In this episode, Dr. Ron welcomes back Breast Cancer Conqueror, Dr. Véronique Desaulniers, or as many people know her, Dr. V. Dr. V breaks down the 7 essential steps that have helped her and many others heal breast cancer naturally. In today’s world, 1 in 8 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. The 7 Essentials System® is a complete and step-by-step educational program that shows you how to prevent “dis-ease” and create vibrant health naturally.
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Episode Transcript
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Intro: This is The Real Health Podcast brought to you by Riordan Clinic. Our mission is to bring you the latest information and top experts in functional and integrative medicine to help you make informed decisions on your path to real health.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to the Riordan Clinic Real Health Podcast. This is Dr. Ron Hunninghake. I’m the chief medical officer at Riordan Clinic, and it’s our privilege today to have back again Dr. Véronique Desaulniers. So Dr. V was on our show not too long ago. And we started to get into the details of her book. Could you just tell us a little bit about the Heal Breast Cancer book to start out with, and then we’re going to get into some of the essence of that book?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Yes. Heal Breast Cancer Naturally: 7 Essential Steps to Beating Breast Cancer, so this is the second edition. And the reason I wrote the book is because so many women were coming to me, and they wanted information and yes, I could send them to the website, and they could read the blogs, but this has been called the bible for breast cancer, healing breast cancer naturally because it has everything you need from the nutritional, the detoxification, the emotional, the dental, the testing. I mean, it has everything you need there to really maneuver your healing journey, because we know there’s so much information out there and it’s overwhelmed, but this focuses specifically on breast cancer.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: And when a woman is told that, “you have breast cancer,” it is such an incredible life change that it’s extremely disorienting. And as you mentioned, there are so many voices out there. There’s conventional, but there’s also a lot of alternative functional integrative material. And I think a woman is just… I know my wife, when she was diagnosed, it just seemed very overwhelming to her. So it’s got to be reassuring to women to know they can go one place and get a very good handle on what the next steps could be for them.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: It is. It really is. And when women hear those words, “you have breast cancer,” it creates that framework work in their mind. What’s the first thing that comes up in their mind is often a sickly woman with a bald head who struggles with her health. That’s kind of the vision of breast cancer. And, and I’m here to change that. We want a paradigm shift because it does not have to look that way. Just because you’re diagnosed with breast cancer, it doesn’t mean you have to be deathly sick. It doesn’t mean that you have to lose your hair and struggle through the journey. I mean, we have many testimonials and many women we’ve supported. Women in almost 60 countries, now we’re at 59, who have gone through this journey successfully and have applied the seven essentials in their life
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: For a long time, I’ve been telling my patients, my female patients that it was one in eight women, but recently I heard that it had really jumped to almost like one in five or six women are being diagnosed with breast cancer. So it’s a timely message. And certainly I think one, all the women and their men that are listening, even if you don’t have breast cancer, this is very important to listen to because everything that I believe that you’re going to be talking about that we know about here at the Riordan Clinic is all about preventing cancer just as much as treating it. And really, there’s not a whole lot of big difference in the two pathways.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Absolutely. And whether it’s breast cancer, prostate cancer, you name it, cancer is cancer. I mean, there’s some little nuances that are a little different, but I’ve worked with many men with prostate cancer who’ve applied these principles. I get emails or meet people at conferences. They say, “My daughter had melanoma and she followed your program.” Or “My daughter had ovarian cancer and she followed this program.” So it’s basic principles that you can apply to any disease in your body.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: I’ve even heard it put that cancer is more of a verb than it is a now and that this idea that cancer occurs in just discreet organs, where actually even in conventional thinking, moving away from that and beginning to see that the body as a whole has changed in a dramatic way to allow for the continued growth of these cancerous cells. And so the idea here is to find out what is it, what are the essential steps towards turning the body around back to more healthy living? And I think is that what the seven essential systems is all about.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: It is, it is. It’s about going back to the foundations of what it takes to allow the body to heal. Whenever there’s disease in the body, your lifestyle, the way you’ve eaten, what you’ve been exposed to, the thoughts you think, all of those things have allowed disease or cancer to show up in your life. So the good news is those things can all be changed. And we know according to studies and statistics that 5% or less is genetic. The majority of it is because of lifestyle changes and dietary issues that can lead to the cancer. And cancer is not necessarily a genetic disease. We now know it’s more of a metabolic disease. It’s an immune system disease. I also say that it’s a stress disease because we know what stress does to our immune system.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: It’s a toxic disease that we live in such a toxic environment. So those are factors. It’s an inflammatory disease. People are walking around in a state of inflammation. It’s an epigenetic disease. And a lot of people, they are still learning what that word means. But yes, we are born with a set of genes that will have our whole life, but how we choose to live our lives, that’s how those genes actually express. And so I really think this is what your book is all about is helping people find out what are the essential steps for turning around this cancering process and once again, finding true health.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Yes, I agree with your assessment, cancering. Rather than tell women that they are cancer free, we like to use the term you’re no longer cancering or producing a lot of active cancer in your body where you can keep it bay.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, even women who have successfully gone through the standard of care and reached a point of where we find no cancer, there still is the risk of recurrence. And that can be a fairly as high as 70 percent of women can recur because the treatments that we use to treat the tumor can be fairly toxic themselves. And so we want all women to look at all seven essentials as a means of not only getting over cancer, but staying free of cancer for the long haul.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Yes. And that’s a good point that you bring out. Just because they can’t see it in the blood or in the blood tests or in the scan doesn’t mean that there’s not those circulating tumor cells or their breast cancer stem cells that are just floating around ready to cause a recurrence.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Okay. So should we jump into the seven essentials? Your first essential is one of the Riordan Clinic essentials as well, let food be your medicine. So I’m sure people have heard that Hippocrates saying. What does that really mean?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: It means that food contains everything that we need to keep our bodies healthy and the type of food that we eat has a huge impact on our health. Now there’s our diets are as individual as our bodies. When somebody tells me that there’s only one way to eat, and that’s the only way you’re going to get well, then that’s a very myopic view because clinically I’ve seen in the last 40 some years, some people do well with more of a vegetarian diet. Some do well more with a paleo meat eating diet. And so we have to look at the individual and what their genetics are, the health of their GI tract, their blood type. All those things are very important.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: But in a general overview, eating as organic as you can, lots of vegetables on your plate. Little bit, when we talk about eating meat, it has to be grass-fed, clean, no antibiotics, no GMOs. And we’re only looking at a small little piece, maybe three to four ounces. It doesn’t take a lot. Avoiding, in my opinion, we need to avoid a lot of grains because that can really increase the carbohydrate load on the body. And some minimal fruit, which some fruits are good and in season it’s okay. If you live in an area where peaches are being grown and it’s in season, it’s okay to indulge once in a while. But if you live in the cold north, it’s not good to eat pineapples and bananas.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So we know that cancer cells, they have changed their metabolic functioning. They no longer can burn fat properly. They have shifted to sugar burning. And so when you talk about grains, that’s for a lot of people, that’s high sugar. That also could be high glyphosate too, because a lot of the wheat is being sprayed with glyphosate. So certainly that is a way of reducing that particular toxin at the same time. But so many of the women that I’ve seen who do develop breast cancer have drifted into the metabolic syndrome, where they have high blood sugar, high insulin levels. And they have difficulty doing fasting because they get hypoglycemia. And so they find themselves using sugar quite a bit or highly refined carbohydrates. And so what kind of suggestions would you give to women to help them shift out this?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, first of all, educate yourself about what it means to have that metabolic syndrome. And the good news is it is very reversible and understand what high sugar and insulin spikes can do to you. It literally can paralyze your immune system by 40 percent for over five hours. There’s something called phagocytes, part of the immune system that gobbles up unhealthy bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, that sort of thing. And when you eat sugar, refined sugars, it literally will paralyze your immune system for up to five hours. So that’s very, very important.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: And then do a little experiment on yourself. Get one of those blood glucose monitors that diabetics use. That’s what I did in my second healing journey. I’d been juicing for decades and I thought, okay, this time around, I’m really going to do extra juicing. Well, when I did that, I was really feeling off. I wasn’t feeling good. So I checked my blood sugar and sure enough was sky high, which showed me that I’d become insulin resistant to a certain point, and I couldn’t handle all the juicing. So I needed to cut back and use things like blending and smoothies instead. So I have a lower, slower increase.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So I’m curious. Did you do any fasting? Intermittent fasting has become a way for people to get into ketosis. And in ketosis, the body is the cells are burning mostly fat. And so that’s one way of lowering sugar. Was that part of your journey as well? Sorry.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: In my second healing journey, I decided that I would experiment with ketosis and the ketogenic diet. And so for six months, I really dove in. Very strict, measured all my fats, carbohydrates, proteins, all of that, worked with a ketogenic coach and really understood the nuances and what I ate and how it affected my blood sugar. And so definitely added more, more healthy fats, really cut back on my carbohydrates. And when I saw my HbA1c or my fasting insulin numbers come down, I knew I was in the right direction. However, because of my genetics, I don’t process a lot of fats very well. So I had to really cut back on the fats and eat a balanced, moderate amount of healthy fats.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. This is The Real Health Podcast. And what we found is that real foods are the best foods. They have the highest phytonutrient content. You want to stay away from any food that’s got a label on it because more than likely it’s been processed and added sugar as well as the fats that are in processed foods have. They’re oftentimes vegetable oil type fats that have become hydrogenated or oxidized in some way. And they really turn your mitochondria off. And the whole goal of good cancer care is to improve mitochondrial functioning.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Yes. And there’s many ways to do that. Exercise. Oxygenate your body, the healthy fats, lowering the stress levels, cheating your mitochondria, healthy things, making sure you supplement with extra CoQ10. And there are specific supplements now. There’s something called oxaloacetate that the product is known as benaGene, which has been clinically shown to really improve the health of the mitochondria.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Let’s move on to number two here on the seven essentials, which that’s to reduce your toxic exposure. Now, my thinking says that there’s a lot of different types of toxic exposures. There could be toxic relationships. There could be toxic homes like mold and whatnot. There could be chemicals that are lurking in personal care products. Can you address some of these toxins and how were you able to track them down and get rid of them?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, where do we start because-
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: There’s a lot.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: The air, the water, even our food, even if we try to eat organic, guess what? What if the field next door is spraying glyphosates and Roundup. The rainwater, the soil, all those things have been unfortunately tainted with so many toxic chemicals, but eat as clean as you can. And then look at your environment. Look at what you’re using outside in your yard. Look at what you’re using inside your home to clean your home. Because there are hundreds of chemicals that have been linked to breast cancer specifically that you may be using in your home as cleaners. Look at what you put on your skin, because anything you put on your skin is being absorbed directly into the body. So be aware of things that mimic estrogens. We call them xenoestrogens. So things like plastics and phthalates and BPAs, heavy metals. Mercury is a known metalloestrogen. It mimics and stimulates estrogen in the body. And so be very aware of those for sure.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: And then look at what we’re dealing with the EMFs. Now they’re starting to turn on 5G. And when I think about how pervasive 5G is going to be with Mr. Musk is shooting all these satellites up into the atmosphere, our Earth. I mean, the goal is to have over 40,000 satellites, beaming 5G down on planet Earth. It’s frightening to think about. However you can. The good news is there is technology that you can protect your environment and your body from the effects of EMFs. And whatever technology you use, make sure that it’s backed up by clinical studies and that there’s proof that it’s working because there’s a lot of junkie woohoo stuff out there.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So awareness is really important in this phase because a person can be overwhelmed, but you can also take a step by step approach and start thinking about what are small steps that help you reduce your toxic load. I was even made aware that hair dyes can be definitely related to breast cancer. So obviously that’s something that a woman does have in her control and it’s just a matter of taking charge and addressing those possibilities.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: That’s right. It’s one small thing at a time. If you’re newly diagnosed, don’t feel like you have to throw away everything and start fresh. If it just means changing your toothpaste, changing the lotion you put on your skin, go to your local supermarket now. You can buy any kind of household cleaner pretty much that is non-toxic and biodegradable. I mean, things that have improved so much in the last 40 some years.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: This really kind of leads us into the number three essential, balance your energy, because it’d be very easy for a newly diagnosed cancer patient, breast cancer patient to just feel totally overwhelmed and probably defeated before they even get started. So the important thing to know is that the body does have cancer controlling mechanisms. And when we take better care of ourselves, when we get adequate sleep, when we make time to walk through the grass barefoot or to breathe deeply and meditate, pray, all these things are balancing our energy. How has that manifested in your experience?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, it’s an essential, so it’s very important obviously. And so when I was kind of downloading my system that I created because it was going to help me on my first healing journey, I realized as a chiropractor, first of all, that we needed to balance our electrical nerve system. Our brain commands, controls every single cell in our body, through the nerve system. And so if there’s any misalignments in the spine, that can cause that information not to get through properly. That can cause miscommunication. So chiropractic definitely helps to balance your nerve system. And there’s the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. One’s the accelerator. One’s the brake. And those need to be balanced properly.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Then you want to balance your chi energy, the energy that runs through the meridian. So acupuncture could be another great tool to balance your energy. Make sure that you get restorative sleep. Sleep has been shown to really help people that are struggling with their health if they start getting that restorative sleep. And you can train your body, and there are things to do. You can test for hormones and your brain chemistry to see what’s off, your neuro transmitters. And you can learn to bowel balance those through specific supplementation and meditation and diet. And I mean, I was an insomniac for 20 years. And then I really learned to balance my sleep. And now 95% of the time, I sleep very well. So it is possible to turn that around. And then of course balancing your hormones, right?
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Absolutely.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: We know when our hormones are off, we don’t feel well, right? We’re off balance. And so for women, especially dealing with breast cancer and it applies to men with breast cancer, make sure that you understand your genetic tendency when it comes to breaking down or methylating metabolizing your hormones because some women and men have a genetic SNP where they don’t break down their hormones properly. And with estrogen, it could mean that you have aggressive circulating estrogens that can be problematic in causing cancer.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Now your hormones don’t cause cancer. Let’s be clear about that. But if you are exposed to too many chemical estrogens and you’re not breaking yours down properly, if your gut health is not healthy, it won’t process those hormones properly as well. And so you should test. Test to find out. You can do that through DNA testing, urine testing, to see if you have that problem. And if you do, the good news is you can support that pathway with things like broccoli sprouts and sulforaphane, D-glucarate, DIM, which is a concentration from cruciferous vegetables, flax seeds. So there’s a lot of things you can do to help bring your hormones into balance.
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Dr. Ron Hunninghake: This kind of also leads into number four, heal your emotional wounds, because if you are in a state of chronic stress due to emotional distress, it’s very hard to do the first three things. In some ways you need to make that step of emotional healing a very priority one. And I don’t know if you think of that more as interpersonal or within just the person themselves. How does that play out in your scheme?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, it addresses all aspects actually. Obviously it starts with you and it’s learning to heal that little girl or that little boy inside of you and to learn to nurture that little girl, to teach her and let her know that she’s safe and she’s taken care of and to learn to forgive yourself and forgive others and really look at this situation. A lot of women that I find don’t progress very well in their healing journey. I ask them the question, and we do some of this in our retreats too, is do you really believe you deserve to heal because some women have such a low self-esteem or they feel so guilty. And this could be all subconscious or they don’t feel they deserve to heal. And so they basically have that subconscious death wish where I don’t deserve to be alive because I did this in my past, or I’m such a bad person, or my mother told me this.
And so it’s very important to work through those things and seek the help of a professional. I worked with two different EFT coaches. One was a trained psychologist. The other one was just a trained EFT practitioner and used tools like EVOX, which is stands for electronic voice. That’s what EVOX stands for. And it’s basically, you put a little headset on with the speaker and you have your hand on the ZYTO cradle and you speak a statement and the technology records the stress in your voice. And then it gives back the frequencies to help neutralize those stressors. There’s technology like EMDR, which has to do with retraining your brain using eye movements.
So there’s a lot of tools and something as simple as meditation or journaling and reading books, like you are the placebo and understanding that if you really believe and focus and visualize and see your body healing, that your body will respond. But if you’re thinking in the back of your head, in the back of your mind and in your heart, well, I don’t know if I’m going to get well or what if this protocol I’m doing doesn’t work, or what if this back pain is the cancer spreading? And you’re always in that fear and trepidation and conflict, well, guess what? Your cells are listening and so is the cancer. So you really have to pay attention to your thoughts and learn to train your brain.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: I think the metaphor of the non-healing wound is really appropriate here. So many of us have had traumas in our childhood. There’s actually research on that that childhood traumas can, so to speak, come back to haunt us. But cancer then becomes an opportunity to drain the wound, open the wound, find out why it hasn’t healed and go about that process even if it’s a bit painful because the stakes are so high. Why not? Why not go for healing? If you’ve tucked it away, bring it back out again and work with it and get it to open up and drain, I think is a good way of thinking of this.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: That’s a great analogy. And it reminded me of the book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, right?
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: You can bury, bury, bury and stuff, stuff, stuff, but guess what? Those emotions and that energy is still stored in your cells. And you must learn to release that.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: One of my good friends, Dr. Thomas Levy is very interested in your next essential, which some people may think is odd, but I think it’s one of the really important ones. And that is to embrace biological dentistry. He spent 15 years with Dr. Hal Huggins, who was one of the preeminent biological dentists and saw over and over again how chronic infections in the mouth, mercury toxicity, abscesses, root canals, cavitations, there’s all kinds of things that can go on in the mouth that serves as a source of chronic inflammation and infection that will drain down to the breast through the lymphatic system. How did you come to discover this and to make this one of your essentials?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, I read Dr. Hal Huggins’ book in the 1980s and late 80s, and that was an eye opener because I had 16 metal fillings in my mouth. My parents didn’t believe in dentistry very well. And so, as I got older, I figured, well, I might as well fill all these teeth because I had so many cavities. And so when I read that book, it was a huge light bulb moment. And I started making that connection with my patients and myself. And so 1991, 92, I happened to find a biological dentist who only worked 30 minutes from where I lived, had all of them removed, replaced, did the blood serum compatibility test and really saw a big difference in my health and my energy and realized how important.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: And so when I’ve worked with women and patients, prior to the my breast cancer story, I saw a direct correlation because I did bioenergetic testing where I tested different acupuncture points. And I would see a correlation between the teeth and the organ because our organs are connected to our teeth through the acupuncture meridian system. So if you have a hunk of metal or a root canal sitting on a specific meridian, and we often see that with women on the top and on the bottom, same numbers there that are related to the breast tissue, there’s typically root canal or filling or a crown with a metal backing and perhaps still some mercury underneath that crown. So very, very important or to work with a biological dentist to clean that up.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: And when you think of a root canal, think of it like a dead appendix or a dead gallbladder. How sick would you be if that happens? I mean, sepsis and you can almost die when you have that. Same thing happens with your tooth only on a smaller level. It’s dripping toxic toxins from the anaerobic bacteria because no matter how clean they try to make it, there’s always a source of bacteria there. And then of course there’s cavitations, not cavities, but cavitations, which is an infection in the bone. If you’ve ever had an extraction and it wasn’t cleaned out properly and most likely it wasn’t, then same thing happens. There’s bacteria that go in there. It festers and it literally starts eating away at the bone. And I’ve got pictures of some of my clients who had cavitation surgery and dentists took a picture and that’s literally a hole in the bone where the bacteria’s been eating away at the bone. So very, very toxic and that needs to be cleaned out and addressed as well.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Women can do something relatively simple. As a starting point, you can request a cone beam CT scan of the mouth, which is much better at picking up the cavitations and these types of kind of occult infections. Also, if you continually run an elevated C-reactive protein and no one knows why, you have to be suspicious of something going on in the mouth and dig a little bit deeper. And so I think this is a very important area that is almost always overlooked in conventional thinking.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Absolutely. Yeah. Very, very important to work with that dentist and get a second opinion if they say they don’t see anything. That’s what I did. I got a second opinion. And sure enough, they found some where the other hadn’t.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. So moving on to essential number six, repair your body with therapeutic plants. Now, if you can expand, how is that more it’s actually related to number one, let food be your medicine, but what were you thinking of when you’re thinking of therapeutic plants?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: So therapeutic plants and herbs, and I also include supplements in that. And so when we look at the quality of our food nowadays, we know new studies have shown us that our food is deficient because it’s been grown on deficient soil for decades. And so what we used to get in spinach and carrots, we no longer get. So it’s very important to supplement. So basic trace minerals like zinc and magnesium and selenium, those are key. And then when you look at vitamin D example, we know that if women’s vitamin D levels are low, they’re more than likely to develop breast cancer and less likely to do well on their healing journey. So we’ve got to bring that vitamin D level up. Looking at iodine, iodine is key when it comes to breast health and thyroid health. Women that are on synthetic thyroid medication are twice as likely to develop breast cancer because they’re just suppressing the symptoms. They’re not getting to the root cause and their thyroid isn’t actively working. They need that iodine.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: And then when we focus specifically on immune boosters for the immune system, so medicinal mushrooms, and I mentioned the vitamin D, vitamin C, then you can look at specific cancer killers. So things that literally will kill the cancer cells. So everything from bloodroot to curcumin and even melatonin has been shown to kill breast cancer and breast cancer stem cells. Wormwood, Poly-MVA, Salicinium. I mean, there’s just a list of literally hundreds of products that can really help boost our immune system and weaken the cancer.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. And this is where it can be helpful to get nutrient testing because there are so many choices. You don’t know where to turn first. But if you can test and find that you’re low in some of these essential nutrients, that’s a good place to start. Another thing that we found very helpful, you can now get superfood powders fairly regularly at health food stores. And this is a way to get the benefits of those phytonutrients without necessarily consuming a lot of sugar. Sometimes people think they have to do a lot of smoothies, which you will get phytonutrients from your smoothies, but you can also overdo the sugar part of this. And so superfoods are a way of making low carbohydrate smoothies that are very nutrient dense.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Yeah. I love that. And as much as we try to eat well and have big salads every day and eat lots of vegetables, sometimes we just don’t get all the grains that we need to get. So the powders are great.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So let’s finish up today this session with number seven, adopt early detection. The truth of the matter is is that we all have cancer cells in our body. I’ve read where breast cancer cells can take up to 15 to 20 years to develop. It has to develop a blood supply. And that can take a long time. So why do we wait until the actual cancer is diagnosed? But there are caveats and I know you’re going to, you need to tell our audience about early detection is a plus minus thing in the breast cancer world. Why is that?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, if you follow the pink movement in the month of October, the push is for women to go get mammograms. Now I’m not telling anybody not to get a mammogram. It’s a personal choice. However, when we look at the history of mammography and the challenges with mammography, we know that by the time, it may take six to eight years for something to show up on a mammogram before it’s actually seen. So you’ve got all that time, where what if you could use a technology or even blood work that would tell you that you’re developing breast cancer when it’s just a few hundred cells versus a big tumor already in the breast. And we know that radiation causes cancer. So when you get radiation and compression, that has been shown according to the British Journal of Radiology, can increase a woman’s risk for breast cancer. So if you choose to do mammography, back it up with an ultrasound, because it’ll give you another picture to look at to make sure that you’re covering all the bases.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Now, you can also look at a technology called thermography. Thermography will not diagnose cancer, just like mammogram will, but it’ll give you an indication physiologically what’s happening in your tissue. And it works on the premise that your body gives off heat. And the camera picks up the heat, the infrared heat being emitted from your body and the software translates it into an image. So where there’s more redness, that means there’s more inflammation. And oftentimes we can literally see a tumor with the blood flow or the vascularity forming to feed that tumor. So thermography is a great tool, but again, I recommend that you back it up with ultrasound.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Then there’s MRIs as well. They’re being used more and more. And by the way, if you don’t want to use the dye, the contrast, you don’t have to. That’s a personal choice. You can do it. They can see relatively well without it. And then breast self exam. So how many women know how to do proper breast self exam? And I just want to show this little chart here. So the average woman who is not properly trained in doing a breast exam will find something the size of this, of a ping pong ball. However, if she’s properly trained, she can find something the size of a pea. And when it comes to breast cancer size matters, right? The smaller the tumor, the better the life expectancy. And so this model was created by the MammaCare Foundation and its model has been used to train doctors and nurses for over 30 years.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: The beauty of this is that it feels and looks like a breast, and it has tumors hidden in four different places in the breast even way underneath the nipple. And the manufacturer of the model asked me to take this to the general public. So women could now have access to use this model. And so there’s a training system with a video and a booklet, and it teaches you how to properly do your breast exam. You don’t do it standing up. You don’t do it sitting up. You do it laying down with the model initially to learn how to do a proper exam. So that’s what I call very early detection.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Right. At the Riordan Clinic, we got my best friend for our thermography room. So when our patients come for thermography, we’re introducing them to this methodology of making you more sensitive to the smaller size of potential lesions so that you can catch them early.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: That’s wonderful. Thank you. And I do want to mention with essential number seven and early detection is blood work. I know we alluded to that, but getting tests other than the typical metabolic profile or the CBC, but have your thyroid tested. Do a liver panel. Check your inflammatory markers, like the C-reactive protein, LDS, EHR, homocysteine, ESR, I’m sorry, and homocysteine. Those are all very important. And there are more and more companies now that will look at free circulating cancer DNA in the blood to detect up to 50 kinds of cancers. I just did one from the company GRAIL, G-R-A-I-L, and it’s the Galleri test. And they look for 50 different kinds of cancers in the blood. So that’s very early detection as well.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, we’ve come to the end of our time. But I want to encourage all of our listeners to get Dr. V’s book, Heal Breast Cancer Naturally, because we’ve kind of just scratched the surface of what can be done. And again, it seems overwhelming until you start to do these things. And then instead of being overwhelming, it becomes empowering. So thank you very much for all your work and helping women become empowered against what is a growing menace in our world. But we’ve got to have a strategy, and this book outlines a very good one. So any last words for our listeners?
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Well, thank you so much for having me on your show. Once again, I really appreciate that. And just recognize that you don’t have to do this alone. When I went through my healing journey, I had coaches, I had doctors, I had certain friends that really supported me. So community is very important. And we do offer some specific one on one coaching for women or even group coaching if they feel like they are overwhelmed and they don’t know where to start. So don’t feel like you have to be the lone ranger and try to figure this out yourself.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Very good. Thank you. Dr. V, and Dr. V will be on another episode of our show talking about her personal journey. But for today, thank you so much for the seven essentials to help our patients heal breast cancer naturally.
Dr. Veronique Desaulniers: Thank you for sharing my message of hope with your audience.
Outro: Thank you for listening to The Real Health Podcast. 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.
