Reframing Cancer as a Messenger with Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Riordan Clinic [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to the Real Health podcast. Today’s episode might sound a little bit different because I want to tell you about our Cancer Care Reimagine speaker series. When we began planning our 25th international conference on human functioning, Dr. Ron Hunninghake sat down and created his dream team of speakers. Now we reached out to all of them and we were so delighted that they all said yes. These speakers are leaders in integrative oncology, functional medicine and research who are truly shaping the future of cancer care. Each week leading up to to the conference will feature one of these extraordinary experts right here on the Real Health podcast. They will be sharing insights, innovation and inspiration to help you reimagine what’s possible in cancer care. Now, this series and the upcoming conference in gala would not be possible without the generous support of our presenting partner, Empower. Did you know that Empower is the most advanced compounding and 503B outsourcing facility in the nation? They’re licensed to serve in all 50 states and they are deeply committed to improving access to safe, affordable, and personalized medication for the patients, providers, and caregivers who rely on them. Their belief is simple but powerful. Behind every order is a person in need. And with that knowledge, they approach everything they do with compassion, innovation and a drive for excellence. We are so grateful for their partnership and their support of this important conversation around Reimagining Cancer Care. Now if you’re looking for tickets, they are on sale now and you can go to our website at cancercarereimagined.org you can also find tickets for our 50th anniversary gala at cancercarereimagined.org/gala. Now these links will be posted in the show notes below. We hope that you will join us here in Wichita this November for both unforgettable events.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:01:44]:
I just want to tell everyone, you know, I’m Dr. Ron Hunninghake here. Real Health Podcast. We’ve got the most amazing, one of the most amazing. There’s a lot of amazing human beings on this planet, but here’s a really special one. Dr. Nasha Winterss, a native Kansas girl. My favorite saying, if you want something done, ask a farm girl to do it. I don’t know if you actually grew up on the farm. Did you? Yep.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:02:13]:
Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:13]:
Yeah. So, Nasha, for those of you that maybe you haven’t heard of her, but this is. You need to hear of Nasha Winters. So Nasha has worked as a naturopathic pioneer in the field of cancer in terms of helping open people’s minds to the idea that Cancer is just not a thing. It’s not just a tumor. It involves all the various facets of what it means to be human. And so. And I think a lot of people intuitively get that about cancer. You know, they even say that there’s a cancer in our organization, there’s a cancer in our politics. So. So tell. Well, first of all, welcome, welcome, welcome. But tell me, what is it about cancer that you’ve learned that everyone really needs to know?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:03:05]:
Well, first of all, I’m so honored to be here. You’re right. Like, there’s something about getting back to your roots or something about, you know, one of these days I get to tell the story about, really my deep roots into Riordan center and all the pieces here. It’s pretty beautiful and sort of accidental, which you and I both know it’s not accidental, but as you alluded to right before we started recording, you stumbled upon one of my websites and was looking at my personal journey on the cancer, you know, hamster wheel, if you will. And for me, what I have personally learned for myself and what I’ve experienced with the tens of thousands of patients I’ve had direct experience with, and the tens, if not hundreds of thousands indirectly, is that, number one, it’s unique to each and every one of us. That’s one thing that we get wrong in standard of care and that we kind of just qualify or classify it as it’s a particular stage, it’s a particular tissue, and therefore it gets this particular treatment. And, yeah, some people will respond to that, but most of us need a lot more. So that’s one of the big things. The other thing that often this sometimes is a trigger warning. I should probably say this ahead of time, but I personally do not perceive cancer as an enemy. So a lot of our ethos, I mean, we started calling it the war on cancer in 1971, but of course, that came out of a global sort of ethos around war. We’d come out of two world wars, Korean War, Vietnam War was still raging. And so I think that there was, like, a collective understanding to use that kind of language, but it’s stuck. And it’s one that I think, unfortunately, in my opinion, my experience, people forget that cancer is us. And so when we wage war on it, we wage war on ourselves. And we literally do that. I mean, the therapies we utilize do just that. That’s their job, is to decimate, you know, the field, if you will. And that’s by design. So great. They do A great job with it. But again, we can and should be doing more. And so for me, I think the third take home of 34 years on this journey is that cancer is just a messenger. It’s just telling us there’s something amiss in the terrain.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:05:24]:
It’s a wound. It’s a wound that we suffer and instead of looking for what is it that we need to heal the wound, we attack the wound. I wonder if that’s going to make the wound worse or not, you know? Yeah, yeah. So I’ve also been amazed at how in talking with you on several occasions, how very often there, the wound itself is not just physical, more often than not emotional or, or relational or self inflicted because you were not worthy or you did something bad. And so now you have this wound and God is punishing you for this and, and it may not be that at all. Maybe it is a wound, but maybe it’s not that you did something, but you have to forgive something.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:06:17]:
That gives me chills. Yeah, that’s, that’s, you know, it’s interesting, I believe. Have you guys had Dr. Kelly Turner on your program?

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:06:27]:
Yes, we have.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:06:28]:
I thought I remembered that. And yeah, brilliant, right? She, yeah, her two books now and you know, she actually wrote the foreword for my book the Metabolic Approach to Cancer. And I think we resonated so much because she highlighted this sort of 9 is where it started. Now 10 factors of people who are able to meet a. A very aggressive process and overcome it without a standard of care intervention. So she called some people call those spontaneous remissions. And she dug deeper and realized there’s nothing spontaneous about them. But what I love that she’s really put the research behind Dr. Ron is that she has shown that there’s about three tangible things that we can do right? Diet, lifestyle, exercise. Those are all things that you adjust those even changing them one direction or the other. If you were over exercising, lower it. If you were vegan, maybe bring on some animal protein. If you were carnivore, maybe bring, you know, bring in more vegetables. Like anytime you shift those tangibles you can make, you can make some headway but you don’t really get very far until you deal with those seven non tangibles. And so your listeners might go back and have a listen to those. But specifically things around like what are your belief systems, you know, how safe do you feel in the world? Do you speak up for yourself, do you advocate for yourself, do you deal with your traumas, do you have a spiritual practice? Those are the things that we as clinicians can’t do for you. And they’re the most important foundation that then when we bring in some of the tools like the IV vitamin C or the mistletoe or the dietary change or the supplements, they need to have something to land in that can be received. And if you’re not tending those other seven intangibles, there’s really nothing to land in.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:08:20]:
I’m going to jump ahead and give you. I’m going to be talking about at our conference. We’re having a wonderful conference coming up here in November, the first weekend in November. And I’m going to be talking about the third medical revolution. We’re talking about cancer care reimagined. But to do that, what I came across in my thinking is that the approach that we’re taking in medicine now is basically left brain. It’s the left brain working with the cancer, and we’ve got to attack it like it were an infection or something like that. But then enter integrative oncology, which you’ve been one of the stalwarts of it. We’re. We’re now bringing our right brain into this. The holistic perspective and, and all the features that you just mentioned. And what’s been missing is the dialogue between them. That’s the corpus callosum. And it’s no wonder that you are at the center of this, because women have a bigger corpus callosum than men do, and they are able to get both sides of the brain working together. To me, this is what I see as integrative. Oncology’s goal is to get both sides talking to one another so that we can make better inroads into this horrible disease.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:09:42]:
Oh, my gosh. Yes, sir. I mean, I love that, and I love that I remembered about that concept of the bridge, but I don’t think I remembered women having such a larger one. So that’s really fun, and I cannot wait to hear the conversation you carry this for, you know, even further when we’re all together in November.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:10:00]:
Yeah, yeah, but. But I mean it. I think what I’m going to say is it took a woman to really get. You’ve. You’ve got it and you’ve lived it 34 years. Now I will have to say, Dr. Hugh, I was. When I listened to your podcast, you. You said a number of doctor who things. So I think he did have an impact on you. You used to come out here and have lunch with him.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:10:24]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 16 years old. I was a. Gosh, I must have been sophomore, junior at Southeast High School in Wichita, Kansas. That’s where I went to school. I was a golden buffalo. And I went through my very vegetarian days. And finding a vegetarian meal in Wichita, Kansas in the late 1980s was not easy. The only place where I could find a very plant forward meal was at the Riordan Center. And the funny thing is, is that my grandma and all my very like kind of conservative family members, including my mom, kind of warned me that that place might be a little too new agey or a little too on the cusp. And so I had to kind of sneak over to go and have those meals. I had to like hide my interactions. And a couple times I showed up in a few Fridays in a row and this gentleman joined me, started joining me at my lunch and started chatting and he just introduced himself as. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anybody. I was still before a couple years out from my own diagnosis. And he just started having these conversations, like curious about why I was there, curious about, you know, he started teaching me the concept then of the, you know, the, the, the living learner, you know, the co-learner that you guys drilled into me at a, at a good young age, which I still carry through today. So yeah, I love these stories.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:11:46]:
Yeah, Hugh was innovative in his thinking. He was a psychiatrist, interestingly enough. I wonder if some of what you became, some of that, I mean obviously are where we’re the total of our life experiences. But, but he did have some radical points of view in the sense that who we are is not just who we are. I mean, it’s what we eat, how we sleep, what environmental factors are at play there. The importance of measuring things, you know, just that simple. That was the whole, the whole concept of functional medicine is measure, measure, measure. But, but the co-learner I think is one of the best ones because I remember in your, in your story the doctor that his daughter was your age and he had to tell you that you had end of life ovarian cancer. Yeah. Did, did you ever get back with him again? Do you.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:12:45]:
You know, because he was a visiting doctor. It’s so. And of course at that time I was very. That kind of shot me out of my body. I wasn’t thinking about maintaining those relationships until many years later. And I did try to find him years later and never did. And I always hope and pray that this man has stumbled across my story somewhere and will reach out himself if he’s still around or someone who he. And you know, maybe his daughter will hear this message because I’m sure he went home in those days after and had to process that, you know, and had to hug his daughter a little tighter in those moments. But he was a traveling ER doc. He was coming through. He wasn’t a permanent doc at that time. And so I, it was a couple years before I thought about even looking for him because I just didn’t think for sure. I didn’t think I’d be here, but I also just didn’t think about that. It’s like how Hindsight’s, you know, 2020, especially when you’re 19, you’re not thinking about, oh, this could be a good story someday, especially in 1991. I think today maybe people going through this, they recognize that they can have kind of a living journal experience, you know, a social media living journal blog experience with it. I wasn’t there. I didn’t even think of those. I journaled like crazy. That was part of my healing, I think as well. But it wasn’t something public at all. In fact, I was very, very private with my story until about in fact. And so it was just an interesting thing. But I would always, man, I would love to run into him or his daughter. I’ve definitely run into a few of my other. The other doctors who saw me at that time, one of which completely. It changed their entire life and their entire practice.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:14:23]:
Was he the first doctor that you felt cared for you?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:14:27]:

1. You just gave me such goosebumps. He was so. Because I’d been coming for months, like at the end, they just kept treating like it was pretty much. They’d had the script pad ready. When they would see me come in, they’d already made up their mind to who I was and what was going on. They didn’t ask further questions. They discounted everything I said. They just saw me as a histrionic, drug seeking teenager. They knew my history of IBS and rheumatoid arthritis and endometriosis and pcos. So they just kept saying, it’s just more of that. Here’s another script. He had never seen me before, but when I walked in, because he had no first impression, he didn’t see polycystic ovarian or he saw someone who was severely malnourished, who had a huge abdomen that didn’t look like ectopic pregnancy or pregnant, like something was off. He saw that my coloration. I had been unconscious for a period of time, put on the pulse ox and saw that I was in the 70s. Like he, he saw me and then responded by getting different Testing done that had ever been done. And that’s where the story changed. That’s where this person was. Oh my gosh, I, I again, I have such compassion. I mean, I think I’ve told the story like I comforted him. He was so just a blubbering fool, poor thing, coming in to tell me that because it was just too close to home for him. But yeah, this man saw me and he was so precious and so gentle with his delivery. The best you possibly could be. And I’m grateful that he had a daughter my age so he could think about how would he say this to her.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:16:06]:
I see you, the whole you, not just your disease, but how this is going to impact your life and you. I think one of the other things you told me one time is that you had so much fluid in your abdomen that you couldn’t even eat. And so that you ended up doing a, a fast. And that was the fasting that maybe kind of turned the tide.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:16:29]:
Absolutely. So, doc, I of course had the ascites. And I know you guys have dealt with a lot of patients dealing with that. It’s just this fluid buildup. It can sometimes just be caused by inflammation, but can also be caused by a malignant process, so a cancering process. And for me, it was on the malignant side side of the coin. So basically, fluid ended up in places where it shouldn’t be in my belly, outside of the containers that it should be, and caused extreme distension, extreme discomfort, but also push organs and things around. So it created kind of a, a change in my real estate, if you will, of taking anything in. But then I had a complicating factor as well as I had 100% bowel blockage in addition to that. So nothing to come pat, you know, to and through if I swallowed it down. And then the pressure that the ascites caused, any amount of drinking behind, literally a few sips of water or warm tea would make me throw up or have such agony that it, I would. I wished for death. I mean, it was so, so painful. I can still remember how painful it was. And so I could not physically eat. And Doc, I tell folks this and they never believe me. They never believe me. But I meet dozens and dozens of people like me all the time. I did not eat anything solid at all for two and a half. And it took me probably six to, you know, six weeks of that to, you know, maybe the last month is when I started trying to play with small amounts of broth or various herbal teas that had any Flavor, because I was also very nauseous with it. And I also had no appetite because I had something known as cachexia, which is a metabolic muscle wasting that also turns off hunger signals in your brain. So it was very like anything didn’t sound good, didn’t feel good, I didn’t feel hungry. It was just this crazy process. So for me, that was, to your point, likely an accidental lifeline. And, you know, our colleague Dr. Valter Longo, just published this year, in 2025, his book Fasting Cancer. He’s been, I mean, I started hearing his research over 15 years ago, a good 15 plus years into my own journey to realize that actually what I was doing was in fact debulking, making the tumor smaller, lowering all the inflammatory drivers. So these cytokines, it was like probably lowering those interleukin 6 and 8 and whatnot. It was helping my body override the angiogenesis. And so angiogenesis also leads to that fluid buildup, which is driven by inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. So I wasn’t feeding it, so I wasn’t giving it sugars and other fuel sources. And not eating also took the burden off that the inflammation could subside. And then slowly over time, in the first few months or first few weeks, I was having to get drained every couple of days just to be comfortable. They were just making me comfortable as I died. And then they needed to drain it less and less and less and less, further and further apart. And in about three months, I didn’t have to go back in for any more drainings. And they didn’t know what to do with me. Yeah, I didn’t know what to do with me. Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:19:38]:
You were your first metabolic patient. You were the first patient of the metabolic approach to cancer. Because this is surely a case of the metabolic treatment of cancer. Just what? And it happened, you know, God, serendipitously.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:19:56]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:19:59]:
It happened. And. But, but so much can be learned from that. In terms of what you went on to write about, in terms of metabolic approach to cancer. And that has become now kind of a standard of care, and everyone’s adopted that term. And, you know, where do we go from here, though? Where do we go?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:20:18]:
Man, I feel so excited. I can even remember speaking at your IVC Symposium in 2018. Right. And even these ideas were. I mean, they were finally starting to integrate into the community, but people were just sort of still. We were still considered somewhat fringe. But just in 2024, a paper came out, I believe Nature came out showing that perhaps the somatic mutation theory is finally dead. And that the theory of current.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:20:46]:
Right.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:20:47]:
You know, is the metabolic theory. So now it’s like we get to all come out of the closet and talk about it at the table together. So when you say what’s on the horizon? I feel like we’re just getting started. I’m super excited to see where research can go. I’m super excited to be collecting more data so we can publish on more case presentations. I’m excited to see what new, maybe novel formulations or novel delivery systems or even novel testing can be done in this field. Because metabolic oncology is a field of medicine now. And so I just. I feel like the sky’s the limit. I feel like we’re just finally getting started.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:21:31]:
Yeah. And I saw that you were pretty much involved with Mark Lintern in terms of cancer resolution and the whole notion of fungal link to cancer, which in 2003, I gave a lecture called the Fungal Link to cancer because Dr. Milton White came and visited Dr. Hugh for a while. Dr. Milton White was the first doctor to make that association. Made total sense. We ended up doing a lecture on it and then promptly forgot about it.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:22:02]:
Well, unfortunately, but not unfortunately. How cool that you could go back into your memory bank and remember that conversation and how relevant it was then and how relevant it is now.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:22:15]:
Yeah. I don’t know where it all fits in. I know there’s a lot of people thinking about parasites and fungi and bacteria and viruses and whatnot, so. But is. Are they there for the simple reason that the immune system is so suppressed and they’re basically just doing their job? This person’s dying and we got to move in and do our job now.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:22:36]:
Yeah. You know, that’s. Questions I have with. With Mark, you know, is I’m not. I mean, I think there’s a lot to. What he’s saying is I definitely have no doubt that this fungal etiology or expression is driving it further. It’s another terrain driver, if you will. Yeah, I’m not certain still and I think. But this is what I’m excited about. I think this is on the horizon of can we prove that it is in fact the starting point of cancer? Because, you know, Mark was basically able to say that the metabolic theory touches all the hallmarks but one and the fungal theory touches all the hallmarks, including the one that metabolic misses. But the really interesting thing to me is how much the fungal and the metabolic are absolutely in tandem, you know, and. And even kind of cross pollinating and integrating with each other that if I don’t with a patient deal with her underlying fungal infections or dysbiosis or parasitic infections or co infections. We can kind of keep in the same cycle of cancering again and again and again. So to your point also, all these amazing things we’re experiencing with off label drugs and whatnot that are really making a resurgence right now, so many of them have that mechanism of action, but I still feel like we have not quite figured it out because I don’t think it’s what we think it is.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:24:00]:
Well, I’m thinking of German New Medicine and the idea that there’s something of something going on, maybe a PTSD type of thing or some self deprecating thing that serves as a catalyst in a negative way to set the stage for the immune system to go down, the, the, the defenses to go down. And, and, and, and maybe this tendency for the body to start disintegrating gets improperly triggered and then you get into a downward spiral. And so unless you go back and deal with all those questions in terms of why am I here? And all the different things like that, you’re not going to solve the problem just by attacking the cancer. Obviously we’ve seen that over and over again, but the process of doing that is more than what the current medical system can sustain. And so now enter in integrative oncology where we take the time, we, we go into that in depth process but looking at everything, not, not leaving anything out, we have to look at the whole picture.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:25:14]:
Exactly. We, we really truly can’t leave any stone unturned because what may be happening in my body is going to be so different than what’s happening yours or Dr. West’s or you know, like any, but like we all are so unique in our life experiences, our life exposures, even the way our bodies interpret that information, you know, so it’s like we’re all just receivers of information. And specifically the little organelles within our cells are the ultimate receivers. The mitochondria literally gather sun, you know, like light, sound, nourishment, water, toxins, thoughts, all the things are input. And then if it’s working, if it’s lucky enough, then it translates that information and then it sends signals or communication out to the surrounding organelles, cells, tissues, organs, et cetera. And so if you can see, I guess for the listener to understand that there’s a few places along the road that it can get in trouble, that it can miscommunicate or misunderstand or mistranslate or misgather the information or it’s just getting too much information into the body in a variety of different ways. And so that, to me, is what’s so exciting today and that we’re starting to understand how best to support the organism, the extracellular matrix, the mitochondria, the tumor micro environment, to change the environment that. That prevents cancer from having the stronghold. So it may be that cancer’s still on board and you can just put it into kind of a pause button. Right. And it can. You can live a long and healthy and vital life with cancer. I’m one of those people. I have thousands of those people in my world. You can be someone who just sort of out on the accidental, goes completely in remission. You maybe never see that again. Great. You could also be someone who goes into remission and a few months or years or even decades later, it’s back with a very different personality than the first go. And so this is what I think is so extraordinary. Standard of care today is just starting to scratch the surface because they’ve not been asking the wrong questions all along. But the folks from the functional and the integrative and the naturopathic and the vitalistic fields, we’ve been asking these questions since the get go. And I feel like we’re finally all coming together and there’s much more of an opportunity for a common narrative, which means a common, like asking different questions and moving forward faster together.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:27:49]:
Yeah. Tell our audience what you’re doing to train people. Because you’re, you’re training doctors, but you’re also training now a whole group of people who have this insight. They don’t necessarily have a medical degree, but they want to pitch in and help. So explain your program to our audience.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:28:05]:
Sure. When I was in private practice for 17 years, I had a ton of amazing patients that would come from all over and they’d spend a few weeks with us. They needed so much hand holding that I had a colleague or a woman in my office that we called her our patient concierge. And she was like the magic sauce for everything we were doing. Because I might be doing the assessment, but she was the person helping explain why they were doing anything or show them how to do it. She was there to answer those questions. So in that, my colleagues always said, why do you have better outcomes than we do? And I’m like, well, I think I have this sort of seamless system of container of support around the patient. And so that model worked for me. And when I got out of private practice and decided to kind of work more as an Educator. What happened is I realized the patients were savvier than the doctors at that point. There was a lot of resources for the patients to get educated. There were none for the clinicians. So in 2020, I started with a group of 12 committed, crazy. We’ll just call them what they were because they were so wild to say, yes, I’ll do it. 12 doctors to say, I’ll take you through the process. I’ll download my brain in you and see what you can do with it. And out of that, I was able to teach the methodology of this sort of test, assess, address. And we’ve gone from 12 clinicians in January of 2020. We just started last week, our 12th cohort of clinicians. We are encroaching 1200 clinicians and allied health professionals in 46 countries to date.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:29:39]:
And I’m one of them.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:29:40]:
I know you have a whole posse over there.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:29:44]:
We really do, so we’re so grateful. But it doesn’t even have to be a clinician, though it can be.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:29:51]:
And that’s what happened. After about a year and a half. We had all these doctors who were like, this is great, but it is a lot. There’s no way I can do all of this. And then we turned our attention towards training what we call patient advocates, which would have been my first iteration when I called a patient concierge. So we trained them in a parallel path. So they’re learning the same terminology and whatnot, but they’re learning, like, what is the role of an advocate versus that of the client clinician, and how can they lean in and support each other? So really, the patient is in the center and they win because the advocate is the handhold between the patient and the clinician. And they are who will, like, prevents all the balls from being dropped. And they can be the voice for the patient when the patient’s unable. They can help ask and answer questions when the doctors are unable. So it’s all in this really powerful way. We now have hundreds and hundreds of those in our midst as well. And we even just began our first cohort. We’re getting ready to start our second cohort the end of September of what we call our aim, our Allied Integral Alternative, our Allied Integrated Medicine Group. So these are the folks that aren’t able to maybe, maybe they can order labs, but they can’t order imaging. They can’t prescribe, can’t prescribe off labels or chemo or, you know, any thyroid medication. But they have a lot more medical background than, say, an advocate. So these are Your nurses, your. Your rd, you know, your nutritionist, perhaps your physical therapist. Those are. We just created this because we had this kind of huge gap that was in between, because a lot of practices today in standard of care, you have these, like, allied health professionals, you know, that you’ve got your md, your pa, your mp and then your, you know, your nurses. We’re setting up the same kind of structure within the integrated oncology community, because it honestly takes a village. And so it’s been really a joy to bring advocates, allied health professionals, and professionals together, you know, medical professionals together, because we all bring something to the table that we need.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:31:57]:
The head of integrative medicine at MD Anderson wrote a book called Anticancer Living, where he looked at the. All the various lifestyle types of things that help cancer, helps you prevent cancer and maybe even get over cancer. But the number one thing that he found epigenetically was what he called connectivity. So when people are connected to other people, and especially people who feel empowered and who want to help and know what to do and can be resources to this patient, that’s a good impetus for survival.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:32:34]:
Love it. I’m guessing you’re talking about Dr. Cohen and his work. Yes, yes, yes. So brilliant. Because that’s just it. And we, so I think, downplay that role. But even, gosh, in the 80s, was it Bernie Siegel who was doing research? Right. Good old.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:32:50]:
He spoke at our Dr. Riordan’s conferences. Yeah. And we actually. Matter of fact, for many years, everyone had to draw their illness.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:32:58]:
So this might. So. Oh, I don’t have it on the wall right now. My husband heard him speak. We were at one of the conferences, and he was having us, all the doctors do that. And we actually framed Steve’s doctor. Bernie grabbed Steve’s as an example and went through it. And it was like. It was shocking how accurate he was. He knew exactly what was happening. And that man, like he was. He wouldn’t do surgery on these little kids if they couldn’t write a good outcome, draw a good outcome, think right, make revision it until it was a better outcome. And then, guess what? He had amazing outcomes. But he’s also the man who really pushed into the research around this concept of community, those patients. There were two things he came up with through his research. One of the answers is the bigger pain in the ass you are, the. The better your outcome. So basically, be proactive, ask questions. You know, be that kind of antagonizing patient, because you have to speak up for yourself and advocate for yourself. So he showed those Patients do. Do better, live longer. And the other group were those who joined some kind of a support group. So there’s that community, that connectivity that. So they could all have had, no matter what their stage. These breast cancer patients that were involved in a support group versus those who weren’t had a far longer overall survival. And so those were the things that just like, why do we not get excited and offer these conversations even more? Those. That was back in the 80s, for crying out loud.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:34:21]:
Yeah. Well, you know, and your insight about patients carrying shame or carrying ptsd, that. I think I asked you this directly. You know, how often do you see that and you say always.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:34:35]:
Always. I. I honestly cannot think of. Maybe if someone says no in the beginning, after we start to work together, to admit it.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:34:44]:
Yeah.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:34:45]:
Or they were just so honestly, like. Because we take such a deep. If you’ve seen, you know, such a huge intake, 54 pages. Right. And we take this in, and we’re also looking at their adverse childhood event scores. I mean, I just did a case this past weekend where I was sitting in with one of our colleagues and going over this case, and I happened to be there with the gentleman, and we’re going through his case, and he does not like. He. He’s got his A score, and he’s telling us it’s a zero. And then we find out his parents got divorced when he was 11. He. The parents divorced after losing a child, so a sibling that was his, like, closest sibling. And I’m like, they’re. The lack of even awareness that that would even be something to say a major loss or change in this part of your childhood at 73 years old, he didn’t even think about that. And then what was really hard in his were his cancer. So I love that you brought up Dr. Hamer’s work in the German New Medicine. What was really interesting is a few years before his diagnosis, they lost a child. And so, yes, a grownup. Yes. Didn’t even. And it had to be, like, teased. Like, it was like an accidental. Almost like, oh, yeah, yeah. We lost a child a couple years ago. What? Excuse me? Yeah. So we. We humans, we push those things away. They’re often too tender to even approach. And so there’s ways of which we as clinicians can kind of get there eventually because we. When we’re really tuning in ourselves, we feel it. We know when that is in the field. You know, as esoteric as that may sound, you can feel that discourse or that lack of, you know, resonance in the field. So it’s just really obvious when someone is not like remembering or feeling into or having awareness around some of these big drivers in their lives.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:36:48]:
So we’re imagining a new kind of way of helping our cancer patients and first of all, in a sense, joining them. I mean, I’ve had, my father died of cancer, my mother had cancer, my brother has prostate cancer. We’ve had. One of our kids has had a melanoma. So it’s out there. It’s there. So until we can get the world, not that we do it, but if people would just open up their minds and say, ah. And we could, we could, we could really make something happen. Because there’s so many young people getting cancer, the level is so high. So if we could take that fear away and say, hey, you’ve got the power to get this better. But, you know, but it’s a process. It’s not just a, you know, hopeful thinking. It’s a process. It’s a science. Yeah, but it’s a different kind of science than what it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s once again integrating the left brain, the right brain, and getting the connection of the two going.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:37:47]:
Absolutely. You know, we used to call that, you know, we’d call the practice of medicine. There’s something to that. Right. That it’s, it insinuates that it’s not stagnant, that it’s dynamic and that it’s ever evolving and iterating. So I want folks to remember that, that we don’t know what we don’t know until we know. And that’s for clinicians, patients, advocates, caregivers, the whole bit. But then this other part is we also call it the art of medicine.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:38:13]:
Yeah.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:38:14]:
And the art is what you’re talking about. That is the true bridging of the right and the left brain because there’s this deeper listening beyond our observ observation skills, beyond our main senses, there’s a deeper listening of feeling. And today in the world of telemed and zoom room meetings, some of that can be lost. You know, I mean, you have to really hone that skill if you’re working with patients in this format because you. It’s harder to miss when you’re in person. Right. And so for any clinician listening or any patient listening who has a sense that maybe their doctor doesn’t fully see them, you know, it’s, it’s worth making that extra, you know, maybe you go and invest in time with that person at least once, because once you engage in that field, even Once it’s an easier to stay connected even when there’s screen between you. You know, I think you guys do that well at the Riordan Center. You try and get people there for intensives and you know, so at least a first time one on one to establish. When I had my practice in Colorado, it was the same thing. It’s like my first visit I had to do because I there was legalities around. But it was also very much a need to actually know who was in front of me and feel who’s in front of me and for them to feel me. And so then when we would connect again over the phone or over a zoom call or what have you, there was already that connection was established and we couldn’t. It was more difficult to break.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:39:44]:
Nisha, I think we could just go.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:39:45]:
On but forever love, I’m just gonna have to come out and hang out with you in November and I’m very excited.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:39:51]:
It’s gonna be fun. We’re gonna also have our 50 year gala which you are going to be receiving a very justly deserved award. And so but I think anyone that can come should be able to have this sense of amazement that we can do this. This is something that is happening. You were a spark, but now it’s turning into a forest. A good forest fire.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:40:19]:
It’s a good one.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:40:20]:
And we hope that our conference will be another step in that evolutionary process of people opening their minds and being willing to see that cancer is controllable. But it’s going to take all of our resources of healing, not just left brain, but all of our resources of healing in order to get the job done in most cases. So. But thank you for all your work and thanks for being on the program and can’t wait to see you.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO [00:40:48]:
Ditto. Thank you so, so much.

Riordan Clinic [00:40:50]:
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