Riordan Clinic [00:00:01]:
Hello and welcome to the Real Health Podcast. Today 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. We reached out to them, and much to our delight, they all said yes. Now our 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, we 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. This series and the upcoming conference would not be possible without the generous support of our presenting sponsor, Empower Pharmacy. Empower Pharmacy is the most advanced compounding pharmacy in the nation, licensed to serve in all 50 states. They are deeply committed to improving access to high-quality, affordable, and personalized medications 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. Tickets are on sale now for the conference at cancercancercare reimagined.org we hope you will join us in Wichita this November for this unforgettable event.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:01:26]:
Well, welcome everyone, to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. And I'm your host, Dr. Ron Hunninghake. And it's really my great pleasure to have with me today Dr. Paul Anderson. Paul, it's wonderful that you flew out to do this live for me. Of course, we have another agenda going on, but we thought we would take advantage of the fact that you're here and pick up on some of the latest thoughts on what's going on in your world and. And in the world of integrative oncology.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:01:57]:
Well, thanks so much. Yeah, I. I just walked off an airplane and here I am. It's the Modern Miracles. I've. I've watched a lot of your podcasts.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:07]:
So you've been on one of my.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:02:08]:
Podcasts and I've been on one of them, but I always wanted to be right here. This table.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:13]:
There you go.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:02:14]:
Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:15]:
Well, we're going to be having a conference here at the end of the year on the rise of integrative oncology. And maybe I. From your perspective, maybe there are people in the audience here that have not Maybe not aware of how oncology has been evolving towards this integration of what some people would. Would have called, know, alternative medicine years ago. Then it became orthomolecular, and it's gone through a number of different phases. Where are we at now?

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:02:53]:
Well, you know, to a degree, it probably still depends who you ask. But I think really, for those of us that have been around through a lot of those evolutions, I think what stands out to me is that it. It really. And I think it's always been this way. It's just perspective, but I think now it's more. You know, it's not that there's one model of oncology and medicine that, you know, is one way and there's another model that's another way. It's that each of them cover different areas that the person needs when they have cancer. And so when I'm teaching medical students or residents or other people, you know, who are kind of up and coming, what I'll say is, well, look, you know, if you look at, like a pie chart, for example, because that's what we're all, you know, used to looking at, standard oncology, for some instances might cover, you know, 33% of the pie or 20% or something like that, but what do we do with the rest of the pie? And what I really feel like is, you know, there's no wrong medicine. Sometimes there's wrong times to apply it. But if standard medicine can fit into whatever percentage it has, we kind of have the rest of that percentage with that person to keep them as healthy as possible, improve their quality of life. But I think the other thing that gets lost sometimes in translation is when a person's quality of life is better, usually their biochemistry is working better, their immunology is working better, and that leads to better standard outcome treatment interventions, but also longer life, much better quality of life, et cetera. So I think it's about using the best from each discipline to help the patient as best we can.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:04:57]:
Yeah, yeah. In. In many ways, conventional oncology is all about, you know, treating the cancer, the cancer itself. And integrative oncology is not only that, but pulling in, you know, what can the patient who has the cancer do for themselves? What can they do in terms of lifestyle choices, in terms of their state of mind and the resilience that they need to have to get through what conventional oncology will have to put them through in order to take out the tumor. So we see a kind of a broadening of perspective and a greater involvement of the patient than what has been considered normal oncology in the past.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:05:40]:
Yeah, I think very much so. And I actually think that our. Our colleagues on the. We might consider the more standard side of the ledger. I. I think very few of them don't realize that there's not all these other areas that can be helped. And although we, you know, we all come up in the traditions, we come up in. And they might have a little residual. Oh, well, we don't, you know, maybe want to share. We don't want to do these things. I think most of the oncologists I work with, if we can together help the patient, and we can do it more than either one of us can do individually. I've. I've not had a lot of pushback.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:06:22]:
From that also, just the. And again, I'm, you know, an MD Family physician, but in my medical training, I think I. I only had a very limited amount of nutrition and things that would involve me taking, or me and training the patient on how to take better care of themselves, let alone me learning how to take care of myself. But I think the. The role of the conventional oncologist in the past has been to just do to the patient do to the tumor without really asking the patient to do anything at all.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:07:01]:
Sure.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:07:02]:
You know, it's not. It's not been, you know, it's not been a big part of medicine. But, you know, when I was in my early years, the term wellness was just coming in. You know, wellness did not exist in the medical genre back then, and. And wellness was a step in the direction of, hey, what can we do? Not only to help the patient recover from the illness, but to reach a higher level of wellness and that, hey, maybe this wellness can help us get better results in our traditional care of, in this case, cancer.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:07:38]:
Yeah. Yeah, I think. And this is what, you know, know, I. I would hope for, especially as we move into the future. But it seems like that evolution from, I am taking care of this part, you know, of the problem, and I am, you know, intervening, treating the cancer and the patient by default almost sometimes you still need those things, you know, but like we've talked about, that leaves a whole lot of the rest of the patient and their life and their, you know, their wholeness that are not being addressed by those approaches. And I think, you know, when. When you and I were first doing this, there certainly was maybe a lot of antagonism, you know, to do anything because it was seen. And I think it was maybe just the way it was seen, but it was seen as well. If I'm the medical or radiation oncologist. I'm intervening here. This is the most important thing. And all the rest of the patient over here, not going to worry about right now, you know, and I think, you know, what we've tried to do is say, well, let's take care of all the rest of that. And I think what we see now, and certainly there's a lot more research, there's a lot more science, you know, than there was 20, 30, 40 years ago. What we see now is the better we do with the rest of the patient, the better their survival and recovery. But also, you know, things like recurrence of cancer, which are highly tied to how you deal with the patient when they're being treated originally. So I think, you know, it's. It's a much. I mean, there's still challenges, but it's a much more open place to be treating patients than I think what we used to have.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:09:31]:
And there's, I guess there's more science in it than there used to be because now when we talk about integrative oncology, we talk about the 10 terrains. And you can almost say that terrains are specialty information areas about the patient's life that need to be covered and investigated in a scientific way. I mean, looking at the whole role of diet or looking at the role of the gut microbiome, well, those are specialty areas within care of the whole patient. So when we say care of the whole patient, it's not just kind of whimsical, you know, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's actually, let's get down to the details of what this, what this is and what can we do that actually does make a difference and that can be shown scientifically to be a value. So that takes integrative medicine into a higher plateau of scientific reality, I think.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:10:31]:
Yeah, yeah, very much. I mean, even if, if we think about, you know, it seems very reductionistic, but we think about all we know now about the tumor microenvironment, how important that is not only in generating the initial tumor, but generating other tumors later and also response to treatment. Think of even 15 years ago, what we knew about that we, we understood it existed. But what we knew was, you know, a minuscule to what we know now. And what I often will tell patients or now, you know, doctors who are training is most of those things that affect the cancer at that tumor microenvironment level, which is extremely complicated and very scientific. Many of those things are mitigated and modulated, etc, by the things that we would do. And for a long time we were doing them not knowing that's what we were actually affecting.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:11:32]:
Right.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:11:33]:
You know.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:11:33]:
Right.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:11:34]:
And now we have explanations for why some of the things we do maybe work the way they do. Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:11:38]:
The one that comes to my mind is angiogenesis. You know, there are obviously drugs that affect angiogenesis, but intravenous vitamin C has a pretty powerful effect on its anti. Angiogenesis. You know, so, so we're beginning to see that these, these natural therapies, naturopathic types, therapies definitely have a role to play in the science of oncology. And this is where the two are coming. The two hemispheres are coming together into the whole brain type of thing. And so we can actually hope for better outcomes, longer survival, a better understanding of what cancer is so that we can help people who don't have cancer not get it right. Because the. Unfortunately, the numbers are going in the wrong direction.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:12:28]:
Right, right.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:12:29]:
So what do you think that's all about?

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:12:34]:
Well, you know, I think it's. If one just takes a step back, it's not a surprise that we, we exist in a world that looks exactly or somewhat the same as if my parents were still alive. They'd be close to 100 years old. All right, so when they were children, the world looked very similar. Maybe the cars were not there or whatever, but the world looked pretty much same. The broccoli looked the same. Everything else. But if you go back a hundred years, the, the number of synthetic chemicals that were used in, in any industry, you name the industry, were a fraction, meaning less than 1% of what we have now. The manipulation of the food supply, the, you know, all these things. So if, and people say, well, yeah, you know, but, you know, our genes aren't that much different than our parents or our grandparents or, you know, whatever. True. But humans haven't been around long enough to adapt and evolve over a 100 year time period to this escalation and changes. We've never had a time that we know of as humans, as long as we've been on the earth where we've had this sort of change in the environment.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:13:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:13:54]:
And I think for all the good that it's brought us, you know, for all the, you know, we've got medical advancements and lots of science advancements, etc. It comes with a price. And if we look at, yes, the majority of cancers are not purely genetic, but epigenetics are the interaction between the environment and your body's ability to resist disease, whatever it is. The world that we live in now with, you know, a lot of literally tens of thousands of new chemicals and other things and exposure to radiation that we never had before, all this. Right. These things are. Are not something that our bodies for the prior centuries were ever set up to deal with. So that's probably one huge reason. You know, you have to look at the logic between why would it be the last, say, 50 years we've seen, and then in. In. In our lifetime, last 10 years, you know, things are getting worse. I mean, we both remember, you know, hotspots for the CDC for childhood cancers, and they rare, very spread out now it's kind of all over, you know, for environmental triggers for cancer. So I think, among other things, that's a huge trigger.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:18]:
And it's. And it's interesting as I talk to our cancer patients and we talk about what they need to do to deal with the cancer, it's almost like we have to go back in time. We want you to be more active, get more exercise, as if you were on the farm. We want you to get fresh vegetables, organic, fresh vegetables, as if you were on the farm. We want you to go to bed earlier and get a really good night's sleep and no extraneous lights and get up early and get your extra. As if you were on the farm. So. So the farm people were smarter than what we thought.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:15:50]:
Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:52]:
And they did tend to live longer.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:15:54]:
Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:54]:
So maybe we can take a big lesson from that.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:15:56]:
Yeah. I think. I think there's so much to that. And. And it's, you know, it's a slow creep, so you don't really realize the changes. But, you know, even if you go back one generation, things were quite different. Go back to you. They wouldn't even recognize the world we live in now, you know, so. Yeah. And it is a lot of the, what we might call hygienic things, you know, sleep, exercise, diet, the way we think about things, you know, and the other thing I think, which, you know, is sort of. It's just the way the world is. We have input of information constantly. You know, we have devices in our pocket and on the walls and everywhere else. And, you know, 50 years ago, you. You had to really go out of your way to find news. Yeah. Now you could get, you know, Maybe negative information 24 hours a day if you really wanted to, you know, and that doesn't wind up helping either.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:16:56]:
Right. So we're having this conference at the end of the year here in early November, and it's cancer care, Reimagined we don't know exactly what's going to come out of that conference. But just if you and I just sit here and reimagine a little bit, where do you think integrative medicine will take us? I'm just going to use one example that, that right now we are, we are talking about. Oh, oh, now I just forgot my example that I was going to tell you. So. Oh, mistletoe. The hot thing in conventional medicine is immunotherapies. The hot, one of the hot things in integrative oncology is mistletoe. Isn't it interesting that we're going back to get simple things to do what modern medicine is saying? This is a really good thing. We're going to do that now with an herb.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:17:54]:
Right.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:17:55]:
And so do you think that's going to change the tide of things?

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:17:59]:
I certainly hope so because I mean, if, if you remove all of our medical politics and everything else that we all live in and you just looked at what would help us get to the target of, you know, getting, you know, we talk about tumor microenvironment, which is very much a tumor immunobiology basically what would help us to make that the most human friendly and the least cancer friendly. Well, certainly, you know, we can develop drugs to go and block this pathway or speed that pathway up and all that. That's great. But there's a lot of things, mistletoe as an example, that work on multiple levels to help to modulate, you know, those things. And the goal would be not to suppress, you know, what we ought to be doing, but to move us back towards how our body ought to work. Vitamin C, lower doses or high doses in IV do similar things, other things that we use commonly, a lot of botanical medicines, low-dose naltrexone, you know, balancing vitamin D metabolism, they all work in that, you know, in that same kind of playground there. And that has been one of the, one of the crossover points with oncologists when we share patients and we're trying to work out their comfort with what I'm doing and me interacting with what they're doing. If I can show them. The only thing what we're doing is going to do is support all these therapies you're doing. It's just your therapies might be very, very laser specific and mine are going to just support everything around what they do, you know, which is the same model we would use with older cancer therapies where they were very non specific and they were hurting every Everything good or bad. And what we did would maybe help the good cells. Now it's almost the other way around, you know, so I, and I, I have, you know, I've been doing this a long time and in working with especially university based oncologists when, when they're open minded and they realize, look, I'm very good as an oncologist at this chunk of the business, I would love it if my patients could stay healthier while I did all of my treatments and they'd live longer. And all this, if we meet on that plane and they see that what I can do complements what they're doing and then the patient has a better outcome, the guards really come down.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:20:39]:
Yeah.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:20:40]:
You know. Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:20:41]:
And we're seeing a few places like University of Iowa has come out with a really nice study showing how vitamin C can be beneficial with conventional chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Much better outcome. So I think we can let the science kind of show us that this, this working together is much better than trying to fight one another. And in the, in the final analysis, the goal here, the goal of medicine is, is for the doctor to help the patient get well. And so if we can do that in multiple different ways, it'll be, it'll be good for, for all parties involved. Thank you, Dr. Anderson, for being here.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:21:20]:
And for, thank you for all the.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:21:22]:
Work that you've done over the years and we're sure happy that you're going to be part of our, our conference. And all I can say is keep.

Paul Anderson, NMD [00:21:29]:
Up the good work. Thank you.

Riordan Clinic [00:21:31]:
Thank you for listening to the Real Health 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 episode 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.