79: The Shocking Truth About Your Dental Health: Dr. Michelle Jorgensen Reveals Hidden Dangers and Holistic Solutions

In today's episode of Keeping Abreast with Dr. Jenn, I sit down with Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, an accomplished author, speaker, teacher, biologic/holistic dentist, and health and wellness provider. Did you know your dental health could hold the key to your overall well-being? In this eye-opening episode, Dr. Michelle Jorgensen shares her incredible journey from conventional dentistry to a groundbreaking holistic approach after discovering the toxic effects of mercury in her own dental fillings. Together with Dr. Jenn Simmons, they unravel the hidden connections between oral health and systemic diseases like cancer, shining a light on what most dentists won’t tell you.

This episode is packed with takeaways, including the surprising dangers of mercury, root canals, and fluoride, and learn why oral infections are alarmingly common in cancer patients.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Mercury in dental fillings poses serious risks, and safe removal techniques are essential.
• Oral infections, especially from root canals, can contribute to systemic diseases like cancer.
• Dead teeth and the body's electrical systems are interconnected and affect overall health.
• Fluoride's benefits are questionable, and cavities often stem from mineral deficiencies, not poor brushing.
• Ozone therapy and mineral-based solutions are effective alternatives for treating dental decay.
• Nutrition plays a key role in preventing cavities, ensuring proper tooth alignment, and supporting oral health.
• Saliva and oral pH balance are critical for maintaining a healthy oral microbiome.
• Holistic approaches prioritize overall health over simply preserving teeth at all costs.
• Finding a holistic dentist is vital for safe, comprehensive, and patient-focused dental care.

Episode Timeline:

00:00 Introduction to Holistic Dentistry and Personal Journey
05:53 Understanding the Shift in Dental Practices
11:57 The Toxic Environment of Dentistry
17:47 Timing and Considerations for Mercury Removal
23:07 The Connection Between Oral Health and Cancer
32:46 Understanding Root Canals and Their Implications
45:36 Alternatives to Root Canals and Fluoride
50:54 Wisdom Teeth: A Rite of Passage?
56:51 Who Really Needs Wisdom Teeth Removal?
01:02:50 The Connection Between Nutrition and Cavities
01:08:46 Integrating Traditional Medicine with Modern Practices

After practicing traditional dentistry for 10 years, Dr. Jorgensen became very sick. Through her own journey to return to health, she discovered she had mercury poisoning from drilling out mercury fillings for her patients. She was concerned that there may be other health-threatening materials or procedures in dentistry, and this led her to the Biologi

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To get your copy of Dr. Jenn's book, The Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer, visit: https://tinyurl.com/SmartWomansBreastCancerGuide

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Transcript

0:01

So I would love to start to get into what is your special sauce? Because for those people who were essentially told to, for lack of a better phrase, go home and die because no one had anything to offer them, how are you different? What are you doing that's different? I think the first thing is just how I approach someone. My word, one of my words of the year is curious. And I think that's who I am as a physician. I'm very curious. And rather than thinking there's nothing we can do, I'm thinking, my God, there's so many opportunities, so many things we can do. Almost my job is to figure out what's the hierarchy for you because everyone is coming to a diagnosis for a different reason. And we were saying about seeing it as a gift and Yes, that's where we want to end up, but it's not always where we begin. And of course, it can be very scary and we can start to blame ourselves. And I think that's part of the... the theme and especially breast cancer can be that we're not giving ourselves self-love, we're not self-nurturing what the breasts are representing, that we are not in a good relationship with masculine energy, whether it be our own masculine energy or the men in our lives, and so we have to give ourselves grace and we have to know that you know I never promise, you know first of all I'm not curing anyone, I'm just an intermediate right. We don't talk about curing anyone, right? Right. We just help them to pursue their health. Yeah, exactly. It's between you and the universe. And sometimes, you know, the cure is that it is your time to transition. And so I don't come in with any expectations. I come in with what is there for you to learn here and how can I best help you. And so my extensive training, I was very fortunate when I was a... a baby doctor in naturopathic med school to get involved with the European biological medicine community. Talk about again, things coming to you. I'm a big believer in let things come to you, don't chase them. And so this came to me and I got to learn a very different perspective, a terrain-based perspective because a lot of... Even naturopathic medicine, certainly functional medicine, it's definitely a step in the right direction. We're getting away from pharmaceuticals, we're getting more to the root cause. But we're still seeing the body kind of systematically and we're still saying, let's look at your microbiome and let's give you the bacteria you're missing. Let's look at a nutrient panel and let's give you your magnesium because you're low in it. And I'm not saying those are bad things because they're important things. They're things that I include in my treatment with patients. But it's really this global looking at the body as a terrain, as the body as a system, as an energetic system, as an emotional system, as a nervous system flow. And so the first thing I do when looking at a patient is really look at the nervous system and look at the flow in the body. And it might seem weird because I'm not a dentist, but the first place I go is the mouth because again, and I'm really happy because this has become much more. spoken of and well known in the states, at least in our circles, maybe not in the general population, maybe someone listening to this is like, what? But when I first started doing this back in the late 90s, it was not really talked about here in the States. You had to go to Europe to get these things done. And so It was really drilled into me. My teachers, you know, from Austria, from Germany, from Switzerland, you know, very brilliant, maybe not the best with bedside manner, but really drilled it in. And I remember one time, one of my... mentors from Austria came to the States and he came to my clinic to see patients with me and he was like, I'm going to watch you see patients. And I was like, uh, no, I'm going to watch you see patients cause I'm going to learn from you. And so we had a woman come in. She had just been diagnosed with gosh, it was so long ago. either bladder or kidney cancer. And he was this big gruff man from Austria and he just said, open your mouth. And he looked in her. And he drew the mouth and he drew the teeth and he numbered the teeth German style and was like you got to get this done and this needs to be pulled and you know and it was so I had to do a little bit of like Trauma work with her after because I his his approach was but it really showed me how important this is and in the clinics over in Europe the one who I still work with you you see the dentist before you see the doctor because the regulation of the body, I'd say a good 70 % of it is getting blocked in the mouth, whether it's from metals or galvanic currents or periodontal disease or cavitations or root canals. And so I just had a patient a few weeks ago who I said, look, if money is an issue, because this isn't covered by insurance. and you have to make a choice, then you go see the dentist, you put me on the back burner and go get your mouth taken care of, and then do work together later. But that's first and foremost, we have to clear the blockages, we have to allow what's the root cause. And I've been doing computerized regulation scans, which are different than themography picture, they're actual temperature readings. of the whole entire body where they're looking at the impact on the teeth and the liver and the lymphatic system. It's one of the only ways to really reproducibly measure the lymphatic system. And so I've been seeing this from the beginning. Root canals on the upper molars almost always see them with a diagnosis of breast cancer. It's kind of crazy when I first I was like what what but now I just kind of expect to see it it's not 100 % of the time but it's a very very high percent of the time and so we we start to think of things from a meridian perspective and the upper molars is the stomach meridian which goes right through the breast and that's how there is that connection and so I so I do a lot of work and people start to ask me very detailed questions about their teeth. I am a big fan of staying in your lane. So it's like, I know enough to know that this is causing a problem in your body, but I don't know enough to really, you you have to go see a good biological dentist and they have to handle your teeth, but that's gonna open up the system. In addition with that, we're also looking at scars on the body because scars are a big blockage to regulation, they're big blockage to the autonomic nervous system, to the polarization of the cells, and scars hold toxins, both physical and emotional. And so we got to go through and clear scars on the body. So and then we've got to release the fascia and get the lymph moving. And just doing those things, which is not a just, you know, this is a big deal. but clearing the mouth, opening up the fascia, getting the limb flowing. We're starting to get movement in the body. We're starting to get flow. We're starting to get communication, which is super, super important. And then... Now as a surgeon, I'm super curious about scars on the body, right? Having put thousands and thousands and thousands of scars on people's body. How do you clear that? What does that mean? I do it with a technique called neural therapy. So neural therapy, also from Germany, is just using, I use different homeopathic remedies and pro-cain, and it's injecting with a tiny, tiny needle into the scar. So you're not going into the scar. And I guess if you're not watching and you're just listening, then you can't see that, but you're going parallel, very subcutaneous. just under the skin and breaking up the scar, opening it up with protein, which can reset the membrane potential. I put some remedies in there to increase flow. And then I'm using muscle testing to see because you can, you know, it's a great party trick, but you can muscle test someone, find a great strong muscle, then have them test their scar. And I would say 99 % of the time, their muscle then go. week. I actually had a patient a few weeks ago who her scar didn't weaken her. was shocked. I was like, you are a unicorn. I rarely see that. But for the most of the time, the scars are weakening our flow. They're weakening our system. And so it's, you know, there are other ways. scars everywhere or does it matter where they are? It's all scars. So it can be the original scar, the belly button. And then, you know, certainly C-section scars, because the meridians are running down the front, all these important meridians are running down the front of our body. And then you have this big giant scar. And then there's also the trauma associated with it, the emotions associated with it, whether it's a scar here from an accident and Neural therapy was discovered by the Hunnaki brothers and they actually discovered this, they called it the lightning effect and you can have a bad knee and it's coming from a scar on your shoulder due to the connections through the meridian and so you can inject another part of the body and woo like lightning, it lights up and you find relief in other places just again. bringing home the emphasis of we are not just a body part, we are a whole matrix living in a system together here. And so it's, you know, there are people who don't inject, who do it with color or magnets or, you know, there's other ways to do it. I'm pretty old school. I like to inject the scars. A big one that I see, because I see it when I do thermography scans, I can see the blockage. So a big one is tonsils and the tonsils are the gateway to our immune system. And so when tonsils swell, have like in children that call them kissing tonsils. And what do they do? They take the tonsils out, but they don't stop to think, well, why are they swelling? And they're swelling in reaction to. the small intestine until the immune system being overwhelmed. And so then it's backing up into the tonsils. And so tonsils, whether you have them or not, because you can have them and they can be blocked and necrotic and full of all sorts of infection, or you could have had them removed and then you have a tonsil scar where they were removed that needs to be injected. So, there are another bit. It actually, is not as bad as it sounds. It's one of those things where I was like, you're gonna do what to my wire? But it's really an in and out, it's a pinch. It's not as bad as it sounds and I'm a wimp, trust me. But it really can open up because we want to open up drainage and there's so much going on in the neck. I I think of the thyroid and I see a lot of thyroid disease connected. with breast cancer and so we need to open this. Yeah, we need to open the neck up. When I do CRT scans, it's almost always the neck is lit up like a Christmas tree. It's just so congested because there's the lymphatics going there, there's the thyroid going there, and we don't really do anything. with our necks, right? We don't pay attention to our neck. Even if you go get a massage, they barely touch your neck, especially on the front of the neck. so it's kind of why I started getting obsessed with the lymph system because I saw it in every scan. was like, my God, like no one's lymph is moving. And part of it is because we only think about the lymph if you have lymphedema. or your cancer is spreading to the lymph. We don't think about, there's no blood test for the lymph. There's no lymphologist. You you go get your cardiac checkup, but you don't get your lymph checkup. It's such an important. right, you're so right. And it's an organ that is only examined when there's a disaster. Right? That's to relief. Yeah. So it's just so, so misguided. And so I'm really looking again, from a European perspective, I'm we have a lot of focus on the cell, which I think is great. We have a lot of focus on the mitochondria, which I think is great. But we forget that these cells are swimming in a soup. And so the swoop that they're swimming in is actually the space between the cells. It's the extracellular matrix. It's where the lymph is flowing. It's where the fascia is. And this is really, to me, where disease begins and ends because this is the communication system. This is what's taking in from the external terrain as well as your internal terrain and giving that information into the cell, into the mitochondria, saying it's safe out here. It's not safe. It's congested out here. That's the highway that the garbage is trying to exit the ramp and the good stuff's trying to get on the on ramp. And so we need to be paying attention to this space. And we don't really talk about this space in medicine. And this has a lot to do with mineral balance and pH balance. And it has to do, I I talk a lot about, but it has a lot to do with our emotions and just negative thoughts, and it's easy to say don't have negative thoughts, right? So I'm saying it kind of simple, but this is sometimes something we have to do a lot of work on because negative thoughts can be just as acidic, that's a mouthful, as drinking a can of Coca-Cola. And so we have to really, we have this powerful medicine in our thoughts. that we need to learn to harness, which we were never taught, we were never talked about. I wish, you we could get a, we should put together like the handbook for being human and then they give it to you and they give you the diapers and the formula at the hospital. Like, and here's this, start thinking about this because your inner child is now being developed and will be developed over the next seven years and what you learn will be what you project and what starts showing up for you in your world as you age. So it's very multifactorial. We're really looking, we're also looking constitutionally because we have different constitutions. And so you see that in oriental medicine, whether you're a wood or water element, we see that in Ayurveda, whether you're Kaffa or Vata or Pitta. And we see that also from a pleomorphic perspective in biological medicine, whether you are mucor, whether you are nigeracan, whether you are inflammatory nodicill, and we tend to have different diseases as different constitutions. And so it's that one man's medicine could be another's poison. really looking at someone because what diet you need may be different than the diet someone else needs with the same diagnosis. You may need a really hardcore keto diet to help overcome what's going on and the other one may need a really pure vegan diet. So there's a lot of individualization that goes on. I mean in my world, no matter whether it's cancer, or menopause or diarrhea, there's never like, let me just pull out my protocol. Here's your treatment plan. Because we get imbalanced for so many different reasons. Yeah, it's so true. And even with that, even with that environmental piece and us getting imbalanced for different reasons, we also come to it from different genetics. And I'm not implying in any way that genetics are the be all end all. They're certainly not. However, I think that in this age of information highway without question, right, we have some of the answers and we still need to respect people's genetics, right? you want to know your constitution. You know, when I think about constitution, I kind of throw genetics in there. And, you know, we know that you can, you can change the expression of your genetics, but it's good to know where your, your weaker links are where you meet, you know, because otherwise, why do seven women get exposed to a mercury plume? And why do three of them, nothing happens at all? One of them gets MS, two of them end up with K. Why do we have different expression when we go through the same experience? That's because we have different weak links in our systems. Yeah. So we started to touch on this a little bit with you talking about mercury or the issues in the mouth. You know, what's really amazing to me is when I went to medical school, which, you know, admittedly was a long time ago, even then, We were starting to read papers about gum disease and its connection to cardiovascular disease. And yet, none of the other areas picked it up. Like cancer didn't pick it up. Cancer didn't pick up the mouth and any connection to the rest of the body. So it's amazing to me that we can be so short-sighted in medicine. We can be so blinded where we're just not seeing the landscape. We're thinking that everything is so siloed. Yeah, I remember when I, you know, when I first learned about it. I was like, because you I had to grow and become a physician who thinks this way didn't start out like this. And I remember being like, I was like blown away because I just thought like your teeth were just you just went to the dentist to make sure you didn't have cavities. didn't. wait, they're actually part of the body. They're actually organs. They actually connected like, it's actually the beginning of our digest. Like, you just we were just not taught to think that way. We're just taught to make sure I don't have cavities. had any importance beyond chewing in cosmetics. Right? Yeah. the other thing I think is how we think about illness because I'm sure you've heard this too, another one of those everything I hear, but almost always like clockwork when I'm doing an intake on a patient who's been diagnosed with cancer, it always comes up. I don't understand Dr. Stills. I haven't been sick in 10 years. cancer now. And that again goes back to how we think we were so I don't have time for this. I don't want to be bothered with this. Let's just pop over the counter and let's stop whatever's trying to come out. And when you look at it from a homotoxicology perspective, which is another German way of thinking. we realize that excretion is a sign of health. Excretion is gold, whether it be saliva or tears or snot coming out your nose or diarrhea coming out your bottom. But this is the body's wisdom. This is the body's wisdom saying this doesn't belong here and I'm going to excrete it. I'm going to keep my highway clean. whether coughing, but what do we do? We go, oh no, I don't want to deal with this. Let me take Tylenol. Let me suppress whatever is excreting. Let me take an anti-diarrhea. so rather than excreting and getting to the next phase, which is fever and inflaming, we shut it all down. And so we're telling our immune system, you don't matter. You don't need to work. You can go to sleep. And so when we shut down our immune system, we also shut down the surveillance of cancer cells, of parasites, of bacteria, of viruses, of fungus. And so we're shutting down our system. so patients are always like, you want what? The top of my to-do list is not to like eat more broccoli. It's I gotta go get a cold. I gotta get sick. We gotta learn, teach my body how to get sick. And I'm like, yes, we have to. When we go through homotoxicology, it's these six phases of excreting, of inflaming. And if we don't inflame and burn it off, then we deposit. And so we deposit, and if nothing gets cleared, the deposition in that extracellular space then crosses over and then it starts to affect the cells. and the cells degenerate and what do we get? We end up with de-differentiation, which is a fancy word for cancer. And so... I think it's also interesting that those people that don't get sick don't get sick because they can't mount a response. So at the time when their ultimate challenge comes, which is DNA damage in the breast and an issue with the initiation of cancer, that same immune system that couldn't respond to viral pathogens, that couldn't respond to bacterial pathogens or to yeast or to mold or to parasites, also can't respond to what's happening in the breast. And so cancer happens, right? so we have to get sick. So if you're listening, when was the last time you were sick? for those with children, let your babies have a fever. Let them get sick. Yeah, like... such an important point. Like, it's New Year's Eve and my son has 103 and my husband's like, give him Tylenol and I'm like, let it burn. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. it is, you know, we have these modern medicines and we don't want to be bothered. I don't have time to be sick. It's an inconvenient time. We're on our way to the news party, but we have to because we're setting up our kids to be unhealthy. We're setting their immune systems up to not know how to function. so like I often whether it's with kids, because I still do some pediatrics, or whether it's with patients dealing with cancer, I use remedies that are apathogenic bacteria. So you can take them in and your body thinks, ooh, I got to fight, it's not. bacteria that's actually going to affect you in a negative way. It's just a, it's like bootcamp for your immune system to turn it back on for the neutrophils, for the granulocytes to start going, we have something to do here so we can retrain and let our system start working again. But we have to stop suppressing. We have to realize the value of a fever. have to. you know when I get sick or like people used to always ask me when my kids were younger you know what do do doctor you know what do do for your kids like because they want to know you know am giving acnesia am I giving eldibar you know what's the magic and I'm like I don't do anything especially for the first 24 36 hours I just lie with you you know give them some love and just let the body do its thing Jewish penicillin. I immediately make chicken soup. But quite frankly, I don't let them eat it until they're actually hungry. Because I think that fasting is such an important part of healing. Both in acute illness, like I don't believe in feeding a cold or a fever. I don't. What is the saying? It's starve a cold and feed a fever, neither one of those are right. Like you should not be eating unless your body sends you hunger signals, which is a great sign that it's ready for food. But no one should be eating out of habit or because it's time to eat. Like if you have a fever, The only thing that I am prescribing 100 % of the time is rest, sleep. That's what your body needs. Your body needs to repair. And it does not need to be distracted by food. And I think that that translates into cancer. I think with very rare exception for those that are cacactic, that they're so hypermetabolic. because the tumor biology has really taken over. With that exception, I'm fasting people because it is kicking all of their body's inherent repair mechanisms into place. And our bodies are so smart. Yeah. Our bodies are so smart. Sometimes we just need to get out of the way. Sometimes it's what we're doing that's actually blocking that healing from happening because we're not enabling it. Yeah, we often, you know, and it's not to be blamed. I mean, we're all a part of this society. We're just unlearning things that it's so funny. Like you said, yeah, cause it's time to eat. And I thought, gosh. I haven't thought like that in so long, I mean, yeah, growing up, was time to eat, right? You eat, it's time, it's dinner time. rather than listening to our body, rather than having a relationship with our body and interacting and... listening, I always say symptoms are sacred messengers, right? And getting curious, just like we get with a baby when a baby cries. So we might not be crying, we may be crying, crying is good, but saying, okay, why, why am I having this? Why do I feel this way? What's going on? on here and listening and communicating with our body. We're so like, we want to live like not in our bodies. We just want to ask for what's outside that I can take to make it stop. Yes, absolutely. I had this very interesting conversation as we were talking about your body getting rid of toxins and all of the... Well, first of all, the birth control that we know contributes, hormonal birth control absolutely contributes to breast cancer diagnoses and especially the hormonal birth control that prevents menstruation. So people who are taking birth control, preventing them from bleeding. So just being on a continual pill or having an implant or whatever that is that prevents them from bleeding because it's part of that process that's actually getting rid of toxins every month, which is why premenopausal breast cancers are not nearly as common as postmenopausal breast cancers because we're getting rid of... those toxins every month and we're getting rid of the breakdown products every month when we shed our lining. But if you stop shedding either because you're on constant hormonal birth control that prevents it or you're post-menopausal, now we've lost one of our major methods of detoxification. Yeah, we talk about the the monkteries or the eliminatory pathways, know, liver, bile or kidneys are gone. And we often forget the uterus and the monthly shed for the period. And yeah, I pretty much and I, you know, I'm a big believer in meeting people where they're at and, you know, letting them be them. But I won't work with someone at this point who, you know, if they were on birth control, but if they're actively on it and they're not willing to stop it, I don't think they're a good candidate for the work. And I just don't want the liability because I know what potentially is coming down the pike. And if they're not willing to stop that, then I don't feel like we're on the same page of understanding how we heal. And I know it kind of stinks because I don't have the perfect, know, just take this magic herb and that can prevent you from getting pregnant. I wish that existed, but I haven't found it yet. And so, and a lot of women aren't, always when women say I was on, because more often than now I get women who say I was on birth control. They don't come into me actively on it typically, but I always ask, well, were you on it for birth control or were you put on it for some ridiculous, you know, It's like, cause they just handed out like candy and it always makes me eye roll. It's like you're worried about bioidentical hormones, but you're handing out the birth control. Like it's trick or treat time. And we know it causes DNA damage. We know it's driving inflammation. We know it's a contributing factor yet for whatever reason it's like, that's, the Wizard of Oz behind and we don't pay attention to that. And we just keep giving. look behind the curtain. Right? And it's really astounding. mean, from everything from cycle regulation, which how anyone thought that that was a proper answer to cycle regulation, I'll never know. But acne, hormonal headaches, I mean, there are so many ridiculous reasons why people get put on birth control pills. and then they get put on birth control pills and virtually abandoned. It's like, okay, that's your plan until you want to get pregnant. Right. And no thought to why whatever dysfunction that's happening is happening, just like mansplain it away with birth control pills that are, I mean, it's all synthetic. So I don't want to pretend that bioidentical hormone replacement isn't synthetic. It's all synthetic in that we're manufacturing all of it. But the hormones that are in the birth control pills are not our hormones. These are foreign substances. That's why they cause inflammation because they're not recognized by our body. And our body is like, what the hell is this? Right? Dr. Jonathan Wright, who is like the grandfather of bioidentical hormone replacement in the United States, he used to call them space alien molecules. you know, when they get to the receptor site, they just look like space aliens and the cell doesn't recognize them. They're like, you don't belong here. You're an alien. whereas bioidenticals are identical to what we... we're producing and so the cellular receptor site goes, know who I know you. Hello, welcome. Or as my husband would say, how you doing? It's a Philly thing. So I want to talk about the fact that breast cancer is certainly an environmental disease. It's also a metabolic disease. And we see a lot of metabolic dysfunction in this country. I don't know what the statistics are like around the world, but I know that less than 10 % of Americans have optimal metabolic function. Less than 10%. And 50 % of Americans over the age of 50 50 % have metabolic syndrome, which means that they meet three of five criteria of hyper high blood pressure and lipid abnormalities and elevated waist circumference, elevated waist to hip ratio. They have it, right? Like they meet these criteria and it's not good. because not only is it predictive of developing breast cancer, it's also predictive of poor outcomes with breast cancer and recurrence. So these people with metabolic dysfunction present with more aggressive disease, higher stage disease, higher risk of recurrence, and less survival statistics. It's bad. Yeah, it you know, metabolic syndrome, again, is really a lifestyle. It really is reversible with proper diet, with proper movement with prioritizing sleep. And so it's not, you know, it doesn't have to be a death sentence. But it has to be and I see it younger and younger nowadays, right? it's like what? Because I see a lot of kids and I see a lot of patients, I'll see their kids and it's like from high insulin levels and 12 worlds to you want to have just some basic stuff that I start screening like give them to me at 10 years old, I mean, I wanna start screening just some basic stuff in blood work. Your triglycerides should be half of your cholesterol if you're metabolizing your fat properly. Your CRP should be low, it should be below one. You shouldn't have an elevated sed rate. insulin should not, and this like definitely not higher than eight and that's even pushing, put this pushing in. we talk about fasting insulin being between two and five, right? so, you know, we can be looking at these things and then we can be looking at how we're feeding ourselves and how we're moving our bodies. Like some of it, you know, when I'm doing therapies for patients with cancer, you know, yeah, there's a lot of complicated stuff and injections and ozone and intravenous lasers and, you know, mistletoe and all sorts of things. But then there's also just The good old basics, right? What are you eating? How are you moving? Are you sleeping? What are you getting fresh air? Are you getting in nature? Are you getting some sunshine? And we often want to overlook these things because it's easier to just show up at my office and give me a vein. Yet the treatment is stuff. is the rest of the days when you're alone and what are you putting on your fork and what are you putting in your mind and are you getting up and moving and you know this is again it's just something we have to realize is part of our medicine and that our food and yes being you know and it's not about being picture perfect in a bikini it's about being metabolically flexible it's about being able to be healthy. It's about being able to get insulin into your cells. It's about being able to normalize your cortisol levels. It's about being able to metabolize the foods you're eating. So it's a side effect of... getting your waist circumference and taking the weight off and getting your insulin levels down as yeah, you might look better in your little skirt or your pants or whatever you're wearing, but the reality of it, it's saving your life. It's healing you. we don't, you know, again, we've been so brainwashed that our healing is gonna come in a pill from that the great doctor is going to bestow upon us and that's what we need to do to heal. And it's changing. I mean, I've been doing this for over two decades now and I see the shift, I see more awareness, but I also think I still live in my holistic bubble hanging out with people like you and stuff. And when you really step outside of that, has it really shifted? Not as much as we'd like to think. There are more people coming into our lane, but our lane is still. very small. It's not a six lane highway yet. and we even patients who come to me, I have to spend a lot of time just restructuring what they're expecting because they want to come to me because they don't want to take a pharmaceutical, but they still want to take things, right? They just don't want to, they want it to be melatonin or mushrooms. I do think that there is an inherent pattern that everyone has been trained in. And that is the symptom solution, symptom solution, symptom solution, right? So there is an interesting part of it. that I remember I was giving a talk once and I was talking about sleep and I was talking to a room full of women with metastatic breast cancer who, know, their messaging has been that there is no cure for them and that they will all die of their disease. And that may be true in the big picture, but you and I know that we have countless people who have a diagnosis of metastatic disease. who are living with no active disease, no signs of disease and living years and years and years well beyond what was projected for them. So here I am giving this talk and at the end, this woman put up her hand and she said, you know, I don't know if what you're saying is true or not, but I'll tell you that I would rather blame the medicine for not working than Wow. failure on my part. And I think that that is in some ways true. Like it's not me, it's you. Right? And your medicine didn't work or your treatment didn't work or that kind of thing because it's a hard pill. No pun intended. It's a hard pill for people to swallow that like they weren't good enough and what they fail to realize is there's no such thing and you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be better. Right? You just have to be mindful. You just have to be aware of what you're doing and how it's contributing to health rather than disease. Because so many of the things that happen in the confines of conventional medicine have really nothing at all to do with health. And actually, quite the contrary. What they're doing is deteriorating people's health, sometimes quickly, rapidly, significantly. Yeah, that gave me chills when you said what she said and I think we, you know, we do, we need to. It's like, so one of my teachers, Dr. Thomas Rao from Switzerland, I remember him teaching very early, breast cancer is never an emergency, right? It took years to grow and so you have time to really explore. what you want to do, what your options are, get your team together. Now, since a couple of years, that's a little different because there's something known as turbo cancers now, where they are just going from zero to 350. which has always been true of inflammatory breast cancer. I do wanna say that, that to me there are, that breast cancer, I agree with you, it is not emergency, though it feels like one, it is not an emergency, it is definitely not a physical emergency, it feels like an emotional emergency for sure, but not a physical emergency with three exceptions. One is inflammatory breast cancer. And you know if you have inflammatory breast cancer because you go from having what is essentially a normal breast to a breast that is bright red, filled with tumor. And this can happen in as little as a week and as much as a month. You go from normal to red breast, red swollen, ademinous breast filled with tumor. So inflammatory breast cancer is absolutely positively an emergency. That's something that needs to be dealt with right away. The other thing that is an emergency from my perspective is someone who has metastatic disease to the bone that has caused a fracture and is causing intractable pain because it is literally impossible to heal when you're suffering. And so we need to do something fast to relieve the suffering. And the third thing that I consider an emergency is anyone who has metastasis or spread of their breast cancer to their brain because the brain exists in a fixed space. Like the skull is a fixed space. You can only swell the brain so much before it will cut off the blood supply, which is not conducive to living. So if you meet those three criteria, All you have to do is meet one of them, not all three. Those are emergencies from my perspective. That is something that needs to be dealt with like today, this week, definitely. Everyone else, you have time. Do you have time? know, and I love what you say, you know, it feels like an emergency but you can you know, you can really get clear and What is healing mean to you and like, you know, I have to have these deep conversations with patients not about okay We're gonna take you know, high dose vitamin C three times a week. But what what is this? What are you expecting? What are you expecting of yourself? What what are you feeling and and if you are feeling guilty or less than or damage, you know, it's okay to have your feelings there, you know, you don't push them aside because those aren't good feelings, we have to bring them up and we have to invite them in and have tea with them and work through them so that they are not causing more damage because unresolved, you know, if you look at it from just an energetic from a biofield perspective, you know, tumors are blocked. stagnant energy. And what does that come from? Comes from blocked stagnant emotions. And so we have to, you know, we have to just be okay with where we are and where we're at and get curious and know it's all for growth and for learning. And it's okay to not be okay. That's going to be part of you getting towards towards your cure and your healing. Yeah, and it also kind of forces you to be introspective and to ask, what are we meant to learn here? What is your body trying to tell you? Because these are all messages, without question, they're messages. And I do want to give a shame. shameless plug from my book, The Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer, because the reason that I wrote this book is for the woman who is diagnosed, who is asked to make probably one of the most, if not the most important decisions that she will make in her life. And people are rushed into these decisions without understanding their disease, without understanding their pathology, without understanding the treatment options, without understanding the long-term implications of all of these treatment options and without knowing what's possible. Because what's possible and what we have seen is truly amazing. Yeah, and it's interesting because I have gone with patients to their oncologist appointment. I haven't done this in quite a while, but I have gone in the past with patients. They're like, Dr. Stills, will you go with me? So I'll go with them. And the fear that is... coming from the end. Like I have gone in there and been like, my God, I think you need to do chemo. it's like, and then I have to go like, wait a second, take a breath and know what you know, because it's scary and they don't talk with you, they talk. at you, they talk down to you for the most part, not, you know, I'm sure there's some good ones out there, but it can be very overwhelming and you're scared and you're afraid you're going to die and you can be rushed into making decisions that you then later regret. And so what we're just trying to say is like, take a breath, exhale, unless you're any of those emergency categories that Dr. Jen was saying, and really think about it from all perspectives. Think about who you want on your team, what you want your team to be, and think about what's going to be... You know, I never tell patients what to do. I just give them options. I give them education. Because at the end of the day, you have to feel good about how you're dealing with and treating your disease process. You have to lie your head on the pillow because if you choose not to do chemo... But you lie your head on the pillow every night going, my God, I didn't do chemo and now I'm going to die. That's not a good state for your nervous system to be in. And if you choose to do chemo and then you think this chemo is going to kill me, I shouldn't have done it, that's not a good state for your nervous system either. So you have to take some time and do some soul searching and some digging and become a little Sherlock Holmes of investigation of what's going to work best for you. Yeah, but I for sure would not engage in any treatment that you don't absolutely positively believe in. Because if you don't believe that that treatment is going to work for you, I can promise you it's not going to work for you. Yeah. have to, you have to feel good. You know, even from the, the little things of swallowing your vitamins or taking your melatonin or taking your vitamin D, you know, there's, I think there was like that study, right? Where I think they were actually doing chemo, but they had them envisioning the chemo was Pac-Man and it was eating up and they did better. And so eat, so for everything, you know, Yeah, when you're taking your supplements, not, this is a pain. I wish, you know, I'm so grateful. I got these things. This is what they do for me when I swallow this and activates my natural killer cells and, you know, and really getting fully involved so that you're giving it's like extra juju, extra energy to what the remedies are going to do for you in the first place. 100%. If all you're thinking about is pill fatigue, then this regimen is not doing anything for you. But if you're thinking about, my God, I am giving my body what it needs to enable it to do what it's supposed to do, that is going to have a very different effect on what's happening without question. it's funny because I do deal with and help coach patients through pill fatigue. I guess because I'm so deeply connected to my remedies, to what I call my medicine. I mean, I take a lot of pills and I never have pill fatigue. It's like, just, they're like, they're my helpers. Yeah. perspective. As someone who starts off the day with 30 tablets of energy bits, it's like, I just don't think about it. Right? Like, yeah, but 30 of them. You know? So we were recently at a conference together, and I know it's a conference you go to every year, A4M. And I just wanted to ask you about a couple of things that, something that resonated with me, something that resonated with you. So for me, I went into that conference thinking, I am not getting on the GLP-1 bandwagon. The Ozempic, the Wigobi, the I'm not doing it, I'm not going there. I think we've like, the pendulum has swung way too far that way. There's too many people on it. There's abuse of it. It's hurting people. I just was an a hell no. And this conference that we were at this year, the focus of this conference was actually metabolic health. And 30 % of the lectures mentioned GOP1s. So I thought, well, you know, I am at a conference with 7,000 people, a lot of whom I really respect, who have like, taken the time to walk out of conventional medicine because they knew that that system wasn't the be all end all and they were willing to put up with being ostracized by their peers like me. So. I have since reconsidered and I'm just curious for you to share how you use the GLP-1s in your practice. Because I know you do. them for a number of years now and been using them wisely. They're not a, you know, you're going to keep eating candy bars and not get off the couch and not, you know, care about your health. And we're going to just give you a big shot. and give you side effects and all those things, but they can be, you know, very helpful for inflammation, for brain health, for kidney health. So they have a lot of far reaching effects. And when we're talking about breast cancer, we know that being obese or even carrying extra weight, 20 pounds can put you at a higher risk. And so if you have truly to be overweight. You can just be over fat. You can just have too high a fat to muscle ratio and have metabolic dysfunction, which... got the in body machine for our new clinic so we can measure all that right when you walk in the door we will know and so yeah, but they can be you know, they're also there's interesting like aspects of them helping with addiction and so if you're if you're overweight or overfed or whatever your high BMI, whatever it is, you know, it can help with the mindless eating, with the emotional eating. So I've always used them in micro doses. There's no reason to overdose someone, you know, so everyone's on a different dose. We're finding the lowest dose that works for them without side effects because you don't need to be puking. all day long and you have to be committed. have to be weight training, you have to be building muscle, you have to be hitting your protein goals, you have to be on board with taking care and being a good steward of your health and your physical. And so in that respect, I have found them very valuable. Sorry, I'm battling with my golden retriever right now. He was just like, okay, mom, you've been working enough today. They are special breed. don't, don't, you know, don't be going to the dock in the box on the street who's handing out semaglutide and GLPs and telling you you can drop 40 pounds and not caring about you as a whole. But when used appropriately as part of a comprehensive plan. They can, you know, and it's not the first place I go. Let's get your hormones balanced. Let's make sure your thyroid is working. Let's make sure you're sleeping. Let's look at your actual diet. Let's look at your movement. You know, because there are some use even just as like a longevity, but first let's get you handled, right? And then we can. this is true of everyone. This is not just true of breast cancer, right? For everyone. We need to get your hormones handled. We need to make sure that your thyroid is working properly. We need you sleeping. We need you lifting weights. We need you eating properly for you, right? And I think all of us can agree that everyone's diet should contain zero, little to zero processed food, right? Like we should all be eating real food. I think that that is a very fair statement across the board. Yeah, I mean, your food is, you know, your food, whether you are what you eat, you know, you have to really make sure you are, you know, you are what you absorb. So you got to eat because I see a lot of women who are hitting their protein goals and then they're protein deficient when I'm looking in their blood and I'm looking at their at globulin or I'm looking at metabolites. And so we have to make sure we have good absorptive powers that our digestive tract is working, that our hydrochloric acid is optimized, that our bile's flowing, that our pancreas is secreting. it kind of, you you just keep taking it a step. But yes, it's, you know, people ask me like, who are your most motivated patients? And I was, it's patients dealing with cancer, right? Because we're afraid of dying. And it's patients who have been dealing with infertility and want to have a baby. And so, you know, very motivated, right? Motivated to bring life or motivated to keep life. But I would love us to just all be motivated to preserve because it's so interesting to me, like when we get a severe diagnosis, We will stop the wine. We will stop the smoking. We will start eating healthy. We'll start moving our body. We'll go to the infrared sauna. But why do we have to wait? Why can't we just say, I'm going to do this now? I am going to work on preventing and staying healthy. I'm going to wake up and say, I feel freaking fantabulous. What can I do to keep feeling this way? Rather than so it's it's responding to life rather than reacting to a scary diagnosis and that's you know that's what I pray and hope. in childhood. That's the problem. Is that we raise our kids on a processed food diet of convenience and then they get to adulthood and we're like, okay, now you need to be healthy. And they don't know how. They don't know how, they never learned. We just start with the kids. Yeah. I'm a bubby. It's my favorite thing. I took my... Do you say bubby? We're gonna need a bubby squared here. So I took the girls, we had Candy-topia come to town and it's like this fun thing you go through and there's swings and it was so much fun. And when you get out, it dumps you into a candy store. It's like anywhere you go, always dumps you into the gift shop. And I was so happy because the little one wasn't talking at the time, but the older one. She didn't even know what that stuff was. She wasn't like, Bobby, she was just like, all right, I guess we're done. Let's go. I don't know what this is. And I was like, yes, job well done. yes, exactly, exactly. You get a gold star for that. So another place where I find a lot of controversy is around the circulating tumor cell tests. And I know that you have spent a lot of time examining this and you actually learned. something about one of the providers at this last A4M meeting. So I'm just curious as to where you have arrived with all of that. Yeah, I have, you I've been doing circulating tumor cell testing for a long time and it's always, it's always been glitchy. You know, we, trust the labs we use because we, we split samples and so we draw blood from one patient and we say it's two and then we see what, what we get. And sometimes we're very disappointed. And so, we've had this happen and that, you know, I've been through the gamut of them and I don't know if I should name names or anything, but there's a lot of them out there that are not very specific or sensitive. And so at the conference we were at, I did come across this cancer check labs and I have a couple of tests that I ordered. I always guinea pig it on myself. But this really seemed exciting to me because they are not... using DNA, which is just a scrap, which is just a part of the cell and can miss things. They're reproducible. They have like a 99 % sensitivity, specificity. They're checking over 200 different types of cancer and they're putting it in front of an actual... pathologist who's like hand counting the cells. So you're getting an actual, you know, in the world of AI and like, it's nice to have an actual human, right? And so I'm super excited about this because I mean, we all have cancer cells circulating, you know, six month old babies got cancer cells circulating, but I'm excited that this can be a really good screening tool along with CRT along with QT along with the new tiers, the oreo. So, you know, screening in the blood, like you can, you know, I can see things in the blood where a neutrophil lymphocyte, you know, the neutrophils are going really high. You can see LDH rising, you can see, you know, you can see things, but this is just another way to look because at some time, at some point, the circulating tumor cells become too abundant and then they're forming tumor and you can catch it by doing this kind of testing when that tumor is like the size of a pinhead not going to be picked up in an MRI or anything but you can pick it up and you can start being preventative. So I'm excited about that. I think that's all of our goals, right? To be able to find things that are actionable really early on and make changes for people before they are in extremis, before they have a crisis on their hands. And of course, my dogs found this time to start to fight. Your dog's like, yeah, let's hear it for cancer check labs. I don't have a lot to say on it because I just, you know, we just got back a few weeks ago. So, but I'm, yeah. But I'm excited about it. I am excited about it. Well, this has, as usual, been an amazing conversation. And I know that people are going to be able to take so much from this and really help them to focus their health and know what path they need to take. So I loved this conversation. Where can people find you? Well, we have a new clinic opening called Lasting Wellness Center. We finally have a name. And so that's in Scottsdale, which is where I am now. know, Dr. Still, drstills.com will be to the new clinic and But yeah, will be, I've got this, it's like I'm giving birth to octuplets. It's a 7,000 square foot clinic and it's like having many babies all at the same time. So, but I really wanted a place where women and men could come, whether it's to prevent, to treat, to stop recurrent, whatever it is that's up for them. but where they could come and have hands-on treatments and get some therapies that aren't readily available. You when I first started doing this, I had to send pretty much... the majority of my patients with a cancer diagnosis, I would send them to Switzerland or over to Germany because they were just doing so much more than we were doing here in the States. And now I feel like other than extreme hyperthermia, we're kind of providing it here in the States. So it's nice to have options where you don't have to get on a transatlantic flight and fly far away where you can heal in the United States. yeah, it's amazing. though let us do extreme hypothermia too. Maybe something to aspire to. Well, I thank you so much for being with us here today and for the amazing work that you do. I know that you are making a huge contribution in the cancer space and the world is a better place with you in it. Right back at you, Sister Bubby. Thank you for having me. And I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. And if you did, like, send us a comment, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and get in touch with Dr. Sharon Stills. She is on all the social media outlets and has this amazing clinic coming. And know that I will be back here next week, same time, same place. It's Dr. Jen. Thank