4 The Stegall Protocol – Pillars of Cancer Care.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
4 The Stegall Protocol – Pillars of Cancer Care.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Welcome to the Cancer Secrets podcast. Changing the Cancer Paradigm. Hosted by Dr. Jonathan Steagall, 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.
Speaker2:
Welcome to the Cancer Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Segall. This is episode number four. If you're new to the show, go back and listen to my introductory episode to learn more about me and my vision for this podcast. In today's episode, I'm going to introduce the Stegall Protocol and share my four pillars of cancer care in detail. I want to share how I specifically treat cancer, what my treatment process includes, and why I use a personalized approach. We invite you to grab a family member or a friend and listen in together. Today's show is going to be foundational to this podcast and reveal the basics behind my unique and innovative approach to treating cancer. My philosophy for cancer treatment, known as the de Gaulle Protocol, is based on my desire to greatly improve the way we treat cancer. Everyone is familiar with side effects from conventional treatment short term and long term. Some of the short term effects we've all seen before in family and friends who have been undergoing cancer treatment, or perhaps even that you've experienced yourself. If you're a cancer patient, include things like fatigue, headaches, vision changes, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, constipation. The list goes on and on. The long term effects are potentially even more significant. Things like neuropathy, which is also known as nerve pain. Fatigue and digestive issues that simply won't go away. And, of course, all of the long term toxicities we associate with chemotherapy, which include risk of cancer, the same things can be seen as a result of radiation treatment as well.
Speaker2:
The foundation of my pillars of cancer treatment stem from my belief that cancer treatment should be personalised to each patient. I tell patients every day, your cancer is as unique as your fingerprint. You've heard the saying, the devil's in the details. And that is certainly true with cancer. Everything about your life potentially matters. I go all the way back to birth when I take a patient history. I ask patients, What were you told about your birth? Was it straightforward? Was it traumatic? We can even go back farther than that. How healthy was your mom? Did you have any issues in utero before you were born? What kinds of things might you have been exposed to in the womb? What kinds of medications was your mom taking? Was she a smoker? Was she a drug user? What kind of home was she living in when she was pregnant with you? What kind of stressors did she have? We know that these environmental exposures matter a lot. Once you were born, what kind of environment were you living in? What was your childhood home like? Was there mold? Were there other potential toxins in your home? What kind of ailments and illnesses did you have as a child? Did you tend to be sick or were you fairly well? Were allergies a significant component of your health or not as you grew into a teenager? Were you healthy? How about as a young adult? What medications have you taken throughout your life? In addition.
Speaker2:
What is your nutrition like? What kind of foods are you eating? What kind of allergies do you have to medications or the environment? What are your stressors like? Are you consciously stressed out emotionally about certain things? Your job, your family, your children, your relationships. If you're a cancer patient, your cancer diagnosis was probably a huge stressor. And my guess is that the decisions related to your treatment are probably a significant stressor as well in your quest to find the best treatment for yourself. You've probably been under a huge deal of stress while you've done your research. We see this, especially when we're consulting Dr. Google online. By the time you've read several different websites or consulted several different research studies, you're already overwhelmed. You want to do the right thing and you realize you can't do it all. It's very confusing sometimes and very conflicting when you read different pieces of information. As an integrative oncologist, I'm thinking about all of these details. When the patient walks in the door. So as you can see, a very in-depth health and medical history is imperative. But we need more than just that. We need to know what makes each person tick, not just on an emotional level or in terms of a health history questionnaire, but also on a physiological and biochemical level. This is where advanced lab testing comes into play.
Speaker2:
Testing to look at genetics and other important factors need to be done at baseline. Now we're going to talk about some of this advanced lab testing in a future episode. So please be sure to check that out. The next thing we need to think about is what is cancer? Now we know that healthy cells, when they're exposed to enough stress, are going to eventually need to do something to remedy that problem. The first option, and probably the best, is when those cells undergo what is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. This is a normal reaction when a cell becomes more worn down than it should be and it's not really able to do its job anymore. The alternative to that is that the cell actually mutates. It actually changes the genetic material so that it changes form into a type of cell that can survive better. This is known as cancer. Cancer is simply the mutation of normal, healthy cells which have gradually become degraded and or worn out, and they can't do their job as well. The mutation allows these cells to survive, and along with that mutation, we see the behaviors that we associate with cancer, such as very rapid growth and multiplication and invasion of other structures. Eventually, these cancer cells are going to get together and they're going to form a tumor. And we know that these tumors can form in virtually any location in the body. The tendency, however, is to get tunnel vision and view cancer as merely a diseased organ.
Speaker2:
For example, if the patient has breast cancer, the tendency is to view the breast itself as the problem. However, if we go back to our weed in a garden analogy where cancer is a weed and the rest of the garden is the body or the soil, the cancer is not just a problem of the breast. It's a problem with the whole garden. We have to treat. Cancer is not only a problem with weeds, but a problem with the soil itself, which allowed those weeds to grow in the first place. In the same way, if cancer is viewed as merely a problem with an organ, we're neglecting the fact that cancer is a systemic disease. Cancer must be treated not only while being aware of the tumor location, but also being aware of the body as a whole system. This holistic view of cancer is one of the foundational aspects of the single protocol in my approach to cancer. With that in mind, here are the four pillars of the STEGALL protocol. Pillar number one is to target cancer cells. Now we know if we're going to effectively treat cancer, we must target cancer cells. We have many tools in our arsenal that do that. For example, chemotherapy definitely targets cancer cells. Intravenous vitamin C targets cancer cells. And these are just a few of the examples of how we target cancer. However, we must be careful that we're not harming the body while we do that.
Speaker2:
Now full dose chemotherapy, also called maximum tolerated dose chemotherapy is the form that most of us are familiar with. This is chemotherapy, which is dosed based on a patient's height and weight, and then the dose of chemotherapy is given based on that, typically once every week or two or perhaps three. The chemotherapy cannot possibly be given more often than this because it's so toxic. If it were given more often than this, the patient would have severe, if not fatal, side effects. Now, the goal in conventional oncology is to give this high dose of chemotherapy as often as possible. And even then, as we know, there are still problems. I give chemotherapy in my office in a much different way. We call it fractionated chemotherapy. This means we give smaller doses on the order of 10 to 20% of that full dose used in conventional oncology. And we give it more often. And this has several advantages, the first of which is that we just don't see the same side effects when we give chemo this way. It's very rare for a patient to get nausea and vomiting, diarrhea. We don't typically see the immune system depression when we do it this way. By giving this dosing more often, we also reduce the potential for what we call resistance. And resistance is simply the mutation of the surviving cancer cells, allowing them to not be as susceptible to future treatments.
Speaker2:
We see this classically with full dose chemotherapy. The first dose or two is going to wipe out a number of cancer cells. The problem is the surviving cancer cells that remain are usually going to be resistant to that treatment by the time we're able to give it again. This creates a very troubling situation where we have a highly resistant, highly aggressive population of cancer cells that simply won't respond to treatment. How many patients have you known about or how many people have you known personally that underwent conventional cancer treatment? It seemed to be going well. Perhaps they were even told they're in remission or cancer free, and then the cancer comes roaring back months or years later. Typically, that cancer is going to be far more aggressive and highly resistant to treatments compared to the initial cancer treatment journey. Now, when we give lower doses of chemotherapy, we're largely combating this problem. We're gradually chipping away at the cancer itself while making the treatments much more tolerable and less toxic, and also doing our best to prevent resistance. Finally giving chemotherapy in this way also helps us reduce angiogenesis. Angiogenesis, we know, is the formation of blood vessels which are designed to feed cancer. We can see dramatic examples of angiogenesis in late stage cancers where patients have basically started to waste away. We we say that they sometimes appear to just be skin and bones. This is because angiogenesis has occurred and the cancer itself has such an impressive supply of arteries and veins that it's actually stealing resources from the rest of the body.
Speaker2:
Nutrients that are not only ingested but also present in muscle and fat are used by cancer to continue to grow. This leaves the patient with few reserves, and this usually means that death is pretty imminent. So getting back to our pillars and pillar number one, we're targeting cancer cells. We do that in a specific and precise way as possible so that we don't harm the body's healthy cells. Pillar number two is to stimulate the immune system. This is very important because not only do we not want to harm the immune system with cancer treatments, but we also want to make sure that we're building up the immune system as much as possible. Some people believe that cancer is actually an immune system problem or an immune system deficit. I don't exactly agree with that because the body is trained to only fight foreign invaders. We can classically look at different viruses and bacteria that when they enter the body, the immune system immediately recognizes them as foreign and attacks them as it should. However, cancer doesn't appear as foreign to the body. This is not because the immune system is weak. It's because cancer is derived from normal cells. If cancer is made from previously healthy cells, it's going to look just like a part of the body that's supposed to be there. So we can stimulate the immune system all we want to.
Speaker2:
But we don't do it because we're trying to kill cancer better. We do it because we want to make sure that the body has as few distractions as possible when fighting cancer. A robust immune system is going to properly fight viruses, bacteria, fungus, allergies. When the body is able to do this efficiently, it has more energy reserves available to fight cancer. We want as many. Attributes in our favor is possible when we're fighting cancer. So similarly, the immune system, but not overstimulating, it is key. Now, this brings up an important point. We've all seen commercials on TV lately about immunotherapy. Immunotherapy is designed to harness the body's immune system to fight cancer. And it does this by tagging cancer cells so that the immune system now views them as foreign. It's a wonderful idea and it makes a lot of sense on paper. The problem is these drugs can frequently cause the immune system to become overactive, resulting in the body actually attacking itself. This is known as autoimmune disease. And I've seen it many times with patients of mine who have come to me from other practices who have been receiving immunotherapy. Now, this is not to say that immunotherapy is not effective, because it can be. But the point is we have to be very, very careful about how we stimulate the immune system, because there's a very delicate balance. We don't want it under stimulated, but we also don't want it overstimulated.
Speaker2:
So when we optimize the immune system and we do this through various treatments, some of which are intravenous and others are related to nutrition and supplementation. When we stimulate the immune system in this way, we know we're going to have optimal conditions inside the body. Pillar number three is to protect the body's healthy cells. And I touched on this a little bit earlier in my discussion of chemotherapy. We want to make sure that all of the treatments we provide are as targeted as possible to fight cancer. However, the body is usually going to need additional support. We look at the body as a collection of systems. We can think about the digestive system. We know that gut health is very important. We want to have the appropriate number of healthy bacteria in the gut so that digestion is working properly. We want to make sure the immune system is working properly, as we talked about in pillar number two. We want to make sure that the endocrine system, the hormones are working properly. The nervous system must be functioning optimally in order to best support our fight against cancer. All of these systems of the body matter. And when you go to your conventional oncologist, they're probably not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about these. But really, the body works as a collection of parts. All of these parts have to do. What they are supposed to do for the body to work properly.
Speaker2:
So protecting the body's healthy cells is very important. This is where we get into nutrition. Nutrition is not as much about killing cancer cells as it is enhancing the internal environment so that cancer cannot grow and thrive as well. It's about nourishing that soil like we talked about earlier, to make that environment for weeds a lot less hospitable. Pillar number four and perhaps the most important is about nourishing the soul. When you walk down the hall of my office, when you come in from the waiting room on the wall, it says, Nourish the soul. And as you walk down the treatment area of my office, we have pictures and those pictures are vignettes, and they discuss different ways we need to nourish ourselves. And those are things like family and friends, pets, music, art, laughter. We have a story that we tell as you walk down the hall. And I think this is very important because it's easy to get caught up in. The science and the treatments and the prognosis and all of these factors that are very important with cancer treatment. But why don't we use that process to truly nourish our souls? How are we using this process, which is admittedly very stressful because it's life and death, but how are we using this process to grow as people? If you're going through cancer right now, how can you use this journey as an opportunity for growth? Yes, you have to focus your energy and your mental and emotional strength on fighting cancer.
Speaker2:
It's a very important. But in the process, how are you able to grow as a person? Can you use it as an opportunity to strengthen your relationships? How is your relationship with your family, with your friends? What kind of support system do you have? Hopefully it's a good, strong one, but maybe you have some relationships in your life that you want to strengthen. Perhaps you have some broken relationships that you want to try to mend. What are your spiritual beliefs like? As a Christian, I want my patients to have a very strong prayer life. Can you use this journey as an opportunity to grow closer to God? How else can you nourish your soul? We talk about nourishment with food. We talk about taking supplements. But nourish your soul with good thoughts. What are you hearing in your head? What are you telling yourself every day through your thoughts? More importantly. What are the words that you're using? Are you speaking positive affirmations over yourself? Are you saying good things over your life and over your body? I spend a lot of time working with my patients on what we refer to broadly as Mind-Body Medicine. We know that our thoughts and our words actually affect our physiology and our biochemistry. And we have very good studies that back this up. So I gave my patients a list of affirmations that I instruct them to say aloud at least twice daily.
Speaker2:
You can do it as often as you like. You can do it on the hour, every hour if you want to. But these affirmations need to be strong, bold statements. I am strong. I am healthy. I am healed, I am cancer free, I sleep well, etc.. And I give these affirmations as a list to my patients, which you can easily come up with your own. Maybe there are some Bible verses that you really like that you want to have in front of you and speak over yourself. But I encourage you, if you're going through cancer, to really work on this part of it, because the more you say something and meditate on it and hear it in your mind. The more your body is going to line up with that, it has no choice. So I encourage you to really spend some time on this because it's extremely important. I've seen patients who were determined to get well and believe that they're going to get well and spoke. Over themselves accordingly and encourage their support system to do the same. And these patients tend to do much better than those who are very negative in pessimistic about their case. Now, this is hard. I mean, we refer to this as the battlefield of the mind. And it's it's a very tough battle. Because we can put on a happy face. But sometimes when we're by ourselves, it's easy to get down and be negative and feel sorry for ourselves.
Speaker2:
Allow yourself some time and some room, especially if you've recently been diagnosed. To have a few pity parties for yourself. It's understandable and it's okay to feel stressed and worried and maybe even scared. But once you've wrapped your mind around your diagnosis and once you have come up with a treatment plan, go for it. Don't look back. Go for it with confidence and believe that you're going to have a good outcome. And by doing that, by being consistent about that, you've greatly increase your chances for success. I hope you found this episode to be helpful. If nothing else, you now know that there is another way, a better way to treat cancer. You don't have to resort to overly toxic, harmful therapies. You have options. Moreover, you are in control of your treatments. You don't simply have to be a passive participant in your cancer care. As you can see, there are many things you can be doing on your own, whether it's the food you eat, the thoughts you have, the words you say. You have a lot of control over your treatments and your outcomes. In our next episode, we're going to discuss some of the advanced testing we use to better clarify the type of cancer a patient has and how that information can be used to optimize treatment. Thank you again for being here today. I'm honored to be part of this journey with you, and I'm looking forward to next time.
Speaker1:
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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