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What If The Warburg Effect Is A Distraction with Dr Robert Hoffman
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Cancer gets framed as a mystery, but a lot of the confusion is self-inflicted. We sit down with Dr. Robert Hoffman, a lifelong cancer researcher who helped shape my own treatment path, and we push on a simple question that too many papers dodge: where are the controls with normal cells? When researchers skip that step, they can mistake general cell stress for a cancer-specific weakness and then build an entire story around it. That’s part of why ideas like the Warburg effect can spread as “truth” even when the underlying experiments do not hold up.
From there, we talk about chemotherapy with zero sugarcoating. Chemo is toxic, and that toxicity is exactly why it hits fast-dividing cells, but Dr. Hoffman lays out why “necessary” does not automatically mean “sufficient,” especially for solid tumors. We unpack how I combined standard of care with methionine restriction and methioninase-based thinking, and why supporting therapy choices with real data matters more than hype.
The biggest mind-bender is methionine addiction in cancer metabolism. Dr. Hoffman shares lab results showing normal cells can grow when methionine is replaced by homocysteine, while cancer cells often cannot, even when they are making plenty of methionine internally. So why does a cancer cell still need a tiny amount of external methionine to grow? If we can answer that, we may get closer to the basic mechanism of cancer, including links to methylation. We also cover HDRA drug response testing in 3D culture, the realities of funding, and how resistance emerges when patients stay on the same therapy too long. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs hope plus rigor, and leave a review with the question you want us to tackle next.
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Here is the link for Sunday's 4 pm Pacific time Zoom meeting
And action. Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we have back with us Dr. Robert Hoffman. Hi, everybody.
Welcome Back And Why This Matters
SPEAKER_01Welcome back. It's always a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Joe. Pleasure to be here. For those of you who maybe are new listening, Dr. Hoffman is one of the key players in solving my cancer problem and helped me to find a lot of good information, good answers. And we have a meeting every Sunday at 4 p.m. Pacific time where we get together on a Zoom, and the link is in the show notes. And if you or somebody you know has cancer, I would highly recommend at least pop in and listen one time. These are some of the most cutting-edge solutions that people are saving their lives and lives of others. And there's nothing like this out in the world. So, Robert, welcome to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Joe. My pleasure too. You know, you have been a researcher for as long as I've been alive.
SPEAKER_00Longer.
SPEAKER_01Longer than I've been alive.
SPEAKER_00And 61 years. You've discovered Joe just turning 60.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm gonna be turning 60 the same day you the same day as your birthday. The same day as the country celebrates Juneteenth. It's exactly how yeah, I was tickled that they chose that holiday, because like every seven years our birthday lands on Father's Day, which is kind of a double-edged sword, you know, you you end up kind of losing a day out of it. But when they decided Juneteenth was gonna be, you know, the memorializing, you know, the when the slaves were massive.
SPEAKER_00End of slavery.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the end of slavery. And I I've always been a freedom fighter. So for me, that was really a special thing. So I I believe freedom is is it's a very special day. It's a very, very special day. Anyways, you've been researching and and particularly in one area, and that area involves cancer's addiction to methionine,
Methionine Addiction As A Cancer Clue
SPEAKER_01and and you know, we talk about this a lot, but we talk about this a lot because it's so darn important, and because it's getting talked about so little. However, a little bit more and more we're finding more people talking about it, not enough, but more. And I I am always intrigued to learn about your research because you know, people talk about science and they talk about, you know, oh, this is the this is science, that's science, this is facts, that's facts. And you're a guy in the trenches of science, literally on the front line in the cutting edge of the science where the experiments are being done and the observations are being made, and the the data's being logged, and the reports are being written, and all the stuff that science is, and you're right, you're the guy doing it. And if you're not doing that, you're reading somebody else's research. I've never I you have like a Smithsonian library in your lab. You have you know nothing but just research, research, research, and that's how we learn, you know, there are truths in the world, you know. The old saying, right, Joe, truth from facts, or yeah, it ain't hard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it ain't hard. Somebody says something, how do you know that? Right.
SPEAKER_01Show me. And and these days it seems that these quote unquote truths come from some leading expert just saying it, and we you and I both know that that's generally a bunch of hogwash, and it means nothing.
SPEAKER_00Um, even even the expert can say something that means nothing.
SPEAKER_01That's what I'm saying. You know, what what does mean something for the whole uh campaign? Where's the beef? Yes, exactly. And you're the guy with the beef. So we believe in beef. Exactly. Exactly, and and and not just because somebody told us it's real.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's there's a lot of stuff in the literature that's not right either. So we would need
Bad Controls And The Warburg Myth
SPEAKER_00to be very discerning, see how it repeats, see if it's logical, see what's missing. These days, the last 20, 30 years, maybe you see a lot of very high-powered papers on cancer research, cancers this and cancers that, and you don't see any control. Right. Did you do the experiment on some normal cells? Never enter their mind. Right. Never enter their mind. So it's crazy because the high school kids could know how to do that, but these guys with their high technology and all their fancy reagents and machines and genes and stuff, they do these experiments. Oh, the cancer cell does this and it does that, it does the other thing. These are the hallmarks of cancer. And the whole paper, 40 pages sometimes, there's not a single experiment about with normal cells. It's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_01It is. I remember in seventh grade, you know, we did a science project, and you know, I I showed the effect of colored light on a lizard. Uh, you know, people think only chameleons can change their colors, but it turns out other lizards can too. But I had I had a control. I had I had two or three alligator lizards, and I did it with more than one lizard, so that uh it wasn't just an anomaly. And maybe they were all relatives, who knows? But the point was I would have one lizard and I would have him under sunlight, I'd have him under candlelight, I'd have him under luminescent bulb, and then I would put them under various different color bulbs, and then we would photograph them, and we would take him out into the sunlight to photograph them. So it was the photograph was always the same, even at the same time of day. And it wasn't entirely super dramatic, but it was noticeable. And these lizards changed their colors when they were in a certain color light for 24 hours. And but if I would have never really known it unless I had that control picture to put right next to it, absolutely, otherwise, you know, you take a picture with the lizard in colored light, and of course it looks colored, you know, or you can I can I can highlight data in a particular way to to prove a point, but unless you have that control and cancer, especially, my god, it's such a tricky problem, and the cells that make cancer cells started out as normal cells, you know, that's correct. So you have to be able to go, well, what about the normal cells? Because without your normal cells, you're not alive, right? You gotta have enough normal cells. So we gotta what what what is it gonna do to the normal cells? And we've talked on the show about you know a lot of claims. People talk about cysteine reduction and glutamine reduction and glucose reduction and all these things, and they say, well, you know, if you just remove these things from your body, then the cancer will suffer and maybe die. Well, the normal cells suffer too.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. All you have to do is a control, and that's like even sometimes we not only do a parallel control, we do a control with a co-culture where we culture the cancer cell and the normal cell in the same dish, and we mark the cancer cell with a fluorescent protein, and we can see the normal cells because we use so-called fibroblasts, and they have this very elongated structure and easy to identify. So we can tell if something's inhibiting the cancer cells more than the normal cells, hey, that's good. And if it's kind of the same old, same old, similar, it has nothing to do with can't cancer, it it's just general. So and and and this problem started a hundred something years ago with Warberg. The cancers are this and the cancers are that, and he didn't do the correct controls with normal cells, and people have been following him the last hundred years. It's he's become very popular in this century, and uh people think they're really cool, they're following Warburg. Ooh.
SPEAKER_01But it's all everybody, every doctor that I've talked to, they all talk about the Warburg effect. That's it. Yeah, well, it's all wrong.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we just published a paper a month ago or so. It's right on our PubMed site that says Warburg effect is not a cancer paradigm. And of course, 99.9999% of the researchers either won't see that paper, or if they see it, won't believe it, or they they'll just see this is another terrible thing from Hoffman, or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Well, I tell you what, being the black sheep of the family, to me, generally indicates that at very least, you're not just drinking the Kool-Aid that's out there.
SPEAKER_00I don't like Kool-Aid, I don't either. I I'm there with you. Anyway, we we need to keep doing very simple experiments, always controlling with the normal cells, and we're gonna learn more and more about what cancer really is. It's we're we're getting we have a good start, we got a long, long way to go, but uh, I think we're in the right direction.
SPEAKER_01Now, today I I want to talk about some things where there's all these medications, you know, chemotherapy's been around for what, 50, 60 years? It's been around.
SPEAKER_00Almost
Chemotherapy History Plus Hard Truths
SPEAKER_0070.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Almost 70. One of the first patients was Babe Ruth.
SPEAKER_01Didn't that come out of poison gas that came out of World War I, World War II? Didn't they like somebody figured out that it could have some the mustards?
SPEAKER_00But the real modern chemo started with Dr. Farber in Boston in what's known as the Dana Farber Institute now, and he was giving the patients analogs of folic acid or derivatives of folic acid. And that approach eventually led to extremely good results with childhood acute leukemia. When I was growing up, when I was a kid, that was a universally fatal disease. But thanks to Dr. Farber, Dr. Fry, Dr. Fry Reich, Dr. Davida, he and and Dr. Bertino. That group of people, that unique group of people were the real heroes of cancer research and therapy, and the majority of those kids where they all died, most of them live now. There hasn't been a repeat of that since then. Maybe it's some of the other leukemias and lymphomas, but for solid tumors, which are the vast majority of the cancers, that kind of great result has never been repeated.
SPEAKER_01And when you're talking about chemotherapy, you know, I I was one a lot of people have this real, really, really negative opinion about it because they don't know anything about it. And it's no fun, and it is no fun, and and it can be deadly, and it can be usually not deadly, but it can be, but it could be.
SPEAKER_00I mean, especially it's very toxic, yeah, and that's why it works, right? These are not cancer drugs, they're they're so-called cytotoxins, cell toxins. That's why you lose your hair. The hair is the most rapidly dividing component of your body. Well, the king, the those drugs, that's what they target dividing cells. So, first thing that happens, you lose your hair. We hope the humor is at least a little bit sensitive, like the hair. And so they're not cancer drugs, they're cytotoxins, and even the so-called targeted therapy. Yeah, that's it's still chemotherapy. So in your case, you got standard of care chemo, and it was heavy duty, and then we augmented it with methionase, low methionine diet, ivermectin, all the other things you were doing, ozone, all the other things you were doing, and what we learned from you, Joe, standard of care therapy is absolutely necessary, but in most cases, it's not sufficient. And everybody told you, yeah, Joe, it's not gonna work without radiation, and they even wanted to cut you up in the beginning. Yeah, take off half your face. That's what they were gonna do. Take off half your face, and and we just said, two of us just sat down and said, Hey, why don't we just give chemo a try? It might, you know, if if it's not working, we do other we'll okay, we'll go to the radiation, maybe we'll even go to the surgery if it's not working, but it worked exactly. It worked, and if it didn't work, or if it stops working one day, I'll consider more consider everything to stay alive, dramatic options, but right now you're getting immunotherapy as a kind of tentative, um, but we have to be vigilant. The the chance that you are I mean you're negative even on methionine pet, which is the most sensitive imaging there is you the chances that you still have some of those cancer cells are very high. So we gotta keep them from becoming from growing back to the extent that they can affect you. So that's where we are. I think we're in a we're in a good place. You certainly have the doctor I would go to myself, and I recommend everybody to Dr. Song. Absolutely. He's uh national resource. He also was a black sheep, and I knew him. Oh yeah, he gives high dose Tom. But and I think he really gave you very high dose too.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, I am certain of it. I I have no doubt. And I'm grateful for it. I I it it was not fun, it was not easy, but I I believe it it was instrumental in knocking it out. And in fact, even giving me that seventh course when we only talked about six, and he's like, No, I'm gonna give you another one. And uh it whooped my ass, but I I think it it finished it off. I think it it it it finished scorching the earth there, and and uh that's a that's a thing, Joe.
SPEAKER_00Uh people don't like chemo. Nobody likes chemo, but if you have an aggressive cancer, there's no choice. You need it, you gotta have it, you gotta have it, and it's absolutely necessary, but in most, most, most, most cases, it's not sufficient. You gotta do more things.
SPEAKER_01I want to talk a little bit about the the experiments that you're doing, because you know most, if not all, of your work in some way is centered around the methionine effect either on the cancer directly or on other treatments in association with the cancer. But somehow methionine's involved in the work that you're doing. And there are so many different treatments now, there's so many different drugs, there's so many different kinds of cancer that you would have to clone yourself a hundred times and have a billion-dollar budget and a giant laboratory to even begin to take on all the things to experiment.
SPEAKER_00The good thing is I think all the cancers are much more similar than they are different. Agreed. They're all methionine, all methionine addicted. There's no question about this.
Why Standard Care Needs More Help
SPEAKER_00They're all methionine addicted, so that is a big help. We work on that assumption. There's always exceptions, but I've never seen one.
SPEAKER_01And so and you even found that when a cancer becomes methionine immune or or or independent or independent, it becomes less malignant.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so rare cells in a population of cancer cells, if you're they're put under selective pressure of very low methionine or methioninase, can become we call revert and become independent of methionine. And just needing the normal amount of methionine, not the cancer amount. And then when we analyze these guys, we look at them in the dish or we put them in the animal, they're really either not cancer anymore, or they're very benign cancer. They've lost either all their malignancy or most of it. What does that tell us? It tells us that malignancy and methionine addiction are really tight.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Probably one causes the other. You cannot separate. Well, let's put it this way. If the cells are methionine addicted, they're cancer. If they're methionine independent, they're normal or near normal. So that's telling us that methionine addiction and cancer are so tight together they can't separate the two. And that means there's must be some cause and effect there, I think. Right. And so we want to try to figure it out. What what is the property of methionine addiction that confers malignancy to the cell?
SPEAKER_01And do you have a suspicion?
SPEAKER_00I think it has something to do with methylation.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00I'll show you some unpublished data. Just a moment, please.
SPEAKER_01All right. So while you're getting that, I want to set up the next line of conversation here. Go ahead and do this. So when we were at Dr. Song's office last time, we you were talking to Dr. Song about your work. And, you know, in every chemo infusion, there's always little leftovers of these drugs. And, you know, you have to dispose of them because they're toxic and there's not enough to do anything with. But there are these trace amounts that are left behind in every in every time somebody gets an infusion. And you were able to get access to some of that. And the thing that's really interesting about that is as readily available as these drugs are, some of them are expensive, and you can't just go out to the drugstore and go buy some dose of taxil. You have to have access to it, and you have to be able to get it. And in order, some of your experiments, and I'm again, I'm just repeating what I've heard, and I'm sure there's a whole lot more to it than what I'm repeating, but it seems that you do a lot of experiments around the removal of a dietary element, whether it's a glucose-type molecule or amino acid type molecule, or some something that we eat that is part of our nutrition cycle, and you'll remove it and then compare the results to the healthy cells and the cancer cells as a single experiment. But other experiments you do, you will add a drug or a toxin or some standard of care or even some proposed standard of care to the cancer cells, and either add methioninase or restrict the cancer cells and the healthy cells with methionine when you do it. And you are able to study the interaction or the effect on these drugs, and it's interesting because in some cases we find that a drug that has a particular purpose, like ivermectin, was designed as an antiparasitic drug, and it people give it to horses and animals, and they it's it's a very safe drug. There's all these different drugs. Dr. Castro gave me a flu drug that was a very safe old drug that had almost no side effects, and it was good for certain flu symptoms or whatever. But people will find that sometimes these very same drugs will have an effect. Well, just like they discovered with Viagra, you know, it had this unexpected effect that everybody really liked a lot. So next thing you know, they marketed it for that. But what other things happen, and I'm learning as I go, I'm I know very little when it comes to science, but I'm learning a lot as I'm going. When I was battling the anemia, I learned that, well, when you take iron into you can get iron from all these different sources, but your body doesn't necessarily absorb it, and it just kind of passes on through you. But if you take it with some vitamin C, all of a sudden your body can absorb it a lot better. So there's these combinations of things that can make something work better or keep it from working. And you're you're able now to study some of these interactions between some of these chemo drugs or different types of therapies and these other factors like removal of methionine or adding of methioninase, etc. Why don't you tell me a little bit about that? First, let's go back to your data that you were just you just grabbed, and then we'll jump over. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, I don't know if you can see this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, so this is normal cells. The black is how they grow in methionine, and the red is how they grow when homocysteine replaces methionine. And this is the number of cells, and this is the concentration of methionine and homocysteine going up. Okay. Right. And this is a cancer cell that grows really well on methionine, as you can see in the black. Even it's super high doses of homocysteine, it can't grow. They're so different, the normal cell and the cancer cell.
SPEAKER_01That's wild. And that's it's it's a mystery.
SPEAKER_00So in the old days, people said, and they were wrong, that oh, the cancer cell can't convert the homocysteine to methionine.
Homocysteine Data And The Core Mystery
SPEAKER_00We showed that was wrong in 1976, we published, and to this day, some people keep saying it. It's amazing how misinformation never dies.
SPEAKER_01The good information, it's hard to get out there, but the bad information spread that's right. Like cancer.
SPEAKER_00That's right. So both the normal cell and the cancer cell are making a lot of methionine from homocysteine. But the cancer cell needs external methionine, just a little bit in the presence of in the presence of homocysteine. It just needs a little tiny bit of external methionine and it grows like crazy. So I think the answer to what is really going on in the cancer cell that that distinguishes it from the normal cell is what is that little tiny bit of methionine that the cancer cell needs as an external source, not from what it makes as an external source, what is it the cancer cell doing with that methionine? I think if we know that, we'll know we'll know the basic mechanism of cancer.
SPEAKER_01I think you're right. I I think it it makes perfect sense. And you know, when it comes to the diet, pretty much every food that has methionine is also loaded with cysteine. So it's not, you know, if if you're trying to remove one or the other, you don't have to remove the cysteine, Joe.
SPEAKER_00If you you can have tons of cysteine around, you remove the methionine, the cancer cells don't grow.
SPEAKER_01Right, exactly. That's what that was kind of in this case.
SPEAKER_00The the medium, the growth medium, has lots of cysteine because there's no methionine there. Right. All the cysteine, all the glutamine, all the glucose, it's all there. It can't grow because we've replaced homo methionine with homocysteine.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And now and and we've known since 1976 that under this situation you add a little bit of methionine, one hundredth of the normal amount, and cells take off.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't take much in the presence of homocysteine.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00If there's no homocysteine, it they need a lot of methionine. So we need to find out what the cancer cell is doing with this little bit of external methionine that it needs. The cancer cell is making tons of methionine from this homocysteine.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00This is over one millimolar, four millimolar. It's a huge, huge amount, much more than you could ever even get in the body. Wow. And it doesn't grow. But if you add extra and but and they're making lots of methionine from this, we showed this in 1976. And we also showed in 1976 that you add a little bit of methionine, one hundredth the normal amount in the presence of homocysteine, the cells take off. So, what are the cancer cells doing with this minute amount of methionine that they need, but they need it coming from the outside of the cell, not from what they make. So the cell the cancer cell distinguishes the methionine that it makes from homocysteine and methionine that it gets outside. It's the same methionine.
SPEAKER_01Right, molecularly, it's the same.
SPEAKER_00It's absolutely the same. But the cancer cell treats it differently if it makes it or it gets it from the outside. And and so that's the question, I think, is uh is gonna tell us the basic mechanism of cancer. What is it doing with that little tiny bit of methionine that it requires from the outside even though it's making tons of it from homocysteine? So this is not gonna be easy to find out. May take some machines that we don't have for analysis, but we're gonna find a way. So that's we're gonna be doing a lot of different different kind of research, but this is the main problem now. And I think it's the main main problem of cancer research. Of course, nobody wants to believe that the the uh the mainstream guys they're they're all doing their stuff. That's not that's irrelevant. This is this is the answer.
SPEAKER_01And I think you're on to it. I I I'm curious, you know, the future is gonna involve technology. I I've been doing a bunch of interviews with doctors and scientists that are in different fields talking about different things. I I did a an interview with a guy who's a a hair restoration surgeon and all the different the the technology and how it's improved and stem cell treatments and single follicle transplants, and they're doing it.
SPEAKER_00Well look up our our studies on the stem cells and the hair follicle can that can make neurons.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Heart cells that can make muscle cells.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But he doesn't never read any of the there's 88 of those papers, but he never read one.
SPEAKER_01So, anyways, it in in looking at the future of of you know machines and and and instruments that are able to detect different things. Is there anything on the horizon that
The Tools Exist But Funding Does Not
SPEAKER_01you see that that's gonna be helpful?
SPEAKER_00We have the machines, Joe. They're just so darn expensive. The things we need for this analysis are out there. We just don't need that little money. Wow. Um they're out there. They're out there.
SPEAKER_01That's a topic I really want to get into is the the the possibilities of health and science and the reality of of limitations of funds and and and what what that what that means. I I before we get finished, I I wanted to touch on a topic. When we were at Dr. Song's last, you were able to access some compounds that are going to help you in some of your your research. I was curious how you were going to set some of those things up and what you were looking to discover with them.
SPEAKER_00Well, this is not so much for discovery, but to help the patient. So 40 years ago, we discovered what we call the histiculture drug response assay. That's a big word. We use the acronym HDRA, and but the concept is simple. We culture the cancer cells in the dish and we put in the drugs, and we say that the drugs work or they don't work. Do they kill the cells or they don't kill the cells? And what we found is that using a better type of culture that allows it the three-dimensional growth rather than two-dimensional growth on a flat surface of a dish. We use a sponge, and the sponge is what the surgeons use for hemus fat, but it's a great substrate to grow cancer cells or normal cells or cancer tissue. It's called gel foam. Wow, I like that. And so we need drugs to test, and
Testing Drugs On Your Tumor In 3D
SPEAKER_00they're very you can buy the cancer cells from these chemical companies, not the drug companies. It's a lot of money. We don't have the money. And in the all the bottles that we've recovered from Dr. Song's box, there's a little bit of chemo left in them. And we're we're gonna try to. We haven't even finished going through the box yet because it's so full of bags, needles, a lot of stuff in there, yeah. And the nice nurse, her name is Tui. She's yeah, she's gonna separate out everything for us next time.
SPEAKER_02Right, right.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, meanwhile, we're trying to recover, and so that's what we want to do. And and we these patients are in Japan. We get the tumor sent to us. Usually we put it back in the mice so that we have an infinite amount of the tissues growing in the mice, and we put them in the in culture using the 3D culture of the HDRA, and that's we're going to be using these drugs to see which ones work better. And that has been shown in clinical trials. The results in the dish correlate to the patient's outcome. We show this in a number of different trials. This is not widely accepted at all by the oncologists, it's just another thing that makes more work for them for for no money. Right. So they don't do it. They allow the surgeon to put the cancer all into the pickle pickle jar with formalin, dead. Nobody wants to do it. There's a few labs, there's a few clinics in Japan that want to do it. They're way ahead of the world. It's something we've that the concept has been known for 70 years, more than 70 years. But the cancer doctors, they don't want to be bothered with it. They know better. They they can tell you what's gonna work just because they think about it, they don't need data. If only I could be as smart as they. So right, you know, so that's why we're begging for some try to recover some drugs for these experiments to try to help the patient choose the right drug. I love it. I love it. Well, I again effective drug or the less ineffective drug.
SPEAKER_01The the way that we were talking about what Shahiro was doing and what you guys are doing in collecting an actual tumor cell from or you know, chunk of tumor, and then replicating it, and then being able to experiment specifically. You know, we're gonna talk maybe on the next episode about you know, cancer cancer building resistance to treatments, and this is a huge problem.
SPEAKER_00In the last remember, I said yesterday on the Zoom, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And and even his doctor didn't want to really hear about it. And it's working, we're just gonna keep doing it.
SPEAKER_00But these doctors know, and then it's too late, right? And these doctors know that drug, it and and in so doing, there's a very big chance it becomes more malignant, right? Very big chance it's gonna be cross-resistant to whatever else they have. Exactly. You can't stay on the same drug continuously, you gotta get off it and and maybe come back to it. But staying on the same drug, sorry, continuously is going to result in resistance. This is
Resistance, Adaptive Therapy, Staying Ahead
SPEAKER_00you can say this uh way over 90% or 99%, I don't know the number. But you keep on the same drug, and it's the the cancer is going to become resistant.
SPEAKER_01Well, and it's the same thing in the human body with every with with every system.
SPEAKER_00If you take the same bacteria with antibiotics, all of it is a big trouble. People are so over-treated with antibiotics. Exactly. They've become resistant. Right. It's a huge problem. With the kind of same principle with the cancer, right? So they they these things, these drugs, whether they're antibiotics or chemotherapy, they work until they don't work.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_00If you go that far, it's mostly too late.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I think, like you said, I think you nailed it. It's too much work.
SPEAKER_00And but you know, the drugs work and don't bother me. I'm you're we're gonna just give you the same old, same old. That's what Alan's getting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I keep telling Alan that it isn't good. I don't think he quite catches it. The doctor told me I'm doing good. It's true, Alan, you're doing good, but there's gonna be a point where you're gonna be not doing good. So I don't know. Chihiro's story taught us a lot. Exactly. This drug for three years doing fantastic, and all of a sudden the cancer exploded.
SPEAKER_01Right. And that's even with the low methionine diet and and the methane.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, on all of that, the cancer became so tough to control now. She's on another drug and doing really well, but she shouldn't stay on that too long. Right. Can always you know, the the adaptive therapy, up, treat, get it, get it down, go off the treatment, even let it come back a little, treat again with that drug or a different drug, just so that you don't allow the resistance cells to take over the cancer, to be the dominant ones, and that's what's gonna kill you. Those resistance cells. So you you you have to do certain easy logical steps to prevent the resistance cells from becoming dominant. And and we can do it, we can do it. The the the adaptive therapy guy, I forgot his name. He's got a kind of cool name. He says, We're prostate cancer using my way, he said, should never be a lethal disease anymore. Uh that's a pretty big statement. I wouldn't say that's the truth right now, but I can say it's certainly in the right direction, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_01Well, and and it certainly has that potential. Yeah. Well, Robert, I I I love this conversation. I I I each time we talk, it opens up more doors of things I want to talk about. And so we'll we'll be back sooner than later to get more into it. I I want to talk in the future about the different types of treatments and how they're different, what they do. I know, and then we can talk about your experience with methionine restriction or methioninease or both as to their effectiveness. And I think that you're gonna we're gonna look at some very, very different approaches to different cancer treatments and what they work. A lot of them are similar, they're oxidative stress, but then there's a lot of them that are not that, and and a lot of different things. So it's interesting to think that this methionine restriction, like just off the top of my head before we sign off, you have immunotherapy, which is kind of the almost the polar opposite of chemotherapy, where you have one that is oxidizing and attacking a certain type of cell, and the other one is targeting your own body's immune system and supporting it to for it to go and take care of it its own way. Very, very different.
SPEAKER_00But one doesn't they're different, as like you say, but one exclude the other. You'll still find that like you did one week, one, one week, the other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and so you'll still find, though, with these totally different types of treatments, that removing methionine from the diet and adding the methionine is limiting the amount of methionine circulating in your body makes both of these totally different types of treatments work better. And I want to get into that a little bit more in the next episode. Okay. Well, Robert, it's always a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00I I our conversation talking about the most important things for cancer.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, we're we're we're we're getting to it, and you know, I'm I'm I'm in my protocol, you know, even like I told you about last week, my my own little crazy fast, but I thought about it's a pretty good idea doing sort of a methionine purge for my body, you know, working. I think it's a good idea too. Working out during a fast, just taking the hominx only so I don't lose muscle. Really cool. I felt good doing it, so you know, I'll do it again in a month. That's the bottom line, isn't it? How you feel? Exactly, exactly. All right, Robert. Well, thank you again so much for. For having me.
SPEAKER_02And I look forward to it.
SPEAKER_00I hope a lot of folks will watch this. Yeah. I hope they'll have a lot of questions. We're here to answer it. And if you have cancer, it's not a death sentence, it's a call to fight.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Exactly. And becoming your own advocate and finding a doctor that'll work with you. And maybe it takes three or four doctors to get what you need. And maybe you might need three or four at one time. Doesn't matter. What the heck? Go after it. Yep, exactly. And remember, Sundays at four o'clock Pacific time. We have our Zoom call. Everybody for you. And we have a lot of other patients that are very, very supportive of you. Exactly. Exactly. All right, Robert. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. My pleasure, Joe. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine. I want to thank all of our listeners for making the show possible. And we will see you next time. Next time, everybody.
