#356 Pediatric Cancer Solutions with Dr. Dagmara Beine

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am honored to be joined by  Dr. Dagmara Beine, who holds a PhD in Integrative Medicine. Dagmara's focus changed to integrative oncology with the diagnosis of cancer in her 3-year-old daughter, Zuza. In this episode, we talk about Dagmara's story, what to do when your child is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, effective therapies to use with conventional treatments, and Dagmara's new book, A Parent's Guide to Childhood Cancer.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Understanding diagnoses and how to go about seeking a second opinion
• How to assemble a medical team comprised of conventional and integrative experts
• What are different integrative therapies that are safe for pediatrics?
• How the prevalence of childhood cancer has changed

ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Dagmara Beine is revolutionizing the Pediatric Cancer World! She holds a PhD in Integrative Medicine, and has over a decade of experience in Emergency Medicine, as well as being the CEO and practitioner at her Wisconsin based integrative health clinic, Zuzas Way. Her expertise is only surpassed by her passion, which is fueled by the fire that burns within the soul of a mother whose child has battled cancer. Her daughter's four fights against AML lead to Dagmara being steadfast in her knowledge that there is a better way. Lead by this passion, she is uncompromising in her treatment of patients as a whole, looking after their minds and bodies. She uses a terrain based approach, including modalities such as lifestyle modification, Mistletoe therapy, LDN, Ozone, targeted supplements and more. Her new book, A Parent's Guide to Childhood Cancer: Supporting Your Child with Integrative Therapies Based on a Metabolic Approach, is available now and making waves throughout the world as we begin to treat pediatric cancer patients in A Better Way. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://zuzasway.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dagmarabeine/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: ****https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY:

• Over restriction is dead; if your practitioner is recommending this, they are stuck in 2010 and not evolving
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

EPISODE SPONSOR:
A special thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode. Get a discount on any of their products. Use the code lessstressed10

Transcript

[00:00:00] Dr. Dagmara Beine: These are all little things, right? Cancer is never caused by one thing, but it's Most kiddos have an imbalance of maybe three or four of these areas that's helping contribute to this diagnosis.

[00:00:11] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:40] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:00:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on the Less Stressed Life, I have Dr. Dagmara Beine, who's revolutionizing the pediatric cancer world. She holds a PhD in integrative medicine and has over a decade of experience in emergency medicine, as well as being the CEO and practitioner at her Wisconsin based integrative health clinic, Zuza's Way.

[00:01:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Her expertise is only surpassed by passion, which is fueled by the fire that burns within the soul of a mother whose child has battled cancer, which just hits a lot. Her daughter's four fights against AML lead Dagmara being steadfast in knowledge that there's a better way. Led by this passion, she is uncompromising in her treatments of patients as a whole, looking after their minds and bodies.

[00:01:38] Christa Biegler, RD: She uses a terrain based approach, including modalities such as lifestyle modification, mistletoe therapy, LDN, ozone targeted supplements, and more. Her new book and integrative approach to pediatric cancer will be coming out soon. Making waves through the world to treat pediatric cancer patients in a better way.

[00:01:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Welcome, Dr. Beine. 

[00:01:55] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Thank you so much. And actually the book title has changed. So it is a parent's guide to childhood cancer. That's helpful. Yes. Which is exactly what it is. Like it's a guide. We had to call it what it was. It's a guide for caregivers who are on this journey and need a guide because no, it's not.

[00:02:17] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There's nothing out there like it yet. 

[00:02:19] Christa Biegler, RD: Perfect. Let's start with your story because it is where that passion and that fire and that's where this comes from. I love knowing the behind the scenes of Wow, what was it like transitioning? I always love to ask people also about their transition into kind of their traditional medical and to, the journey that is creating their own practice and whatnot, but it's really led by this story of your daughter.

[00:02:41] Christa Biegler, RD: So let's just start our conversation with that because that's going to lead. That's going to guide us a lot in this conversation today. 

[00:02:48] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah, was probably about a decade into working as a physician assistant or now. Now they're called physician associates in the emergency department and had 3 year old daughter and 18 month old son, my husband also physician assistant in the ER.

[00:03:06] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So we were very much so in conventional medicine, maybe considered ourselves a little bit natural, but. Pretty conventional. Which was what our training was. And our then three and a half year old daughter Zuza just started exhibiting She was our first. So like a loss of appetite and some leg pains and some mood stuff, but nothing that. That you could really pinpoint or that you couldn't maybe just question like, is this what it's supposed to be like? Because I've never had a 3. 5 year old. And we took her to the pediatrician and demanded labs because it's crazy that in, our conventional system, kids don't get labs, so we don't really even have a baseline of what.

[00:03:51] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Your kids normalize. And her labs came back a little wonky, but again, nothing that you couldn't explain by like a cold, a white blood cell count can be a little bit low when you have a cold. A neutrophil count can be a little low because you have a cold. Something just didn't seem right to us.

[00:04:07] Dr. Dagmara Beine: It took a couple months, but eventually, on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 o'clock after dragging her to yet another pediatrician and demanding labs because I knew something wasn't right I got the phone call that it looks like your daughter has a type of leukemia. And, we will be contacting your local hospital, the hematology oncology floor and they will most likely be calling you next.

[00:04:37] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Your world just stops. Cancer has this very like when we hear the word cancer, we automatically think the worst. And we'll talk through that, there's truth in there and there isn't because there's a lot that we can do, but our world stopped, fear took over and then we were sucked in to the conventional oncology world of really so much more fear of we have to start treatment tomorrow.

[00:05:05] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And you're like, yeah, of course she has leukemia. We have to start treatment tomorrow without any thought or breath or how do you know she has leukemia? What type of leukemia does she have? Like you, you become so overcome with fear that those questions that should be asked aren't asked. And so we did what everybody else does is the next day we started chemotherapy on my three and a half year old daughter only to find out a week later.

[00:05:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: She had the wrong type of leukemia. She actually has AML. It was the wrong chemotherapy. You can't get diagnosed with cancer in 24 hours. You will never know what type of cancer you have until biopsy results come back, whether you're talking about solid tumors or blood cancers. And. We, went head on with chemotherapy.

[00:05:54] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I was still very much conventional. I didn't know that there was anything that needed to be done to help support my daughter very fast. She had every side effect you could imagine. She stopped eating. We had to put a feeding tube in. And my first kind of aha, light bulb moment was when they gave me the options of what kind of formula I should be putting through this NG tube because it's, she's three and a half, so it's not like baby formula and every single thing that was offered through the hospital was just crap.

[00:06:24] Dr. Dagmara Beine: It was like high fructose corn syrup and seed oils and corn. And the amount of work it took me to be able to. Yet my daughter organic. And that just really snowballed. I then started looking for books, information, Googling, integrated pediatric support, nothing. And then I started looking for a practitioner and there's a lot of practitioners and a lot of books who are happy to help adults, but that door gets shut as soon as they hear that it's a child.

[00:06:58] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And so I didn't quite know it then. It took me about a year after she was initially diagnosed. But I wanted to become the practitioner that I needed when this happened almost a decade ago now. And so I have spent my last 10 years, going back to school being blessed to find amazing mentors in the integrative cancer world because it's a messy world just as well. And unfortunately, my daughter's journey didn't end there. She was in remission for five years, and she had more and more integrative support as I learned how to support her better and heal her gut and help her body detoxify. But she did relapse five years later from the original diagnosis, and the last.

[00:07:49] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Four years have been very bumpy. So we just came home three days ago 

[00:07:56] Dr. Dagmara Beine: from 

[00:07:57] Dr. Dagmara Beine: her third bone marrow transplant. And I think Zuza's story so this book that I wrote, it's not a book that's, I'm not selling a cure. And I think Zuza's story speaks to that. But I know that there's a better way on this journey.

[00:08:11] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I know that I've seen the difference, now in hundreds of patients, but in my own daughter, that's where it started. What was her journey like when she wasn't supported? And how can chemotherapy and other cancer treatments look like when you are supporting them? You can make them less toxic, more effective.

[00:08:32] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And I really believe that the reason she's been able to have more toxic treatment is because we've done so much through it and in between. 

[00:08:40] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So the book, oozed out of me. I wrote it really through her, all her hospitalizations. I wrote it in the hospital. And it's a guide that takes a parent.

[00:08:50] Dr. Dagmara Beine: From literally the moment that their child gets diagnosed, if they're lucky enough, that's why I wanted a book to be out there, because they're often not lucky enough to find somebody like me or somebody to tell them to stop and breathe. But maybe they'll be able to find this book all the way through, how to get through treatment, side effects, and then.

[00:09:08] Dr. Dagmara Beine: This whole other world of there's so much that needs to be done when we're told by conventional oncology. You're done. Ring the bell. Everything's done. You're good. That's really when the healing starts for our children with all the gut healing and everything we need to do to try to prevent relapse.

[00:09:26] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So it's a guide that they can use, they don't have to read the whole thing. They can just use whatever chapters apply to their children. 

[00:09:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I love that. I told you, I think before we hit record, for some reason, I'm very drawn to this topic just to answer in general. And I've been fortunate to have some really amazing interviews about the topic.

[00:09:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Some being, I don't know if Dr. Michael Robinson out of Chicago, he's at integrative cancer center there. I don't remember. I don't remember every detail, but some very good ones. And you, when you talk about your daughter's story initially she has leukemia and we're going to start chemotherapy tomorrow.

[00:10:00] Christa Biegler, RD: And that was 10 years ago. Some people it's interesting because that was your experience. And now I wonder if the experience is sometimes different than that. Not necessarily because anyone. Believes that you need a moment to stop and breathe and consider the options, but because of the common landscape now, and I don't know if it's kids have a little bit of a fast track over adults where I think the care is a little bit, sluggish sometimes just because there's so much there's so much coming in the pipe. But I would love to ask you about the landscape or prevalence of childhood cancer now and 10 years ago when. Your daughter was dealing, first started dealing with this, like, how has it changed? 

[00:10:44] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. One way it's changing is that now we're up to 46 kids every day in the United States being diagnosed and 10 years ago it wasn't, but now it is the number one cause of death by disease in kiddos.

[00:10:57] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There is a really big difference, you touched on this, between when an adult gets diagnosed with cancer and when a child gets diagnosed with cancer in this country. And the difference is an adult can choose. how much conventional treatment they want to do when they want to start. 

[00:11:19] Dr. Dagmara Beine: A child under the age of 18 in the United States can not choose.

[00:11:25] Dr. Dagmara Beine: They have to go with what's considered standard of care with oncology. Otherwise there is a real risk of child protective services getting involved. And, other than more pediatric cancer and maybe some things like cannabis use and some supplements like L glutamine being more, 10 years ago when I wanted to use L glutamine to prevent mucositis, I was looked at strangely, and now I They actually handed it to me in a syringe as like one of the things that they're going to give her.

[00:11:59] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There actually hasn't been that much that's changed. The drugs haven't changed because less than 4 percent of the money that's donated for cancer research goes to pediatrics. Which is insane because most of it should be going to pediatric because these kids have a life to live, right? And 95 percent of cancer, pediatric cancer survivors have a chronic late effect later in life.

[00:12:28] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So whether that's a secondary cancer, congestive heart failure, endocrine issues. So there really hasn't. I feel like there's been a much bigger change in the integrative oncology world when it comes to adults. We know so much more. There's so many practitioners who practice integrative adult oncology.

[00:12:50] Dr. Dagmara Beine: More and more adults are looking to implement more integrative support and therapies, but in the pediatric world, maybe there's more parents that are curious in how they can support their child because they're watching some of these doctors or influencers on social media talk about cancer and how there's more that you should be doing.

[00:13:12] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But it is still very much so discouraged by most oncology teams to do anything. They're just told, don't do anything. You're going to hurt your child's treatment. And it's not because they know that it's because they don't have knowledge in what you're even recommending. And so it's easier just to say, don't do it.

[00:13:32] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Because you're scared of it because you don't know what, how, what mistletoe is or how it's going to affect treatment or even fish oil, something as simple that's been studied in pediatric oncology and shown how amazing it is to have a child on fish oil. I had them come back to me and say, oh, you can't get fish oil because it's got heavy metals in it or something like it's funny what they'll come up with.

[00:13:55] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But look at what they're giving your child, right? Yeah. In comparison. 

[00:13:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Is that one of the hardest things for you, honestly, is when you're trying to treat in this care team and they're like, You cannot and you're thinking I am using the best quality fish oil that is third party tested to not have this in the first place.

[00:14:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:14:15] Dr. Dagmara Beine: That is the hardest part for families who work with me because I've gotten to a point where I'm. I'm not asking permission. I know what I'm doing. And I have learned by trying to ask permission in my situation with my team that has not gone very far. So that to me is a non issue, but for families who work with me I feel them because I know that they're being told don't do anything.

[00:14:43] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Being told this is going to make treatment ineffective. And then there's me saying, how can you not do this? This is going to make this chemotherapy less toxic and more effective. A very small example of that is there's a chemotherapy that's used in pediatrics and adult. called doxorubicin and it is a pro accident and it is very toxic to your heart cells.

[00:15:06] Dr. Dagmara Beine: It's used for breast cancer and it's used in a lot of pediatric cancers and kids will literally have to stop using the chemotherapy through treatment because they're, they begin to have heart failure or 15 years from now you get heart failure. And by using something as simple as grapeseed extract, 

[00:15:25] Dr. Dagmara Beine: we 

[00:15:25] Dr. Dagmara Beine: can reduce that by 80%.

[00:15:27] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Why wouldn't you do that? But it's, it's just a matter of I've learned that it's not my job to ever convince families. My job is to give them what I would do the best, the best information for their child based on their child's story and labs and epigenetics and their treatment plan.

[00:15:45] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And it really needs to be up to the parents to to decide what they want to do. Because it's me, usually most of my patients at this point are virtual. So it's me in this little zoom box against a team of like doctors at a huge institution in white coats. And that can be intimidating, right?

[00:16:03] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So to say how could they not know? Because they're experts in chemotherapy. They're experts in radiation. They're not experts in your child's terrain. They're not experts in nutrition. I think that's the difference that parents don't understand. 

[00:16:21] Christa Biegler, RD: One thing I feel really comforted by now more and more after I've done some of these interviews and gotten on the trail of some things is the good news is that we do have a lot of amazing resources out there related to integrative oncology.

[00:16:32] Christa Biegler, RD: I think. I think compared to what I was expecting, there are some textbooks that are a little more conventional. There are some. Physical and digital textbooks that are not so conventional, a little more integrative, right? A lot more supplementation. And So thankful for any trailblazer in this area, because I think one of the reasons I know why I'm so touched by this topic, as soon as someone near you is diagnosed that it feels unfair and like, why would this happen to this young person?

[00:17:01] Christa Biegler, RD: And if you're close to them, like you, it's just it's like totally different. Like you, you just have this stark, we all just have this epiphany on how we come about things. And then of course, with cancer rates approaching one and two in adults. I can't really see how this is acceptable.

[00:17:18] Christa Biegler, RD: So I'm just like, I have, I feel drawn to it because it's not that I don't have any choice, but it's this is going to be here regardless. I'm just going to get ready for it. And as soon as I said that they came to the door almost as well. 

[00:17:30] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. Yeah. It's really good to start having these conversations and I think with pediatric cancer, it's such a hard topic for people.

[00:17:39] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And I remember that. I remember being a young mom and just the idea when Zuzia had abnormal labs that she might have cancer and going to the hematology oncology unit before we knew she did and seeing the bald kids in the wheelchairs and it just It's too hard to think about. And so we shut out like, Oh, that's just a kid on a poster, right?

[00:18:03] Dr. Dagmara Beine: That's not my kids. That's never going to be my kids. But now the statistics are becoming pretty significant for cancer in general. Like we're at one out of two or one out of three. If you're born now that you're going to have a diagnosis, whether that's when you're young or when you're a 30 or 40, which is now the new kind of time where everybody gets.

[00:18:24] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So I think it's really good to start having conversations around even in pediatric cancer. Most of the time, 95 percent of the time. It's preventable. It is not just bad luck. And I think that's really hard for people to grasp. When we think of an adult who gets cancer, we're like, Okay we think of smoking and drinking and eating crappy, and we're like, okay that sort of makes sense.

[00:18:51] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But when a child gets diagnosed with cancer, it gets flipped upside down for us because we do, but a lot of people don't know how toxic our world is. And the babies are so little, they're born umbilical cord blood now has over 200 toxins and their little kidneys and livers can't process the amount of glyphosate that's being sprayed, in the golf courses and by their neighbors and that's in their food, toxins are just, that's the world we've created, unfortunately.

[00:19:21] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But I want parents to listen to conversations like this. To be brave enough to listen when they're not on a cancer journey, to hear there's things you can do in your life to prevent cancer in your family, and that includes your kids. 

[00:19:36] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah I see. I want to talk about all those things, but and I want to talk about terrain and it's going to overlap for sure.

[00:19:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I see a lot of kids with skin issues to your point. It's these are immature detoxification systems and guess what? This same stuff, if your child has a skin rash, they're not necessarily going to have cancer, but learning how to support the systems that create that is going to support you.

[00:19:57] Christa Biegler, RD: You don't know about the cancer. You never are going to have. Yeah. So that's a good feeling. It's I go forth in life of Oh, I'm just preventing it after you start to understand physiology, which is my approach. It's yes, I'm just going to support these systems to function more properly than they do in the top.

[00:20:14] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. Because we all make cancer cells, we all make them. It's just that our immune system, our terrain, our environment, like we've made it healthy enough. Yeah. If we haven't been diagnosed to for us to never know about it, right? 

[00:20:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I 

[00:20:30] Christa Biegler, RD: also wonder if we would all go looking for it. If we would just find it as well.

[00:20:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I've been we're having that internal conversation in our team with some. And it's there. I'm neutral about it. I don't have necessarily feeling, but there's some advanced. Scanning technology now, right? That's becoming popular. And I think to myself. If I go look for that, I think I've been, which is fine.

[00:20:52] Christa Biegler, RD: I don't have any opinion about it. I just feel like we have this. And are we clearing it? Or is it turning on? Is it becoming malignant, et cetera? So we talked about, you've mentioned terrain a couple of times. I love asking people about their definition of terrain. How you would you describe it to someone who's I don't have any idea what you're talking about.

[00:21:10] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah, so the way I explain it to parents, I usually have two stories and neither of them are original for me. I'm sure I've taken these from somewhere. One way that I describe to parents how I function differently than their oncologist. is the weed, right? If cancer is a weed and your oncology team wants to get rid of the cancer, they're going to pull the weed, so surgery, or they're going to spray it with a whole bunch of pesticides.

[00:21:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: toxins, chemotherapy, radiation, and they're going to hope that weed never grows back. I'm going to look at the soil that the weed grew in, and I'm going to say, what's wrong with the soil? Let's look at everything that's in the soil and let's balance it so that this weed doesn't grow back.

[00:21:54] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Another way that I explain it to my families is a fish in a fish bowl. So if you take a fish, let's say you have a fish in a fish bowl and you just haven't been taken great care of. It's water and it gets murky and icky and the fish doesn't look so good. So you take the fish out and you fix it. It doesn't matter how you fix it.

[00:22:12] Dr. Dagmara Beine: You fix it with chemo radiation, high dose vitamin C, mistletoe. You fix it. If you take that fish and put it back into the same water, it's going to get sick again. That same water represents what we refer to as our terrain. Our terrain is all the things internally in our body and externally in our environment that affect us.

[00:22:34] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Positively or negatively. So I talk in the book about seven broken terrains with the permission of Dr Nisha winters, who originally came up with the top 10 broken terrains. I got rid of some that didn't apply to kiddos, combined some and came up with epigenetics, which are huge for kids. They're huge for all of us.

[00:23:00] Dr. Dagmara Beine: You are born with you get genes from your parents, and then you also get epigenetics, and those are just hiccups, and they're hiccups that sometimes can be good for you, and sometimes can be bad for you, and there's some very common hiccups that kiddos who get diagnosed with cancer have. MTHFR, PON1, we can get into them or not, but there's some just very common ones that I see.

[00:23:23] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Our kids blood sugar, so one out of four kiddos right now are pre diabetic, so that help, that doesn't cause cancer, but it helps contribute. These are all little things, right? Cancer is never caused by one thing, but it's Most kiddos have an imbalance of maybe three or four of these areas that's helping contribute to this diagnosis.

[00:23:43] Dr. Dagmara Beine: You can look back and say, Oh, that's probably why they ended up getting diagnosed. Toxicity. So we've touched on that. I'm really big on glyphosate. I think it's a big contributor to. Pediatric cancer and leukemias and lymphomas. If you look at a graph when glyphosate was introduced into our food system and our everything system, it literally goes up as pediatric cancer goes up.

[00:24:10] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So there's just no denying it. And most kiddos who I test we all have glyphosate toxicity at this point. No one's at zero, but they're through the roof. Like 900 percent crazy levels. Our microbiome. If we're a C section baby, if we were breastfed, if we got antibiotics under the age of 2 or 12, all those things affect our gut health.

[00:24:31] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And gut health is very important going into treatment because we do have multiple studies showing us that you may be a lot less responsive to treatment if you have an unhealthy microbiome. Our immune system. So when I think of our immune system, I think of, the child who got way too much Tylenol because mom and dad were just doing what they were told.

[00:24:54] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Inflammation. I think of the child who got way too much steroids for that eczema rash. Again, eczema is not going to ensure that your child gets diagnosed with cancer, but it's all these little decisions. And then stress and mental health. We also have an epidemic in this country right now with kids and young adults and their mental health and anxiety and depression.

[00:25:16] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And I do think, and we have studies actually on pediatric cancer and HPA access, so their stress response and how that affects their treatment. So all those things, with an adult, you look at. What contributed to your cancer first, because you have time with a child, we look at how can we support your treatment?

[00:25:37] Dr. Dagmara Beine: What do we need to get you on? What should you be eating to get you through treatment? And then when the dust settles, then we sit down with parents and talk about, okay, let's figure out through testing through the story. What helped contribute to your child's diagnosis. And then let's focus on those areas.

[00:25:58] Dr. Dagmara Beine: In what can we do to clean up those areas in your child's life? So if it was toxins, what toxins, where are they coming from? Where can we do better? Is it? in the non organic food? Do you live behind a golf course, or is it microbiome? Oh, your kid got four antibiotics in the last year for an ear infection.

[00:26:19] Dr. Dagmara Beine: What can we do if an ear infection comes up again that's not an antibiotic? So we try to focus because this is such an overwhelming journey. You really have to just take little baby steps in empowering and educating parents. 

[00:26:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I want to mention 1 of my 1st interviews that really made my mouth drop open was it was episode 80.

[00:26:40] Christa Biegler, RD: We're in like the 300 now with Dr. Arthur Frankel, and he was so cute. He was transitioning between institutions because he was having this epiphany with all of his research around microbiota. And then. He wanted to find an aligned institution to work with and I, I don't know what happened to him, but he was between institutions and I remember he did this mouse study and he said it was so annoying because, we just had to feed them all these little things right around microbiome and essentially, and I don't remember the results, but he said they were so ridiculous.

[00:27:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Like the cancer was so much better when the microbiome of the mice was better. I didn't even submit it because they wouldn't have believed me because it was so dramatic essentially. 

[00:27:20] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. It's so dramatic. 

[00:27:22] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. There's a lot of, most studies unfortunately are on adults, not on kids, but there is a lot of adult studies coming out specifically with immune therapies because immune therapies are like the next.

[00:27:33] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Conventional treatment on the rise. And in what a difference having a healthy microbiome makes versus sometimes they're just ineffective because, you came in with, I would say most people come into treatment with a broken heart. microbiome. Sure. Same thing with like low dose naltrexone.

[00:27:52] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So low dose naltrexone in certain chemotherapies like the platens, so cisplatin and carboplatin, you could have somebody, and those are also used a lot in pediatric cancer, you could be on a chemotherapy that's in this class and not be responding and then start taking something called low dose naltrexone and it can literally make treatment.

[00:28:16] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Effective. 

[00:28:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Why do you 

[00:28:17] Christa Biegler, RD: think that happens with LDN? 

[00:28:20] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I just, I always tell families, it's just this like magical little. Guy that goes in and makes your immune system smarter. I don't know. I don't, we don't know. We don't know. 

[00:28:30] Christa Biegler, RD: I know. But LDN perplexes me sometimes. 

[00:28:33] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. Yeah. But I love it.

[00:28:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There's no protocols. I don't put everybody, there's no such thing like, Oh, you have this type of cancer. This is your protocol. You don't want to work with anybody that does that because that's exactly what conventional medicine is doing. You really want somebody who's going to look at your child's labs, your child's epigenetics and your child's terrain.

[00:28:52] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But the one thing that I can say, I have almost every single one of my patients who are on a cancer journey on is low dose naltrexone. The only time I don't use it is if they're on like high dose narcotics, which doesn't happen very often with kids. 

[00:29:07] Christa Biegler, RD: I've heard you mention a few other integrative treatment options, including mistletoe, including high dose vitamin C and any other ones you want to mention.

[00:29:15] Christa Biegler, RD: And my question is, do you ever struggle with accessibility or ability to, because if you're working virtually with people at a distance, do you ever struggle with accessibility to some of these treatments for people? 

[00:29:27] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yes. So I'll go over some of my favorite treatments that are simple. So things that I don't struggle with that I love using.

[00:29:35] Dr. Dagmara Beine: In many cases I love full spectrum hemp oil, so a good quality, people refer to it as CBD oil, but CBD is just one of the cannabinoids. In fact, it made such a difference in Zuza's journey that, We are blessed enough to grow have a farm that's never been touched by pesticides.

[00:29:56] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And my husband ended up creating growing our own and creating a company where we now know that hemp oil is clean, right? Third party tested because it's an industry that you can get really icky stuff. So yeah, I love full spectrum hemp oil because you can avoid and or you can treat nausea.

[00:30:16] Dr. Dagmara Beine: vomiting, insomnia, pain, anxiety with one thing and it's non toxic and it's anti inflammatory, right? So I, that's there's a few chemotherapies and immune therapies where it does interact. That's why it's important to work with somebody. But that's up there for me. I love vitamin A, D, K. So D3, K2, vitamin A and I will have my kiddos on a methylated B complex, but not with methotrexate fish oil.

[00:30:41] Dr. Dagmara Beine: We've touched on sometimes shark liver oil, but it's a different Dirty oil. So it's very short lived. If I use it, I'll glutamine very short lived post. And fermented wheat germ extract has great studies on pediatrics showing that it will reduce neutropenic fever in kids. So that's awesome. And then lotus no tracks on also fairly easy where it comes to other therapies.

[00:31:07] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I love that. is a little more challenging. So mistletoe, I will almost always recommend and prescribe subcutaneously. And we, at this point, our nurse, we have a beautiful nurse named Heidi in our clinic. She does all the mistletoe therapy training and we do training virtually and families learn. So mistletoe for the parents who are brave enough to inject their kids which most kiddos do so much better than we.

[00:31:34] Dr. Dagmara Beine: makeup in our heads they're going to do. It's fairly accessible and we're so lucky to have a Uriel pharmacy in Wisconsin, actually, that makes mistletoe. Where I run into trouble is more of those out of the box therapies that I love to use. So even something as simple as high dose vitamin C, which I love, there's a lot of places that will not access that. There's all these boutiquey or places that do IV therapy, but they don't feel comfortable accessing a port or a PICC line. 

[00:32:10] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And 

[00:32:11] Dr. Dagmara Beine: nine, I would say a hundred percent of kids going through treatment have a port or a PICC line, and no parent's going to get it. Take their child who has access now be poked again.

[00:32:23] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:32:23] Dr. Dagmara Beine: so that becomes a problem and then therapies like IV artesonate Biclora acetate some of these other really cool therapies most of the time Families have to travel Because There's very few integrative practitioners who are brave enough, usually for medical legal reasons to work with pediatrics, especially when it comes to like more out of the box therapies.

[00:32:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Sure. Will you describe those last two you said? I don't know what those are. 

[00:32:51] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yes. So artesonate is an anti malaria drug. It's used as an anti malaria drug in the United States. And that's the only like FDA approved. Indication for it. It's also can be a phenomenal anti cancer drug, especially when used in conjunction with high dose vitamin C.

[00:33:09] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So there are situations where it makes sense. Not a lot, but there are situations where it makes sense to use that in an IV form. Now that you can do by mouth, but anything IV is always going to be better than. What you can get by mouth, especially for a child going through treatment because they're not absorbing very well, 

[00:33:26] Christa Biegler, RD: right?

[00:33:27] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And then DCA dichloroacetate is a chemical it used to be used in the emergency department for diabetic ketoacidosis So it works in a a metabolic way at you want to ensure that the child or is as close to ketosis as possible. So it's exposes the cancer cells and then the dichloroacetate, is an anti answer, IV is how I explain it. Used with another IV called poly MBA because the only not very common, but potential side effect of DCA is reversible neuropathy. Meaning like a kid can be sitting there and be like, mom, my leg feels weird. So to prevent that, we give something called poly MBA, which is alpha acid and lots of B vitamins to help prevent.

[00:34:16] Dr. Dagmara Beine: neuropathy. And that protocol is usually in combination with a hyperbaric chamber, and it was created by one of the best integrative oncologists that we have, Dr. Paul Anderson. 

[00:34:32] Christa Biegler, RD: He's on my calendar, 

[00:34:33] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yay! He's one of my favorite people. So he created that protocol. DCA with PolyMBA and Hyperbaric Chamber, and I have in my practice had some amazing results on kids who have been told there's nothing else that can be done. Because it made sense for them, and it was a family that was able to really keep their kid in ketosis, and Yeah, so it's not, it's not a one size fits all, everybody should do this, but there are some really cool the kind of the next exciting thing for me for therapy is gonna be the phototherapy.

[00:35:07] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So there are lasers where you can could have a photosensitizer, so IV curcumin for example, or oral curcumin is the photosensitizer. And then if you hook up a yellow light as an IV and give the yellow light with the IV curcumin, you're making that curcumin like a hundred times more bioavailable and effective. And heat therapies. So different forms of hyperthermia along with the light therapies. There's some really, I think we're just learning more and more. And unfortunately, I don't know how much of this is ever going to make it into. Conventional medicine. It takes 17 years for us to learn something and maybe it'll get there.

[00:35:53] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But usually if it's not a big pharmaceutical drug, it maybe never makes it there. But yeah, but those are some of my favorite therapies. Obviously, My patients who are in a different state or in a different country or can't travel to me. I try to find a colleague that is doing similar things when I can, but not everybody lives at a place where they have access, but there's so much you can do without these.

[00:36:20] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I don't want people to think that's absolutely necessary. There's so much you can do with just nutrition and fresh air, nature, grounding, sunshine, and some simple supplements. And mistletoe is accessible because everybody can get it and, you can inject your child. You don't need anybody to do that for you.

[00:36:39] Dr. Dagmara Beine: That's something that we teach our parents. 

[00:36:40] Christa Biegler, RD: Will you describe what happens when people use mistletoe in conjunction with their other therapies or the benefit again? 

[00:36:47] Christa Biegler, RD: If you're urinating a lot when you're drinking water, maybe you're not actually hydrating that much. Or, in other words, getting the fluid and nutrients into the cell. Electrolytes are minerals that help fluid and nutrients get into the cell. I recommend all of my clients start by drinking electrolytes when we begin our work together, so to improve energy.

[00:37:06] Christa Biegler, RD: And then we get even more strategic with our electrolyte recommendations as test results come in. Now, generally electrolytes are potassium, sodium, and chloride. One of my favorite electrolyte products is pickleball cocktail from jigsaw health, because it's one of the only products you can get with an adequate dose of potassium to meet my recommendations, which is critical for blood sugar, which everyone should care about hormone health.

[00:37:29] Christa Biegler, RD: And digestion huge thing for relapsing digestive issues. Jigsaw health is also maker of the famous adrenal cocktail made popular by the pro metabolic corner of the internet and root cause protocol, as well as a multi mineral electrolyte for recovery called electrolyte supreme. You can get a discount on all of jigsaw's amazing products, including pickleball, electrolyte, supreme, and adrenal cocktail at jigsawhealth.

[00:37:53] Christa Biegler, RD: com with the code less stressed 10. That's three S's less stressed. Ten. 

[00:38:00] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah, so I think of mistletoe in 2 different ways mistletoe therapy. For example, for certain cancers, I'll use blood cancers. for acute because it's not true for chronic, but for acute leukemias, I don't feel that it's curative.

[00:38:18] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I feel that mistletoe therapy in that situation definitely helps reduce side effects during chemotherapy. It helps reduce neutropenia. So you're not, your white blood cell count, your neutrophils aren't going to crash as hard. So you're not going to have as many complications, infections, mucositis, all those things.

[00:38:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And then after you're done with conventional treatment, mistletoe, once you start it, we always tell every patient you want to commit to it for one to two years. So it's not something we're just going to do for a couple of months. Studies show the best benefit overall for any type of cancer is at least two year use.

[00:38:51] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And so it helps children recover, just get through treatment better. But if you take a cancer like osteosarcoma, there is a study that and it's a pediatric oncology study, which doesn't happen often osteosarcoma is bone cancer. There's a study that shows for kids who had relapsed osteosarcoma, then they had surgery and they had clear margins.

[00:39:20] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Okay. And they gave half the group chemo that's usually used then called a toposide and the other half, they only gave mistletoe and years later, the chemotherapy arm had 0 percent survival and the mistletoe therapy had 56 percent survival. So when I think of mistletoe therapy for the umbrella of sarcomas, cause there's lots of different types of sarcomas.

[00:39:45] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I do think of it as contributing to their prognosis and helping. Attain remission 

[00:39:53] Christa Biegler, RD: that's a really big statistic. I'm surprised. 1 of the reasons I would guess that we don't have a lot of pediatric cancer studies is just ethical. Yeah, so it's crazy and maybe it was a choice, right? It was like, hey, we're doing this study, which thing do you want?

[00:40:08] Christa Biegler, RD: I have no idea, but it's crazy. And it was 10 years later, so there's hindsight's 2020, but it's if that was a short term thing, they would have been like abandoned ship. Everyone's getting mistletoe. It's unethical not to give them the mistletoe. But it's crazy. How old was that study?

[00:40:22] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I want to say it's quite old. It's early 2000s. 

[00:40:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, my gosh. So we've passed the 17 year mark guys on that one. 

[00:40:30] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And it's so sad because if That mistletoe would have been a pharmaceutical drug, like there would have been everybody would have been on it. It is, I'm so glad for that study because I feel like because I have it, I can usually convince conventional oncologists who have patients with osteosarcoma to use mistletoe in family in families who need oncology to be okay with it.

[00:40:56] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So there's tons of families. There's families who are like, My oncologist has to know everything we're doing or else I'm not comfortable. And that's hard because it often means we end up doing a lot less. But that study helps. And actually I was just watching somebody brought a podcast to my attention and it was brother of a boy who had relapsed osteosarcoma, and then I heard them say, yeah, I heard Dr.

[00:41:19] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Jamarabaini say this study, and they were in that situation, and they ended up using Mistletoe, and he ended up getting a cure. It's just, right? It's just more, if every osteosarcoma family could hear about Mistletoe. 

[00:41:33] Christa Biegler, RD: I know now, I just want a whole folder of all pediatric oncology, just to read just because right.

[00:41:39] Christa Biegler, RD: That's the kind of stuff like, pediatric integrative oncology, right? Because it's you don't know what you don't know. But I was most surprised out of you saying that 1 by the drama of that. Outcome and 2 by how long ago the study was right? And that's the good news. There is some research and evidence for things for lots of things.

[00:41:56] Christa Biegler, RD: There's plenty of opportunity. I think that's always my takeaway here is there's always an option. Typically, right? There's always an option. 

[00:42:02] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There's always an option. And even if they're, I think Zeus is a really good example of I get a lot of questions. Wait, I get a lot of messages of confusion of like, why are you in the hospital?

[00:42:15] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And she's getting this toxic treatment when you do integrative oncology. Like, why can't you just make her better at home? 

[00:42:21] Christa Biegler, RD: That's what integrative means. 

[00:42:24] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And of course we've tried to, like we've done everything to avoid a chemotherapy. But I think that's the other thing that people need to know, like chemotherapy and radiation.

[00:42:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yes, they're toxic therapies, but oftentimes they're needed and they can be life saving if they're used in the right way. So it isn't this like one or the other and oftentimes. Pediatrics don't get to choose. And by the time you get to choose, it means that you're not doing well.

[00:42:53] Dr. Dagmara Beine: We've been given the choice at this point because if an option is palliative care for you, then they don't, that's when integrative care becomes an option, which is just terrible because it should be, 

[00:43:03] Christa Biegler, RD: I think that's really important for us to process that you don't have a choice as a parent, unless you want social services to take over your child, which is crazy.

[00:43:12] Christa Biegler, RD: Crazy. 

[00:43:13] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah, you 

[00:43:13] Dr. Dagmara Beine: don't have a choice. No, I've been a part of so which brings us to how important it is to choose your conventional team, because your relationship with your oncologist. Is going to determine whether CPS gets called or not. And a really good example of that is so you go into a meeting and you say, okay, I'm looking for an oncologist who's open to 

[00:43:40] Dr. Dagmara Beine: integrative 

[00:43:42] Dr. Dagmara Beine: support, who understands nutrition is important.

[00:43:47] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And if your oncologist says no, like that's the wrong oncologist for you. If you want to go down this journey, because it's not just. Saying no to treatment, what happens, most parents don't want to say no to all of conventional treatment. That's usually not the situation. Usually what the situation is, you start treatment, your child's kidneys or liver are failing, and conventional team wants to continue pushing.

[00:44:11] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And it's, Either the cancer or the treatment that's going to take your child's life and you need a good enough relationship with that oncologist that you have somebody like me on board, you have an outside of the hospital nutritionist on board who can then help your oncologist come up with a plan of like, how can we support the liver?

[00:44:30] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So we can do a little more chemo, right? How long can we pause therapy? So we can help the kidneys in between, and then it really becomes teamwork. Which happens, but it's very rare. 

[00:44:43] Christa Biegler, RD: It makes me want to ask about verbiage for, if the standard of care for pediatric cancer is we're going to start treatment tomorrow, I would like, could I have 48 hours to breathe for a second and think about things?

[00:44:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Do you think that is, how do you think someone could ask for that? 

[00:45:02] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Whoa, this is a lot for our family. We just need a moment to process this. We don't even know a hundred percent what the diagnosis is. Is it safe for my child to stay under your care in the hospital and get IV fluids and for us to get to know each other and wait for results while we find out and wait and just know what we're dealing with and we'd also like to get a second and third opinion because that's what we've been advised to do once we know what the diagnosis is and then we can decide how and where we want to, I always joke like the other reason why there's so few integrated pediatric oncology practitioners is because you're taking care of the whole family.

[00:45:51] Dr. Dagmara Beine: You're taking care of the mom who's just barely breathing. You're taking care of the dad who's completely reacting. Differently, but like falling apart, but differently. Oftentimes I'm taking care of a couple who one feels very strongly about integrative support and the other doesn't. 

[00:46:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:46:10] Dr. Dagmara Beine: you're taking care of siblings.

[00:46:11] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And so one of the best things that I can do is empower parents. They. need to know they are hiring the team. So it often feels like they're hiring me because I'm side outside of insurance and they've had to look for me, but no, you're hiring your oncology team too. You get to decide who's going to be able to take care of your child.

[00:46:33] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And so that's, I think if they look at it that way, if that oncologist walks through the door and he doesn't look in your eyes and barely looks up from the computer and like you get a bad vibe, like why would you Go with that. And parents also need to realize 99. 9 percent of the time, nothing will happen bad if you wait a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks before you start treatment because this cancer did not develop overnight.

[00:47:02] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yes, there are situations where there's, you hear of emergent surgeries or something's pressing on the heart and they need to do something. 99 percent of the time it would actually serve your child to not rush into treatment. You can prepare your child for treatment. You can change their nutrition around.

[00:47:22] Dr. Dagmara Beine: You can start to give them, probiotics for their gut. You can hydrate them. You can, there's just so much that can be done to prepare for treatment and get to know your team at the same time. So I actually don't, one of the, Chapters in the book is all about who to hire, how to talk to your team, how to not rush into treatment and like all the typical kind of questions or things that an oncologist would say to you and what to say back because I get asked a lot and there's a lot of There's a lot of fear, unfortunately, that's put into an already fearful situation in in Parents Cave, because I don't blame them you did too.

[00:48:01] Christa Biegler, RD: I understand completely. There is fun. I align with you a lot, right? I love using the soil as the best analogy for terrain. What's hilarious, but not hilarious, probably extremely intentional. Is it so crazy? The more you learn, the more you realize we are just a mirror of nature, actually, like the same stuff that happens in nature does happen in our microbiome.

[00:48:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Yes, is extremely parallel. So it's pretty sweet. Actually, it's pretty sweet. So look to nature. There's a reason, we often talk, I was talking about this morning with clients. It's I have some concerns and I'm sure this would be. There could be a part 2 here, by the way, we did not get to fully like, how do you prevent cancer and kids before and after?

[00:48:39] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think there's lots of room to discuss that. But in practice, if I'm dealing with skin issues, I'm looking at all those root causes. We're talking about mold. We're talking about all the things and it's like, how did we get here? How did we arrive here? And some of it, there's so many options.

[00:48:56] Christa Biegler, RD: It's not like one thing I think necessarily, but it's also, we did probably spend more time outside once upon a time, right? And now we spend more time inside and there is something, I love talking about the nervous system. And I remember also one, my very first conversation with Dr. Lisa Song, she did this beautiful, by the way, she is like the holistic integrative OG doctor, right?

[00:49:17] Christa Biegler, RD: So you probably know her, but just in case someone doesn't know her. And I remember she just started talking about her. The kid, her patients, her pediatric patients, nervous systems, and I was like, how wonderful that we're having this conversation across the board, because as a parent, to your point, it is mirroring to the child.

[00:49:33] Christa Biegler, RD: And when we get into nature, there is all of this stuff because nature has all these Has a lot of energy to it. And when we put, spend 15 minutes, I think this stat was 15 minutes in nature is like two hours of stress resiliency or something like that. So if we can just be outside all day, we can get a whole week's worth 

[00:49:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Of that.

[00:49:52] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yes, I talk about, the last chapter of the book is how to heal the family. And I talk about, I think that's the hardest part. I think it's easy. To follow how to eat, what supplement to take. But when it comes to how broken a family is, I call it beautifully shattered. And then you have an option to put your family back together.

[00:50:12] Dr. Dagmara Beine: It'll never be normal again, but normal, what we say, like back to normal, let's go. There's no such thing ever again. But healing the family is so important. And parents need to heal themselves because our kiddos feel our energy. Like they, they know and I talk about all the different healing modalities as simple as grounding, right?

[00:50:34] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Forest bathing. And then I get into some other like psychedelic therapy, microdosing, ketamine therapy, neo emotional release. There's, I love what's happening in the mental health movement and how families can now start to heal versus we used to just think of therapists and talk therapy.

[00:50:53] Dr. Dagmara Beine: And I think that talking about what you just went through may be helpful, but I think there's So much more that we need to do for our body. 

[00:51:01] Christa Biegler, RD: So many opportunities, and that's the good news. We don't have to look at that as overwhelming. It's oh, wow, I have many options. Let me pick a couple from different places.

[00:51:09] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah, exactly.

[00:51:10] Christa Biegler, RD: A little piece by piece. We could keep talking about this. Hopefully I'll come back for a part two. When is the book coming out? 

[00:51:16] Dr. Dagmara Beine: The book is coming out May 16th. It will, it's available on Amazon and Chelsea Green website, who's the publisher. And then there'll be a pediatric course.

[00:51:26] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Good at towards parents coming out in June and that will be off my website at Susan's way. com. 

[00:51:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, how wonderful. I was thinking that there needed to be, there's a lot here. 

[00:51:36] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:51:37] Christa Biegler, RD: A lot. 

[00:51:37] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. 

[00:51:38] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Oh, 

[00:51:38] Dr. Dagmara Beine: it's a lot. Yeah. 

[00:51:40] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think my brain just in the way I was going to ask you, like, how long sometimes there's obviously no set duration to those children's treatments.

[00:51:50] Christa Biegler, RD: But I was wondering how long sometimes you're supporting them through treatment before you even get to the prevention in the next step. 

[00:51:57] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yeah. The most common type of cancer is ALL acute leukemia, and that treatment is one of the longer ones, it's two and a half years of treatment.

[00:52:06] Dr. Dagmara Beine: So I'm, yeah. I would say otherwise for solid tumors, a typical treatment regimen lasts about six months. If there's no relapse or complications. So I'm with my family for years. 

[00:52:19] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:52:20] Dr. Dagmara Beine: for years. 

[00:52:21] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And I can tell that you've got, maybe you are already this soothing force, but I can tell you, think you're a really grounding presence for your family quite often.

[00:52:32] Dr. Dagmara Beine: No, it took me a really long time to get here. I yeah, it took me a lot of actually, I would say. This started 10 years ago, so I've had lots of time to try to not react so much, but respond. Lots of relapses and lots of opportunities to be the woman and like the human being that I think I was meant to be.

[00:52:58] Dr. Dagmara Beine: There's a reason why this happened to our family. Zuse is my greatest teacher. I can't believe I wrote a book on pediatric cancer. I would have never become the person I am or been deep and who I am. If it wasn't for what my daughter has had to go through. So I am, I'm forever grateful to her and said at the same time that she has had to continue to endure what she has had to endure.

[00:53:23] Dr. Dagmara Beine: But But she's here and she's racking it and she's 60 something days away from her 13th birthday, which is all I hear about. And we're home from the hospital and we're healing. We're blessed. 

[00:53:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, for sure. And your website is it Zuzasway? 

[00:53:40] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Yep, it's zuzasway. com. 

[00:53:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Perfect. 

[00:53:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Thank you so much for coming on today for sharing your story and so many useful nuggets for this undoubtedly challenging, but more prevalent situation, scenario that many people find their way into.

[00:53:59] Christa Biegler, RD: If you're listening to this, I hope you share this with someone who needs it, someone who's on your heart, and I hope that we get to do a part two. 

[00:54:06] Dr. Dagmara Beine: Oh, 

[00:54:06] Dr. Dagmara Beine: I would love that. Thank you for having me.