28 Interview with Robert Miller How to Beat Pancreatic Cancer.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
28 Interview with Robert Miller How to Beat Pancreatic Cancer.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
He says, if you take a tree and it's growing out in the middle of the woods and that tree has moss all on one side of it, and you go out there, you can cut the moss off. You can pour chemicals on the moths and you can burn the moss off and the moss will will die. But if you don't change that tree's environment, that moss is going to grow back. And that is so true with cancer. And that's why I say you need to change your lifestyle, your environment.
Speaker2:
Welcome to the Cancer Secrets Podcast. Changing the Cancer Paradigm. Hosted by Dr. Jonathan Stegall, a medical doctor and cancer specialist practicing in Atlanta, Georgia, deeply affected by his grandmother's death from stomach cancer, as well as patients he cared for in medical training, he realized there has to be a better way to treat cancer. Dr. Stegall has a unique and innovative approach to treating cancer called integrative oncology. Combining modern medicine with alternative therapies personalized to each patient. This podcast is designed to educate, support and give you a positive voice you can trust. We invite you to join us on this journey as we seek to change the cancer paradigm.
Speaker3:
Hello and welcome back to the Cancer Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Doctor Jonathan Segall. This is season two and episode number 28. And in today's episode, I have a wonderful guest joining me. Mr. Robert Miller. Robert is a pancreatic cancer survivor and author of the book How I Beat Pancreatic Cancer and Other Bedtime Stories. He was born in St Cloud, Minnesota in 1943. He lived there for nine weeks until he was old enough to travel to Manhattan Beach, California, where he remained until he was nine years old. He lives for 53 years in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to Cape Coral, Florida, in 2006, where he currently lives. Mr. Miller is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 53. His treatments were all administered while he was living in Atlanta from 1996 until he left for Florida. He attended Georgia Military Academy as a high school student in the University of Georgia. Mr. Miller feels strongly that he is alive today as a result of his integrative cancer treatment approach. And he feels that his story is not only helpful for pancreatic cancer patients, but patients battling any type of cancer. Robert, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker1:
Doctor, it's a pleasure. I can't tell you how excited I am about sharing my story with your listeners.
Speaker3:
I think they're going to really enjoy it. And really, I'd like to start with with when you were diagnosed, tell us a little bit about how that came about and kind of where you went from there.
Speaker1:
I'll be delighted to give you a little background. I was living the good life, about £50 overweight, probably more than 50. I weight a little over £250 and a six feet one. My cholesterol was 350, 360. My triglycerides were higher than that. I thought I was in pretty good health. I ate anything I wanted and I drank a lot. I had lots of cocktails that I enjoyed and I drank them. I had gone to my regular GP for physical once a year, which was normal for me, and he thought that I needed to do something to control my cholesterol. So he put me on Lipitor, never said anything to me about diet, never told me to stop eating this or stop eating that. He said, Here's a pill. This will make you good. Patted me on the head and sent me home. Well, I. Hey, I didn't need to change anything. I had this magic pill that's going to take care of my cholesterol so I didn't have to worry about anything. Continue drinking the way I had been drinking. Continued eating the way I had been eating. And I wasn't on cholesterol on the Lipitor. But two weeks when one night my wife and I went out to dinner and I'd already had a couple cocktails, we went to a mexican restaurant and I knocked down a few beers there, had a big, great, fantastic meal. We came home and we were getting ready for bed. She was in the bathroom.
Speaker1:
I was sitting in the bedroom, actually. We had one of these very high king size beds and I prop my rear end up against the mattress and I've been over to take my socks off. And when I bent over, I had a shooting pain through my chest. It was right underneath my sternum. I thought I was being stabbed. I can only imagine it's like what it would be for a knife to go through there. And I went all the way to my back bone and I set up a meeting and I took a deep breath and it went away. The first thing that went through my mind was I was having a heart attack and I just couldn't imagine anything else other than maybe a reaction to the Lipitor. So I didn't say anything to Diane because I didn't want her to get worried and not go to sleep. So I went into the bathroom, got ready, came to bed, and the next morning when I was relieving myself in the bathroom, my urine had turned to a bright orange and this was overnight. And I looked at that and I said to myself, There's something serious going on here. Either I got kidney problems or I've got a liver problem, and I could only think about the alcohol that I've been consuming. So I went to my doctor four days later, as soon as I could get in there. And he looked at me and I was already starting to jaundice.
Speaker1:
My eyes were turning yellow and my skin was yellow. And he immediately asked me if I had access to, well, water. And of course, we had a place in the North Georgia mountains. We'd go up there every weekend and everything up there was on, well, water. And then he asked me, Do you eat raw fish? Of course I love sushi. And he said, Well, I think you got hepatitis C. So he did a test for hepatitis C, didn't get the results back to a week later. And then he went and convinced because it came back negative. And by then I was really you couldn't see the whites of my eyes. And he did one more test and then another week went by and at that point it came back negative. So he said, I need to send you to a specialist. Let's see what's. Going on inside your belly there. And so he sent me to a internist. They did an endoscope. They ran the tube in my stomach up into my the bile duct. And they couldn't get up in there because it was swollen shut. They put me into a hospital in two days, three days of X-rays and more tests. Then I was introduced to two new doctors. One was a surgeon and the other one was an oncologist. And they came into the room and announced to me that I had pancreatic cancer. I that I had never really been sick and I was not that familiar with cancer, other than the fact that it was the big C word, didn't know much about the different types and things of that nature and had no idea how severe pancreatic cancer was.
Speaker1:
So they immediately the surgeon said he wanted to do a Whipple procedure and then they were going to treat me with chemo and radiation after that. And he said this was pretty nasty stuff and we're going to jump in with both feet and see how what we can do and hope for a positive outcome. There was no talk of a cure at that point, and I asked the doctor, I said, well, apparently this is pretty serious stuff. What about this operation? What is the survival rate? And of course, he immediately answered, the mortality rate is 80%. I never heard mortality. All I heard was 80%. And I'm thinking this is a survival rate. Hey, no problem. Let's go ahead and do the surgery. Let's get it done. So anyway, they scheduled me for the surgery. A lot more tests and. And so forth and. After the surgery and a month of recuperating. Then I started to came with the radiation. During that 30 days, I read everything I could get my hands on pertaining to pancreatic cancer. Nothing was encouraging. 22 years ago. It was horrible. Still is. But they've made some headway. But nothing like it was back then. It was. The percentage of survival was horrible.
Speaker3:
So what kind of emotions were kind of going through your head at this point? I mean, people talk about the sort of all the emotions that flood in when they hear those three words, you have cancer. And then certainly from that point, until when you started researching, I mean, were you were you scared? Were you angry? I mean, depressed?
Speaker1:
I was terribly angry. I didn't know that much about it, but I just. Why is this happening to me? I mean, I've got I've got the good life. I mean, this is great. Now I'm going to all of a sudden be faced with not being able to continue and raise my two boys and be with my wife. And, and and so a lot of things went through my mind, but I guess I was more angry than anything because the more I read the matter, I got and it just really, really upset me because there wasn't a whole lot of encouragement. And the one book I read that was encouraging was the one that we spoke about earlier from Dr. Quillin beating cancer with nutrition. Once I read that. I decided this guy's got, got, got. I got a plan here, and this is something I can do and I'm going to jump on board and get involved. So during that 30 days, I had designed or come up with a program that I would be doing the rest of my life, and it included supplementation and completely changing my lifestyle. I gave up alcohol and had not had a drink in 22 years. I gave up all sorts of foods that I really enjoyed and I liked having eaten anything from any meat from an animal with a hoof. And it's now 22 years later, they're starting to talk about how bad red meat is for you. And of course, back then there was no discussion about red meat. It was protein. It was great. Eat all you want. Please stop. Don't eat it. It's not good for you.
Speaker3:
And I'm guessing you didn't get a whole lot of support from your conventional oncology treatment team in terms of nutrition advice?
Speaker1:
Well, none. We went in to the surgeon and Diane had a tablet and pen in hand and we sat down and discussed the future and what I should do as far as what I should eat and how I should conduct my life as far as foods and things like that. And he said it doesn't make any difference, you know, eat what you want. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, there's one or two things here. He's either terribly ignorant as far as nutrition is concerned or he knows I'm going to die. And why create a problem for me? Let me enjoy the last bit of time I have and eat whatever I want. So I think it may have been a combination of the two, but I told him, I told my oncologist, I told the radiologist, I said, I'm changing my diet. I'm going on a plant based diet and I am taking supplements. And I gave him a list of the supplements I was taking. And of course, you know, pat me on the head and say, okay, fine, Bob, that's good. It's not going to make any difference. Do whatever you want. And I would always leave, but I just felt that I had something that I was doing that was going to help them in their efforts. So I kind of felt like I got in the game and I was part of the team. I wasn't just the patient. I was doing stuff that would help improve my immune system, that could help me fight and stay in there and not let this stuff go crazy and take over. So here I am.
Speaker3:
Well, you bring up a great point. I think a lot of patients who are sort of stuck in that, you know, the standard of care, conventional cancer treatment system, they feel like they're on the sidelines and they feel like they're not enough of a participant and they want to get involved more, obviously, because this is potentially life or death and they want to do as much as they can and they don't feel like they're really allowed to do that sort of in the traditional system. And I think you're just a great example of someone who looked at this from a very practical standpoint and said, okay, I'm going to trust my doctors, but I'm also going to do all that I can do within my control. And so I think you're just a wonderful example of that.
Speaker1:
Well, thank you. And it's proved to be successful. You know, your doctors are not bad people. They're trying to help you and do everything they can to get you through this. But you need to read as much as you can. You need to get your hands on as much information and find out everything you can about your specific type of cancer. Ask the doctor questions. You know, don't be afraid to say, Well, I'm going to take this supplement. Will this interfere with what I'm doing? Will it help strengthen my immune system? What do you know about it? And if they can't answer, you know, don't hold it against them. Just continue reading and find out more that you can find out about it. And I just feel that, unfortunately, the medical community today, there's just not enough information from the doctor's perspective as to what nutrition will do to help you.
Speaker3:
Right. Very well said. I mean, you know, it's not I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there about how well, they just want you to be sick and they know the nutrition works and they're not going to tell you about it. And I don't feel that way at all. No, you don't either. It's not a a lack of of of interest in it. It's a lack of knowledge. And it's just not part of the training. And I think, you know, again, you took an integrative approach, which is which is what I preach every single episode of this podcast. But, you know, you didn't the temptation for some people is to just reject conventional therapy altogether and say, you know what, I don't like it. I'm not doing surgery, I'm not doing chemotherapy. I'm just going to change my diet. And and I know that's not enough.
Speaker1:
And you didn't that's that's silly. You know, if they understand how cancer works, they're not going to do that. They're going to do everything they can to defeat it. And there are a lot of things that that that are out there that you can do combined with other things. So it's not necessarily I'm just going to do this because it's easier. It's not I'm not going to get sick. Listen, chemotherapy is not it's not easy. And you know that from your perspective, people have different reactions to it. Eating is hard to do when you're on chemo and it's and it's difficult. Everything tastes like metal. Nothing has a good taste. It's hard to find things that you can eat or even enjoy swallowing you. Very, very difficult to swallow, especially when it's whole food or something of that nature. So, you know, I forced myself I knew I had to get nutrition in my body after reading about what nutrition was and what it did for you. And so I made myself eat whether I liked it or not. I forced myself to ingest food and it was plants, it was fruits, vegetables, all everything. And I didn't eat any meat. I just stayed away from it. It just didn't have any any place in my program, so to speak. And, you know, they were amazed at how I responded.
Speaker3:
So you did say animal protein didn't drink any more alcohol. I'm guessing you stayed away from processed foods. You know, the cookies and crackers and chips.
Speaker1:
And all that. Yeah, all that stuff. Taboo. It's just, you know, and it's easy to do. It's hard to change your lifestyle, but once you do, it's easy to stick with it.
Speaker3:
So you really just dove right in. I mean, some people talk about, well, I'm going to make some gradual changes, but you just kind of just you didn't stick your toe in the water. You dove in headfirst, it sounds like.
Speaker1:
Absolutely. I felt, you know, look. I had I didn't have an option of making a whole bunch of different choices. I figured this was the best one. So in order to. Make a result that I wanted, an outcome that I was looking for. I figured, listen, I've convinced myself that a plant based diet is the way to go. I'm either going to do it or I'm not going to do it. It's just like, I know you're not a little bit pregnant. You either are or you aren't, you know? So the whole idea was, I'm going to do this and do it 100%. And that's what I did and still do.
Speaker3:
And in my experience, the patients who who just dive right in like that are the ones that tend to do better. The ones that say, well, maybe going to cut these few foods out and maybe add this in and you turn around six months later, a year later, and they still haven't all the way embraced, you know, the strategy. And I think they're really doing themselves a disservice.
Speaker1:
Well, I do, too. And several and I address it in the book, The Irish Doctor. I can't think of what his name is right now, but he had read the Colin Campbell's China study. And Dr..
Speaker3:
Kelly.
Speaker1:
Dr. Kelly and his position was he was flabbergasted that the medical community didn't jump all over this particular book that Campbell had written. And Campbell is a vegan. He is down on oil, he's down on all sorts of stuff. And it makes a lot of sense what he what he proposes. But this Dr. Kelly, when he read the book, he was flabbergasted. And he he had several cancer patients. And he suggested to the cancer patients, not just pancreatic, but all sorts of cancer that he was dealing with, that they try this, the ones that switched and started a plant based diet. Survived over a long period of time, and a lot of them are still surviving today. The ones that he talked about and talked to that tried it for a month or two and then went back to their old diets. They died. And this is what I was saying earlier, is that this book is not just for pancreatic cancer patients, it's for all cancer patients because it will affect how your body responds to your cancer. What I can't understand is people will go in and they'll be treated and the tumors will disappear, whether it's through surgery or chemo or radiation or combination. And then the doctors pronounced them cancer free. You're in remission, but remission doesn't mean the cancer is gone. It just means your tumors are no longer there. And if you don't change what you were doing before, you're encouraging the cancer to come back. So, you know, it just people just seem to need to realize that there's a lot more to nutrition than just. Eating. It's a lot more than just sitting down and eating something that you like. You get full and you know you're great and everybody's happy and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot more to it.
Speaker3:
Absolutely. So so you dove in headfirst on on the nutrition. Did you find that you were able to find foods on your new plant based nutrition plan that you enjoyed and that filled you up? I know a lot of people maybe listening are concerned that switching to a plant based diet is going to result in in dietary boredom or being hungrier all the time. How did you feel about all that?
Speaker1:
I felt great. I mean, it was it was tough to begin with because I didn't know what I was doing. And like I said, you want to read everything you get your hands on. And I. I bought a lot of books on cooking, on plant based diets and preparation for preparing meals and stuff. I like to cook, so it was fun for me and I kind of dragged my wife along and she's she's a plant based diet now as well. But we we just it's an adventure and there's always something new coming out and a lot more fun to experiment with. So there's so much variety. And if you if you go to a restaurant and you tell the the waiter or waitress server, whatever you're dealing with, you're a vegetarian, they'll prepare the meal for you. For a vegetarian, they're not. In fact, a lot of the chefs or cooks that I've talked to and some of the just the regular chain restaurants, they love the opportunity to do stuff that's different from what they do day in and day out. And they love the opportunity to do something that's special, like just requesting a vegetarian meal. They'll do it. And you don't have to sit around and and watch other people eat and drink water while they're doing it. You can enjoy the dinner, too.
Speaker3:
Well, that's what I try to tell my patients as well as in our listeners of our podcast. Also, just it's a very flexible diet. I mean, we're talking about eating plants, fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains. It's there are a lot of foods out there that fit that description. And you really don't have to count calories or carbohydrates or any of that kind of stuff. I mean, it's it's it kind of takes care of itself if you're eating as close to the earth as possible. And I think for a lot of people, that that removes a lot of the stress associated with a new diet plan.
Speaker1:
Well, you know, I read about I'm reading all the time and all these new diets and all this new stuff that they keep throwing out. And I find that my my whole diet has been I'm on a high carbohydrate diet. I eat whole grains, nuts and beans and, you know, very little not well, I eat fruits and vegetables. I mean, most of my dinners are salads. And that's how I get through the day. I only eat two meals a day and breakfast is normally bowl of oatmeal with walnuts and blueberries and a little bit of honey. And that holds me most of the day afternoon. It will be a small snack, probably an apple, orange or something. Banana. I might have a shake if I'm really hungry. Smoothie. And then for dinner it's a salad and that's that's pretty much my unless we go out and then if we go out I'll ask them to prepare something special for me, if they will. And they do.
Speaker3:
Excellent. So so I know you mentioned when you were diagnosed, you were you were overweight. So with your new dietary plan, you lost some weight.
Speaker1:
I'm guessing I'm down to £185 and I'm 61. I'm 75 years old. The. My cholesterol as combined, I think is 125 or 130, and that's quite a drop from 350. And it's just because of no meat, no no animal proteins. And the the doctors. I just had a checkup. I got my results about two weeks ago, and he just says, you're fine. He says, you know, you're just chugging along. Keep it up. But it's, it's there's there's so many videos that I reference in my book, and I also have several books that I've recommended. Yours, of course, being one. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to say more about it, but it just came to my, my, my attention right after I had finished writing my book. So but and it's an excellent book. I highly recommend your book to anybody, but the thing that I find that guided me in from the very beginning was one thing that Dr. Cohen said, and it made all the sense in the world to me, for anybody that's dealing with cancer, and I'm going to paraphrase what he had written.
Speaker1:
He says, If you take a tree and it's growing out in the middle of the woods and that tree has moss all on one side of it, and you go out there, you can cut the moss off. You can pour chemicals on the moths and you can burn the moths off and the moths will will die. But if you don't change that tree's environment, that moss is going to grow back. And that is so true with cancer. And that's why I say you need to change your lifestyle, your environment. And stress is another big issue. And when you ask me, how did I feel about it? I got mad. I didn't get stressed out. I just got upset. The fact that I had had had let myself get in a position to be a victim of this terrible cancer. And the more I think about it, had I made changes earlier in my life and done different things, if I didn't drink all the time, if I was eating more plant based foods, I probably never would have experienced pancreatic cancer.
Speaker3:
Right? Yeah, I agree. And just to go back to when you were diagnosed, I mean, I'm assuming the numbers when you were diagnosed are pretty similar to today, if not worse, but know currently pancreatic cancer, five year survival, it's about 2%, maybe 3%. Very low. And so, you know, we're we're faced with similar statistics at the time. And so that's that's what kind of motivated you and really made you angry to use that anger to fuel your your your protocol. But but just to kind of go back to to everything. So you did you did surgery, you did radiation, chemotherapy. And then since then, obviously changed your diet and took some supplements. But since then, you've been monitored with with regular scans and labs and so so your cancer free now, right?
Speaker1:
Well, yes, I am physically cancer free.
Speaker3:
No evidence of disease in terms of your scans.
Speaker1:
I'm not I am not in remission. I am cancer free.
Speaker3:
Yeah. So and I wanted to clarify that because, you know, I tell patients a lot of times, you know, view cancer is a lifelong diagnosis. Yes. Our goal is to get it to where you're not seeing any any cancer on your your scans and your labs are normal and all that good stuff. But because we know that there can certainly be little micro metastases, too small to show up on a scan and there can be cancer DNA in your bloodstream. We need to stay on top of things. And of course, that's where a good nutrition and supplementation regimen really comes into play. And I know that's what you're doing.
Speaker1:
Well, you know, you have built in mechanisms in your body to to kill or defeat cancer. I mean, cancer is everybody has cancer. It's an ongoing part of life. We all have renegade cells. And I had a great description of cancer the other day. And it's it's not cells that are just dividing crazy. They just continue. They don't die. Cancer cells just do not die. And they continue. And of course, I know you're probably familiar with Henrietta Lacks and the woman who I guess it's hh1, l one or something, the cancer cells that they remove from her, from ovarian cancer back in the thirties, they're still alive. They kept they've kept them alive all this time. And, you know, that's just a great example of how cancer does not go away. And we continuously have cancer developing in our bodies, but we have our own immune system, which is tuned in to getting rid of these cells. And if we start compromising our immune system with alcohol, with foods that cause inflammation and things that requires the services of the immune system and weakens it, it's just not a good practice. And that's why plant based foods and non no alcohol is is good for you. And of course, supplementation, you know, that kind of goes hand in hand with plant based foods because unfortunately a lot of the nutrition that we're expecting to get is either reduced and is not like it used to be in some of the foods that we're eating.
Speaker3:
That toxic world out there.
Speaker1:
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
Speaker3:
Some patients often ask me, why did I get cancer? You know, how could I? You know? It ranges from people who maybe who weren't that healthy to begin with and didn't eat well to people who feel like they were doing pretty well in terms of of a lifestyle. And they say, how did I get cancer? And I always say, well, a lot of reasons. But the main reason is that world out there. You know, unfortunately, our food supply is not what it used to be. The air quality is not what it used to be. We're more stressed than ever, and it actually changes the function of our healthy cells where they mutate. So what we can do a lot on our own, too.
Speaker1:
Yeah, I think I think everybody has a responsibility and, you know, to to create better health for themselves. And again, the best way to do that is read, read as much as you can, get your hands on everything you can and find out all there is to know about good nutrition of plant based diets. And it's just and there's so many books out there that are so well written by very qualified individuals. And, you know, you've got to kind of weed your way through all the the mystic stuff that's hanging around that people are promoting. And you'd have to be careful. But you can tell when you read something that is that it is written by somebody that knows what they're talking about and they've been there and experienced it and have a background in it. And again, there's so much information out there now and it's just incredible that people are not making themselves aware of it.
Speaker3:
Right. Right. And that's a real advantage today versus probably when you were doing a lot of your research. I mean, there's just so much more information out there now on the Internet and other places that your patients have access to a lot more information, which I think is good. But then on the flip side, like you said, it's not all good information. And and I think nutrition is a great example of that. There are so many different cancer diets and protocols and a lot of patients that come to my office for the first time are are truly overwhelmed because they don't know who to listen to or what to believe. It seems to conflict and they've been drinking from a fire hydrant, so to speak, and they're not sure if they're getting all that they need to. And I think really, you know, I tell them, you know, a plant based diet, it has the most research for it. I mean, yes, you're going to read about ketogenic diet and some of these other diets ranging from from from basic to extremely complex. But but when you get down to it, I mean, a plant based diet has a load of research behind it. And just in my patients, I've seen that work the best. And I think your story certainly reinforces that. So so if people listening who are on the fence, you know, I dive into the plant based diet and give it a go. I mean, it's the most research based out there.
Speaker1:
I agree. I agree. And hopefully people will pay attention and just not pass this off as a bunch of Yahoo! And that it's crazy stuff. It isn't. It's there's too much scientific evidence to back it up. And again, Colin Campbell, I mean, his book I'm sure you've read the China study and he he he I don't know if you know who Dr. Campbell is, but. Oh, you do. Okay. He's he's his qualifications are incredible. But he did a study in it was done in England, I mean, India to begin with. And he has been promoting protein, mostly animal protein his entire life, doing it for the government. He was head of nutrition for Cornell University and he said on most of these government boards that investigated these different research projects and handed them out and stuff like that, he is so totally against animal protein and he in his book, he basically proves that animal protein feeds cancer. And the one experiment where he what he did was duplicate what they did in India case in which I'm sure most people I hope they know what that is. That's protein from milk and and they use that in whey products for bodybuilders and stuff like that and which I just don't understand. But of course they don't know what it does. But the way is, is, is made from casein and the case is animal is basically the protein that's in milk. And he fed animal rats 20% diet of casein and they all developed liver cancer over a specific amount of time. And that was the duplication of the India study. He went one step further and he reduced the animal protein or the case in their diet to 5% and all the liver tumors disappeared.
Speaker3:
Powerful stuff. I love that study. I read the China study as well, and it made a big impact on me. And as you said, Dr. Campbell is just brilliant researcher and and still works with Cornell today. They have a they named their Center for Nutrition Studies after Dr. Campbell and and I actually did the plant based nutrition certification through them. So I'm very familiar with his work and agree with you. I mean, that study is pretty, pretty amazing. And it only showed that that the animal protein can promote cancer formation, but that it also stimulates cancer to continue to grow and divide in that various points in that process. If you go to a plant based diet where you're you're basically eliminating the casein or having very little, you reverse all that. So it's fast.
Speaker1:
Or the body steps in and is able to offset what's going on, which is going back to good nutrition.
Speaker3:
Right. And that really mirrors what Dr. Kelly, the Irish doctor, saw in his general practice. Like like you said, I mean, he noticed the patients who followed a plant based diet had really good outcomes with their cancer, even people with some really, really bad prognoses. And that people, the patients of his who didn't do that didn't do as well. And I've really seen that in my practice too.
Speaker1:
Well, it's I just hope people that are listening will pay attention and certainly read about all this and then make the proper decision to go forward with it for their own benefit and their family and their loved ones, of course.
Speaker3:
And I want our listeners to just draw a lot of of hope and inspiration from your story. I mean, 22 years ago, I diagnosed with pancreatic cancer with a horrible prognosis. And not only are you still alive today, but you have no evidence of cancer in your body. And and talk about your CA 99 and the of course, the. Oh, yeah.
Speaker1:
When I when I left Atlanta, all my doctors and testing was being done there. When I retired and came here to Cape Coral, I. Found another oncologist and all the information was transferred to him. I guess I saw him for about six years, but he would always do the C 19 test, which is for tumor markers. And it's a very good test, especially for pancreatic cancer. And mine were always pretty low. And so one one day and I was in the office getting the results for the 19 test, and he came in and he just you know, he looked at me, he says, you know, we had to run this test twice. And I said, Why? Because I was concerned. You know, he says, What's the first time we've ever had one come back? Zero, which, you know, is, I guess is unheard of or whatever. Anyway, he proceeded to fire me after they told me not to come back. He said I didn't need to be there. He said I was wasting his time, my time and insurance money.
Speaker3:
So you've graduated?
Speaker1:
Yeah. He said you can leave. You're dismissed.
Speaker3:
That's awesome. I just love your story. You know, I read your book with such fascination when I read it and and I encourage everyone to get a copy and read it. It's a very easy read. You're so relatable. You you use humor as well in a really positive way. And I think any of our listeners who read your book are going to just find it as a wonderful use of their time. How can they get a copy? What's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker1:
Well, it's in a paperback on Amazon and it's on Kindle on Amazon. So you just need to go to Amazon and type in the search bar. How I beat pancreatic cancer and both of them will pop up.
Speaker3:
Excellent. And I know it's gotten a lot of great reviews by other people who have read it, but but I wholeheartedly endorse it. I again, I just think it's a wonderful read and it breaks it down in a really clear way. I think for people who maybe are trying to sort of navigate all the different theories and books out there, it's just a really you broke it down in a really great way. So thank you for that.
Speaker1:
Well, thank you. I appreciate the endorsement and I appreciate your your confidence in the recommendation.
Speaker3:
Absolutely. Was there anything else you'd like to share with our with our audience before we wrap up?
Speaker1:
Well, I don't I don't know that I can. I think we've covered all the bases. It's just that if you get a diagnosis that you've got cancer, regardless of what kind of it is, it's not the end of the world. You know, there are a lot of things that you can do. There's some very good medicine out there. There's some very good doctors out there. And you can get in the game and start fighting and helping your doctors defeat this. So don't give up. It's just don't give up. There's always hope.
Speaker3:
Well, Robert, thank you so much. It's been an honor to have you on the show today.
Speaker1:
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and I hope some people pay attention.
Speaker3:
Well, it's been a wonderful episode. And like I said, I think anyone who's listening to this is has to feel inspired and encouraged by your by your story and hopefully has a lot more hope now that even with the the diagnosis you got, that you beat it and you're thriving and you're just doing great. So. So I encourage people to certainly share this episode. If you're listening, please share this this episode with your family and friends. You can go to Cancer Secrets. Click on the podcast tab and on that page you can listen to this episode and all other episodes we've recorded, and you can even click a little tab to leave a voicemail and ask us a question. And we're happy to answer questions on the air as well. So I want to remind everyone to do that. And certainly if you're enjoying this podcast, please leave us a good review on iTunes. We we thrive on that and we're excited to just continue to grow our listenership every week. It's been really an honor to reach people in over 70 countries throughout the world already, and we look forward to to reach in more. So, Robert, thank you again for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker1:
Doctor. It's a pleasure. Thank you ever so much.
Speaker3:
All right. Keep up the great work I do.
Speaker1:
I plan on it.
Speaker3:
You too. All right. Bye bye.
Speaker1:
Bye.
Speaker2:
Thank you for listening to the Cancer Secrets podcast. If you were encouraged by this show, please share it with a loved one or friend. Help support the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. The more reviews, the more friends like you can find the show. Finally, to learn more, visit us online at Doctor Stay Google.com. The Cancer Secrets Podcast. Changing the Cancer Paradigm.
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