Integrative Oncology with Michael Robinson ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I have on Dr. Michael Robinson who is a naturopathic doctor specializing in naturopathic oncology. Michael shares how utilizing personalized cancer care from a naturopathic oncologist can drastically improve quality of life and treatment outcomes while going through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Cancer treatment doesn't have to be miserable, and we can protect your body while fighting the cancer. Michael also tells us why sometimes the best hospitals in the world don't deliver care like this for their cancer patients.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Mistletoe injections 
• IV Vitamin C therapy
• Ozone therapy
• Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT)
• Outcomes from these different therapies
• Conservative interventions
• Helpful nutraceuticals for cancer
• Nutraceuticals to avoid

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Robinson is a naturopathic doctor specializing in naturopathic oncology in the Chicago Suburbs. He is the Owner of Nourish Healthcare, a multidisciplinary natural healthcare clinic and manages a team of multiple naturopathic doctors, nutritionists, and acupuncturists, as well as he is a staff doctor at the Ayre clinic of Contemporary Medicine, the oldest low dose chemotherapy clinic in the US. He is also a professor of Oncology and Immunology for the University of Western States. Dr. Robinson holds a Bachelors of Science in Health Sciences, a Masters of Science in Applied Clinical Nutrition, and a Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine. He is Certified in Oncology Nutrition via the Oncology Nutrition Institute, Is a licensed Naturopathic Physician, a Licensed Dietician Nutritionist, and a Certified Nutrition Specialist.

Dr. Robinson has big goals for changing our broken healthcare system and is working on this with a two-pronged approach, starting with education of other healthcare providers. When not seeing his own patients he teaches Nutrition Science, Botanical Medical, Medical Assisting, Phlebotomy, Physical Assessment, Pathophysiology,  Internal Medicine, Immunology and Oncology  at various universities and medical programs hoping to inspire better providers to practice better medicine. His students include Naturopathic Doctors, Chiropractors, Nutritionists, Nurses, EMTs, Medical Doctors, Osteopaths, Dentists, Physical Therapists, Athletic Trainers & more. He is also actively engaged with various legislative efforts; primarily with obtaining licensure for Naturopathic Medicine in Illinois and advancing access to natural medicine and nutrition services nationally. He is also a competitive volleyball player.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://www.nourishhealthcare.org/
Instagram: @nourishhealthcare
 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NourishNaturalHealthcare/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

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[00:00:00] Christa: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down we're overmedicated and underserved at the less stressed life. We are a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories.

[00:00:26] Christa: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

[00:00:45] Christa: All right. Today on the Less Stress Life I have Dr. Michael Robinson, who's a naturopathic doctor specializing in naturopathic oncology in the Chicago suburbs. He's the owner of Nourish Healthcare, a multidisciplinary natural healthcare clinic, and manages a team of multiple naturopathic doctors, nutritionist, and acupuncturist, as well as he has a staff doctor at the iER Clinic, AER Clinic. Thank you. Of Contemporary Medicine, the oldest low dose chemotherapy clinic in the us. Super cool. He's also professor of oncology and immunology for the University of Western States. He holds a Bachelor's of Science in Health sciences and Master of Science and Applied Clinical Nutrition, a doctorate in naturopathic medicine.

[00:01:27] Christa: This is so helpful to see cuz it's like how do you learn about oncology nutrition? But he's certified in oncology nutrition via the Oncology Nutrition Institute and as a licensed naturopathic physician, a licensed dietician nutritionist, and a certified nutrition specialist. So we got a lot to talk about.

[00:01:42] Christa: I don't know how you fit in all those years of education with this baby face, but let's jump into it. Welcome, Dr. Robinson. 

[00:01:49] Dr. Robinson: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be with you guys. What do you wanna know about? I'm happy to talk about it.

[00:01:54] Christa: I'd love to hear first about your story and how cancer became part of your practice.

[00:01:59] Christa: I'm sure there's a backstory to this and weaved in there. Why did you go to school for so long? Right? If you became a dietician, were you a nutritionist and then you became a naturopath as well? 

[00:02:12] Dr. Robinson: I've worked in many aspects of healthcare, so actually even in undergrad I was a phlebotomist and an IV infusion, and that was really when I got started is I was doing IVs for bit of their house to do hydration IVs in those sort of scenarios.

[00:02:26] Dr. Robinson: And honestly is I hated it. I didn't like it as I went home every day miserable because, I go to the patient's houses and there'd be stage four patients grabbing my hand saying, save me, save me, save me. And I'm just here to do your iv, I can't do that. I'm not the doctor in a scenario.

[00:02:41] Dr. Robinson: So I actually, throughout my undergrad and even into medical school, as I went through most of medical school sayings, I'm never gonna work with oncology patients again. I thought I was gonna be in a totally separate field. But then when we got to our clinical internship, starting seeing real patients in medical school, I.

[00:02:59] Dr. Robinson: Out of the class of 30, soon to be doctors in my cohort. No one knew what to do when a cancer patient would come in and it just, they knew my background and my history of being in the field. So they would come to me with all the questions in the world anytime a cancer patient came in and I just, I had the knowledge base to be able to answer and I started going into the consult rooms with the other students to help them out.

[00:03:21] Dr. Robinson: And the patients quickly realized like, oh, this is the person that really knows what's going on, not the intern I'm meeting with. And, they started latching out to me. And it was a different experience because now as the provider now me being able to make decisions and help the people, it was totally different.

[00:03:36] Dr. Robinson: And I was able to empower and help the patients and I fell back in love with it. And that's where soon as I could, I got the opportunity to start shadowing again as a provider with actual patients in the real life, in the air clinic, and I knew right away that this was where I was meant to be.

[00:03:51] Christa: I love that story. That's very good. So you've been practicing, you fit a lot in your day. Right now you have a busy clinic and then you're a professor as well. I really want you to unpack How some of that kind of interplays into your day-to-day work, but maybe we should jump straight into cancers, you see.

[00:04:09] Christa: So after school, where were you going to school? And then tell us how you kind of ended up in the suburbs of Chicago. It sounds like maybe you were going to school in that area originally. Right? If that's, if were you interning at the AR clinic? 

[00:04:21] Dr. Robinson: Yeah, so my, both my bachelor's and my doctorate are from schools in Illinois near my house.

[00:04:26] Dr. Robinson: So my doctorate's from National University of Health Sciences. There's only seven accredited naturopathic medical schools across North America, US and Canada combined. So not many options for the Midwest cuz everything is off on California and on the west coast. So, About quarters of the way through my doctorate program.

[00:04:46] Dr. Robinson: I started to say I was learning a whole bunch of general practice natural medicine, but I knew that I wanted nutrition to be a major focus of how I was going to treat patients. And honestly, even in naturopathic medical school, I wasn't learning enough of the nutrition that I wanted to. So I added on the masters.

[00:05:03] Dr. Robinson: Truly at New York Chiropractic College at the time is now Northeast College of Health Sciences. So I ended up completing both my master's and my doctorate degrees basically at the same time, graduated a month apart from each other with both of those. So as soon as I graduated, went right into practice, opened my own clinic right away.

[00:05:21] Christa: Nice. Well, if it makes you feel better, where I went to school, I feel like we didn't learn enough about nutrition either. I'm sure you know already, right? 

[00:05:29] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. That's always the case. Anyway, I teach doctors of clinical nutrition now and some of these people have been in practice for 20 years and are now going back and getting their doctorate and they're still, there's always more to learn in medicine.

[00:05:39] Christa: Yeah. Always more to learn. Okay. Let's jump into kind of day-today when you're seeing cancer patients, you said you'd opened, you're in a clinic right after school. Talk to me about common types of cancer that you see in your clinic. Day in, day out, week in, week out. 

[00:05:56] Dr. Robinson: So it's kind of funny how it's split between, I definitely see hundreds of breast cancer and colon cancer patients per year just because of how common breast cancer and colon cancer and prostate cancer are.

[00:06:07] Dr. Robinson: So of course we see the common cancers because they're so common. Right. , I probably see over 250 breast cancer patients a year. That's definitely probably our biggest demographic there. But outside of the couple very, very, very common. Then I also see an a normally large amount of the extremely rare cancers because those are the patients that know conventional medicine doesn't really have many answers for them, right?

[00:06:32] Dr. Robinson: These cancers with one and 2% survival rates in the conventional system, those are the patients that need to seek additional personalized care and need to do everything they can. So my practice. This gets flooded with a whole bunch of extremely rare cancers or very deadly cancers to, to be able to offer them everything, right? And it's kinda split. 

[00:06:51] Christa: Yeah. So when people come in like that, are they flying into the Chicago area to see you? 

[00:06:57] Dr. Robinson: Very often, yes. Especially if they are gonna come in to do our low dose chemotherapy, there's only about 30 clinics across the US that do the low dose chemotherapy aspect of it, and we're the oldest one.

[00:07:07] Dr. Robinson: So, we have the history aspect, so people fly in from all over North America to come in for that. I do see people virtually as well, if it's a scenario where, They're gonna stay with their medical oncologists, do standard of care, chemotherapy or radiation, whatever it is. But then they're just seeing me for supportive therapies to try to mitigate side effects of their chemo, for example.

[00:07:27] Dr. Robinson: Then I offer that virtually as well. 

[00:07:29] Christa: When someone comes into your practice to see you, I know there's several people in your practice, what does that care plan maybe look like, and another way to say this is maybe what are some of those pieces of the treatment pie? Do they come in and see you one time or do they come in and kind of get all the modalities over time?

[00:07:46] Dr. Robinson: So it depends on where the patients are. We like to get them early on as soon as they're diagnosed because we know the stages they're gonna go through. We know that they're going to be prescribed surgery and then prescribed chemo, and then prescribed an immunotherapy. So we like to make the whole trajectory, but it's very common for patients to not come in until they've already started treatment visible, and then they're like, I need support. I need help. I need to get better. 

[00:08:12] Dr. Robinson: But when they come in, It's a two hour new patient visit where we spend the whole first hour reviewing the whole history of their disease and just their lifestyle and everything about them in general. But then the second hour is spent making a pretty comprehensive treatment plan.

[00:08:27] Dr. Robinson: So, I do have a whole team that helps out the patients where I say I handle the higher level medical stuff, I will go through their labs, their medications, their supplements, make sure there's no interactions and design supplement and herb and vitamin plans that play along with their conventional chemotherapy or make sure it's compatible with their radiation therapy or whatever they're doing.

[00:08:47] Dr. Robinson: We also offer many other therapies such as missile toe, so I have someone on staff specifically that just helps the patients go through their missile toe therapy, or if we're doing IV vitamin C or hyperbaric chambers, then we have staff dedicated for that. And then we're also a teaching clinic. So I have oncology interns where a lot of the patients, after a two hour meeting with me, they get so much information.

[00:09:08] Dr. Robinson: They're overwhelmed. And especially with what they're going through in the stress in their life, it's a lot for them. So they get all this information after two hours. Sometimes they go home and a week later they're like, I forgot 90% of what he said. So then I have an oncology intern that's there for just that they can call up and say, Hey, I know this thing was prescribed to me, but I forgot why.

[00:09:27] Dr. Robinson: Can you talk to me about why this is indicated in my case, that sort of scenario. So we have the handholding aspect as well. But then almost all of my patients, I'm recommending, we have an acupuncturist on staff. I'm recommending acupuncture at the same time. And very commonly we're a big hyperbaric clinic and using hyperbaric medicine in our office as well.

[00:09:45] Dr. Robinson: So it's a whole team. 

[00:09:46] Christa: Cool. Can we talk about some of those individual therapies? I don't know what missile toe therapy is. 

[00:09:52] Dr. Robinson: Yeah, so missile toe is injections of the plant missile toe. It's widely used over in Germany. There's probably hundreds of studies on missile toe. And actually in the hospital system it's like 80% of cancer patients get it alongside their standard of care.

[00:10:06] Dr. Robinson: Just the US medical system kind of has this approach where they don't do an intervention until there's US studies. They don't really care what's happening in Europe sort of scenario. Soto has been around for a very long time. It just was never done in the US until the eight weeks ago or so.

[00:10:25] Dr. Robinson: Maybe March 23, John Hopkins finally just published the first US Missile Toe trial and it was positive and we knew it was gonna be positive cuz it's been done a hundred times over in Europe before. But we hope that this is the first study to really get this to be a popular medicine, popular option for people in the United States.

[00:10:44] Dr. Robinson: But when you look at some of the data, even in stage four population studies, sometimes there's 40% increased survival times, with missile toe therapy as an injunctive to what they're already doing. And I'll tell you, there's a whole bunch of chemotherapy drugs that do not have a 40% increased survival time.

[00:10:59] Dr. Robinson: It's like, it's a really efficacious therapy with virtually no side effects. Missile toes and kill cancer. Missile toes stimulates your immune system, stimulating your immune system to fight back against the cancer. So it's a way to get some cancer fighting ability, but then also to just build your body up from, all the chemo and everything like that.

[00:11:17] Christa: I am wondering, did you travel, internationally or do you have international colleagues where you learned some of these things that were like, what are some of the things that we do internationally in cancer care that we don't do in the us? I know that's kind of a loaded question since we talking about missile toe.

[00:11:31] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. haven't been to Europe or Germany or anything like that for any of the training. They do do missile toe training in the United States through a couple different institutes here. 

[00:11:39] Dr. Robinson: But yes, I do travel around North America. So this year I was at a integrative oncology conference. I was one of the speakers down in, Mexico where patients flew from all over the world.

[00:11:50] Dr. Robinson: It was probably half US and Mexican doctors, but there was a number of doctors 

[00:11:54] Dr. Robinson: I'm Eastern European, doctors that are wanting to learn about a bunch of these different therapies coming over to us to learn. So it's nice to see and have that exposure to what is everyone from around the world doing where sometimes various therapies are not available everywhere. Like there's a doctor from South Africa there, and at the end he came up to me and said, everything you said sounds absolutely amazing.

[00:12:15] Dr. Robinson: I have no idea how to give this stuff. So it's interesting, 

[00:12:18] Christa: Right. and that's what we say maybe about this missile toe therapy. It sounds like it's IV given alongside cancer treatment in Germany, but unless people can come into your office or find a place that does missile toe therapy, they're kind of out of luck probably. Right. It's not something they can necessarily do. 

[00:12:32] Dr. Robinson: It's a cutaneous injection, so write the order for it so the patients can get it, but it's a tiny little diabetic insulin needle that they're injecting into their belly fat typically. 

[00:12:41] Christa: Oh, easy. 

[00:12:41] Dr. Robinson: We just train all the patients how to do it on their own. It's not an expensive therapy at all. It's about $20 per injection.

[00:12:47] Dr. Robinson: You do an injection about once per week, so we tell people don't pay to come into our office to do a five second procedure. We just train you how to do it, and then have the pharmacy drop ship at two directly. 

[00:12:58] Christa: Cool. Sounds like you've thought through a lot of these things. I really appreciate this. Okay, so back to international.

[00:13:04] Christa: Is there anything that you took away from that integrative oncology conference internationally where you're like, oh wow, over here they do this and I wish we had this in the United States, or do you feel like you are able to access a lot of the things that you want? 

[00:13:18] Dr. Robinson: I really wish in the United States there was better access to peptides, and a lot of different peptides.

[00:13:24] Dr. Robinson: Peptides are basically just tiny. Proteins, but a large amount of the peptide therapy and peptides are popular right now. PIC or semaglutide, everybody is on as a peptide drug to try to lose weight. Right now it's all over the news. 

[00:13:38] Dr. Robinson: But there's a bunch of different medications that are peptides and I even hesitate calling them medications cuz they're very natural substance.

[00:13:45] Dr. Robinson: But the majority of peptides are in a gray area called research chemicals, which means. It's not an FDA approved drug, but it also doesn't meet the criteria of a supplement. So it gets thrown into a gray area called a research chemical. And technically, they're only supposed to be used to do research.

[00:14:02] Dr. Robinson: So unless you're injecting it into rats, they're not you really commercially available in the United States. Except for some unique scenarios. So when Ozempic or Semaglutide is the generic of Ozempic, how that got approved in the United States was the pharmaceutical company basically patented the pen injector to be able to inject it into you, cuz you can't patent a peptide itself.

[00:14:22] Dr. Robinson: So now they're able to sell it at pharmacies and everything like that. But that's the thing with peptides. If peptides are dirt cheap, Things. They're, very, very, very inexpensive, natural biological substances. Many of them have used in other countries, not just for cancer, but for all kinds of health issues for decades.

[00:14:38] Dr. Robinson: You know, we're talking 30, 40 years. Some of them have, 60 years of clinical trials of use in Russia. No drug company wants to spend 22 million to get it approved as a drug here in the United States because they cost 5 cents to make, and they're not patentable. So there's all this competition.

[00:14:56] Dr. Robinson: They're not gonna put in the money to get it approved and then not be able to make any money back off of it. It's just, that's not what healthcare should be about. You know? It shouldn't be, let's only approve the things that we can make a giant profit off of. Who cares if it's saving people's lives? So that's the frustrating part here.

[00:15:11] Christa: So you don't really have access to peptides like you would like them to be? 

[00:15:17] Dr. Robinson: The vast majority of peptides that I wish I had access to is we don't have access to, in the United States, there's maybe 20 or so that are available via compounding pharmacies. That again, just that process makes it very costly compared to what they actually would be. 

[00:15:32] Dr. Robinson: But I mean, the reality is, is patients come into me all day long, taking these peptides from, they either flew out of the country to get them, or they're ordering them online in the black market, and it's like, Yeah, I wish this was something I could prescribe to you, but they've decided that they care about their life more than, you know, what they'll do, whatever they have to do to get their medication sort of scenario and that's where we're at right now. 

[00:15:54] Christa: Right. Which is why we're having this conversation, partly because you have to know what options are out there and maybe who they can come see, et cetera. What's the mechanism of action of peptides on cancer? 

[00:16:06] Dr. Robinson: It varies there. There's many, many, many different types of peptides.

[00:16:09] Dr. Robinson: Some of the most popular ones are thymus extract is an organ that. Produces immune cells. So tract peptides are same thing as they really, really strongly activate your immune system. And those are peptides that, again exist in the United States because they're given to AIDS patients that have no immune system and they are FDA approved for that population to boost to give them some immune function.

[00:16:33] Dr. Robinson: But it's like there are patients other than AIDS patients that need immune activity. So that's where. Technically they're available in the United States. They're just being used off label for other indications. There are other peptides. There's one called P N C. P n C directly inhibits, it activates an enzyme that tells the cancer cell to kill itself off.

[00:16:53] Dr. Robinson: It directly causes apoptosis. It actually got, kind of went through some clinical trials here and got paused because it killed some of the rats in the study because of something called tumor lysis syndrome, which means it killed the cancer too. Well, it broke down the cancer too quickly and then all that dead tissue and debris overwhelmed the kidneys in the liver and the body couldn't process all of it.

[00:17:14] Dr. Robinson: It's kind of like how burn victims sometimes don't die of the burn. They die of all the dead tissue that the body can't process. It's a similar scenario with P N C and it kind of got halted in the clinical trials because it caused strong tumorlysis and it broke down the too quickly. And to me it's like, well, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place.

[00:17:34] Dr. Robinson: That means we just have to figure out how to dose it better. You know? We need to figure out, we need to do more studies to figure out how to use it more appropriately so that we can use it for its benefits, but not kill people in the process, obviously is the main goal. Right. 

[00:17:49] Christa: I feel like you're so organized in your practice and with the university that if you're not already doing studies, it's in the near future for you.

[00:17:57] Christa: Are you doing some studies in the clinic?

[00:17:59] Dr. Robinson: we do so. I do a lot of speaking around the US and a lot of clinical presentation sort of stuff. To do what a lot of people refer to as a randomized controlled trial, double-blind study. Those are really, really hard to do in our type of medicine because we give multiple different therapies at a time, and trials are all about one intervention at a time sort of thing.

[00:18:24] Dr. Robinson: And that's just not what we think medicine should be like. They want to change one variable at a time. So clinical trials are hard on that aspect as well as they're incredibly, incredibly expensive. So most of what we do is, our patients, but then when we get surprising outcome things that we're going and publishing the data after the fact, and sharing the knowledge. 

[00:18:45] Christa: All right, so we went through missile toe therapy. We went through peptides. You mentioned also having an IV, vitamin C and HBO in the clinic. So I interviewed Jeanie Driscoll one time about IV vitamin C. I think she had the first NIH study in the US for IV vitamin C therapy.

[00:19:00] Christa: Will you share a little bit about when you use IV vitamin C therapy, maybe what cancers use it for, and what kind of results you see with it, and how often you use it and just a little bit more about it.

[00:19:10] Dr. Robinson: Okay, so IV vitamin C. Has applications in a lot of different aspects of cancer care. Really, it's an oxidative therapy. So many things that we do in cancer treatments are oxidative therapies. IV vitamin C is, I mentioned hyperbaric chambers is a way to deliver oxygen. There's ozone therapy.

[00:19:29] Dr. Robinson: That's an oxidative therapy. All the oxidative therapies are doing a similar goal of. Cancer can't survive an oxygen-rich environment. It has a very hard time surviving in oxygen-rich environments because it doesn't have the same metabolic pathways that normal human cells do. It more so metabolizes, kind of similar to how bacteria and fungus do, and most bacteria and fungus again also don't really like oxygen.

[00:19:54] Dr. Robinson: So it's a way that we can deliver exogenous amounts of oxygen to the body to get some cancer fighting ability. But at the same time, your normal human cells love oxygen. So it's a way that we can really get a beneficial building up of the immune system at the same time, which also fighting that cancer at the same time.

[00:20:13] Dr. Robinson: There has been a number of clinical trials on it. There's not just this one, but it's used in various different scenarios such as post-radiation therapy. So radiation therapy is also an oxidative therapy that destroys a lot of body tissue very, very strongly. A lot of patients will use vitamin C to recover to make sure we can clean up all the damage that's been done after the radiation therapy, for example.

[00:20:35] Christa: So you can kind of use it all over the place, right? 

[00:20:38] Dr. Robinson: Yes. And IV Vitamin C is probably one of the biggest alternative medicine things out there for cancer, and people know about it and the medical oncologists know about it. And to them they will very commonly tell their patients not to do it because they know the therapies that they're delivering, such as radiation therapy is an oxidative therapy and vitamin C they know is an antioxidant.

[00:21:00] Dr. Robinson: So, In their minds, oxidation plus antioxidant, they cancel each other out and they think that it's gonna make the radiation therapy not doing anything right. And they don't want to give someone radiation if it's not gonna do anything. But we have to say is that's a theoretical thing, or that happens in Petri dishes.

[00:21:17] Dr. Robinson: Humans aren't petre dishes. We have to look at the real clinical trials about what happens in real life people and see that the patients, when we give them radiation and then give IV vitamin C, they do better. There's better survival outcomes. So that's what we have to pay attention to.

[00:21:29] Christa: When people are doing IV vitamin C, Can you speak to doses used in cancer? Because there's a lot of med spa clinics popping up on every block now that do IV drip vitamin therapies, and I'm guessing what is being delivered there is a bit different than what maybe you're doing. 

[00:21:47] Dr. Robinson: So the typical dose for cancer is 50 grams, where most med spas will do like 10 grams.

[00:21:54] Dr. Robinson: 10 grams is a nice immune system boost if you're trying to recover from a hangover or you know, after a cold or flu sort of scenario. But that's using vitamin C as an antioxidant. It's obviously patient individualized, but. Usually vitamin C in an IV will be an antioxidant until you get above, say, 35 grams, and then anything higher than 35 grams that switches into an oxidative therapy.

[00:22:18] Dr. Robinson: So some patients will start at 35 and then work their way up to 50. There are other clinics that try to go higher than 50, but. It's very rare that there's patients that need that. Honestly, it's kind of a, money aspect. It's like, well, if we can charge the patients this much for 50, if I do 75, I can charge them 50% more. So 50 is usually where we shoot for. 

[00:22:40] Christa: Okay. Let's talk about HBO the other day. I was talking to someone about cognitive, All the things, all the uses for hbo, and a lot of times the dosing is 40 hours over time. What are you using in a cancer clinic , what's the minimum efficacious dose you're looking for?

[00:22:59] Dr. Robinson: Again, it depends on what we're using it for. So radiation patients, if it's just radiation recovery, it's like, well after every radiation session go and do HBO t So it depends on how many radiation sessions, and sometimes that's 10 or 20, right? 

[00:23:11] Dr. Robinson: If we're looking at just using it as a fighting back against cancer sort of scenario, yeah.

[00:23:15] Dr. Robinson: You're in the 30 to 40 session. Range or you have these patients that have chronic cancers for, decades at a time sort of scenario. That's where sometimes we even recommend patients getting their own chamber and, we'll write the order for them to get a chamber in their own house so that they can do it indefinitely.

[00:23:32] Dr. Robinson: I have probably 50 patients that have gone that route cuz they wanna do therapy five or six days a week and it just becomes more cost effective to do it that way. 

[00:23:40] Christa: Is there anything that sticks out to you that you wanna share about when you're doing some of these therapies, some of the measurements that you might do before and after?

[00:23:47] Christa: For example, in my practice, and I use symptoms as the biggest measurement, even more than labs, just because we care about how we feel the most in cancer. Or when you're doing these measurements, what are some of the things that you guys look for? What are typical outcomes you see from some of these therapies we've talked about so far?

[00:24:04] Dr. Robinson: So definitely symptom-wise is how the tumors feel, how the patients feel. All of that is definitely important to us. But there's a number of labs that we can do as well. Standard oncology mostly just orders A C, B, C and C M P, which is, $2 of blood work to monitor their cancer patients.

[00:24:21] Dr. Robinson: There are some different calculations that exist in the literature where you can take different pieces of the C B, C and do some math. To give an idea of what's really going on with the immune system. Is it growing? Is it shrinking sort of scenario. And there are published numbers on there about, oh, outcomes are okay as long as the ratio ends up being here, and we wanna try to shift those ratios around.

[00:24:42] Dr. Robinson: But then there's also what we would just call traditional tumor markers. So the best example of that is PSA for males. You know, a male turns 50, they get a PSA test, it's a $1 test, and if it's elevated means they have prostate cancer, and then if it's going up, it means their prostate cancer is getting worse, right?

[00:24:57] Dr. Robinson: There's the equivalent of that for dozens of other cancers. There's three for breast cancer, there's colon cancer, ones lung cancer ones. It's just, they're not honestly used that often in the conventional system. Mostly because of an insurance financial reason sort of scenario. But those are, they're not very expensive tests.

[00:25:14] Dr. Robinson: When you get into the cash world, we're talking $30 tests to giving us an idea is, Hey, is your cancer getting better or worse? 

[00:25:22] Christa: Can you talk about what some of those are called? 

[00:25:25] Dr. Robinson: Yeah, most of them have abbreviations. So, like ovarian cancer, one is probably one that a lot of OB GYNs will use.

[00:25:32] Dr. Robinson: It's a CA 1 25. But then at breast cancer, there's a CA 27 29. CA stands for Cancer Antigen. It's a CA 15 dash three also used in breast cancer, and some of them have overlap, so like a 15 dash three will be used in breast cancer, some ovarian cancer is uterine cancer, things like that. And then a CEA is traditionally a colon cancer marker, but also shows up in the majority of lung cancer shows up in about 70% of breast cancers.

[00:26:01] Dr. Robinson: And then ca 19 nine again is traditionally a pancreatic cancer marker, but shows up in stomach cancers and liver cancers and other things like that. So there's dozens of them, but a lot of them are these random numbers and they have applicability to not just the main cancer they were designed for.

[00:26:17] Christa: This is interesting. Do you think in the future there will ever be like cancer screening, blood draws, or they kind of encompass several of these, or does this already exist? I feel like people are interested in preventing or not having cancer with the rates going up. 

[00:26:32] Dr. Robinson: Yes. And two things is some commercial tests are available and advertise that.

[00:26:38] Dr. Robinson: I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but there's a lot of issues with a lot of them out there. They're very misleading. They'll do one single. Marker and say that this marker shows up in 60 different cancers. So if that marker is normal, then you don't have 60 different cancers. And it's like, well, it might show up in 2% of breast cancers, but if it doesn't show up in 98% of breast cancers, then it's not really that good of a screener for breast cancer. If that makes sense. And it's a thousand dollars test. So a lot of the commercial tests that exist out there aren't where we need them to be.

[00:27:11] Dr. Robinson: But to your point, and what we can do is I go all the time and lobby for advocate for this, even at these conferences with medical oncologists and say a PSA test, like I talked about, that prostate specific antigen test that we run on every single male when they're 50 and 60, because it costs 50 cents to run.

[00:27:30] Dr. Robinson: If you run that at a female, it's a very high likelihood if it comes back positive that they have ovarian cancer or breast cancer or something that's not right because they don't have a prostate. Right. I advocate, why don't we run a PSA on a female every year starting at 35 or 40 or so to screen, do some screening for breast cancer.

[00:27:49] Dr. Robinson: And I get these pushbacks of, we would spend so many unnecessary healthcare dollars doing that. We would get all these negatives that it's not worth it. And my opinion is just like, if you just ask the patient, would you want us pay 50 cents to do this test to, you know, potentially screen if something comes up, every female in America would do that, right?

[00:28:08] Dr. Robinson: So, I try, but so much of what we do here in the US is driven by insurance policies and dollars really, that we're kind of far away from that being standard of care. 

[00:28:20] Christa: Yeah. While we're on the topic of things that annoy you and cancer care, is there anything else you wanna throw into that bucket?

[00:28:27] Dr. Robinson: The majority of patients come into me wanting something that is not. What they actually need. It's very common that patients come into us with a stage four cancer diagnosis, highly aggressive cancer, and they know I'm a naturopathic doctor and make, want me to make a plan to juice away their cancer, for example.

[00:28:49] Dr. Robinson: And it's like, maybe when this was two years ago, stage one cancer and it was a millimeter big. Sure, that's the time. If you wanna try to juice away your cancer, maybe there's some success with that, but, The intervention that we do has to match the disease. And if you have this raging disease all over your body, just starting doing some juices a couple times a week is not gonna do anything.

[00:29:09] Dr. Robinson: So, a lot of the times I'm having to talk patients into surgery and things like that cuz a lot of breast, breast cancers, if you get a breast cancer stage one or stage two even, they have 99% survival rates. As long as they're treated appropriately. With surgical intervention, it's mostly just.

[00:29:26] Dr. Robinson: Cut the tumor out of there and over a 99% chance that everything's gonna be just fine and you're gonna live, I can't tell somebody to not do a 99% chance of beating their cancer by taking a gamble and going and doing some juicing. Right? So I have to do a lot of talking the patients into. Yes. Stay with your conventional medical doctor due to surgery.

[00:29:46] Dr. Robinson: Get your 99% chance and then I will be there to build your body up, support you as much as we can, keep you as strong as we can. Make sure you heal properly from surgery so that you can get the best outcomes that you're looking for. 

[00:29:58] Christa: That was a good one. Okay. Since we're on the topic of breast cancer now, you said earlier, and I've been seeing this unravel with friends that surgery is usually the most common situation.

[00:30:07] Christa: I just had a friend who had to have, Chemotherapy for, several treatments before surgery cuz it was like intertwined into the tissue. But what I am seeing or hearing from them is surgery and then sometimes tamoxifen is recommended. And so this is where my brain goes when I see that cuz I think the mechanism is reducing estrogen and I just think to myself, there's a lot of metabolic pathways for estrogen to go down. And at the very top, even though I don't think it's always indicated, is DYL methane or DIM supports it. So is DIM sim, is Tim Dim almost like a natural tamoxifen or am I way off board here?

[00:30:41] Christa: Just curious. This is what my brain is thinking about. 

[00:30:44] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. So yeah, there are similar analogs to some of the natural medications. So depending on the person's age, they may either get anastrozole is the common one, or if they're postmenopausal, they'll get tamoxifen. But either way is that's shutting off, a lot of the estrogen that floats around in the body and it's affecting all estrogen in the body and.

[00:31:03] Dr. Robinson: Kind of to your point, a lot of the estrin is not necessarily bad, but the doctors don't take the time to measure the various different estrin metabolites to actually see how much of the bad estrogen is there, how much of the good estrin is there, and try to get some balancing going on. 

[00:31:18] Dr. Robinson: But dim and then I three C and calcium D, glucarate. C, D, G. Those are things that dim takes care of the estrin in the blood. I three C helps the liver process it and calcium D glucarate helps the bowels and bile. Really make sure you get the estrins out of the body. Those are all. Really good interventions for people in these scenarios that don't have the side effect risk of things like osteoporosis and uterine cancer.

[00:31:43] Dr. Robinson: That's what they don't talk about enough. You take a tamoxifen for your breast cancer and then you get uterine cancer. Doesn't have the crazy side effect profiles, but are there any clinical trials that takes some patients on DIM and some patients on Tamoxifen and see what percentage of people do better?

[00:31:57] Dr. Robinson: There's not, because there's an issue with oncology and research of. Ethics where if there is a therapy that they know helps people, you can't put someone into a placebo controlled trial that may withhold that treatment for them, and then the patient may die. So anytime anything new is invented in the oncology world, it's always keeping the old intervention, then adding something new to it.

[00:32:21] Dr. Robinson: They never withhold something, which is how we're at the place where a drug called Adriamycin or Doxorubicin is the oldest chemotherapy in existence. It's a really, really, really toxic drug that is still used today because they just keep adding new things to the regimen. They don't wanna get rid of the old thing because they say, well, what if we do, and then some of all of our patients die.

[00:32:42] Dr. Robinson: We just killed all these people in the clinical trial. That wasn't our goal, and that's an ethical issue

[00:32:46] Christa: Right. Okay. So you were just talking about, with this medication or this can happen a lot, right? You have one cancer and then before you know it you can have a different cancer. I interviewed this very lovely oncologist one time and I learned a lot from that about when we're doing surgery we never really quite get it all and you're never really completely clear from cancer, so it can always grow back.

[00:33:12] Christa: Which makes tons of sense in my brain because of how I think about cancer metabolizing. But is there anything you would. Like say about that. 

[00:33:20] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. So there is a new category of testing out there called M R D testing. M R D stands for monitoring residual disease testing. the company I use is Natera and they do the SIGNATE test, but there's a couple of companies out there.

[00:33:34] Dr. Robinson: So say you do surgery and then they do a scan after to see if everything's all clear. People have to realize, when we talk about x-rays, whether it's a mammogram or a CT scan, those types of images can only see a tumor that's about 10,000 cells large. An MRI is our best imaging and that can see something that's like 8,000 cells large, which means you could have a significant amount of cells, 5,000 cells, somewhere that.

[00:33:58] Dr. Robinson: Nobody can see on imaging and they keep telling you, you're good to go. You're good to go even though there's cancer in your body. So M R D testing is a D N A screening test. It can detect significantly better. We're talking on the order of 10 to a hundred cells, which is like, a thousand times better than 10,000 cells.

[00:34:14] Dr. Robinson: Right? Their data says that they can detect many cancer recurrences up to two years earlier than standard imaging can. So, That's what I tell people all the time is if we can find out the cancer is back two years earlier than what an image could do, it is so easy to treat the cancer when we're detecting it that early, that we don't have to go through a bunch of crazy interventions to do so as we get to treat you very, very conservatively and get good outcomes.

[00:34:41] Christa: If you were catching at that early, what would you mean by conservative interventions that you could do? 

[00:34:46] Dr. Robinson: So that's like what the low dose chemotherapy that we do here. And so the chemotherapy is about a 90% lower dose than what you would get in the standard oncology office. But what we do is instead of just pumping it into your veins and letting it go everywhere in your body, and the reality is 90% of what you put in your veins goes sudden.

[00:35:03] Dr. Robinson: The non-cancer cells, only 2% of it goes to the cancer cells. We use insulin to drive it to the cancer cuz cancer metabolizes sugar. So, We give the patients insulin, really drop down their blood sugar, take a tiny amount of chemotherapy, mix it into a bag of sugar, basically infuse it into them, and it's preferentially gonna force the chemo to the cancer, not let it go to the rest of the cells, meaning let the chemo do what it's gonna do.

[00:35:26] Dr. Robinson: It's good at killing cancer. Just the problem with chemo is it's not good at keeping the rest of your cells alive. So don't let it go to the rest of your cells. So if we can direct it somewhere, we get the cancer killing ability without the destroying your body at the same time. 

[00:35:38] Christa: Man. Does anyone else do that?

[00:35:40] Dr. Robinson: There's about 30 clinics across the US that do I p t. 

[00:35:43] Christa: Oh, I was thinking with, you were putting glucose in with the chemotherapy or your dosing at the same time. Right. So that way it goes to , that specific piece. Only 30 clinics do that. 

[00:35:53] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. 

[00:35:53] Christa: Seems like a really efficient way to use and target chemotherapy properly. Seems real smart and cheap. 

[00:36:01] Dr. Robinson: The funniest part of the whole thing is, conventional oncologists all the time are like, oh, there, there's no way that could work. But then let me go order a PET scan on my patient. That's what a PET scan is, a PET scan is they inject radioactive sugar inside of you and then take an x-ray of you and wherever that sugar goes.

[00:36:17] Dr. Robinson: If your elbow lights up like a light bulb, they say, well, there's no reason for your elbow to be eaten a bunch of sugar. There must be cancer there. So it's like they already use that for imaging and diagnostic purposes. We're just using that same concept for treatment and purposes.

[00:36:32] Christa: I love it.

[00:36:32] Christa: So in theory, if someone didn't have access to one of these 30 clinics, could they drink orange juice during their chemotherapy treatment and potentially have some benefit? 

[00:36:43] Dr. Robinson: Kind of the other way around. There's a significant amount of research about going into chemotherapy. Fasting. So 13 hours is the magic number where if you hit 13 hours at the time, the infusion is going in.

[00:36:54] Dr. Robinson: Basically you, you make the cancer so starving cuz your blood sugar is so low. Right. The cancer is like, Gimme, gimme, gimme opens up all the doors. Cancer has 25 times more insulin receptors than normal cells do. So really it opens all the floodgates and just whatever you put into the veins after that are going to preferentially go there more so compared to the normal cells in the fasted state.

[00:37:17] Dr. Robinson: And then, you take some food or some sugar, and then you shut all the gates and to keep it closed. So you go into a fasting to get it in there, and then you shut the gate. 

[00:37:26] Christa: So you eat. After you start the chemotherapy or after the chemotherapy's done?

[00:37:30] Dr. Robinson: They usually won't let you eat it during, cuz they don't want you to choke, I guess, and go into anaphylaxis or something like that.

[00:37:37] Dr. Robinson: But yeah, as soon as you're done with the IV start eating. 

[00:37:40] Christa: Super interesting. Okay. So you mentioned earlier that cancer metabolizes a lot like a bacteria and a fungus metabolize. And when I think about cancer, I think about autophagy and I think about when that does not work well or clean up a program, cell death, right?

[00:37:57] Christa: Then we have this diseased cells and then we have diseased tissue, and then. What is gonna turn that tissue into malignancy. And then there's some people that say, yeah, it's fungus that's running amuck, or sometimes parasites or some kind of immune stimulation or immune insult perhaps that's turning on that tissue into malignancy.

[00:38:15] Christa: This is just like, I have been thinking about this a lot, which is why I reached out to you because I'm just like on a real cancer kick right now with having friends being diagnosed and you're probably not surprised, like I think you shared this the other day. An alarming number of this age group are being diagnosed with cancer, and so I'm just feeling really called to this topic.

[00:38:33] Christa: What do you think about the development or malignancy or malignancy being turned on from cancer? This is like how my brain's thinking about it, but what do you think about it? , you know, a thousand times more than I do. 

[00:38:44] Dr. Robinson: So whatever is happening right now is scary. And we don't know, like if we would've had this interview a year or two ago and you would've said, what is your patient population?

[00:38:53] Dr. Robinson: I would've said mostly 60 and 70 year olds, people that get cancer. Right now, more than half my practice is, In their twenties and thirties, coming in with stage four diagnoses it was a rapid shift. You don't see a demographic shift, 30, 40 years in a year. So something's going on.

[00:39:09] Dr. Robinson: We try to search around and find out, but what's really happened? And you can only make conjecture right now, but we're trying to figure that out. But to your point is yes, and the research does know that there's. I don't know if you're familiar and listeners are familiar with something called the Warburg Effect odor.

[00:39:26] Dr. Robinson: Warburg was this guy back in the twenties that basically studied cancer and he won the Nobel Prize for saying that cancer lives in an acidic environment. So that's for the last a hundred years, all these people have been trying to juice away their cancer hydrogen peroxide away their cancer to try to get rid of the acidity of cancer.

[00:39:46] Dr. Robinson: The problem is that doesn't work in real life so much. You can't. Really just pump a bunch of a hundred peroxide in your body and change your pH to kill the cancer because that was a Petri dish. And again, we're talking about humans. Human pH is incredibly, incredibly narrow window. It doesn't allow fluctuations.

[00:40:00] Dr. Robinson: The cancer makes a little acidic bubble around itself that's kind of separate from normal human tissue. So last hundred years, everyone in the medical world has worked under this idea of the Warburg effect where cancer is creating acid around it. And we have found out that's not actually the case anymore.

[00:40:17] Dr. Robinson: It's something that's called the reverse Warburg effect, which you guys can Google image and find some little diagrams on it. Basically, the reverse Warburg effect is, Cancer cells and pre-cancer cells squirt out these products, we'll call them, squirt out these cellular signals that tell all the healthy cells around them.

[00:40:35] Dr. Robinson: It hijacks the healthy cells around them to start pumping out the acid and to start pumping out basically protective mechanisms so that the cancer can be in an environment that it likes to, the cancer's not turning healthy cells into other cancer cells. It's tricking the healthy cells to go and produce a cancer thriving environment.

[00:40:53] Dr. Robinson: And that's the tricky part. You can try to go and do chemo and stuff all day long to kill off cancer cells, but if there's all these healthy cells that just keep pumping out the acid and keep saying, yeah, go, go, go. New cells, come on back. That's where you don't get good outcomes. 

[00:41:09] Dr. Robinson: So that's why integrative oncology is so important because chemo wipes out the immune system. It stops that ability from being able to fight back. Even if it kills the cancer, the body can't fight back. So you need somebody on your team to help you fight back, help you build up your immune system so that terrain issue doesn't allow the cancer to regrow. 

[00:41:28] Christa: You mentioned earlier a couple of times things that you use to stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. I have a friend who works in cancer and nutrition, and we were talking one day about some of the modalities she uses, which are the same for many other things. It's looking at what's going on with the immune system in the microbiome, looking at chronic stress that occurred before looking at drainage and detoxification.

[00:41:52] Christa: And I was thinking that there's a lot of overlap between maybely that and the autoimmunity. It feels like a lot of that and autoimmunity. However, in autoimmunity the conversation is let's not stimulate the immune system. Cause the immune system is already really overstimulated and I feel like you could almost make that argument and cancer. 

[00:42:08] Christa: I mean, I think this is like a conversation, I dunno what you think, but I think, I went to something with Jeffrey Bland and they're talking about like stimulating the immune system versus supporting homeostasis. And so it makes sense in your context, right? If you have chemo and you're killing things and you're suppressing the immune system, we wanna stimulate it.

[00:42:23] Christa: But what are your thoughts about stimulating immune system cancer wise? When is it appropriate to stimulate versus not stimulate, I guess is the question. 

[00:42:32] Dr. Robinson: It's, the problem with the question is the oversimplification. And we talk to patients about it that way, about, oh, you're immune suppressed, or We need to boost your immune system.

[00:42:42] Dr. Robinson: The reality is that word immune system is, your immune system is many, many, many different things. So just like an autoimmunity. So my practice is actually half cancer. The other doctors in my office do autoimmunity. I only see cancer. But yeah, it is inherently the same issue where it's immune system modulation that is needed.

[00:43:00] Dr. Robinson: It's the wrong part of the immune system is activating. We need to lower that down and then stimulate the right part of the immune system. That's where the imbalance is coming and I tell patients, even just look at your standard C B, C blood work. Yes, it says white blood cells at the top. That's not really what we're talking about.

[00:43:17] Dr. Robinson: You scroll down and it says, Neutrophils, lymphocytes, eosinophils, basophils, monocytes. That's the subcategory of the white blood cells. That's what we're talking about is when you have too many of the one and not enough of the other, that's when that imbalance happens. 

[00:43:31] Christa: Oh, we've covered a lot of things today.

[00:43:33] Christa: You brought up a test for monitoring residual disease and right before that we were talking about estrogen metabolism. And since you mentioned the one test, I think I should go back. I often say to people that have family history of breast, cervical ovarian cancer, female cancers, that they should have a test that looks at estrogen metabolism.

[00:43:53] Christa: And the only one I'm familiar with is the DUTCH test. Is there anything you wanna add to that? Or do you disagree or agree? 

[00:43:59] Dr. Robinson: I am not the biggest fan of Dutch tests just because of the issue of, so Dutch, the DU stands for dried urine. There's an issue when you're taking one or two drops of dried urine, cuz think about your pee.

[00:44:11] Dr. Robinson: Sometimes it's white, sometimes it's yellow, it varies so much. So I like the idea of the Dutch test, but doing it through other companies like Genova that have you collect 24 hours of urine so that you're getting all of the urine, all of the estrogen squirted out for an entire 24 hour period, and then using that as your sample, that doesn't leave issues.

[00:44:33] Dr. Robinson: Cuz if you drink a bunch of coffee, a Dutch test can be skewed because it changes , just how much you're peeing out in your hydration level. 

[00:44:39] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:44:39] Dr. Robinson: But that exact idea of Yes look at all the estrogen that people are making and balance it out. 

[00:44:44] Christa: Yeah, you're not supposed to do that when you take it.

[00:44:47] Dr. Robinson: I know 

[00:44:47] Christa: that doesn't mean . But it could happen. Right? People don't always, that happens all the time or in different types of tests. Things like that happen all the time. For sure. 

[00:44:56] Dr. Robinson: I don't think that test is garbage. It's just I prefer the 24 hour urine. Cause I think there's less margin of error.

[00:45:02] Christa: Yeah. Cool. 

[00:45:03] Christa: Well, when I talked to Dutch about this, they said with the per one person I talked to who worked with Dutch said, I think we're the only lab that does estrogen metabolism. So you're bringing up another option from Genova. 

[00:45:16] Dr. Robinson: Yeah. 

[00:45:16] Christa: So cool. All right, so we talked about. You the practice. We talked about missile toe therapy.

[00:45:23] Christa: We talked about peptide therapy. We talked about IV vitamin C, hbo. We got into little blood tests for screening for colon, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, et cetera. We talked about things that kind of stink in the cancer, realm, which is trying to do things. You see that a lot, right? Where you get to that desperation point where it's like, man, I think that's why I'm so interested in this topic is like I feel like we should all be working on cancer prevention all the time right.

[00:45:47] Christa: we talked a little bit about some meds. We talked a teeny bit about some nutraceuticals. Is there anything you wanna say about any other nutraceuticals in cancer? Whether here are some things that are a hundred percent contraindicated and I take people off of them all the time, or these things are really supportive during chemotherapy for liver protection.

[00:46:05] Christa: Anything you wanna say to that? 

[00:46:07] Dr. Robinson: So the tricky part, and that's why I say find an expert over and over is because every chemo, there's dozens of different chemos and everyone has different things that interacts with. So it's a really hard question to answer. I'll say if there's anything that is generally a good idea, it's medicinal mushrooms.

[00:46:22] Dr. Robinson: Medicinal mushrooms basically don't interact with anything. So reishi, maitake, shit, talkie, Turkey tail. You know, there's various different medicinal mushrooms out there. Those are always a good idea in cancer. 

[00:46:33] Dr. Robinson: In terms of the avoidance, it's really two things that I very commonly every patient comes in taking and I have to throw it away and they get mad at me for doing it.

[00:46:44] Dr. Robinson: Is going to be their methylated vitamins, their methylated B vitamins. It's of hot topic and functional medicine right now where the patient talks to their oncologist and says, I wanna do some natural stuff alongside my chemo oncologist says, I don't know any of this stuff. So then they go and find a functional medicine doctor that randomly puts 'em on a bunch of methylated vitamins.

[00:47:02] Dr. Robinson: Methyl donors are on signals, a lot of Americans that are fatigued, overweight, depressed. You give 'em a bunch of on signals and suddenly they feel good. Well, what is cancer? Cancer cells that, that's all they know how to do is turn on. They don't know how to turn off. And that's a. You look at a b12, a methyl B12 supplement, it's a thousand times the daily value of methyl b12.

[00:47:21] Dr. Robinson: That's or a hundred thousand times the daily value sometimes, right? That's a hundred thousand times every day saying, go, go, go. Grow, grow, grow. That's the exact opposite of what we want to do in cancer. But patients always come in on tons of methylated B complexes, and that's the last thing we want. And then glutathione.

[00:47:39] Dr. Robinson: You know, glutathione is probably one of our strongest antioxidants that a lot of people end up on and glutathione has people don't realize that a lot of things you could do to strengthen your body can also strengthen the cancer. That's the tricky part about cancer, is it's your own cells. So if you take all this glutathione to try to strengthen your body, well then you just made the cancer more resistant to the things you're trying to do to kill it off also

[00:48:03] Christa: I'm really glad I asked that question. Those were some really good answers. I am not like a giant methyl put people on bunch of methylated stuff, so I'm glad. Thank you. But I feel like glutathione could be easily missed because it's a huge antioxidant. 

[00:48:17] Christa: I do have to ask then and you might not be able to answer this, if someone is on chemotherapy and they need to strengthen their immune system and they can't get peptides and they maybe, I don't know if they could even go to a med spa and the five or 10 grams of IV vitamin C is better than zero grams. I don't know. Is there anything, you mentioned the medicinal mushrooms, which I think is great, and I see the overlap of that in a lot of places. Is there anything you can safely tell someone this might be supportive in this situation for you?

[00:48:47] Christa: Or not really, it just depends. 

[00:48:48] Dr. Robinson: Let me also quickly just say so I don't forget. In order to do 50 grams of vitamin C, there's a blood test you have to do first to make sure you qualify. Because if you have a genetic disorder that you wouldn't even know about and nobody tests you for it and then they give you IV vitamin C, you could acutely die.

[00:49:03] Dr. Robinson: So you need to have that test done first. And a lot of times the med spas don't know that. So don't just convince your med spa to randomly give you 50 cuz you might die. Anyway, 

[00:49:12] Christa: thank. 

[00:49:13] Dr. Robinson: It's not kill patients. Yeah, there's a lot of basic things that have a small amount of interaction. 

[00:49:18] Dr. Robinson: So zinc, zinc for the immune system. A lot of the things that you would do to fight viruses, it's the same, your lymphocytes or your white blood cells that fight viruses, but those are also the white blood cells that fight cancer. So a lot of the virally supported stuff in the body is going to be indicated as well.

[00:49:34] Dr. Robinson: Zinc is a very classic example. Even fish oil, fish oils, that's what they do is they modulate those cell's ability to squirt out inflammatory compounds. So if we can get fish oils in there so that the cells can't squirt out so many inflammatory compounds, we're going to significantly get a good resistance to allowing the cancer to be able to thrive.

[00:49:55] Christa: Super helpful. Okay, so we talked about all the stuff we talked about before. We talked about estrogen metabolism. We talked about whether you really ever get away from cancer. We talked about things that you throw away when people bring it in, which was more interesting than I was even expecting. So thank you.

[00:50:10] Christa: And then you talked about some things that are helpful. Or most people, or at least like a big picture of what that is. We also talked a little bit about cancer versus autoimmune stuff. Is there anything else you really wanna throw in here after our conversation today? 

[00:50:24] Dr. Robinson: There is so much that can be done.

[00:50:27] Dr. Robinson: Chemo doesn't have to be miserable. Surgery doesn't have to be miserable. And the medical oncologist commonly will tell patients like, well, none of that stuff is studied. We don't know about it. We don't know how it's gonna interact. And that's just not, the reality of it is if you go to the textbook of naturopathic oncology, for example, you go to the end of the textbook.

[00:50:45] Dr. Robinson: And look at the resources section. There's thousands of studies on using these things in cancer patients and. You look at the journals that they're published in, and it's Lancet and the American Oncology Association. It's not crazy alternative medicine journals. It's these normal oncology journals out there.

[00:51:02] Dr. Robinson: The problem is, if you publish this study on turmeric and cancer, and the oncologist reads it, They're like, oh, great. Turmeric's good for cancer, but I don't know how to dose it. I don't know what it interacts with, and they don't know how to apply it. So there's so much research on what can be done, specifically studied alongside the chemotherapy, where this makes the chemo more effective, or this reduces the side effect of the chemo.

[00:51:24] Dr. Robinson: You just have to find someone that knows what they are and knows how to dose them appropriately and knows when to use the medications. So you don't have to suffer the help is there. You just gotta find the person that knows how to give the help. 

[00:51:35] Christa: I'm so glad I asked you to come on today. Now, if this happens to me, I know who I'm gonna go to.

[00:51:40] Christa: It's very good. Dr. Robinson, where can people find you? 

[00:51:44] Dr. Robinson: I [email protected] is our website, but also on Facebook and Instagram as just nourish healthcare. Like I said, as we're in the Chicago land area, we have three offices in the suburbs of Chicago, but we work virtually with patients all over the place.

[00:51:59] Dr. Robinson: So I'm easily findable. 

[00:52:01] Christa: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:52:04] Dr. Robinson: Of course. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

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