Turning Loss Into Legacy with Robin Daly and Yes to Life

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 Reimagined 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 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 and 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 are licensed to serve in all 50 states and they are deeply committed to improving access to safe and 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]:
Well, hello everyone. I’m Dr. Ron Hunninghake. We’re welcoming you back today for another episode of the Riordan Clinic’s podcast. And I’m so pleased today to have Mr. Robin Daly, who is the Executive Chair of Yes to Life in England. He’s with us today and we’re going to be talking about his organization, which Robin, welcome aboard. How long have you been at the head of your organization?

Robin Daly [00:02:16]:
20 years this year, in fact. Yeah, we’re just beginning to get going and yeah, we’re celebrating our 20th year in style. We’ve been doing an awful lot and making a lot of noise and celebrating, which has been great and it’s actually done an awful lot to raise the profile of our work. So I’m very pleased about that. But, yeah, it’s taken 20 years to feel like we’re having some impact at last.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:44]:
My understanding is that, you know, Yes to Life is all about supporting integrative cancer therapies. And I was wondering, how did this happen to you? How did you get involved in this?

Robin Daly [00:02:59]:
Right, well, it’s a charity, it’s a not for profit, to put it in American language. And the way most of these charities start is through personal experience. And that was true for me as well. I had a daughter who had cancer three times, starting from when she was nine and she eventually died when she was 23. And yeah, three rounds of cancer during that time. And so we spent an awful lot of time inside a lot of UK hospitals and we got to know the good, the bad and the ugly on the way and there were some gaps which were just so massive that there was nothing to do but to roll up our sleeves and get on and do something about it. And we actually started doing that while my daughter’s still alive. Yes, life started just in the last few months of her life. Of course, we weren’t expecting to lose her at that time, but, yeah, after she died, there was nothing to do but to get on with it and we’ve been at it ever since.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:04:08]:
Yeah, I think everyone in the world now is getting pretty deeply touched with cancer. I’ve had. My father died with cancer, my mother has had cancer, I have a brother with prostate cancer, my wife has had breast cancer. So we’re all being affected. And as this tsunami of cancer seems to be growing, certainly it’s overwhelming many of the medical resources and I think it’s showing us where the gaps in our care exist. And I’m wondering, how does Yes to Life kind of help fill in some of those gaps?

Robin Daly [00:04:49]:
Well, we’re a patient facing organization. That’s the first thing to say. Everything we do is for patients and we are seeking to empower patients to help themselves. So anything that they can do to help themselves and we will be there supporting them. So this is with information, but very importantly with education, helping them to learn about integrative medicine, the power of it, the way it works, which areas to look out for, who’s doing what, why it works, you know, all of this stuff we’re intensely focused on and we do that through every medium we can. Basically we’re trying to get information, good information out to people, reliable information. When I set up, one of the biggest problems, of course, I was out there researching to get help for my own Daughter, you know, the first two times she had cancer was long before the Internet really existed. We didn’t even have a mobile phone. And so researching was a relatively minor matter. In a way. We didn’t find that much, even though there was actually more out there than I knew about and more than I ever found. But come the last time she got cancer, this was in the Beginning of the 2000s, the Internet was there with a vengeance. And, you know, we did the thing like everybody else. You just get on the Internet there and you do a search and you come up with so many million results. And the problems were not, you know, shortage of information, it was overwhelmed with information and no kind of grading system to understand what was good information, what was poor information, what was really important information, what was relatively unimportant. All this kind of thing was there were just so many unanswered questions about, well, you know, I’ve seen this treatment on 10 different websites now. It looks like it’s something that could have some effect. Is it relevant to our situation, can we get it, or do we have to go to South America? You know, there’s so many questions to be answered. And you know, I was researching 21 and a half hours a day, basically for weeks, trying to find out, you know, really what to do and what could genuinely help us. And so a sort of primary mission for Yes to Life was to get good, reliable information to people quickly so they didn’t have to go through this. And in order to do that, it needed to come from an organization which had got no other agenda other than helping people with cancer. No financial agenda, nothing. And so hence the charity was the obvious vehicle for this. And, and that’s why we said that that was our primary aim when we set it up. And it still is really.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:07:47]:
So we refer to our patients as co learners. And I would assume that’s where you’re at too, in working with these people that are oftentimes desperately looking for new information regarding their own or their loved one’s cancers. So how do you work in that capacity? Do you, do you actually do research or do you have consultations? How do you have on one contact that helps people figure out what they need to know?

Robin Daly [00:08:18]:
Right, okay, well we, for the one on one stuff, we have a variety of things going on as kind of core offering, which we’ve always had since almost since the beginning, is our helpline. So we have a helpline which people can call up, they can email it to it. You know, when we set up, I was the helpline you know, there’s the phone on the sideboard and it sat there for a long time before it rang for the first time. We were like, blimey, look, it’s the helpline. It was quite a thing. But anyway, it’s now a fully fledged service and it’s manned by people who all have experience of cancer themselves. So they know where people are coming from, they are great listeners, they really understand the difficulties that the callers are facing. So those people are not there to give them advice. We don’t give advice to people, but we do signpost them to the kind of resources they’re likely to need. And we help people financially in any way we can as well. So that takes a number of different forms of, you know, maybe offering them free access to something or giving them a great discount on supplements or whatever it is. Well, we’re always looking for ways to reduce the costs because, as you know, they’re very high for people who, you know, don’t necessarily have any resource for something like this and they may have lost their meager job when they got cancer. So that’s our central offering. And then we, on top of that, we have things like one to one support, which is actually specifically set up for mentoring people. And we have a lot of group work. Groups we find are extraordinarily powerful. We’ve really got on board with groups in the last six, seven, eight years, just, you know, around the. We were running groups, one or two groups before the pandemic, in person groups. Along came the pandemic and of course it was like, oh, blimey, those poor people stuck, isolated in their flat, you know, somewhere or another, with no support whatsoever. They’re probably not even getting their conventional cancer treatment. They’re just sitting there worrying. And so we really took off with the online platforms and bringing groups together. And after the pandemic, we do both now and these are enormously important. I mean, it can’t be understated how much good support comes out of a group scenario and what depth that support can take as well. I think that what’s being shown more and more in research these days is how vital to our longevity, things like social connection are, a sense of belonging, all these kind of very basic things, which our healthcare doesn’t think they’re any relevance at all. But these are actually the major predictors of how long people live. And becoming part of a group where everyone’s facing similar difficulties and everyone wants every other person to succeed is an extraordinary, powerful mix and it can bring out the most amazing things in people. So that’s another huge way in which we can offer them direct support. So those are some of the ways that we’re actually directly interacting with people. We’re a virtual organization. We don’t even have an office. We did at one time, but we nearly went bankrupt about 10 years ago and gave up the office and we never got it back again. We don’t need it, so we’re virtual. So we don’t have a face to face interface with beneficiaries except at public events. And those are great and we love them. And so we’re going to do those forever because they’re very important for us to have those actual meeting and interaction points with people. And they absolutely love them as well. But, yeah, that just seems to be the way it’s gone for us. We’ve become this, I like to think, nimble virtual organization. We can respond quickly to situations. The pandemic came along and we. We had probably the biggest integrative oncology events in Britain ever, online, almost immediately, right at the beginning. And they were enormously successful. They were hugely attended by people around the world, not just Britain, and very popular. And because we adopted the technology, we rolled up our sleeves and got on with it and did a good job on delivering the very best speakers over the course of two weekends. So that’s the kind of thing we like to do, is to actually, you know. Yeah, deliver what’s needed, what’s wanted.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:13:35]:
How do you kind of find yourself, you know, between conventional, between alternative and then. Now we’re coming into the. Finally coming into the word integrative. Do you feel like integration is truly upon us or are we still a long ways from true integration?

Robin Daly [00:13:54]:
Well, I think we’re still quite a long way from true integration. Wherever you are in Britain, we’re a million miles from true integration. It’s, you know, people in America think things are bad over there, but they’ve got no idea. The model, the healthcare model in America is not something we’re particularly fond of over here. We like our national health and the free service to everybody, regardless of their means. But there is a downside to it and the downside is this. There’s zero competition and the NHS doesn’t want to do it. It just can’t and doesn’t budge. It’s like a super tank, you know, changing its direction is just virtually impossible. And whereas the business model, it thrives on competition. And, you know, if somebody has an oncology unit that has some integrative stuff there and the patients Are liking it and it’s cheap and it helps. Well, everybody else around is going to start doing it. And that is one of the positives of your model in America. We do, of course, have private health care here. And I hope that it’s going to actually be the trojan horse, if you like, that gets more integration into this country. You know, the best, the nearest thing to integration we have is in private healthcare at the moment. And I think they’re beginning to realize they need to push ahead with this model. You know, we’re not, you know, I used to talk about us being a decade behind here, but we’re much more than that. I think now. You know, the ability to resist change here is stunning.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:42]:
True in the human being as well. Just not just England. What do you think will be the point at which? I mean, because right now the crisis is ever, ever looming around the world, especially in western countries. And it seems least obvious to me that so much of what cancer is about is poor lifestyle choices, poor environment, environmental toxins, stress. All the things that we now know are part of terrain. You know, the, the whole. One of the fundamental aspects of the integrative model is that there are terrains within our body and within our lives that if we can clean those up, we have a chance of increasing our immune response and, and getting over the cancer. But it’s a, it’s a big jump for a lot of people when they, when they first get the cancer, they, they really, they’re coming at it from no real background in this idea that lifestyle could have a true bearing on their health and well being. How do you, how do you kind of approach people when they’re calling in? Are, are there some fundamentals that you’d like to share with them?

Robin Daly [00:17:00]:
Well, first thing is to, you know, on the optimistic side, whereas healthcare is doing everything it can to resist the idea that lifestyle has got anything whatsoever to do with cancer, the public are much further ahead. So a lot of the public, when their oncologist tells them, oh, it doesn’t matter what you eat, you know, just keep your weight on, eat buns, whatever, you know, they sort of scratch their heads and think, well, you know, that doesn’t seem right to me. They do actually realize that this is bad advice. So they start to look outside the box. You know, the oncologist says, don’t look on the Internet. And they go home and they look on the Internet and they find it confirmed that, yes, lifestyle is very important. And so, yeah, I think, yeah, the public is further ahead. Not everybody. I mean, there’s a huge swathes to the public, just do what they’re told. But. But a significant proportion now knows that that’s not right because quite a proportion of healthcare professionals and media gurus, if you like, are out there talking about lifestyle and how much it’s impacting on the epidemic of chronic disease that we have. Not just cancer, of course, as everyone recognizes now, the things that you just described that are driving the cancer pandemic actually are driving all the other chronic diseases as well. Cancer is just the way it manifests in some people. So, yeah, I think people are realizing, and I very heartened actually to come across a proportion of young people, and this is a first in my experience, young people who are worried about the fact that they could get cancer because in the past nobody wanted to know anything whatsoever about cancer. They just want. They didn’t even like to hear the word and they just had their fingers crossed. Hope it doesn’t happen to me. And they didn’t know what chemotherapy was, you know, they just didn’t know anything about it. And so when they landed on Planet Cancer, it was just literally a completely foreign world to them. It’s like, how on earth did I get here? Because, well, they weren’t paying attention. But now there are young people who are actually aware of the fact that if they don’t watch out, they’re going to be in the 50% who are going to get cancer. And that’s really heartening because they’re right. If they don’t watch out, they will be. Because if you live without attention nowadays, the surroundings that we are living in are so poor. We’re being fed so much poor food. There are so many environmental toxins, there are so many lifestyle factors which are out of step with our very nature. We are heading towards a cliff basically with a blindfold on. So that’s really good to hear and I hope we get more and more of that, which is, you know, young people waking up to the fact that the way that society lives, the way that we’ve been induced to live by consumerism, is actually extremely bad for our health. So that’s one piece of good news.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:20:15]:
Well, Robin, I first met you by listening to you interview Mr. Mark Lintern, who has done an amazing thing with his book, the Cancer Resolution. He’s reopened a topic that actually here at the Riordan clinic we discussed 20 years ago. And I actually did a lecture called the Fungal Link to Cancer. And unfortunately we didn’t stay with it. What do you think? Mark’s book and this New revelation of how fungal elements could be a major driver in cancer. How does that change the playing field in terms of helping patients figure out what they want to do in terms of dealing with their own cancer?

Robin Daly [00:21:00]:
Well, it’s important. That’s the first thing. I think it’s very important what he’s done. It’s an amazing achievement. I’ve got massive respect for the man. He came to us, he wrote me a letter about three years ago or so and told me how he’d spent more than seven years researching cancer and he’d come up with a new theory of cancer. And I was like, mm, new theory of cancer. Okay, from a graphic designer. But I’m open minded. I thought, okay, give him a go. And you know, I was very impressed with what he’d done right from the start. And I think that the things that are very significant about what he’s achieved is this. We already, you know, in our world, the metabolic theory is the one that’s kind of, we know is the best theory we got is a million miles better than the somatic mutation theory that mainstream medicine uses, which is not just unproven at this point. It’s disproven in my mind. There are reasons why it could never actually be true. So the metabolic theory is there and it’s given an awful lot of hope and access to helpful approaches to metabolic theory from that base of thinking. There are lots of strategies which do help people in a myriad of different ways at different stages of cancer. So that’s a great base. But it’s, you know, it’s not perfect. We all know that. It’s not like, okay, we know the metabolic theory, therefore we can fix people. It doesn’t work like that. And there are some parts that still remain unexplained in that theory. So. And very importantly some. The unexplained part is right at the very beginning what happens, why cancer even occurs in the first place. So this is where Mark’s work majors, if you like. He has, I mean, the actual suggestion of microorganisms, fungal involvement and all that is kind of like the icing on the cake. The heart of what he’s done is to come up with a new mechanism of how cancer evolves, how does it develop. And that is a major achievement. When you think that one man on his end has pulled this off. And having been worked with Mark, in absolute in depth with him on his work, I helped him with his book and everything. I’m no scientist. I just want to point that out. I’m really not a scientist and. But nonetheless he’s able to put everything across in a manner that I can understand. So therefore it makes sense to me. So he’s managed to come up with this new mechanism which is an extraordinary thing. But now that I know in detail how he did it, I can see how a major ingredient in his ability to come up with a new mechanism was the fact that he had zero conventional training.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:24:10]:
Right. He was not by, he was not pre biased in any way. He. And that’s the true essence of science is you’ve got to get rid of bias.

Robin Daly [00:24:19]:
So he didn’t have any bias. And also he didn’t. He wasn’t siloed. Medicine is siloed. And when he. There’s one fact he told me which nobody had ever said to me, I’ve been doing this for, you know, well, at that point for about 18 years and nobody had ever said this to me before. And I was like, what? Really? How come I’ve not heard this before? And that fact was that within infectious diseases they have something called a Warburg-like effect. And it’s so like the Warburg effect that actually you can’t.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:24:56]:
It is the Warburg.

Robin Daly [00:24:59]:
And it’s like nobody had ever made this connection. And when he first made it, he thought, well, somebody else must have done this. But no, they hadn’t. And why not? Because the people in infectious diseases stay with infectious diseases, the people in cancer stay with cancer and never the twain shall meet. And you know, extraordinary. But this led him to come up and formulate this new mechanism for cancer. Now in terms of your question, what this does for people with cancer, look, the first thing is to say, well, look, this is just a theory, okay? Theories, they’re very important because they help you decide what to do. But at this point, his theory is largely untested. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of evidence to support it, because there is. He’s found it all, it’s in his book. But nonetheless it hasn’t been directly tested. So you wouldn’t go out and rely on the information that, you know, what this implies to be your 1 method of dealing with cancer. That wouldn’t make sense. Fortunately though, his theory doesn’t in any way negate any of the discoveries of metabolic science. It actually adds to them. So the answer is here in terms of how this affects. Well, I would say, well, you embrace everything that metabolic science has to tell you and you use it to the full and you address the issue from the point of view of Mark’s theory as well, and just see what that does for you. And you know, people are doing that now. It’s happening, all right. Because Mark’s got a group of people on Facebook who follow his work and everything. And of course, a lot of those people have got cancer and a lot of them are trying to stay alive. So if you can do something which is relatively non toxic and is an addition to everything you’re already doing to do a belt and braces job on trying to get yourself well, well, there’s almost no reason not to do it at this point, given the arguments that he can make with his theory. And the most compelling argument he has is that he can explain all of the hallmarks of cancer.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:27:24]:
Exactly.

Robin Daly [00:27:25]:
And a lot more. A lot more than that as well, which nobody else can. So that’s a good reason to say, I’ll give this a go.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:27:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re going to be. I’ve asked Robin and he’s. He’s agreed to come to the United States for our conference in the first weekend in November where we’re doing the rise of integrative care in the whole cancer world and cancer care reimagined. And I’ve asked Robin to introduce Mark. And so for those people who might be interested in the conference, you’ll have a chance to meet both Robin and Mark. And we plan to really, hopefully open people’s minds to the idea that, hey, we’ve got such a huge problem. Can’t we think about better ways of dealing with it? Helping people achieve longer remissions or complete remissions using new knowledge? This new knowledge that has been discovered by Mark and then promulgated by people like yourself, Robin. There are a lot of people now are saying we’ve got to start thinking outside of the box if we’re going to prevail against this monster that’s essentially taking over the planet.

Robin Daly [00:28:49]:
It’s interesting if you put, if you start to think along the lines that Mark is proposing and say, okay, it’s an intracellular infection with fungus and you look at what we’ve done in our lifestyle for the last 50, 75 years with antibiotics, disinfectants, all these things we’ve primary fundamentally change our relationship with things like fungi. And many of these things have reduced our resistance to them. And the fact that we should more easily get infections is unsurprising. I mean, it’s been proven that kids who grow up in a farmyard have got much better immune systems than ones who grown up in a sterile environment. And, you know, it’s easy to see how we’ve weakened ourselves by a myriad of ways. The number of toxins we’re having to deal with every day, the poorness of the nutrition we have to actually, you know, support our immune system, it just all adds up to. Yeah, it could very well produce a situation where the balance is changed enough for fungi to just have a bit of a field day.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:30:02]:
Well, we could go on. I’m so glad we were able to make this connection today. And. And I hope that your work continues to be successful. You’ve. I know how much you loved your daughter because you have devoted 20 years now trying to make this more known to the people who have. Who are suffering through this as well. I know that pain myself. And so hopefully we can together create a whole new way of people beginning to approach this terrible thing called cancer with a sense of ability to succeed instead of chasing failure like we do so often.

Robin Daly [00:30:44]:
Yeah, Absolutely agree. Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s. It’s been great to actually engage in this way. There’s nothing worse than being a victim of a situation.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:30:53]:
Right.

Robin Daly [00:30:54]:
To actually turn that around and be proactive in changing it has been a great, great way of making sense of the loss that we had. And, yeah, at this point, it’s brought so many good things in its wake. It’s all rather a confusing picture. But. Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:31:15]:
Robin, we’ll be looking forward to seeing you soon in November.

Robin Daly [00:31:19]:
Very much. Thank you.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:31:20]:
Thank you for being on this program and for the work you do.

Riordan Clinic [00:31:24]:
Thank you for listening to the Real Health Podcast Podcast. This episode was brought to you by Empower Pharmacy, the most advanced compounding pharmacy and 503B outsourcing facility in the nation. Licensed in all 50 states, Empower is committed to improving access to safe, affordable and personalized medications for patients, providers and caregivers. Learn more at empowerpharmacy.com if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. You can also find all of the episodes and show notes over at realhealthpodcast.org also be sure to visit riordanclinic.org where you will find hundreds of videos and articles to help you create your own version of Real Health.