May 13, 2019
Recorded Live, Catch this educational interview with Dr. Paul Anderson: Researcher, Teacher, Doctor, Hay House Best-Selling Author, and Wellness Warrior.
In this Interview, our CSO, Dr. Michele Burklund asks Dr. Anderson questions about his view and philosophy on medicine, how he addresses the root cause of illness, hear about his 20 years of experience in clinical practice, his reasons behind writing the book ‘Outside the Box Cancer Therapies’ and why we all need to read it.
Read the transcribed version below…
00:00 Dr. Michele Burklund: Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Michele Burklund, and I am the chief science officer here at Puriya. And today, on our Living Well series, we have a leader in the naturopath industry. Dr. Paul Anderson. Please say hello Dr. Anderson.
00:20 Dr. Paul Anderson: Hi.
00:22 DB: Thank you for joining us today, so if any of you guys, I just want to remind you before we get started, feel free to say anything you want in the comments, let us know where you are listening from today as well. And I am going to read your biography, it’s a short one, there is a lot in there, feel free to add anything you want as we go. Dr. Paul Anderson is a naturopathic medical doctor and the medical director and founder of the Anderson Medical Group. His facility Advanced Medical Therapies, is the first of its kind in the US. Offering therapies in multiple modalities based on his over two decades of research and patient care. He is a recommended authority in the field of integrative cancer research and the treatment of chronic disease. He’s also an adjunct professor at Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research Center in Seattle, Washington. And is the primary medical advisor to the Sanoviv, I think I pronounced that right, Hospital in Rosarito, Mexico.
01:30 DA: Correct, yeah, yeah, and that’s the short version. So I’ve been around a long time and done a lot of things with cancer and chronic illness. I guess that’s the best way to start.
01:43 DB: Yeah, well, we have a lot of questions about what you’ve been doing. This is a big question, we’re actually starting off right now. So you are probably known as a leader in naturopathic medicine and you have a huge passion for education and research. I have seen a lot of your education and research personally and I think it’s amazing what you’re doing to bring it along on a larger scale and teach people. Here is the question, what is your goal or what would you like to see changed in medicine in the future?
02:20 DA: Oh boy. It’s probably a long list, but as I was thinking about us talking earlier, I think a couple of things. I think one thing would be that there’s really an artificial split in North America and parts of maybe Western Europe between what we might call integrative or naturopathic medicine in the western model of medicine. And if you go to almost anywhere else in the world, that divide doesn’t exist or it’s very, very tiny. So when I’ve been in Asia or in other parts of Europe etcetera, It’s just non-existent. And even my friends from, let’s say, the eastern portions of Europe, who may be MD, PhDs trained very, very classically, they also are completely aware of almost everything that we would do and consider alternative or integrative etcetera.
03:20 DA: So I think that there’s a million reasons why that exists in the western world so to speak that we probably don’t really need to get into, but I really think for medicine to truly change in the Western world, we have to start to break that barrier down and that includes a lot of trust issues that have built up or distrust issues, but I think because the predominant model of medicine is the way that medicine is delivered to most people, if you’ve just changed those of us who are in the integrative and naturopathic community, it’s great and we need to do that. And that’s what I’m really mostly about, but if we don’t get the rest of the community of medicine to kind of buy into that, there’s more than what they see and there’s more than what they’ve learned which many do actually. But if we can’t get that kind of going on a bigger scale, access to what we know and what we do will be limited forever and ever.
04:26 DA: And I think that it might be a while, maybe longer than my lifetime, but I think as a goal, I think that’s really important. And just so it doesn’t end on a sour note. If I go back to say… Just so people know I entered the world of medicine in 1976, so that was a long, long time ago. You can figure out how many years, and I was primarily in the allopathic side of medicine until, I don’t know, it was probably the late ’80s, and then I came over to the side of being a naturopathic medical doctor. And so I see both sides and I know where all of the predetermined notions come from, but because of that background, I started teaching to largely integrative groups naturopathic and integrative MD and acupuncture, chiropractors, etcetera, over 20 years ago.
05:27 DA: And what I saw about 10 years ago is, we used to get maybe out of a group of 50 doctors, there’d be one or two MDs there, and about 10 years ago, there started to be five, and then there were 10. And then sometimes, now it’s more medical doctors than there are integrative doctors of the other types. So I see a shift going on and when I talk to those doctors, it’s not either/or, it’s that they realize for chronic problems and for cancer patients where things aren’t working out, we don’t have answers for those things. So there seems to be a growing openness at least on the personal doctor to doctor, the corporate and maybe government end is a different story, but I really think that if we wanna look really long-term and make big differences in people’s lives, I think that’s where it has to start. There’s a million steps before that
06:23 DA: And then I guess from the micro level, what you mentioned is my real passion is educating people and I do that for both patient groups, as well as, as you said, a lot of physician groups and the whole point there is, I feel like people shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel and make the same mistakes that those of us who’ve been around longer made, and the only way to do that is education.
06:53 DB: And I think you’ve done a lot. I think you’ve done an amazing job, with the doctors. And then also with the patients, I think empowering the patients. Like what we’re doing here. Getting people think differently as well. And that brings me into my next question which I love to… You recently published a book and it’s called “Cancer Outside Box”. And what I love about this book in that in your introduction you talk about individualized medicine and how in conventional medicine that’s lost and it’s become so standardized. So can you tell us more about your view on that and individualized medicine and how you do it? What is your patient approach?
07:53 DA: Sure, so right up over my shoulder some of the books I’ve written the white one there, is the “outside the box” one this is a close-up view. So it’s “Outside the Box Cancer Therapy”. I have to give props to my co-author. Dr. Mark Stengler, really without him, we wouldn’t have probably gotten the publishing deal. He and I were in medical school together, a million years ago, and our practice is both involved integrative care for cancer and chronic illness and about the same amount of years, just two different areas. And we didn’t see each other for 20 years. He ran into me. I was teaching a course in integrative oncology procedures, and we started up a conversation about how our lives had gone over time and what it really turned out was that he was doing a great deal of work in integrative cancer and chronic illness care, and so was I, ut because of where we practiced and our personal ways of doing things our philosophies were very much the same, but the tools we use are very different. And what we realized was, in the area of cancer, and specifically giving patients tools for cancer…
09:06 DA: We had two totally different approaches that each together would make a great book. So that’s what we did when we wrote the book, and we specifically wrote it knowing doctors would read it, but really we wrote it so a patient or a family member or loved one support person or just someone looking for information could get it. The editors at Hay House edited so that we had a patient voice. And most of what I’ve written has all been for physicians, so I had to change the voice of my writing a bit. Mark rights mostly for patients. So that helped quite a bit, but that was the first thing, and I think the second thing which goes back to really… I didn’t plan this. I guess it’s a deep-seated thing. It goes back to before we even started, we really had this discussion about what do we want the biggest picture thing from this book to be obviously want resources we want data and all this stuff for patients to help them. And the first thing that was was that it goes back to our first point of big picture things was there’s not right or wrong. There’s not western medicine is all bad when it comes to cancer and what we do is all good, or whatever.
10:25 DA: Every patient comes to, let’s say it’s cancer or chronic illness at their own place and you can’t treat somebody here who’s over here and vice versa. And so I think that we were very clear about that, in the book that we… We’re not saying we’re better than you, or your worse than us, or better on us, we’re saying this is a bigger picture than what we have, in the most cases. So, for example, there are some people for whom the very best treatment is to do a standard treatment. And then back it up with a lot of integrated stuff. For some people, their oncologist literally will tell them. If it was me, I would not do the standard treatment because it has such low, chances of outcome, and if you can find something that’s not what I do, great do that, and then we get those patients.
11:16 DA: So the most important part about this is saying all medicine has a place where it works great, but you gotta be thoughtful and meet the person where they are when they come to you because it’s totally different if someone comes in and they just diagnosed, that’s a low stage low grade cancer. Or if they come in and they’re done with chemo and radiation, and they can’t even move anymore and they’re so fatigued. And what do I do with that person that’s totally different than the other person. So I think that while it’s easy to say it’s one of the hardest things to do in medicine, you have to meet each and every person exactly where they are and you have to assess what their needs are, not only big picture, long-term, like I don’t wanna get cancer again, but where are they today? Do they need to recover? Then they can build on… So I think the idea of being individualized in your approach and your focus, it sounds really trite and easy, but it’s probably the hardest thing in the world to do, ’cause we humans wanna do everything the same way and that doesn’t work with people.
12:27 DB: Right. It’s a lot more time consuming, there’s a lot more time consuming, there’s a lot more variables. It’s great for people to know that that’s an option too. Okay, I will jump to the next question which talks about more of the philosophy. In your book you discuss the philosophy of medicine from a physician’s view and how it can really affect treatments because of their own bias. And so it is so important to have your philosophy in medicine. And how you look at patient when you go about treating them and everyone has a bias but when you go about treating them having a philosophy is such core important thing.
13:13 DA: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really… And again, this is where there’s so many shades of gray, if you will. And there’s two things that have to be balanced in my mind, and I probably better for everyone, but I didn’t have any graphics today, so I’ll just sort of describe this. But often when I’m teaching students or doctors, or whatever, I have this graphic where there’s a triangle on one side that’s right side up. And then an inverse triangle so it’s like just two triangles next to each other. They sort of balance each other out.
13:56 DA: On one side is the type of treatment that a person might need and there’s a natural logical order it can go in. So there’s the base, like the biggest part of the pyramid are things what I call hygienic things or things that we have to do, like eating, sleeping. All of those things. How are our relationships, how is our relationship to our own thoughts, all that stuff. Now, most people blow right by that one because they feel that it’s too simple or those things won’t make any difference or whatever. And what I usually tell patients is maybe today those things won’t make a difference, but in 10 years, how healthy you are is all about that first sort of base. So yeah, most people I’ve had some people that were really OCD and they change everything immediately, but most people will not do that. So for the base which is all about what we eat, how we eat, kind of liquid we drink, how clean things are that we get into us, how our relationships with us, and other people are, how we exercise all of those.
15:08 DA: Those things, you have to have a long-term plan, even if your the sickest person in the world to make those optimized because that’s the whole base on which all other treatments fall. And in the cancer world, I’ve started to expand this in patient groups where we actually have pillars and what I say is based on my experience and looking backwards at decades of people getting cancer treatments. If those things aren’t in place and it’s those basic things, then the treatment sort of fall through and they might work for a while, but they don’t stick because who you are isn’t really solid. And so, well, no, if you need surgery today, those things may not matter as much, but like I say, in five or 10 years, they matter a ton. So you kind of start there and then you have maybe a next level that includes some basic additional things. We’ve already dealt with hydrating and eating and all sleeping and all that stuff.
16:10 DA: So now maybe you do need some more nutrients or you need some more of this or that or you need some constitutional treatments. Some people respond really well to say constitutional acupuncture, some people do really well with constitutional other treatments like hydrotherapy, or homeopathy or ayuverda, etcetera. That’s, to me, very practitioner-dependent. If I’m good at one of those, my patients will tend to respond to them, but some kind of constitutional additions and basic stuff and then you get more specific as you go. And then at the top, little pointy part, if you need something cut out of you, or if you need a particular, I don’t know, the medical suppressive therapy or something, then you need it. You usually don’t need that forever. It’s kind of there and done, but it sort of builds that way. So, on the other side where the pyramid’s the other way around, is essentially the level of sick you are. Okay?
17:14 DA: So prevention is the little tip, and it matches all those base things. How we eat, sleep, live, love, do stuff, whatever and then big deadly diseases at the top and matches the big heavy duty of therapies. And so in the back of my mind and a lot of people I know when they interact with a person the first time. If a person’s coming in, this happens a lot. For example, of family members you may have seen the other family member for cancer or for MS or some heavy duty thing, but maybe their partner or their child comes in and just says, “You know, I, I’d like to not get that when I get older, I’d like to be healthy.” And a totally different conversation than the person who has MS or cancer or something. So then you’re looking at, “hey, you’re starting with no real disease you’ve got a good, healthy system. What are the best ways to keep that healthy lot simpler?”
18:17 DA: And so, you wouldn’t start with… They don’t need surgery, they don’t need a lot of drugs they don’t need all the stuff. On the other hand, if someone comes in and they’re just recovering from radiation and they have a lot of radiation burns, they might need some high level care to help their body heal through that, but they don’t need it forever. So literally, every so often with a chronically ill person, the goal is that you kinda knock him down a step or a part of a step and they don’t need as much intervention. And this is really hard to teach, it’s very difficult when I cross over into the allopathic world, because they are very, very used to pretty much one problem, one answer thinking. Which is great if you’re at the level of surgery or something, but when it comes to functional problems or healing that takes them a while to kinda get to that. It’s not that they can, it just takes a while. I think that as far as a philosophy, really, again, this sounds really trite, but it’s actually in my mind, the most useful thing is you really have to know where the patient is.
19:30 DA: And then deal with them at something that matches and realize they’re not gonna stay there forever. They can be a sickest person in the world, but in six months they’re not the sickest person in the world, so they don’t need the sickest person in the world treatments. So I really think it’s about meeting them physically, mentally, emotionally, health-wise, where they are and that’s your starting point and that’s only for them. And then you start there and you work on. If you do that with everyone, it’s only gonna work on people who are here, not here, you know…
20:02 DB: Right.
20:02 DA: Yeah.
20:04 DB: And I think that’s just an important, I mean it’s about philosophy, and leading them where they are at again, I think it’s just empowering for patients to know that that’s an option too, instead of just going one way or knowing… Or having in the past, that this is certain to happen, but finding all that out. And this is kind of going from the philosophy into the next question, in the second chapter of your book, you talk about the root cause of illness, specifically cancer. Now, we don’t necessarily have to go deep into it. We can just discuss it in a general sense, what is the root cause, what is your viewpoint? And how can we teach that to our viewers?
20:54 DA: Yeah, just to quickly… And we won’t keep this about cancer, but it’s, in a sense, a little easier to talk about than a few other things. I have graphics for this too, but I’ll just use my fingers; it’s gonna be great. So, it’s sort of funny to me, being in and around medicine as long as I have, and as you mentioned in the book, we, specifically about cancer, it’s like, “What causes cancer? What are the causes, plural? And why would we even care?” Well, we care because if you don’t know how the problem is broken, it’s really hard to figure out how to get in to fix it. And this was… So, the way we did it, we had 10 chapters and I wrote five primarily and Mark wrote five primarily, and then we traded and edit each other’s stuff.
21:52 DA: So, this is the one I got to do the primary writing on it. It was really a lot of fun for me, because it only allowed me to crystallize the fact that in the modern times that we’re in right now, there’s three big, seemingly competing theories of cancer cause. But the other side of it that was really wonderful after I really got clear on those three theories, so to speak, was they’re really not competing at all. What they are is saying that there are three different ways that cover tons of territory into a person, to the point that we could trigger cancer to start. And so, when you say theory, it sort of that means if I’m right, then the other two have to be wrong, etcetera, and that’s actually not true. They’re all pieces of the bigger puzzle.
22:48 DA: So, for example, in that world you have two really old ideas. So, there used to be something called the trophoblastic theory of cancer that’s over 100 years old. It’s now called cancer stem cell theory, which is a very, very well referenced and researched tumorigenesis cancer-causing theory. And it’s not really a theory because it’s so well-documented. Well, 100 years ago we didn’t really know what stem cells were, so we called them trophoblasts and stuff like that. So, there’s that theory. Then, there’s metabolism problem theory, which is a big deal, and that’s of course it’s not an issue with every cancer, but many. And then, there’s the genomic theory, which has been the predominant theory for 50 years, but what we found is when we do genetic interventions into cancer, we sometimes make them worse, so it’s not always all about that.
23:43 DA: What really happens, so if you work with people, is there are some people on one end or the other of the spectrum, but they all together have a hand in triggering cancer. Now, you could back up, and the reason I said cancer was all easier, sadly, is if you have a chronic illness like auto-immunity or chronic fatigue syndrome or any of the chronic X, Y, Z diseases, they have never one cause. There’s never one cause. There can be three causes or five causes or 10 causes. And what happens with chronically ill people, which is different from cancer. If you have cancer, you find it, or your doctors find it, everyone knows it’s cancer. There’s not a lot of ambiguity there. We can argue about what to do about it or who caused it or whatever, but once we find cancer, it’s cancer.
24:42 DA: When you have a chronic illness that’s not cancer, people often have the experience of being slowly diagnosed. Now, some people think misdiagnosed, which does happen, but usually it’s just they’re slowly diagnosed too. Part of it is because autoimmune and other problems are usually slow-progressing. If they’re fast-progressing, everyone knows what it is right away. Most are not, most are slow-progressing. But the other problem is is that there are so many reasons that your immune system can be triggered to fight you, which is autoimmunity, or in the case of say, chronic fatigue syndrome or chronic lyme illness or whatever, there’s so many reasons that the immune system and the musculoskeletal system gets messed up, that you don’t know from the outside… You have a name of a disease. You don’t know which of the 40 things is wrong until somebody looks into it.
25:40 DA: Well, standard medicine for screening looks… What I always told people was, “They’re looking for one or two big problems to come out on your labs or your imaging. If you don’t have one or two big problems, you don’t get a diagnosis today. You might in two years, when you get bad enough. What if you have five little problems that all add up to one big problem?” And that’s usually what we see. Well, better to work on the five little problems than the one big problem in waiting for it to come about. So, I really think if you break your leg or if you get strep throat or if you get something else, it’s simple, there’s basic treatments. That’s perfect. Western medicine is actually set up for those things. If you need to have a tumor surgically removed, we’re really good at that.
26:32 DA: If you have all these other things, for example, slow expanding MS or chronic fatigue syndrome or something. We’ve done everything we can in Western medicine with your cancer and now your body needs to heal, Western medicine doesn’t have a lot for that. So I really think when it comes to cause, again, you’re looking back to say, “Okay, I’m meeting you where you are,” but we would say there’s more than… We don’t have to wait for one giant problem to emerge. Your body as many systems, they can all get in the act and create trouble. So why don’t we look at all of them and just make sure there’s not like three of them that are pushing you down the road of chronic illness.
27:18 DB: Right, I think that’s important for people to keep going to their primary care doctor, and [unintelligible] certain point then they won’t be notified, but they can have a lot of things when they wait for a long time. And so, getting to that root cause, finding that earlier I think is so important.
27:42 DA: Yeah, and I always try and encourage people. I have a weekly radio program for patients and I always encourage them to do the regular work up first, because certainly if there’s something really, really wrong, you wanna find that. And there are people that don’t know they’re severely anemic or they don’t know, whatever. But if you have symptoms that aren’t going away, and your labs look good, it’s worth then taking a step back and getting a broader view. And the idea is, there is a broader view, that’s all.
28:16 DB: Definitely, definitely. Okay. Jumping on to the next question. So here at Puriya, I’m the chief science officer and we believe in science based natural medicine. You know, like I feel like there’s still a dated view out there where natural medicine and science are not together, like they’re mutually exclusive. But there’s so much research and so much going on right now. Can you talk to us a little bit about research in alternative medicine and your personal research as well?
28:51 DA: Sure, one of my favorite topics. One of the things that we did when we wrote the book, and I think it was necessary actually, but it was also one of those things because this book was gonna be marketed to patients and families, we didn’t really have to do this part but we knew that patients and families would take the book to their oncologist or to their family doctor or whatever. And so we referenced it like a text book. And so if you looked at the book just from the side… This is one graphic I do have. So if you look at the book from the side, that whole bottom part which is about 20% of the book, those are all references, so everything we talk about in here has multiple, multiple references. We weren’t really trying to compete, but people are competitive. So I thought I had the chapter with the most references, and it was like 289 and then Mark had 345 for herbal medicine or something.
29:54 DA: So that’s just in two chapters, too, so we have like nearly 1100 reference, that’s a lot of references for a direct to the public book, but it’s, as you know, but as people have heard, usually the first thing that someone who hasn’t looked into things as maybe a primary care doctor or whatever, just didn’t have enough time to look into their oncologist. They’ll usually say, “Well, I don’t think there’s any research on that, so I don’t think you should do that,” right? So we at least wanted to take that away and say, “Well, actually they have 200 references on this. There must be something to this, maybe we should look into it.”
30:34 DA: So that was one of the reasons why the bulk of the backend of the book is all those references. Now, it made it a little easier on Mark and I, because we had both been collecting references for the work we did our whole careers basically. And what I’ll tell you is 15-20 years ago, there weren’t a lot because no one really studied natural… I mean there were some, but they were pretty sparse, and then there was this kind of explosion, especially around botanical herbal medicines, and nutrients and things of that nature. And what I see is, I see that as a growing area and to kind of segue that to the other part of the question about research I’ve been involved in, the one largest research project that I was involved in, I was the head of the IV therapy services for National Institute of Health-funded research project in cancer. And it was an Integrative Oncology Research project done a few years back, and it went for five years, and we actually had a number of clinic partners and we had our own clinic and we had our own IV clinic that I ran. And we were in a group with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance which includes University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson’s, Seattle Children’s and Bastyr University, and that’s where we housed our research center. And Dr. Standish and Andersen, the other Andersen, ‘SEN’, they were the PIs on that.
32:08 DA: And so that being a collaboration with really some, in the Northwest, the big dogs in the cancer world, we could get referrals from them but they really would often push back and require data and information before they would feel comfortable sending a patient over. And although I had been collecting data that really sped up my sort of codifying of the data, especially around the injections and nutrient interventions we are doing and things, and that actually helped to kind of speed that up. And when I would send it back to the oncologist, unless they were just totally close-minded, which humans some are, you know.
32:54 DA: But many of them would actually say gee, I didn’t even know there was any data on what you do. This seems like it’s not a dangerous thing. Okay, you can see my patient, and we’ll do this. We slowly built a rapport over time. So I think that was really important. The other thing that is the direction a lot of Integrative Oncology and eventually I think integrative chronic illness research will go, but it’s easier to get money for oncology right now than non-oncology chronic illness. What we were involved in, was outcomes studies. So if you got standard treatment and you had colon cancer stage four, and if you got integrative treatment with colon cancer stage four, which group survived longer? And there’s national statistics to figure that out.
33:50 DA: And just in our first round… Long studies, the statistics take forever to get all done and stuff, but just in our first go around, in our first like three or four years, there was not a single major stage four cancer where our patients were not surviving longer than the standard of care. We had people, of course, they could be doing standard of care and we were just adding on, right? So the next level then, which is something that we discovered really early on in that process. And I tried to get it included but it was too late ’cause the study was already written. So the follow-up study which is going on right now that I help see in the beginning of, but I’m not part of now it’s called the QCO study. It’s being done at eight or nine centers around North America.
34:39 DA: That has outcomes, and we limited it to four major cancers for both survival, but also quality of life, which was the next thing that we looked at with people. Because you may not live a whole lot longer but if you’re able to do things that you wanna do and have a higher quality of life, that is worth as much to people as any other metric out there. If you’re living X amount of time, but in horrible pain or unable to move or whatever, you have no quality of life really. That was another part that we added. So, I think that’s the direction that research is going. Yes, it’s really nice to have specific research such as we have in the “outside the box” book. You can look up 20 references on artemisinin family, the wormwood family of herbs. You can go on PubMed and 50,000 references on Curcumin or whatever. There’s a lot of this equals that, but really, how is it when you do it as a whole system intervention for whatever you have? Is your quality of life better? Do your disease metrics improve and in cancer, do you survive longer? That’s really whole practice medicine research and that’s really, I think, where things are going.
35:53 DB: Yeah, and I think it’s exciting that we can finally prove that too. That we have the data and we’re giving the data to show the people that… ‘Cause that idea nature and science are mutually exclusive is very dated. You’re definitely doing a lot in the cancer area.
36:17 DA: And just something I’ll say, because it was remarkable when I saw it. When that five-year project was done, Dr. Standish, one of the co-PIs went to the Society for Integrative Oncology, SIO, which is a big meeting once a year and presented just some preliminary survival findings. There’s a new service for physicians and researchers called Medscape. You can get a fee, [unintelligible].. And they have reporters that they send around to different meetings. I will tell you, they are not alternative integrative medicine friendly. This is not a group that likes integrative medicine. They wrote the most, for them, glowing report as a Medscape update on integrative oncology that I have ever read before based on the survival numbers that we were showing [unintelligible].
37:17 DA: And I often pull that out and send it to people just to show that this is not just us saying, this is actually real numbers we saw all the time. It’s important that things, they change slowly. 20 years ago, I would have bet you all the money I had, which wasn’t a lot 20 years ago. But I would’ve bet you all the money any one I knew had, that there would never be a research project like I was involved in and no one would ever believe it. I have hope for the future, that if we just keep at it and keep looking at outcomes. ‘Cause at the base doctors care about their patients. We get caught up in what kind of school we went to, or whatever that stuff is, but really at the base of it, if the patients are getting better, most doctors will at least be interested.
38:09 DB: Yeah, definitely. So we’ve come a long way and you’ve definitely helped that a lot too in the last 20 years as well.
38:19 DA: I hope so.
38:21 DB: So this leads me into my next question about your book. What prompted you to write it? And why do you feel that people should read it? What’s the main benefit that they can get from reading your book?
38:36 DA: Well, I really think… I think the initial prompting was that when Mark and I met for the first time after all those years of not seeing each other. We just talked about our experience those couple of decades with cancer patients. Because I was teaching at a cancer symposium, that was a topic that was on our mind. So we meet for dinner, we go through all that. I think the first thing that struck us was, in very different ways modality-wise, we had both found effective ways to impact the lives of people with cancer. They came back to the same basic philosophical point of view that we’re meeting you where you’re at, we’re using the appropriate level of intervention and so on. So that was kind of where that started. And then he had been reading a lot of the professional things that I write the patients never get to see, or most patients don’t, and really, they don’t wanna read, ’cause they’re written for other doctors.
39:49 DA: And he really just said, “This is a story that needs to be told so that patients have access to it.” And this is true of any study. Even if every part of the study that you guys did eventually gets published before we all die, it’s gonna be a long time, it’s gonna be spread out, no one’s gonna hear about it. And also, nobody is going to benefit by all the years of practice that we had and that our friends contributed to, etcetera. So, that’s really what triggered it, was we wanted patients and families to have access to information in one spot, and that was the thing. The other thing is the phrase or the title “Outside the Box Cancer Therapies”, just simply came from the idea that we know what’s in the box in Western medicine, and there’s nothing wrong with the box, we love the box, it does what it does. But there’s a lot of things out there that we know that can make the stuff inside the box work better. But a lot of times what’s inside the box you don’t qualify for anymore, so what do you do? There’s a lot of stuff out there.
41:02 DA: And it’s in a way where we both have the big picture thing of, we go through our favorite herbal medicines and nutrients and why and where, how do you do healing after radiation or chemo or whatever? And then, we have a more micro-section where the top cancers, we give people lists of where would we start with these things. So, if you’re in the middle of somewhere where there’s no integrative medicine, you’d at least know where to process your resources so that you’re not just shooting in the dark, ’cause there’s 50 million things on the internet that sound good. So the book, really, was to try and help people dealing with cancer, whether they have it or they’re supporting someone with it. And also to help doctors who have never even heard of this, or maybe are curious, or who’ve heard of it but don’t know where to find the research, it’s all in one place. And that’s really why the book came about.
42:02 DB: Yeah, [unintelligible] if I have a patient or a caregiver [unintelligible] book would be amazing, it would give me so many things that I wouldn’t know existed or had access to, and I think that’s just a huge help. And I really like how you went through each cancer too and created protocol which gives people a template to go [unintelligible]. I think it’s incredibly valuable to give that to some of the people who have no idea where to start when they get a cancer diagnosis.
42:37 DA: Right. And that’s our goal. There’s no one protocol, but our thought was, “Well, if it was us and a cousin called us and we care about our cousin, but they’re 1,000 miles away, what we’d give him as our top group of things, and if those aren’t working, what’s the next tier of things to consider?” Because you’ve probably seen it, and I’ve seen it more than I wanted to, someone gets a diagnosis of anything, cancer, especially, any chronic illness, they’ll come in with a shopping bag full of things, all of which might be good, but there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. So, we really were trying to help with that.
43:20 DB: Yeah, I think that makes a big difference in that [unintelligible] what are three takeaways that are [unintelligible] from the book, three key things that you wanna share, ’cause there’s a lot, I know.
43:37 DA: Yeah. Boiling it down to three, I’ll have to stay on the high level of things. I think the first thing is, honestly, if I look top-down, first thing is, there’s more resources than almost anybody, even those of us in the integrative and naturopathic communities, even remember, and they’re all in one place. So, there’s more resources than you think are available. The next thing is, there is actually data to back up almost everything that we bring up anyway. And we even have another chapter I wrote was, “Other Therapies.” It’s like, you could write a whole book on many of the other therapies, so it’s not that they’re marginal, it’s just that they’re maybe a little harder to get in the US or they’re not as well known or whatever, so we’re making people know.
44:28 DA: So, the first thing is, there’s a lot of resources you may not even know about. Next thing is… And part of that too is sometimes you could… Say, if you’re in the US, certain therapies you get in Canada that might be worth going there for, or maybe Mexico. Here you can at least read about it first and say, “Oh, okay, these ones make sense. They use them a lot in other countries and they’re well researched. These ones maybe don’t make sense.” So, that’s one thing. Next thing is that there actually is this large set of scientific data that would back these things up. So, it’s not only there’s a lot of resources, there’s science behind them. And then, I really think the third thing, which was our overarching goal for patients, for families, is that there is hope.
45:17 DA: There’s always this sideways glance thing of, “Oh well, what you guys do is give false hope.” It’s not false hope. If you’re lying to people, you can give them false hope. But we’re very clear in the book, we tell case stories about people who’ve had good and less good experiences, etcetera, and because it all goes back to meeting the person where they are, and if you’re here, you don’t treat them like here and vice versa. But the hope part is that even if you’re doing a complete, full, standard of care oncology protocol that’s got a 90% cure rate, there’s still ton of stuff to make you healthy after ordering, or after, or before, and most people don’t think about that. They think they have to pick from box A or B, and sometimes box A and B go really well together. And I think that hope is that if you just take a step back, it’s really a worthwhile endeavor.
46:20 DB: Yeah, I think that’s invaluable for sure, is having them get that information in one place too. [unintelligible] years ago before I [unintelligible] helping other people, I had that information and that science as well to know how much you could do during any kind of treatment and any stage too. So we’re just about done. I just have one more question. Actually two. How can people get your book? Can you tell us.
46:55 DA: Well, it’s very easy with the internet. So again, here it is, it’s “Outside the Box Cancer Therapies” Dr. Stengler and Anderson. We didn’t pick this but they put an orange in a box. And I guess orange is good for you. I don’t know, whatever, they thought that was good. So anyway, that’s what it looks like there. There’s actually, it’s not close to me or I’d grab it. It’s been published in Eastern Europe, it’s also been published in Mandarin Chinese, and the covers are totally different. So if you don’t speak English, it’s coming in Spanish, it’s coming out all over, but if you do speak English, Amazon and Barnes & Noble online, both for sure have it, Barnes & Noble book stores, most of them were carrying it, and I think they still are. And then Amazon.ca, Amazon Canada has it. And then as far as other countries go if you’re in a Mandarin-speaking country, I forget the name of the publisher, but what happens is when you go to a different region a sub-publisher takes it over, so whatever your normal outlets for books are, they are probably the easiest way. So Barnes & Noble or Amazon online are what most people seem to do.
48:14 DB: [unintelligible]. We covered a lot of great topics from the root cause to the philosophy, to individual [unintelligible], if there’s anything else you wanna tell them then it’s a perfect time right now.
48:37 DA: Well, I think sticking with the idea of actual hope as opposed to false hope. If we really wind back to the very outside of my name, the first answer that I gave you, which was that we really in Western medicine, because in other parts of the world it’s easier. But in Western medicine, I would really like us to see at some point to come full circle to a truly integrative model, where we can honor what everybody has to bring to the table and honor their training and all of that stuff and in doing that actually help patients better because in the end of the day, it’s not about profession, A, B and C are all different, so maybe none are good or whatever.
49:28 DA: At the end of the day from what I have personally seen and everybody I know who does what I do has personally seen, if we work together, people get better much more quickly, they stay better longer etcetera. And this infighting is really just crazy. The hope I have, which I wouldn’t have given you any money on a bet for 20 years ago, is that what we’re seeing now, and what I’m seeing now in the educational world with doctors have more open minds and people looking, is that we will work towards that place because people are presenting information and they’re just making the Western system aware of what the other system has and bringing them together instead of apart. That’s really… That’s my goal in what I do and it’s my goal for every patient we have at our clinic, and I can see that that will maybe not fully happen, but I can see that it will be on the way to be happening, hopefully in my lifetime, which would be great.
50:30 DB: Yeah, it is, I think it definitely is slowly, very slowly.
50:33 DA: Slow, but sure.
50:36 DB: Exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I know that you’re always giving speeches and traveling and busy researching and seeing patients and managing clinic, so thank you so much.
50:48 DA: Thank you for having me, it’s fun.
50:50 DB: Yeah, [unintelligible] and I know all the viewers learned a lot about what naturopathic medicine and the core of it.
50:58 DA: Thank you very much.
51:00 DB: Okay. Thank you very much too, have a good day.
51:02 DA: Goodbye.
*We named our interview series ‘Living Well’ based on the Ancient Greek term “Eudaimonia” translating to doing and living well. The Greek Philosopher, Aristotle uses this term in relation to balance in all areas of life. At Puriya, we believe that living well encompasses much more than health but all aspects of life. This interview series was developed to provide educational resources for our customers because we believe knowledge is power.
Tags: Dr. Paul Anderson, Living Well, Puriya