Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Science Is Not Certainty with Dr. Robert Hoffman
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“Trust the science” is easy to say until you are staring at a scan that can’t truly rule cancer out. We sit down again with Dr. Robert Hoffman to talk about what medical evidence can prove, what it can only suggest, and why patients get trapped between uncertainty and aggressive standard-of-care treatment. Along the way, we share real stakes: recurrence fear, metastasis language that lands like a hammer, and the hard truth that you have to want to live enough to do the work that survival demands.
We walk through the practical side of cancer diagnostics, including the limitations of PET/CT detection thresholds, the role of blood biomarkers like the SCCA “liquid biopsy,” and why Joe is traveling to Japan for a MetPET scan to get clearer answers. Then we zoom out to the bigger problem: how scientific paradigms decide what gets funded, published, and taken seriously, even when real-world results seem too important to ignore.
Dr. Hoffman draws on decades in research to explain why “science” is a method, not a message from God. We unpack how cancer research has swung from virus explanations to gene-first thinking, why massive collaborations can miss simpler metabolic truths, and how evidence for cancer metabolism, including methionine addiction and methionine restriction, struggles to break through. We also touch vaccines and public health history as a reminder that disruptive ideas can save the world, even when they start outside the mainstream.
If you care about cancer research, metabolic therapy, clinical trials, FDA barriers, and how patients can think clearly inside a noisy system, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone making treatment decisions, and leave a review with the biggest “science claim” you want to question next.
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A Cancer Scare And Urgency
SPEAKER_00Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we have back with us Dr. Robert Hoffman. Robert, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today? Always great to be on your show. Well, you know, I love our conversations, and I I I know that people that listen to them are gaining insight into things that I'm I'm not here talked about anywhere. And I don't, you know, we talk about the paradigm and and science and all these big words, but the truth is information doesn't go where it needs to be. I had a guy just leave here, and his father has cancer, and he was going through a treatment, he was in remission, and then he just had a CT scan, and it's metastasized. And his father's older than me, but I don't think by a lot. And he's going through the shock of all that right now. And I and I've been telling this guy, I want to talk to him, I'll help him, you know, get him onto the the call, listen to my podcast. And this guy just won't do it, hasn't done it. And and just today, you know, I can tell as my friend Ray, he's he's down, his dad, you know, won't listen. And and he even shared my case report with them. I mean, I sent everything to him. And, you know, now they told him they want to give him radiation and chemo, and he's already been through it. And, you know, for people who have been through this, these are difficult treatments to go through. And to have somebody tell you you got to do another round, like if they told me I had to do chemo again today, I would sit there for a minute before I said okay, I would say okay, but it would take me a minute to swallow it because it's rough, it's not an easy thing to handle. And right now, this guy is like trying to decide what to do. And I told him, I go, man, you gotta find a way to get your dad to acknowledge how important staying alive is. And that's like the key of it all. Like, you gotta want to live. And I just feel, you know, I I told him, I go, I gotta, I get my heart broken twice, three times a week from people who say they want help. And then I start talking about what it takes and they lose interest. And I'm just like, wow, I don't, I don't, I don't get it. But anyways, I want to bring you up to speed. We you're already kind of aware of everything that's been going on, but you know, since I got my PET CT back, that seemed to indicate that I'm okay, but it was certainly not definitive. And the problem with the scans is they all have limitations, you know. Number one, the limitation that all of them have is the the size of an anomaly that they can recognize. So if you've got cancer cells, a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand or maybe even a hundred thousand cells, nothing's gonna see a few million. Yeah, nothing's gonna see it. It's too small. And and there are blood tests that can sometimes be indicators that there's something anomaly going on and and maybe give you direction, but to actually see the problem, cancer gets so big and it's already established by the time it's big enough to see. So that's a big giant problem that people have. And so when you flash up on a scan that says you've metastasized, this stuff's all over your body. It's already a big problem, a huge problem, but it's a problem that can be overcome. And so in my case, you know, the areas of concern did not light up dramatically. There's a couple little spots in my lymph nodes, there's a little spot in my lungs, a little spot in my knee, but none of those were likely cancer related. But they don't know for sure. So I have subsequently, through you, Dr. Hoffman, and your connection with Dr. Sato in Japan and the clinic over there and Shahiro and Kuji, I've got my plane ticket to go to Japan. I leave on the 12th of April, and my appointment's on the 14th. And I paid for the scan. I had to send them the money up front, and and so I'm I'm in I'm I'm in the process of going to get the MetPet scan, which we've talked about before, and that will tell me definitively if something large enough to see is present and it's cancerous. Doesn't mean that there's not something smaller creeping around, but we already know everybody's got mutated cells floating around their bodies. So we all have the propensity to get cancer or to, you know, I think when they call it cancer, it's already something that's developed to the point where you know it's malignant, it's it's it's become a problem. I also received blood work for what they call SCCA blood test. They call it a liquid biopsy, and Dr. Song approved that. And I'm waiting for the results of it, but they did take the test and submit it. And that's for the squamous cell carcinoma antigen. And again, it it'll tell if there's a presence of something in my body that would be likely to indicate that there would be still a problem, but it's certainly not definitive. And that kind of brings me to the point I wanted to get to today, which is you know, science. And you remember when COVID was here and and the disease before that, and the disease before that, and you know, people throw around the word science like it's a like it, like it's synonymous with the truth. And you know, they say you gotta trust the science, and they gotta, you know, what you're doing is is not science, and this is science. And you know, they they they use this word like they know what it means. And I really want to talk about you know what science is and kind of what it means and how it really affects us, you know, because if you look through history at what science has said, it's been wrong all the way through. And every time it's wrong until it says, oh, we figured out we were wrong before, but now we know. And then that goes along for a while, and then it says, Oh, we figured out we were wrong before, but now we know. And it seems like it's a combination of, you know, we keep learning a thing, and then we find out a big portion of it was totally wrong, and now there's a different model, you know, and it goes from biology, the science that you work with, you know, living living cells, animals, and humans, all the way into you know, quantum galaxy stuff, you know, they keep finding out they're wrong about big stuff, and they gotta go back to the drawing board to figure it out. And I think what happens a lot of times is like we'll build a model of how reality is, right? And we'll say, here's the parts, here's how they work, and within this framework is our paradigm, right? But then somebody will stumble upon something that doesn't fit in there, and all of a sudden it's like maybe it's a mechanism, maybe it's a protein, or maybe it's a particle or something. All of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, there's no place for this in our paradigm. What do we do with it? And you know, so I I I know you've been a scientist for longer than I've been alive. And I think it's really important for people to understand really what the heck science is, and and and maybe to understand that the truth is something that we can sometimes find in science, but it's also something that we all need to spend our time figuring out the truth that applies to us. And sometimes it reaches on all different sides of the spectrum. So why don't you take us back? I mean, I I know we always get new listeners, and maybe they're not going to go back and listen to every episode you've done. But why don't you tell us a little bit about your history as a scientist? Because, like I said, you've been working in a lab, you've literally dedicated your life to science, and I I have such a deep respect for your commitment to your work. And generally that's where you know the best work comes from is somebody who's put so much focus into it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, Joe. Well, uh, I got my start, real start in science in the Boston, Cambridge science community. I was a graduate student at Harvard. Harvard was connected to MIT and all kinds of research institutes around there. And I felt so overwhelmed by all these great scientists. I'm just this little little twenty-two-year-old and so that so that the the paradigm leaders are s were and are so dominant. It's extremely hard to get out from under the paradigm. You don't even know you're under it. So I did my PhD, I worked on a mutant fungus, and this fungus couldn't produce body mass. It was using up tons of oxygen oxidating its food, but it couldn't produce much body mass. That paper was published in 1971 in Science. I doubt that it has more than 30 citations after 55 years. And I didn't know where that stood. It surely wasn't part of the paradigm. Then I I moved over from Harvard Biolabs to the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, full of big shots walking around. I mean, you were just so overwhelmed by all these big shots. And I started working on this project of cancer cells eventually. And they they needed methionine, and yet they could make methionine like crazy. That it took a publication from the University of Singapore or the Singapore Research Institute. Nineteen plus twenty-six. Thirty thirty-five years forty-five years later. That I finally that paper I realized what I found that the cancer cells were addicted to methionine. That paper showed a similar to result in 2019 that I found in 20 in 1976. Of course, they had a million times more sophisticated ways to do it, but they claimed that cancer, in their case, the cancer initiating cells were addicted to methionine. STEM, no stem. But it took all that time because I I was so out of the paradigm. So the when I first got started, the paradigm was all cancers are caused by viruses. That turned out to be 99.99% wrong.
SPEAKER_00And yet there's still people today that make that claim.
SPEAKER_01Well, there's some are, Joe. I mean, for example, your claim is mine was, yeah. It turns out mine was, yeah. Probably the virus had some role, but it couldn't have only role because everybody's infected with that virus and they don't all get cancer. So it's like something else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's something else going on for sure.
Breakthrough Funding And Glioblastoma Reality
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not, hey, there's the virus, there's the cancer. No, no, no, not at all. Like that, it's not flu, right? Well, so this the paradigm and the leaders, they control everything, they control what gets in the fancy journals, they could control who gets to be the big talkers at the meetings, and that's very important. When you're a big talker, when you big it make a big lecture at the meeting, you're like a god. And everybody else is just, you know, kicking rice. So that the paradigm is so overwhelming. And you know, the paradigm can be doing science, but it might not be science that gets at the question you want it to. It can discover something, but not what you want. Science is not the message from God, it's a way to get data, a logical way. You collect the information and you put it, organize it, and you make a hypothesis based on your data, and you and you try to substantiate or disprove your hypothesis. But you might be all doing all this going in the wrong direction, discovering stuff, but not discovering what you want to discover. How the hell would you get cancer? Not cure, maybe not the word, but control. So here we are today. So same thing. So there's this rag. I'll get it in a minute. Hold on a second for me, please. You read this rag. It's called the county. It's very inside. I get it because UCSD has a kind of system-wide subscription, otherwise you gotta sell out five hundred and fifty-five bucks a year. And you know, I can almost eat a whole year for that. So you know, I I it comes out every Friday. I can't wait. I can't wait to see what the current bullshit is. And sorry for the French. And it's all good, it's true. Last week's here's the cover, it's a bulb, man. The idea. So the feature story is this guy. His name is Tyler Jacks.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01Boy, is he a paradigm leader. And uh by the way, he hates my guts. Just so uh that means you're doing good work, I'll bet. It could mean that. So he I don't know how I don't know the whole story how he did it, but there's a there's a foundation, it's called Breakthrough Cancer. Okay. Just ahead of it. And this story interview page, page, page, he's interviewing. What the greatest thing ever was this foundation, because people are working together in a radical way. They've never worked together in a radical way, radical collaboration. I think we've never delivered on that. Okay. So I'm reading this. 18 of the best cancer centers who are in a kind of sign of consortium working together. So, and what are they doing? So one of the main things they're concentrating on is glioblastoma. That's a brain cancer. It's it's really, really, I mean, it and a lot of it, maybe the most of it happens in kids. It's it it ain't good. So they're going on, yeah, we're gonna find out everything. We're gonna, and they're taking from a couple of these patients 40 biopsies from their brains. I mean, they're delivering a drug through the skull and taking out brain, and then they're gonna test all these genes that they know are that's that's it, the genes. So it's not the viruses anymore, it's the genes. And that's what's causing the cancers. They're going on and on and on about you know what a great thing it is, and all the best scientists are doing it. And this guy, Tyler, he's the leader. And and they don't give any scan, anything from any of the patients. How are they doing? They're giving them some immunotreatment, whatever that's delivered into the brain. And then they're they deliver it in, then they they drill out some biopsy, and they're gonna find all the genes turning on and off during the treatment. And that's gonna solve it. Then three days ago, I got a scan from my previous glioblastom, the father of my previous glioblastoma patient. She was about thirteen when we were treating her. She got she had chemo, radiation, low methionine diet, methionase, and a lot of supplements. Well, she's now she's 18 or 19.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And I I looked at that scan. I'm not a radiologist at all, and I've asked Dr. Sato to look at it. And you get it before the the image in 2022 before treatment started, and then Chiro's gonna send it around to the Zoom. Okay, this monster thing in 2022, and the one that was just a couple weeks ago is the same circle. You see, something it was like a crater. Wow, there like a crater after the meteor or something.
SPEAKER_00Kind of like mine. I had this giant tumor, now I've got a little bit of scar tissue or some exactly a little bit of something there, but it's so these guys, the paradigm leaders from this foundation, breakthrough cancer.
Kuhn, Model Failure, And Unseen Assumptions
SPEAKER_01I love this modest name, break through cancer. Spent 125 million dollars drilling these two patients by opsing the brain. We probably spent a few hundred dollars, well, a few thousand dollars probably for methionidase for the girl, and the publication fee was free. We published the first paper on it. We're gonna publish another one based on this great new scan. It's the same disease. This this young lady is done great. And do you think that's gonna enter the mainstream of knowledge? It'll be published in one of our nice little journals. Published in Nature or Cell or New England Journal or all these papers that these guys control. Oh no, no, no, no. There's a paradigm. The paradigm, these guys now Tyler Jacks and his hundreds of millions, the new thing is drilling the patient, getting the biopsies. Biopsies and biopsies and biopsies. See how you're doing every week. And it's gonna be there are gonna be no hypothesis, they're just gonna be looking at whatever they know how to look at. Wow. That's the paradigm thing. And here and and here are we, we really, I think, you know, we don't have proof, we haven't done a trial, but you know, you say, oh well, she's an end of one. Well, so are you, so are mine. So I so are all these people. Yeah, we've got dozens and dozens. Yeah, and if we're doing good and better than anybody ever thought we could, isn't that good? But we can't, we can't get out of the paradigm. This is the problem. And if you read Kuhn's book, K-U-H-N, everybody should read that. Something scientific revolutions, it's all about paradigm shifting. He uses the the history of the planets and the sun. And you know, at one time the earth was the center of the universe. Well, it ain't anymore. It's so interesting to see how the science evolved over five or six centuries, and we still don't know what's going on. They they these these astronomers talk about dark matter, right?
SPEAKER_00And they have no idea what it is.
SPEAKER_01What's that? Oh, that's the stuff we can't see, right? I see. That's most of the universe. That's what they say, but they don't know what it is. Oh, it's dark matter, yes, a name. Right. Well, remember, they used to call it the ether. Then I'll tell you something else, Joe. You take uh one of the smallest proteins, the smallest is small. It's about a hundred amino acids. Okay. These are the histones that wrap around the genes. Some of them four and five hundred. Okay. The big ones, the big enzymes that do all these fancy things. Yeah. So you and so this the hundred amino acids, each each position of a hundred amino acids has a choice of twenty. There are twenty different amino acids that could be in each slot. Right. So the probability of this forming by itself, for example, spontaneous, is one over the twentieth, one over twenty to the with one hundred zeros. Wow. Then these these schmucks, they they come out and say, Oh, the universe formed from a big bang, 14 billion years ago.
SPEAKER_00It just happened, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It just happened, you know, bang, dad said bing, and it was bang. Right. And 14 billion is nothing. For example, if you compare gorilla hemoglobin and human hemoglobin, three amino acids changed over six million years.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01How do you explain a teeny little protein that has a probability of evolving by itself of one over 20 with 100 zeros? There's not nearly enough time in the universe, right? Nearly 13 or 14 billion that these guys say is the age of the universe is like blink of an eye.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so what's that? The paradigm is so stupid, but that's the paradigm. The Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago, and then there was origin of life on the earth four billion years ago. Nobody has any idea what's the origin of life. How matter become living? Right. Yeah, nobody's ever recreated.
SPEAKER_00The paradigm can't explain this at all. Exactly. And and not only that, but they can't make it happen with all the technology and all, and they never will make it happen. Of course not.
Money, Incentives, And Cancer Treatment Limits
SPEAKER_01They never were, in my opinion. Yeah, no, we're we're not here to do that, yeah. So here we are, the paradigm. The paradigm. We can't get out from under the paradigm. So let's go back to cancer.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01Can't get under the paradigm. Here's this guy uh with his 125 million, and he's got another 125 to go, and they're drilling people in the brain and taking out biopsies and measuring all the genes that they know all the genes have caused cancer that don't really, and that's what they're doing. And here's a little guy like us, us, you know, hey, you maybe try a lomethionine diet. Exactly. Maybe a little ivermectin, a little this and a little of that. Maybe you're gonna get a good result. But that that's so far from the paradigm. Is it a conspiracy? No, it's not a conspiracy. They're not all these guys are hey, we're gonna keep this, you know, we're planning the paradigm. It's just it's human nature.
SPEAKER_00That's part of what I wanted to get into a little bit is you know, when you talk about like this guy, you always end up talking about money because that's the thing that makes all these fancy things, Joe. Right. Everything's money. I mean a lot of it.
SPEAKER_01Money, and it's not that some people say, Oh, yeah, you know, all the money's there because they don't want a cure. I tell you, Joe, they don't know how to, they don't have the first idea to get to quote unquote a cure. They they stupidity reigns much greater than any kind of conspiracy. Stupidity and ignorance and arrogance.
SPEAKER_00Well, and and if you think about it, the the companies that are funding most of the research are for-profit companies.
SPEAKER_01Okay, the companies also do research, they they they they never get anything from it, but they do.
SPEAKER_00Okay, all right. But at the end of it, generally, the outcome is some sort of a a drug or a treatment or something, and the idea generally is that it's gonna be some sort of a treatment, right? Like it's gonna help you maybe prolong your life or maybe knock some of the cancer back. I mean, all of these treatments that they have out there from chemotherapy to radiation to immunotherapy to even these, you know, more cutting edge things that are out there. Uh none of them, I don't believe, are even attempting to reverse the disease.
SPEAKER_01They're trying to they they're they they they all have some good effect. Right. There's no question. Yeah, but it's not enough. Right. How did we start chemotherapy? Was Dr. Farber in the 40s? He started making these antifolate chemicals because he thought the cancers needed folate, which they do. And he was starting, and one of the first cancer patients in the whole world getting chemo was none other than Babe Ruth. Wow, I didn't know Squamous Cell that was of course way advanced. And he actually had a a brief kind of remission. And then, you know, he recurred and he passed away. So that you know that was Dr. Farber and and the the next generation that followed him were were so great people. Dr. Fry, Dr. Fryright, Dr. Davita, Dr. Dr. Holland. They were they were curing kids of leukemia that were sure death. They could cure them. And that was a great paradigm for that. But for people with solid, so-called solid cancers like you have from from tissues rather than from blood, right? Very different. And these kind of chemo, they have some effect. You got a good effect. I think my opinion, right or wrong, is that you were under very strict methionine restriction, which helped these drugs work a lot better.
SPEAKER_00And the fasting and the oxygen and all the other things.
SPEAKER_01Even the patients don't want to listen. Right. The patients who don't know anything are influenced by it. Either through the cult of their doctor, or I don't know, I don't know what it is. They don't want to listen. They they just they intrinsically kind of know it's not in the paradigm. So they're not going to bother with it.
SPEAKER_00You know, one of the anytime as that, you know, people start talking about, you know, especially the doctors who, you know, when they're saying, well, this is this is where the treatment is right now. You know, when they were trying to give me the radiation and the chemo, and that was it.
SPEAKER_01That was the big institution. Yeah. They they had to give you that because they're working for the UCI, and that was the guideline there. And then when they said we can't treat you in another way, yeah, they were telling you the truth.
Eggs, Histotripsy, And Rule Bending
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But I think to myself, what about eggs?
unknownEggs.
Vaccines, Jenner, And mRNA Lessons
SPEAKER_00What about what eggs, chicken eggs? Yeah. You know, if you if you follow the science of eggs for the last 50 years, they've gone from the best thing in the world to the worst thing in the world about a dozen times. And one day eggs are the best thing, eat 20 of them a day. The next day, don't touch an egg because they're horrible. And you know, it's the same science. Well, that's just it. Exactly. Neither of them are right. It's the nutrient of the new chicken. Right. Exactly. A lot of good stuff in it. Right. It's it's one of the most complete foods there is. It's a it, you know, it's it's it's like eating seeds. A lot of the seeds are really good for you. It can overdo them. Exactly, exactly. So I I always have that in my head. And then you have like, you know, when COVID came along, you've got this dichotomy. You have treatments like that ultrasound treatment I was trying to get access to, but histotripsy that is only available for liver tumors. But there's evidence that, you know, it's an ultrasound that that can destroy a solid tumor without destroying the surrounding tissue. And there's a lot of good evidence that it could be helpful, but they've only approved it for this one little type of cancer in a liver, and it has to fit these criteria, or or FDH says nothing else that matters. And they've got all these rigors that say, well, in order to have a treatment that's available through insurance or through, you know, that's accepted here in the United States, you have to go through all of these rigors. I understand the meaning, the reasons of safety and whatnot, but then you get a pandemic come along and all of a sudden all that goes out the window. And they're like, oh, we're gonna rush it through and we're gonna make it. Oh, here we go. We got our vaccine. You're good, you're good, you're good. And I'm not saying one thing or the other about the vaccine. I'm not saying one thing or the other about any of it. It just seems that the rules of science are awfully fungible sometimes. Well, let's talk about that for a minute.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we go back to Jenner in the late 1700s, uh-huh. Smallpox was wiping out Europe, it's gonna wipe out the whole Europe, right? And maybe it would have wiped out the whole human population, it might have. Could have put the whole human population back into the cave. Right. Here's this guy, Jenner. And there's no such guy as Jenner anymore. The bravery and intelligence, right? So he's he's watching everything, and he's all the people that are dying of smallpox, but the the the milkmaids don't die. Okay. Why's that? And this guy out of no paradise, out of nothing, he figures, wait a minute, the milkmaids are becoming immune. That maybe the he knew the cows got cowpox, and he knew cowpox was similar to smallpox.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And he figured, oh, the milkmaids, they're getting something that is making them immune. So he started collecting uh the pustules or whatever from the cows, right? And he found this little kid. I mean, today he would be the worst, he would be a thousand times worse than Epstein. He finds this little kid. He says, Come here, kid. And he gives them, he injects some of the cowpox pustule stuff, and then you know what he does. A few weeks later, he injects them with smallpox postules. Wow, and the kid lived. Wow. And this that was the first vaccine, and you know the name of the smallpox virus?
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_01Named after his vaccine. Wow. This guy, Jenner, and of course his he wrote a paper on it, I guess it was the British Journal of Something, and it got rejected. Of course, it got rejected. So there he was. He saved he saved the world. And then here we go. Here we go. How many hundred let's see, 1790, 19, 90, 200, 90, 230 years later? We get COVID, which was almost seemingly as dangerous as smallpox. The morgue was filling up. They had to stack people they had a rent cool tra uh trailers with a cooler to stack the bodies in the hospitals. Yep. A lot of people died. Holy shit. And there's this Hungarian lady. I forgot her name. Cool cool with a K. This is I know how to make the vaccine. mRNA vaccine. Worked on it for years. Nobody paid any attention to her. Then she started showing it works on COVID. That vaccine, Joe, maybe a few people, some people had some side effects from it. It saved the world again. And she got the Nobel Prize along with her collaborator. She couldn't keep a job. They fired her here, fired her there. She was some assistant to some assistant at the University of Pennsylvania or something, something, something. Wow. So our are vaccines perfect? Of course not. But they've I think they've saved the world at least twice. And you know, I'll take another example. When I was growing up in the 50s, my mom wouldn't let me go out in the summer. I could only go to the ball field or whatever. I couldn't go to the, she wouldn't allow me to go to the pool or or or any of that stuff because you're gonna get polio. Oh wow. Look at Itsak Perlman. He's about my age. He's out, plays his violin, comes out on the sticks. His leg's never recovered. That's the way it was. And Salk, he invents one and it isn't quite there. And Saban he invented, I think, an oral one. Neither of them won the Nobel Prize, but uh they didn't save the world, but they sure saved a big part of it. The polio vaccine, sure, measles vaccine, all of it. Do some people get a bad reaction to the vaccine? A few, you know, you go up and you fly in the airplane, will Airplane's crash? Well, not that often, right?
Clinical Trials, FDA Barriers, And Mexico
SPEAKER_00Um, so there we are. That's where my concern comes from is not, you know, I I think you know, you take your chances. You want to get a vaccine, get your vaccine. You don't take your chances. But when it comes to cancer, it's totally different, Joe. Yeah, no, that's the point. Yes, but still the the cause, and we can do something. What's the cause of cancer? Jesus, what but that's where I think to myself, why don't they make these experimental treatments easy to come by? Because we know for sure the standard of care offers what they call a survival rate, which is three to five years generally, and then after that, they're not really so worried about it, right? They don't they don't even know what to think after that in the paradigm, there's nothing in the paradigm to replace it. Exactly. But but what if we were to, and then again, it's just me thinking crazy because I do that sometimes. But what if we were to make it really easy instead of really difficult? So we know this, all right? If you take a cancer and it doesn't get treated right, it's gonna spread and mutate and metastasize and eventually kill you. That's what most cancers will do. Some will just sit there and slowly grow along, but most of them are gonna get ugly and ultimately you're gonna have a big problem and probably die from it if it doesn't get treated right. Most of the treatments are also pretty harsh on the body, gonna leave you a lot worse than they than you started. And again, I'm not talking about the people doing what we're doing, I'm talking about the the average guy that goes into this standard of 99, 99 and three-quarter percent of the people out there that do that. I think to myself, you know, there's a handful of people that get that get into a study, right? But you gotta qualify, you gotta have certain conditions, you gotta have, you gotta know about the study, you gotta have all these little things to happen to be even take part in a study. And in a study, it's possible that you get a placebo. You don't even get the treatment, right? Well, these trials are terrible. And what if they just said we've got something that shows promise? Maybe it runs through the first phase that that shows that it's not you know a time bomb that's gonna kill most people, right? The fur first they show the relative safety of a treatment, right? That says, okay, well, it may not work, but it's probably not gonna kill you. What if it gets through that phase and then we say, well, let's open it up to virtually anybody who wants to try it? No, that's the way it is in Mexico, right? Mexico doesn't have an FDA, right? Mexican government says we trust our doctors, yes, and people go down to Mexico for treatments, but you know, it's not always a good idea to go down to Mexico. Correct, you know, and that's the problem. Like, why the hell don't we do that here? It just because it's not in the paradigm, Joe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those billion dollar trials or almost billion dollar, that's part of the paradigm, right? And that's that's weird. We're trapped in the paradigm. How are we gonna have a paradigm ship? Well, here's one little example the biggest cancer. Meeting of the year is in San Diego. It's called the AACR, American Association of Cancer Research. Did they invite me? No way. Then they said, I got some little blurb. Would you like to participate in our mentor program for high school kids? I said, sure. Okay. Then they give me a follow-up letter. Well, we're there's a program that's on this day from this hour to that hour. I said, Well, I'm sorry, I can't afford the registration fee, which is about$1,500 or$1,600.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01And I said, But you know what? I'm gonna open up the lab of anti-cancer, and every one of those high school kids is welcome to come over and I'll share with them my 61 years in research. Wow. How many other people can share 61 years of research?
SPEAKER_00I don't know any.
SPEAKER_01You know what the answer was? Oh, we're very sorry. We don't have enough time to get all the permissions from the parents. Wow. This one for off-site. I mean, off-site? Who's off-site? Some uh cancer organization that comes here and takes over the convention center or a lab that's been here for 33 years. Which one is off-site?
SPEAKER_00Right, right.
SPEAKER_01That was it. That was it. And they said, oh, we hope to see you at the next meeting in Orlando next year.
SPEAKER_00For what? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, we've got something that can, as you know, from every Sunday, we're helping a lot of people. Can that get in the even crack the door in this of 20 or 25,000 people that are gonna attend that thing? Will they even give you a little crack in the door? Of course not. So I'm just giving you an example of me, one little guy.
Methionine Addiction And Metabolic Experiments
SPEAKER_00I mean, just the paradigm is so overwhelming. Here's something that I I have been so impressed with the last several of the experiments you've been doing. You did one about cysteine absorption, and you demonstrated that the healthy cells need cysteine, and if you don't, you know, if you take away the cysteine, you can kill the cancer cells, but the healthy cells die too. That was huge. And then you've done over and over again the methionine experiment that says, well, you take away the methionine, the cancer cells die, but the healthy cells stay alive. And then you just did one recently, and I don't know if you've published it or not, but you were talking about one about glucose and a similar thing. We published one, the same kind of experiment with glutamine. Glutamine, that was the other one. And so these data that will come out maybe in two weeks or maybe in six weeks. But, anyways, you've done some some like you say, they're high school science fair project type experiments, but these are experiments that could be replicated over and over and over again, and they inequivocally up in some of the quote-unquote paradigm science. Yeah, it's you know the the Warburg paradigm.
SPEAKER_01But do you think these little tiny observations that we're making, we're publishing them in good journals, but small impact relatively, but very good journals, approved journals, they get on PubMed. Do you think that these that the stuff coming out of our lab is gonna move that paradigm?
SPEAKER_00I don't know, not in my lifetime, it ain't. You think it might get a little foot in the door somehow. Somebody's gonna see that.
SPEAKER_01I always say this, if some famous person, Elon, whatever, comes and says, give me methionine restriction and gets a good result, that could have a very big effect of shifting the paradigm. We've not run into anybody like here here's President Biden, okay? Has prostate cancer, maybe more advanced than Scott, but really the same idea. Scott is in remission with his methion restriction, his chemo, and his and his radiation. Is Joe Biden gonna go into remission? No way. They both had bone metastatic prostate cancer, and Joe Biden will be treated by all the the guys, the paradigm leaders. Of course.
SPEAKER_00He's gonna die. You know what blows me away is Steve Jobs. Now, Steve Jobs decided he didn't want radiation or chemo, and he had all the money in the world to spend on all the research in the world, and he did all kinds of supplements and different natural things, but he never found you. No, all the money in the world, he couldn't find me.
SPEAKER_01And Elon, with his 700 bill, he can't find Eve.
SPEAKER_00And I that to me, it it just blows me away. I mean, like for me, I just really wanted to live, and I was willing to do whatever it took.
SPEAKER_01You understand? You entered a parallel universe that have literally no connection, right? Imagine the the animals that live in the sea. Do they know about the animals on the land? How could they know about the animals on the land? How could they know?
SPEAKER_00There's no way, yeah.
SPEAKER_01These are parallel universes that have a tiny little chance of connection, right? Right, right. You were just somehow you got my email address, and I have a my own way of working is everybody, no matter who, that makes an interesting to me, I respond all right away. And here we are. Here we are. By just some brute luck, the fish in the water figured out to contact somebody on the land.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm sure glad that I did. And I I would love to keep pressing somehow the notion of these experiments that you've done, a way to do them bigger or more or with more complicated subjects, or somehow to keep working that those experiments to where more people can see them. But we keep publishing, and the the list of papers gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Yeah. Just by the literal gravity of all the papers snacked up, few of them might get noticed.
How Ideas Spread And Closing
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, and I think that's it. We just keep going and we keep putting we keep putting it out, and and the patients getting better. And we're getting a better leg to stand on. We have more and more case studies. You know, I mean, I've broken through Dr. Song. Yeah. And I I I got Dr. Song to tell me about cancer's addiction to methionine, and that wouldn't have happened. Nice Dr.
SPEAKER_01Song story, yes, and and none of that we have a patient in Russia, stage four lung cancer, like Amil, Dr. Xebay. He's in really bad shape. He he's gone through all the uh first line and second line drugs, and Dr. Song, despite his professed discomfort in making an opinion like this from so far away with so little knowledge, sent me a beautiful uh email letter today with all kinds of options for this patient. He said, I hate doing this because I don't have all the information I need. But he did it. I I want to help your patient as much as he said in the letter, I hate doing this. Yes, but he did it. He did it. He the guy is a sage.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'm so happy.
SPEAKER_01I know when we just talked last Monday, you were anybody with cancer and is having trouble, go see Dr. Song. Yes, 100%. I'll go there with you.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Well, that that makes me so happy. Well, Robert, we've we've consumed much more than a half an hour here, but uh it's such an important conversation we're having, and I'm gonna keep talking about this work. I'm gonna keep talking about it, and we just never know.
SPEAKER_01People gotta read it, and that'll help them a lot to understand where we are.
SPEAKER_00I got it. I read it. I've I'm gonna read it again, even if you can read it again and again. I got the audio book, and and it's just it's it's it's not particularly exciting reading, but it's powerful. And if you engage it and you really start thinking about what you're reading, it you can't take it down. You can't, it it will jar your world, Joe. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Well, Robert, as always, this is important conversation. I'm so grateful to know you. I'm so grateful that we're able to have these conversations, and I know even sometimes it doesn't feel like it's a living example of what can happen. Exactly, exactly. All right, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbond. I want to thank all of our listeners for making this show possible, and we will see you next week. Hope to see all of you on our Zoom on Sunday, too. Yes, absolutely.