Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
When Patients Become the Teachers with Dr Robert Hoffman
What happens when a cancer patient decides to challenge the medical establishment and forge their own path to healing? In this deeply personal conversation, Joe Grumbine and Dr. Robert Hoffman explore this question through Joe's ongoing cancer treatment journey.
After completing his third round of chemotherapy, Joe shares how this round "walloped" him more than previous treatments, likely due to increased dosage. Despite the challenges, he discusses the importance of occasional mental breaks from rigid cancer-fighting protocols. During a recent trip to the Sierras, Joe allowed himself small departures from his strict methionine-restricted diet—a couple bites of trout and a hamburger—while doubling his methioninase enzyme intake. This brief "vacation" from discipline provided the psychological reset he needed to continue his cancer battle with renewed determination.
The conversation pivots to a critical examination of standard cancer treatment approaches. Dr. Hoffman and Joe discuss how the conventional sequence of surgery-radiation-chemotherapy often fails to address cancer's fundamental nature: "By the time you can see it, it's already spreading." Joe's decision to refuse disfiguring surgery for his head and neck cancer in favor of neoadjuvant chemotherapy combined with methionine restriction demonstrates an alternative paradigm that preserved his quality of life while effectively fighting the disease.
We journey behind the scenes of methioninase production, as Dr. Hoffman explains the fascinating process of fermenting genetically engineered bacteria and purifying the brilliant yellow enzyme that helps starve cancer cells. Despite operating as a small nonprofit with significant financial constraints, their team manages to produce enough methioninase to serve approximately 100 patients monthly.
This episode stands as powerful testimony to patient-driven healthcare innovation. Through courage, research, and determination, individuals like Joe are challenging medical orthodoxy and discovering effective treatment combinations that conventional oncology hasn't yet embraced. Their experiences offer hope to cancer patients seeking alternatives beyond standard care protocols while highlighting the crucial role of metabolic approaches in comprehensive cancer treatment.
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we have back in the studio with us Dr Robert Hoffman. Robert, welcome back. Thank you, joe, always glad to be here. Oh, it's a treat. So I discovered over this last week that actually yesterday, I discovered that we share the same birthday Unbelievable, and it's kind of a whole country down for you and me. I know I'm telling you over freedom, right, yeah, I like that. When they, when they made that a national holiday a few years back, I thought, well, that's pretty appropriate. I've been a champion for freedom all my life.
Speaker 1:So, yeah me too, excellent, excellent. So I thought, well, that's pretty appropriate. I've been a champion for freedom all my life. So yeah, me too, excellent, excellent. So I discovered yesterday that you turned 84 years old and man 81, joe 81.
Speaker 2:Well, even still, I'm just a kid.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, I wouldn't have pegged you a day past 60. I just am blown away by your youth and vitality and hell, you've even got hair. You see the front part.
Speaker 2:You don't see this part.
Speaker 1:I know I got you, but well, where I'm coming from, you got a lot of hair.
Speaker 2:Okay, who needs hair?
Speaker 1:What good does it do you? It just gives you. You know what I discovered? I don't know if you were a cat. I discovered it makes your shower take a lot longer. It really does. You know, I found, by I get in the shower and out of the shower I'm like, wow, I'm all done. And my wife's like are you clean? I'm like I didn't have to wash my hair. Yeah, what a waste of time. I tell you, a bar of soap goes a long way. So I'll give a little update from last time.
Speaker 1:So last time I had recently taken my third round of chemo and I was in the middle of the five-day pump and I had people tell me that it gets a little more difficult as you go through it and I had ridden through the first two rounds pretty quickly and easily without much side effects and this one really kind of walloped me and I talked to a lady that I know that has dealt with cancer herself and and works with she works in a surgical ward and she says, well, they generally will increase the dose as they're going through. So that third round is like your, that's your big dose, and I don't know if it's an accumulation or if if it was a larger dose, but I realized that it just really took the wind out of my sails. How do you feel now? How do you feel today? I'm feeling much better today. I'm still. I still get winded easier than normal and, of course, being up in the Sierras, you know it's up at 8,000 feet.
Speaker 2:So that's a lot of feet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I know that generally you get a little winded up there anyways, but normally I'm up there hiking and doing a lot, and I didn't do a whole lot of hiking. I did a lot of fishing, caught some fish and I got to tell you, robert, I actually had two little bites of trout. I had to have two bites because it was— Absolutely. You had to have a sample because it was absolutely and you had to have a sample. Yeah, and you know what? I've been such a diehard on this diet and the methioninease. I told myself on this little vacation I was gone for what? Five days. I said I'm going to bring up a double dose. So I was taking four doses a day. Terrific, I'm going to live a little. I'm going to eat a couple of things I wouldn't normally eat. Terrific, I'm gonna live a little. I'm gonna eat a couple of things I wouldn't normally eat. And I had a hamburger and I hadn't had a hamburger in almost six months. I hadn't had anything.
Speaker 2:you know, hey, listen the double dose will do it yeah, yeah and I, I didn't.
Speaker 1:And then actually one day, one of the days, I I stayed rigid, so I, I didn't, I didn't, let myself get out of control okay, now you're back into your routine.
Speaker 1:I'm right back into my routine and, and you know, fruit and vegetables and a little bit of beans, and that's it, and my double dose a day and we're we're right back on track. I, I, I and and this is a thing that I wanted to kind of share with you um, all the people, in fact, today I interviewed, I interviewed Cynthia, cynthia, chin Lee, chin Lee, yeah, yeah, she's awesome and she shares a somewhat similar story to myself and Shahiro and some of the other people that have overcome their cancer with this diet and other therapies Is that the work is work. You know, it's a. It's a. It's a lot of effort to do what it takes to beat this cancer, and that's right.
Speaker 1:Every once in a while, I think it's good to give yourself a rest, even if it's just a short one, to just because you know you think about it like your body is is doing the work right. It's, it's fighting the cancer. Your mind is disciplining yourself to do the things that are hard. Your spirit kind of pays the price for it all and over time, you get weary, you know. You just get a little tired and I think that, like right now, I feel restored. I could go back and fast all day long, no problem, I don't feel like the diet's hard. I don't feel anything's hard right now, and I think sometimes it's just important to just give yourself a break not a long one, once in a while.
Speaker 2:It should not be a routine. Five days on, two days off. That's not for methioninase.
Speaker 1:No, no, no no.
Speaker 2:It may be okay for ivermectin, but it's not.
Speaker 1:I don't do any of that.
Speaker 2:I don't take eating a couple of tunas and a burger and and and washing it down with a couple doses of methaninase on occasion, on occasion. I don't think that's going to be harmful.
Speaker 1:It was once in four months for me and I don't feel like it. It I feel like I didn't lose any of the impact.
Speaker 2:No, I don't think so either.
Speaker 1:It gave me back, you know, just like a sense of my own freedom. You know I can do what I want for a minute and it felt really good. So I just think that you know people need to realize when they're, if they make the decision to live, then you have to make some choices that are not necessarily pleasant, and maybe there are choices that you've got to stay focused on and do some things that you just got to put attention to. And you know, I think it's just important once in a while to give yourself a little bit of leeway, latitude. I agree with you, joe. Good, good, I'm glad we're on the same page on this.
Speaker 1:I've been so very rigid with this and I was talking to, you know, cynthia, and you know we're talking about all these different things. You know she has a different kind of cancer and different kind of therapies that she was doing, but we both came down to the notion of there are things that work and that if you're going to decide to live, then you're going to choose these things that work and then maybe you're going to modify and add your own other things that can help you. But this diet is going to work for everybody's cancer and it doesn't matter what kind of cancer, what drives it, what caused it, how far along it is. I mean, we're just talking to this guy in Japan over the weekend and unfortunately my brain's a little cloudy. His name slips me right now.
Speaker 1:But yeah, scott, my God, what a story. I mean the guy was metastatic Great story and he went from being riddled with cancer but he just drove man. He's an inspiration. He did everything. He did all the things like I'm doing. He did more things than I'm doing. He's got the same disease.
Speaker 2:As President Biden Right. Everybody says Biden is incurable. Right, that's the paradigm. You cannot recover from prostate cancer, bone metastasis, but you can.
Speaker 1:Sunday meeting is so important is people are coming in and sharing their stories and even doctors are coming in and learning and and they're they're once. A doctor knows this. Hopefully they start talking to other doctors and we start to get.
Speaker 2:They won't get very far, I think. But well, I think the key point is the doctors are learning from the patients, and that's the way it would be agreed, and that was another.
Speaker 1:Another thing that you know we were talking about today is, you know, navigating the medical world like in some ways, well, in all ways, it's the patient's responsibility to figure their problem out but it's not easy if you're up against an obstinate oncologist.
Speaker 1:Well, that's just it. Like generally you get luck of the draw, like you go into whatever your medical center is and say I've got this disease. Or maybe you go in for blood work and they come and tell you you've got this disease and then all of a sudden you sort of fall into this automatic system where they assign you a doctor and I think most people the news that you have cancer is so traumatic to most people I think it really just knocks them back.
Speaker 2:To have to battle the cancer and the oncologist too, Right exactly, and I don't think most people even try. I don't think they even try to battle them, I think they just kind of they think okay, you know, I'm gonna just follow the oncologist and you know, as dr exime emile always says, you follow standard of care. You get a outcome which, for many cancers, is terrible. Well, we were talking about that. You really need the standard of care which is, in most cases, necessary but not sufficient. So we got to augment it.
Speaker 1:Yes, indeed, and the thing is is like the standard of care generally. There's three basic ways they go. You got surgery, radiation and chemo. Now they've got immunotherapy and some others. But if you look at it, the surgery, which is generally the first line that they go after, is probably the least effective in the sense of like with cancer. By the time you can see it, it's so big that it's already spreading right, I mean, it's already breaking off I think we have to make that assumption.
Speaker 2:It's probably not true every time, but I think that's the assumption. That's got to be the working assumption. It's trying at least.
Speaker 2:No, I was talking with Chihiro, yeah, and a young lady, a daughter of a person who's contacting with Chihiro, had, I guess, a cancer similar to yours. Looked like it originated on the tongue. They took out half the tongue, took out a big chunk of the jaw. They replaced the jaw with some metal. Just think of the disfiguring surgery you would have had and that's what they wanted to do first. I know Surgeons said by model, I do surgery and then you go to radiation, then you go to chemo.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And that's the model. And, yeah, I guess in some cases there's no choice, but especially head and neck cancer. Oh yeah, the disfigurement. There's no way to get around it. Surgeries do, and you know. Imagine that this poor girl lost half her tongue. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's awful, you know, and with just a little common sense, try neoadjuvant first.
Speaker 2:What have you got to lose? You've got nothing to lose, you know, a few weeks of chemo hey, it just may work. Of course, when you're on methionine restriction, there's a better chance that it's going to work. Exactly, you need to change the paradigm. I think you're the model for changing the paradigm. We can start with head and neck cancer. You're such a clear example of what to do and what not to do, exactly example of what to do and what not to do Exactly, and you know.
Speaker 1:Again, I listened to the first doctor and he told me I probably didn't have cancer, which is how I do that.
Speaker 2:This guy's an outlier, he's an idiot, I mean, but after that I got a little more Every grandmother could have looked at you and said you got cancer. I mean, this guy, okay, he's an outlier, we don't even want to deal with it. No, but the standard of care here, you know, get the disfiguring surgery first and then go from there. So it's really important. But then they'll argue, yeah, but the chemo doesn't work that good. But then we say, hey, combine it with methionine restriction, no big deal.
Speaker 2:Well we should be doing this since 1959. It's mind blowing, wouldn't you think We've got to? Really, you've got to be the poster boy, joe. Oh, I'm carrying the torch, you bet I am. Now we've got to go to the next step and change the paradigm. Right, you just said the chances of when you have a primary tumor and it's already visible, being able to be diagnosed. Blah, blah, blah. It's almost certainly spread. Okay, we're going to try it. What are you going to do? We're going to go now to radiation, which is local, and not deal with the very high probability that you've got cancer cells walking around your body. So we've got to find a way for you to get maintenance chemo, and we're going to find it. We will.
Speaker 1:You know we will. It's not in the guidebook no no, but you know what?
Speaker 2:It's not for head and neck cancer.
Speaker 1:We're going to find the answer.
Speaker 2:I know we are it could be any kind of good chemo like Chihiro takes. It doesn't have to be, it's just something to keep the cancer down, which is probably not a high bar when you're on methionine restriction.
Speaker 2:Exactly Almost any kind of chemo there. Their action is very similar. They're cytotoxic. They're not really cancer drugs, they're drugs that kill cells that rapidly duplicate. So it's not almost any of those standard drugs. I think would be good for you. And anyway, we're going to get there and, worse comes to worse, we'll go down to Tijuana to the most interesting drugstore I've ever been at.
Speaker 2:That's right down the road from you, or you walk upstairs to the doc and tell him what you want and you pay him five bucks and he gives you a prescription. Talk about freedom, right? Freedom, freedom to determine your own fate, freedom to determine your own fate. So I think you know let's get the. We need to get the scans We've got it. We'll analyze the scans and then we'll send everything to Dr Castro and see what he says.
Speaker 1:Another 10 days I get my scan and you know, I guess, one of the really good things there are two good things that came. Three good things came out of what this card that I was dealt was. Number one it was visible, and so I was able to document the progress with photographs. And number two, it was virus-driven rather than drugs and alcohol-driven, so the survivability rate was almost double what it would have been. And then number three the fact that it was virus-driven made there be a blood marker that I can test for and I can know for sure if that virus is in my system then there's a likelihood that it's making some cancer cells. If there's no virus in my system, then it's probably not. I mean, it gives me at least a pretty strong marker. The only problem is, you know, cancer can change, it can mutate, it can, it can turn into something else.
Speaker 2:So in order to mutate, it needs a lot of divisions. So if we, if we keep it down, either not dividing or very slowly dividing, it's not going to change that much, I I think I think you're right and that's that's where I feel like I have some control over the situation.
Speaker 1:So you know, I've made the decision that for the rest of my life I'm not going to give it anything to grow on. So I'm going to continue diet, I'm going to continue keeping this enzyme with me. If I'm, you know, going to break through a little bit, I'll always have it as a backup. But my diet is going to be rigid and you know I can continue my oxygen therapies, my exercise, all the other. I'll probably off and on with the ivermectin. I don't know that I'm going to keep on that all the time. I don't think I need to. But you know, sporadically we'll go into a few cycles. I keep on it as much as you can tolerate, oh, okay. Well, it doesn't bother me, I take it without any problems.
Speaker 2:I think it's very, very promising.
Speaker 1:And then I still, like I learned from Dr Castro, because of this diet it's very low in protein and protein is where you get a lot of your zinc from. So I'm now zinc deficient by just the nature of my diet. So I take a zinc supplement.
Speaker 2:No, because just part of my there you go and you know if you really your blood comes back too low in protein, start on some hominix I take it.
Speaker 1:No, I take the hominix regularly. I I go, then you're gonna be. I take it because I exercise a lot and I don't want to. I try to build a little muscle mass and you know, without taking protein it's pretty hard. So I take this With the hominids. You're going to be fine. Yeah, and I tolerate it fine, it doesn't bother me. I put it in my coffee in the morning and just drink it and I get all the aminos except for methionine and cysteine.
Speaker 2:So that's right, and the body stitches together all those aminos. It finds the methionine left in the body and you're all making your protein.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah. And you know I've learned so much, like you know, this thing with the diet. So many people have come down the road that I came where we cut out the sugar, we cut out the carbs, we're eating protein like crazy, because we thought it was fine. And then you come to learn that, whoa, that's totally the opposite. And then I learned a lot about protein. You know, this has been such a journey. For me is just learning. You know I'm always learning. I think you know you inspire me with all the research you do and you're constantly researching. But I've always been that way myself, and anytime I stumbled upon something I didn't know. That's how I found you. I was just researching, I was just looking for answers and all of a sudden, one of the articles you wrote about cancer's addiction to methionine popped into my field of vision and it caught my eye, and so that that one article that you wrote has probably saved countless lives, if it's, if it, if it.
Speaker 2:I hope so, joe.
Speaker 1:I think it did. I mean, and you've, you know we gotta get the word out. Well, I know that, um, I know that that's what we're doing with this, with these conversations, and you know I to always, while we're going through this, I like to learn a little bit about you and your process and your history. You know you've got such a rich history, you've been at this for so long, and I always like to learn, like, how you go through discovery, like, how many experiments have you documented while you're researching methionine?
Speaker 2:Well, Joe, I started researching methionine in cancer in 1973. Right, so I can't count that how many. We probably have just on that area? A couple hundred publications at least, maybe more, I don't know All from different areas, a lot. We went through some dry periods, you know, when the injectable methionine caused some problems with the methioninease. I'm sorry, oh yeah, killed a monkey, we lost a monkey, we got you know. That really depressed us. Ten years later, well, maybe 15 years later, Dr Hahn and Dr Kawaguchi found you could take methioninase by mouth. Right, that started. I mean, that was the renaissance.
Speaker 1:So since you discovered that, like when you're going through, like right now, you spend your days working, consulting, how do you spend a normal day?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I help out dr hon. We're, you know, a real tiny little organization, so I help dr hon. Uh, I check every vial to make sure it has enough methioninase. Every single vial I check. Usually I do that in the evening and then I finish up putting the labels on the vials in the morning because I get tired of doing that stuff. Then I try to do some creative work in the morning and I try to write or revise a scientific, different scientific paper every day if I can, trying to get as many papers out there as possible. And you know, then, kind of toward the middle of the day, I kind of run down, I kind of doze off in the chair and then, as the afternoon proceeds, I've got to take all the methioninase I take methioninase over to FedEx and get it all shipped out.
Speaker 1:How long does the process to make the methioninase over to FedEx and get it all shipped?
Speaker 2:out. How long does the process to make the methioninase? Well, it's two big steps. The one step is to ferment our special genetically engineered bacterium, which is a standard E coli. Tons of it in our in our gut. And this e coli has been engineered to have the methioninase gene, which comes from a bacteria in the soil, a really tough bug called pseudomonas pudida. So the first step is to ferment it. So you start out with a little culture on like Monday, and then on Tuesday this is all done by Dr Lee. On Tuesday he has enough of the little culture to inoculate about a nine liter culture, which is on a very fancy fermenter. The air, the oxygen, the agitation, the pH, it's very, very sophisticated. Temperature with all these little lights flashing and curves, great environment though yeah, it's real Star Wars, so that's an overnight culture, I guess. From that culture we get on the order of 10 grams of methioninase once it's purified. So Dr Hahn now is purifying methioninase once a month. So he gathers together four weeks of the product of the fermentation where we centrifuge the bacteria.
Speaker 2:We call it making a cake, okay, a blob of bacteria that have tons of methioninase in it. Then he has to open the cell. Okay, oh, okay, I'm going to have to plug in here a little bit, joe, and my phone is getting warm. No worries, I hear you, okay. So then you have to kind of explode the cells open and you go through some steps, one of which is heat. The methioninase is very heat resistant.
Speaker 2:The rest of the proteins in the bacteria are not. They precipitate like when you boil an egg, okay, but the methioninase stays in solution. And then he precipitates it with what's called polyethylene glycol you may know it as an antifreeze, but it's got a lot of uses in biochemistry and then he puts it over a column which separates it from most of the other proteins by their charge. Every protein has a little bit different charge, positive or negative, and you can see the methioninase because it's brilliant yellow, oh, wow. And the yellow comes from its so-called coenzyme or cofactor. Vitamin B6, which is a cofactor for many enzymes in the body, got it. And when you're swigging your methioninase, you're swigging a little bit of vitamin B6 too. All right, make sure it keeps working. So that's pretty much it. And when you're swigging your methioninase, you're swigging a little bit of vitamin B6 too. All right, make sure it keeps working. So that's pretty much it.
Speaker 1:And how much does he generally generate in this one-month purification?
Speaker 2:Right now we're generating probably between 30 and 40 grams and that's probably the order of about 100 patients.
Speaker 1:And is that how many patients you're serving right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah about, so we can expand by the controller of the fermenter. Now is running one big vessel, a 10-liter vessel We've built built about nine, so we'd like to save up a little money and get a second vessel.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Probably 30-something K. But we have so many expenses Electricity, because of all the stuff we have here just electricity is $4,000 a month. Wow, it's a killer. Rent is is 4,000 a month Wow, it's a killer. Rent is 11,000 something.
Speaker 2:I mean it's just, it's really tough just to break even, which is all we want to do is break even. So that's where we are. You know we're pretty flat out. So that's where we are. You know we're pretty flat out, and but we're trying to save up a little and get that second vessel. Then we'll be able to serve 200 a month. Nice, nice. Well, I'm here to help you do that, as I can bring more people and in these conversations I'm'm meeting people, people are finding me and okay, well, you know we're, we're a 501c3 corp.
Speaker 1:Everything is taxed, tax deductible. Yeah, I hear you, I and and you know it's funny people think, oh, you know, the enzyme's expensive. It's a thousand dollars a month that's.
Speaker 2:It probably costs a little more than that to make it.
Speaker 1:I believe that I have no problem paying it because I know you guys are the real deal and I know I'm absolutely pro bono.
Speaker 2:I live off my Social Security.
Speaker 1:No doubt I understand I have such a deep respect for you and the work you're doing. I didn't, I didn't need to know those details, but I I kind of assumed them. I just I just can the the, the character that you have, the work that you're doing, and just just your willingness to, to share. I was sharing the story about how I ran across you. I sent an email and you said I still remember that email.
Speaker 2:You just signed it, Joe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you said give me a call. And I called you and you picked up the phone. And every time I call you, you pick up that phone and if you don't, you call me right back. And that tells me the kind of person you are and I try to be that kind of person as well.
Speaker 2:Joe, a little bit warning that my phone said getting hot so it'll automatically shut off with no, it'll just go boom.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll go ahead and preemptively cut it down. We're down at about the 30 minute mark anyways. So, Robert, it's always it's a pleasure to talk to you.
Speaker 2:I really just Me too, joe, and I'll see you on sunday, yes, you will.
Speaker 1:I'm back at it. I've got. I'm gonna have some company ever. So I probably won't be able to be on the call for the whole call, but that's okay I like joining. Every minute you're on the call, you're inspiring somebody all right, that's what I'm here to do, and you inspire me, so thank you so much. Thank you, joe. Thank you so much, too, for everything. We'll see you on Sunday, okay, all right, this has been the Healthy Living Podcast, and we'll see you all next week. Thanks for joining us.
