Biohacker Ben Greenfield returns on the Anatara Medicine Podcast

Ben: Alright. Well, Ahvie, it is good to see you. It’s good to be back in San Francisco.

Dr. H: Same here.

Ben: We’ve podcasted now, well, twice. Even though our last podcast was so big and long and hairy and audacious, we split it into a two parter. And by the way, for those of you listening in I’ll link to all of the podcasts I’ve done with Ahvie, if you go to www.BenGreenfieldLife.com/cancerpodcast.

And indeed, we’ve talked about all sorts of stuff in the past, Ahvie, like constitutional assessments.

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: Which is how you first met me, eating a giant pork chop that was not conducive to my constitutional assessment. Then you’ve fed me through the firehose about that and I’ve learned a ton. We’ve talked about advanced blood and biomarker testing and nerve blocks and joint treatments and stem cells.

But this whole idea of cancer is something that you and I haven’t taken much of a deep dive into, besides briefly talking about these biopsies, these liquid biopsies, which I think we’ll talk about a little today. But, you know, I’ve been very interested in cancer for a couple of reasons, and I’ll have a chance to fill you in here.

Ben: But one reason is that it seems to me like I’ve been reading a lot of articles, a lot of news reports that people are getting cancer with increasing frequency, often at younger ages. I doubt that it’s just we have better detection methods and people are just catching things earlier. But why is it that cancer seems to be on the rise across the board?

Dr. H: Oh, well, I think I agree that there’s data sifting in now, because now we can look at data from 2022.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: You know, a year behind, of course, there’s no data yet for 2023, with the trend that predated COVID, of getting certain types of cancers in younger populations.

Ben:  Mm hmm.

Dr H:  So, cancer used to be, aside from leukemias and certain other cancers, was a disease of the aged with spectacular rises after the age of 75 and incidence rates. But now, the group that seems to be targeted, disproportionately, is the 40 to 49 years.

Ben: 42-49? So, when you say young, we’re not talking like 18-year-olds getting cancer, but people 40 to 49 remarkably younger than the 75 plus we’ve seen in the past.

Dr. H: Right. I mean, it starts rising after 60, traditionally, but now 30 to 40, or 30 to 49 is being hit harder. That’s what the oncologists that you can talk to for anecdotal information about, that they’re seeing very large rises. And the more provocative thing is that these are late-stage cancers.

Ben: Meaning that they have been developing for a long period of time?

Dr. H: Or an accelerated or an acceleration of that phase.

Ben: Oh, a little bit faster? Okay.

Dr. H: Yeah, an acceleration of that phase. So just a quick anecdote, and anecdotes are just not worth their weight in gold, obviously, but they do heighten your awareness when you have serial studies in the same person. Which we we’re seeing now for the first time, people with negative PET CT scans or negative MRI’s, but good solid imaging for a tumor in one location…

Ben: Yeah…

Dr. H: …Let’s say colon. Looking at the liver in May, and looking at the liver six weeks later in late June…

Ben: Yeah?

Dr. H: …Showing multiple metastases in the liver, so…

Ben: With like a PET scan?

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: So, I mean, a PET CT. So you’re seeing that in one study was negative, and the other study is positive. But only six weeks has gone by and you know that it was there before, but it was too small to see.

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: But a mass that’s six weeks, that you’re looking at for six weeks, there only after six weeks where you can see it at probably 2 or 3 mm, now at 10 mm, is spectacularly aggressive. I mean, this is….

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H:  This is mutating and this is so, this is a very accelerated thing, so…

Ben: Even in young people?

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben: We’re seeing that?

Dr. H: Yes. We’ve seen it in all age groups, of folks that are coming in with later stage disease. So, something is causing this, but the trends have already been present in the past. So the younger population is involved more so; breast, lung, colon, the three most, so lung is the most common cancer in the United States, then colon is second but happening in the younger people.

Ben: And just to address the elephant in the room, this is not because people at younger and younger ages are out getting PET scans and MRI’s because, you know, Tony Robbins is championing the benefits of a full body MRI and all the biohacking and anti-aging enthusiasts got to go off and get their advanced, you know, CT angiographies and everything. It’s not a matter of us testing younger people, you think there’s actually something going on, causing cancer at a younger age?

Dr. H: Right. Well, it’s very unlikely that that’s the reason, so…

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: …And during the pandemic, the first year of the pandemic, in 2020-2021, there was a decrease in cancer incidence. And that was because we weren’t identifying people in a timely fashion…

Ben: People just like, weren’t going to hospital…

Dr. H: They weren’t going to the hospital, they weren’t getting screening tests. So, we lost a lot of the folks with earlier cancers at that point.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And then in 2022, it’s now back to pre-pandemic levels.

Be: Yeah.

Dr. H: So, that’s one message at the same time, there are entities now that will do whole body MRI’s specifically to find that lesion that’s early somewhere in your body, some 200 plus cancers that they can identify.

And we’ve seen a case like that. But one case out of hundreds of cases you need to follow in that particular fashion is very inefficient…

Ben: Okay, yeah.

Dr H:  …To take these screening tests willy nilly. And we’ll talk about that even when you’re concerned about cancer and you look at these tests, we’ll go over the different findings with the test, but it’s unlikely.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: So the elephant in the room is also, what is the impact of COVID, and what is the impact of vaccination on this trend that already was accelerated?

Ben: Yeah, well, how do you even know? Because you have the COVID pandemic. But it sounds like the trend was already accelerated with vaccinations, which have been around for a long time. We have some new ones, but then there is, of course, stress and emotional processing…

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben: Which I know has a very large correlation. I just got done with a book called Anti-Cancer Living, which is all about how human connectivity, or the absence of it, and loneliness is one of the biggest contributing factors to onset of cancer or even poor cancer survival. We’ve got you know, you can go back and read books that kind of get an eyebrow raise at them, like the Electric Rainbow that talks about increased incidences of chronic diseases with response to excess, exposure to wi-fi

Dr. H:  Right.

Ben: …And electromagnetic radiation and radio frequencies and cell towers. We have ultra processed food and toxins in the in the food supply. I just interviewed a guy last week who talked about pesticide companies creating small, short chain peptides that replicate continental venom, cobra venom and scorpion venom and that these venoms may cause a steep rise in the incidence of cancer. Is it like a cluster of a bunch of things you think or

Dr. H: Yeah, well…

Ben: Is that a crazy idea?

Dr. H: My hypothesis, when I first opened up this clinic, Anatara Medicine in San Francisco, about a dozen years or so ago, was that our area under the curve of these individual risks is now taking a transformational shift and putting us into much higher risks than we had before.

Dr. H: It’s an area under the curve, so it’s multiple factors, always as you know, all the different factors you just cited and many, many more, um, with both specific cancers as well as, as others. What we do know… let’s just take it from the top, okay?

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: What do we know? We know that people in the developed world have higher rates of cancer than in the underdeveloped world. And that may be an issue of simply reporting. We just don’t know.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Now, in the countries that do report well, and there are Latin American countries that do that, and African countries that do that, it tends to be still higher in the developed world.

Ben: Undeveloped countries that report well, still have lower incidence of cancer than developed countries that report similarly?

Dr. H: Yes. They have specific, they have regional cancers you know.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: But overall, as a general trend, there’s one thing about the way we live versus the way they live that it has to be taken into account. So of course, there is many different factors and we’ll talk about each of them then. And then in United States, and then you say, what’s going on in the United States?

Dr. H: Well, the United States ranks in the top 10-15% of all nations with cancer rates, but not as much as Germany and not as much as, uh, Czechoslovakia, like, the number one and number two is Australia. For some reason that, you know, so are people in Czechoslovakia drinking more alcohol, are the Australians drinking more alcohol? Are they exposed to some specific regional toxins that we’re not aware of?

Ben: Mhmm.

Dr. H: They’re not less, they’re not more sedentary than we are.

Ben: Yeah

Dr. H: You know, certain things are clear. They’re eating the same food as we are, maybe even a better food supply than we are. So there are multiple factors going on. But why has lung cancer, for example, still the number one cancer worldwide, even in places that don’t have high smoking rates anymore?

Dr. H: So we’ve reduced smoking rates and, actually alcohol rates in France, and Italy are going down, but…

Ben: Although air pollution is still a pretty hefty issue, and a growing issue.

Dr. H: So you’re left with the area under the curve.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H:  …That something else is supplanted.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: What was exposed by smoking, and now you remove the smoking from the equation and you still have, you still have it…

Ben: Mhm.

Dr. H: …Because the rates of air pollution over, and the rates of inflammatory states in the lung that we’re constantly inflammatory.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: …Interacting with the pollution…

Ben: And when you say smoking has decreased at the same time, we’ve seen concomitant increase in vaping of nicotine and cannabis.

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben: And from what I understand, that at this point is dwarfing the rate of decrease of cigarette smoking.

Dr. H: That’s correct.

Ben: So that people can suck down polyethylene glycol all day.

Dr. H: That’s true. And that’s a disaster in the making, because again, the exposure to environmental toxins and food toxins and oncogenes and viruses and so on.

Dr. H: So when you when you say, I want to see what the area under the curve is, well, I have to know that on an individual basis, I can…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: We’re not talking about epidemiology now. We’re talking about natural history. Natural history of cancers we know are affected by the inflammasome, this inflammatory cascade that’s generally much more pro-inflammatory today than it was 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

Ben: Mhmm.

Dr. H: We understand that to be a fact…

Ben: The inflammasome.

Dr. H: So this is the pro-inflammatory signaling. So this is, so when I first became immunologically trained, we had, you know, three or four cytokines that we knew about. We knew TNF-Alpha and IL-1, IL-2…

Ben: Those are inflammatory molecules?

Dr. H: These are cytokines that talk, communicate. So generally speaking, it’s certain ones are modulatory, like interferons are modulatory, and certain ones are pro-inflammatory. The one that’s probably the most commonly known are TNF-Alpha and the IL-1 and IL-2 receptors, but you need them to exist. They’re not bad, they’re just constantly activated. So, when you study this today versus, and now we have we know that the cascade is about 300 of these communicating molecules, that…

Ben: These inflammatory molecules?

Dr. H: These signaling molecules that some tend towards, most of them tend towards inflammation – inflammation repair overlap. So many of them are useful in repair. Many tend due to autoimmunity, many tend due to an allergic phenomenon. But they’re all in the cascade. No super computer today can figure out any, if you measure all 300 in a person, no one’s going to be able to figure out the puzzle at this particular point in time. But we know that the overall inflammatory state is now pretty secured in the population.

Dr. H: You know that if you go out drinking and eating junk food, the next morning, you’re inflammatory.

Ben: Mm.

Dr. H: Period.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Now you can measure it with the basic, basic stuff like C-reactive protein…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: ..Because it’s an acute phase reactant. It’ll go up…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: You know…

Ben: Or qualitative measurements, like how long you lay in bed watching Netflix when you wake up…

Dr. H: That’s right.

Ben: …Because everything just feels too hard.

Dr. H: Right. Haha. And it has total body effects, we know that.

Ben: Mhmm.

Dr. H: …If you, if you’re sensitive to it. The reason you feel crummy is because a lot of that is because of these inflammatory signaling molecules…

Ben: Mhmm.

Dr. H: …Give you a touch of the flu, even though you don’t have fever, you don’t have a virus.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: It’s just, it feels the same way. Your fatigue feels the same way. It’s just not as extreme as it is when you’re you know…

Ben: And so what you’re saying is that you have, cause I know you do, and we talked about this in our last podcast, a much more comprehensive series of inflammatory marker measurements then…

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: …You might get on the average blood test. You’re saying that an increase in those inflammatory markers is something that has risen in correlation to this rise in cancer?

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben: And that could be due to some of the other things we talked about; toxins, electromagnetic soup, ultra-processed foods and ingredients…

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: …Animal venoms, or poor emotions and lifestyle and stress, etc., like any of those things could cause rise?

Dr. H: Right. But the reason I bring it up today, because we’re talking about cancer is, I think that that aspect of things is not discussed in depth as it should be…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: …Because it’s, you know, everyone, oh, I know that I’m eating ultra-processed foods and the chemicals and they’re bad for me. I understand that. But it’s okay that I might, my doctor said my C-reactive protein is five or four, the upper limit is three, but we want everybody to have it less than one, less than point one. I mean, it should be zero…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: …Period. And that…

Ben: Unless you just got done with a workout.

Dr. H: Yes, but, by the next morning…

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: …You should be back to baseline. So, when you’re running around with the inflammasome activated in a pro-inflammatory way, that’s what inflammasome means, it’s this pro-inflammatory.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Inflammatory cascade is good and bad. You need you need it both. You need it to survive. You can’t exist only on antioxidants.

Ben: Yeah, but why? Why is, because like, obviously, if you exercise…

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: You know me, like I’m, that’s my jam. Like, my business is exercise, science and fitness to a great extent. You create inflammation. You know, arguably, even if you do a hefty sauna session or something like that, you could create hyperthermia-based inflammation. But you don’t see people who exercise frequently or lift weights, it seems at least they are getting cancer at as high rate as someone who develops inflammation from, say, a toxic lifestyle, ultra-processed food. So, there must be a certain flavor of inflammation or a certain environment in which the inflammation takes place that would cause the rise in cancer. Yeah?

Dr. H:  That’s correct. So, inflammation and repair go hand in hand. I mean, there’s a tremendous overlap. So, when you microscopically injure a muscle by overuse, it requires the same cytokines that also would produce in a chronic state, an inflammatory state, that is not reparative.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So, it goes overboard. It’s not modulated back.

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: And why, is why is that? Well, some of the major modulatory pathways are completely off now. What are they? Vitamin D pathway is one of the major immunomodulatory pathways. I mean it’s a hormone. It’s not a vitamin. So that hormone is responsible for modulating your immune system back to the center. It does so not just by acting as an anti-inflammatory, it is not, it goes through sets of hundreds of pathways, including anti-inflammatory pathways. But it also modulates with the renin angiotensin system that has, that is the target of COVID. That’s why I brought it up. It’s a target of setting the system out of its modulatory pathway.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So, for example, you could argue that the cancer rates have really been pretty flat, despite you know treatments and despite everything, the death rates are pretty flat, overall, for the last 30 years. Well, we have better treatments, better surgeries, better chemotherapies, more targeted immunotherapies. We have those, but it hasn’t really made a huge dent.

I mean, certain ones on a total. Totally. The total number hasn’t changed. And the total number is anticipated, in the modeling today, is anticipated based on these other factors that modelers put in, like what’s the effect of being more inflammatory than we used to be? What’s the effect of being more stressed than we used to be?

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: What’s the effect of a more miserable biome that we currently treat ourselves with, you know?

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: What is that effect? It’s going to rise by 60 to 70% by 2040.

Ben: Wow.

Dr. H: So, whatever the numbers are, they’re going to go up, according to, you know, according to the logic and according to the models.

Ben: Yeah, so, you know, it sounds to me like we might not know the exact reason, even though there’s a cluster of clues as to why it’s increasing. But I think that what I’m interested in is, how people like me, you know, in our young, virile ages can actually know. This morning I got up at the Holiday Inn last night, the front desk called up and said my pickups were here. And I went downstairs and I gave my first morning void.

Dr. H: Yes.

Ben:  And I brought that in, which I think has something to do, along with this needle in my arm, with the type of ways that you can detect whether or not a young person, or an old person, would be getting cancer even before we might see a PET scan or an MRI.

Ben: This is interesting to me because, I’ve even told you this, six weeks ago my dad showed up at my house with gut pain.

Dr. H: Hmm.

Ben: And he has a history, and he’s Ashkenazi Jewish, which I think has a little…

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: …History of gut issues as well. I even have a pristine gut myself. And so I said, alright dad, you know, you know, everything you’re talking about sounds like diverticulitis and inflammation.

Ben: And, you know, I cleaned up his diet for that day and I brought him down to my friend, who’s a naturopath who gave him a vitamin C IV and some ozone. And as I was driving him home, his pain was just getting worse and worse. And I said, Dad, something’s not right.

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: I’m going to take you into the E.R. So I pulled a U-ee on the road, took him into the E.R. Long story short is, we had series of scans, you know, CT scan, chest X-ray, etc., the nurse came into the room and said, Well, Mr. Greenfield, you know, we thought this was diverticulitis or some type of inflammatory pocket in your colon, but it’s instead like a pretty massive growth. As a matter of fact, when we met with the physician for a follow up a few days later, after more scanning, they said that it was likely that the size of the growth, this tumor that was blocking nearly his entire digestive tract had been growing for nearly ten years.

Ben: Now, I don’t know if that is the case, but regardless, went in for emergency surgery because it had progressed to a pretty concerning point, almost died in the hospital three times with sepsis and surgical complications, and it was very emotional time. Just six days ago, he was discharged from the hospital and he’s now at home. But I’ve been calling up my brothers and saying, well, look, three cousins on our mom’s side have died of colon cancer. My grandfather died of colon cancer. Now we know my dad, who was adopted, we didn’t know his genetic history obviously has some issues…

Dr. H: Right.

Ben: …And there’s likely issues on his side. We got to get colonoscopies guys, and we got to we got to start to do, some detection and also begin to educate ourselves on the treatment. So, I’ve been on this, on this journey to learn more…

Dr. H: Okay now, now I understand.

Ben: …And more about why it happens and how we can detect it. And so that kind of leads into my next question for you. You know, you got me, you got my two brothers, and we’re sitting here quaking in our boots. Maybe we have something that even a PET scan or an MRI wouldn’t be able to pick up. What do you do? What’s your screening method?

Dr. H: Well, let’s just again, take it from the top. There are some factors that we know about. So, you’ve heard that genetics mediates some percentage of risk…

Ben: Mhmm.

Dr. H: …Whether it’s cardiovascular or Alzheimer’s risks, so on. So somewhere in the low range, 5 or 10% or something like that. But for colon cancer, there is a specific genomic alteration called, Lynch Syndrome. These are the genes that deal with repairing your DNA at night.

Ben: Hhmm.., interesting.

Dr. H: Mismatched genes. So, these are the genes that that repair at night. So, when the copy is not exactly the same as the original, they repair that. So, there’s a group of maybe about ten genes. So, the Lynch syndrome people have an increased risk for colon cancer specifically, all the gut cancers, but mainly colon cancer. And that’s where you have to be very aggressive in terms of colonoscopy as much more often. And I’ll explain why colonoscopy is the is the better way to go.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: For them, but also probably for the entire population. Although, we would all like it to be easier than that. And I’ll review all that, too. But so that’s one thing. So, let’s just assume that only occupies a small portion of people. It’s probably not your dad, because your dad is getting colon cancer at an age that is standard.

Ben: Mhmm. Yeah, 70.

Dr. H:  You know, standard colon cancer.

Ben: Then there’s the three cousins on my mom’s side who are more like 40.

Dr. H: So that’s the risk.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: The risk is there on that side of the family. But, um, so it’s been there for a long time. It’s enough to obstruct. And that’s not an uncommon scenario because, unless you go to the doctor and or buy a guaiac stool test and say that I’m leaking a tiny bit of blood microscopically…

Ben: A guai-X stool test?

Dr H: No, it’s called, g-u-a-i-a-c, guaiac, it’s just the stool, it’s a stool test for blood.

Ben: Oh, okay.

Dr. H: And microscopic amount of blood is not when you’re seeing blood right in the toilet, this is when you can’t see it.

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: Typically, someone like your dad may actually have had anemia from that microscopic loss of blood over the years of which he didn’t notice.

Ben: Hmm.

Dr. H: Because ultimately it obstructed him.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And then by that point, he may be unfortunate enough to have metastatic disease and local disease, certain local lymph node involvement or metastatic disease. But the point is, what do you do when you’re 40 and 50 to figure this stuff out in advance.

Ben: Especially if you don’t just want to get a series of colonoscopies every year.

Dr. H: No, no, I understand.

Ben: For example.

Dr. H: Yeah, of course. But right now, even the trend to younger, younger age groups getting colon cancer, just as on a national level to understand that it used to be when they first came out that colonoscopies were only paid for by insurance if you were…

Ben: Certain age?

Dr. H: The age was 50, and now it’s lowered to 45. They’re not going to go lower than that because it’s going to be prohibitive, utterly expensive for them. But that the screening…

Ben: Not enough tubes to go around to shove at people’s butts.

Dr. H: Right. I mean, so ultimately, even if you’re asymptomatic, 45, you can get your first one and then another one for ten years.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: Unless you find the polyp. So, the issue is, the reason that, um, you could say, listen, I’m willing to take a Cologuard test, you know, which is…

Ben: A Cologuard test?

Dr. H: Cologuard, c-o-l-o-g-u-a-r-d, which is a test also, a test that’s based on DNA, mutated DNA’s that are found in the colon, secreted by colon…

Ben: Oh, I’ve seen this once, it’s like a blood test that you send in that has a certain percentage rate of being able to pick up colon cancer specifically?

Dr. H: Right. So that has a pretty good positive predictive value. It means if it’s positive, it’s good. That means you already have it, right.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: So, it’s not preventative at all. It just is maybe you’ll catch it earlier.

Ben: And this is something anybody’s doctor could order for them. A Cologuard test?

Dr. H: That’s correct.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: I think you can order it. You may be able to order it soon on your own. It’s not going to be covered by insurance.

Ben: That home test kit type of things.

Dr. H: Something like that. Yes.

Ben: Okay

Dr H: But you have to be, you have to fulfill very strict criteria. They won’t run it if you’re below 45. They just won’t run it. You can’t…

Ben: Even if you have high genetic risk.

Dr. H: No, no, they won’t, and they don’t want you if you have high genetic risk for some reason, I don’t quite understand all the different things.

Ben: That’s odd.

Dr. H: So, you have to be asymptomatic and you have to be above 45 and not have a family history and so why they stay away from there? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something to do with I can’t afford to have a false-negative test in population. Okay. And that population really needs to go to colonoscopy. The only, the major advantage of colonoscopy, even though you have to be prepared and prepped and then put under anesthesia, of course, is the fact that you’re going to find in a higher number of people, not cancer, but you’re going to find the precancerous lesions that that the blood test can never you know.

Ben: And those are called the polyps.

Dr. H: The polyps.

Ben: Okay. How big are those, by the way?

Dr. H: They can…

Ben: So, I think polyps, I think about like a bunch of mushroom spores I’m walking through the forest or something like that but I don’t really know.

Dr. H: Right, so you’ll pick it up on a colonoscopy if it’s about a half, a half a centimeter.

Ben: Half a centimeter. Okay. All right.

Dr. H: Yes.  It doesn’t have to look like a bulbous mushroom like we see in a cartoon.

Ben: Yeah, Yeah

Dr. H: But, but in any case, at that point, it’s, it’s pre-cancerous. It’s an adenoma. It’s not. It doesn’t have dysplasia and it doesn’t have an abnormal cell type in it, but it also sometimes can actually have a carcinoma in situ right there. And you just clip it off and you’re done. But then, you owe yourself another colonoscopy in five years.

Ben: In five years. And so that’s what I’m wondering, obviously, with what you were talking about earlier with this rate of cancer growth, when you cited a figure of six weeks. You could do a colonoscopy, get polyps removed or not if you don’t find one, wait five years and by five years have a pretty massive growth. It sounds like the Cologuard test could be one option as a blood-based screening. Is that the best one out there?

The Cologuard is a stool test; https://www.cologuard.com/using-and-returning-your-cologuard-kit

Dr. H: Probably for colon, yes. That is the Galleri, g-a-l-l-e-r-i test, Galleri Test.

Ben: Okay

Dr. H: There’s also a blood-based DNA test that can measure about 120 different cancers at one time, can very strong, positive predictive value. That means that if you have a positive result, 99 times out of 100, you have cancer.

Ben: Is that the one you were telling me about that you send off to Europe, this Galleri test?

Dr. H: No, that’s different.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: So we’ll get to that.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: Uh, but it’s poor for early stage. So stage one, they only can identify a 40%…

Ben:  Okay.

Dr. H:  Stage two, 60, stage three, 80 and 95% of stage four cancer. So, your father would have a positive Galleri test, but he obviously knows he has cancer.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And if he knew about it six weeks earlier, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

Ben:  Probably not.

Dr. H:  But if he if he was wanting to predict five years ago when he had perhaps had a very early stage disease, it wouldn’t be a great test to use.  So, we send the test off that, there are multiple German-based tests.

Ben: And by the way, is this a blood test that sends blood?

Dr. H: A blood test, yeah.

Ben:Okay.

Dr. H: This you’ll need a doctor for and there’s a few German entities. The one we sent, moved the laboratories over to Greece, so we call it the Greek test. The RGCC test. It actually means something with the name of their lab.

Ben: RGCC is the name of the lab in Greece that you send these tests off?

Dr. H: But using the German technology that he brought over. So, this is a brilliant German immunology oncologist who put forward the methodology to look at multiple cancer stem cell receptors on circulating blood.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: And finding it in small numbers.

Ben: Is this what you would call a liquid cancer biopsy?

Dr. H: Yeah, so this is the liquid biopsy.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: So, there’s a liquid biopsy revolution happening in the United States, which we’ll talk about. But this one is the technologies in Europe currently that are approved there, but not here at this point. Um, will show you results when you don’t, when you have a circulating marker that’s abnormal, but you can’t find the tumor in that location.

Ben: Hmm.

Dr. H: It’s not visible.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. H: So, you’re catching it truly in an early…

Ben: Even before you could potentially find in a colonoscopy.

Dr. H: Yeah.

Ben: Wow, okay.

Dr. H: So, once that polyp turns cancerous and it’s more than a millimeter or 2 mm in size, it will leak into the bloodstream. And then in the bloodstream, it has a life of its own because the cancer stem cells are immortal, and they’re immortalized so that they exist there and they grow a certain amount. But even in low numbers, they can be picked up. And, then you have to track it down. Sometimes each of the different tests, the one that we use, can pick up prostate specific, breast specific, squamous cell specific cancer.

Ben: Oh, so you don’t send off the test and say, hey, we want to test this for colon cancer.

Dr. H: No, it’s for everything.  So, there’s one panel, you get immunologic, because, you know, lymphomas and lymphomas are up and leukemias are up and myeloma is up. And then there they run it all. They run it on everyone, but they have a different panel for epithelial like cancer, for the solid tumors.

Ben: Okay. And if someone’s listening in, how do they even find a doctor who would run a test like that? Do you just do a like a Google search for this RGCC test?

Dr. H: Well, you go to their particular website.

Ben: The RGCC website.

Dr. H: Yeah. Because they’ll, I mean, obviously we do them a lot and we do them a lot for other doctors in the Bay Area.

Ben: But someone still has to come into the clinic.

Dr. H: They have to because it’s a real blood draw. So, you have to take 30-50, 40-50 cc.

Ben: Is that what they did on me this morning? This blood draw?

Dr. H: Oh no, that was, that was filling in everything that I’m going to talk about from now on with regards to really having a cancer prevention stack of data.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: Okay. Um, but we’ve already sent your test over there, and it was negative right? Didn’t we sent the RGCC test?

Ben: I don’t know. I lose track of all the things you do to me. Yeah. Okay.

Dr. H: I think we did.

Ben: Okay. So, what are these other tests that you do then? Like the ones that you, that you drew from my blood today?

Dr. H: Well, I figured that if I let the clinic grow organically, and when we first opened that, we would learn more than if we restricted it.  Coming from immunology and cardiology background, I mean, this never, never came close to becoming a cardiovascular risk reduction type of a place, because it was open to everyone, and the folks in the inflammatory state sort of was king here for the first ten years.

Ben: What does that mean, open to everyone?

Dr. H: I mean, we didn’t select patients. Patients who came through the door, came through the door…

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: …And then we noticed that we had to find our solution. Best care solutions for cancer care patients, and they were in two different groups. One that was doing traditional chemo and one that had an affinity towards just doing it in an alternative integrative way.

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: Just so…

Ben: Apricot kernels and high heat saunas and all that stuff?

Dr. H: Right, right. So, we had this extraordinary data set from cancer care patients and understood what was associated with that and I’ll talk to that in a minute. But then we also were interested because of my own age, I was interested in, you know, tremendously interested in longevity and its interaction with the immune system.  So, when you look at cancer prevention, it’s wise to look at what the drivers of longevity are because it’s the same thing. It’s sort of, it’s an accelerated form area under the curve pushing you into mutational forms. But when you look at it, we sort of also forget some of the most basic stuff. So, for example, the single most important piece of information that will get from you, the early morning urine that you and your wife brought in…

Ben: Hmm. Mm hmm.

Dr. H: …was your urine pH.

Ben: Your urine pH. You can get that from just like a pee test strip?

Dr. H: No, you can get that for $4 from any Walgreens. But that’s a single, one of the most important tests you can use every day.

Ben: For cancer screening. Really?

Dr. H: Yeah. I’ll tell you why. So, because you know from your own studies that having more alcohol in urine means that at night you repaired more DNA, you’re repaired, you produce more, more reparative proteins, you know, you’ll recover faster…

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: …than if you are acidic. So a lot, most of the people walk in the street, have a urine pH of 5 or 5.5, they’re quite acidic.

Ben: Which is very acidic. Yeah.

Dr. H: So that’s a pro cancer environment, period, end of sentence. The tumor microenvironment is acidic. It’s also hypoxic. But that’s the information…

Ben: Right, so based of Wahlberg’s hypothesis…

Dr. H: That’s right.

Ben: …with cancer growing in hypoxic, anaerobic, lactic acid accumulated environment.

Dr. H: That’s correct. So, most doctors don’t think that that’s the most important thing to change. And one of the most important and that’s the one that’s also been associated with longer life. If you look at the few things that have been documented in the literature that were associated with longevity, early morning pH between 6.5 and 7.5 rather than lower or higher, mainly lower is associated with longer life.

Ben: So, we all just need to get one of those Kangen alkaline water generators, right?

Dr. H: Well, maybe that would work. I don’t know if it would work because it, um, the question is what gives you the effect? And the effect is mainly from food and, and from shifting your metabolic system into a better state.

Ben: Poor kidney function, mineral depletion, there’s a lot.

Dr. H: That’s right. There’s a lot there..

Ben: Acid-alkaline imbalances. Yeah.

Dr. H: And some of us get it back by simply taking it a different approach to nutrition. Um, but then what, what, what are the drivers? What drives longevity that we know about been proven is vitamin D, hemoglobin A1C for your blood sugar metabolism. We know that from Warburg’s days that tumor cells love glycogen and glucose. So having that under control…

Ben: So, pH, hemoglobin A1 C, vitamin D, glucose, these are all things that you would test. These are very basic test.

Dr. H: They’re very, very basic.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: But look at them as a stack, you have to include, whatever you’re measuring, most of us have normal renal function and liver function. Okay. But you have to add C-reactive protein has been shown to you live longer and that that’s pretty much about it, that’s been, that’s documented.

Ben: That’s not an expensive or fancy series of tests man.

Dr. H: No…

Ben: That’s not sexy.

Dr. H: No, but I think it’s lacking. It’s lacking, because we’ve identified a much deeper data set that is much, that is more…

Ben: Oh, so you go beyond just what you just told me…

Dr. H: It’s more predictive, because…

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: …the only, the only immunological marker there is, are you inflammatory or not and it’s one of the more basic ones. I mean it’s just basic. Everyone does a C-reactive protein that has their normal, I don’t know, cardiac risk factors done. Um, so you need to go more. So, for example, what is the area under the curve of all the toxicity end up doing? Uh, what is it doing in everybody. Well, it’s affecting everyone’s biome and that’s a, well, we have to get into that, but it also affects our innate natural immune system.

The summation of all the pollution, all the chemicals and so on affects it. So, what that means is our surveillance system looking for foreignness, looking for foreign proteins, looking for mutations which are foreign, is suppressed.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: Then you add the absolute epidemic of toxic mold, which is also a suppressant, and then the epidemic of having, most people today, having a very large viral load over when they were kids.

Ben: I’ve also heard, in addition to mold and viruses, that parasites can also be a contributory factor.

Dr. H: Yeah, except one interesting thing. Having worked in global health for a long time and traveled all over the world, that again, when you look at the association between countries with heavy parasite loads, they have a lot of stuff, but they don’t have autoimmunity, they don’t have cancer.

Ben: They also eat a lot of hot peppers…

Dr. H: And they eat what they eat, yeah.

Ben: And those Thai ghost peppers, no cancer can survive that.

Dr. H: No cancer can survive that, that’s true. So, when you add something that measures… So it’s not the fanciest 100 cytokine panel that, you know, we can organize here but you measure something called natural killer cells. So, these are the CD8, NK – natural killer cells, which are labeled CD57. These are, what we call here in the office, I’ll just do a CD57 count…

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: …And everyone knows what we mean. So that has a huge range of 60 to 360. The range is really high. You know, it’s very, very broad. But if you’re, if you’re less than 100, if that’s the number that you have and you’re less than that, then you have some work to do. And, and that’s, to me, one of the one of the most fundamental reasons I like Thymosin Alpha One as a peptide because it can move that number up. Now you have a very high number…

Ben: It can move the killer cell?

Dr. H: Yeah, the killer cells. So, one thing I find, that’s a cute story, is someone comes in and is proud to tell me that, you know, everyone is sick in my family, I never get sick. I’m just the one who’s so strong and never gets sick and I have to sit him down and saying, that’s not good news.

Ben: It’s not good news.

Dr. H: It’s not good news. No, it means your innate system is asleep. I mean, get sick once in a while.

Ben: But could it also mean you have, like good vitamin D status and toxin…

Dr. H: Yeah, but then you don’t get sick very often? But the last time I got sick was 12 years ago. Doesn’t make sense…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: …to me. Because, you’re in everyone else’s environment. So, you’re right. Most people get sick too often.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And their innate system.

Ben: I’m just going to say, you’re making me nervous cause I rarely get sick.

Dr. H: Well, but I’m saying. But your number is really high.

Ben: My number…

Dr. H: You have CD57 – natural killer cells is really high. And we’ll see what your wife’s says today. So, and that’s to me, when we apply A.I. to our dataset, we’ll find, I think, that there’s a strong likelihood that we’ll find that CD57 counts will be associated with longevity.

Ben: Okay. Okay. And you also said Thymosin Alpha One peptide is a peptide that can increase that?

Dr. H: Well, Thymosin, yeah.  So, this is the thymus, the thymus communicator, thymus is governing our immune systems until we’re adolescents, 12, 13, 14 years of age and then disappears.

Ben: San Francisco babies.

Dr. H: San Francisco, we’re in a big city.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So that can move, that can move the number up. The way you train your thymus gland is when your mom breastfeeds you with colostrum.

Ben: Oh, I love colostrum.

Dr. H: But that’s real, the real colostrum.

Ben: And that’s why my levels are so high, because I do colostrum almost every day.

Dr. H: But, you know, I don’t believe that that’s the case.

Ben: Okay.

Dr H: That’s because the colostrum that we eat is we take it as a supplement may, may or may not, I don’t know, we have to see, but um, but that’s where it comes from. So Thymosin can act on it. But you say, well I want to know what my number is in about 90 to 95% of the cancer patients have very low CD57 counts, have very low natural killer cell counts, and the ones that get cured all have them raised up over time.

Ben: Okay

Dr. H: So, they clean up and then…

Ben: So that’s one reason people go and do like NK killer cell treatments in Mexico and things like…

Dr. H: Sort of, it seems like that’s logical. I don’t know. I don’t know that anyone’s proven that that makes a big difference, but that makes sense.

Ben: Yeah

Dr. H: But that’s where, what suppresses it, mold, oral infections, the deep oral infections, root canals…

Ben: Okay

Dr. H: …the deep sinus infections that are occult. And heavy metals, all of it, you know. And then you have the biome consistently being a source of, of inflammation.

Ben: Yeah. You mean like gastric inflammation…

Dr. H: Well gastric, yeah, the whole GI system is we have an explosion of SIBO, we have an explosion of dysbiosis. So dysbiosis that’s untreated. So, you say it’s okay, I only pass gas once or twice a day and I, I have my bowel movements every, you know, every two days. That’s completely unacceptable.

Ben:   Every two days is a long time.

Dr. H: Completely unacceptable.

Ben: I can’t hit the gym…

Dr. H: Even one, once a day, yeah.

Ben: …at all in the morning without having a giant dump, giant toilet filling dump.

Dr. H: The masters in the developing world that take care of themselves 100% naturally, and do it. You know, they’re pooping every time they eat, after every, after every meal. But I think twice a day is quite normal. But you know again sometimes we’re even suppressing our desire to go to the bathroom because we were too busy.

Ben: Yeah, I’m a two-a-day-er, 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. like clockwork, baby.

Dr. H: Well, that means your elimination pathway. Your major one that you’re using for toxins. I mean, urinary function is normal in almost so much of the population, but pooping is not, you know, and so you have to regulate that. And so, then you have to say, well, what’s my, what’s my detox area under the curve? What do I need to get out of my system? Well, you have to measure it. I can’t guess what it is. And looking at blood, blood tests for heavy metals and all the toxins is not appropriate because these are in the deep tissues. You have to provoke them out. So, a blood test that shows you, your low in heavy metals is worthless.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Now, if it’s positive, it’s already elevated. You don’t need to, you just need to know the provoked level to see where my baseline is, how long, then you can predict how long you’re going to need to be chelate it out.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: But the mold takes, and this change the subject back to mold again. It takes time and the mold is not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. You got to take the binders for which you were started on probably for 12 to 18 months to get it out.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. You know, there’s a couple of good books, one by Nasha Winters and one by Leigh Erin Connealy, both books about cancer screening. And much of what you’re saying I’ve seen some of these same tests in those books. So certainly, in the show notes at bengreenfieldlife.com/cancerpodcast, I’ll link to those titles if you, if you guys want to take a look at a comprehensive review of some of these labs in case you weren’t writing down notes like I am right now. But I guess you know it’s important beyond testing, I think to talk a little bit about what you particularly in your practice, would do. Let’s say you find a young person who you’ve found tested positive with one of these cancer screenings or at least shows a lot of signs or even, you know, shows a significant growth on a PET scan or an MRI or a colonoscopy.

You know, I mentioned slightly gest, but slightly not, you know, apricot kernels and ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies and drinking your own pee and, you know, going off to Mexico for the killer T cells or off to Paracelsus in Germany for the hypothermia. And, you know, so there’s just so many remedies out there that it seems like you can’t swing a cat by the tail without hitting one. And then with my dad, with what’s going on, everybody’s like coming out of the woodwork. Your dad needs to do this. Your dad needs to do that. I respect you and your opinions on these matters. You’re very well connected in the medical community. So, what’s your general approach as far as the things that really seem to move the dial for cancer treatments?

Dr. H: So, as you know, on the big picture side, the earlier better.

Ben: Early detection.

Dr. H: Even with nothing about what we’re talking about. When you get, when you get into the system earlier you know at stage one versus stage three and four it’s a big survival difference. So that teaches you. So, when you get super early with these liquid biopsies, then we have never had a person that’s been treated here in the 12 years and has had a liquid biopsy that showed circling tumor cells that has advanced…

Ben: Really? because of the treatments that you know?

Dr. H: Because, because of the, of the laboratory screens and then fixing what you’re, if you’re depleted in something a fundamental, then you have to replace them. And you have to understand that for some reason you need more magnesium than the person next door. Sometimes, you know, you have something going on with the vitamin D receptor, you need more vitamin D and you need to reduce your carb load.

Ben: Yeah, that makes sense. But some of the people talk where you got to like cut and burn and get it out of the system, the cancer.

Dr. H: Well, I’m saying, but here you know, you can’t even find the cancer because it’s very, very, very early. So, you have that five years in order to…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Yeah. So, no one’s ever progressed and the great majority of them go to, back to zero.

Ben: Wow.

Dr. H: Um, and, well, one lesson we learned about that was, we used to ask patients to do the test every month. It’s an expensive test.

Ben: Do which test?

Dr. H: To do this RGCC test every month.

Ben: The RGCC, yeah.

Dr. H: So, they would have, they start off with, let’s say the number was three and then to two, then to one, then to 0000003. What happened? Oh, my husband got ill. I went off my routine, tremendous stress.

Ben: Oh, when you said they went off their routine they specifically, were going off of their replenishment routine for whatever vitamin D or magnesium or anything else you got.

Dr. H: And then, and then you go back on the routine, back to zero. So, you have to be aware that, you know, cure, cure is, it may take another five years if it was left untreated in some way by you unadjusted, but it could come back.  So, but that’s one group and that’s the best possible group because it doesn’t change your life forever other than making you healthier than you’ve ever been. Now, if you’re stage one, that’s where we start saying all of this shouldn’t be done, or stage one or two, all this shouldn’t be done orally. I mean, you have to replace what you’ve depleted, and you have to detox, you have to get rid of your, you know, of the infections in the root canals, you have to get the mold out over time.

Ben: Yeah

Dr. H: It’s not an emergency…

Ben: All things you’d probably want to do even if you didn’t have cancer.

Dr. H: Well, that’s the point. If you want to live longer, it’s the same gig.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. H: But if you want to end up being stronger than you’ve ever been and be alive and know that you’re actually cured, you have to go to a, to intravenous chelation, you have to go to IVs to replace, replenish and get there faster because you don’t have an endless amount of time to wait.

Ben: Yeah, if you’ve found cancer in its later stages, you could use those more aggressive approaches.

Dr. H: Yeah, certainly, and even with stage three or four, but obviously with stage four you have a very limited time because, and it seems to be that the cancers are getting a bit more on the aggressive side so you have less time. And then we have our approach which takes in the German biological medicine approach that subsumes it into our…

Ben: Yeah. I’m kind of familiar with. I don’t know if I told you this, I took a whole group of people like three years ago, more than that on a medical tourism trip to the Swiss clinic and in Switzerland of all places. And it was up in the Alps. They did a lot of these German-European biological treatments. I spent 4 hours in a hypothermia chamber just to see what it is like, you know, lots of IVs, lots of chelation, lots of ozone. And so, these are the type of protocols that you have to go to Europe to do?

Dr H: No, no, you can do them here.

Ben: Really?

Dr. H: What we don’t have, we don’t, in our clinic, we don’t use a surrogate of hypothermia. When you look at the mechanism of action of hypothermia, it induces heat shock proteins and that runs a cascade that ultimately ends up to have more oxygen in cells and tumor cells don’t have antioxidants. So, we have, we use the laser frequencies to get the same, to get the same…

Ben: Oh, so it generates heat shock proteins with lasers.

Dr. H: With lasers, yeah. So we use that.

Ben: That’s convenient…

Dr. H: But otherwise, and we use obviously all the same IVs. All of our, most of our IVs are.

Ben: So you don’t have to go to Europe.

Dr. H: No. You don’t, you no, no, no more.  Uh, and the trouble with going to Europe is very simple, and that is you can’t stay there forever. You know, you want to be able to do it.

Ben: Ask my wife. She’d probably like to…

Dr. H: Close to home, but at the same time, your wife’s going to go there just to do their version of rejuvenation.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So that’s fine. But we can do chelation here of course, my organization that I’m president of called ACAM, we brought chelation to the United States 50 years ago.

Ben: With chelation, basically being a detoxification protocol?

Dr. H: Yes, Mm hmm.

Ben: Any particular strategy for that for the chelation?

Dr. H: Well, when you’re chelating orally, you can only do it for let’s say we started off with three days on chelating agents and then 11 days off…

Ben: And you’re consuming a chelating agent orally that’s binding toxins and then you’re removing them…

Dr. H: But I’m also binding your minerals…

Ben: …via urine and stool and sweat.

Dr H: That’s right. But they’re also binding your nutrients. You can’t run them all the time.

Ben: Okay, yeah

Dr. H: But intravenously, you do it once a week.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: In Germany, in the cancer protocol, even here, you probably end up doing it twice a week.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: Um, and, and, but we have a more immunological based system here trying to get your own immune system to work on your behalf 24/7 than the Germans do.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So, we’re more focused because of my background in that area.

Ben: Yeah, okay. Got it.

Dr. H: So, we’re more advanced in that particular area, I guess.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And hypothermia is, is also, uses the same type of mechanisms and there are, the world’s best hypothermia units are probably in Germany. But again, you have to stay there.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And this is not a single treatment. You can you go through 20 hypothermia…

Ben: And for people who don’t know, it’s way more than just the sauna. Like it’s this pod and there’s your head sticking out and you got a rectal probe in to gauge your temperature and you’re getting extremely hot and using a full body fever, basically. Right? Like, 105, 106 something like that.

Dr. H: Yeah, and then some of the centers take you so high, which is a reasonable thing if you can tolerate it under general anesthesia.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: So, but I do want to mention something, is another marker that I think is going to end up going on to the longevity list, which is a very bad marker to have when you have cancer, and that is ferritin.

Ben: Really?

Dr. H: So, ferritin is an iron store marker.

Ben: Yeah, iron storage protein.

Dr. H: But you know about oxidation, and you know about lipid peroxides. And you’ve heard that term before, but basically our oxidative stress state that we’re in produces rust from the iron. Now iron is everywhere. Hemoglobin cell repair mechanisms, all the phosphorylated enzymes that are working on all the systems that we know are anti-cancer uh, also could contain iron as part of their molecules but when you’re oxidizing it, it produces food for tumors. So, so the ferritin starts going up.

Ben: Is that why red meat can be a predisposing factor for cancer?

Dr. H: Well, I think that red meat is probably, has been shown in literature to be predisposing for cancer at the relative risk of, let’s say 1.2 to 1, 1.3 to 1. Smoking is higher, alcohol ingestion is higher.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: But red meat countries, yes…

Ben: But they don’t they break that out between processed crappy red meat.

Dr. H: No, no.

Ben: There is a McDonald’s versus like a, I’ve wondered that before because…

Dr. H: You’re right.

Ben: …I think, I still limit my red meat consumption. I probably have it one or two times a week. And I’m careful with pork chops now based on your advice, but I’ve been doing a lot more fish and poultry to a limited extent just since my father’s cancer battle.

Dr. H: Right. But in nowhere in the literature, this suggests that eating less than a pound of meat a week has ever been increased, you know, in terms of cancer risk.

Ben: Okay, less than a pound.

Dr. H: I mean, that’s eating, you know, meat from our wholesalers, you know, that’s eating the meat. You get it at Safeway and Costco.

Ben: Right, right. So, your average processed grain fed, high omega six meats. Yeah.

Dr. H: That’s right. So that has its own toxicity. So, I don’t preclude my patients to eat meat at the same time the ferritin number unless it’s normal you’re not going to be cured. You’re not going to get cured. Something is still quite off.

Ben: Okay.

Dr. H: You need more antioxidants, you need more, a better metabolic system overall.

Ben: Are you familiar at all with the root cause protocol by Morley Robbins, which basically is a copper and mineral based protocol, and part of it is designed to limit the amount of oxidation that takes place in iron and ferritin accumulation? It’s called the root cause, RCP – root cause protocol. You can find it free online.

Dr. H: Yes. Well, I think those, those are really good ideas, um, to incorporate both for longevity and for cancer prevention, but it also has to go on to, I think the thing you’ve been talking about more recently and that’s um, the talk about, um, being emotionally stressed.

Ben: Yeah, combined with lack of connectivity.

Dr. H: Particularly when… right. So, all of those things that we also know have some connectivity with longevity, but at the same time, today, do you want to talk about what you’re doing today in terms of the…

Ben: Absolutely, sure. We can talk about anything?

Dr. H: Yeah, so we’re in fight or flight. So, you’re measuring it on and your people you’re coaching…

Ben: Heart rate variability.

Dr. H: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, and most of us are, most successful people are running, uh, in a sympathetic state and that’s what makes, that’s part of why you’re successful. But to modulate your parasympathetics up, uh, and to be the equivalent of what some of the masters feel are 1000 hours of meditation in the 90 seconds.

Ben: And I want to, I want to come to my defense real quick in a lot of people think I’m driven, hard charging, high achieving, sympathetic. My HRV is extremely, you know, high.

Dr. H: High, sorry.

Ben: Yeah, it is. I am not very stressed despite being a driven guy. Um, most of my stress factors from brainwave production to HRV to heart rate to body temperature, I tend to have very high readiness scores, but I also do a lot. I do like vagal nerve stimulators and meditation and yoga and cold plunges and every single day paying a lot of attention to nervous system balance.

Dr. H: And I believe you. I mean, I know you well enough to know that that’s what you’re saying is true. You could also sense it in somebody, um, when they’re just out of sorts.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: But the stellate ganglion block that you’re going to get today will modulate it even further and we’ll see what the subtle effects are. So, we know one of the reasons at minimum that you’re going to benefit from it is we know that people, particularly the Navy SEALs, have been studied the most, they get stronger.  Their recovery times decrease.

Ben: After doing a stellate ganglion nerve block.

Dr. H: Yeah, so they, and you know they’re massively disciplined people as you are and they’re exercise, they’re doing a lot every day and pushing themselves to the limits every day and they have documented the metabolic effects and the efficiency effects of musculoskeletal, on the musculoskeletal side and VO2 max goes up and so on. So, you get all of those benefits. And some of the world class athletes that Dr. Tierney talks about a lot, they, they know to come in for their next stellate block when they’ve been, they’ve been leading the world in their fields for a long time. And then as someone comes closer to them, then they know it’s time to get their next stellate block and they get pushed further. So, then they’re back to being 100 meters ahead.

Ben: Just like, block doping. Yeah. And that that’s just an injection that triggers the vagus nerve to, to rebalance.

Dr. H: Right. But it’s, it’s unsafe when it’s done in the wrong hands.

Ben: Yeah, I do have to say that I actually have found a great deal of success with what would be considered the baby version of that, which are just these vagal nerve stimulators.

Dr. H: Yes, absolutely.

Ben: That one called a Pulsetto that I use, there’s another good one called the Truvaga. But yeah, those are, those are fantastic at home devices for some of this nervous system modulation via the vagus nerve.

Dr. H: Right. So just for your audience to understand that, I’ve chosen a stack of testing that does biomic tests, lymphocyte reactivity assays to 180 or 100 foods to see what you’re reacting to, heavy metals, immunological studies, they’re expensive and, and I think everyone is shocked and surprised by saying when insurance doesn’t come in, it may cost 5, 6, 7,000 dollars just for the studies.

Ben: Wow.

Dr H: To finish, to do a job. And of course, the older you are um, I’m concerned just a little bit more, but I don’t leave anything unturned.

Ben: Right.

Dr. H: So for you, the first time we saw you, we didn’t run every test down.

Ben: Right?

Dr. H: You know, but that’s quite expensive, and we don’t that, that’s what it costs…

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: …to do the right thing. And then surely over time, what we’ll do is we’ll identify a landscape for you and say this is the hierarchy of the things you should worry about, these are things you should measure two or three times a year. And this is what you’re depleted and that’s what you need to, you know, for now. And then you’d probably repeat some of those tests, fraction of those tests, once or twice a year after that. And that’s an investment that you do again once when you’re younger, a big investment and you do it, you did it again five years later.

Ben: Yeah.

Dr. H: And so on.

Ben: Yeah. Well, what I like about this is it’s a lot of, of pretty simple tests from the get go that you’re recommending some basic protocols like your gut biome, mold, parasites, viruses, you know, C-reactive protein, hemoglobin, A1C urine pH, vitamin D, glucose. You know, I’ve got some very helpful notes here. And then, you know, like we were talking about earlier, it’s kind of a multimodal approach, especially if you’re concerned about being young, your risk of cancer in a lot of these preventive strategies.

I do recommend, for anybody listening that book I just finished that I mentioned, the Anti-Cancer Living, which is also the book that talks quite a bit about connectivity. That’s fantastic. Like I mentioned, Nasha Winters is another resource that delved into quite heavily. She’s good.  For you, oh, of course, linked to your website in the show notes at bengreenfieldlife.com/cancerpodcast, but generally someone could just go to Anatara Medicine. Do you have like a new patient form or something like that if people are interested?

Dr. H: Yes. And um, and ask for the, that you’re interested in the cancer prevention type of stack of things…

Ben: The cancer prevention stack, the CPS. All right, cool. Ahvie, as usual, you’re a wealth of knowledge. I always learn a ton when we sit down and make the mics hot. So, thanks once again for coming to the rescue for everybody who’s been asking me all these questions about cancer screening and cancer treatment.

Dr. H: You’re welcome. You’re welcome, Ben.

Ben: I appreciate you, man. All right, folks, I’m Ben Greenfield, along with Ahvie Herskowitz from Anatara Medicine, signing out from bengreenfieldlife.com/cancerpodcast. Have an amazing week.