#358 🤓 Autoimmunity & Cancer Connections with Dr. Paul Anderson, NMD

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am excited and honored to be joined by Dr. Paul Anderson, a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex chronic illness and cancer. In this episode, we get super nerdy chatting about the rise in issues like cancer and autoimmunity. We dive into how our immune system can get thrown off by genetics and environmental triggers. Dr. Anderson shares tips on restoring balance through detox, managing infections, and keeping hormones and gut health in check. We also talk about the role of hydration and nutrients in avoiding toxin buildup. We even dive into interesting facts everyone should know about glutathione and coffee enemas. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• How do you create safety in the immune system?
• Why hydration is so important
• Do coffee enemas actually increase glutathione?
• Surprising facts about cancer cells and glutathione
• Why are cancer cells making their own glutathione?
• Is glutathione going to cause cancer?
• Is red light therapy negative for cancer?
• How to use hyperbaric oxygen treatment in cancer
• The benefits of oxygen

ABOUT GUEST: 
Dr. Anderson is a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex chronic illness, and cancer. In addition to three decades clinical experience, he also was head of the interventional arm of a US-NIH funded human research trial using IV and integrative therapies in cancer patients. He founded Advanced Medical Therapies in Seattle, Washington, a clinic focusing on cancer and chronic diseases and now focuses his time in collaboration with clinics and hospitals in the US and other countries.

Click here to check out Dr. Anderson's books: https://dranow.com/written-works/#our-books

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://dranow.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/draonline/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1FLIaKDzkU5Z0knDYYKyPQ

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. Paul Anderson: If killing cancer was all about depleting glutathione in a human, we could stop all cancer. The problem would be the human would die because you can't live without glutathione. 

[00:00:15] 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.

[00:00:45] 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.

[00:01:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Dr. Paul Anderson, who's a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex chronic illness and cancer. In addition to three decades of clinical experience, he was also head of the interventional arm Of the U S NIH funded human research trial using Ivy and integrative therapies and cancer patients.

[00:01:25] Christa Biegler, RD: He founded advanced medical therapies in Seattle, Washington, a clinic focused on cancer and chronic diseases now focuses his time in collaboration with clinics and hospitals in the U S and other countries. Former positions include multiple medical school posts, both at Bastyr and other places.

[00:01:42] Christa Biegler, RD: He's co author of Hay House book, Outside the Box Cancer Therapies with Dr. Mark Stangler and Lioncrest Publishing book, Cancer the Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, which I love that title. Also co author with Dr. Osborne's and Carter's of the IV textbook, a scientific reference for intravenous therapy.

[00:01:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Nutrient therapy. What a welcomed resource as we see I being nutrient therapy, honestly, taking off and becoming quite trendy. Welcome to the show, Dr. Anderson. 

[00:02:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: Thanks for having me. 

[00:02:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I am excited to chat about this. You've come up on my online feeds quite a bit, and so I'm glad you're here.

[00:02:18] Christa Biegler, RD: I think we're mostly going to cover cancer, but whatever nerdy topic we go to. But before we jump into all of that, I find there's just a lot of burned out clinicians out there, and I want to learn more about your How some of this started and I know, that's all a book on its own, but I'm just curious about some of the things that have really changed the trajectory of your career and how you've practiced and how I know it's not hard to find a large cohort of complex medical patients because they're always looking for someone who can support them.

[00:02:51] Christa Biegler, RD: And honestly, it's not hard to have a beautiful long list of people that you could support with cancer with our current rates, which is why I'm also really passionate about this topic and connecting people to information about it. But if you want to share anything about your history and kind of what has led you to now, and especially you made that fun.

[00:03:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Common and passing you do a million interviews a year, where did that start? And how have things really taken off for you and to where you're, how you're living out your life's mission or impact is what I want to hear about. 

[00:03:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. The million is maybe a hyperbolic number, but it's a lot.

[00:03:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: Shortest version of my origin story in this kind of medicine is it starts in 1976 when I started working on the allopathic side of medicine in laboratories. And I did that for a long time. I was going to go finish a quote unquote regular, allopathic medical program, and I realized I'd probably just get in a lot of trouble.

[00:03:54] Dr. Paul Anderson: If I did that because I was a little too creative, etc. And believe it or not, so my father, my late father was an allopathic physician, my mom was a nurse. And they came from an era where physicians really were trained to be creative and work with whatever they had, and all that. But that was a long time ago.

[00:04:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: Long about the. I don't know. My, my children are old. They're in their 30s and 40s. When the older ones were babies, they started to have kind of the revolving door of ear infection and antibiotics and other problems then more, and that sort of thing. And actually my mother, the nurse one day said, I know this.

[00:04:40] Dr. Paul Anderson: Naturopathic physician and you should take, whichever child it was to them. And I thought, Oh God, why, but the kid kept getting sick. So I took my older children there. He really impressed me with his breadth of knowledge and what he did. And also my kids quit getting sick.

[00:04:58] Dr. Paul Anderson: And that's really, 

[00:05:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Or at the latest, a long 

[00:05:01] Dr. Paul Anderson: time ago. And were you working, 

[00:05:03] Christa Biegler, RD: were you doing bench research at that time? Is that what you were doing at that stage? 

[00:05:07] Dr. Paul Anderson: There was a little bit of research, but more of it was more of it was kind of standard process oriented lab things. And then there was, I got into physics end of laboratory medicine and that, sort of took me in a whole other direction, which that's a whole other story.

[00:05:25] Dr. Paul Anderson: And the reason I didn't go down that trail was a whole other story. So yeah, so the kids are little, it's a long time ago and it really got my attention. So I started to see this doctor cause I had allergies and things and really I was just, every time I saw him, I thought I could probably be this kind of doctor, so I started looking into it, and by this time I owned my own lab and I went to my wife, who is still my wife, thank God, with five little children. I said, hey, I want to sell the business and finish medical school, and she was like, ah, okay. And and she said, so we talked about it and she was behind it, obviously, because she's still with me.

[00:06:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: But that kind of started the whole odyssey. But I really planned when I got out to be an old fashioned general practitioner. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to limit myself, but because I had done, and I did a unique kind of training where I did a partial allopathic hospital based training and all of that stuff.

[00:06:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: And then the naturopathic medicine concurrently. 

[00:06:31] Christa Biegler, RD: You can do that kind of stuff in Portland. 

[00:06:32] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah, it and back in those days, It was just a little bit easier if you knew people, right? So that's what I did. So I get out and I'm really, happy to be in practice. And I do have a general, I saw babies to elderly.

[00:06:45] Dr. Paul Anderson: But then what happened within not long, like six months 

[00:06:49] Christa Biegler, RD: and we're in the nineties, right? At this point 

[00:06:51] Dr. Paul Anderson: in the nineties, by this point it was fast forward to 30 years ago. So then I started to see cancer patients and they were like back then what it was is my oncologist says there's nothing else they can do for me.

[00:07:03] Dr. Paul Anderson: Now I'm free to go see an integrated provider. It was like, so everyone was ready to pass away, unfortunately. So really tough group to start with. And then I started to also see people who were, didn't have cancer, but had these massive complex chronic illness problems that weren't responding to, standard therapy.

[00:07:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: And so my practice in under, the first year was my dream general practice, and then it just switched into those two populations. Once you help One person, it's like they know lots of other people and then, so I still, even last week, I might do some primary care things, but mostly I keep cancer and chronic illness going.

[00:07:46] Dr. Paul Anderson: So in the middle of that, but about, I think, 12 years ago. Maybe a little bit longer. I was full time faculty had a best year at the medical school and they started a human research trial funded by the NIH, and it was integrative oncology, and it was a true whole practice thing we had.

[00:08:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: We had a nutrition section. We had acupuncture. We had an herbal medicine section body mind We did everything that you know if people wanted to write they also had an interventional part which was IV and injection therapies and they started it but they didn't have anybody to run that and because I was full time they came to me because I taught that at the time.

[00:08:31] Dr. Paul Anderson: And they said, do you want to be involved in research? And I said sure, let's do that. And that was a whole wild ride, but so we did five years with that trial looking just at survivability by, so people still did whatever the normal standard of care was, but we added in this whole practice integrative model.

[00:08:51] Dr. Paul Anderson: And my part was the IVs, I worked with all the other parts too. So that kind of accelerated a lot of both my writing and research and other things because I was just so steeped in that process. And that, of course, when you know when you have a government research project, we were connected to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and U Dub and big places.

[00:09:16] Dr. Paul Anderson: So you get, for better or worse, connected with the system. And I had always been teaching, I'd always been a speaker, but that led to a lot more specific speaking in cancer and like autoimmunity, etc. And then there were many things that followed on that. The books and all of those things.

[00:09:34] Dr. Paul Anderson: So that's the speed version of the last 40 years. It's a good 

[00:09:38] Christa Biegler, RD: version. It sounds like you're in the right place at the right time when you were full time teaching for IV nutrients. I 

[00:09:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: try. Yeah. I didn't plan it that way, but that's the way it worked out. 

[00:09:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Thank goodness. I need to know how the survivability rates were when the patients were doing their traditional therapies and they added in the integrative components.

[00:09:57] Christa Biegler, RD: All Yeah. 12 plus years ago. 

[00:09:59] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. So there's two things about that in reverse order. Our project for five years got enough positive positive press, et cetera, that another funding source from Canada did an expanded version of it. And they narrowed down to four. We took an e cancer, right?

[00:10:19] Dr. Paul Anderson: They narrowed it to four cancers. And it was survivability over the norm, plus quality of life. And they just ended that research. I helped to start that study, and then I got busy and others took it over. And there was actually an international group of clinics. So that one, I think, will tell the tale a little bit better.

[00:10:41] Dr. Paul Anderson: When they report it out later this year, hopefully or next year. But what we saw was with whole practice edition. And what we did is we compared the length of life curves. You have these Kaplan Meyer curves people have seen that go, if it goes down, you're losing more people. We compared those from usually the SEER database, which is a whole national database, so you can take all people with stage four colon cancer and it averages out their life expectancy on a Kaplan Meier curve.

[00:11:16] Dr. Paul Anderson: And then we would take our stage four cancer people. Match, age match, et cetera, and say did we gain anything or not? Did they live longer? So in some cases, such as colon cancer, where we had a fair number of patients we actually had quite good survival gains. People with stage four cancer, some go into real durable remissions, but many of them eventually pass away.

[00:11:43] Dr. Paul Anderson: But we had a lot of pretty stable gains. There were some subsets in breast cancer that were especially in my area where we were doing what now are common IV interventions, but back then we're a little bit less and people who. Advanced stage four breast cancer were, more, more higher percentage was alive, each year over three years 

[00:12:05] Christa Biegler, RD: from doing IV, 

[00:12:06] Dr. Paul Anderson: from doing that and everything else we're doing, so it was really a whole practice model.

[00:12:12] Dr. Paul Anderson: The other thing, and the reason the follow up study added official quality of life metrics was we knew people's quality of life was much better. They were healing from chemo better and all that stuff. 

[00:12:23] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:12:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: Who, when they designed our study, they were just looking at survival. And so we, on the side kept quality of life measurements, they, that's why the new study picked it up.

[00:12:35] Dr. Paul Anderson: So generally speaking, it's like there, I've lived long enough to see miracles. I've also lived long enough to see nothing work with people. So I know that both ends of the spectrum occur, but generally speaking, a whole practice approach to somebody, regardless of what kind of treatment they're doing, will improve their quality of life, will improve.

[00:12:56] Dr. Paul Anderson: their immune system recovery, which is huge for having your cancer stay calm or not come back. And then, like I mentioned in the second book the goal also is just to make them an empowered patient. Because in the research, empowered patients, drugs work better on them. They have better quality of life.

[00:13:13] Dr. Paul Anderson: They often live longer because how 

[00:13:15] Christa Biegler, RD: do you measure what an empowered patient is though? 

[00:13:19] Dr. Paul Anderson: There's research just like quality of life. There are different scales that you can measure are met with. I was actually when I wrote the second book. I wasn't so the first book. Outside of the box has 1100 references, which, and Mark and I did that just because when you go to the oncologist, they say, no, there's no research for this.

[00:13:38] Dr. Paul Anderson: So we wanted that in there with the second one, I want it to be a quick read. So I didn't want to put 11 under references, but I was actually surprised as I started looking into peer reviewed research, that there was a lot more empowerment research than we ever hear about, like they're empowerment researchers.

[00:13:54] Dr. Paul Anderson: And it was hard markers, like pain control with drugs. And then there's a scale, just like quality of life scales are all these factors that you take, you do a score every week. And if it's going up and down, your quality of life goes up down. Empowerment there, there are validated scores for that.

[00:14:11] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. 

[00:14:12] Christa Biegler, RD: I think empowerment might be the answer to the medical crisis, partially. That's my feeling. 

[00:14:17] Dr. Paul Anderson: Think, yeah. 

[00:14:18] Christa Biegler, RD: I think when you bring that up, that there's all this hard research, it's along the same lines as like, how does our mental, whatever we want to say, the mental, emotional piece of everything, cause you either feel like you're grasping and you're stressed and that is sending messages to your immune system that I'm not okay. So I would naturally think physiologically that everything is going to be much worse when you're not empowered. 

[00:14:42] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. 

[00:14:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Makes perfect sense. And 

[00:14:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: it's almost which I know you'll probably resonate with it.

[00:14:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's like when doctors say they give diet advice or something like that, it's if anything, it's like a handout or they say something in passing. And then that's the diet advice you got from your doctor. It's empowerment building is a chore. And, it's the kind of thing where.

[00:15:03] Dr. Paul Anderson: The patient has to be coached through it. So you actually usually need to bring other people in with other skill sets, just like with diet and things like that. Yeah, I think and who are the most unempowered patients often? It's someone who just heard they have a life threatening illness.

[00:15:19] Dr. Paul Anderson: Or you're chronically ill people who, it's not life threatening, but it's life altering. It's, they see no end to the trouble. And I think because those are the two patient populations I've always worked with when I look backwards through time, empowerment and somebody saying, Look, I'm not gonna, ignore my disease and say it's not there, But I know I'm in charge of me.

[00:15:42] Dr. Paul Anderson: And I know I, to the degree I have control over my medical care and over this and that, I'm the buck has to stop with me. Those people just do better, and it's not easy to get there for most of us but they do better. 

[00:15:56] Christa Biegler, RD: I, at some point, later we're going to talk about how you've avoided burnout through all of this because I am, but imagine working with dying and complex patients.

[00:16:07] Christa Biegler, RD: It gets, it's it's such a need. yet. There's a challenge. There's a challenge there. But there was a big shift. I love that our conversation has gone this way for a moment because there was just a shift for me when I realized if I could empower these people, that was the big shift that needed to happen.

[00:16:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Disempowered to me felt like people just continually needing you because they didn't feel like they could do something on their own. 

[00:16:32] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah.

[00:16:33] Christa Biegler, RD: And I just think, I often feel and think now and share with people that my goal is to get you your goals, get you your results and then move on. I don't want you to need this because that means you're empowered.

[00:16:46] Christa Biegler, RD: We're creating confidence, but it does take a while. It takes a handful of months. It takes some education. You got to understand. I always tell people that your results are your best educators. You understand better when you've had those, when you've grasped that, when you understand it fully love that.

[00:17:00] Christa Biegler, RD: And I love when I first saw that name of that book, I thought I got to add that to my cart because I like to collect cancer books. It's a weird feeling I have. I got to collect cancer integrative cancer books. All right. So we could talk about that all day. But. You're a super nerd. So we're going to talk super nerd for a while.

[00:17:20] Dr. Paul Anderson: I'm ready. 

[00:17:20] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. So we've had on this show, a couple, some amazing podcasts, Michael Robinson has done one or two episodes. Dr. Arthur Frankel, who I met through microbiome labs conference, did a couple adorable man. I don't know if you know him. Talked to him. He specifically talked about how he did not even publish a research study where he fixed the microbiome in his mice because the results were so good.

[00:17:46] Christa Biegler, RD: That they would never believe him is what he said. So before we get into some very cancer specific topics and some very interesting questions clients have asked, you definitely work with a lot of complex cases in autoimmunity as well as cancer. And we have literal epidemics of both right now.

[00:18:04] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm very interested in the cancer epidemic and I'd love to hear your feelings and thoughts on the overlap and the differences between autoimmunity and cancer. Which is, a big topic, interpret however you see 

[00:18:15] Christa Biegler, RD: fit. Yeah. 

[00:18:16] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. And I think because those are probably two of the biggest areas of people, at least at the core of their troubles that I see.

[00:18:23] Dr. Paul Anderson: I think the first way to consider it, and I would say it's been getting worse every year, or a couple years I've been in practice, but it's accelerated in the last four or five years. Both of those problems, whether it's cancer or autoimmunity are immunoregulatory issues. And if you look at the massive complexity of why we aren't sick every day, which is our immune system it doesn't take much if you, especially, maybe you have some genetics that aren't You know, helping you out and then you have exposures to things that, trigger epigenetic problems or trigger your immune system to do the wrong thing or whatever.

[00:19:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: It doesn't take much to imagine that if I have a system with, Over a thousand inputs all day, every day, all the time. And as long as those things ebb and flow in the right direction, I fight off bugs and I have a great immune system. If I take some of the key players and I either suppress them or over activate them for too long, then the ebb and flow starts to go away and my body will either try to become autoimmune or A cancerous process will try and develop, which eventually both of those things can, of course, happen. And when I look at them, because I purposely have kept my practice not just to one or the other, because there's so much overlap. You're at the base of what you're trying to do behind all the questions. The specific treatments of which there's many for both. What you're trying to do is get the immune system to come back down to this modulation it's supposed to have, and in either direction, whether it's the cancer direction or autoimmunity, you lose modulation and then either your body attacks itself or cancer stem cells hang around and all of us decide to turn on and create their own little life, which is cancer. In the treatment end of those ones, we know we have them getting immune system modulated is like one of the major goals and one of the heart. It's like empowerment for the immune system. It's one of the hardest things to pull off because by the time we notice we have a problem, by the time your labs positive for autoimmunity, or by the time you find out you have cancer, it's been going on for 10, 20, 30 years.

[00:20:56] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:20:56] Dr. Paul Anderson: it didn't just start yesterday, 

[00:20:58] Christa Biegler, RD: right? 

[00:20:59] Dr. Paul Anderson: So there's a huge crossover, albeit same players, they're just doing different things and maybe the wrong direction. But many of the treatments wind up being quite, at least in the integrated world, many of the treatments become similar. Further down the road, because you're trying to get to this really like we have the most amazing, elaborate orchestrated immune system, and you're trying to get that to work again, and not just go too high or too low or, or feed a cancer cell you don't want to feed or something, 

[00:21:35] Christa Biegler, RD: it would be natural for people to say how do I improve the modulation, which is going to be a loaded question. And I want to ask you if it's as simple, if it could be as simple as. just creating safety inside the immune system, which could look like detox stuff and gut stuff and nervous system stuff.

[00:21:52] Christa Biegler, RD: What are your feelings on that? Yours might be like, Oh, a lot about th1 th2. I don't know. Maybe it has nothing to do with that, but maybe that's how I think about is like, how do you create safety in that immune system? So what do you think around modulation? 

[00:22:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: If you look at I think it's also good to start with if the system's working like it's supposed to it's like a web that's going up and down all over, and it's got this band in which normal function occurs.

[00:22:16] Dr. Paul Anderson: We get an infection, sure it up regulates for a while, but then it goes back down. We have a compensatory mechanism for that. There are some times it actually modulates down and then comes back up. But by the time you get sick, the things that take that balance away, or that sort of immunologic feeling of safety, like everything's right in the world and we don't have to do the wrong thing here.

[00:22:42] Dr. Paul Anderson: One of the things, and this, it doesn't matter whether it's someone with autoimmunity you're trying to unwind, or somebody who's got cancer they've survived and you're trying to keep them in remission. It's the same project. It looks different, but it's really the same player. So what I found in dissecting, Backwards over time is there's areas where you need to focus regardless of which direction it went autoimmune or cancer prevention or secondary prevention. And these are things that get in and you can think of it like if we have this nice little modulating web and then I throw. Some wedges in there that get stuck between some of the webbing. It's going to modulate, not in this cool little, happy way. So the wedges can be from lots of things that we often pick up and drag through our lives with us.

[00:23:38] Dr. Paul Anderson: And so people say why are you looking at that? It's because. It's something you probably had wasn't a big deal before. Now it's a huge deal. So those areas include toxic influences, which if you just go back 70 years, it's 10s and 10s of thousands of chemicals didn't exist 70 years ago.

[00:24:01] Dr. Paul Anderson: We have them now. Human body has not had time to evolve or change to deal with all that. And yes, we have good detoxification pathways, but not for the chemicals we have now. So that's one. And it's really, oh, the world's toxic. The world is hellaciously toxic and it only gets worse. Children born now are born with more toxins in them than my father, who would be close to a hundred now, if he were still alive, had when he died.

[00:24:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: And if you want to read like one of the most dark medical publications ever it's the Endocrine Society's periodic publication of endocrine disruption chemical report. Every time they write it, it just gets worse. And they're like, here. Here's, this is bad for you. So toxicities of any kind.

[00:24:53] Dr. Paul Anderson: So that's, chemicals and metals, sure, but also biotoxins, like mycotoxins from mold, but also there's other, biotoxins that are made. And, something we just did a conference on Neurological stuff like neurodiversity. And part of what I was talking about was we also make our own toxins in our body.

[00:25:11] Dr. Paul Anderson: And some people genetically don't get rid of them like they're supposed. And they're all neurotoxins. They're immunotoxins. So toxicity is a big area. Your immune, so we're already talking about the immune system, but what can go wrong in your immune system? Everybody is exposed to chronic infections.

[00:25:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: In probably 100 percent of cases of advanced autoimmunity and certainly cancer, there are lots of infections that never leave. A healthy person, the immune system marginalizes these things and they're never a problem. We carry lots of bugs in us, right? These folks get out of whack with, autoimmunity or have a cancer journey somewhere down the road as you're getting sicker and sicker.

[00:25:58] Dr. Paul Anderson: These things are, they're not probably a primary cause they're just opportunistic. And they're saying, Hey, we got a funky immune system. We would like to live in this body too, and so they're going on. So they make the immune system taxed. The other thing is a lot of people with chronic illness may have low grade autoimmunity that's not diagnosable as lupus or, some other disease, but to have just enough autoimmunity to, again, keep that modulation from being, in the right band, right?

[00:26:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: Another one that. People who are real aware, will already say, Oh, I knew that was probably a problem, but a lot of my colleagues don't always is your hormonal system, the endocrine system. And that's all of it, of course. So that includes reproductive hormones, adrenal and thyroid, but also blood sugar control hormones.

[00:26:50] Dr. Paul Anderson: They all work together, and if they're. stressed, your immune system cannot work properly because part of it's like up and down modulation to help me get through, an infection and go back to normal is bouncing off the endocrine system. So if it's not working or if it's in a real out of balance pro inflammatory way, it loses all of its safety as you were calling it, right?

[00:27:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: So that's another big area that we look into. All of the things that feed you. So there's a lot of digestive dysfunction. We have a huge GI immune system, a huge GI nervous system, and it's like our immune system. It's very elegant that the fact that we can eat something and digest it and get all the nutrients out.

[00:27:35] Dr. Paul Anderson: And we have this ecology of trillions of organisms in there that are supposed to be helping us, right? It's easy in modern times to throw all that off. And then of course your nutrients aren't. Going in right and that, that immune system that's cross talking with your body's immune system isn't happy and all, all those things.

[00:27:52] Dr. Paul Anderson: So the digestive GI component, it's, that's always the, I think the longest thing to work on. And then there's as we were just talking about, there's that psychosocial mind, body, heart, whatever people like to call it the sicker you get generally the harder a hit that takes too. And then.

[00:28:12] Dr. Paul Anderson: That, that feeds back to your system it, it stresses your end, your hormones, to be feeling, attacked. And feeling disempowered and all that. And it does all sorts of things and it also makes you not want to do healthy, usually when you're feeling really down and disempowered, you're not motivated to do the most healthy, lifestyle things and stuff like that.

[00:28:33] Dr. Paul Anderson: There's a lot of reasons for that. So those are the areas that kind Now if you want to say, okay, So those are some external, some internal. Are there things deeper, like in the way that, that our cells are supposed to work, that let's say those external things aren't so bad yet.

[00:28:51] Dr. Paul Anderson: Are there things inside the way that our cells work, because the immune system largely works off cells and the chemicals it emits, that help to keep that balance? The first thing is like our, just our natural base redox system where the antioxidants work. It's so easy. To normally have that process like it's supposed to because your body's made to keep oxidation reduction balance.

[00:29:18] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's it. You don't want too much of either. If we never had oxidation, by the way, we'd never get an immune response. So we do need some of that. But in people who get really beat down, whether it's autoimmune or cancer, they tend to become in a redox imbalance more toward oxidative activity in there. And so every antioxidant has a cycle it goes through, right? The cycling slows down because we lose, the intermediates because we burned them all up trying to deal with, whatever is wrong. And it turns out, If you look a little deeper at immune function, one of the predicates just for it running normally is that redox still works because if redox starts to go shift towards oxidation and it can't come back, those crosstalk chemicals.

[00:30:08] Dr. Paul Anderson: get skewed. And then all of the downstream, the T cell mediated families get confused in what they're doing. The B cell, plasma cell stuff for, antibodies get confused. And then they start running into each other. And then you have either you'll lose surveillance and the cancer cells will all carry around, decide to party and grow, or the immune system gets confused and starts attacking everything, including you, so yeah, there's a ton of things and it's one of the things that, you talk about physician burnout, patient burnout is huge too. One of the things is trying to. be real with people that these things are that complicated, but also that like we have to do all this at once. There's a process.

[00:30:59] Dr. Paul Anderson: Usually your body will tell us how it's doing. And as long as we keep moving and making forward progress, these things will take care of themselves eventually, but it's really my experiences, if you don't think about it in that level of texture, you miss a lot of things when people are not getting better.

[00:31:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Essentially, a lot of these processes are very nutrient dependent. And so you said it in different words, we burn up a lot of nutrients. And so if we're really low on our antioxidants, we may not be able to have These cycles functioning, and that's going to keep us in this stuck stagnant state. So I have to ask, and this is a really good segue into talking about an antioxidant, glutathione, which we have questions about.

[00:31:45] Christa Biegler, RD: But before I go there, I have to ask you about a comment that you made about people making their own toxins in their body. Would you explain that for a moment? 

[00:31:55] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah it's one of my many favorite topics. 

[00:31:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Probably one of the most underrated nutrients I use in practice is potassium. Low potassium can be a huge factor in energy, relapsing gut issues, thyroid function, and even regulating blood pressure. Now your blood test for potassium will look normal most of the time, otherwise you'd feel faint and maybe like you're going to pass out.

[00:32:17] Christa Biegler, RD: But your tissue levels of potassium will decline With an increase of the stress hormone, cortisol big picture. I find it's just really hard for humans to get enough food based potassium in their diet, unless they live in a tropical place. And I'm usually recommending my clients get at least 4, 000 milligrams of food based potassium per day.

[00:32:37] Christa Biegler, RD: That's why I really commonly recommend Jigsaw's Pickleball Cocktail to help my clients. It's one of the only electrolyte products on the market with a hefty dose of potassium at 800 mg per scoop, when most electrolyte products only have about 200 mg. Making it really hard to reach those high doses of food based potassium I recommend per day.

[00:32:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Plus, it's automatically the best choice if my client is dealing with swelling, which can be related to imbalances of sodium and potassium in the tissue. I'm a potassium evangelist, and Jigsaw's Pickleball Cocktail is one of my most used tools of the trade. You can get a discount on any of jigsaw's amazing products, including pickleball@jigsawhealth.com with the code less stressed.

[00:33:23] Christa Biegler, RD: 10. That's three S's, less stressed, 10. 

[00:33:27] Dr. Paul Anderson: So just the way our biochemistry works, we naturally have intermediates often that we make in metabolizing things that if we build up the intermediate and it doesn't leave our body like it's supposed to, it can become a An interior toxin like an endogenous toxin.

[00:33:45] Dr. Paul Anderson: So the ones people often hear about because now they, there's people who just have these content things on YouTube. So everyone hears about it. Oxalates are an example. Okay. And that's an intermediate that's not supposed to build up real big, but it does in some people. 

[00:34:02] Christa Biegler, RD: Because of a bunch of crap and it, 

[00:34:05] Christa Biegler, RD: A bunch of junk, essentially, right?

[00:34:07] Dr. Paul Anderson: A number of reasons, but junk is a huge reason junk and dehydration is the enemy of everything but after that junk so oxalate or one example sulfites, so not sulfate so much, but sulfites are supposed to be a pass through and they go through sulfite oxidase normally, and they're supposed to pass through to sulfite. Sulfate. So it is the kind that builds up, gives us headaches, can make us look allergic when we're not can make people, have manic episodes. It's never good for us in high amounts, and it's supposed to pass through this enzyme system to sulfate, which our liver uses for phase two detox.

[00:34:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: So it's got a purpose, but it's if you stop in the middle, That's where the trouble starts. And those pathways, you mentioned junk, the biggest reason sulfite oxidase slows down is not genetics, although there are some of those, it's because there's too many competing metals for the molybdenum that's supposed to be a cofactor for sulfite oxidase.

[00:35:04] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's anything that's got a metal cofactor bad metals will attach to and slow it down. So that's another one, sulfite. So we said oxalates There's also nitrogen residue. So you could have too many, nitrites, nitrates, ammonia is a big nitrogen one, or just generally too much positive nitrogen balance, which you see pathologically, huge problem.

[00:35:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: People on dialysis, they're always working with that on dialysis. But if you have normal kidneys and everything, You're supposed to have ways to get rid of it between your liver's urea cycle and your kidneys glutamine cycle. But those build up in people and they create a lot of troubles. Others are salicylates.

[00:35:46] Dr. Paul Anderson: A lot of times people are sensitive to those. Aldehydes, one of my favorite topics. So aldehydes are in the middle of a bunch of processes. And aldehydes, people say, what does that feel, what kind of symptoms do you get with that? Aldehydes basically just make you feel poisoned, because they are, they're a neurotoxin.

[00:36:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: And we make them as an intermediate all the time, right? There are people who have genetics that slow down aldehyde removal. But all of these enzymes, as you just mentioned, require tons of vitamins as cofactors, but vitamins in almost all cases are the organic cofactor, and there's an inorganic cofactor that's a mineral, and if you don't have both, the enzyme slows down.

[00:36:35] Dr. Paul Anderson: you've got this sort of dynamic thing where if my body Is genetically slow at getting racings or I'm just too much junk. I need more of the vitamins and minerals or I can't process these things. So it's like it's very all very nutrient dependent. The other thing is aldehydes are also downstream product of alcohol.

[00:36:56] Dr. Paul Anderson: Like the kind people drink. And then they're also actually part of histamine metabolism in one respect. And you make histamine aldehydes, which if you thought regular aldehydes made you feel sick, histamine aldehydes make you feel really poisoned. 

[00:37:11] Christa Biegler, RD: I was waiting 

[00:37:11] Christa Biegler, RD: for you to bring up histamines here in this 

[00:37:14] Christa Biegler, RD: list.

[00:37:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: Histamine we could do two days on, but if you ever know anyone who went to a spring break and got a spring break hangover from cheap booze, that's a histamine aldehyde poisoning. Because it's the last step in getting rid of aldehydes and not good. Not good for you. And there's some people who just build that up because they have mass cell problems or other stuff like that.

[00:37:37] Dr. Paul Anderson: So those are, and there's many others, but those are the big endogenous toxicities. And most of the answer to them, as I said, is hydrating better. So we have enough fluid to move things through. Getting enough of the nutrients to run all these enzymes that get stuck. And then not having so much junk in the system to plug up the, the detox pathways.

[00:37:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Eloquently stated to simplify complex topics, which I used, I either still touched all of these, or I used to talk about, you won't hear me talking about salicylates as much anymore. I try to avoid talking about oxalate and it's just like a preference. It's if we do these nutrients and get rid of the junk, this will work itself out at hydrate, which is always the first step.

[00:38:17] Christa Biegler, RD: And I think a clinical pearl here that I want people to take away is, I just want to underline what you're already saying is if you're very chronically in complex, usually you have a lot of deficiency, I always think the resources to do the general processes, so support the resources to do the processes.

[00:38:35] Christa Biegler, RD: And sometimes it, sometimes there's a step forward and a couple of steps back, especially if you're having issues with sulfites. It's man, that one makes you feel a little crazy sometimes, but. Then sometimes not right. I always like to I hear you oversimplifying and I'm here for it. I like love the complexity.

[00:38:49] Christa Biegler, RD: And then I'm like, it's easy. You just support the nutrients and get rid of the junk and hydrate. Fine. No problem. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

[00:38:57] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. 

[00:38:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. 

[00:38:58] Dr. Paul Anderson: At least on paper, it's that simple. Clinically. It's a little harder. 

[00:39:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:39:04] Christa Biegler, RD: We're empowering here. 

[00:39:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's right. 

[00:39:06] Christa Biegler, RD: So we're empowering. All right, let's talk about antioxidant systems a bit and what comes up is glutathione, one of the sexiest antioxidants.

[00:39:20] Christa Biegler, RD: There is, and in another cancer episode, we talk about maybe cancer patients should not have glutathione given to them. And I had a client say what about coffee enemas? Because those are supposed to upregulate glutathione by several hundred percent. So is that okay? Because coffee enemas were born.

[00:39:42] Christa Biegler, RD: in integrative cancer therapies. That's my understanding, right? Curse and therapy stuff. So will you unpack? I know that's a big topic. 

[00:39:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Let's talk 

[00:39:50] Christa Biegler, RD: about it. 

[00:39:52] Dr. Paul Anderson: So do we want to go from the direction of coffee enemas backwards towards glutathione or go from glutathione out to coffee enemas? 

[00:40:01] Christa Biegler, RD: I do think that coffee enemas toward glutathione sounds nice because the argument is that the coffee enemas increase glutathione.

[00:40:10] Christa Biegler, RD: And then they're part of, if you go to some integrative cancer clinics, you're doing a lot of coffee enemas, which by the way, also as an aside would require a lot of nutrients. So they're going to use up your nutrients even more, just to go back to that other statement we just said. 

[00:40:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. Because coffee enemas obviously are.

[00:40:29] Dr. Paul Anderson: Absorb through the lower portal venous system and they make your liver work harder and your liver runs on nutrients. Yeah, it's going to burn out more. So here's the first thing. And On my YouTube channel, I did something and this question is on the minds of everyone who's thought about it.

[00:40:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: So I got a lot of questions. So I did a reply. I forget what this video or I just typed it or whatever. But anyway here's the thing, what most people hear. is that there is something like, I don't know, like a 700 fold increase in something related to glutathione when you do a coffee enema. And because the majority of patients, and actually the majority of clinicians are not biochemists, that's as close as they get.

[00:41:17] Dr. Paul Anderson: So the first thing about glutathione is it's in the middle of a core set of three redox molecules, and it is the biggest cofactor hog in your whole body. To make glutathione cycle properly requires more nutrient cofactors than any other process. in biochemistry in humans. So that's the first thing.

[00:41:43] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's not an easy thing to parse out. But here's what happens with Coffeanimus. Glutathione cycles between an oxidized and a reduced form using two enzymes glutathione and If it keeps going, it's everything's fat and happy in your redox world, right? And that's actually a cancer prevention strategy is to have it keep going.

[00:42:13] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's also a strategy, by the way, to not have you build up oxalates just in passing there that it does that too. But because glutathione to run those enzymes and all the ancillary things in its world, it uses. Vitamin B2 and B3 in huge amounts, it uses vitamin B5 to operate, it uses magnesium, it uses zinc, it uses selenium, and then vitamin C. Without all, and that's half the cofactors go to glutathione. 

[00:42:46] Christa Biegler, RD: I know, your 

[00:42:46] Christa Biegler, RD: thyroid is not going to function without all those cofactors. 

[00:42:49] Dr. Paul Anderson: Just one 

[00:42:50] Dr. Paul Anderson: trick. Just for one pill, right? So if we're throwing all those toxins and crap in there, we're going to do that. And then every time it cycles it, vitamin C and vitamin E cycle, they're less demanding, actually, they're much lower maintenance.

[00:43:06] Dr. Paul Anderson: So glutathione though, has this next step. When you run in phase two detox, normally your liver, but there's other places it goes on. When you run glutathione in phase two detox. You have a next step, which is GST, which is a glutathione transferase molecule. And that is what attaches to whatever went through glutathione and takes it away from glutathione.

[00:43:36] Dr. Paul Anderson: What coffee enemas raise is GST, not glutathione. So coffee enemas raise glutathione transferase, GST, by 700 fold in some cases with glutathione. So glutathione actually doesn't increase at all with coffee enemas. Glutathione transferase does, but And that's a hugely important thing because the next step in a lot of people being toxic is phase two works.

[00:44:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: But if you don't have enough GST, you can't move over to phase three and get rid of the junk, right? So the idea, and then of course they invented coffee enemas long before they knew about GST. But the idea of why this is so important is your body's already overtaxed. And if we can, through some.

[00:44:23] Dr. Paul Anderson: A miracle of nutrition keep glutathione cycling It's going to shove more stuff over into needing to leave the body if gst and gst is more than one thing, but if that slows down you just build up toxicity Like you can't get rid of it and you get sicker and those toxins become epigenetic triggers for all manner of badness Whether it's cancer autoimmunity or whatever.

[00:44:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: So by the Coffee enema increasing some hundreds of percent this sort of interface between phase two detox and phase three detox. We're taking the trash out faster, which is, it doesn't matter what disease you have. That's probably the thing. So the question of. And I believe I probably got a hundred of this question also of, Oh my God, if it's raising glutathione 700%, is it like I'm going to kill myself because I got too much glutathione and I got cancer?

[00:45:18] Dr. Paul Anderson: No, it's not. It's raising the trash removal system, which takes pressure off glutathione, but it doesn't make glutathione actually go up at all. But I think because, and it the biggest research was the University of Wisconsin, I think, or somewhere, and they were very clear about it was GST, not, glutathione but, If you look at that and don't realize there's this multi step process glutathione use you could read it and say, oh, glutathione transfer is probably glutathione, and they're cousins, right?

[00:45:49] Dr. Paul Anderson: So on the order of the coffee enema, if that's, for you and your provider think that's a good thing which I think there's a lot of utility for them, it's not going to raise your glutathione, it's going to help glutathione do its job. The same as getting those nutrients in that help glutathione go through its cycle.

[00:46:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: You got to have it, like it has to go through its cycle. So they're not going to hurt you either. So then if we go back a step to glutathione and cancer, I have a class I do for doctors and it's called controversies in oncology. And the class, every time I do it, it gets longer. Because there's just so many controversies, most of which like all controversies have some basis in reality and some basis in hysteria. So here's the thing about glutathione,

[00:46:33] Dr. Paul Anderson: what the research that is focused on to extrapolate over to glutathione. So that's a long distance, is. That there are some cancer cells that create resistance to chemotherapy because they make their own glutathione. These are very smart cancer cells.

[00:47:00] Dr. Paul Anderson: In the main. Your glutathione is not even considered by these cancer cells. They don't care whether you make glutathione or not. They make their own, and they're very efficient at it, 

[00:47:13] Dr. Paul Anderson: right?

[00:47:14] Dr. Paul Anderson: Generally, they are unaffected by exogenous glutathione. You could take some glutathione. They're not going to be stronger because of that, because they're strong enough as it is. 

[00:47:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Why are they making their own? 

[00:47:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: Because they've learned how to be resistant to being killed. They actually upregulate their own.

[00:47:33] Dr. Paul Anderson: So we talked about like the, so if glutathione transphrase is the cousin after glutathione, there's the GSS. Systems that are the ones that make glutathione, they have their own GSS that they build inside of the cell that make their own glutathione, right? And they do it because it may, it's like superbugs, superbacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

[00:47:57] Dr. Paul Anderson: They figured out a way to do this. Cancer cells. even smarter than bacteria, they figured out a way. And like I said, it's not all cancerous. So here's the balance clinically with this. Take it to the other end, just logically. If killing cancer was all about depleting glutathione in a human, we could stop all cancer.

[00:48:21] Dr. Paul Anderson: The problem would be the human would die because you can't live without glutathione. And one of the really nice summary papers ends with this, actually many do, with this statement, although, they say stuff like, although glutathione reduction or interference strategies have been, tried in research, et cetera, and they seem to hold a lot of promise, they have been very unrewarding in their outcomes.

[00:48:55] Dr. Paul Anderson: So it's never that simple. 

[00:48:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:48:58] Dr. Paul Anderson: Now I always tell patients and I especially tell doctors, so they know to tell their patients nowadays because we can get good absorbable glutathione supplements through liposomal forms. If you take glutathione seven days a week and you have cancer, you have a potential to raise your level enough that then those cells may do something bad with it, right?

[00:49:26] Dr. Paul Anderson: But if a person is, you've got someone recovering from surgery or chemo or radiation or something, and they're doing a punctuated dose of glutathione once or twice a week, there's not gonna be enough glutathione for anything other than their body's needs. It's not going to affect their cancer. 

[00:49:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah.

[00:49:45] Dr. Paul Anderson: Because it's the cancer cells that they make glutathione better than we do. Okay, and that's a whole deeper there, so it's a balance. It's like we don't want to overfeed them But by the same token unless we're our goal is to kill the patient and you know Have them feel horrible all the time.

[00:50:04] Dr. Paul Anderson: There are times when they need glutathione support and they need it should they do it forever? No. Should they do it seven days a week? No, none of those things make any sense. But once their body is working better, then what they really need are those cofactors we talked about that kind of help the system keep cycling.

[00:50:22] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's really the goal. So it's one of those things where it's easier just to say because we have these cells that have learned how to make their own glutathione, that makes them resistant. Ergo, Glutathione is bad for everybody with cancer all the time. That's too far of a stretch, but also because a patient could go out and buy liposomal glutathione and take tons of it every day.

[00:50:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's not good either. You just don't need that. So it's we modulate it, we use it clinically, we look at what's the need, has your body been beat up, whether it's surgery or a bunch of drugs or chemo or radiation, whatever. Do we have to repair something? Okay, we're going to do this punctuated glutathione therapy and it'll just be enough to fill the tank, but we're not going to give it to you every day.

[00:51:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Are you doing it via IV because that's your thing? Or also orally? 

[00:51:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Because doxine would 

[00:51:14] Christa Biegler, RD: make probably a really big difference here if we're doing punctuated. I. I just wonder. 

[00:51:17] Dr. Paul Anderson: I do all I don't just do IVs. Yeah, so part of that human research of a side project that We didn't know we were going to do was IV glutathione for radiation burns.

[00:51:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: So the radiation oncologist would send us patients that burned. And once radiation oncologist is done with you they don't care what treatments you do anymore. Like they're very cautious when you're getting radiation and they, it's go do whatever. And we were doing IV usually twice a week for eight weeks, once a week for eight weeks, and we were helping people recover.

[00:51:51] Dr. Paul Anderson: burned cranial nerves in a much faster time than they would heal normally. If I had a burn, like a radiation burn or something, yes, I'd definitely do an IV. People who are really ragged out post chemo or, what, for whatever reason we'll do IV once a week or something, but people who, live far away or whatever, we would, I would set up an oral protocol.

[00:52:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: Again, it was like two days on and five days off, just a cycle. with a lot of support. But we definitely did see with so we didn't just do IV glutathione though because of the other biochemistry I would give them an IV with all the cofactor nutrients first then I would give them the glutathione and we never had to give them like these herculean doses of glutathione because we could keep it working longer with that.

[00:52:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:52:42] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah but it's a blanket statement it's more of a caution just so people don't go out and say, Oh, glutathione is good for me and take, a bottle every week or something. So do definitely punctuate it. Cause here's the other question. I'm sure you've gotten this question.

[00:52:54] Dr. Paul Anderson: I know I have I don't have cancer. Is glutathione going to cause cancer? Because of this thing it's bad in cancer. Same with N acetylcysteine, it's precursor. And the answer is no, unless you supremely overdo it or something, it's not going to cause cancer. That's not how that works.

[00:53:12] Christa Biegler, RD: I think if anything, when you're supplementing things, you have to be considerate of the other cofactors that are necessary and make sure that in some capacity, you're always supporting those cofactors. And I think it would be okay to say. That if you're doing a lot of glutathione and you don't have those cofactors you may see something from that, right?

[00:53:29] Christa Biegler, RD: You may not tolerate that beautifully. It's a possibility. 

[00:53:31] Dr. Paul Anderson: It will at the very least make you more toxic because you get, you're going to push the level of oxidized glutathione in your body. So you're going to push that out and that will create a backup in other toxins. So yeah, at the very least, it's not going to be good for you that way.

[00:53:51] Christa Biegler, RD: For sure. Okay. So on the same notes here, as we're trucking along with cancer, another question I had gotten was about red light therapy, because the mechanism of red light therapy is that it's increasing cellular production, increasing ATP. And so I had a client ask, so with that in mind, if we're increasing cellular energy, don't we not want to do increased cellular energy for cancer?

[00:54:14] Christa Biegler, RD: So is red light therapy negative for cancer? 

[00:54:18] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah, that's a really It's just like the glutathione, excellent question. And again, it is and I will say some very well intentioned, brilliant people sometimes have this in their lecture notes and stuff like that. Oh, red light might be a contraindication or something like that.

[00:54:38] Dr. Paul Anderson: And again, dose and timing and all that, it's important just like with glutathione, right? But here's the thing. Red light therapy, one of the things it does is to help the transition between complex 3 and 4 in the mitochondria, which is right before we make ATP out of ADP. So it's a primer to that end.

[00:55:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: So we think of it as energy producing, right? There's a couple things about that with cancer. We purposefully, it's another research project that turned out well, and then I won't say what happened that was not good that involved the government, but it was a fun story. Unless you were there.

[00:55:31] Christa Biegler, RD: I think you're gonna have to give us some slice of that, but carry on. 

[00:55:34] Dr. Paul Anderson: Let me tell the story and then I'll try and figure out a way not to get arrested and see what I need to say. So we purposefully in a number of cancer therapies, actually give things to the human that increase mitochondrial activity.

[00:55:57] Dr. Paul Anderson: And the reason now you have to do it along with other parts that involve the Warburg effect but the mitochondria and cancer are abnormal. Most cancer cells, mitochondria don't work the way your normal cells do. So if you do a therapy that can go in, And a normal cell can suck it up and the mitochondria are stronger, and a cancer cell, say, sucks it, it's a very medical term, sucks it up or takes it in, and it doesn't like its mitochondria working normally or working quickly, you actually weaken the cancer cell.

[00:56:35] Dr. Paul Anderson: Now I'm doing this as a stepping stone to red light because it's analogous. This is not what I'm talking about. But so we would do this with people where we would force the cells into normal glycolysis, which is what normal human cells do. Cancer cells don't like to do that so much. And then we would give them mitochondrial primers that would make the mitochondria. Not super mitochondria, but they would run at their normal speed. They would be super healthy. You do that to a cancer cell, it weakens it in metabolism, and then it also makes dysfunctional mitochondria more dysfunctional. So the immune system actually can notice and kill or create apoptosis or whatever in those cancer cells.

[00:57:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: One of the dangers in indiscriminate killing, like with a, an old time, cytotoxic chemotherapy, is it'll kill your cells that are good, kills the cancer cells, so we have friendly fire crossover. These sort of therapies, if I can give you something that your normal cells are fine with, no problem, cancer cells get weaker with, that's a win. In the case of red light therapy, although it does things other than just the complexes, in ATP formation, but specifically, if you're doing red light therapy And again, I'm not living in a red light bed or, whatever, but if you're doing punctuated red light therapy to recover from surgery, which we use it a lot for, or to, combine with hyperbaric oxygen or do whatever you're doing with it.

[00:58:14] Dr. Paul Anderson: In no way is that going to make your cancer stronger because the complexes are usually damaged. In a, in the mitochondria of cancer and anything you do to rev those up just makes them weaker and leakier. And then the cancer cell is more prone to not living as well. So yeah it's a theoretical concern that gets listed everywhere in the universe.

[00:58:39] Dr. Paul Anderson: But that's not actually how it works. 

[00:58:42] Christa Biegler, RD: My brain's over here, like processing everything you were talking about with mitochondrial primers. And if you're doing this. And other things are not lined up, things fall apart, is essentially how I was interpreting it. And it made me wonder, even though you were giving a correlative, you were giving an analogy, it made me think about whether I have this one person that I know with an autoimmune condition who said, Oh, red light therapy makes me feel worse.

[00:59:13] Christa Biegler, RD: And it made me wonder if that's along the same lines, like there's mitochondrial dysfunction. 

[00:59:18] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. With, so we move out of cancer for a minute. Yeah. 

[00:59:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Whoops. Sorry about over there. 

[00:59:25] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's all right. Just warning the audience. So now we're going over that other side. Yeah, so it is completely not uncommon in people with especially more advanced autoimmunity or complex autoimmunity or autoimmunity that comes with other chronic disorders, like even worse.

[00:59:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: If a lot of the underlying, predicates of your body and your cells and your organs working correctly are not there because you're chronically ill. A lot of therapies will feel like they aggravate you. So we see this with red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, some IV therapies even some just oral therapies.

[01:00:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: And it's not because they're inherently bad, but they're going in. They're doing something. What they do, let's say making the mitochondria work a little faster or something, but what I always tell people is if your engine is falling apart and you put gas in your tank and you floor it, your engine may just start to come apart because you're putting more energy into a damaged system.

[01:00:34] Dr. Paul Anderson: If I put energy into mitochondria that aren't ready for it yet. Your whole body feels like something's very wrong. 

[01:00:41] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[01:00:42] Dr. Paul Anderson: Because the, it's like a broken engine. You got to fix the engine first, really. Yeah. And that could be many levels, but. They could have true mitochondrial dysfunction. That's a little more rare, but that can happen.

[01:00:54] Dr. Paul Anderson: There's a lot of acquired mitochondrial dysfunction in autoimmunity though, where your body knows something's wrong. And the feedback lowers your metabolism by shutting off parts of your mitochondria. Yeah. Yeah. And so unless you fix the reasons the body needed to turn down your mitochondria and you just jack them up with, any number of things can do that, people will just feel, they'll feel sick at a higher level is what it is.

[01:01:20] Dr. Paul Anderson: And so we always tell folks like. Especially when so my daughter, I have five children, the eldest daughter runs a hyperbaric and photodynamic therapy center. And so we always tell people like look, if you're complex chronic illness, bad autoimmunity, whatever, we're going to walk real slowly into this therapy to make sure your body's ready for it.

[01:01:46] Dr. Paul Anderson: And if you do aggravate, what that means is we need to work on the other stuff first and then get your body strong enough for those therapies. lot of people will I hear this a lot. So I think people resonate with it. Sometimes people like will be hypothyroid labs are totally hypothyroid.

[01:02:05] Dr. Paul Anderson: They take it and they feel sicker. And it's not because they don't need the thyroid. It's because the thyroid is making their mitochondria run faster. And there's just nothing supporting them, 

[01:02:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: Boom. And you think you burned up the cofactors before now you're burning up. 

[01:02:19] Christa Biegler, RD: I 

[01:02:19] Christa Biegler, RD: have a client like that right now.

[01:02:21] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. 

[01:02:21] Dr. Paul Anderson: So it's thyroid's not bad. You just, we got to fix the system first before we do that. Yeah. 

[01:02:27] Christa Biegler, RD: And that's a takeaway. I think there's probably many things that could support that engine, as you say, but. Nutrient cofactors might be an option, gentle, basic, 

[01:02:36] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah, the mitochondria tend to run off nutrients.

[01:02:39] Dr. Paul Anderson: So that would make a lot of sense. 

[01:02:40] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. That's good. When you have like consistent underlying messages, like maybe the nutrients are low, and that doesn't mean go supplement something really huge. So you brought up your daughter running a hyperbaric oxygen. Center, I did see on your online presence, I saw some things about and I would love to hear how you're using hyperbaric oxygen treatment in cancer, which is a little bit of a segue kind of maybe not really into also I want to hear about oxygen dysfunction in general in cancer.

[01:03:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And the real question that I got. Was, it was, we were reading about cancer and looking at, there might be oxygen dysfunction and that got me thinking about breath work and that got someone asking about, do you see people with sleep issues, oxygen dysfunctions, like CPAPs?

[01:03:30] Christa Biegler, RD: And sleep apnea people that have oxygen dysfunction. Do you see them falling into the cancer bucket more commonly? 

[01:03:40] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. So yes, so this is, it's similar to the glutathione universe. There's the oxygen universe and all of 

[01:03:46] Dr. Paul Anderson: them 

[01:03:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: intersect. We'll start complicated and go backwards I hope.

[01:03:52] Dr. Paul Anderson: So in regard to hyperbaric oxygen for my professional life where I do a monthly continuing education, I did one last week that was an update on hyperbaric medicine. And cancer specifically. 

[01:04:10] Christa Biegler, RD: How 

[01:04:10] Christa Biegler, RD: timely. 

[01:04:11] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah, the reason I did that is, if I would have taught that class 15 years ago, I would have taught almost the exact opposite class.

[01:04:21] Dr. Paul Anderson: The research has changed so much, right? Most, and here's another little hoo ha problem the majority of the way that hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is three things, it's pressure, gas mix, and time. So it's not just pressure. They all do different things. The way that little combo affects tumor cells is about 80 percent the opposite of the way that combination affects non tumor cells.

[01:04:57] Dr. Paul Anderson: So when I published this, we call it the combined metabolic oncology treatment, and it's changed eight times since it got published, but because, hey, we learned. One of the things we did as a synergist in there was hyperbaric oxygen. Then there was this thing of weakening the cancer cell by forcing oxidative metabolism and weakened, essentially making its mitochondria dysfunctionally work.

[01:05:21] Dr. Paul Anderson: So all of that went together. So people often look, and if they know a little bit about like brain trauma and hyperbaric, there's certain things that the chemicals that help you heal do in like brain trauma or post surgery, anything but cancer. And though, if you extrapolate those chemical changes over to cancer, you'd say, my god, this would be the worst thing to do to a cancer patient is to give them hyperbaric.

[01:05:46] Dr. Paul Anderson: And up until about 2012, all of the research said that, but it was because they weren't looking at cancer cells. In 2012, the whole research world started to make a shift. In 2016, it made a bigger shift. And then since then it's been, steps up, but there's still people who don't get that there's a difference.

[01:06:08] Dr. Paul Anderson: So I get to talk about update for oncology because it's about tumor, but same as that glutathione thing with cancer. So You know, it's just it's cancer cells work differently. And it turns out when we put them under pressure and gas change in time, they respond totally differently than if you hit your head, both are healing just in totally different way.

[01:06:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: So the oxygen thing. Yeah, it used to be thought, Oh, my God, oxygen to make the tumor grow. It turns out, which we knew, but no one connected the dots and in the research world really for a long time. The main reason with solid tumors. And hematologic cancers, like blood cancers and stuff, turns out they're the same problems.

[01:06:55] Dr. Paul Anderson: The main reason that they, beyond this glutathione business we were talking about, that they can get stronger and bigger and badder, is lack of oxygen. And so if I can put, either a solid tumor or a blood cancer under pressure, change the gases up and all that. I reversed the initial signals that are making it stronger, which are created by, think of it like a fist that's held tight and the tumor's in the middle.

[01:07:22] Dr. Paul Anderson: You can't get oxygen in there and they thrive on that. 

[01:07:25] Christa Biegler, RD: On lack of oxygen. 

[01:07:26] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah. And so if I force the oxygen to permeate, then the tumor loses most of its drivers of of strength, essentially. So that's one part there with oxygen and cancers. Now, hyperbaric is probably the most efficient way to change that because of the pressure component.

[01:07:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: There's other therapies where you can get gas changes but you can't do pressure with anything except a pressure vessel. So that's a big deal. And it was just to do that update and connect all of the mini research papers that come out to show about this tumor biology business.

[01:08:06] Dr. Paul Anderson: It was close to two hours to do that. Just hitting the high points. So today I did it in what? Three minutes. So there you go. And so that's one thing. And so it can be very helpful, but again it's not on its own going to do it, no one thing that's on does you put things together though, like that thing we were talking about earlier where in this, I'm trying to segue into your question about breathing and oxygen and all that.

[01:08:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: the tumor normally not using oxidative metabolism like normal cells do, right? So you're forcing them to do that, and also you're taking away the drivers of tumor strength. Hyperbaric is a really good synergist there, and these other therapies I was telling you about, to force regular oxidative glycolysis.

[01:08:55] Dr. Paul Anderson: Normal cells do that normally. Tumor cells mostly don't want to do that. They go down and then they create a lot of lactate and they dump lactate out. They poison the environment and then a bunch of bad things happen. So that means then the weak mitochondria in a cancer cell are used to just getting the leftover scraps.

[01:09:15] Dr. Paul Anderson: If I forced the cancer cell to shut this lactate thing off and I force oxygen down there, that beats up the mitochondria, starts to fall apart. And if I give a mitochondrial primer, it falls apart faster. So not. To try and segue that then to, okay what's, let's say it's not hyperbaric, it's just oxygen and cancer.

[01:09:38] Dr. Paul Anderson: When you get to tumor cells, if you look at them like two cells next to each other, and you just look at the basic metabolism in your normal cells under normal conditions, We make energy at least through the use of carbohydrate through regular glycolysis and that goes down and it has these steps and that gets to the mitochondria and then it goes into the Krebs cycle and makes more, energy substrate and then the mitochondria make ATP.

[01:10:10] Dr. Paul Anderson: There's another way, let's say you've overexercised or something, you become anaerobic, your natural cells will run out, they're not enough oxygen, so they'll go into lactate metabolism. So people, your muscles hurt with lactate, all that business. Cancer cells, most of them naturally just don't want to do this regular energy production.

[01:10:34] Dr. Paul Anderson: They want to make lactate. So they do it really easy. So they have dysfunctional oxygen metabolism. That leads to less energy to their damaged mitochondria and that leads to the damaged mitochondria being happy and slow and being good cancer mitochondria. So then people will say does external beyond that hyperbaric thing I talked about with the, if the closed fist does external oxygen, would it drive that, or would it be a problem or something like that?

[01:11:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: Actually not directly. So like somebody who had a breed, there's many reasons sleep apnea and hypoxia are bad for you. But that's. An external problem that is not the cancer cells are not going to be impressed by that. Like they, they really don't care how much oxygen, if you're still alive you've got enough oxygen for them. Now, that being said, there's all sorts of, disorders, metabolic disorders and stuff that can be triggered by chronic hypoxia. Like sleep apnea and all that stuff. So certainly you need to correct. If you have that, or you have some other reason to wear a BiPAP or CPAP or something, you should do that.

[01:11:54] Dr. Paul Anderson: But it's not really going to affect the cancer proper. Because they like the glutathione story. They're good at their metabolism without any help from the outside. When we try and attack them, we try and attack them where they're weak and that turns out to work pretty well. 

[01:12:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I will offer.

[01:12:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Part of the question is to your point, very clinical, right? Is there a, is that lack of oxygen? Very technical CPAP. And then people just doing breathwork and the communication to the immune system being maybe a positive thing also. 

[01:12:28] Dr. Paul Anderson: Yeah, on the 

[01:12:29] Dr. Paul Anderson: positive side, I really think As we were saying earlier, the immune system needs all sorts of things and one is us to have normoxia and to be turning over oxygen CO2 appropriately because be beyond, needing A-C-P-A-P or something.

[01:12:47] Dr. Paul Anderson: As most people are chronically dehydrated, a lot of people dip into chronic hypoxia a lot, through the day. Like obviously they don't die. It's not that bad, but yeah, and that will shift. Your internal pH, not again enough to kill you, but it will shift your pH so that your body is a little less likely to respond the way it's supposed to, there's a really wonderful paper that came, I think it was last year, real recent anyway, and it was like something like if your grandma's top advice got research done on it. It was one of those. I love those papers. It's we finally did a study to program what was right. And this one, we have all sorts of studies about hydration and disease and all kinds of stuff.

[01:13:30] Dr. Paul Anderson: This was an oncology journal, and it was like it makes sense to us that if people are dehydrated, that they're not moving fluids through the cell and taking out the metabolic trash and all that. Can we prove that in an experimental model? And indeed dehydration even makes cancer worse. And it's the same with chronic low level hypoxia, where you're not, breathing as you should and all of that stuff, it's not only bad for your nervous system and your muscles it's, it can make your cancer worse too, yeah. 

[01:14:03] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I don't know about the listener, but I'm going to go put all of Dr. Anderson's books in my cart. I'm going to ask him if I can take his controversies and cancer class annually. I have an abnormal interest in this topic. I'm not sure why yet. But here we are. And, I brought this up earlier, so we'll wrap with this.

[01:14:23] Christa Biegler, RD: We'll talk about Where can people find you online? And then also I heard you talk about this and you brought it up at the very beginning that medicine, there was a time where there was creativity and I was going to ask you about, how do you avoid burnout when you're working with such sick and complex clients that really need you?

[01:14:42] Christa Biegler, RD: And it does sound like you are allowing creativity to flow. And it also sounds like you're doing what you want to do right now. I don't know, because one of the questions I could ask you is like, how do you have time to do all this education? So where can people find some of your education online?

[01:14:57] Christa Biegler, RD: How are you finding joy and doing this? Is this, how does this failure come? 

[01:15:02] Dr. Paul Anderson: That's an excellent question. All of yours have been what I would say with regard to just, the physician burnout and all of that sort of stuff. I probably experimented with every way to be burned out.

 And learn many things the hard way ultimately. And if I fast forward to now with the help of, some really wonderful external helpers to work on me and all of that, I am very much at a place where I really, I love what I do with my patients. I love what I do with my education and writing.

[01:15:39] Dr. Paul Anderson: And that is a culmination of a lot of years of doing a lot of patient care and keeping track of stuff. And I've always been a teacher. So that's always been like my hobby is teaching. So it's just like now it's just different because I've done it longer and I'm older and I get to make more choices too.

[01:15:58] Dr. Paul Anderson: So burnout is, especially when you chronic illness and cancer. is very easy to create burnout in as a provider, because obviously you have a population where some people, we're all going to die. But some people have diagnoses that speed that up quite a bit. My current oncology population is more pediatric.

[01:16:27] Dr. Paul Anderson: Cancer patients, and I've had pediatric cancer patients pretty much the whole time I've worked with cancer patients. But it's an area where not a lot of people want to go into. It's fraught with a lot of legal issues and stuff, so I don't, I can only handle so many at a time, but, nobody passing away is fun.

[01:16:49] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's not, we're here to try and help people, not die. And I would say, the first five years were really rough because it was like, as I was telling you, back in those days, no one came in until there was no hope, which is great place to learn because.

[01:17:07] Dr. Paul Anderson: If you can help somebody in that situation, that's wonderful. But it was rough deal. And I had to really learn the hard way that, there's only so many things I can control. And is that, what's more important is this relationship to patient and I have, and that has to be, honest and, all that.

[01:17:25] Dr. Paul Anderson: So there was, there's definitely some, dips in the burnout there. And then there's the problems of abundance, where you help enough people and then you have to, you can't help any more people directly, which is another reason why I started doing more and more education was I don't want other people to learn these lessons.

[01:17:43] Dr. Paul Anderson: I learned a hard way also. Learn your own hard lessons, let me make some mistakes and tell you what not to do. So that's and I'm at a place where, I have, as I tell people, I tell my patients this too, my entire, a hundred percent of my patients exist only to humble me every day because they're what works for the worst of the worst patients.

[01:18:09] Dr. Paul Anderson: doesn't work for them for some reason, right? So they keep me learning and we have a good relationship because they know I won't give up and all of that business their parents know, and we do what we do. But I also have to, I had to limit the number of patients now because I do so much educational stuff and writing, and I really love that.

[01:18:31] Dr. Paul Anderson: Like it's why spend. All these years learning all this stuff and not like sharing. 

[01:18:38] Christa Biegler, RD: I know you're just paying it forward. It's you're, creating the legacy. The legacy of Dole Anderson. 

[01:18:44] Dr. Paul Anderson: I do plan to live a long time. 

[01:18:47] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, exactly. That's part of my goal. That's really the question. It's keep 

[01:18:51] Christa Biegler, RD: doing what you're doing, please.

[01:18:52] Dr. Paul Anderson: My mental health team and I, we call this the, this is my third act. We're just gonna make it a long third act so that I have time to do all this. But yeah, no, I, and I feel good too. So it should, that should work out. But no, I think it's something you almost have to go through on your own.

[01:19:06] Dr. Paul Anderson: But if I was speaking to myself 20 or 30 years ago, I would say get somebody to help you as an objective helper faster than I did. Certainly don't try. 

[01:19:18] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm glad 

[01:19:19] Christa Biegler, RD: you brought that up. I think there's a lot of stuff, all up here that we 

[01:19:23] Christa Biegler, RD: just 

[01:19:24] Dr. Paul Anderson: we think, Oh, I'll be fine. And we're really not, you're not fine.

[01:19:27] Dr. Paul Anderson: It's you get. Get some help. 

[01:19:29] Christa Biegler, RD: Not, and there's so many options. That's my point. 

[01:19:31] Dr. Paul Anderson: Exactly. 

[01:19:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Where can people find you online? YouTube? 

[01:19:35] Dr. Paul Anderson: Certainly there's so many outlets that we had a brilliant idea a couple of years ago and I made a hub website. So I only have to give one out in podcasts.

[01:19:45] Dr. Paul Anderson: As I said, I, because I do a million podcasts a year, it's simple, it's dranow. com, so d r a n o w. com. And so there's different buttons on there. So if you're a provider and you want the CE stuff, that'll take you one direction. If you're looking for YouTube, which is huge right now there's that. We, and there's other stuff, the books, everything's all on that.

[01:20:11] Dr. Paul Anderson: And it, it will take you to the correct places. 

[01:20:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Perfect. 

[01:20:15] Christa Biegler, RD: Thank you so much for coming on today. Easily we could talk to you for hours. I'm sure everyone feels that way. So we'll just go binge your books, see your YouTube, your continuing education, whatever. I'm thankful when people share their talents, right?

[01:20:27] Christa Biegler, RD: Like share, share the mistakes. And it's a wonderful gift and I can see where it's life giving instead of life draining if done well and done right. So thank you so much. 

[01:20:37] Dr. Paul Anderson: Thank you very much.

[01:20:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Just keep breaking. Gotta get myself.