Can you share a personal experience where you witnessed the positive impact of naturopathic medicine and acupuncture on a cancer patient’s overall well-being? What lessons did you learn from that particular case?
Several possibilities here. I have a current patient, a woman in her 70s diagnosed last Fall with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She was given 6 months to live. She did a round of conventional chemo, which nearly killed her, and she didn’t respond to it. She decided to forego any more conventional therapy. She came to the clinic initially with overwhelming fatigue and understandable depression about her situation.
Her treatment program included a wide range of naturopathic therapies, including IV therapy (high-dose vitamin C, intravenous ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation, and others), transdermal ozone sauna, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF), ionic foot baths, and others. I also had her consult with the nutrition therapist I work with Maria Zilka, for both diet guidance and training on autonomic nervous system regulation.
When utilizing acupuncture, I will do dry needle acupuncture, laser acupuncture, or both. In her case I decided to use laser acupuncture to take advantage of what is called Photodynamic Therapy (PDT). This involves the use of specific light wavelengths to create a free radical “explosion” within cancer cells.
I also started her on some repurposed medications. These are very safe prescription medications that can be extremely valuable as part of a cancer treatment program. For her I used something called methylene blue, among a few others.
Within about 8 weeks of starting this program she had better energy that she said she had experienced in decades. Her tumor markers had come down into the normal level as well. She and her husband recently went on a cruise around the Greek islands, and she is living essentially the same active life she did prior to her diagnosis.
She is now almost 9 months beyond the “expiration date” they had given her, there is no evidence of cancer on imaging, and she’s feeling fantastic.
I certainly make no claims to having found a cure for cancer, but cases like hers remind me that our bodies have an astounding ability to restore balance when the right circumstances for that are present.
In the field of naturopathic oncology, what emerging trends or research findings do you find most exciting or promising for improving cancer patients’ outcomes?
Two things. First, I think that it is becoming increasingly well-understood that cancer is fundamentally an issue of abbarrant energy metabolism. “Cancer is a Metabolic Disease,” as the book title by Dr. Seyfried puts it. And it is. Beyond that, I think there is also a growing understanding of the importance of the redox (reduction/oxidation) balance within cells, and how that balance can be impacted by our therapies to tip treatment in favor of the outcome we’re going for.
There was a time when, at least in the naturopathic oncology world, there was a great emphasis on antioxidants. These seemed to protect healthy cells from becoming cancerous, and there was evidence that they could kill cancer cells as well. I’m talking about nutrients like green tea extract, curcumin, vitamin E, vitamin C, and others. But we have come to understand that cancer cells are perhaps even more vulnerable to excess oxidation than they are to antioxidation. Going further, it was realized that some therapies thought to be antioxidant therapies, such as high-dose vitamin C and green tea extract, are actually oxidative. They drive oxidation within cancer cells.
In a coherent cancer treatment program, all the oars are rowing in the same direction. I always review a new patient’s supplements to be sure they don’t overly “antioxidize” the oxidative program I’m recommending for them.
I think these new understandings are allowing us to develop treatment programs that much more specifically target the metabolic vulnerabilities of cancer cells.
How do you collaborate with conventional medical practitioners in the treatment of cancer patients? Can you provide an example of a successful interdisciplinary approach that resulted in positive patient outcomes?
Only once have I been in an ideal kind of “collaborative” situation with a conventional oncologist, who has since retired. I referred patients to him, and he occasionally referred to me. When a patient had a conventional treatment recommendation given them that just didn’t sound right to me, I would refer them to this oncologist for a second opinion. He would commonly tell them no, I wouldn’t recommend that. Do whatever Greg is advising you for 3 months, then come back and we’ll reevaluate. That was ideal.
I think there is a bit of a misconception about what it means for conventional and complementary practitioners to collaborate. It isn’t like we’re getting on the phone and talking through what our treatment strategies are going to be for the patient. For the most part, they do what they do, I do what I do, and in an ideal world there is no animosity between us. And by that I mean I always hope the conventional team doesn’t dissuade the patient from following my recommendations. There is no evidence that the vast majority of complementary therapies could be detrimental to the patient and abundant evidence that it will help. Nevertheless, they often play it cautious and recommend against *all* of them.
That said, I have shared enough patients with a few local oncologists who have seen that they tend to do well when they implement my recommendations and that they don’t push back at all.
I am currently referring to a local conventional oncologist who is doing low-dose chemotherapy. Again, it isn’t like we’re talking to each other about our treatment ideas. He’s good at what he does, and he trusts and supports my recommendations as well. I have had many patients do extremely well under his care, tolerating the low-dose chemo much better than the standard of care.
What type of services do you offer?
Naturopathic medicine is an umbrella term. It encompasses a wide range of therapies, which can even include what are commonly thought of as conventional therapies. I always keep in mind a fundamental premise of naturopathic medicine: use the least force necessary to accomplish the goal. In other words, don’t use prednisone to treat joint pain if you can do the same by eliminating dairy from the diet. The elimination is a much much lesser force applied to the body. However, if my daughter were to contract acute bacterial meningitis, I would get her to a hospital and expect IV antibiotics to be administered. That would be the *naturopathic* therapy, because it is the least force necessary to accomplish the goal of bringing that infection under control. Sure, do lots of other supporting ND therapies, but don’t forego the IV antibiotics just because they seem “conventional.”
I co-own Immersion Health with Maria Zilka, the nutrition therapist I work with. we have several intensive kinds of treatments to offer not only for cancer patients but also people with mold illness, environmental toxicities, autoimmune diseases, more recently long covid and vaccine injuries, and other issues. In addition to therapies I listed above, Maria offers comprehensive nutritional evaluations, energetic scans utilizing devices called an Asyra and a Biowell. I have a long history researching, writing about, and presenting on the topic of biological water and its unique properties. I have incorporated a number of therapies into the clinic related to this as well. These include a system for imprinting water with hundreds of different therapeutic substances, as well as a device called a NEO. This water vortexing system broadcasts the frequencies of coherent (healthy) biological water and thus entrains the body’s water into that coherence.
Many of these don’t summarize easily, but I believe each one offers something unique toward the overall therapeutic goal.
As both a Naturopathic Physician and Licensed Acupuncturist, how do you integrate acupuncture into your overall treatment strategy for cancer patients, and what benefits have you observed in doing so?
While I find acupuncture to be an extremely valuable therapy, I admit that I don’t give it a privileged position within the overall treatment program. There is a long story behind this, but I believe that acupuncture needles act literally as antennas that pick up the healing frequencies of our natural environment, amplify them (much as a radio antenna does for your car), and transmits those into specific synergistic points of the body. As our environment has become saturated with a cacophony of artificial EMF frequencies, I’ve been increasingly reluctant to utilize dry needles and am now favoring laser acupuncture. By doing so I can deliver very specific frequencies to specific points, taking advantage not only of the acupuncture in the traditional sense (delivering beneficial frequencies), but also incorporating photodynamic therapy I mentioned previously.
In your opinion, what are the key considerations for ensuring ethical and responsible use of complementary therapies in cancer care, and how do you communicate these principles to your patients?
Most important to me is that patients make informed decisions about their care. I have had hundreds of patients arrive at my office stating from the outset that they are not going to utilize conventional therapies because “they destroy the immune system” or some similar reason. And they can do that, certainly. My own responsibility, though, is to the well-being of the patient in front of me. There are some cancer diagnoses that, were I to get one of them, I would absolutely do the conventional treatment course. It can be *curative*.
I think it is my obligation to steer people away from an ideological predisposition against *all* conventional therapies, and help them understand if any of them could be appropriate (i.e. enhance their probability of an optimal outcome) if utilized, of course in combination with ND therapies. And there are many situations where I don’t think conventional will offer any meaningful benefit at all, even though it has been recommended. My job is to help people understand these pros and cons, and give them the information to make their own informed decision, one more sophisticated than “conventional bad, naturopathic good.” It’s more complicated than that.
