Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Cancer's Shifting Paradigm with Dr Robert Hoffman
We explore groundbreaking cancer treatments with Dr. Robert Hoffman, who joins us from Japan after meeting Dr. Toshihiko Sato, the only doctor performing whole-body MedPET imaging to determine methioninase responsiveness in cancer patients.
• Dr. Hoffman explains why most doctors don't recognize methionine's crucial role in cancer, citing Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the resistance to paradigm shifts
• The host shares his treatment approval journey with UCI, including unexpected insurance coding issues after initial approval
• Dr. Castro identified the host's zinc deficiency, which affects immune system recognition of tumors
• Personal stories about delayed cancer diagnoses highlight the importance of investigating persistent symptoms
• Both emphasize that patients must become experts in their own conditions rather than passively following medical advice
• The methionine addiction paradigm represents a fundamental shift from the glucose-focused Warburg effect in cancer treatment
If you want the best outcome with cancer, you've got to be dedicated to learning everything you can. Your life depends on it.
Intro for podcast
https://www.wcsblog.com/podcast-episodes
I'm in it. Okay, Hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. Today we have Dr Robert Hoffman with us again, and this time, today, he is in Japan. And why don't you give us a quick rundown of what's going on in Japan?
Speaker 2:Okay, joe. Well, the most important. I met with Dr Toshihiko Sato last evening and he has the only med pet clinic in the world that does whole body med pet imaging Wow. And he uses the MedPet to determine which patients will be most responsive to methioninase.
Speaker 2:And he's so innovative and great and he expressed an interest to be on our Zoom call, so I'm hoping we'll get him on at least sometimes. Of course he's very busy. He just published a great book on methionine addiction and restriction of cancer, so it's going around the whole Japan. So it was a great meeting. So that's the main point so far.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is fantastic. You know it's so wild point so far. Wow, that is fantastic. You know it's so wild as I, as I go on through this cadre of doctors, I'm talking to you, know more doctors than I've ever talked to since I was a kid. You know my dad was a surgeon, so I knew a lot of doctors. But and every time I mentioned methionine and methionine, you just watch their eyes kind of glaze over. Nobody recognizes what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Joe, everybody's got to read Thomas Kuhn's book.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:The Structure of Scientific Revolution and what it Takes to have a Paradigm Shift. Absolutely so. These guys are all stuck in the old paradigm.
Speaker 1:Yes, agreed. Well, I'm carrying the news.
Speaker 2:The Warburg effect. Everything is about glucose Right, and it really isn't. It's all about methionine. So this paradigm shift takes a long time. It's kind of started in 1959. It's only 65 years ago. But Kuhn's book explains all what must happen in the paradigm shift. Kuhn would say so would Max Planck, one of the greatest scientists ever. That science advances one funeral at a time. So these paradigm leaders basically have to die before the new paradigm can be shifted. So these guys who just glaze over when they hear methionine are just stuck in the old paradigm. And when you read Kuhn's book which is really a classic Kuhn K-U-H-N. Thomas it's one of the greatest science books ever read and it's meant for the general audience can understand what's going on by reading that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I've ordered it. I haven't gotten it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:You will, you've got plenty of time to do it. Probably get a $3 copy on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and you know what? I'm carrying this message. I've seen the literature, I'm living it, I'm listening to all these people that have experienced it and I'm bringing it everywhere I go and I know that more people will know because of my experience. So this has been a really big week. Since we last spoke, on Tuesday, I received a call from UCI and they had approved my treatment.
Speaker 2:And insurance is approved approved yeah, they approved it.
Speaker 1:So, uh, tuesday about noon they called me up and says we need to get you in for some blood work and an EKG prior to the port install. And I said all right, and I literally me and my wife we left within an hour went down there, I, I took care of that and and then I had a yesterday. So yesterday was Wednesday. I had a consult with the medical oncologist and she reviewed basically all the protocols. What to expect. What to expect? I'm all excited, everything's good.
Speaker 1:This morning I had a tele-interview with a integrative oncologist from UCI. I went through my whole experience. What brought me from there to here? It turns out she knows Emil and Dr Exame and she also knows Dr Castro and she seemed to be very, very in line with what I was saying. She said she wasn't sure about the whole methionine thing.
Speaker 1:But I said you know, and I told her about fasting and all of that, and she she supported what I'm doing, so she wasn't opposed to it. She said she didn't know. I said you know, look this literature up. I said go to PubMed and look it up. There's lots of science that backs it up. So maybe I've got one person to consider it, she seemed to at least be open. And then today I went to go see Dr Castro and he was a little disheartened because I haven't moved forward yet and I explained to him how hard I've been working and all of the things I've done and the obstacles that have been in the way. But we're powering through and you know he just wants to see this thing happen. And you know he just wants to see this thing happen. And he told me that with the lab work he did that I showed that I was zinc deficient and he said that I'm sorry, say again, I didn't catch that last.
Speaker 1:He said that I was zinc deficient. The mineral zinc, did you catch? It Zinc, are you hearing me?
Speaker 2:I hear you, but I don't catch. What did Dr Castro?
Speaker 1:say. He said I was deficient in zinc, the mineral zinc.
Speaker 2:Ah, you're deficient in zinc, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:And he said that the zinc affects one of the switches that cause the immune system to recognize the tumor immune system to recognize the tumor and he said he ordered a supplement that's going to help to fix that. He also said there was some kind of issue with methylation and that my genetic expression was doing something that was in the way, and he said that there was some kind of a folate supplement that I needed to get as well. He's going to do more work on that, but meanwhile he liked the idea of what we were going and he was excited. Well, on the way home from this trip I'm expected I'm supposed to schedule, get my port tomorrow and start chemo on Monday I was excited. I was just like here we go, we're ready to go. I had everything cleared, consent, everything done, and then on the way home I get a call from UCI. They said somehow the insurance sent the wrong code or somehow it didn't get, it's not cleared right now and so they've submitted an urgent request to get it changed. But right now everything's back on hold.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, though, have you told the medical oncologist this.
Speaker 1:She just, I mean, I just literally just got home from this trip, so Okay, so you call her and tell her to straighten it out. Oh, I am Absolutely. That's my next move.
Speaker 2:She'll straighten it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So anyways, it was like everything was going great, I'm all excited, everything's great. Then wham.
Speaker 2:Just a little bump in the road, joe. Yeah, yeah, we'll get there.
Speaker 1:We'll get there. So so, um, you know, I I feel like I'm right there. I've I've been fasting hard and I'm gonna. Well, I was planning on breaking fast today and then I was going to go the next two days prior to the, to the chemo treatment. So now we'll see what happens, but I'm going to just stay in my fast not not too many days fasting.
Speaker 2:You don't want all that muscle protein breaking down and just flooding you with methionine.
Speaker 1:No, no, I'm not. I'm cycling in and out, I'm not letting it go too long, okay, okay. I'm on this really well. As soon as I taste the ketosis, I take a little green juice and I switch myself back, eat a little something and then I let it go back again. So I feel like I'm strong and I'm doing that. Hominix as well as a supplement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the hominix is wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really like it. I feel like it's helping carry me from one meal to the next, and I know I got no methionine in me while I'm doing it, and I've actually doubled up the methionine A's and I've got a new batch that should be here tomorrow, so I've got just enough to get me through till tomorrow. Okay, I think, did you get the new methionine A's package? It should be here tomorrow. Okay, great, yeah, so everything looks like we're on track. It's just getting-.
Speaker 2:You're on track, little speed bump with the insurance. Tell your medical oncologist, please, to straighten this damn thing out immediately.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, it's in her interest too to get started. Oh, absolutely yeah absolutely, it's okay. So, anyways, we Small little glitch. I think we'll run a short show today, because you're on the road, I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's probably 2 o'clock in the morning over there. No, it's 10 in the morning. It's already tomorrow. I'm okay. It's a little hard to hear because of the road noise. But I think we're going to stop in a couple minutes, okay, but anyway, we're hanging in there, all right. Well, if you have more things to want to talk about, I'm okay.
Speaker 1:I just wanted to go over this one thing. I look at my situation and there's two things that really brought me to this difficult spot. One was waiting too long when I noticed that I had this lump on my neck. I always believed my body would just heal itself and you know I'm not a guy that's gonna, you know, be a hypochondriac or get a little bump and go run to the doctor. But in this case I should have and had I caught this a year ago it's okay, it's okay, you're still in time.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, oh yeah, but I'm just saying that, the advice to somebody who who might notice something out of sorts, you know not, not like.
Speaker 2:I slipped and twisted my, let me give you was a teenager, maybe about 65 years ago. My mother had a brother, very, very brilliant guy, great athlete, and he kept coughing, and he kept coughing and he would go to the lived in Boston. He went to the Massachusetts General Hospital and the doctor shined him off and he died of throat cancer.
Speaker 2:So, you know I agree with you. It's not cool to be a hypochondriac. But when you feel your body somehow out of sorts you need to check it and feeling it might be cancer, then you've got to get the doctor to rule it out. You know, my uncle died needlessly because the doctors kept shining him off, and they shouldn't have. They should have had him rule it out. Rule it out. Of course that was a way long time ago. Imaging is not like it, nearly like it is now, and stuff like that. But it's a good thing for people to know You're not a hypochondriac. If you feel you're out of sorts, find out what it is and if the doctor doesn't give you satisfaction, go to another one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the second part to this. You guys signed off.
Speaker 2:The doc said you don't have cancer, very reminiscent of my mother's brother. But you kept hanging in there and got the right diagnosis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that there was just. You know, I started listening to my body and that was once I did that, I think everything changed and I realized, you know, that in all of these doctors that I've spoken with, they all have some good information and some poor information. And I realized that I have had to become the expert in my cancer and I know that as of this moment.
Speaker 2:And, joe, that goes for every patient. Every patient has their own responsibility to become their own expert. No doctor knows everything, Far from it.
Speaker 1:Agreed. That's really what I wanted to get to, because I put more effort in the last six months into solving this problem than anything else I've done in my life and I feel like the learning curve has been dramatic. I feel like I have a grasp on where I'm at and why I'm here and where I'm going and how I'm going to get there. I still don't know all the little details of switches and names of everything, but the idea of how it works and what's happening. I feel that now, when a doctor tells me something that doesn't seem right, I have a body of knowledge that I can put it up against and weigh it against, and I also have this group that I can bring it to and bounce it around and see what everybody else thinks, and I think that that's critical. I think if somebody is I think a lot of people they go in, they get a diagnosis and it freaks them out. They just do whatever the doctor says and they don't bother to try to understand it themselves. And I think I mean that's the old.
Speaker 2:Again, we're talking about the old paradigm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The doctor is God, and that's a wrong paradigm. Nobody's God, and you know. So that's the old paradigm. The new paradigm is cancer patient is responsible for him or herself, and if you want the best outcome, you got to just be so dedicated to learn everything you can.
Speaker 1:That's exactly my advice If you find yourself diagnosed with cancer or any major disease that needs to become. Your life is figuring it out. Learning what you need Well, your life is figuring it out. Learning what you need Well, your life depends on it. It does 100%, 100% Well, robert, I am just so pleased that I stumbled into your world and that we're working together like this.
Speaker 2:I believe this is we sure are, and I'm so glad we stumbled together. In each other's world, we have a lot that contribute to each other and we're making unbelievably good progress.
Speaker 1:I agree, all right. Well, I look forward to seeing you again on Sunday. So that call.
Speaker 2:and I'll be on here on Sunday, it'll be Monday for me, and I'll be going home that same day, so anyway. So we're good, joe, and I'm really pleased that dr castro found that zinc deficiency.
Speaker 1:Gets you up on that, that's great yeah, yeah, and he's ordered the genetic work. So that's, that's all in progress now okay we'll be talking about that too, absolutely all right. Well, thank you so much, and we'll see you next time. All right, okay, we'll see you next time.
