dr katz had previously let me know he would be stepping out a little bit early okay continuing i have five more questions um that each of you can answer one of them the first one is how do we protect our thyroid gland against thyroid issues number two what do you recommend for people with acid reflux number three what do you recommend for people who have eczema number four do you recommend mammograms and if not do you recommend thermographies and number five what type of treatment would you advise for someone diagnosed with cancer
so the five questions again well the first one was about your thyroid second about acid reflux third about eczema fourth about whether you should get mammograms on a regular basis or at all uh or thermography and the fifth one is what type of treatment would you advise for someone diagnosed with cancer
i’m gonna leave dr katz with those five questions
can i i’ll i’ll talk about reflux since i’m actually a reflux surgeon so i do a lot of reflux and the reflux is a complicated disease it is amazing how many people have it almost everybody a lot of it has to do with physiology with weight with our diets there’s been some very good studies showing plant-based diet helps the reason plant-based diet helps us because it’s low in saturated fat saturated there’s a muscle at the end of this esophagus called the lower esophageal sphincter it is loosened by several things it is loosened up by saturated fat caffeine alcohol so that’s why after dinner a lot of people get really sick and get heartburn
work up and treatment of this is very complex we start with lifestyle changes like i do with everybody plant-based diet again not vegan or vegetarian necessarily but a whole food plant-based diet low saturated fat low caffeine low alcohol keep the bed elevated
i do use the medications there’s been a lot of debate lately over whether ppi’s which are nexium prilosec omeprazole there’s been some debates over whether they may contribute to all kinds of things such as dementia osteoporosis things like that the data is very circumspect that they do that though who wants to be on a pill all of your life certainly lifestyle changes and getting your weight under control helps
there are certain people where reflux is so bad that just about everything causes them to get severe heartburn if they bend over food comes up in their mouth that’s a different story we do tests for that i will do a scope where i put a camera down their mouth do they have irritation do they have changes in the esophageal mucosa that suggests that this acid reflux is really bad because that can lead to cancer
in fact there’s a been a huge increase over the last 20 years in esophageal cancers of the reflux type instead of the old type which is squamous cell and a lot of those have to do with this changes in the esophagus called barrett’s changes so if people have that then we start getting more aggressive that’s when we start talking about surgeries to combat reflux so i have kind of a whole protocol it starts with lifestyle changes medicines if needed if you get really severe problems we do endoscopy we put a little very smart little device inside the esophagus that measures how much acid is coming up so i could get a quantitative score if it’s very high then we may suggest surgery to fix that
yes dr mills was mentioning h pylori h pylori is a bacteria that causes not necessarily reflux but it causes gastritis like an irritation in the stomach and we’ve had a huge increase in h pylori uh that has been both documented in literature but i have been seeing it like crazy in in my patients and that will give you symptoms of reflux but it’s not true reflux it’s just irritation of the stomach
we do treat that with an antibiotic regimen that is now becoming resistant so it’s a little bit scary with the changes for h pylori it used to be that we had very good control of it with antibiotics but now it’s down to 70 percent
one comment about the h pylori um the humans have lived with h pillory for hundreds of thousands of years and eradicating it i think is not necessarily the best thing because now we know that when you’re sterile from h billory it increases your risk of inflammatory bowel disease and reflux um ironically is that sometimes the reason why people are treated yeah that’s why i don’t actually do biopsies unless i see a problem because we have found h pylori but there’s no gastritis so what do you do with that and some people are inclined so i don’t do a biopsy unless i actually see inflamed stomach and then i’ll treat it only if there’s inflammation i’ll take
mammography here’s the problem with mammography it does not reduce the risk of dying of breast cancer bottom line and the only reason to have a screening test is either that it’s going to prevent a morbidity of some sort or it’s going to prevent early death so
what you do get when you have mammograms routine mammograms and i’m talking about screening purposes here is you find a lot of things that you really would be better off not knowing about like ductal carcinoma in situ which is not cancer it’s a risk factor for cancer by itself it doesn’t mean very much but it gets treated like cancer lumpectomies increasingly number of women getting mastectomies often radiation treatment and hormonal therapy i mean it’s astounding how much over treatment there is
the worst part about it is that these women then become survivors who would have been survivors five years they would have lived five years anyway and it makes the cancer industry look like it’s doing a whole lot better because you take a bunch of people who don’t have cancer you treat them as if they have cancer and the numbers get better and they’re all out racing for the cure and the whole nine yards it’s just a despicable distortion of uh what should be going on
thermography is no better in fact if anything it suffers from more inclination to find even smaller abnormalities that are meaningless and there’s such inconsistency in the way that the thermograms are read no two people come up with the same answer the longer they look at various images the worse that they get so the studies are pretty abysmal
one just real short story i’ll share with you i was driving to work one morning and i turned on the radio i don’t know what i was what station but somebody was um talking on a talk show talking about the race for the cure in central park and she was a famous person i don’t know who she was but she was in charge of it she was like the figurehead person and the person interviewing her said tell me your cancer story and she said well i had a mammogram last february and it was clear and then in september i found a lump and it turned out to be stage three cancer so fortunately i had this happens all the time um so it’s an interval cancer these are the ones that grow in between mammograms so unfortunately thanks to modern medicine you know i had treatment and chemotherapy and now i’m fine well it’s a year later i don’t think we know she’s fine yet
but in any case at the end of the interview after all about the race in the in the park this this sunday the the interviewer says what advice do you have for women and i just almost drove my car off the road she said well you know how we are we always want to take care of everybody but ourselves and so take the time and go get that mammogram you know it’ll save your life and i thought listen lady you just told everybody about how you found the cancer a few months after the mammogram told you you were clear and and it doesn’t save your life
so here one last thing i want to say about this one of the most insidious things about all this screening that we do with the exception of cervical cancer screening which really does work is people drink the medical kool-aid and think that they’re protected all right so basically what happens is they get their mammogram results back and it’s clear and they think you know what somewhat in the back of the mind eating cheese pizza and having wine for dinner every night is working out pretty well for me along with sitting on the couch i’ll do it for another year and then i’ll go get tested and i’ll see you if i’m still getting away with it
and that is we’ve got to stop doing that a clear mammogram is not first of all it doesn’t mean anything but the second thing is this type of incessant screening is giving people a very false sense of security about their health and it’s a very disgeneous destructive thing that we’re doing
i i will say this because in a prior entity i used to be a breast surgeon and i quit because i could not stand the mammogram but it wasn’t it wasn’t any kind of insidious i was cutting breasts out medical legally like as soon as you get that mammogram and it says you’ve got this you have to cut it out because otherwise you will be sued the lawsuit’s in breast surgery and i could not stand all the we did it turned out we were looking back at our data and we found two i i think it was like six percent actual breast cancer of all the biopsies and breast tissue that i was taking out and so it’s a tough world i don’t know the right answer i mean mris are extremely sensitive extremely sensitive so they will pick up the cancer but they will also pick up a hundred other things that aren’t cancer right and i found myself whittling away it was breasts until i was like gosh you should just get a mastectomy also i didn’t get sued so i quit
thank you um so i’d like to talk a little bit about the the cancer question first of all i think it’s important to understand we talk about cancer as though it’s one thing and cancer is not one thing cancers arrive in different tissues and cancers of different tissues have different characteristics so you have blood cancers like leukemias which are very different from solid uh masses and you and even within the category of solid tumors a solid tumor in your lungs carries a very different prognosis from a solid tumor in the testes of the prostate uh and so on so the number one thing we have to understand is that you know cancer is not just one disease and you can’t just assume that one approach is going to fit every type of cancer now that being said
the question was well how do you treat cancer what would you recommend all right in the interest of transparency i am a critical care doctor not an oncologist so one of the first things that we do is look for an oncologist i respected to refer the person to but the the what the question i think is getting at is what do i think is the best approach to it and i want to share some some stories from some people that i’ve met to kind of illustrate what i think um
two years ago i went to um i was invited to ireland to speak at the red fest afterwards i met this young man uh he’s greek he told me that he had been in the greek army training for the olympics he was lifting weights he was 400 meter runner and he thought he had to eat not you know mainly red meat which is what he was doing until he started noticing uh abdominal pain blood in the stool went got worked up and he had stage three colon cancer a large mass with evidence of metastasis and i was expecting him to say i then had surgery and changed my diet that’s not what he said
what he said was in essence i eventually became completely raw vegan i did not do surgery i did not do chemo i did not do radiation and over a six to eight month period the tumor regressed and all the cancer markers went to zero and at that point he was seven years out he effectively cured himself with diet change um
last february i met a woman down in alabama uh who in 1996 was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer stage 3 breast cancer according to conventional medical dogma is a death sentence women are told we can treat you we’ll give you a lumpectomy or a mastectomy followed by radiation and chemo which will buy you some time but eventually the cancer is going to come back and it’s going to kill you
she had a pecan sized lump that was removed and 11 of 17 lymph nodes were positive for the cancer she had stage three breast cancer she decided that after her lumpectomy she was going to go completely vegan she went raw vegan for about at least six months and over that time her uh tumor markers went to zero and as i said this was 1996 this woman is down there teaching plant-based classes in alabama um
i just met another woman who was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer three years ago she actually went to the hypocrisy institute i think she had the initial mass removed but then she became completely vegan again the she was raw for about eight months before she started weaning uh cooked foods back in and she’s three years out and uh by all appearances cancer free
met another gentleman who in 2013 was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer told dude you got six months get your life together because you’re not going to be here he went to see a vegan practitioner in washington dc and put him on a vegan diet again raw for a minimum six months and frank is here uh still alive cancer free i guess seven years out now
so what i’m saying is that there clearly is great power within uh um plant foods to help treat cancer now can i tell any given individual that this is going to cure your cancer no but what the data do show and this is just general medical data that those who change their diet post-diagnosis given all cancers to a diet that includes more or mostly plant foods um and you know fruits and vegetables that it will increase their overall survival it also increases uh time to recur their cancer-free survival so we know even within the conventional medical literature that plant foods are having an effect um
and there are these anecdotal admittedly anecdotal cases that i just mentioned of people who actually uh by all appearances where it will cure themselves of cancer by uh uh using a plant-based diet
my point is this plant foods have power they have potent anti-cancer properties this we know i’m sorry i got my chin down this we know from again a number of different studies um we need more research we need to figure out what the hell is happening in these people who do have these cures and what is it about particularly a raw plant food diet that seems to have such bioactivity against cancer cells
and if anybody came to me with cancer i would talk to them about the various options uh conventional modalities um whether like if i had been in the manuals that’s the greek gentleman’s shoes i would have said cut out what you can cut out and then i’m going to be going raw but he was bold enough to just do it with diet alone obviously it’s each individual’s decision but whatever they did i would strongly urge them to be on a strictly plant-based diet because we know that animal protein and animal food feeds cancer and the analogy i use is if your house catches fire it makes no sense to have the fire department in the front yard pouring water on it while you’re in the backyard throwing kerosene into the house it’s just going to eventually burn down and so when you get a cancer you’ve got to stop doing the things that are feeding those cancer cells causing the inflammation that’s driving the cancer and that’s an animal food centered death
but i would say this because of course i say that but as a cancer surgeon and having done certain man please go and see an oncologist and don’t say that you know if an oncologist was here they would go crazy with the anecdote on the colon i’ve seen colon people come in and oh my god had they just gotten the colon surgery done earlier they would have lived along with your life
as i said i would have done the surgery and i’m not i’m not recommending this don’t take this i’m saying that what it shows is that plant foods have power against cancer but that i would never like and i said yeah the first thing i would do is recommend someone i just want to make sure that oncology he said i respect yeah but you know it has to be the individual’s decision i mean if you look at ornish’s study with prostate cancer he took the blood of the vegans and dripped it on the auger jail cells and killed him so there’s definitely an advantage to vegan diet but there’s again there’s certain there’s certain diseases if i got pancreatic cancer i’ll i’ll try anything right give me what you got i do
i used to do a surgery where we cut out the pancreas i wouldn’t get that done but there are certain surgeries colon cancer and breast cancer that are very treatable now the the the the rates of cancer death from breast cancer and colon cancer are going down dramatically with some of our treatments if i had glioblastoma yeah i mean i wanted to ask you what should i do but uh but there are situations where i definitely would still go and see an oncologist
i also know of a vegan woman who had stage four ovarian cancer which is essentially uniformly fatal she had the debulking surgeries she had the intraperitoneal chemotherapy she did all of that plus she went raw vegan and she is like at least 12 years out which is again anecdotal but unheard of so my fundamental point is just to say plant foods have power and that whatever modality of treatment you use you got to make sure that being 100 plant-based is part of it great