Translator: Tina Huynh Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I was not prom queen in high school.
But I was voted most likely to cure cancer.
Somehow I managed to get a cancer research position
while I was a senior in high school at the University of Windsor.
We made huge discoveries that year.
I was studying the Hawaiian spider lily plant
and found that it could induce apoptosis
in every cancer cell line that we exposed it to.
Meaning that this plant extract
could actually make cancer cells kill themselves.
So I was basically on a cancer-killing high for the rest of that year.
But all of that came crashing down very quickly
because that was the year that my mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer.
Her cancer story was a very painful one.
I was 18 at the time,
and after all these discoveries,
I couldn't even help her.
One of the most important people in my life was slipping away from me,
and there was nothing I could do.
Her pain, her suffering, the nausea ... It was uncontrollable.
Her oncology nurses were angels, and her oncologist did everything right.
He did everything he was trained and learned to do.
But chemotherapy just didn't work for her.
Unfortunately, her cancer was actually operable,
but we had to wait two weeks
for surgeons to come back from their Christmas vacations.
Two weeks, we thought, was a harmless amount of time to wait.
Two weeks was all it took for the cancer to spread everywhere.
And she was given three months to live.
The thing you should know about my mother was that she had this unbreakable spirit.
She was a very strong and sassy woman,
and she was my ultimate hype girl -
always supporting me.
Now, I was a huge nerd, and I still am.
And any time I had an exam or a test,
I just was filled with so much anxiety and stress.
And any time I had this exam and I was on my way to school,
she wouldn't wish me luck.
But what she would do was she'd grab me by the shoulders,
and she looked me straight in the eyes, and she said,
"Kick butt, because Valero girls don't need luck."
(Laughter)
Now,
unbreakable spirit or not, to go from being told that you have operable cancer
to terminal cancer in the span of 14 days ...
that would break anybody.
And it certainly broke her.
Throughout the chemo process, we asked over and over
if there was anything else that we could do.
We asked about supplements, diet, anything.
And not just to help fight the cancer, but to help support her
and make her feel better.
And the answer was always no.
And soon enough the chemo stopped working. The cancer kept growing.
Her pain, her suffering, the nausea and the vomiting, it just wouldn't stop.
So naturally, of course we're going to look elsewhere for answers.
But we didn't know where to find them.
This was 15 years ago, and the state of integrative oncology
wasn't what it is today.
And so she continued to decline.
She lost over 100 pounds in eight months,
and weighed 60 pounds when she passed away.
Going through something like this at that age, I learned very intimately,
that although we have a cancer care system that has so many successes,
it still has its limitations.
And so I decided that day that I was determined to make it better.
This experience impacted me so deeply that it set a fire in me
to learn everything that there was to learn about cancer.
I wanted answers.
I wanted to know, What else can we do?
And that set in motion a very long education
in naturopathic medicine and integrative oncology.
Now, the state of cancer care today is divided in two camps.
There's the conventional world and the alternative world.
And honestly, I could not hate both of those terms more.
Alternative implies "instead of."
And conventional implies "the standard, the status quo,"
which is kind of what it is,
but it also implies that anything that doesn't fit this conventional model
is worthless; it's not worth considering.
And that's simply not true.
These terms are creating a divide between two systems
that would actually shine and work so much better
if they were just merged together properly - key word: properly.
The other thing to consider is that we don't really know
what causes cancer, there's no one singular reason.
It's often the consequence of multiple biological systems failing us,
and breaking down.
Our immune systems can fail us. Our hormonal systems.
Our environmental pollutants and exposures. Our genetics.
They can all come together and find a way to fail us
and lead to cancer.
But cancer is not that easy of an illness that you can just pinpoint to one cause.
It's more complex than that,
and it's going to take more than one system to fix it.
It requires a team effort.
Now, cancer is basically like a weed.
And to get rid of it, we want to pull it out ASAP.
So we need chemo, radiation, surgery.
But we want to pay attention to the soil as well.
We want to look at the underlying terrain,
and make sure that it is as inhospitable to cancer as possible.
While we're pulling out that weed though, we need to make sure
that we protect that soil, that we don't destroy it completely.
We want to be able to grow flowers and plants and vegetables in that soil
and watch it thrive.
So how do we merge these systems together?
In the field of integrative oncology, the patient is the center of care.
They seek medical advice from their naturopathic oncologist,
medical oncologist,
their radiation oncologist and their surgeon.
And the forefront of treatment is that tumor eradication.
Weed removal.
The next layer involves naturopathic oncology.
It is here where we discuss lab results, imaging, pathology reports.
We look at it all, but most importantly, we review and assess the case
from a holistic standpoint, placing an importance on the soil.
When we're looking at the soil, we're talking inflammation.
We want to know how your digestion is,
if there's any issues with your elimination.
How your stress levels are, how your fitness levels are,
your immune function.
Do you have any issues with blood sugar control?
How is your mental, emotional status right now?
And your nutritional status?
We look at if you have any additional risk factors
that maybe no one else has discovered yet.
We're looking at the overall disease status.
Naturopathic doctors work collaboratively with the conventional oncologist.
And we do this well, and we ensure safety as well.
We ensure safety, and making sure that we are not causing any interactions
with conventional therapy.
We are experts on how to do that.
There are many areas where we can support a patient throughout the cancer journey.
We can support them at the onset of diagnosis
and help prepare them for what lies ahead.
We can support them during treatment.
We can help reduce side effects
and help co-manage the disease with the conventional oncologist.
We can also support post-treatment and help with recovery
and recurrence prevention.
One of the areas that we shine is in the prevention of cancer
in the first place.
A lot of cancers are truly preventable,
and often the consequence of the lifestyle choices that we lead.
One of the best ways to treat cancer is to never get it in the first place.
And if you are going to get it, at least try to catch it early.
So merging all of these collaborative care methods,
what we're finding is that patients, they require fewer blood transfusions,
they get to skip chemo.
They feel better,
they're doing better, they're living longer.
These are people who were once told that they only had a few months to live.
And yet years later, they're thriving.
They are redefining what it means to live with Stage 4 cancer.
And this is one of the aspects that I love so much about what I do.
It's really a beautiful thing to watch the evolution of a person
who was once at ground bottom.
And they were in despair, hopeless, living in fear.
And they evolved to reach a place where they felt a sense of control,
that they could play an active role in their care.
And that in itself creates confidence.
It creates hope
and a sense of faith in themselves,
that they may be able to get through this after all.
Now, I think the best case that highlights all of these things
is one of my most memorable cases in my career so far.
And it's the most memorable because it really highlighted for the first time,
and so clearly,
the power that naturopathic medicine has in such a collaborative scenario.
And it was memorable because it was also a full circle moment for me.
Having witnessed my mother pass away so brutally to stomach cancer,
it was such a shock 10 years later
when I found out my sister's father-in-law was diagnosed with the exact same cancer.
Same stage, same everything.
The only difference was, unlike my mother, his stomach cancer wasn't operable.
Their plan of attack was "Let's just throw some chemo and hope for the best."
In the world of stomach cancer, the best chance for success,
for a positive outcome, is to do a gastrectomy.
A positive outcome though, in the world of stomach cancer,
is just living for the next five years.
And sadly, statistically, when a person's diagnosed,
the chance that they will survive those five years is only 20 percent.
A gastrectomy is no joke.
It's a very serious surgery and often comes with a lot of weight loss.
So, thinking very optimistically, I planned ahead for this.
This was my goal for him. He's going to get there.
And we put him on smoothies, high-nutrient smoothies,
to help him increase his weight and keep his weight stable.
We fortified those smoothies with fruits and vegetables,
and liquid vitamin D.
We put omega-3 fish oils, and MCT oil, and additional protein powder.
And all of this was strategically dosed
to make sure that he could gain weight in a healthy way,
and that he could prevent losing muscle mass.
I corrected nutrient deficiencies that he had before he even started chemo.
And I put him on coriolus, a medicinal mushroom,
that is really great at boosting up energy levels,
but also increasing white blood cell counts and neutrophil counts,
which, if anyone's ever experienced chemo, you know that once you start chemo,
those cells tend to drop rather quickly,
and this helped prevent that.
We put him on melatonin.
There is so much research on melatonin and it's support during chemo.
It helps reduce side effects in a way that it doesn't interfere
with the pharmacological action of the chemotherapeutic drugs.
It also induces apoptosis, which we are familiar with.
And a lot of people know melatonin to be really useful with sleep.
And you can imagine he wasn't exactly sleeping very good
at this time in his life, so this came in really handy.
We also gave him curcumin. This is the extract of tumeric.
And curcumin is really interesting
because one of the problems with stomach cancer,
and what happened with my mother's case,
is you can be responding to the chemo just fine, and then all of a sudden,
it stops working.
Curcumin can help prevent that. It prevents what we call chemo-resistance.
Now, his oncologist wasn't really a fan of the idea of working together -
this is not unusual - and he came around.
And it was great that he did,
because my sister's father-in-law, he sailed through chemo.
He did incredibly well. He even kept working the whole time.
But his oncologist and his nurses, they started to freak out a bit
because at one point, he didn't have any side effects.
So they assumed, well, the chemo must not be working then.
And if it's not working,
then maybe it's because of those supplements that she put him on.
So they were very uneasy about it.
But he continued the protocol.
And by the end of his chemo, when we re-imaged him,
we found that not only had the chemo been working,
but the cancer, it didn't just shrink, the tumors didn't just shrink in size,
when he was done chemo, the stomach cancer was gone.
(Applause) (Cheers)
And this is an incredible example of what collaborative medicine can do.
Together, we annihilated the weed, and we protected his soil.
His oncologist was ecstatic and so happy,
and because of this great news, he was eligible for that gastrectomy.
And he did it.
Now it's been more than five years, and he is still in remission.
He is living with great quality of life.
(Applause) (Cheers)
He's living with great quality of life.
He watched his son and my sister get married in the Mayan Riviera.
He still works in his late seventies.
And I am honored that he is here today with us in the audience.
(Cheers) (Applause)
Please stand up.
(Laughs)
(Cheers) (Applause)
(Laughs)
Athletes, when they're preparing for big sporting events,
they're surrounded by a team of support.
They see nutritionists,
and they help them prepare meal plans.
They're meal prepping, taking supplements,
doing blood work.
They're eating very specific ratios of fats, carbs and proteins
to build up their bodies so that they can function the most optimally.
They can perform their best and win.
And this is totally seen as normal. This is standard. Conventional.
Nobody questions that.
So why, when a cancer patient asks for the same kind of support,
why is it that when my mother asked,
"Is there anything else that I could be doing?"
Why are they told no?
Because we're fighting cancer. We're not training for a marathon.
This isn't an Ironman. This isn't the Olympics.
This is your life. This is the fight of your life.
Cancer is an all-hands-on-deck situation.
Right now, the rate of cancer is that one in every two people
is going to get cancer in their lifetime.
That is terrifying.
So as my mother taught me, don't be afraid to kick butt.
Don't be afraid to veer from the conventional.
Break away from the mold.
Be an outlier. Create your own statistic.
Because unfortunately, right now,
our current cancer care system may have a few gaps.
But it is possible to make that system whole
if you have the right people on your team.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)