Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
Thanks for tuning in today.
I'm going to continue talking, as we did last week, about breast cancer prevention.
Been getting a lot of questions over the last month about this, different aspects.
Can you prevent breast cancer?
Is there any guarantee?
Can you help people who already have breast cancer?
Are there any other ways to detect it earlier than mammograms and the standard recommendations
that you get from the American Cancer Society, etc.?
So last week we went through a pretty detailed description of many of the main ways that
you can help minimize your risk of getting cancer in the first place.
Wouldn't it be great if you could stop cancer before it started?
So it is an early detection, which we hear about every October, is important.
And developing new and better treatments for people who get breast cancer, obviously very,
very important.
But it's also, I think, important to learn about and implement ways of dramatically reducing
your risk of getting breast cancer in the first place.
So review last week's episode, number 56, for more information about that.
I ran out of time, as I was discussing some of the ways that I help patients who have,
unfortunately, already got breast cancer.
So I do have people who come in to me.
Because they have breast cancer, I'm not an oncologist.
I don't, quote, treat cancer.
I do help people get healthier who have cancer.
I help optimize their immune system function to give them a fighting chance.
I have provided, test them for nutrient deficiencies and impairments and other struggles, like
exposure to toxins that stress their immune system and make it more difficult for them
to fight off cancer on their own.
And I basically just make people healthier to give you a fighting chance whenever you're
doing battle with cancer.
So I should remind you that you can listen to past episodes of this show anytime you
like on demand at my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com, as well as on Apple podcasts, if you like
to listen to the podcast app on your iPhone or iPad, Spotify, and YouTube.
Just search for the name of the show, Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions, and my name,
Dr. Todd Binkley.
So last week, we began this presentation on breast cancer prevention by identifying how
can you stop cancer before it starts?
How can you dramatically reduce your risk of getting cancer in the first place?
Well, number one, know your risk factors.
Two, get better testing.
And number three, take better care of your overall health.
So we talked about testing for toxins and things that, chemicals, heavy metals, plastics,
things that are in our food and hair products, cosmetics, sunscreen, mold, things that we're
constantly exposed to that cause the genetic mutations that trigger the formation of cancer
cells in the first place.
There's testing for tumor markers, blood tests that can identify cancer fighting activity
that your immune system is engaged in.
And as always, just taking better care of your general health, keeping inflammation
under control, preventing heart disease, diabetes, keeping your liver and kidneys and digestive
system and immune system functioning at their peak, all dramatically reduce your risk of
getting cancer.
Taking better care of your general health by exercising 30 to 45 minutes a day, five
days a week, eating mostly vegetables, healthy fats and proteins instead of loading up on
nutrient free carbohydrate junk food, obviously.
Hopefully people know about that.
Drinking plenty of clean water, getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night, maintaining
a healthy weight for women to reduce risk of breast cancer specifically, limiting alcohol
to one serving per day, flushing out toxins, et cetera.
These are ways that you can reduce your risk.
We went over how important it is to optimize your vitamin D levels.
Vitamin D dramatically reduces your risk of breast cancer.
You can breast cancer in a study that came out last year, 80% lower risk of breast cancer
if you get your vitamin D in your blood up to 60 compared to people whose blood level
of vitamin D was only 20 and people who do not supplement vitamin D about 5,000 units
a day every day usually have a vitamin D level of less than 20.
I talked about a 47 year old woman who woke up with a grape sized mast in her breast that
tripled in size a few days later and was told that she had to have it cut out immediately
and stressed to her that a recent cancer diagnosis is rarely an emergency.
Even when you're told that you have to have surgery or chemo or radiation or some combination,
immune therapy, et cetera, they're coming out with new treatments all the time.
Even when you do end up possibly needing that, they usually don't even schedule for a few
weeks out, sometimes months out, and you have time.
It's rarely, almost never an emergency and you usually do have time to do some tests,
identify some ways, some areas that your body needs support in, give you some high doses
of really important nutrients that tests show that you're lacking, and then retest in a
couple of weeks and see if the numbers are heading in the right direction.
Then you can make a more informed choice about the treatment that you want going forward.
This particular woman didn't have cancer.
She had a cyst.
She had a fibroadenoma, which is a relatively common cyst that forms in the breast and it
can become cancerous, which is why if you're over 40, the standard of care in the medical
profession is to surgically remove it, but it's often not necessary to do that.
I put this particular woman on a high dose of vitamin D, iodine, and fish oil, and three
weeks later the mass disappeared and it never came back, and that was 10 years ago.
So to truly understand what's possible with functional medicine, with identifying nutrient
deficiencies and optimizing them, I encourage you to think of your bloodstream as a river
of life.
So there's nutrients in your bloodstream coursing through your body throughout the day from
whatever you swallow, and there's construction crews on both banks of the river there ready
to heal and repair various tissues in your body, and if the materials are there that
they need to do what they're waiting to do, then that project will take place.
That part of your body, that tissue, that repair job will occur.
You will heal and repair that tissue.
That's how every part of your body is maintained throughout your life.
But if the construction crew is sitting there waiting and the raw materials they need are
not there, if the nutrients are not available that are needed to heal and repair that tissue,
then that just goes, gets put on the back burner, and sometimes indefinitely, sometimes
forever, and we chalk that up to feels like I'm getting old, or any number of other reasons,
and it's just, it's really, it's amazing what is possible when you flood your river of life
with all the nutrients that every part of your body needs to heal and repair itself.
So basic things like vitamins and minerals and antioxidants, systemic enzymes that help
scour your body for inflammatory debris and eliminate it to reduce inflammation and facilitate
healing and repair.
Last week we talked about the importance of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, because
that's essential to digesting the protein that you eat.
Protein is the basic building block of every cell type in your body, and especially if
you get cancer, you need adequate protein to heal and repair every part of your body.
And many people are deficient when we measure their protein level in the blood.
For most people it should be seven point something.
So if you have an old blood test that you've done recently, look at your protein level
in your blood.
If it's six point something or five point something, then you should do something about
that.
We talked about glutathione support.
That was where we left off.
Last week we left off in the middle of a discussion of the importance of glutathione for cancer
patients and for a whole host of other things.
Glutathione is the master antioxidant.
So antioxidants are things that help heal and repair tissues that need support.
Some people liken rust as a form of oxidation.
So some people like that metaphor.
You've heard about antioxidants in fruits and vegetables.
Among the most important reasons to eat a reasonable amount of fruits and vegetables
is for the antioxidants in them to help you heal and repair.
So glutathione is made by your body.
You can supplement it.
It is the master antioxidant.
But taking supplements of glutathione is not often the best way to resolve a deficiency
in glutathione.
It's more important in most cases to help your body make more glutathione on its own.
Glutathione is made of three amino acids, cysteine, glycine, and glutamate.
Most of us get enough glycine and glutamate in food.
The limiting factor is we often don't have enough cysteine.
So many people have heard of the supplement N-acetylcysteine.
Maybe you have, maybe you haven't.
But N-acetylcysteine is a common supplement.
A lot of people think that it is itself an antioxidant.
It is in fact a precursor for glutathione.
It helps your body make more glutathione.
It's been available for many, many years.
It can be very helpful to help replenish glutathione levels, very commonly used in certain circumstances.
But there is a better way.
There are a couple of better ways to replenish glutathione.
Number one, liposomal.
Lipo means fat, somal means body.
So liposomal glutathione is basically glutathione that's been encapsulated in a little blob
of fat.
Little phospholipids, the technical term for a liposome is a spherical vesicle composed
of phospholipids that are compatible.
They basically mimic the structure of a cell membrane.
So it makes any nutrient, makes it easier for it to cross cell membranes and enter the
tissue where it has its active function.
So liposomal glutathione is an option and I use this in my office a lot for many different
things.
Another option that I more commonly use, especially for cancer patients, is a cysteine donor.
So we talked about the three amino acids that your body uses to form glutathione.
They are again, glycine, glutamate, and cysteine.
We get glutamate and glycine from food readily.
We need more cysteine.
So a cysteine donor, a really excellent product for that is called Immunocal.
The company that makes Immunocal, Immuno-Tech, has published a tremendous amount of research
that's available on PubMed to substantiate the fact that it does raise glutathione levels
in the blood and that it has beneficial effects on a whole host of human conditions.
That's what first impressed me about it when I first heard about it and started using it
in my practice.
I've been using it for several years now for a whole host of different things.
But especially with cancer patients, it's actually a specially processed form of whey
protein, nothing like the protein supplements, whey protein supplements that people take
for building muscle mass or just as an alternative source.
But the difference mainly is that it's processed without any heat and without any agitation.
Proteins actually have a three-dimensional, it's a little bit complicated, but proteins
have three-dimensional structures that alter their function.
If you change the shape of it by, say, putting it in a blender or heating it, that can alter
its function.
So to protect the delicate structure that makes this particular amino acid work well
in supporting the production of glutathione, this particular product is an excellent donor
of cysteine.
So I know that's a little complicated, but the takeaway is for many, many cancer patients,
I've found this to be the best way to optimize glutathione levels.
And many of the most dramatic examples of cancer patients who have achieved dramatic
results, oftentimes doing both chemotherapy, radiation, standard oncological treatments,
along with nutrients, this has always been a key component of the patients that I've
gotten the most dramatic results with.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We're talking about breast cancer prevention generally, but also specifically now, things
that can be done to help people with breast cancer.
I'm not an oncologist.
I don't treat breast cancer, but I do help anyone with cancer optimize their immune system
function to give themselves a fighting chance.
And a lot of people are surprised to learn that if you do end up going to an oncologist
finding out that you need chemotherapy or radiation or surgery or immune therapy or
any of the newer cancer treatments, you can do natural therapies along with conventional
oncology treatments.
And most oncologists won't tell you that.
Sometimes they're even confused about it.
They think, oh, we're trying to destroy your immune system and hope you survive.
And in fact, you can do both, not at the same day.
So for example, if you're doing a chemotherapy regimen, you're not doing it every day.
You do it in cycles.
So the days that you're taking a chemotherapy regimen, you don't take any supplements.
But then the day after you finish with that, you can flood your body with nutrients to
recover from the damage from the chemotherapeutic agent or whatever other type of pharmaceutical
treatment you're doing for your cancer.
So in between rounds of chemo, you can flood your body with nutrients to give it a fighting
chance to heal itself.
So for example, here's an example, a 75-year-old woman came to me with a 3.2 centimeter invasive
ductal carcinoma.
That's bad.
That means it spread from the breast to the lymph nodes.
And she went through two courses of chemotherapy and aromatase inhibitors, which are estrogen
blockers.
It's a relatively common type of cancer treatment these days.
And I reviewed her scans and her biopsy and gave her some supplements to maximize their
healing ability to boost her immune system function, et cetera, to take between rounds
of chemo.
And a few other things, as so many cancer patients do, she had some difficulty getting
adequate amounts of protein in her diet.
But the upshot is she made a very rapid recovery that amazed her oncologist.
That was the way she described her experience.
Her oncologist was amazed at how fast she got better, especially given her age, 75 years
old with her pretty scary cancer.
And so after all that, even though she had this dramatic recovery, she's feeling great
now, no signs of cancer, she's in complete remission, the oncologist was still recommending
that she continue to take the estrogen blockers for the rest of her life.
And so she called me up and she said, you know, I'm so grateful, I'm feeling great,
better than I expected.
But these estrogen blockers are horrible.
They make me want to kill people.
When you take estrogen blockers, it's like having all the worst effects of menopause
all at the same time, and more or less indefinitely.
So she said, do I really need to take these?
I said, well, I can't make that decision for you.
You have to decide that for yourself and in conversation with your oncologist.
But here's what you can do.
Ask your oncologist, what is the risk given his experience with your type of cancer?
What is the likelihood that your cancer is going to come back if you don't continue to
take estrogen blockers for the rest of your life?
And she went back and she asked him, she said, oh, he says it's actually going to reduce
your risk by about four to 8%.
And she said, so that doesn't sound like a lot.
He says, yeah, actually, given what you described to me, she made it clear how miserable she
was on these things to him.
And he said, you know, now that you mentioned that, you really don't need to take these
things.
The risk reduction is probably not worth the stress that it's going to cause you if you
continue to take these.
So she was very excited about that.
And that sounds like a simple thing, but it made a huge difference for her.
And so that's one of the things that I get really excited about being able to help people
with because a lot of times you just don't know.
You don't know what your options are.
And the medical standards of care mean that you get the same treatment as everyone else.
They're mostly just concerned with doing whatever they can to save your life and prevent the
cancer coming back.
And you really have to educate yourself and know what your options are and know good questions
to ask to make an informed decision on how you want to proceed.
And this 75-year-old woman with a pretty nasty cancer was very excited about the fact that
even her oncologist thought that she recovered better than expected.
And she was also happy to, after having a discussion with me and her oncologist, realize
that she didn't actually need to continue taking estrogen blockers for the rest of her
life.
And if someone you love has breast cancer and is wondering if there are options to optimize
their immune system, give them a fighting chance, give them the best possible outcome,
I'd love an opportunity to have a consultation with them and see what their options are.
Everyone's different.
We don't know for sure what any specific woman's options are until we do some testing and I
ask them a few questions and figure out what will work best for them.
I also help breast cancer survivors.
So there are 15, 20 million projected, I think, the last numbers I heard.
I don't remember exactly, but there's millions of women who have survived breast cancer because
the treatments are better than they used to be.
And early detection means that they're going to find it and do something that allow you
to survive.
So that's all great.
One problem is there are a lot of cancer survivors that have risk of cancer recurrence that they're
not always told about.
Anytime you have cancer, you're at dramatically increased risk of cancer coming back, even
when you're in complete remission.
Any cell in your body that learns how to override the innate mechanisms that your body uses
to stop a cell from dividing and dividing over and over and over again, that's how cancer
works.
It's just a cell that no longer cooperates with its neighbors and just learns how to
continue reproducing itself indefinitely and establishing its own blood supply so that
it can spread to other parts of your body.
Every cell would love to do that, but multicellular organisms like ourselves are able to survive
and function because we have robust mechanisms to prevent any particular cell from dividing
uncontrollably.
And when those mechanisms are overridden, that's when cancer that might have been fought
off naturally instead grows and spreads to other parts of the body.
So it's wonderful that more and more women are surviving breast cancer, but it also means
it's a whole bunch of people out there.
Usually when you're finished, you're declared in a state of remission by your oncologist.
They monitor you occasionally, but a lot of these survivors have lingering complications
like neuropathy, burning, tingling, and numbness in their hands and in their feet and other
parts of the body, profound fatigue, brain fog, vascular inflammation that can increase
your risk of heart attack and stroke, anemia and protein deficiencies that they don't even
know about except that they cause fatigue and make them more likely to get sick.
And unfortunately, once you're declared in remission, most oncologists do not do anything
to routinely address these lingering complications that can be often resolved with adequate amounts
of high dose nutrients based on testing to identify deficiencies that you have and then
treating them with better food, exercise, and supplements.
For example, here's another great case study.
A 76 year old woman came to me who had an ER positive breast cancer survivor, which
basically means that there are estrogen receptors on her cancer.
Therefore it would be dangerous to take estrogen because it could cause the cancer to come
back potentially, but she has a whole bunch of symptoms that could also be attributed
to a lack of estrogen.
She has mainly afternoon fatigue, low mental sharpness, allergies, night sweats, muscle
loss, and low libido.
She's not feeling great and she's wondering if she has options.
So instead of doing the typical blood tests for hormones, I did a saliva hormone test,
which is much more sensitive for identifying both problems with the adrenal glands and
with the standard sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, et cetera.
So her test results came back and showed a number of really interesting things.
Number one, her estrogen was within range.
She has symptoms of low estrogen, but other hormones can cause the same symptoms, deficiencies.
And her estradiol, E2, the main estrogen that you think of with hormone replacement therapy,
was actually okay.
And her progesterone was fine.
Her testosterone was basically undetectable, really, really low.
And her DHEA, which is the precursor that your body uses to make estrogen and testosterone,
was also really, really low.
So I told her this is really, really great news because she doesn't need any estrogen.
And if we just supplement DHEA, it will help her body make more testosterone, which is
likely to improve all of her symptoms.
And it will not increase her estrogen levels because her estrogen is already fine, number
one.
And even if it does increase her estrogen a little bit, the risk of even that causing
a problem is minuscule because her estrogen, although it's within the normal level, is
very, very low within that normal range.
So fast forward, I put her on some supplements to support adrenal function and some DHEA.
And when we retested her four months later, her DHEA level had gone from 41 to 104.
The range we're looking for is 100 to 300, so it went from 41 to 104.
And her testosterone went from undetectable, less than six, up to 34, well into the healthy
range for testosterone.
And her estrogen level was one before on the initial test, and it remained exactly the
same on the follow-up.
So just like I'd predicted with her, she was very excited that the DHEA didn't raise her
estrogen levels at all.
It just increased her testosterone, and she felt amazing.
All of her major symptoms were either gone or much better.
Her fatigue was nearly gone.
Her mental sharpness had improved.
Her night sweats were nearly gone.
She was able, she had more energy to exercise more, so she was building some muscle mass
again.
And her libido was back to where she thought it should be for her age.
So don't wait until drugs, surgery, chemo, and radiation are the only options.
Try all the places where normal function has become diminished with comprehensive testing
and experienced functional analysis so that you can restore optimum health with better
food, frequent exercise, and researched back supplements.
This is the practice of functional medicine.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
Thank you for listening.
Again, send me your questions about any health-related topic you have.
I'd be happy to answer your questions privately or on the show.
Take a moment this weekend to do something to be healthier than you were last weekend.
Go for a walk.
Call a loved one that you haven't spoken to in a while.
And if you're constantly feeling overwhelmed, learn the power of saying no to people who
put demands on your time to prevent you from taking better care of yourself.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The
Word KDAR.