Good morning, John. So, strangely enough,
and I don't know if you've heard about this, I got a cancer.
It was, and this isn't a super close race, the worst thing that's ever happened to my body.
If I hadn't gotten treatment for it,
I wouldn't be dead yet, but I'd be on my way to dying.
Luckily, though, for me,
there was never any question about what were to do about the cancer.
Hodgkin lymphoma was one of the first cancers
that was shown to be really responsive to both chemotherapy and radiation.
So even though chemotherapy sucks, I knew were going to do that.
Chemotherapy targets cancer cells really specifically,
but not so specifically that it doesn't also get a bunch of the good guys.
But I was 100% on board with chemo, and it's definitely extended my life.
It's probably saved my life, and I'll die of some other thing.
And three out of the four chemo drugs that I was on are natural.
They're from nature.
Vinblastine comes from the Madagascar periwinkle.
It's just in a cute little flower. It was known to the Indigenous
people in Madagascar. Scientists checked it out
and found that it had a bunch of anti cancer properties.
Another one, adriamycin, also called doxerubicin,
was found in microbes in the soil at the base of an Italian castle.
The third, bleomycin, was also found in a soil microbe
called streptomyces verticillus.
Soil microbes have been known for centuries to have antibacterial properties.
People would pack wounds with specific soils
because they knew that those soils would prevent infection.
They didn't know why, but they knew that they would.
And the reason why is that a lot of bacteria
produce antibiotic compounds to compete with other bacteria.
And it turns out a lot of antibiotics are also good chemotherapies because
they work by messing with cells ability to replicate themselves.
Streptomyces verticillus was never used
in traditional medicine, as far as we know.
But all three of these molecules
are both natural compounds and very effective chemotherapies
for Hodgkin lymphoma, and some of them for other things.
And they've been tested, not just to see if they're effective,
but what doses are most effective, which cancers they are most effective against,
how dangerous they are,
what side effects are most common, how they affect women versus men,
how they affect people based on their age, their efficacy at different stages of cancer,
how long you can safely take them, which side effects are most serious
and how to minimize those complications, both in the short term and the long term.
Because when we're talking about chemotherapy side effects,
we're not just talking about puking this week, which is a big deal,
but we're also talking about long term potential damage,
like lung scarring or cardiac effects or secondary cancers.
Cancers are not chill. Treatments usually have to be high impact
because these are high impact and sneaky diseases. And so it's kind of amazing that we are in
this point in history where a lot of these medicines
have been tested in a lot of different ways to see what their best dosing schedule is,
to see how little you can take without increasing the chances that
the cancer will come back,
to know how to be prepared for potential side effects.
This is the slow, careful, tedious work of medical research,
and it made the cancer treatment that I've been through way less awful
than it would have been just ten years ago.
During the time when I was publicly living with cancer
and talking about cancer treatment, I received almost universally good vibes.
I just want to be clear about that.
People were amazing.
But I did get some folks who would come to me and say
that I would have a better outcome and be healthier if I took a more natural route,
by which they meant that I should not be doing chemotherapy.
There was also a second set of things that happened,
which is that people would take my words
and then they would move them over into their social media feeds in some way.
So they wouldn't be talking directly to me, they would be talking about me.
And those people were a lot less polite. Those people were creating content around me
about how my decisions were bad and about how you should do something different
if you ever have cancer or if you currently have cancer.
I know that the right thing to do is
to not let the anger that I felt about that how in how I talk about those people.
So I'm trying to do that.
But the question becomes, if most of my cancer treatments came from nature,
what do they mean when they say that I should be doing more natural treatments?
I got to be clear here, too, when it comes to, like, epsom salt baths and
acupuncture during chemotherapy, yes, I'm in favor of all of that.
If you want to do it and your doctor is
telling you it's not going to do any harm and you feel like it's going to do good, do it.
I took Epsom salt baths.
I don't know if it was any good,
but it was like a chance to take a big, long bath and feel like I was doing something for myself.
And there are also supplements that we know don't hurt and we think might help.
Like, I took fish oil, I took vitamin D, I took magnesium.
Especially the magnesium I think helps. I was getting muscle cramps.
That cleared up after I took magnesium supplements.
As long as you're talking to your doctor about it
and it doesn't look, there's negative consequences.
I say do it.
There are some things that look like they might have some positive effect,
but nothing has a positive effect like actual cancer treatment.
So skipping those actual cancer treatments in favor of natural treatment makes me wonder,
what do you mean by natural?
And here it is.
And I'm not sugar coating this, I don't know, a nicer way to say it.
When we say natural cancer treatment, what we mean is something that either
we don't know it works, or we know that it doesn't work,
or that we know that it does more harm than good.
That's the only things that we mean when we say natural cancer treatment.
Because otherwise, a natural cancer treatment
would include the three compounds from nature that I put in my body to cure my cancer.
The majority of cancer cases on earth and an even greater majority
of cancer deaths on earth happen outside of high income countries.
Those people don't die of cancers because they don't have access to coffee enemas,
or cannabis oil or apricot pits.
They die because they don't have access to chemotherapy,
radiation, surgery, and screening.
It's just obviously true.
It's just not something that I think people
who talk about natural cancer treatment and avoiding chemotherapy think about ever.
While I was feeling like garbage while on chemo, I designed a bunch of socks.
And then my friends picked the top eight that they liked the most.
It was one of the only things I felt like I was capable of doing creatively
with my brain in the state that it was in.
They're comfy and cozy and stylish and fun patterns,
and they all use the exact same color scheme.
So if you want, you can mix and match to have a little fun.
And 100% of the profit goes to increase access to cancer treatment.
Cancer treatment does often suck. Absolutely.
And also, I feel so lucky to be alive in this time,
in this place, so that I can have access to it.
Ten years ago, my treatment would have sucked more.
30 years before that, it would have been horrible and probably caused me lifetime disability.
30 years before that, it would not have existed. And yet, there are people on the earth right now
for whom that same reality of 80 years ago in the US
is their reality now.
We don't have to live in a world like that.
And also, we don't have to live in a world with boring socks where the profit goes
to some stranger somewhere.
These socks are going to be available for a long time,
but this is the last day for standard shipping with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve,
so if you want to buy them for somebody else, now is the time.
That's also the case for everything else at Good Store and dftba.com.
For people in the US international, all bets are off.
If your style or the size that you want has sold out,
you can sign up to get a notification.
I suggest you do that.
I actually went to the warehouse this week
and made a bunch of boxes and packed a bunch of orders.
It was a good time.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.