In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy, the owner and medical director of the Cancer Center for Healing and the Center for New Medicine. Her clinics have become the largest integrative medical facilities in North America and are visited by people from all over the world, with 47,000 patients and growing.
In this episode, we do a deep dive into all things cancer—its causes, misconceptions, how it’s viewed in the conventional medical community, in the alternative and holistic communities, and widespread myths and misconceptions along with treatment options.
This is part one of my discussion with Dr. Connealy because there are many other questions we didn’t get to. After you listen to the episode, please comment on the YouTube video or send an email to ari@theenergyblueprint.com with any cancer-related questions that you’d like me to ask Dr. Connealy in part two.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Connealy and I discuss:
- 3 major misconceptions about cancer that hold a lot of hope for prevention
- The connection between cancer and the 4 primary factors that make up the exposome
- Is there one cause of cancer? What’s actually leading to the uptick in diagnosis?
- Why Dr. Connealy believes cancer rates in younger people are increasing at such an alarming rate
- The differences in how she addresses cancer as an integrative medical doctor versus the conventional paradigm
- The effectiveness of chemotherapy and the way Dr. Connealy commonly uses this intervention in her office
- If cancer truly is a death sentence and the available options and lifespan of most people once they get a diagnosis
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. With me in this episode is Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy, who is a prominent leader in the integrative and functional medicine field. She is the medical director of two clinics, the Cancer Center for Healing and the Center for New Medicine. The combined 30,000 square foot clinics have become the largest integrative medical clinic in North America and have been visited by patients from all over the world with 47,000 patients and growing.
Dr. Connealy created the Cancer Center for Healing as a result of the epidemic spreading of cancer. Patients receive scientifically based treatments and integrative protocols and she’s created acute awareness for the need to focus on cancer prevention, providing unique testing to determine the early stages of cancer years before a scan actually reveals the presence of cancer. Through sophisticated testing, she and her skilled team create personalized treatment plans for early to late-stage cancer patients. In this episode, we do a deep dive on all things cancer, its causes, misconceptions, how it’s viewed in the conventional medical community, in the alternative and holistic communities, widespread myths and misconceptions about cancer, treatments for cancer, and lots and lots of other things that come to mind.
Cancer screening and some surprising findings around the usefulness and potential risks of that and lots of other stuff related to cancer. This is going to be part one because there’s a whole bunch of questions that we didn’t get to but there’s lots of wonderful information in this episode. One other thing is after you listen to this, reach out to me or comment on the YouTube video for this episode. You can email me at [email protected] and let me know if there are any questions you have related to cancer that we didn’t get to in this episode so that I can ask her that in part two. With all that said, enjoy this episode with cancer specialist Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy. Welcome to the show, Dr. Connealy.
Dr. Connealy: Great to be with you, Ari.
Common misconceptions about cancer
Ari: I want to get started with probably a question that you could talk for maybe two hours about but maybe you can give me a sort of succinct answer just as a lead-in to this whole discussion. I want to talk to you about cancer. I’m curious what you would say to the question of, what do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that people have on this topic in the general public? What do people get wrong in their assumptions about the nature of cancer?
Dr. Connealy: I think the biggest thing is people think cancer is genetic. That’s number one and they think so if their mom or dad had it. That’s why we do family histories and physicals and we always ask family history. Genetics plays a very small part in whether you’re going to get cancer or not. Number two, people think that it’s something foreign, and strange, and ominous when they get diagnosed. They never thought that could be possible and that cancer just appears one day and it actually is probably an 8 to 10-year process. Then, I think, when people get diagnosed, people are not afraid of other diseases like they are of cancer and so when they get cancer, they are immediately scared as opposed to like, “Let me research and find out every single thing I need to know.” They tend to go to the doctor and the doctor says, “Oh, this is what you have, this is what we mechanically do and then this is how I will follow you.” People don’t ask the why, where, when, and how did this occur?
Ari: Anything else that comes to mind as far as myths and misconceptions?
Dr. Connealy: One thing they think it’s an older person’s disease and it used to be an older person’s disease, and now it can be a young person’s disease and not something to somebody 60 years and older.
Ari: Let’s dig into each of those three points. Number one, you said it’s not genetic. If it’s not genetic, it involves DNA in some way, right? That’s part of the mechanism of cancer. Explain what you mean by it’s not genetic.
Dr. Connealy: Your genetics, whether it’s a family history of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer, you have something called epigenetics. Epigenetic means above. There are many, many factors influencing your genetics every single second of every day. There’s something called the exposome. The exposome is what every person’s influenced with in their entire existence. That is what is really going to trigger the genetics, whatever you’re eating, your exercise, your exposure, every single thing that you’re exposed to in a day.
Ari: I think this is a really important point because cancer is often conceptualized as this internal problem. There’s something wrong inside of me. There’s this genetic thing. People think that they’re going to have some mechanisms that mutate their DNA, that drive cancer development for arbitrary reasons, bad luck, bad genes. Then you just have this uncontrollable cancer growth that’s growing. I think that this connection between the exposome, lifestyle, and environmental factors, and how that interacts epigenetically to alter gene expression or to affect the likelihood of DNA damage is very poorly understood.
Part of this is related to the timeline of it. As you said, it takes 8 to 10 years. I think the human brain has a really hard time perceiving cause, the nature of causation when it happens over a long period of time. We’re really good about understanding cause and effect when it’s relatively instant, it’s happening within seconds or minutes or maybe days. When it’s extended over months or years, we have a very difficult time understanding causation and linking whatever this internal mechanism of cancer development is back to the exposome is hard for our brains to do. How would you help people understand that connection better?
Dr. Connealy: First of all, I think everybody needs to look at their 24-hour day. That’s not something that we’re really taught like, how do we sleep? What is the quality of our sleep? 50% of the population really doesn’t sleep that well, maybe even more. Then they think, “Oh, well, that’s just normal. I don’t sleep because my friend doesn’t sleep or someone else.” They talk about it. Just that alone. Then water. Today, most of the water is not sufficient to drink because it’s pharma water and or polluted water. Now we have to drink purified water.
Most people drink out of plastic water bottles and they think that’s okay. Then people really aren’t mindful of what they’re putting into their body. For 100s of years, especially the last 100 years, you think about it’s needs to be low sugar and then it’s high fat, then it’s all these different philosophies on what we should be eating. We really need to eat like our ancestors did. People are really not mindful of their eating and what they’re putting in their mouth. Then we have 800 muscles and exercise has a profound effect on oxygenation, lymphatic drainage, how their brain works, so many different things.
Then if you think about everything that you’re exposed to in a day and then you think about your daily stress. Now stress is part of life, but abnormal amounts of stress. Then how do we recalibrate when we have abnormal amounts of stress? Instead, we just kind of like, “Okay, we have to muscle through it.” I think some consciousness and mindfulness in how do we live our 24-hour day because we know that in a study of 44,000 identical twins, whether they were going to get cancer was determined with their eating and their lifestyle.
Ari: I think this point is so important. I think what I was saying earlier that the timescale of it makes it hard to see causation, but I think there’s another aspect to it, which is that we’ve all been indoctrinated into an understanding of health and disease where we ask questions like, what is the cause of this particular disease? We look for a singular cause of it. That singular cause is often mistakenly conflated with whatever the biochemical mechanisms are that are linked with the development of that disease. We mistake the internal mechanisms with, “The cause” like the idea that a neurochemical imbalance in the brain, a serotonin deficiency underlies depression, or the cause of heart disease, “Is your high cholesterol levels”. Then we look for the solution by attacking this singular mechanism which we’ve identified as the cause.
We take a drug to alter the levels of serotonin in our brain or we take a drug to lower the LDL cholesterol and so on. This is how we’ve all been trained to think about the nature of disease development and how we’re supposed to try to treat or to try to cure or reverse the disease. The picture of the exposome and how that relates to this isn’t like that. We’re talking about dozens of factors, each of which triggers dozens or hundreds of different mechanisms that are affecting the overall systemic function, metabolic function, cellular bioenergetic function, all of which basically creates a sort of environment that is either pro-cancer development or pro-other disease development or anti-cancer development. That landscape of all of that complexity and nuance, even though it’s vastly more accurate in understanding what’s going on to drive a disease like cancer, is much harder for our brains to wrap around than the idea that it’s, “Oh, yes, it’s just DNA mutations. The way we do it is the way we affect that mechanism of that disease is by taking this drug that blocks X, Y, Z mechanism.” You know what I mean?
Dr. Connealy: Exactly. It’s a reductionistic approach. Yes, everybody is looking for that one thing. Life isn’t that simple. I tell people, “You live in a miracle,” and the miracle is 50 trillion cells in this incredible, complete world of 8 billion people. Like you said, we’ve been taught and indoctrinated to be, “Okay, here is a disease and here is a drug, or here is a surgery, or both.” You may need medications. There are times that your patient may need medications. In an emergency, it’s very, very helpful.
For the chronic management of anything, a doctor’s goal should be to de-diagnose a patient. They get paid based upon how many diagnoses [inaudible 00:13:25]. You gave the example of the cholesterol. That has not done anything to extend the disease. Heart disease is still as prevalent as the number one cause of death despite the use of lowering our cholesterol levels, not to mention all the ramifications that are involved with taking a statin and how critical and crucial role cholesterol plays in your cellular health.
Why cancer is no longer an old person’s disease
Ari: One of the other things you mentioned earlier was that cancer used to be an older person’s disease. Now more younger people are getting it than ever before. Why is that?
Dr. Connealy: I think it’s many different factors. I think if you look at, one, the lifestyle and what the average person probably feeds their children. I grew up in a time where we had a farm, we ate real food and we ate like an ancestral eating program. Today it’s fast food, it’s cereal. What can we do that’s very quick and easy? Food, they’re not outside. Kids aren’t getting sunlight and being outside on hours and hours a day. That’s critical for their growth and development. I think probably more exposure to toxicity. I don’t think we’re using less toxins. I definitely think we’re having more toxins.
I think that people bring their kids to the doctor and they are given a medication. One of the most prescribed things is antibiotics. That alters the microbiome. I think just the food we’re eating, if you think about how our microbiome is being changed, which houses 80% of our immune system. I think also electrical output now from everywhere and anywhere, I think that can change the whole electrical part of a cell. I think there’s a different stress today compared to when I was young. I think it’s a whole different level of living today. I don’t think it’s as easy, and comfortable, and relaxed compared to when I was younger.
Yes, everybody has stress, but I just think it’s a little more. Then, I think, the input coming into people is extreme. There’s no time to just relax and just take in their world. I think there’s just so much input from so many sources. When I was young, we didn’t go to the doctor. Now, everybody goes to the doctor, especially young people are very, very– you bring your kids to the doctor and everything is treated. We’re over-treating everything, whether it’s ADD or acne. They all have something until they get a medicine. Medications cause a myriad of problems. According to who you read, it’s either the first or the third leading cause of death. No one–
Ari: It’s such an important point. I was just having a conversation with a family member who doesn’t read and natural health, isn’t particularly health conscious. I’m so embedded in conversations with other health experts that sometimes I can be very dissociated from how most of the population thinks about these kinds of things. I brought up exactly the point that you just did, iatrogenic harm, and the fact that pharmaceuticals are essentially the third leading cause of death, maybe the first, depending on– I’ve seen that too, that some people estimate it to be even higher, more like 450,000 or greater, instead of, I think the low end is more like 200,000 or 250,000 deaths per year in the US. His response was interesting. It was striking to hear this response.
“How could drugs be harmful if there’s supposed to be medicine that help people?” It was such a basic rudimentary question that it almost shocked me for a second before I answered him. I said, “Well, how when you watch on TV every time a drug commercial, at the end of it, they go, side effects may include da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and potentially this and this and this medical problem and that medical problem and death. Why do you think drugs always have those kinds of side effects?” It was a shock for him that he was realizing for the first time that drugs don’t just have benefits, but they also carry risks of harm. Anyway, I thought I’d just insert that because it was very shocking almost to just hear how most people have been indoctrinated to think about this topic.
Dr. Connealy: They present it as it’s going to save your life.
Ari: Exactly.
Dr. Connealy: If you look at commercials, they’re always these happy, wonderful people. I’m like, “That is not at all like it is.” They have you believe and mesmerized by you’re going to have your life back. I said, “There are opportunities for using medications in the proper context.” You bring a good point about a perspective. Every head’s another world. In his world, that’s his front-row seat. In your world, it’s what you are exposed to because that’s all you are doing, is devouring the literature and health and talking to health experts. It’s also an opportunity to cooperate and collaborate and say, “Well, let me explaine how I see it,” and then give him the opportunity to explain his, because I think that’s where we just get these volatile conversations instead of like, “Let’s all look at this and see,” because our main goal and intention is how to make the other person better.
Common misconceptions about cancer in conventional medicine
Ari: Agreed. To start this conversation, I asked you, what are some of the biggest misconceptions in the general public about cancer? I’m curious what you would perceive as some of the biggest misconceptions in two other groups of people. One is conventional allopathic medicine. What are some of the misconceptions in cancer? How do they perceive things? Maybe you could answer it, not necessarily in terms of their misconceptions, but maybe speak to how they perceive cancer, the nature of its causes, and how to address it and talk about in natural health, holistic health circles, how many people perceive it there. Then tell me where you stand in relationship to those different views.
Dr. Connealy: That’s a great question because I am a medical doctor. I’d combine the best of conventional Western medicine, so that can be blood work, that can be scans, that can be biopsies, that can be many different things. Every patient, if they have a lump or bump or something that needs to be investigated, should– first of all, before they do anything, I always tell people, “Precautionary. Be precautionary with everything that you do,” because we need to look at the good, bad, and the ugly, like you just said, the risk. I think a patient will go to a doctor and let’s just use breast cancer since that’s the number one cancer.
It will look suspicious on whatever imaging they’re using. They’ll say, “I need to do a biopsy.” When I recommend a patient to do a biopsy, because the gold standard is to do a biopsy so you know the pathology because is that breast cancer? What kind of cancer is it? It could be a neuroendocrine tumor or something else in the breast as opposed to an ER-positive, PR-positive breast cancer. I usually prepare the patient before, during, and after the biopsy. That’s one thing. Then once you get it. I always recommend to patients, since I’m not an oncologist, “Go and speak to a surgeon and oncologist and listen to everything they say. Probably do a couple of them. Then ask them, why do you think this happened?” Now, most doctors will say it’s bad luck or you have a genetic, depending on their family history.
Then no one will really tell them the causes of the cancer, actually. When I see a patient, I will go through a detailed sense in utero to where they are now and what’s happened to them their whole life. I go over an entire lifestyle. Then if the patient and I order very comprehensive blood work, typically doctors order a chemistry panel, and a CBC, and maybe a tumor. What about their C-reactive protein? What about their hemoglobin A1C? What about their vitamin D levels? What about their hormone levels? What about your immune system? All the things that need to be checked if a person has a serious diagnosis as cancer. The conventional will just go attack the cancer, remove it. Then they will decide the patient needs chemotherapy.
Unfortunately, sometimes you may need to incorporate chemotherapy, especially if cancer’s Stage 3 or 4 and you’ve got to shrink it. Now, in my clinic, I do insulin potentiation chemotherapy because cancer cells have insulin-like growth factors so that we give the patient insulin, bring the patient down to the therapeutic moment, and then give the chemotherapy, trying to preserve the other cells. That’s only given a 10% dose, sometimes 20, but a much lower dose, but a targeted approach. In the conventional world, they will use the typical dose-dense chemotherapy.
If you give chemotherapy, what are you doing to protect the patient? There should always be protection in everything you do. Even if you were to give a medication for any chronic disease, what’s the protective nature of giving that medication? If you give antibiotics, what are the things you should be doing to correct that person once they’ve taken the antibiotic? Then I’m looking at oxygenation. I draw an immune panel on everyone. I’m looking at environmental pollutants. I’m looking at their gut, I do a GI-MAP, I do hormone testing.
In conventional oncology, it’s surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation, or immunotherapy. Some combination, depending on the diagnosis and extent of disease. Some patients may need those treatments, especially if it’s very extensive. I will do intravenous vitamin C and curcumin. To alkalinize them, I’ll be doing IV sodium bicarb. I do ozone and ultraviolet blood irradiation with this ozone, which is a treatment been around for 100 years. I will add all these other supportive therapies to maintain the integrity of the patient. At the same time that if a patient needs surgery, if they need chemo, if they need– another thing I do is repurpose drugs.
There’s over 400 drugs that have blocking cancer in different ways. Hyperbaric oxygen. Correcting their nutritional deficiencies. Then I have them do things at home. Whether it’s a detox bath. I like to do emotional work on every single patient. Just because I think that is just another piece of the puzzle to address. I think people who’ve had unresolved emotional conflicts or extreme drama and stress in their life. That’s the difference, conventional pathway is drug surgery or both and maybe fancy medications, but what are you doing to keep the patient integrity great and wonderful while you do those injurious immunosuppressive processes?
Ari: On the flip side of this, we have a lot of people over many decades who are in the realm of natural cancer treatments and natural cures and things of this nature. I want to be a little cautious in how I talk about this to not conflate things that may be largely legitimate and things that are nonsense. Just for the ease of asking you this question. Under this broad umbrella of, let’s say, natural cancer treatments and natural cures, we have things like the Gerson therapy, which actually my grandma went to in a clinic in the Bahamas decades ago when she was diagnosed with cancer and actually had a successful cancer remission from it.
This was at a time when there wasn’t much of a culture around alternative cancer approaches. It was considered very radical and crazy to do something like that. Then, I’ve seen over many years, there’s lots of other claims of all kinds of stuff, that cancer isn’t really what we think it is, that it’s a fungus, or that it’s a virus, or that it’s this or that. If you use this antifungal treatment or inject baking soda into the tumor. I’ve seen all kinds of stuff like that. There’s also this pervasive idea that there are cures that have been actively suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry. Maybe that’s something you want to separate out from your answer here and address separately. I’m curious, what do you consider to be some of the biggest misconceptions out there within the natural cancer treatment approach?
Dr. Connealy: I’m a bit familiar with the Gerson protocol, and I’ve had many patients do that. I will partner with the patient if they want to do. They will say, “No, Dr. Connealy, I’ve read everything. I want to just do the Gerson protocol. Will you follow me?” I say, “Absolutely.” I have patients come in, “Dr. Connealy, I have a lump in my breast. I know it’s under my arm, but I am not doing chemotherapy.” I will partner with them. Now, obviously, I make each individual decision based upon the patient, because if they’re really young, cancer tends to be more aggressive. I will watch them monthly. Then the other patients, they’re older patients, I can watch every couple of months. I’m very familiar. I always say, “You don’t know until you do it.”
You mentioned about injection of sodium bicarb. I met Dr. Simoncini, who has the website Cancer Fungus. They all thought he was a renegade in doing it, talking about doing IV baking soda and injecting baking soda into tumors. I personally have not done that. I do IV baking soda all the time every day here because that’s a very beneficial way. It’s anti-fungal, plus it creates an alkaline environment. I just think that in each individual case, I will say, “I’m more than happy for you to do any of those. You don’t know because there’s so many factors at play.” The Gerson protocol has lots of really good things because the people who have continued the Gerson Protocol, which was Dr. Kelley, who wrote the book One Answer to Cancer. Then if you look at the work of Dr. Gonzales, he’s dead now, but his work continues on.
There’s lots of pearls to all of that, like the pancreatic enzymes, the coffee enema, and I utilize all those. I believe that everyone has a sovereign decision that they need to make in their care because I have patients all the time. “I am not going to do that, Dr. Connealy,” and I honor their wishes. I tell people, “You don’t know until you’ve tried it.” Now, if it’s something that I’ve already done with a patient 20, 30, 50, 100 times, and I realize it doesn’t work, then I will say, “I haven’t found that to work in a lot of patients, but I’m more than willing to partner with you.” I think doctors, their biggest mistake, I think, is not looking at everything. They’re so in medical school and in training. When you get training in the hospital, you are just taught that one thing to do with every patient.
No one’s taught about how do you eat, how are you thinking, what are you exposed to. 100 years ago, all doctors had is natural treatments. That’s all they had, whether it was essential oils, or baths, or making special things in their office. That’s all they had 100 years ago. Coffee enemas have been around for 100 years. I think there’s a lot to the natural things, but you have to combine them both and not endanger the patient and make sure. Because they need to know all the risks that they’re taking.
Ari: There’s a subtle aspect to what you’re communicating that I just want to point out to listeners. I think that we all grow up with this perception that, if I get older, and I’m unlucky enough to get diagnosed with a particular disease, like a particular type of cancer or something, that I would go to a doctor and there would be this scientific consensus of here’s exactly what type of cancer you have, what stage of cancer you have, and here is the exact treatment that you should do. All doctors agree this is exactly what you should do. This is the exact correct approach for this particular problem.
I think that when people actually get into that situation, they discover quite the opposite. This is true of a large number of diseases, not only cancer, that you experience that there isn’t a consensus and there isn’t a perfect treatment for it. There are some treatments that, maybe some research shows are beneficial in some people and other research maybe puts that into question. Some experts are a fan of a particular treatment. Some physicians are not a fan of that particular treatment and recommend a different approach. It is this vast landscape of complexity and differing and sometimes contradictory views and opinions and approaches that can be almost maddening for the patient.
The way you’re talking about it is as a physician, on top of everything that I just said, you’re saying, “I have a relationship with the patient where I also respect their views and their wishes and what they think is right and what is their approach and what they want to do or not do,” and say, “I’m willing to partner with you,” which ultimately I think paints a picture of this whole process almost as less of a rock solid science and more of an art.
Dr. Connealy: Exactly. Because what I find a lot of times is what is the relationship and partnership that you have with each person. A lot of times people, I think the care of medicine is gone. I would say one of the number one complaints I hear from patients is the doctor isn’t interested in anything else that I have to say or talk about. These are the rules because the doctors have to follow NCCN guidelines. If they’re an oncologist, they follow the guidelines in the book. In this group of patients, this is the treatment and this is the outcome. If you add this extra layer, you might get an extra year, depending on the situation. They have to follow those guidelines as an oncologist.
Ari: Otherwise, their license is at risk?
Dr. Connealy: Their license is at risk and the corporation they work for will not be happy if they don’t follow those guidelines. Because I’m not an oncologist, I can look at every single thing that’s possible for the patient as long as I have properly educate them and I have told them conventional as well as other treatments. I give patients, “Here are your options. Here’s a drug you can take for your blood pressure, or I can give you natural herbs to bring down your blood pressure or arginine or something,” whatever concoction I decide. Now, if a patient comes in with high blood pressure and it’s a blood pressure that’s very high, I will institute medications.
Then I’ll say, “Okay, why, where, when and how did you have this problem?” I will start. Maybe they have they’re not sleeping. Maybe their weight is too high. Maybe they have lots of other things going on, too much stress in their life. We don’t want to ever endanger a patient. The patient needs to know that we’re going to try this and ensure that your blood pressure goes down. Also, why do you have this blood pressure to begin with? It’s very important to inform the patient of all the– the best thing is informed consent about everything, whatever you’re going to give the patient. Drugs are the only tool that a doctor has and or surgery to fix a patient. All diseases usually have many underlying factors that are contributing to their disease process.
Ari: I have a couple of questions in relationship to that. One thing I think might be interesting to address is there might be, I’m imagining, two groups of people listening to this. One, who are maybe hardcore naturalistic, people who only approach cancer through natural compounds. They might say, “Well, you sometimes use chemotherapy, how could you?” Then on the other side of this, you have people in conventional medicine, who, as you just outlined, have to adhere to the– what’s the body, the–
Dr. Connealy: The NCCN guidelines.
Ari: NCCN guidelines, who are maybe listening to you and saying, “Well, who do you think you are? Do you think better than all of the established consensus among oncologists, as far as how we approach things? How dare you think for yourself and approach things or think that you could know better than all of us.” I’m just curious what you would say to someone who may be approaching you with those kinds of criticisms.
Dr. Connealy: First of all, we should all be cooperating, collaborating for the healing of the patient. So-and-so at a major cancer center down the street has all the answers, okay, great, I’ll listen to it. If the extreme natural person, which I would consider I’m pretty extreme natural person. At the same time, if a patient comes in here and we’re facing very serious, dire consequences of not doing something, then we all have to work together for the healing of the patient, period. If it takes all three of us to get the patient healed, that’s what we should do. I think that is a problem because there’s–
I don’t know of anyone who has all the answers. As far as I’m concerned, every patient is in a one, they’re their own clinical trial. I don’t think we’re ever going to achieve anything being against another person’s opinion on how to get a patient healed. In fact, one of our doctors had a situation a couple of weeks ago where a oncologist called and said, “What are you doing? Are you an oncologist?” The doctor said, “No, I actually started in pathology and did internal medicine and now I’m doing what I’m doing now.”
She tried to help the doctor understand what they were doing and how we can work together because that’s really what we need to be doing. It’s not about the doctor, it’s about how we’re going to heal the patient. I work with oncologists all the time. I encourage, I always tell every patient, “Go and see what the doctor has to say and look at all your options.” Then we’ll come back and discuss, “Okay, if the doctor said X, well, let me explain that further to you, so you understand the ramification of that plan, and then how we’re going to protect you during whatever we have to decide that.”
Because some of my patients, they need dose-dense chemo, they need the full thing if they’ve got pancreatic cancer and the low-dose chemo is not working. Then I tell the patient, “This is what we’re going to do to mitigate and enhance your vitality and integrity of your body right now, and how we’re going to enhance the healing of all the damage of the chemotherapy or the immunotherapy, whatever drug that we’re using.
When chemotherapy is efficient and when it isn’t
Ari: What do you think, and this might be a difficult question to answer because I know there’s lots of nuances to it. It’s sort of a mixed bag of yeses and noes. What would you say to the question of, how would you conceptualize the efficacy of chemotherapy more broadly in terms of treating cancer?
I remember years ago, and it has been years since I read this, so maybe things have changed. I remember reading papers on the efficacy of chemotherapy that were basically saying that for the vast majority of types of cancers, most of the chemotherapy options are of minimal effectiveness. What’s your take on that, sort of speaking with broad brushstrokes? If that’s possible or maybe that’s a bad idea, I don’t know.
Dr. Connealy: No, that is true. It has very low efficacy, and patients today, a lot of patients who do their research know that. That’s why I say we can’t put all of our healing in just the chemotherapy pathway. You must do all these other things if you want to enhance your survivability.
Ari: What would you say if someone says, “Well, what if I believe chemotherapy is fundamentally bad for me? Rather than a contributing factor to my healing, what if it’s actually at odds with me doing some of these other therapies?:
Dr. Connealy: Then I will tell them, “If you don’t think chemotherapy is right for you, then we will try all these other modalities to see if we can heal you without chemotherapy. Because there are some people– there’s the placebo and nocebo, so if you don’t think it’s going to work, it’s not going to work.
Ari: That placebo and nocebo dynamic adds a whole other dimension of complexity to this, because if you– let’s just imagine you had a treatment that is actually helpful, but somebody believes it’s bad, then what’s going to be the end effect of that? Vice versa, if you have a treatment that is maybe no better than placebo, but somebody thinks it’s extraordinary, maybe it can actually lead to a very beneficial effect. I think the misalignment there is much more important.
If the doctor wants to administer something, but the patient fundamentally has a belief that it’s actually harmful to them, who knows what the effect of that thing is going to result in? Let me ask you this. How central do you think chemotherapy is in healing people with cancer? Are you able to have remissions of cancer without– how common is it to get remission of cancer without using chemotherapy and using some of these other modalities?
Dr. Connealy: If someone has just a simple lump in their breast, they can do surgery. Over 70% of breast cancer patients are not going to benefit from chemotherapy, because there’s a test you can do called the Oncotype DX, and it will tell you if chemotherapy is going to be a benefit or you are not. Over 70% of cases, it’s not.
Ari: Is that also true of a number of other types of cancers that are fairly common cancers, that they are non-responsive to chemotherapy?
Dr. Connealy: Right, because there’s something called chemoresistance and chemosensitivity. You’ve got a 50/50 chance whether it’s going to work or not. That’s why you can’t just rely on just chemotherapy because the chemoresistance and also the circulating stem cells and tumor cells get very angry and upset under chemotherapy. Typically the doctors aren’t checking that even. Then you’re making the terrain significantly more unhealthy when you give chemotherapy.
If you take a pancreatic cancer patient, for example, which is a very aggressive 90% fatality in less than a year. That you probably are going to need chemotherapy, either low dose or conventional chemotherapy. No one recommends chemotherapy unless there’s really an absolute need for it. For example, if you have Stage IV cancer and the cancer has traveled to new organs other than the breast then, of course, you’re going to have to shrink it and chemotherapy is necessary.
If a patient comes in and says, “Dr. Connealy, I just do not want to do chemo. I know that I have Stage IV cancer, but I just want to take a repurposed drug and naturals and IV vitamin C and sodium bicarb.” I’m like, “Okay, we’ll do the scans to see if you’re getting better.”
Ari: Then if they are awesome and does that sometimes happen? That somebody’s getting better?
Dr. Connealy: Yes. Chemotherapy doesn’t have 100% slam dunk. If you do chemosensitivity testing, you’ll see there’s no 100%. It’s 60, 50, 70, 80, but nothing over 80%.
Ari: You’re talking about the efficacy and causing remission.
Dr. Connealy: No, of killing the cancer. If you send your blood and get chemosensitivity testing from different labs, there’s no 100% kill rate.
Ari: That’s the predicted kill rate.
Dr. Connealy: Right. There’s no 100%. There’s nothing that’s 100% kill rate. That’s why I always tell people, “Can we just rely on chemotherapy?” We have to incorporate all the different drains to the system.
Ari: I know this is another question that’s hard to answer, but how would you sort of paint the picture of the number of people who once they get a cancer diagnosis of any type go on to die relatively rapidly? Versus the percentage that are able to go into remission or keep it at bay enough that they still live a normal lifespan?
Dr. Connealy: Well, I think that’s really dependent upon what stage they are. Stage I and II is much easier to reduce a reoccurrence.
We don’t have really good testing in the conventional system to prevent a reoccurrence. Typically doctors will order scans and minimal blood work. They’re just waiting, they’re just waiting. They just tell the patient, “I’ll wait till you have a symptom before I do anything.”
We don’t have any safeguards in the system to prevent reoccurrence. Whereas here, that’s all we’re trying to do is help to prevent a reoccurrence. Stage I and II, I think is easy, but we have a lot of patients who are Stage III and IV, and they do everything and they’re able to prevent reoccurrence and stay cancer-free.
Ari: To get remission.
Dr. Connealy: Yes, to get remission and stay there and keep check because they get an annual checkup with us once they’re really, really healed and they are in remission.
Ari: I think a lot of people have been trained to see a cancer diagnosis almost as a death sentence. If you can’t cut the tumor out surgically, it’s almost like people think it’s going to kill them. What would you say to somebody who has that impression? Sort of as maybe the percentage likelihood of being able to treat it in a way that you can go into remission.
Dr. Connealy: Well, cancer I think most people perceive it as a death sentence, even if it’s really small. I explain to them how this is completely– you’re going to fix this and your whole mission in life is how never to get any cancer again. That’s my goal with the patients and that’s what their goal is too once they know that that’s an option. A lot of them just think that cancer is a death sentence, it’s going to kill them. Then they’re very fearful all the time. Every little thing that they feel, it’s coming back, it’s coming back.
Ari: Which itself is a big problem.
Dr. Connealy: It’s a big problem. In our cases, we’re able to really teach and educate the patient. Then the testing that I do, we do circulating tumor cell tests. We do bioenergetic testing also because I can’t find everything on a scan and blood work. I do other kinds of testing to look what else is going on in the terrain. I always do emotional work on every patient also. You become what you think about most of the time. If people are living in unreasonable stress all the time, it’s going to be very difficult to get better.
I think if they don’t address all the facets that got them into the situation, then it’s going to be very difficult to keep them out of the situation. Our system doesn’t educate and empower patients on how to get healed and stay healed. It’s like we focus on sickness, and illness, and disease, not optimizing someone and de-diagnosing their problems. That’s what we should do as doctors.
We should be de-diagnosing. If you have high sugar, okay, you can have a body that doesn’t have high sugar. If you have inflammation, you can fix these things. We’re living in 2024, please. This is ridiculous that we can. An early-stage cancer is really easy to fix and keep people in remission and teach them and educate them on how they’re going to keep themselves in remission.
Keto and cancer
Ari: What do you think of the metabolic theory of cancer and keto diets in relation? What role does that have to play in this picture?
Dr. Connealy: Well, keto’s been around for 80, 90 years, 1930, I think, when it was first used for epilepsy. I think it can play a role in cancer, especially when patients are pre-diabetic and diabetic. If you check their hemoglobin A1C and it’s elevated, we know that is functionally weakening the cell. A ketogenic eating program might be very good, especially like for brain cancer and for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer patients, you don’t want their pancreas overworking.
You definitely want to prescribe them the ketogenic eating. Also for brain cancer, if you study the work of Seyfried, the metabolic approach to cancer. I do and I talk about that in my book. Is it a one-size-fits-all all? No, but it can be very, very helpful for patients with different cancers and looking at their blood, looking at their fasting insulin, fasting sugar, and their hemoglobin A1C. I think it’s helpful.
Ari: I have 20 other questions I want to ask you, but we won’t have time for them. We may have to do a part two here.
Dr. Connealy: Okay.
Ari: I have a couple more things that I think are important. One is screening. When it comes to screening, we have lots and lots of public messaging from the medical institution that we have to get regular screenings. It’s really important to do these diagnostic checks. We hear these horror stories of people who wait too long to get diagnosed. Now they get Stage IV cancer and their life ends. If it was caught early, they could have prevented it. We all assume that regular screening and testing is really critical to preventing bad outcomes.
I was relatively shocked to learn recently as I dug into that literature that the evidence to support regular screening is actually pretty weak and pretty controversial, even for just yearly physical exam checkups. A lot of different kinds of medical screenings actually have very weak data to support them. Having said that, it still is the case that there are those instances of people who were caught late when they could have been caught early and leading to very tragic outcomes. I’m curious what your overall take on that subject is.
Dr. Connealy: I think screenings are not very beneficial at all. It’s obvious because the cancer rates are going higher. Now, there is no screening for young people. The first screening is a colonoscopy at 45 for men and women. For females, it’s a pap smear and they don’t get breast screenings till 40. A lot of the new breast cancer patients are younger. Then PSA screening is not recommended even though it may be beneficial by testing it and looking for the change in the level as opposed to the quantitative number.
If a patient’s always been PSA one, and they jumped to two, we probably know there’s a problem. For males, it’s 45, and PSA screening, maybe yes, maybe no. For females, it’s pap smears and breast screening, not until 40. Mammograms still are the standard of care. There’s new imaging called QT, quantitative transmission, which is no radiation, no dyes, or anything in 40 times the accuracy of an MRI. The screening is not that great, you’re right. That’s not how I screen for patients because prevention is priceless for me.
Ari: I think we should just wrap up part one on this because I have way too many other questions. It’s going to for sure be another 40 or 60 minutes of conversation. I think it’s important that we go into some of these questions that I’ve outlined. Part two is in the works. For people listening to this, let me know in the YouTube comments or email me, [email protected] with any good questions, things that I haven’t asked here that you’d like me to ask Dr. Connealy in part two.
Dr. Connealy. This has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you for indulging me and all of my long list of diverse questions. I have many more. I want to seed one topic that I’m very excited to get into with you for the next episode, and that is, I’ve seen you talk about this and share some of the research that supports this, and this is fascinating, that cancer cells can revert back to normal cells.
I think just that knowledge is very empowering, and especially looking at– I saw some of the research that you shared related to this and some of the factors that influence it. I was unaware of that research before I saw you share it, and I felt it very insightful and very empowering. Even just seeing that really changed my perception of what drives cancer and how we can avoid it. I’m excited to get into that with you.
I think it’s a really important topic, and I have a bunch more things on my list here, but we’ll leave part one at this. Again, to everybody listening, let me know what questions you’d like me to ask Dr. Connealy in part two. Dr. Connealy, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with my audience. I really appreciate it. Let people know where they can follow you or get in touch with you to work with you.
Dr. Connealy: Right, they can follow me on connealymd, the Instagram, that’s my handle, and they can look up Center for New Medicine, Cancer Center for Healing, and we have a regular cancer conversation every two weeks that’s on Zoom, that’s recorded, that you can find on YouTube.
Ari: Beautiful. Thank you so much. I look forward to part two.
Dr. Connealy: All right. Thank you.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:50 – Guest intro Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy
03:06 – Common misconceptions about cancer
14:45 – Why cancer is no longer an old person’s disease
21:15 – Common misconceptions about cancer in conventional medicine
43:39 – When chemotherapy is efficient and when it isn’t
54:35 – Keto and cancer
Links
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