Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs

Beyond Natural vs. Synthetic: Rethinking Our Approach to Healing

Joe Grumbine

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The health world is filled with dogma that can actually harm us. Drawing from my personal journey with aggressive squamous cell carcinoma, I challenge the common belief that natural remedies are inherently good while pharmaceutical interventions are universally harmful. This false dichotomy has dominated health conversations for too long.

After two decades of relying exclusively on natural medicine, my cancer battle has taught me a profound lesson: every therapy—regardless of its origin—carries potential benefits and risks. The water that sustains life can harm you during improper fasting. Supplements that heal some can damage organs in others. Even cannabis oil, which I've dedicated years to developing and distributing, isn't the universal miracle cure many claim it to be.

Becoming your own health advocate represents your strongest defense against both disease and misinformation. This means establishing a baseline understanding of your health, critically evaluating information sources, and recognizing that plant medicine is medicine—it affects your body's chemistry just as pharmaceutical compounds do. Our understanding of conditions like cancer continues to evolve, with established paradigms regularly shifting as new discoveries emerge.

The most valuable insights often come from connecting with others on similar healing journeys—those pioneering individuals who've extended their lives beyond terminal diagnoses through personalized, evolving approaches. My own treatment regimen has changed numerous times, adaptations I believe have been crucial to my survival.

Whether you're facing a serious diagnosis or simply want to optimize your health, take initiative to learn and adapt your approach. Don't wait passively for miracles or blindly follow conventional wisdom. Your life—or the life of someone you love—could depend on what you discover. Subscribe to access more detailed content about my personal cancer journey, or share this podcast with someone who might benefit from this perspective.

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Speaker 1:

Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we're going to talk about therapies and choosing therapies and misconceptions about therapies. As you may know, I am currently working on healing myself from a squamous cell carcinoma very aggressive cancer and there's been a lot of additions to the subscriber what do you call it? The subscriber episodes. I've been doing a lot of those lately and we've had a lot of new subscribers and I'm really grateful for that because it's allowing me to be able to create more content and share this intimate story in that side of the platform story in that side of the platform and I today want to recognize Paul for subscribing and really grateful for your support. But this podcast is about healthy living and not just about my journey, and I want to make sure that we stay true to that, and so there's a lot of topics that translate into more general knowledge and understanding of truth, and that's where I'm going to be sharing more and more of these topics. We have a lot of new guests that are scheduled. We have a lot of new guests that are scheduled, and in the next weeks we'll be having a pretty diverse group of new guests coming aboard sharing a lot of good information and new perspectives. So I'm looking forward to sharing a lot of that with you.

Speaker 1:

But today I want to talk about therapies, and we think a lot of things about a lot of things, and I know I specifically have and did and still do. We have the idea that, you know, pharmaceutical drugs are all bad and that pharmaceutical companies are evil and there's this giant conspiracy to do certain things and that you know, chemotherapy is bad and radiation is bad and supplements are good and everything natural is good and everything synthetic is bad, and I think I want to bring this to mind because I come from that place. Remember, I had a lifetime of lung disease and I was treated with Western medicine and I hated it. I hated the way it made me feel. I came upon a book and began studying natural medicine and that took me here and, if you're interested, there are many episodes that I delve deeper into that and, as I'm going through, I may reference that we've already talked about these things, because I don't want this to be a very repetitive podcast, as so many of them are. I'm trying to look at things through different lenses, different lights, so that people can understand in the way that reaches your learning, love, language or whatever you call it. And so that's what I'm trying to do here, and I came from this place where I started growing herbs and making products with them and using them, and the truth is, it's been my entire um medicine chest for more than 20 years.

Speaker 1:

I haven't taken any pharmaceutical drugs in over 20 years, and now that I'm dealing with this cancer, I've learned that there are some things that I just haven't found the natural solution for, and there are also some things that the natural solutions have caused problems, and I think this is important for us to realize. And if there's a lesson to be learned, it's that everything cuts both ways good and bad, or at least it has the potential to. And I've talked about this with fasting already, and I'm not going to go too deep into that because I've already delved pretty deep into that aspect of fasting from water to even oxygen, you know this thing that we need so much, but you can get too much of it if you do it in the wrong way, and it can have a negative side effect. Food supplements they can be miraculous healers, but they can also cause problems if not done correctly, and the same thing with pharmaceutical drugs. There's times where a particular drug might be the one thing that would help you if done correctly. And if done incorrectly, it can have all kinds of negative side effects.

Speaker 1:

And I am working on a very stacked regimen right now, because I've done a tremendous amount of research and I've gathered a tremendous team of experts around me, and then I think that that's where I want to start is you are the one who's going to find the answers. There's no guru going to solve your problem for you. There's nobody selling a miracle supplement that's going to have your answer. I mean, there's that unlikely chance that you're that one person that the miracle thing works for, and in some cases, like cannabis oil, there's a lot of people that have found tremendous value to it. The Rick Simpson oil I dedicated a good chunk of my life to learning it, developing it, making it, distributing it, and I continue to and I continue to.

Speaker 1:

But now, instead of it being the miracle cure that helps everybody with everything, I'm a lot more realistic and cautious about who I give it to and what instruction I give it to with, and the premise that it's the safest compound known to man is flawed. It's not actually true, and when we want to believe things, we tend to believe them, and when we look for answers that are reflective of our beliefs, we find them, but when we see contraindications and we see things that disprove us, we tend to poo-poo them and dispute their viability and sources. So I think it's important that we're objective truly, and it's hard to be objective even internally, because our opinions and feelings tend to get in the way of everything. So the first thing is evaluating, you know, evaluating where your information comes from, and, frankly, if somebody is trying to sell you something a book, an idea, a product I would be suspect I'm not saying that they're not telling you the truth.

Speaker 1:

Plenty of people, myself included, offer services and products because we make things that we believe in, and that first thing I tell people, though, is that you need to try it on yourself, and you need to pay attention to yourself and see what works, and dose yourself accordingly, and titrate and learn. I think the most important thing that we can do is establish a baseline of who we are and where we are in our healing journey. You know, start journaling and decide. You know, determine your pillars of health how much sleep are you getting? What's your stress levels? What's the source of your injury or disease? What are the contributing factors? What things make it better or worse? What's your diet like? What's your exercise? I mean all the basic pillars. Let's start looking at those things first before we start throwing supplements at them or medicines regardless.

Speaker 1:

I think I I now carry all compounds on an equal footing. Not that they're all going to end up there, but they begin there, and if we start evaluating a compound, whether it's a pharma drug, an over-the-counter drug or a supplement, it shouldn't really matter. And so the first thing that you know we want to look at is you know what is this thing, what's it do and where's it coming from. You know there's some benefits and detriments of products that are regulated by the FDA, and a benefit would be that, well, they are at least regulated and somebody is looking at it. The detriment is, you know, statistics and data are heavily skewed and things that are dangerous are still determined as safe by FDA, and I don't trust their standards. I think trials sometimes are manipulated, a lot of money can make a lot of things happen and there's a lot of motivation to sell these drugs.

Speaker 1:

So I'm very skeptical of the information that comes through. But published studies, I believe, carry some weight, and looking at PubMed for information, I think is a great source and it gives you information in a way that you can't get in other ways. With supplements, you know, as if you have a good source and you have a trusted source, then that's what you should do. But realize there's a lot of problems with supplements and mislabeling and misrepresentation and contaminants, and you know people selling you stuff that's not what it says and that's really important. And testing isn't necessarily the answer, because testing results are faked all the time and the people that are trying to scam you they will have ways to scam you, you know, and so really getting to know your sources is important. I think if you're going to get information from somebody, it needs to be firsthand, if possible. That's why this podcast is important, because people are sharing their own stories. I'm sharing my experience with you, which is all that it is, and you can take it or leave it, but at least you know it's coming from me when I tell you oh, I know a guy and he told me this that information just diminished its value by a lot. So this is something to be mindful of.

Speaker 1:

People don't realize that supplements can have tremendous adverse effects. Vitamin A can cause toxicity at high levels. Iron can cause organ damage at high levels. Doses of one vitamin or supplement can inhibit the absorption or effectiveness of others. The same thing with prescriptions. We have this gigantic problem with prescriptions where you take one and then you have to take another, and another, and another and before you know it you have this giant cocktail and it's important to study a drug before you take it. I'm going to get into this with my current chemotherapy regimen and the research I've done and I'm doing to mitigate the negative side effects and maximize the effectiveness, but that'll be in a subscriber episode and the things that you know, like blood thinners.

Speaker 1:

This is important things. I know personally people who have suffered organ damage from taking supplements and it's just they didn't do their research and they took the wrong supplements or too many of them. This is all things that people need to realize. Plant medicine is medicine. Chemical medicine is medicine. It all affects your very complex chemistry in your body in ways that we know and ways that we don't know. And even as informed as you can be, you have to realize this paradigm is shifting and the understanding of what causes things, especially things like cancer. They don't know shit about cancer and even though they're learning lots of new information, every time, a new bit of paradigm starts to shift, like, for example, you know, for the longest time the understanding of how cancer metabolizes glucose has been the dominating paradigm. And you know people and it's not that it doesn't but the cancer cells addiction to methionine, the amino acid, is so underlooked and understudied and yet there are hundreds of scientific papers that prove this. It's just not in the paradigm.

Speaker 1:

I go through and talk to every doctor that I see and I tell them about this and their eyes glaze. They just don't recognize it. And I think to myself, wow, they just don't recognize it. And I think to myself, wow, you know. And these are the experts in the field that are guiding me to my treatment. And I realized that, you know, finding resources of information are powerful. So this cancer group that I keep talking about, these are people and doctors and professionals that are going through this themselves and sharing their information and cutting edge. You know, these are pioneers, people experimenting on their own bodies, just as I am, to solve their problems, and they're solving them. These are people that were diagnosed terminal years ago and are still here, diagnosed terminal years ago and are still here. And you know you're going to see the books and the stories of. I just did this one thing I ate this one fruit and my tumor went away. And, yes, these are possible.

Speaker 1:

Miracles happen and I believe in miracles and my faith will create a place for a miracle every day, in every way. But they don't always happen and they don't always happen the way you want. I think more people have died from waiting for miracles or just blindly doing what they're told than have ever been cured by doing those things, and it's important. If you become your own advocate, you will do a better job than if you just put yourself in somebody else's hands. So I don't want to get too deep into this and I'm trying to keep these episodes short enough to digest, but take the time and study and learn, and the more you learn about your own disease or injury or health as it is, the better you're going to be able to complement it.

Speaker 1:

And it's a constant journey.

Speaker 1:

My journey has shifted course so many times, but I sincerely believe that I would not be here talking to you right now if it wasn't for the regimen that I currently have, and it has changed and it will continue to change as need be, and I spend every waking minute to my own financial detriment.

Speaker 1:

I don't know how I'm going to even pay for any of the stuff I'm trying to do right now, but I have to put all that energy in because I'm confident I would not be here talking to you right now if I hadn't done everything I'm doing, and that's why we're sharing this with everybody, because if I'm here, I know that there are hopefully hundreds or thousands of people that can take the initiative to start to learn and act to heal yourself, and so I really appreciate everybody who's supporting this podcast. I hope you find it interesting, informative, inspiring, and please, if you are interested in going deep, consider subscribing and accessing the locked episodes and, if not, at least let somebody else know about this. You never know, the life you save could be somebody you know and love, and just a little information might get them on that course. So thank you very much and I will talk to you next time.

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