Believe Big Podcast

Summer Replay-19-Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy - What Every Cancer Patient Needs to Know

• Ivelisse Page with Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy • Season 1 • Episode 19

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When you are diagnosed with cancer, so many questions come to mind:

  • How quickly do I need to begin treatment?
  • What tests do I need to understand my cancer?
  • What changes do I need to make to my lifestyle and food choices?
  • What is a CSC or a CTC and is that important for my cancer journey?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy answers these questions and provides so much more information for anyone who is currently a cancer patient or anyone who wants to take preventative steps.  She has been named one of the top fifty functional and integrative doctors in the US.  Don't miss this episode!

Connect with Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy at the Cancer Center for Healing:
https://cancercenterforhealing.com/

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Ivelisse Page:

Hi, I'm Ivelisse Page, and thanks for listening to the Believe Big podcast, the show where we take deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page and today's episode is all about an integrative approach to cancer treatment. My guest is Dr. Erin Leigh Connealy. Dr. Connealy is a prominent leader in the integrative and functional medicine medical field. She is the medical director of two unique clinics, the Cancer Center for Healing and Center for New Medicine. The combined 30,000 square foot clinics have become the largest integrative medical clinic in North America and are visited by patients from all over the world. Patients receive scientifically based treatments and integrative protocols. She is an author, host of the TV series, Dr. Detective TV and was named one of the top 50 functional and integrative doctors in the country. Welcome Dr. Connealy to the show.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Thank you. Great to be here and share this special information with you.

Ivelisse Page:

Our listeners are always interested in discovering what our guest's favorite health tip is. I know you have many, but can you share one?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Probably the most important thing I think is that your day starts when you go to sleep. So you need to be mindful of how you're sleeping and get a good night's sleep. And usually you have to honor the circadian code, which is around 10 o'clock give or take, and wake up around six because the next part of your day is not going to be good if your sleep is not good. So I would tell people to focus first and foremost on their sleep and the quality of their sleep.

Ivelisse Page:

Oh, that's a great tip. And that's one that I try and work hard at. I've heard people say it doesn't matter if you go to bed at 10 or 11 or 12, as long as it's the same time every night, but you're saying 10, why?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Because our circadian code is like that, our circadian rhythm is like that. I know there are extenuating circumstances, but I would say most people fall in a 24 hour clock, that bedtime is around 10. If you look a hundred years ago, people went to bed when there was no lights, because there was no electricity. People went to bed when it was dark because there's not screens and TVs and all this other stuff. So it's really honoring the rhythm of our body. And I know people sometimes say I'm a night person and there probably are nocturnal people, but really most of the time people need to go to bed around 10 o'clock. And I say, give or take, cuz some people it's 9:30, some people it's 10:30, but I have lots of patients are going to bed at 2:00 AM. I'm like, why do you go to bed?

Ivelisse Page:

Wow.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Cuz that's when I like to look up stuff. I'm like, no, that isn't good for you. So anyway, there's lots of science to the circadian rhythm of our body.

Ivelisse Page:

I love that. Thanks for sharing that tip I'd love to know from you, what got you interested in integrative medicine and to specialize in cancer?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

First of all I grew up in Texas and my mother was all about feeding us naturally. And when I say that, like we never had cereal for breakfast. She made breakfast, we all made breakfast. It was six kids. So we all made breakfast and she used to read the books of Adele Davis. And during that time, Adele Davis was very well known for all of her health books and health tips. And so I grew up on liver and bone marrow, and sauerkraut all the things that are supposedly fashionable today and have been fashionable for the last several years. And so I grew up like that and I don't remember really going to the doctor that much, in fact, hardly ever. Then when I was in biology in high school, I loved biology and I said, okay, gosh, what can I do to use my biology ability? So I said, oh, I can be a doctor. But before that I was born in the fifties and I'm number three of six children. And my mother took a drug called DES, Diethylstilbestrol. And that was a drug used long time ago to prevent miscarriage and stop bleeding. And so when I was 16, my parents got a letter saying that drug given to mothers and their offspring, both male and female offspring had increased risk of cancer. So I started going to MD Anderson, which is one of the largest cancer institutions in the world to get evaluated and to get biopsies I actually had dysplasia, which is abnormal cells I, learned all about that, but that was one of my interests was DES. And so my whole interest for personally is how do I prevent cancer? But I went to medical school and then training, and then I started my practice in preventive health and weight loss. Because at the time people didn't have ways to lose weight. It was just like count calories and lose weight. I always said, no, we gotta look at your metabolism. We have to look at the individual and how their ability to not lose weight or lose weight and look at all their hormones. And so that was 36 years ago and I started out with a dietician in my office from day one, because

Ivelisse Page:

Wow.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

how you eat is what determines everything. Let's face it. And anyway, that was 36 years ago. Fast forward I had a lot of personal problems I didn't have regular menstrual cycles, I had infertility, all kinds of detours from just that one little drug DES. And then I met at a conference I met a gentleman who had sarcoma and sarcoma is a tumor of muscle and bone. He told me his whole life story, that he was diagnosed when he was 22 and they wanted to amputate his leg. He goes, no, I'm not gonna amputate my leg. He spent the next 11 years figuring out how to save his leg and cure himself of cancer. And I'm like, I need to learn everything this guy knows. So that was 25 years ago. He taught me so much about the mitochondria and stress and what is the environment of cancer and so forth and so on. So it's been a personal interest for myself and that's just carried on. So back about 12 years ago, we said we need to set up a division in the clinic about prevention, early detection and treatment of cancer. So I spoke to one of my oncology friends who was local in the area because I referred to him all my cancer patients. And I go, look, why don't you join forces with me? And so we did that. And we partnered with Oasis Of Hope in Mexico, cause Oasis Of Hope, always wanted to be in the United States. So Dr. Contreras and I had met and he's the only person I'd wanna partner with, so let's do it. So I brought the oncologist to Mexico. We started that, like I wanna say 12, 13 years ago to where we are today. I want everyone to know all of their options. And there's 1.2 million PubMed articles written per year. So that means there's new updated information every single nanosecond of our life. And we all, as scientists need to look at everything possible to save a person's life and to give them the quality of life they deserve. And I'm very passionate every single day about prevention and early detection. The problem is that doesn't sell. People are not interested in prevention. They're not, I don't wanna know, I'm scared to know. I talk about this in my book because the bottom line is cancer is one in two people. And it's growing. The next five years, they expect a 30% increase. I tell people

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

every day it's so much easier to prevent cancer than treat cancer because once you have cancer, you've got to really make sure that you are covering every base. Yes, you may need surgery. Yes, you may need chemo. You may need those conventional therapeutics and treatments, but that's just a bridge for you to learn how to never get cancer again.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes, I completely agree.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

And that's what people don't know. I always tell people, all of this is in PubMed, all of this information about natural things, about hyperthermia, about ozone. It's not like it's not there. It's there. If you go read and study, it is there. I remember we had this patient who had cancer and it was partly in their lungs and we said, can we inject mistletoe in their lungs area? And sure enough, there was a paper on it. I tell people it's impossible for anyone to keep up with the constant flurry of information that is happening all the time. But, I'll tell you one thing that I would tell anyone, it would be partner with a functional integrative practitioner who knows cancer but knows the early detection and prevention of cancer. And if they don't know, they can read my book and figure it out because I have patients who ordered their own test and have consults with me and they are already doing things and implementing things just because of my book. And so there is a way, and it's not that difficult and it's not that expensive. What's expensive is the treatment. And so we've got to change everything. Doctors unfortunately do not have time to teach patients how to live. And that's what we have to do is we gotta learn how to live. Because if you were born and you were taught we gotta get a good night's sleep, we gotta drink water, we gotta eat foods that nourish and drink and heal our body, we've gotta move our 800 muscles, we need to do a little bit of laying on the ground in stress reduction and these things that's what carry on. If patients can't do it one on one, create groups. Create little community groups with the patient, something to change so people can help each other get better.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes, I agree. And for those that are listening, and I know you have several things in your book that they can read into as far as what specifically they can do for the prevention side, but what would be your top thing out of all the things you list in there for someone who's starting on this journey? They find a functional medicine doctor. What should be the top thing they should do to prevent cancer as form of testing?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

As far as testing goes I would say the number one thing is take inventory of their stress. Because I ask every patient what happened to them as far as their life stress in the last 10 years. From one cancer cell to tumor is 10 years. So what happened to you? And as soon as you say that to patients and I don't ask them until the end. They tell me their whole slew of everything that happened. And it correlates with their diagnosis of cancer

Ivelisse Page:

Yes.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

almost all the time. So I would say, first of all, is we have to take inventory of how we're living and how we're responding to life and what we are perceiving as stress. So that would be the number one thing.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes, I think people focus in on the physical so much. And so much of our health is on that emotional, mental, and it affects our inflammation and so many other aspects. So I'm really glad that you mentioned that.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Yeah, because we just go through life thinking I just need to get through. And I'm like, oh no, everyone needs to get rid of the toxicity of their life no matter what and who it is. You can't a lot of times change people. So you have to learn how to just focus on yourself and get well. There is no other way. If you wanna save your life, you've gotta focus on your entire existence and how you're living, period. So that starts with how you're thinking you become what you think about most of the time. And then you've got to take inventory of your life. Most people are not eating the foods that nourish and strengthen and heal their body. So if they're eating cereal for breakfast, and you are eating pasta for lunch and macaroni and cheese for dinner, then you're not eating foods that nourish and strengthen your body. But if you honor how we ate over the last thousands and thousands of years, we were hunter gatherers. And if you eat like that then that's going to be the nourishment that your body needs and that's how you're gonna get your vitamins and all that. So we've forgotten how in the last a hundred years food has been, unfortunately, bastardized and we get all these boxed and junk. I saw a commercial there it's pizza with fried things and I'm like, oh my God, that's just not going to do anything to help your system. Yes, you might like it from an emotional standpoint but you're going to pay a price when you put things in your body that cannot nourish and strengthen each and every cell. You have to think when you eat food, how is it going to be profitable for you? And is it going to give your body the necessary information for the cell to work. That's really the bottom line.

Ivelisse Page:

Thank you, yes. What would be your best advice for someone who finds out that they have cancer?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

So most important thing is have your list of questions for the physician, make sure that you understand everything he or she is talking about and then become a perpetual student. Start reading as many books as possible. Do not make any quick, fast decisions. Don't let a doctor say, this is an emergency. Because no, it started 10 years ago, so it's not an emergency. All right. But you need to get at peace with what you're doing and what you need to do to prepare your body. So let's just talk about a biopsy. You should not be getting a biopsy without proper preparation, because you're puncturing an area where you can have the release and seeding. Do the preemptive measures before a biopsy. You have to understand why and where this happened because surgery is injurious and immunosuppressive. You don't wanna run in and just immediately do surgery. I had a patient the other day, I'll give you an example. She was diagnosed. She had abnormal things on her mammogram for five years. They go, oh it's consistent, it's tame, it's unchanged. And then all of a sudden now, seven years later is breast cancer. Unfortunately that's sad because the patient could have had preemptive testing to know, is this a problem or not? She also had fibroids. So the doctor decided to do a total hysterectomy and she has breast cancer. Fibroids are benign cuz they did a pet scan to see and why would you do an injurious procedure knowing a patient has breast cancer. Cancer's the number one priority. So I see things like this and I'm like, oh my gosh, how can this be? This is sad because here now I don't even know what's happened. She's a brand new patient this week and I didn't wanna alarm her or anything. At the same time you don't go do surgery on a patient for something benign, cuz you can manage that. Take care of the breast cancer first. Make sure that you partner with a doctor who knows cancer and treats cancer. Not all functional integrative doctors treat cancer every day like we do. Start reading every book, start listening to podcasts. And if you hear people saying similar things, if they're talking about the eating, the exercise, detox, that's what we need to do.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

And just don't make any fast, quick decisions. What I find with all patients is the doctors say, oh my gosh you gotta get this going, now we gotta do this. And I'm like, no, you don't need to do that. So I think people need to do a self-reflection on their life. What happened here? Why did I end up here? What changes do I think I need to make? Yes, my surgeon said I need surgery, but how do I prepare for surgery and what do I do after surgery? So I create this healing environment of fighting cancer and taking care of myself.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. And that's one of the things that my integrative doctor helped me with as well before my surgeries. And you are absolutely right. I think people are rushing into treatment, put on this conveyor belt of the system and they're trying to take care of you as best as they know.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Correct.

Ivelisse Page:

They don't know the side of medicine that you've been trained in and the importance of getting to the root cause of disease. As you said, cancer is not a cancer of a body part it's of the whole person. So trying to figure out what those things are, is so important, your care team, being your own advocate, and also the questions to ask oncologists. And we do have a PDF that we can add in the notes, along with the title of your book and a link in the show notes for people to download, if they're interested in those things. But yes, those are so vital and so important. And patients realizing that they do have time to research and to make the best decisions for their care. So for those who are listening, that may not be familiar with integrative medicine that well, can you share with us some of the wide medical disciplines that are included in this practice?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

So conventional medicine is great and wonderful. I don't want people to not get that because we have great testing that we can do. So that's comprehensive blood testing. Typically doctors only order a chemistry in a CBC. You're way more than that and you've gotta check inflammation, vitamin D, blood sugar, hormone levels, all these other things for anyone. It doesn't matter what you are, what your label is. Then we have phenomenal imaging, MRIs, and pet scans and CTs and ultrasounds and all that kind of stuff. That's conventional medicine and conventional workup. A hundred years ago, every doctor practiced integrative functional medicine because that's all there was. There were no drugs so they used iodine. They used homeopathics. They made their own potions and everything. It's already existed. And so unfortunately with the existence of patented drugs, they say, oh, we can make money. And unfortunately that's been the indoctrinations of doctors and all the medical practitioners today. Here you have a label, a pathology, whether it's high blood pressure or breast cancer, whatever. And then this is what you get conveyor belt. I Now that doctors are seeing functional integrative medicine work. So you're analyzing the nutrition of the person, you're analyzing the stress of the person. You're doing a very detailed blood work of the person you're looking at toxins, environmental toxins. You may need acupuncture. You may need homeopathy. In fact, there was a famous study that was done on homeopathy and how homeopathy increased the life of a patient. It's been around for several hundred years now we have scientific proof that homeopathy is real.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah I actually used homeopathy as part of my cancer treatment. It was one of the first steps that I did into natural medicine. I had a kit, a family kit, and when my kids were sick and when they're little, they had ear aches, they rarely had antibiotics because the homeopathic remedies always resolved

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

That's right.

Ivelisse Page:

their issues from simple things. So there is such power in homeopathy and actually mistletoe falls under the homeopathic Pharmacopia that many patients are using today.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

I just call it updated medicine now. Integrative is combining the best of conventional with this new. Acupuncture's been around for thousands of years. Homeopathy has been around for a long time. So we're resurrecting things that have been used for many years. Now we are saying, oh, they do work. They do help. And they do assist the body and they can, like you said, with your children, I encourage all the mommies out there. The body has this innate capacity to heal and we need to turn that on. Drugs, people need to understand that drugs are toxins. They all damage the mitochondria, which is one of the root causes of illness is damaging that mitochondria, that energy in your system that makes a TP and drives the energy of the cell. And so people just need to know that this stuff is all clinically validated. Now there's many medical centers around the United States who have integrated functional medical centers.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. And before we go into all those I wanted to go back to what you said about toxins. Many people are surprised when they get a cancer diagnosis because they didn't have a family history of it. And in your book, you share the medical research done by the American Medical Research Group that states how over 70 to 75% of all cancers are caused due to toxins and then viruses and other infections cause 20 to 25% and the electromagnetic pollution and genetics are thought to only cause less than 5%. Can you share some of those environmental toxins people should be made aware of that fall into that 70 to 75% category causing cancer?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

First of all we're exposed to a toxic soup. I always tell people this has been scientifically proven drawing people's blood, checking placenta, umbilical cord, breast milk that we hold over 200 toxins. And I tell people, we know what one toxin does, but we have no idea what the 200 plus what the synergistic potential is. I would say the number one pollutant is we're inhaling plastics and eating plastics. They now say we're eating a credit card a day of plastics. Plastics cause myriad of hormone problems, not to mention cancer. So that's one. Then you look at air pollution, and indoor air pollution is worse than outdoor air pollution. And then you think about the pollution in your food. Even if you eat perfectly, there's probably nothing perfect. They just found glyphosate in over 80% of people's urine. In England, it was like 95%. Then there's the chemical exposure. If you have an infection infections, make their own chemical byproducts. All your clothes have toxicity. Everything you use in your house. I wrote my book Perfectly Healthy, about getting rid of every toxin in your house. You don't need any toxic cleaning products. There's just abundant amount of beautiful natural companies that are selling everything that do not damage your body. But if you think about how many people are using products on their body, their skin, their shampoo, and then water look at all the toxins in water, whether it's drinking water or shower water. It's everywhere. They found pharmacology in the water not to mention all the chemicals in the water. Unfortunately we have to cleanse every day now whether it's sauna, detox bath, or something to detox by our body because that is just the reality of where we are. Nobody's gonna come together to clean up the existing situation. We don't have enough time, money, resources, or people to clean up the world we live in. And so that means we all have to embrace self care. Self care is the new healthcare because there's no drug that's going to get rid of toxicity. There's no surgery, there's nothing in the conventional system that's going to, so you've got to take ownership of yourself and equip your body the best way possible, clean your environment. It's not something that's gonna happen overnight. Usually I tell people when you start this journey, it takes about a year. A lot of people go, oh my God, there's so many things to do and so forth. Yes, but once you take a year to cleanse your living environment.

Ivelisse Page:

What are some examples?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

I am such a conscientious person about every single thing so I go to a restaurant and I know the restaurant doesn't care about me. I have, I have to go out sometimes, so I just put it, outta my mind and go, okay. But I like eating at home my own food. When you think about, from the time you wake up take inventory. What kind of water are you drinking? Everybody needs to invest in a good water system. I have a whole house system. Twenty-five years ago, I installed a whole house system so I know I'm bathing in water that is detoxified. And then everything that I use, it's organic nontoxic. And then all my food, it's all organic. And I think is this a conscientious food company that I'm buying from? Luckily we have farmers' markets. I have a non-toxic dish washing, non-toxic cleaner for the counters. I have an essential oil diffuser, I have air purifiers in the entire house. And you could just go on and on, but I tell people, I didn't do this overnight.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

Little by little you make, the most important investment in your health. If you don't invest in your health, if you don't take time for your wellness, you're gonna spend it all on your illness. Look at society today. Where are we? We are sick. Everybody's sick. The children are sick. The adults are sick. Everyone is chronically ill. I would say 93% of people are metabolically unhealthy. This is sad when we have all the resources at our fingertips. Now you have your phone, you can look up anything. Whether it's this podcast or another podcast, everybody is putting out phenomenal information for all of us to get healthy. I think the biggest thing is people need to execute. We're not executing and the doctors are not on board. When you go to your physician, he or she is not telling you, I want you to take inventory of your lifestyle. I hear all the time patients tell me that their doctor says what they eat doesn't matter. How can we be saying that in 2022?

Ivelisse Page:

Absolutely. And I wanna go back real quick to something that you said, and I really wanna make sure everyone's hearing this today and it's, you have to start somewhere and it can get super overwhelming to hear all these amazing tips that you're sharing and feeling like, oh my goodness I have no idea what to do. And I figure this a good analogy is, when you walk into your pantry and it's a disaster, and you need to clean out your kitchen and the drawers, seeing the whole project can be overwhelming. But just start with one drawer, organize one drawer. Start with one thing let's say, this month, I'm just gonna focus on the products that I use on my skin and makeup. Next month, I'm gonna focus on the clothing that I wear and the sheets that are on my bed and things like that, following month water. And there's inexpensive ways for those people who are in apartments or who don't have the ability to buy a whole home water filter, start with something small, like a Burkey. I have one here at the office that I use. Or a water adjustment that you can attach to the showerhead to prevent the toxins from being on your skin. So start small, but start somewhere. And before you know it by the end of the year you will have made such great progress in your health. So I really appreciate that. And one thing that I really wanted to make sure that we covered before our time ends today is something that you shared in your book as well. You share that many know that neither chemotherapy, radiation, nor surgery can eliminate circulating tumor cells(CTCs) or cancer stem cells(CSCs). They are responsible for more than 95% of all metastasis and cancer deaths. And so what therapies and treatments do you use at the Cancer Center for Healing to help eliminate those CTCs and CSCs? So one, it really attacks those things and two people don't get recurrences.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

That is the number one thing is to deal with from the very beginning because if you have surgery or chemo, you're going to stimulate the progress of those cancer stem cells and circulating tumor cells. You don't wanna do that, you wanna know what those are. If you go to the doctor today and you ask the doctor, what about my circulating tumor cells, which is one of the questions you should be asking. You can find a podcast right now on circulating tumor cells or YouTube. You can find a PubMed literature on circulating tumor cells. What they told my patients is oh yeah, we know about those, that doesn't matter. The definition of remission or cure of a cancer patient is a circulating tumor cell of zero. In the United States, I haven't found any great test for circulating tumor cells. So I've been using the lab in Greece called RGCC. They're about 20 years old. They're all over the world and doctors from all over, not just United States, utilize RGCC. It has an accuracy of about 85%. It will check for circulating tumor cells. Now, the interesting thing circulating tumor cells are only killed typically by natural agents. There are some medicines like doxycycline and naltrexone, which are prescribed medications that do kill circulating tumor cells, and that come up on the RGCC. Circulating tumor cells, you want to know that because if you don't know that, then how are you going to prevent cancer and the relapse of cancer. That is just one big thing, not to mention changing the garden and the terrain of the body that the cancer came in. But circulating tumor cells are the single, probably greatest determining factor, whether cancer's going to come back. So you've got to check that circulating tumor cell test. And then I recheck it in a year. I have found over all these years that they don't go down fast. Now I do have something that I use called SOT. What SOT is supportive oligonucleotide technique. So what they do is they take each individual circulating tumor cells, they reverse engineer a new messenger RNA to disrupt the DNA of the cancer cell. That is given back as one IV infusion. That IV infusion works over about four and a half to five months, seven days a week, 24 hours a day killing. So I have found that to be an amazing treatment. I have people that are out of stage four cancer and they're 7-10 years out just doing SOT. What's beautiful about SOT is that it's individualized to each patient. We don't have anything in oncology that's individualized. here's your surgery, here's your chemo, and everybody pretty much gets the same thing. But cancer is unique to each person irrespective of your diagnosis. You could have the same name, same age, same diagnosis, but people need to understand that everyone's cancer is heterogeneity unique. So the biodiversity of everybody's cancer and every layer of the cancer is unique to you. The future of cancer will be analyzing the cancer genome of each patient and creating peptides to bio immune, edit the cancer out of the body. And that is coming.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

So proteomics is a whole new science of cancer. It's brand new. It's very complicated, but people can go and watch a Ted talk on proteomics to understand it because it is the wave of cancer. Right now we're using standard of care, conveyor belt, everybody gets the same thing. We have commonalities but we're all very unique, just like our fingerprint. So we need to respect that facet of cancer. Every cancer cell in the patient is different. Even though the pathology's the same, every cell and every layer is genetically different.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes and one of the things that you shared in your book is that the five year survival rate for all cancer types and stages is only about 60%. And this shocked me, actually, it said that chemotherapy increases the five year survival rate by only 2%. And that those conventional treatments, while sometimes useful and necessary may have the potential to harm some patients as much, if not more than cancer itself. In closing, how does one determine, for patients, whether the risk outweighs the benefit?

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

It all depends on each one. None of our patients just get chemotherapy. They are doing so many other things. One they've gotta take care of themselves if they're gonna get chemotherapy. So we have them fast the day before and day of chemo, whether it's conventional or low dose fractionated chemotherapy. We have them have changed their lifestyle. We've had'em do emotional work. We have them do detox. We have them do hyperbaric oxygen, if that's necessary for their protocol. We have them do activated hydrogen synergistic with chemotherapy. Our patients do great because they don't have all the problems because they're doing all this self care. And making sure that you have changed everything in the patient, looking at their blood. Cancer is a sugary acidic, low oxygen environment, discovered by Otto Warburg. Cancer is making through glycolysis, sugar, and then this glycolysis creates this acidic environment and the acidity. So what are you doing about acidity? Surgery and chemo makes your body more acidic. We have them take something to alkalinize their tissues. People think alkalinity, they think blood urine, saliva. No, it's your tissues that are acidic, it's the cells that are acidic. We give them IV alkaline drip. So we give them an intravenous alkaline drip to basically change the geography of every cell. There's nothing simple about cancer. I tell people we declared war cancer 52 years ago. And where are we? Worse and it's getting exponentially worse every day. The worst thing that I'm seeing now is 25 year olds, 29 year olds, 30 years old, all these young people, men and women getting cancer. It's an alarming situation. What I'm seeing I've never seen before is the dramatic increase in cancer in the latter part of 2021 and especially 2022. When you see a 29 year old with stage four lung cancer, she's never smoked. We are in big problem. I also just saw a 19 year old who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last year. This is abnormal. We all should be ringing the alarm bell. We should all be saying together, how do we help each other be the best we can be? I'm not kidding. Why aren't we all talking about prevention and early detection? Why? We have cancer conversations every other Wednesday so people can come and listen and learn. We have Instagram. We are constantly educating people because we want people to know this new updated information, just like you do.

Ivelisse Page:

It's so important to be in a community that is supportive of your health. And I would just encourage everyone listening today to share this with someone that they know and that they love. There are so many practical and easy things in Dr. Connealy's book that you can incorporate today that goes into greater detail. If you just start incorporating one thing each month you are gonna be far greater, and so is your family, on a journey to health. Cancer does not have to be a death sentence and it doesn't have to be the end of life as you know it. You can have incredible quality of life. For those who are listening, who have cancer, get connected to one of our functional medicine practitioners that specialize in cancer so that that your care team is complete. And you can have great quality of life going through something so difficult. Dr. Connealy I could speak to you for hours. And so I am so grateful that you took time out of your incredibly busy schedule to speak with us today and so thank you.

Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy:

You're welcome my privilege to get to do this, and I appreciate everything you're doing too.

Ivelisse Page:

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