#430 Prevention and First Steps in a Cancer Diagnosis with Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC

I released a free training that shares the 4 steps I use to help clients reduce eczema, inflammation, and food-reaction symptoms by 50%+ in a few months — without restriction or overwhelm. Watch here: christabiegler.com/blueprint

This week our favorite naturopathic oncologist returns and I am so excited! Michael Robinson always brings the nerdy gems and I learn something new every single time. We dive into advanced decision making for cancer and how to think clearly about screening, diagnosis, and treatment long before you are in crisis. We talk about the value of yearly tumor markers and whole body MRI, why tumor mutations matter more than where cancer appears, and how personalized targeted therapies can meaningfully shift outcomes.

Michael also shares what he would do if he were diagnosed, how integrative care can reduce chemo side effects and boost effectiveness, and why air, water, and food quality matter more than extreme diets. We also explore the emotional and mental sides of cancer and why mindset, support, and clarity are essential parts of any treatment plan.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Early screening helps you act before symptoms appear
• Tumor genetics, not location, guide treatment
• Integrative care improves tolerance and results
• Air, water, and whole foods support immunity
• Mindset and emotional support influence outcomes

Check out Michael's previous episode here: 307 Integrative Oncology 

Tumor marker testing: https://www.nourishhealthcare.org/labs-guides

ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Robinson is a naturopathic doctor specializing in naturopathic oncology in the Chicago suburbs. He is the owner of Nourish Healthcare, a multidisciplinary clinic with a team of naturopathic doctors, nutritionists, and acupuncturists, and also serves as a staff doctor at the Ayre Clinic of Contemporary Medicine, the oldest low dose chemotherapy clinic in the U.S. He is a professor of oncology and immunology for the University of Western States and holds degrees in health sciences, applied clinical nutrition, and naturopathic medicine. He is certified in oncology nutrition and is a licensed naturopathic physician, licensed dietitian nutritionist, and Certified Nutrition Specialist.

WHERE TO FIND GUEST:
Website: https://www.nourishhealthcare.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nourishhealthcare/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSOR:
Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎 Use code LESSSTRESSED10 anytime for 10% off!

I released a free training that shares the 4 steps I use to help clients reduce eczema, inflammation, and food-reaction symptoms by 50%+ in a few months — without restriction or overwhelm. The feedback has been incredible, and I answer every question inside the training. Watch here: christabiegler.com/blueprint

Transcript

[00:00:00] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: that's the biggest problem. When people find various natural treatments and stuff online, they find something for brain cancer and then try to use it for the breast cancer.

And it's like this is two totally separate diseases and just what works for one cancer doesn't work for something else. The real answer though is the type of cell in the mutations that it has.

[00:00:16] 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 the 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.

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.

All right. Today on the Less Stress life, I'm delighted to have back Dr. Michael Robinson. He's a naturopathic doctor specializing in naturopathic oncology in the Chicago suburbs. He's the owner of Nourish Healthcare, a multi-disciplinary, natural healthcare clinic, and manages a team of multiple naturopathic doctors, nutritionists, acupuncturists, as well as.

Being a staff doctor at the ER clinic, A YRE, clinic of Contemporary Medicine, the oldest low dose chemotherapy clinic in the us. I honestly have no idea how he has time for this. He's a professor of oncology and immunology for University of Western States. He holds a Bachelor of Science and Health, science as a master of science and applied clinical nutrition and a

doctorate in naturopathic medicine. He's certified in oncology nutrition via the Oncology Nutrition Institute, and is a licensed naturopathic physician, a licensed dietician nutritionist, and a certified nutrition specialist. I wish I could remember which episode. I'm gonna find it while we're talking which episode you were on in the past.

I dunno if it was one or two episodes. But welcome back. 

[00:02:03] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Thank you. I'm excited to be back. Is my patient base always watches these different podcasts that I do, and I will say is yours is by far the favorite. I hear about it all the time. 

[00:02:12] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh good. I'm so glad to hear that. Because you know the goal podcasts are.

Can be a little bit one sided, right? And I love to have a good nerdy conversation. So these are very self indulging. But I found that listeners similarly wanna have really deep, nerdy conversations. But one of the reasons we're having this conversation today, aside from, us both enjoying having these nerdy conversations is that I like to think about something.

So an advanced topic in like mindset coaching is making advanced decisions because when we are faced with something really stressful or challenging. It's very natural for our logical brain to shut down our prefrontal cortex, to shut down our parent brain to shut down. This is just like basic biology.

We freeze sometimes and there's a lot of nervous system state to this of course. And so I think that there's a lot to be said for advanced decision making, and I'm weird and morbid. I have an unusual interest in this, which is probably why I love interviewing you. I've learned. A ton of crazy cool nuance things from you about what to take, what not to take.

All these things that make things work better, chemotherapy, work better. But from the perspective of advanced decision making, I've heard from another one of your colleagues that we've already transitioned over one and two people having cancer, so I don't know if you can corroborate that. Like it was one and three, now we're one and two.

[00:03:29] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yep. Definitely. And it's still the second leading cause of death in the United States and it's only getting worse. We think about in America as we're supposed to be making everyone healthier and healthier, and it's like cancer rates are just going up. There are certain cancers we're getting better at treating, but pancreatic cancer is honestly not really one of them.

[00:03:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Yeah. And my grandma was told she would die very soon from pancreatic cancer. Actually lived a long time and did not die of pancreatic cancer back in the early two thousands for fun. But back to advanced decision making one of the things I think about a lot is like developing my cancer toolbox in case I get diagnosed with cancer.

Now, I might not be planning to, I might be taking steps to prevent cancer, but I'm not immortal and we got a 50 50 chance here. So I am just trying to plan in advance because. If this strikes, sometimes you don't make intelligent decisions in that time. And so the reason I bring this up is because one of my advanced decision making things would be I would go see Dr.

Rob. Personally, and the reason for that is, is I just really enjoy him. I don't really understand how he has the capacity to do all of these things. And he, I was just asking him if he sees pediatric cancer cases, which is probably one of the most heartbreaking areas because we've interviewed here, Dem Baney, who has a child who has cancer.

And I did not realize you don't have a lot of options when your child is diagnosed with cancer. You can't really get multiple. Maybe you can get multiple opinions, but you can't choose an alternative treatment from any normal treatment, or your child will be taken away, which is like in one hand. I can see where we wanna make sure the child has the best case of survival.

So I can understand. The one side of it and on the other side of it's oh my gosh, crazy, right? This is a little, it's oh, I can't even make decisions for my own child. So anyway. And you talked about like you see some children or a lot of children.

I 

[00:05:19] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: see a fairly decent amount just because a lot of people in my field will not see kids. And I actually have a background in pediatrics from a previous career that I did. So I just have always been comfortable with that population and I didn't want people to be turned away when honestly there's, it's the same drugs, it's the same chemotherapy that we give, it's just this tinier person.

It's I'm not going to pretend they don't have all these skills that I could help someone out with just because they are four years old. 'Cause those are the people that need more help than anything else. And luckily in kids, it's yes, it's, you can't abandon the standard of care system, otherwise they will take away your kid.

But luckily in my experience, it's kid cancers. There's kind of two different types of kid cancers, honestly. There's the ones that have very high survival rates. Leukemias and lymphomas and such have over 99% survival rates for certain types. Where it's everything's gonna be fine. All we just need to do is.

Do the standard of care, but then make sure it doesn't suck so much the whole time. Mitigate side effects, which is not so hard to do. And then the other part of it is these very aggressive cancers that there aren't good answers for. DIPG is this cancer that zero people, zero kids, have ever survived in the history of medicine.

So luckily in those cases when we work with DIPG kids, they're oncologists most of the time are on board with us supporting them because they know, the medical doctors know that they don't have all the answers, so they say, sure, why not? We can't kinda get any worse than it is if we only have a six month survival rate anyway.

Everything that we can do is only gonna be beneficial, so we don't get as much pushback sometimes as you sometimes would think in the peds world. 

[00:06:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, so what I wanna cover a little bit today with thinking about this, making decisions in advance, and I think an interesting angle is, okay Michael, let's pretend, and I don't know, maybe this will be a hard one to answer.

Let's pretend you are diagnosed with cancer, or maybe someone, God forbid, that you really love, that's very close to you. What is going to happen first? Typically, with that diagnostic process conventionally. And at what point would you maybe layer in some of the stuff, so there's possibly three or four questions to this, but let's just per, let's use my example of okay, let's say we get a diagnosis and actually even the step before that, when might we want to pursue.

Additional screening because going to the doctor and saying, I don't feel that great isn't probably gonna yield the type of testing that would diagnose something. There might be some, white blood cells or something that look off in that like $3 blood testing. But I'm curious if someone wanted to do any, if someone like had a gut feeling and they wanted to be screened a little bit more in depth for cancer, what might they do to start that process?

What might they ask their provider for? 

[00:07:51] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: And I will tell you what I do. So I run and not me and my family members, is we run tumor markers on ourselves every year, once per year. And people are sometimes a little bit familiar with tumor markers 'cause they're familiar with a PSA for males. Males are 50.

They get a PSA for their prostate. If it's high, they say you have prostate cancer. If it's getting bigger, it's getting worse. If it's getting lower, it's getting better. Like people are familiar with that. But that's like the only tumor marker they know about. But they don't realize. It's there's colon cancer, tumor markers, stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer.

There's three for breast cancer, lung cancer. There's a whole bunch of different tumor markers out there, and most of them are like five to $10 tests each. So it's like for a hundred bucks a year, I can screen for 25 different cancers. And is it gonna pick up every single cancer? No, certainly not.

But it's like, why wouldn't I spend. 10, a hundred dollars a year to make sure. I also will whole body MRI myself. People talk about whole body CT scans to screen yourself, but it's there's a bunch of radiation and there's been a lot of articles out recently. Our new estimates are roughly 5% of the cancer diagnosis in this country are caused from nothing other than our overuse of CT scans in this country.

We're very obsessed with scanning everyone. Whoa. But you can just do an MRI and there's no, you can do an MR MRI without contrast. There's no chemicals. There's no radiation, there's no nothing. You just sit there with zero side effects. And you can MRI my, your entire body, right? And that is more expensive.

It's roughly in the $2,000 realm, but that's why I only do it every couple years. But again, is when you look at a lot of the scary diagnosis. We mentioned pancreatic cancer, it's it has horrible survival outcomes because nobody finds it until it's stage four and there's no other options. If you actually find pancreatic cancer early, it is pretty treatable 'cause you just surgically cut it down and everything's fine.

But the average estimate is when someone gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, they will have had it growing for five years before it is found. Where it's if they were doing a $10 pancreatic cancer tumor marker, blood test yearly, or they did whole body MRIs every two years. There wouldn't be a five year period where something goes undetected.

So that's definitely the first step. Okay. 

[00:09:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Question? Couple questions about that. 

[00:09:45] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yeah. 

[00:09:45] Christa Biegler, RD: I'll go in reverse is, I haven't really looked at this 'cause I decided I was in denial because I thought if I went and got a Pvo scan, I'd probably have something wrong. I wasn't quite ready for it. How is a whole body MRI like, first of all, who's gonna order a whole body MRI as a screening tool?

That doesn't, I 

[00:10:02] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: recommend Nuva, which you don't need a provider for. You can just sign up on your own. 

[00:10:06] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, so that's the one, but isn't that 5K? 

[00:10:09] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: No you can do pieces, if you only wanted your abdomen or whatever, it's six or 700 bucks. I think for the first whole body, MRI, I paid like 2300, but then once you do it, you get all these referral codes and discount codes and everything.

So you can find codes for $500 off and, get it for probably $1,800. But we send, I don't know, probably 50 patients a year there that want to do it too. Interesting. 

[00:10:28] Christa Biegler, RD: I've never seen a 

[00:10:29] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: five grand price tag maybe in Okay. Cool publications, but. 

[00:10:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, cool. Thanks for that. I had written it off.

We both know Taylor Duke's Wellness, she ended up having a brain tumor and I'm like, I'm not ready to find out. And doesn't this sound opposite of what I'm saying? Advanced advanced decision making. Okay. Back to tumor markers. I do love this. Thank you very much. So do you have a, un requested test or things like that?

You can actually set up a batch. So can anyone go? Pull these tumor markers technically, 'cause there's a lot of labs you can pull yourself. Would you recommend that or not recommend it? Do you think it needs to be professionally interpreted? 

[00:11:02] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yes, I would because sometimes certain cancers don't. The cancer has to be a little bit advanced before the tumor marker will go up.

So like for the breast cancer tumor markers, if you have a stage one breast cancer, the tumor markers are probably still gonna be normal. And what we don't want is people to only do that test and they say, oh, tumor markers are normal. I don't have breast cancer. And then they, screen because they put all of the weight in just that.

So it's a tool, but it's not universally AP applicable as well as there are other conditions that can mess with those tumor markers. Like I have a patient, she has six tumor markers elevated and has no cancer in her body, and we've checked her 10 times over. But she has rheumatoid arthritis and just her autoimmunity flares those tumor markers.

And it's the same thing. It's like you don't want someone to order them on themselves and think they have six different cancers when they don't realize that they just have arthritis. 

[00:11:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay. This could be a dicey question, but so can we. Be. Can we get our tumor markers ordered through Nourish. So you can tell us if we have cancer, do you do preventative care as well?

Yeah. Yes. Okay. Got it. Okay, cool. So first of all, you come in to, we're just talking about prevention right now, so that way we can double check it. And this is, I don't know, I think, this whole, the whole purpose of this is like education helps and the sooner you find something out.

Usually the better. And so we can actually, and the other thing is, and I don't know who told me this once on an episode, sometimes it's okay to just stop and take a moment and recalibrate after a diagnosis, right? Like it's, you don't have to make a decision in five minutes or one hour or one day necessarily.

You can stop and assess your options. But this is where. Trying to figure out like what are some potential options I might have once I find out I have cancer. So one thing that I think is tricky about your job is cancers vary a lot. I am curious, do you have like buckets of the way you think about them?

Like for me, I deal with a lot of rashes and skin issues and I have segmented them into buckets of different areas I have to support and whatnot. And I'm curious for you, like you've mentioned pancreatic cancer and you mentioned breast cancer and you mentioned how. Leukemia and lymphoma are very treatable and have a big survival rate, at least for children.

So are there ways you categorize cancers? 'cause I don't know how you do I think of for some reason, skin cancer as a totally different off the wall cancer than other cancers. So can you talk a little bit about how you segment them? Because I'm guessing it's almost like an internal triage process on what people would do first.

You have to be like it's this kind of cancer, so you would go do this type of thing. 

[00:13:20] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yes. And that's the, honestly, when we get into treatment site too,

The reality is many of the common cancers that you're familiar with when you think about like breast and prostate and colon cancer are some of the most common ones are most of the time adenocarcinomas.

And adeno means glandular cells. They're gland, they're cancer. Of the glands of those guys, like 90% of breast cancers are gonna be. Those glandular carcinomas. Some breast cancers are lobular carcinomas and some of them are rare or what are called sarcoid mixed type. They're basically skin cancer of the breast.

But that's what I'm getting at is when we, when you think about it like that, it's like. Glandular prostate cancer and glandular breast cancer are almost the same thing. They're just in two different spots in the body, but they're much more similar than a lobular breast cancer in a glandular breast cancer.

They're to totally different cells that just happen to be in the same spot in the body. And when we get into this further with the genetics of cancer, like what mutation, not hereditary genetics, not what's in your. You know your family tree, but what, how has the cell mutated after you're already born?

Like how did the cell change from a normal breast cell or normal pancreatic cell to a cancerous one? What mutations occurred? Those are what realistically matters, and I use this analogy of. If you have spiders in your house, I don't care if the spider's in your bathroom or your basement, like I don't care if the tumor's in your breast or your colon, your pancreas or whatever.

I care if you have a KRA S mutation, then we use KRAS drugs or KRAS herbs or whatever it is. It's like that's the problem with the cell. That's what we need to treat. I don't care where it is in the body. 

[00:14:46] Christa Biegler, RD: I think that's really interesting. Okay. So there's really, when we're triaging it, it's really has to, do you need to do some kind of genetic testing different than hot Reddit.

Can you talk a little bit about how you do? I've always been a little bit confused about how I used to do genetic testing versus how genetic testing is done in the cancer space. It just doesn't feel very similar to me. I used to take, old 23 and me, or ancestry data. We'd run it through calculators.

We'd have evidence-based charts that, gave some different lifestyle changes to improve how that gene's expressing. But it feels like it's a different. Planet with cancer, genetic stuff. So can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? And is this one, one of, it sounds like maybe this is one of the early steps.

[00:15:35] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yes. Because the types of genetics that you're referencing or that you might see in 23 and me, I always, I try to use the word, those are hereditary genetics. Those are what are is in your family tree. Those are what you were born with, right? If you were born with an M-T-H-F-R defect, you're gonna always have that MTHR defect.

You can take different supplements to try to up or down regulated, but you can't change your genes. The genetics we're talking about. And sometimes it's relevant in cancer. If a 20-year-old gets colon cancer, they're gonna say that's not supposed to happen. Let's go see if you have some weird family tree thing.

Or if you have BRCA for breast cancer. People are familiar with BRCA Angelina. Yep. Jolie cut off her breast because she had brca, right? She didn't have breast cancer. She had a risk for breast cancer. Here, stereo genetics. The term that we're talking about the type of testing is called MGS testing, which is next generation sequencing.

And they're talking about specifically taking a genetic sample of the cancer. So this isn't just like a blood test and we see what your genes are, or a cheek swab and see what your genes are. This is off of the biopsy, so they take a piece of the tumor. Mail it off to a lab that genetically sequence the tumors and says, Hey, this tumor has some mutation that all the rest of your cells don't.

That's a mutation that happened after the fact because you were exposed to pesticides or heavy metals or mold or whatever. It's like something happened that changed that normal pancreas cell into a cancerous pancreas cell after you were already born. Maybe you were 70 years old when it happened.

That's what's wrong with the cell. That's what we wanna fix. Does that make sense? 

[00:16:54] Christa Biegler, RD: It does. I wanna underline and highlight and repeat that. If necessary. 'cause the way I've been thinking about the majority of cancer for a long time is disease and damaged cells not getting cleaned up very well by normal autophagy and apoptosis processes that should happen in the body.

And then being triggered in turned on into cancerous cells because of some kind of immune insult event. And you just listed an entire list there. Would you re-list that again? 

[00:17:22] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: The. Mutations that can happen after the fact because of radiation exposure, mold exposure, heavy metal exposure, pesticide exposure.

And even, alcohol and smoking and all those other things that we think about. 

[00:17:32] Christa Biegler, RD: So that's what happens. Okay, cool. So that makes sense to me. So what I'm thinking about right now is like when I read your bio, you've got quite a multidisciplinary team, but my understanding is people come see you at all different places.

I think one of the. Most unfortunate things that we see in cancer, that I see a lot in cancer treatment is that people go to their, whoever is the best team, local to them or close to them and tell, they are told there's nothing more that can be done and then they go seek out some type of alternative treatment.

I don't wanna call you alternative Michael or Dr. Robinson. I don't consider you alternative. I consider you integrative. However, anything that's, maybe unconventional or something that someone doesn't know about. And that's the beauty of podcasts that allows us to crack open and be like, this isn't actually woo.

So anyway, my point is it's unfortunate that people wait until sometimes it's very late. And I'm not saying miracles don't happen and success stories don't happen. But I guess what I wanna split in half is do you, I think the first question is do you, does your team, does your work, do you guys work as primary?

Because when we're talking about these, it sounds like we find out. What the genetics of the cancer mutation are, and that helps lead to the treatment. So that can happen at their primary care team if they're going to Mayo Clinic, or it can happen if they're coming to you. So you can be primary or you can be part of a care team to that.

Is that correct? 

[00:18:57] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Many states, Illinois is one of them, actually have laws on the book that if you have cancer, you basically have to have a medical oncologist on your team. You can't be seen by a other type of provider as your sole provider. So like in Illinois, actually chiropractors are primary care physicians have the best scope in the country.

They can do basically everything they want besides prescribed drugs. Except tree cancer, unless there's a medical doctor on the medical oncologist, not just a medical doctor, but an oncologist on the team as well. So sometimes you we're restricted a little bit in that and we tell people it's even if they don't want to go and do chemotherapy and everything like that, you still have to have that person as your, main quarterback that you're checking in with to, to make the law happy and everything like that.

But many patients, it's probably a third of our practice is. Doing completely conventional care. And then they're coming to us for supportive therapies to make sure they're not getting side effects and such. A third of our patients are they already did all that, and then they're coming to us for what's left, because they've told me I don't have anything left.

And then a third of them come to us wanting to not even explore. They don't even want to do the biopsy to get a full diagnosis. They want to come to us as the primary from the very beginning. And most of the time we say we can't do that. I'm happy to do a whole bunch of care with you, but you need a diagnosis not only for legal reasons, but I need to know what I'm treating.

And like we said, it's just 'cause you have breast cancer. I don't know what type of breast cancer and I don't know how to build your treatment plan unless I know what type. So sometimes the law gets in the way, but we do everything we can. 

[00:20:20] Christa Biegler, RD: I honestly feel, there's pros and cons to things, but I feel like you probably spend a lot of time dealing with administrative and red tape.

Maybe just 'cause you've been posting about it a lot on Instagram, but I think it's tricky. It's sometimes people are going to their other provider and you're providing, so I appreciate you broke down these thirds. The third I really heard was like, how do we reduce the side effects of the conventional treatment?

Which some of what are some of the most common side effects, right? Neuropathy and the hands and the feet. What are some of the other ones? 

[00:20:49] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Definitely gi, just nausea, vomiting, constipation. 

The constipation is honestly, people always think about the vomiting, but it's really they dose you on so much Zofran, which is an anti-nausea medication that's extremely constipating.

It's really, the constipation is worse than the diarrhea and stuff. And then because you're so constipated, you don't end up pooping out the chemotherapy and then a chemotherapy sits in you longer than it's supposed to. Oh, it has way more effect. On the patients and they realize the number one side effects are going to be bone marrow effects.

But that's something that like, unless you're getting a lab, which they do, they are running monthly CBCs, but the patients, you don't feel when your white blood cells are down. You don't feel when your red blood cells are down unless they're totally in the tank. But chemo is not specific to cancer.

Chemo is specific to rapidly producing cells, right? So it's really, it's your bone marrow that's pumping out your red and white blood cells constantly over and over. That's. Truly the thing that's most affected. That's why your red and white blood cell counts drop so much. 'cause the chemo wipes out the bone marrow too.

And then your other, hair, skin nail stuff in lining of your GI tract, which are also cells that are constantly turning over. Those things are gonna be affected also because they're just cells that every day need to regenerate, but they don't have an ability to regenerate when you're on chemo.

[00:21:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And we talked about a little bit about this before, so we'll send just a few minutes on it. There's some therapies that you might recommend that makes the treatments more effective, like missile toe therapy.

[00:22:04] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yes, certainly. And 

[00:22:06] Christa Biegler, RD: So a while back, my college age daughter shared with me that she was tossing and turning and waking up several times per night after a period of stress. We started her on magnesium and her sleep immediately improved. I personally think magnesium should be your first thing to try if you're having trouble sleeping or staying asleep, especially tossing and turning, and it's a no brainer if you have any restless leg issues.

The thing about magnesium at that is that there's a lot of types of magnesium that will give you symptomatic relief, but I like to steer my clients and loved ones to a more absorbable form of magnesium because most big box magnesium is mag citrate, and that will push bowels, but it can be damaging to your teeth if it's used daily and it's not the most absorbable.

Rather, jigsaw Health makes one of my favorite great tasting magnesium powders called Mag. So that has magnesium glycinate, my favorite calming and absorbable type of magnesium. It's available in both a great tasting powder and to-go packets. And they also make a product, that's great for slow release, especially if you have restless legs called Meg, SRT.

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[00:23:52] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: there's a plethora of research out there on herbs and vitamins that can enhance chemotherapy, but co convent, medical doctors don't know what to do with them.

And I say all the time the data isn't published in some crazy alternative medicine journals, like it's published in the Main Journal of Oncology and all of the chemotherapy journals and things like that. But if an oncologist reads a study that says turmeric is good for breast cancer or makes their FOLFOX works better.

They can say, this is great, but I don't know how to dose turmeric. I don't know what it interacts with. I don't know how to use it. So then they don't use it. But there's hundreds and hundreds of studies, and everything we do is incredibly evidence-based. It's not just us making up and saying, oh, I think turmeric is gonna be a good thing.

We have the data for it. It's just you have to go to a provider that knows how to use the data. 'cause the medical team doesn't. I will be honest with you as one of my best friends is she's a conventional medical oncologist and she's triple board certified hematology oncology and integrative medicine.

And even though she has the board certification, integrative Medicine Hospital won't let her do any of it because it's like she wants the patients to take these supplements, but she can't. So then she has to, and the patients ask her about it and she says yeah, it'd be a good idea, but I can't write it in the chart.

So go see Dr. Robinson so he can write it in his chart and, 'cause I want you to be on it. So 

[00:24:56] Christa Biegler, RD: that must be so hard. It's to really,

I don't think I could do it because that's it drives me bonkers and I think that story is really important. 'cause I think this is all day, every day.

And. Cancer medicine. I think that there's things, I've heard some other side stories where it's like I can't tell you this. Let's go for a walk. I can't tell you this, but this is what we see happening. Like it can't be documented. It's like bonkers. Do you have, I think like occasionally it sounds like sometimes the provider.

Doesn't love what you are doing. How can a patient, it's tricky. It's like the patient is in the middle and I feel like you do a lot of legwork to try to support them, but it's like the patient can still choose to do what they want based on your recommendations, even if their doctor doesn't understand what they're doing.

I just wanna say something that I think is important. No one likes what they don't understand, and I think that's the main thing we're battling up against all the time. Yeah, of course this provider doesn't get it, so they don't like it. Like it's like anything we, none of us like anything we don't understand.

So how do you handle some of those scenarios that come in the door? How do you handle dealing with. Grouchy oncologist. 

[00:26:01] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: It's shifted a lot. Five years ago I used to do a lot of printing out all the studies of everything we prescribe and giving it to 'em to bring in an oncologist. And I would be getting on phone calls with the oncologist all the time, especially the kids.

'cause everyone's nervous about kids. So I'd have to call the children's hospital and say Hey oncologist, you told my patient not to take any of the things I prescribed. Why is that? And most of the time their answer was like. Oh, you're a real provider. And I say, yes, is I use chemotherapy in an outpatient setting.

We do lot dose chemotherapy, and I use these things alongside of chemotherapy every day. Like I'm not someone crazy at Whole Foods. And that's what they're just like, I didn't even know you're a real doctor. I thought you're just someone selling supplements online, or whatever it was. 

[00:26:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:26:37] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: They say I don't know what any of this stuff is, but if you know what it is now, I'll say yes, and now I'm on board with it.

So sometimes it was that, and I would just waste all this time printing out studies and on phone calls and everything, and honestly. I don't do the phone calls anymore because half the time I would get the answer of the doctor says, once I send them a study, they're like, oh, this is great. This is awesome.

Thanks for opening me up, opening up my mind. But I still can't tell my patient that it's okay 'cause my hospital won't let me. So it's I'm not gonna spend 10 or 20 hours a week trying to do a fruitless effort when again, it's up to the patients. Is Yeah. They get to make their decisions about their health.

[00:27:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I honestly don't know how you know how we haven't. Who the heck else is like Dr. Robinson. I don't even know anyone else like Dr. Robinson. So I'm like, how would you even keep up with what you're doing now? Do we need to come and help you automate some things so you can see more patients, so you can help more people?

That's like my concern in life is like, how can we make sure. All this hard work gets preserved and it makes it easier. And, speaking of, I'm glad that this podcast is a good source of patient referrals, but I told you one day some one day a woman reached out to me and was like, Hey, I think my brother should go to see this provider, but would you see a, is he like, a good provider?

And I was like, what a bizarre question to ask me. I would see him. But it was just an interesting thing, right? Like people are in a pretty big stress state around cancer. What I wanna ask you next is like we lightly touched on a lot of cancers. We talked about like prevention.

Then mo what would happen first? Just a little bit of complimentary stuff. We need to make sure we link your past episodes. 'cause we get more into the nitty gritty of what makes the chemotherapy work better. And I'm going from a perspective of. What would you do if you were diagnosed with cancer type thing?

So I wanna ask some bigger picture questions now on which cancers, I have things like this in my profession. Like where do you think there is so much opportunity that you wish you could treat more of? And it's dang, this could go so much better if you just knew these X, Y, Z was available to you.

[00:28:26] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: I'll answer it both ways. It's really, the medical world isn't making any new chemotherapies. For the most part. All the new drugs are immunotherapies, biologics, targeted therapies. These very specific drugs that 'cause, again, chemo is not specific to cancer, it's specific to fast-growing cells.

Now, the new drugs, these targeted therapies, immunotherapies, are trying to get very specific. Let's shut down one pathway very strongly. And targeted therapies, immunotherapies are. Amazing. They put cancer to sleep for a year or two or so and are extending survivals a whole bunch.

'cause we had these cancers that people would survive six months or 12 months and now we can give an immunotherapy and basically hide the cancer for a year or two and then the drug will stop working always because the cancer finds a workaround. 'cause we're only shutting down one pathway at a time and there might be 12 pathways that it can grow down.

The best conventional medicine has to offer right now in the cancer world is let's do an immunotherapy that might get you a year or two, and then once that stops working, maybe there's another immunotherapy we can switch you to, and maybe there's one or two on the market. And then they say.

We hope more drugs are gonna be invented by the time we run out of the one or two years that these immunotherapies are gonna buy you. Yikes. That's where we're at. What I would do, and what I do with my very advanced patients, whether it's they're coming to me from the very beginning and they have a cancer that doesn't have good survival outcomes, or someone that's already done years of conventional treatment and is out of options, is personalized immunotherapy.

So it's basically the FDA makes. The drug companies design one drug that you can go and sell to 20 million people, right? It's $21 million to get a drug approved in this country. So if a drug company is gonna make a new drug, they have to be able to sell it to a lot of people. So all these targeted therapies are made for.

Breast cancer and prostate cancer and lung cancer. 'cause everyone gets those cancers. So all my patients with say, pancreatic cancer that not a lot of people get, but it has incredibly bad survival outcome with, there are no targeted drugs for them. 'cause no one's designing them, no one's trying to design them for them.

So they just get the crappy, there's two plans for pancreatic cancer. It's two chemotherapies, two chemotherapy regimens, and both of 'em suck. They have six months survival outcomes in them. But that doesn't mean that there's not immunotherapies that are relevant for that patient. Again, is if a patient has a K RRA S mutation, I want a KRA S drug.

I don't care that it's never been gone through a giant study in pancreatic cancer. Many of these drugs have already been studied in other cancers. It's just we have never done 'em in pancreatic, so it's not FDA approved. So essentially what we're saying is off-label immunotherapy drugs. They are cancer drugs.

We're just using them in different patient populations. That's the best conventional medicine has to offer. What I do is what we call personalized immunotherapy, where we. DNA sequence, the whole tumor. Find the 10 or 12 mutations your cancer might have. Instead of giving you one drug that shuts down one mutation that might get you a year or two.

And then it, finds a workaround. We get peptides designed for all 12 of the mutations and then microdose you on all of them. So there's no side effects for the most part of them. Very low side effects of them. 'cause everything's just dose dependent. You give someone low doses, they don't get side effects, but when we shut down 12 different highways, there's no place for the car to go down anymore. And that's where we're able to get. Long-term outcomes. So that therapy is awesome, it's. Roughly for two years of treatment. It can be in like the 70, $75,000 realm of things, which a lot of people that they have no other options for, or they have a stage four cancer diagnosis in six months to live, they will find $70,000 to go and do it.

And like you said, if I got diagnosed, that's what I would do from the beginning. I wouldn't trash my body with chemo first and then try to do this. I would do it from the very get go and just try to get this over and done with. Lots of people that come into me don't have $75,000 to be able to do this, right?

So that's where we sometimes say let's find one of those other drugs on the market that, again, might not be studied in pancreatic cancer, whatever it is. But let's get it approved for you because they're very strong drugs. And then, hey, I have all of my herbs that I can use to make them work better.

'cause if the drug typically only works for say, 12 months, but if I can enhance that and make the immunotherapy work better, your immune system work better, then the immunotherapy works better. The better your immune system is, the more the immunotherapies are gonna work. Yeah. So then patients sometimes can stay on their immunotherapies for four or five, six years.

Again, is it a cure? No, but it's better than six months. 

[00:32:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. This reminds me of, I think we've got a whole playlist on cancer for the podcast. It would be you, Dr. Anderson. And there was another guy, I cannot remember his name, but the reason I'm thinking of him right now, he was a researcher in Texas and I remember he said, we didn't even publish the study of mice because it did so well, we improved their microbiomes and then the cancer.

Therapies worked so well. Basically, like you improved their immune system that the therapy worked so well. They wouldn't have even published the study 'cause it was like look too dramatic essentially. And that's what I think of as you talk about when you support the immune system. All the therapies work better and a lot of times the go-to treatment is like for, and this is extremely oversimplified, right?

But it trashes the immune system. So then it's a lot harder to make things work. So very interesting. I feel like we could have little mini episodes on every type of cancer. Thank we. We sure could. Okay. So we talked a little bit about, I think this is interesting about pancreatic cancer. The options right now literally suck and people wouldn't know that unless they're diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, right?

Yeah. And that's why I wanted to go through what's the journey sometimes that people get, and I know it's all over the board on how long the treatment is, et cetera. And is it pretty common, once you have one cancer to have another one pop up, or is that not super common?

Because I feel like that shows up a lot. 

[00:33:30] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Your risk is definitely higher than the overall population. But it's not super common. It's 2% of the time. 

[00:33:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, okay. 

[00:33:36] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Mostly just because it's if you're on chemotherapy for breast cancer, like that, chemotherapy is gonna have a little bit of a spillover effect.

So you're probably not gonna develop colon cancer the next day because you're getting chemotherapy and it's, even if something popped up, it's probably knocking it down before you even find out it exists. 

[00:33:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay just to wrap a bow with pancreatic cancer though, so there's a couple treatments you would prefer to do this.

Best case scenario, this peptide treatment that's not covered by insurance ever, so far. Somehow, sometimes people find money for it, but sometimes they don't. And so you come up with a hybrid treatment best case scenario based on their specific genetic mutations, right? 

[00:34:10] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Yeah there's two conventional protocols that exist for pancreatic cancers.

One called folfirinox, which is four different drugs. It works actually. It actually is good at not knocking down the cancer, but it's incredibly toxic and no one can ever stay on it. Even the typical eight sessions that is recommended, everyone discontinues it early and then they say, Hey, I know that chemo was really hard.

Guess what? We have this chemo that's not so hard. It's quite gentle. You'll be fine. And guess what? Patients do tolerate it just fine. And then what happens? It doesn't work. So there's two plans. One that works, but it kills the patient and then one that doesn't kill the patient but doesn't work. We can target plans for both of those.

We can take the chemo that is destroying them, but destroying the cancer and protect them, stop them from being destroyed or the other way around as if they're on the gentle chemotherapy. We can do things they don't need protection from the chemo. It's gentle. We can make it more efficacious. So that's where we try to go.

If the patient's doing a hundred percent conventional. 

[00:35:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, so we talked a little bit about pancreatic cancer. I think on past episodes we've covered some of those other really common types of cancers. I think where to wrap today? 'cause we're going through this conversation of, okay, how can I be preventative?

What does it look like when you get diagnosed, essentially the conversation was figure out how to treat that specific cancer based on what's happening with the cancer cells genetically. And customize the treatment to that. You talked about three different types of client profiles that come to you, reducing side effects.

The patient that wants to only do integrative stuff, but they still need to have a primary oncologist. And what was the third type? 

[00:35:36] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Patients that have already done all the stuff and now they're out of options. So they're coming to us. 

[00:35:40] Christa Biegler, RD: Got it. Like with pancreatic cancer would be common. And one of the reasons pancreatic cancer sucks is 'cause you don't find it right away.

Overall, are there some other, I suppose like how many types of cancers are there? Hundreds. Hundreds? Yeah. I don't even know how you handle 100 

[00:35:55] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: close to,

[00:35:55] Christa Biegler, RD: I don't know how you do what you do, honestly is a pretty challenging thing overall. Okay, so I wanted to ask you one more question then I want you to lead, whatever last things you want to leave us with about this topic.

'cause we could probably keep going all day on this topic. And I think if we wanted to keep going on it, we'd wanna segment it down to different kinds of cancers. Yeah. I think something that people would be interested in knowing. And out there on the internet, like there's all these things you could do for like there's all these people talking about lifestyle things and diet things around cancer.

What do you think are some lifestyle changes that anyone could make or should make if they have cancer that would possibly improve outcomes? 

[00:36:37] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: The medical doctors always focus on just drugs and alcohol and smoking. But the reality is things like an air filter is, a hundred bucks once and then you can clean your house significantly because molds are incredibly immunosuppressive, and that's what cancer is.

Your body develops cancer cells every day. Your immune to system cleans it up. If you don't have an immune system, 'cause maybe you're packed full of mold, then you develop cancers, right? So a hundred dollars air filter could be completely lifesaving for you filtering your water. Again, a Brita costs 30 bucks and that's every day doing something.

So the medical world likes to focus on avoidance of let's like not drink a lot of alcohol. It's not smoke and everything like that, but easy things you can add in. Filtration of water, air, the food that you eat, buying organic is honestly some of the biggest things you can do. 

[00:37:20] Christa Biegler, RD: I gotta ask you though about a little bit more about diet.

Is there anything that you would say besides eating organic that you think is good for everybody? Or do we just feel like Whole Food organic is best? 

[00:37:32] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Every patient comes in. Either all the patients come in trying to be vegan 'cause they've been told red meat is the cause. Or they come in trying to have be on keto 'cause they've been told sugar's the cause.

But the data's very clear and there's hundreds of studies on diet and cancer. It's like there is not one magic diet. And Mediterranean diet is always the answer because it is generally supportive of many different pathways. But the vegan plans don't work. The keto plans don't work unless it's brain cancer.

It does work in brain cancer. But overall, it's getting the crap out of there and eating healthy. And that's what people don't realize is they focus on, oh, if I just get rid of sugar, everything's gonna go away. It's you have a breast cancer that's responding to estrogen that has nothing to do with sugar, and it's like it's busy eating estrogen all day long.

Let's target that pathway. I'm not telling you go live on donuts and McDonald's, but it's stop focusing a hundred percent on sugar. So being dogmatic about it actually ends up most of my patients getting worse outcomes. When we take a step back and say, eat intuitively. Eat what you know is healthy and things like that, those patients do better.

[00:38:26] Christa Biegler, RD: That makes sense because if we're inducing stress by over limiting we're actually suppressing the immune system as well. We know that stress suppresses the immune system, so anything that's really inherently stressful should be contraindicated for everything. So a hundred percent. There's so much we could cover.

If someone was listening to this and they were trying to discern their cancer treatment journey, what would be some things you'd for sure want them to know? 

[00:38:47] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Get an integrative oncologist to naturopathic oncologist on your team because when the medical world says, Hey, there's two or three options and these are your only three options, I promise you those are not the only options.

And those three options might be good options, but they have side effects and there's things you can do to reduce those side effects. So get a naturopathic oncologist on your team. Get psych support, whether it's a pastor or counselor or whatever it is. This cancer is a journey. You mentioned Dr. Paul Anderson.

He's written a book with the Chicken Soup for the Soul Guy about the emotional journey behind cancer. That is critical too. Joe Dispenza has a whole book called You Are the Placebo, where he dives into all that research and. The people that know they're gonna beat their cancer.

The people that say I'm gonna die 'cause I have cancer, they're the ones that die early. So that is your team, your medical oncologist, your integrative oncologist, and then the mental health professionals is. My, my main team. 

[00:39:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that. I'll never forget I was working in dialysis a million years ago, not really that long ago.

Sometime between 2010 and 2000 12 or 13 when we were in this one clinic. 'cause I can picture myself sitting with this man who told me that his wife beat cancer because of her attitude and because of her mindset and because of her. Faith like that is why she beat it. And some things just hit you differently and there was a real conviction there.

And now I've learned so much more about that psycho neuroimmunology. As well. Dr. Michael, I can't wait till you come back again, but until then, where can people find you? 

[00:40:06] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: I am@nourishhealthcare.org is my website and pretty much everything is at on Facebook. It's Nourish Healthcare on Instagram, it's Nourish Healthcare, so that is us everywhere.

[00:40:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, we'll link your past episodes so people can dive in more. Thanks for doing this big picture. What should we do if we get diagnosed and how can we prevent diagnosis and what does it look like when we're diagnosed? So thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:40:28] Michael Robinson, ND, MS, CNS, LDN, ONC: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.