Reflecting on Integrative Oncology

Just a quick episode reflecting on Heather's story and the difference between "functional" or "integrative medicine" and "alternative" medicine.

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Transcript:

 Those of you listening on the day that this episode is released, happy Easter to you if you celebrate Easter. I'm just here again just me reflecting on some of the things we talked about in the last episode with my guest, Heather Jose. Her episode was packed full of controversial issues and I'm just gonna cover a couple of them today.

And also wanted to give you a heads up that I may not be putting out episodes in the next couple of weeks. I've had a couple of guests cancel and have to reschedule, and then my dad just passed away this last week, and so I'm not able to reschedule with them soon. I do still intend to put out, um. Maybe three or four or more episodes before I take a break for the summer though.

So I will be back at some point probably in May and not in April. Um, but don't worry, I haven't finished this season quite yet. So just to get back to last week's episode and some of the topics discussed with Heather, I wanted to talk about her complimentary or integrative, uh, approach to her oncology, the fact that she worked in tandem with both the conventional system and the lifestyle medicine system.

This can be really confusing for folks who aren't familiar with. The world of functional medicine or even nature paths. There are so many different types of cancer experts, so-called experts in the world, and some of them are, are highly, you know, board certified and backed up with lots and lots of education and others of them may not be.

All of them claim to have some interest in some kind of research, or usually they do, but not all of them have really solid research behind their practices, and so this can be really confusing and really expensive and kind of scary for the typical patient to explore. I have a background, personally,

I'm a functional nutritionist, so I have a lot of experience with telling these kinds of schools of thought apart. And unfortunately in cancer there's a lot of quackery. I think there always has been. Throughout history with cancer. There's a lot of, um, people making false claims or really, really naive claims without a lot of research behind them.

And this. Movie that we talked about that Heather and I were talking about briefly in the last episode that just came out on Netflix recently called Apple Cider Vinegar is a really good example of a couple of different really scary elements, um, in this kind of shady practice. In the movie Apple Cider Vinegar, which I'm not sure if you'll be able to watch as a cancer patient. For me, it was excruciating. It took me a couple of months to get through this very short series of episodes because it was just so painful and uncomfortable and cringey for me to watch. Just, just a really unfortunate story that seems to be somewhat true, um, that takes place in Australia.

But, uh, there were two elements that were disturbing. One was that this one character in, in the film, which the film kind of was focused on, was completely lying. She was a sociopath and coming up with dietary measures for people to fix or. Cure their cancer through As someone who had never had cancer and was claiming to have cured her own cancer, that really never existed.

Of course, that is a bizarre and disturbing story to watch for anyone. I. But then there were a couple of other characters in the movie that were kind of,, carrying on a claim for themselves, and they did have cancer. they were looking into all the alternative to conventional medicine options that were out there in the world.

There were things in Mexico and South America and, um, different in indigenous practices and. , it didn't go into all the details of all of them, but the really poignant part of the story was the death of, of one woman who became kind of a thought leader and influencer of other cancer patients. And all the while her cancer had been progressing and she was denying that.

And, it's a really good wake up call for those who are seeking the alternative kind of solution to cancer in in our world right now. I think we need to have that kind of sobering reality brought to us every once in a while, and yet people like my guest, Heather Jose, do feel like lifestyle changes, diet and exercise and stress.

Related and sleep related changes in their lifestyle have made all the difference. So there is, there is something to the lifestyle end of things. And I think for me anyway, in my, in my research and my exploration, I have found that functional medicine is the best kind of mediator of the two, um, of natural and integrative and complimentary medicine.

Approach to cancer as well as medical, conventional medical, because most functional doctors are actually MDs. They're, they're fully trained in the conventional system, and then they go beyond that to get trained in the lifestyle medicine, complementary or integrative, depending on what. Label you wanna choose, and the difference is that they look for the root cause

so they're going back to the origins of the disease, which only makes perfect sense to you if you're a scientist like it. It would make sense to most people who are scientifically minded and Dr. Block. My impression is, um, when Heather went to Dr. Block in, um, Illinois, that he is one of those functional type doctors.

He is an MD so he is certainly a, a full fledged oncologist, but he's also looking into some of the other ways to compliment that with natural and lifestyle approaches. And I'm really hoping myself that he does not get shoved under the bus as we are watching films like apple cider vinegar, uh, because there are very few people like him that bridge that nicely, that really embrace both sides of the continuum.

And I think that is where the most hope lies personally. Um, I've talked a little bit about my enthusiasm for exercise oncology. As a nutritionist, I have seen literature. Across the board with nutrition and it is really messy. It's really hard to establish whether or not food can be the reason for certain outcomes, positive outcomes, and lowered risk when it comes to cancer, because food is just really hard to isolate in our, you know, study of our habits.

It's, it's not something you can. Crystallized down to one behavior, well, the way that science kind of needs us to do. But exercise and sleep and stress are much easier to get crystallized down to a single behavior or outcome. So I have a lot more confidence as a nutritionist, even as much as I've studied and as much as I do believe in nutrition, I have more confidence in exercise and stress reduction.

We, we are so young in the world of science, and that's why it breaks my heart that so much science is being, dismantled right now with our current political situation.

But I just wanted to clarify kind of how I separate out these things, and I just wanted to say again, how blown away I am that Heather is out there sharing her story every week, just the salt of the earth, the most down to earth. Human being, not making any wild claims. She's the opposite of these personalities that you see in the Netflix series, apple cider vinegar, where they're just so confident about the reason that they got better, supposedly got better, which neither of them did.

Um, whereas Heather has stayed cancer progression free as a stage four patient, which is remarkable. It's not unheard of. There are other women like her who've lived 20 or 30 extra years with stage four cancer without. Any extra meds, even like her not having a whole lot of lifestyle inhibition by the drugs that she takes, but, uh, but that is pretty rare and I just love that she's sharing incrementally how she's doing week by week and staying on with her kind of. Regime of, of strict lifestyle habits with diet and exercise and stress, reduction in sleep, habits to increase the quality of her sleep.

So I just love, I love having her in the cancer community at large, not just breast cancer, but the larger cancer community. 'cause I think she gives people hope. And one of the things that Heather and I talked about was the placebo effect, the fact that. Patients do better when they believe they're doing something themselves that makes a positive difference. And I think this is true with any patient taking just about any drug. Um, for anything really, it's, the drug is so much more powerful when we believe that it's making a difference.

But it also can be true of our lifestyle choices, our dietary habits, our sleep choices, our stress management. You know, our exercise habits, all of those things, if we believe they're making a big difference, that makes our body all the more powerful, somehow in some magical way that we don't understand and that science can't really capture.

But it's called the placebo effect. And Heather was saying that she's a big, a big fan and believer in that in mindset, um, and mindset. Is not just a hocus pocus, you know, belief in something that's false, but it's a belief that the small things that you're doing, even though you can admit that they're small, make a big difference.

And so I think this is a great reminder to all of us to choose something, you know, whether it's green tea, like her first oncologist told her to just to go out and start drinking green tea. And then we'll talk about getting rid of this cancer next week. Um, whatever it is, eating more vegetables, eating more fruits, eating more whole foods and less, um, dirty meats and dairy products maybe.

I would just encourage you to choose some small thing that you can do that you've decided is warranted. Whether it's something you've read or a doctor's told you, um, do some small thing, not believing that it's gonna cure you or make everything get better, but that it will make a difference. And feeling empowered in that process, I think makes a huge difference for all of us.

There is one other movie that just came out on Netflix that I was thinking about talking about 'cause I just saw it today. Um, having just lost my dad, I'm really interested in some of the choices that we make around the time of death. And one of the things I wanna do sometime in the next year is to take a course on end of life doula/end of life planning, because I have friends that have been diagnosed with stage four and I wanna help them--people like Danyel that I would like to help plan the last days and weeks and months of their life. Um, I'm, I feel equipped to do that. And so I'm always interested in movies that talk about death and explore and watch death and few movies do this very well. Like my friend Christine Handy was saying in, in my interview with her, most movies about cancer patients will show them getting sick and then dying immediately, and boom, that's the end of the movie or that's the end of that scene or that person's character role in, in whatever story it is. They don't really address it. They don't. Stretch it out and watch it because it's uncomfortable, it's painful to watch.

And this movie that just came out on Netflix called The Room Next Door with Julianne Moore. And Tilda Swinton is a really good example of that. It's not a comfortable movie to watch. It is the least entertaining movie that you've probably ever seen. It's an awkward, drawn out movie with lots of silent parts and hesitations, which as Americans were pretty uncomfortable with, I think.

But if you're interested in the subject of death and especially euthanasia, I think that it's a really interesting movie to watch. I didn't love the acting. I'm not a huge fan of Tilda Swinton. I just don't love her acting for some reason. So I don't recommend it as an art piece or something to admire, but just something to.

Draw your thoughts out on death and as a cancer patient, I think we can be less afraid of recurrence or stage four diagnoses if we are willing to ask some of the harder questions about what we would do if we were diagnosed and if we were facing death. And I think this movie in particular really addresses it well.

I think it gives death less of a sting. It makes it less of a threat or less scary. Of a topic to think about. If we can think about all of the options, all the ways that we can deal with the pain or not deal with the pain. Um, with my dad having passed away just a few days ago, I really faced this myself, um, in terms of just being really insistent that he not be given measures to prolong his life. He was already psychologically suffering from dementia. And it was really important to us as a family not to prolong that suffering. And yet in the moment you always feel a little bit strange telling a doctor that the doctor we were dealing with was really great at supporting us through that decision and not making it awkward, but it's really good to practice. I got to practice with my mom and now I've gotten to practice with my dad, and that makes me more ready to be able to make those kinds of decisions, awkward as they are, socially hard as they are, for myself at some point. If you're interested in those topics, if it's not too scary for you, if you're in a good space, not too stressed out by the political situation right now, then you might check out that movie on Netflix just as an educational opportunity.

I just love Julianne Moore. She really takes on roles that explore these bold subjects a lot, so I appreciate her work in that respect.

So I will probably be away for a couple of weeks dealing with my family business. And if you'd like to be in touch with me, I am on Substack. That's the best way to hear from me every week. And, my substack is called abreastcancerdiary.substack.com. You can either subscribe through email or if you get the app, you can subscribe on the app and then check it out on the app and not get an email, and I will talk to you soon. Take care friends.