Video: Frequently Asked Questions about Cancer

Hi there, my name is Dr. Nina Iyer. I’m one of the doctors here at lifeworks wellness center who treats cancer patients. I’m a specialist in internal medicine Because I wanted to help patients beat chronic illness. My passion is treating cancer patients. We’ve seen so many successes over the past 26 years, treating cancer naturally. Now, we know that rates of cancer are on the rise, so it’s important to reduce the risk of cancer over your lifetime.

I also wanted to tell you a little bit more about how to naturally treat cancer. Cancer usually originates from a single cell. That cell was damaged from either a toxin or an infection. Now, once that cancer cell is damaged, it starts misbehaving and going haywire. And we can see that cell start replicating much faster than normal, healthy cells in that organ. And once those cells are damaged, there’s a risk of it spreading to other organs.

Usually, cancers develop about a decade before they’re actually found on a scan. So I say patients generally have had cancer for about 8 to 10 years before we find it. Now, that really emphasizes the need of early detection for our patients. So I wanted to tell you a little bit more about how we can find cancer early. When it’s more treatable, particularly if you have a family history of cancer, it’s important to meet with one of us in order to get testing and imaging to find cancer early before it develops.

So one of the best tests I recommend for my patients is called an Onco-D-Clare test. The Onco-D-Clare test is run by a greek lab, and it finds very early signs of cancer and actually pre cancer. So this is really important because it allows us to detect cancer, hopefully before it develops into a tumor. So it looks at the immune system function, and it looks for signals in the immune system that might indicate that the immune system is responding to a precancerous cell.

And so if it’s positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have cancer, but it does mean that we have to start looking. And there are a lot of things that we can do while we’re doing the testing to hopefully reduce the risk of developing cancer. For example, lifestyle, nutrition, detoxification, you know, eating organic, all these things are important in order to prevent or reduce the risk of cancer.

The common symptoms of cancer are ones that you really don’t want to ignore. I found patients far too many times because these developed very gradually, that they just accept these as normal, but they’re really not normal. So the warning signs are night sweats, you know, drenching the bed for no reason. Though there’s unexplained fevers. You know, fevers we know can be a sign of infection, but if they’re happening and you’re not infected, you’re not dealing with a cold or a flu that signals that something’s cold wrong and your body’s responding to something.

The other thing is unexplained weight loss. So, you know, weight loss when you’re trying to lose weight is good. Weight loss when you’re not trying to lose weight, you’re not dieting, you’re not exercising, is a signal to me as your, as your doctor that there’s something going on that we really need to look at. The other thing is any changes in stool. So for example, dark tarry stool or bright red blood in the stool is also very concerning for me and would signal to me that there’s something that I need to look at.

So turbo cancers kind of break the mold of what we’ve known about cancer for many years. Beforehand, it was a relatively slow growing tumor. Like I said, about 8 to 10 years until we develop a cancer. Unfortunately, in the past few years we’ve seen cancers develop in younger patients and also these cancers behave much more aggressively. So it could be that, you know, a young 20 to 30 year old develops stage four cancer out of the blue.

And so this is just something very new that we are learning to best treat for our patients. So you should definitely not ignore these symptoms, first of all. The second of all is to see a practitioner as soon as possible. So it’s best to see a functional medicine doctor who is experienced in integrative oncology. This is because the conventional healthcare system has not caught up to these turbo cancers.

And also there are screening requirements that are a little bit too slow for my patients. So for my patients, for example, I might recommend that Onco-D-Clare test. I might recommend imaging also for all women. They should get a, well, women’s exam every year. And for men, get a prostate specific antigen or PSA test every year as well. A really good story that illustrates the importance of early screening is my patient who came in with bright red blood in her stool.

Now, before she saw me, she had seen her primary care doctor and she was below the screening age for colonoscopy. So she said, okay, I’m having abdominal pain, I’m having bright red blood in my stool, there’s something wrong. And eventually after a few visits, she was referred to a specialist for colonoscopy. But the colonoscopy was 10 months from when she developed symptoms. When they actually went in and did the scope, they found that she had stage three colon cancer.

So it already spread to lymph nodes. So, you know, this really illustrates, don’t ignore your symptoms. Also make sure that your doctor’s taking you seriously with your symptoms. And the best case scenario is to really find these cancer cells before they develop into a tumor. And that’s really with advanced diagnostics that we offer here at LifeWorks Wellness Center. For example, the Onco-D-Clare that I talked about, you know, a thorough physical exam, you know, imaging like, for example, I recommend for my patients, especially patients that are younger and maybe don’t want to be exposed to radiation,

there is an excellent full body MRI called Pernuvo that I will recommend for my younger patients. So stage one means that the tumor is relatively small and confined to the organ that it started with. So for example, for colon cancer, it’s, you know, very small. It’s a small tumor early stage, and it’s only in the colon. Now when we get to stage three, for example, this is not only a larger tumor, but it’s also started spreading to lymph nodes in the belly.

Stage four is when it starts spreading to other organs, for example lung or liver. In that case, you know, it’s a little bit more difficult to treat. Although we get really good results with those patients. It’s just more challenging at that point. So the RGCC test stands for Research Genetic Cancer Center. This is a specialized test that we perform that goes to Greece actually. So oftentimes it’s called the Greek test.

And we use this test because it is essentially a liquid biopsy. What does that mean? It’s a biopsy of the cells in your bloodstream without needing to poke around in that tumor. We use it because it helps us personalize our patient’s cancer program so that we know that they’re getting the very best treatments. This is truly a state of the art test. We’re looking at living cells in the blood.

We know these are cancer cells that are wreaking havoc in your body. And so it only makes sense to look at living cells. And again, this is non invasive. We are not poking around in the tumor or risking any type of disruption of the tumor itself. And because we’re looking at the cells, we can also determine what’s going to be the best treatment, what’s going to kill those cells.

And so this test, it looks at a battery of different natural treatments, and medicines, and chemotherapies that we can give low doses to determine what is the best combination for patients to heal from cancer. When we’re treating cancers, it’s important that we also keep the rest of the body very healthy. What the downside is of conventional therapies is that usually like carpet bombs the body with chemotherapy, and radiation, and surgery, and that really weakens the patient.

And patients are not able to heal when they’re weak. So essentially what we’re doing with this, this test is determining the best course of treatment. Usually our patients, they do a form of low dose chemo which we call insulin potentiation therapy. Insulin potentiation therapy or IPT is a way that we deliver targeted low dose chemotherapies that are based on the Greek test or the RGCC test in a way that is gentle, it kills cancer cells and is not harmful to the body.

We also use this test to look at markers. So for example, some cancers are more responsive to hormones, for example, so like breast cancer, are there estrogen and progesterone receptors on those cancer cells that are in the bloodstream? For prostate cancer, do those cells express testosterone receptor? We can see this information from the Greek test. The other part is looking at natural substances. We know that there’s so many powerful natural treatments for cancer and we want to make sure that our patients are given the best treatments.

So things like high doses of vitamin C, and curcumin, which is in turmeric, and a lot of these other supplements and treatments that have anti-cancer activity. We want to see what’s going to be best for the patient rather than just giving a one size fits all approach for our patients. 

So the normal immune response to cancer and pre-cancer cells is to really have a surveillance role.

The immune system is supposed to recognize those cells that I mentioned. When cancer develops, it’s usually because of a toxin or infection. So to find those cells in their early stages, after those abnormal cells are recognized, there should be an alarm signal that the immune system gives that recruits these powerful immune cells that should eradicate the cancer. These immune cells are specifically called cytotoxic T cells and natural killer cells.

And these have the ability to destroy cancer before it develops. Sometimes the immune system can fail to give that alarm signal because there are distractors that the immune system is working on and it fails to find, for example, the single pre-cancer cell in the breast. So some of these distractors include mold toxins. The other ones are dental infections like toxic root canals. Or sometimes the immune system’s confused by an autoimmune condition.

So it’s important to handle these things, so that the immune system can perform its best surveillance role for pre-cancer and cancer cells in early stages. 

So there are really four pillars of our cancer program. The first thing is immune system. So figuring out what is blocking the immune system. Like I mentioned, sometimes it’s toxins, sometimes it’s infections, sometimes it’s dental issues, and then really boosting the immune function with natural treatments like for example, vitamin C, ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, to really get your immune system boosted so it can find these cancer cells.

The second one is detoxing. So like I mentioned, usually our patients that develop cancer have some form of toxicity, whether it’s heavy metals, mold toxins, environmental toxins that are cancer causing or cancer promoting. So we really want to get our patients detoxing as part of the cancer program. The third pillar is nutrition. So diet’s foundational. And for cancer, I usually recommend my patients have a very low carbohydrate diet.

And I want to actually, for the most part, recommend a ketogenic diet for my patients where they’re getting most of their calorie needs from healthy fats rather than carbohydrates, because we know that cancer thrives on sugar. The other thing is, you know, fourth, let’s kill the cancer, right? We need to kill the cancer, but we need to kill the patient healthy. So we have gentle therapies that are cancer killing and reduce the growth and spread of cancer.

During your first visit, we do a very thorough history because I want to know for my patients, what was their state of health before they developed cancer? Because that usually gives me a clue for why did this develop. So we take a very thorough history. We look at any pathology or imaging that the patient has already that establishes diagnosis. I also want to hear a little bit about any current symptoms.

So, you know, like I mentioned, the night sweats, the fevers, the weight loss, that’s very important to hear about. I also want to hear if there’s any toxins that the patient has, for example, toxic root canals or any toxins or vaccines that really triggered inflammation and toxicity in the body. I do a very thorough physical examination and I look at if, for example, there is a breast lump or liver mass.

We want to make sure that we examine the body and take measurements and track that as we see our patients improving. So I typically order lab tests during the initial consult, including the RGCC test or the Greek test, looking for circulating cancer cells. I also look at tumor markers, some cancers, they produce abnormal proteins that we can track as a patient progresses through their program, for example, cancer antigens or something called CEA or CA 19-9 for my pancreatic cancer patients.

And then we also look at a PET scan. So a PET scan gives us a lot of information about what is the activity of the cancer and what is the size and where is it spread to. We sometimes see that there’s a high activity that goes down during treatments before the tumor will shrink in size. What essentially the scan looks at is an SUV value. SUV I tell my patients, stands for sugar uptake value.

That sugar uptake value is showing us how active is that cancer, how much sugar is it using relative to a healthy cell? The healthy cell is defined as a sugar uptake value of one. So sometimes we see cancers that are taking up 20 to 40, 40 times more sugar. So this is a really great test. It’s really considered the top line scan for cancer. And it helps me determine what is the patient’s current state.

And then we repeat it at the end of the program to see what is the improvement. So at lifeworks wellness center we offer a very comprehensive program for cancer including IV cancer therapies, including things like curcumin, like turmeric, for example, IV ozone therapies, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, hyperthermia, so high heat that damages cancer cells. And also IPT, which is a form of low dose chemo with insulin. And we really personalize our patients cancer treatment plans to meet their specific needs.

So alternative treatments really focus on boosting the body’s natural healing processes and also minimizing side effects to the patient using natural and holistic methods rather than conventional techniques that are, you know, destructive to the body like chemotherapy and radiation. Ozone therapy is very powerful to boost the immune system and clears infection. It also has powerful anti-cancer properties. We know that cancer cannot thrive in a well oxygenated space or body.

The more ozone and oxygen therapies we can get into the patient, the more we empower their immune system to get better. 

For our patients, time is valuable. We don’t want to lose two and a half weeks while we wait for the greek test to come back to get started with these beneficial cancer fighting and immune boosting therapies. So for example, my typical regimen for patients when they get started is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, ozone therapy in the form of IV and hocat sauna.

So ozone sauna, vitamin C. We also recommend hyperthermia, so heating the cancer area to damage cancer cells, and encourage good blood flow so that the anti-cancer therapies can get to the tumor where they need. Sometimes when the Greek test comes back, we make some adjustments. But I think any patient can benefit from ozone therapy, vitamin C, hyperbaric like these are standard therapies that will be beneficial to boosting the immune system regardless of the Greek test.

The fine tuning on the Greek test is really icing on the cake. You know, a lot of cancer patients benefit from these therapies regardless. So, you know, time is valuable when you’re treating cancer, right? Like I said, this developed eight to ten years ago in many cases. So don’t delay. Get started with these treatments and then we will fine tune your program once we have all the results back.

IPT stands for insulin potentiation therapy. So that’s a big, long word. I want to break it down for you. So insulin is a natural hormone that is made by the pancreas. Its job is to control sugar levels in the body. Potentiation means that insulin makes this therapy work better. So essentially what this therapy is, IPT, is delivering low dose chemotherapy with insulin to make it work better. If patients come in already having done these conventional therapies, there’s more work to do to rebuild the immune system.

So I really like when my patients come to me early because these therapies have a better chance of working. That being said, you know, even patients that have progressed on conventional therapies, including chemo-radiation, they do very well with our program. This is a 100-year-old therapy and it’s incredibly safe. And the physician that initially developed this in Mexico discovered that insulin can drive chemotherapy into cells, cancer cells, specifically, and selectively.

So we can use this to really drive low doses of chemotherapy, let’s say 10% to 25% of the conventional dose into cancer cells, so they get a higher concentration of the chemotherapy and healthy cells stay safe. And so using this method, we can kill cancer while the patient experiences minimal to no side effects. The difference between IPT and conventional chemotherapy is that with IPT, we’re delivering about 10% to 25% of the dose of chemotherapy to our patients versus 100% of the dose with traditional chemotherapy or conventional chemotherapy.

So you can imagine with such a stark contrast with the dose that patients are receiving that the side effects are minimal with IPT and, you know, pretty severe with conventional chemotherapy. In fact, sometimes the side effects can be fatal for patients with conventional chemotherapy. So that’s why I really prefer IPT because it’s targeted to cancer cells, and also the side effects are minimal and it’s much safer for our patients to beat cancer this way.

So I wanted to tell you a really encouraging story of a recent successful patient that I was able to treat and get them to a better place. So this patient, she came to me with stage four breast cancer involving pretty much her whole spine. Now, she had been in excruciating pain, and she had been going to the chiropractor, getting adjustments, and the chiropractor actually discovered, hey, your MRI shows that you have, you know, bone disease.

You have bone cancer. And she came to me after she went to the oncologist, and the oncologist basically said, you know, I’m sorry, we don’t have much to offer here. She came to me. I told her that I sincerely believe I can make a difference in your case. And so she went full force into the program. She did IPT, she did IV therapies, including the most successful ones on her RGCC test, and she did the supplements.

She did everything 100%. And from the first time that we did her PET scan that showed widespread cancer all throughout her spine, three months later, she had 90% of her cancer was gone from her body. And she came to me initially not even being able to sit in a chair, barely being able to walk, just in excruciating pain to now she says that she wants to run and jog, and she’s back to her hobbies, including sewing.

So, you know, seeing these patient cases just gives me so much encouragement and really fuels what I my passion, why I want to continue to do this for my patients. Some patients will be recommended to undergo select conventional treatments alongside their lifeworks program. So if that is the case, typically it’s a couple scenarios. First is the patient has a particular immunotherapy that their cancer would respond well to.

For example, common ones are keytruda for lung cancer or various cancers that have a PD L1 receptor, which is a very specific type of growth factor that some cancers can use. The other one is HER2, which is a growth factor that some breast cancers will use. So for that case, patients will undergo, for example, immunotherapy with herceptin and perjeta. So these would be therapies that are delivered by a partnering oncologist and are typically only one time, every few, like, two to three weeks, and would not interrupt the Lifeworks Program.

In fact, dovetail really well with our therapies. I don’t routinely recommend radiation treatments for my patients, except in select circumstances. We have some very good alternatives. For example, hyperthermia, local regional hyperthermia. For example, if a tumor is, you know, at a surface, that we can apply heat. I like that as my first option for patients before they undergo radiation. Now, certain circumstances will require radiation, and if that’s the case, I might recommend that.

But again, it’s not my first go to. And in terms of conventional chemotherapy, we talked about how this is very harsh on the body. In fact, it’s kind of like carpet bombing your whole body to really attack the cancer. So I really prefer the IPT treatment over conventional chemotherapy. And so that’s typically my recommendation for patients. So if you’re doing IPT that is in place of chemotherapy, the treatments that we deliver here at LifeWorks Wellness center are generally considered very safe.

They are administered and monitored very closely by our cancer practitioners, including Dr. David Minkoff and myself. In fact, patients usually experience improvement in their overall health and minimal side effects. The treatment plans are designed on many factors, such as type and stage of cancer, overall health, any contributing factors to the cancer, such as toxins, infections, or nutritional deficiencies. We also perform advanced cancer testing that helps the personalize the cancer treatment program.

The personalized approach is aimed at optimizing therapeutic outcomes for each patient. So I tailor my patients programs based on the type of cancer they have and the stage. For example, are they Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4? A program for a Stage 1 patient with breast cancer is going to look much different than a program for a stage four patient with pancreatic cancer. I also look at what is a patient’s overall health.

Are they well nourished? Are they underweight? Do they have high inflammation markers? If so, that will be addressed with their treatment program. The other thing is, you know, are there any other contributing factors such as toxins, infections, nutritional deficiencies that might have contributed to their development of cancer and overall health? So I also look at that Greek test that we talked about, and based on that information, we can personalize the treatment program for our patients by looking at the exact sensitivity or effectiveness of each of these treatments for the specific cancer.

So the overall treatment program is really tailored and personalized for the patient in order to address underlying causes that contributed to cancer and also treat the cancer that’s developed. So compared to conventional therapies, the side effects of treatment at LifeWorks is very minimal. At most, some patients will find that they have some healing reactions. So what exactly are healing reactions? Sometimes patients, as they are receiving cancer killing therapies, can feel a little bit of flu like symptoms.

So maybe some fatigue, some headaches, some nausea. Typically, these are Temporary, and patients recover in the course of a couple days. So side effects specifically for IPT or low dose chemotherapy can include very rarely, some minimal hair thinning. I would say probably only one in a hundred patients has hair thinning and more commonly, some constipation afterward, which is relatively easy to manage. So we just let our patients know in advance that’s something that they might experience, so we can handle it.

I think it’s also important to mention that because everyone has a different health history, they might be more predisposed to certain side effects than others. For example, some patients that really struggle with, you know, swelling or fluid in their lungs, we have to be a little bit more careful. But generally patients, they do very well in our therapies and don’t experience very many side effects at all. So I think it’s important for patients to expect to make big changes to their lifestyle.

Like I mentioned, cancer usually is brewing for several years before we find it on scan. So there are a lot of contributors that have led up to this point. A major factor for my patients that they really have to address is stress. We know that stress lowers your immune system. It is also creating an environment of inflammation in your body. We know that cancer feeds on inflammation, and thrives in a body that has a weak immune system.

So that’s very important to really, you know, evaluate and treat for our patients. It’s also important to expect to make some dietary changes. Like I mentioned, ketogenic diet is our typical recommendation for patients who are fighting cancer. So some patients will have to adapt to not eating sugar. And we have sometimes patients that undergo a process or side effect called keto flu, where their body is really adapting to using these different fuels for energy.

So that’s something to also expect. Also time, right? So these therapies, they take consistency to work, so it will be a time commitment. And some patients need to also adjust to that. So I want to encourage you that you’re not alone when you’re making these changes, which can be significant for some folks. We are here to support you. You also have a community here of other patients that are doing the same hard things to get better.

I wanted to mention that you have a team of practitioner assistants that are available that can help guide you through these changes, as well as our nutritional consultants that help with implementing the diet, and the supplements, and are there to support you. So you’re not alone. We will support you every step of the way. 

So patients are monitored through lab testing, serial exams of the tumor site. For example, breast tumor we’ll take measurements before and after the program, and then also PET scans before and after to compare what is the tumor activity and has the tumor shrunk.

The initial treatment program for cancer is about 12 to 16 weeks. We have patients do initial testing and a PET scan, and then we have them go through their treatment program, including natural treatments, IV therapies, and IPT for that initial phase. And then we do another PET scan, typically, and we see what the progress has been. You know, has the tumor shrunk, Is it less active? What is the state of their cancer at that point, and how well did this work?

So after that, we also have to address root causes for why did this cancer develop. Right? We want to prevent a cancer recurrence. So sometimes we will do an initial phase to clear up the body and detoxify before transitioning to maintenance phase, where patients will either have an additional amount of IPT here, or they will go home on a maintenance regimen, including certain medicines, and supplements, and home therapies, and then commute back and forth for ipt, let’s say every other week to every three weeks to every one to two months, just to reduce the risk of this cancer coming back.

Typically, the second program may be an additional round of IPT from like, 6 to 12 weeks here at LifeWorks, or we might say, okay, we have a local contact for you to go home, continue some maintenance therapies at home, and commute back and forth for IPT while maintaining very closely your diet, your medicines, your supplements in order to continue to progress in the right direction with your cancer, and prevent this from coming back.

Patients should prepare to make big changes to their lifestyle and diet. I think that’s the main sticking point for a lot of patients. You know, a lot of things contributed to this cancer. So it’s important that you change your diet, do keto, work on stress reduction, be prepared to take a lot of supplements. These are things that I think that patients should learn to expect and really mentally prepare for.

I encourage patients to bring family members or support persons because I find that patients do better when they have someone to really support them during their program. Support them by, you know, making sure that they’re keeping track of their schedule for appointments, attending their physician appointments and lab reviews with them, and taking notes, helping them with transportation. There are three buildings here that patients commute from, so that’s important for patients to plan for, and then also, you know, eating right, so preparing food.

You know, this is a very busy program. I find that patients need to find time or find a support person that helps them make the right diet choices. So we have a very high success rate for cancer. Of course, no cancer treatment is 100%, but we have about an 80% response rate for our patients that either achieve stability or improve in terms of their cancer burden. And how we assess that cancer burden is really that PET scan before and after.

So we see that cancer activity and size, and location, and spread on that initial PET scan and then we want to see that cancer not only not progress, but shrink on that follow up PET scan. 

So if you’re looking for a comprehensive approach to cancer that not only is proven and has a track record of, you know, hundreds of patients improving with this therapy, but also is very gentle and humane, our approach is the right fit for you.

After you finish your initial program at LifeWorks, we don’t want you to be a stranger afterward. In fact, there will be a maintenance program that we will prescribe at the end of your treatment. The real work begins once we have a negative scan because we have to prevent cancer from coming back for decades to come. So there will be a maintenance plan. Some folks, they will have to stay for a second program after their initial program to get additional therapies that we’ve seen been working for the past three or four months.

Other folks will have a maintenance regimen of supplements, some IPT where they travel back and forth, and we do some adjunctive therapies to make sure that we are keeping cancer numbers low and reducing the risk of this coming back. So I recommend that you get established with one of us at LifeWorks Wellness center as your practitioner and help you get on the right path towards wellness. There are a lot of proactive steps that you can take to reduce the risk of cancer over your lifetime.

I also really encourage you to find someone to help you with moral support because there will be a lot of life changes. Again, we have a lot of advanced testing that we can do to find cancer in early stages when it’s more treatable. So particularly if you have a family history, I highly encourage you to do the hard work, right? Work on your diet, work on lifestyle, exercise, detox.

These are all important things that we can all do to have a healthy lifestyle. So I hope I’ve addressed most of your questions today. Of course, we’re available to you if you have any further questions, particularly about our success cancer program. So if you would go to our website, it’s lifeworkswellnesscenter.com and you can view videos there of Dr. Minkoff and myself explaining a little bit more about the cancer treatment program, and we look forward to helping you soon.