think, came into prominence. I think it was still virtually unknown in 2022 that there was a possible link between the MRNA vaccines and cancer. A couple of doctors were talking about it. Dr. Ryan Cole was talking about it, Dr. Charles Hoff in Canada. There was a couple of pathologists in Europe, in Germany, attention to. And, and I think as more people were developing these extremely aggressive cancers, the topic just gained more and more prominence, and I started documenting you know, a lot of my articles started to shift from being just about, you know, died suddenly phenomenon into the cancer phenomenon and really the turbo cancers, the extremely aggressive cancers. And I really tried to reach— behave as a phenomenon, as a, you know, as a biological phenomenon. They seem to be completely different than what we'd seen in the past. And again, no one was talking about it. No one was researching it. No one was looking into this. And so I think I've worked very hard to bring this sort of phenomenon of turbo cancer sort of into the broader consciousness. You know, I, I was literally posting about it every single investment. That's how my Substack has evolved. And as I, as I explored more into vaccine injury, sudden deaths, and so on, I came across— obviously, I did some deep dives into ivermectin, and I really came across a body of research, preclinical research, that was mostly ignored, I would say. I mean, the fact that— answer— completely ignored until the past year or so. People using ivermectin to try to treat their cancer was virtually unheard of. About a year, year and a half ago. And so I started writing articles about that. I started doing really research reviews, but for the layperson, you know, these weren't reviews meant, you know, to be submitted for peer review or anything like that. These were really articles, you know, what are the, what are the potential side effects and so on. And, and that's how I really came upon this area of repurposed drugs. Now, I'll tell you, there's something very interesting. As people got desperate and came to me with very desperate situations—stage 4 cancers, you know, extensive spread and so on—I would suggest, I'd say, look, look into high-dose ivermectin or look into fenbendazole, something to try, because the oncologists were not giving patients any suggestions when it came to repurposed drugs. So I said, look, there's some stories and some anecdotal evidence and even some case reports published about ivermectin or fenbendazole. Give it a try. And then people would ask me, well, what dose should I try? And so I started looking into the dosing, and eventually I figured out a dosing I developed from the available, you know, preclinical research that we have and some case reports and so on. And some really anecdotal use and anecdotal evidence. And, you know, a few months later, people started coming back to me with success stories. I had one particular case, for example, of a woman with stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma. Her, you know, she was basically sent home to die. And she comes back and she comes to me, you know, almost a year later after apparently I had— I should already be dead. And it seemed her disease had stabilized and she was— she was— she felt great and basically in remission. And I had a number of cases like this, and that really gave me the idea that, okay, I should be doing this at a more formal— like on a more formal level and really, you know, regimens. And that's— that led me to start offering consultations, cancer consultations, which I'm doing now. The way I'm doing them is I'm doing them outside of the mainstream medical establishment. I'm doing them as a health coach, as a health coach, cancer coach. Patients obtain, you know, whether it's ivermectin or mebendazole or fenbendazole or CBD oil. Or melatonin or whatever it may be, like they can use to whatever the goal is that they may have.

I'm curious, how much oversight or coaching do you find that people need in order to apply these protocols? Because one of the things, you know, I don't— I haven't gotten into cancer patient care largely because it seems like a very big— what's the word I'm looking for? It's deeply challenging from what I can tell. And there's many reasons for that. I mean, it's emotionally taxing that when you look at the morbidity and the acuity, many of them need a very high level of care and they want us to be that. And I wasn't comfortable putting that on myself and my team. I really only started my practice in the last 3 or 4 years, and we are, you know, unlike what your, your relationship that you've set up, we are a formal medical clinic, so we manage medications we prescribe. So I'm really— and the other thing I've noticed is that a lot of these protocols seem like they're very straightforward. You know, you could go to Tractor Supply or Rural King here in the United States, pick up your ivermectin, your fenbendazole. And, you know, what has your experience been with the need that people have for oversight, for coaching, or are these things that people really can just download the protocol and sort of paint by numbers?

So a lot of the, the patients that come to me, I get the difficult situations. And so I get, I get the stage 4 cases where they have failed multiple rounds of chemotherapy. And so I've just already gone to my Substack. They would have already read a number of my articles or the testimonials. They would have watched my videos. And so there's a certain amount of learning that will have already taken place by the time I, I meet with them. It's very rare that I get a patient that has absolutely no idea about any of this. Patients have done some homework on their own. They have some idea, and some of them will have already tried to play around with doses. And, you know, they get, they get the various sources. I do find that in terms of the coaching, I think it is important. I think it is valuable. Because it's very easy to get lost in this area. Like, you don't know how to work to monitor what you would expect to see on follow-up blood work, on follow-up imaging, for example. You know, when would you expect to see results? What is the good result? What is a bad result? You know, there is— you could certainly do it on your own, but it would be a lot harder and a lot more involved. You have to be very motivated. I really appreciate the coaching. They appreciate the experience. You know, each patient will ask me 100 questions easily, anything around the repurposed drugs. But they'll ask me questions about their chemotherapy. They'll ask me questions about, you know, their surgery or the radiotherapy treatment area. And I think this is where some of the practitioners may struggle, you know, if they're coming at this and saying, well, you know, I've got some protocols and just kind of follow this, this dosing. But if you don't have the oncology background, it's a bit harder to give good advice to patients because you get asked a lot of difficult questions.

I'm really curious, what do you see with your new perspective being the, the greatest value from the conventional oncology world. You know, I'll tell you a quick story. We had a woman with a large breast mass come into the practice a year ago or so, and I said, well, I recommend that you get a biopsy, have the imaging, find out what we're dealing with, because if they can offer you a surgical approach, there's no reason not to use that. And I'm very curious, you know, what, what do you find, uh, and what do you strongly urge your patients to still get that's of value from the conventional oncological approach?

With the conventional approach as long as it makes sense and as long as the benefits outweigh the risks. And so, you know, it's always— for me, it's always a balancing act, right? You always have to weigh the pros and cons, the benefits and the risks. And really where it becomes an issue is it's usually not an issue with surgery to the— you know, I have horrific side effects, I've lost a lot of weight. My body just can't take it anymore. And they end up making the decision that, look, I'm done with conventional chemotherapy and the oncologist is telling me I have no other treatment options left or that they can't offer anything else. And that's where I get— that's where I get involved. But where I find it very frustrating is options that they could offer, but they don't. And I think they do it to protect themselves, to protect their license. I think they do it because some of the medical boards have come after doctors for prescribing ivermectin, and that was just ivermectin for COVID. Here in Canada, we had a doctor who was slapped with a $40,000 fine for prescribing ivermectin for COVID, which, which is— it's, uh, my wife did it, my kids did it. I mean, it's literally nothing. It's a safe, approved drug. That has been used successfully around the world, and you're going to have a doctor slapped with a $40,000 penalty just for writing a couple of ivermectin scripts. I mean, this is— I mean, this is the kind of stuff that's happening in mainstream medicine. I don't say, well, tax— I honestly, I have cancer patients who will tell their doctors, I'm thinking of using ivermectin as sort of an, you know, an additional treatment to go along with my chemotherapy. And the doctor will have literally an emotional or mental breakdown in front of them, will have a panic attack, will start screaming because they're so afraid to die, you know, in Guantanamo Bay. I mean, that is, that is the level that we've reached in medicine. It's absolutely ridiculous. But, but, but this is what happens is patients then miss out on the benefits of certain repurposed drugs. And there are tremendous benefits to some of these repurposed drugs, whether it's ivermectin, whether it's fenbendazole. Well, you'd be talking these out. They're not allowing their patients to have access to anything beyond sort of the what's been allowed by Big Pharma.

Thank you so much, Dr. Makis, for joining me today. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. I would love to have you back to chat more and unpack some more of this, because I'm sure we could talk for another hour to, to learn more from you.