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Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Dr. Keesha Ewers is an integrative medicine expert, Doctor of Sexology, Family Practice ARNP, Psychotherapist, herbalist, is board certified in functional medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, and is the founder and medical director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program. Dr. Keesha has been in the medical field... Read More
Dr. Carol Lourie is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a Naturopath, Acupuncturist, and Homeopath. She’s helped thousands of women recover their health and restore their life through her integrative and complementary protocols involving focused nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and an empowered mindset. Dr.... Read More
- Learn about the unique aspect of homeopathic medicine that examines how certain diseases express energy
- Gain insight into the energetic and spiritual aspects of cancer and their impact on individuals
- Find the answer to whether it is possible to heal from cancer
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Welcome back to the Reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit 5.0. And this time we’re talking about healing the energy body. And I’m really delighted to bring back a dear friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Carol Lourie, who is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a naturopath, acupuncturist and homeopath. She’s helped thousands of women recover their health and restore their life through her integrative and complementary protocols involving focused nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes and an empowered mindset. She specializes in complex and chronic disease management, specifically focusing on the emotional aspect and metabolic factors of breast cancer. In addition to her clinical practice, she developed an online program where she’s able to bring her knowledge and caring to women throughout the world. Welcome, Dr. Lourie.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
So let’s talk a little bit about like when we, sometimes people might not be able to make that connection between reversing autoimmune disease and breast cancer, right? And whenever I show a diagram of leaky gut or a stress response, you know, that’s happening from the body where you’re perceiving yourself as in danger or not safe or somehow upset, and then that then triggers the adrenals to release cortisol into the system. You know, that’s not supposed to happen in perpetuity, just in short little bursts. And over time, if that’s happening chronically, it can lead to this degeneration of your health which is autoimmunity and cancer. So I’m really delighted to have you come in and talk about this subject, you know? Yeah.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Autoimmunity and inflammation and cancer are on the same plane.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yep.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
And you can’t have one without the other. They all contribute to each other. And reducing, as you just mentioned, the cortisol, the stress response, and reducing your inflammatory quotient, and we’ll talk about how you can do that, attending to your autoimmune illness is really a requirement when you want to recover from cancer long term.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Really, really well said. A lot of our viewers will have had the experience of being diagnosed, you know, for the first time with an autoimmune illness. And I’ve been diagnosed with both, breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis in my lifetime. And so I’d like to have you talk about like, what’s the first step that you need to take if you get a diagnosis of breast cancer?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
I think the first step is to exhale ’cause we tend to take a breath in, and that is the beginning of our stress response. And you go into hyperactive mode and it’s an emergency mode. And really it isn’t. You need to exhale, and realize that autoimmune illness, cancer, any serious chronic disease takes a long time to develop. And unless a tumor is pressing on some vital organ, it’s not a surgical emergency to have a biopsy or just make serious decisions. So I really recommend, I know this sounds very strange, it’s just to try to get your nervous system under control and to develop the mindset moving forward of what I call an empowered mindset. Because there’s a lot of different pieces that go into creating a serious diagnosis such as breast cancer or autoimmune illness. And then there are many modalities that you will need to bring together to feel like you’re on top and you’re in charge of what’s happening for you. It takes a while to get all those things stacked up. So if you need to take two or three weeks to organize your healing team, that is really appropriate. You don’t need to rush into a biopsy tomorrow.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Mm, exhaling is good.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Exhaling is really important. I had to do that myself several times this morning.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah. So when we talk about the energy body, I’m always talking about it from the perspective of Ayurvedic medicine, with the pancha koshas, the five layers of us where we have our physical body, and then you’ve got your energy body, and then your emotional, mental, and finally your higher self, or it’s called anandamaya kosha, which is your bliss sheath, which is that portal to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
I love that. So beautiful, beautiful.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Chinese medicine, you know, brought some of that along too. And so when we’re talking about energy, right, what is the energy of the mind, the mindset that is necessary to reverse breast cancer?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
First of all, I love the way you described how Ayurvedic medicine plugs into the collective unconscious. It’s all on the same paradigm. It’s just from a little different modalities and a little different perspective. I think for me, I often start with mindset as the beginning entrance into working with a woman because the mindset for me is really important. You can have the exact same thing happening in a day, and if you have a mindset in which I’ll use a jungian term you’re in a complex, you’re going to look at everything from a very negative, upset perspective, distorted but it feels like it’s a reality. Whereas if you are in a meditative, calm, centered place, really clear about what you’re going to do today, and you haven’t decided you’re going to put 15 things on your plate as opposed to five, the day can feel very different. So an empowered mindset for me is about really acknowledging your fragility and your vulnerability. I think that’s important. We don’t use those words enough. And as you just mentioned, getting in touch with all those layers, as many as we can in any given moment. I don’t think it’s possible all the time to be in touch with all of them, but to bring in what you can to keep you centered and calm as much as possible. Now we can’t be perfect quote unquote in this but every little bit counts.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Hmm. So there are a lot of practices that can get us access to all of those layers. Do you have any that you recommend to your clients?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Oh, absolutely. First of all, I think finding a meditation online that really speaks to you. there’s many meditations that are available. I love listening to Joe Dispenza’s morning meditation. For me, that is very calming and very empowering. If you don’t wanna listen to somebody, you can just do some breathing, opening in through your mouth into your heart and then blow that energy out through this imaginary hole in the top of your head. My meditation teacher taught me that. I think that’s a very beautiful way of being centered. There’s the BioMat which you have at home and you lie on it and it really shifts your energetic field. There’s doing hydrotherapy with hot and cold. If you have a sauna or you wanna sit in a hot bathtub with Epsom salts and then get out and wrap yourself in a cold towel, that is constitutional hydrotherapy. We learned about that in naturopathic medical school. There’s walking in nature. There is gardening. I mean, it doesn’t have to be some serious activity where, okay, now I’m gonna sit down and change my mindset or my energy. It’s something that you can easily incorporate into your daily life.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Mm hm, beautiful. So how does energy influence cancer, the growth of it or the lack of growth?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Well, I think we need to talk about this from the perspective that if you’re, you don’t wanna think that, oh, I have bad energy or I messed up my energy and that’s why I developed cancer. So we have to really take this from the right perspective, that there is no one thing that causes cancer. And there are things that we can control. And there are things that control is an illusion. I know in our society, we like to feel like we can control many aspects of our life. And when I do some deeper genomic assessments of somebody’s breast cancer profile, there are genomic SNPs that we have no control over. And some of them can be aggressive and some of them can be not a big deal but we need that information to then decide what your best treatment options are. So energy, as a homeopath there are certain diseases that have miasms or energetic fields. And the term miasm is a homeopathic medical philosophy. And it applies to, for example, cancer has a certain energetic field and that cancer miasm is a, you might feel like rush, rush, rush, do, do, do.
I have to do this; I have to do that. And for women, there is a tendency to take care of everyone before we take care of ourselves, and put ourselves last. And there is a syndrome that I call the blurry boundary syndrome. And that’s an example where people are asking you to do things all the time and you go “Yes, yes, of course I’ll do that,” when really the answer is I’m not able to do that. And notice, I didn’t use the phrase, I’m sorry I’m not able to do that. It’s just I’m not able to do that. And when you start to recover your health and you look at your friends and your family members and you start to shift your availability because you’re prioritizing yourself, and your friends start to get a little pissy with you or angry because you’re not so available, that’s a really, that’s a clue that you need new friends, that they’re really not your true friends. ‘Cause true friends, it’s not always an equal 100% percent but there’s a give and take that we apply in our friendships so that you’re not always the person who is giving.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah, that’s a really good pointer for people. Oh, but I don’t wanna hurt their feelings or I don’t, right?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
They’ll be disappointed in me so I have to X, Y, Z.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
They won’t like me.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Whatever, right?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah, yeah. So do you have any cases that you can talk about where that’s made a difference for people?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Yeah. I have a woman. Her name is Ellen and she came to see me 10 years after her breast cancer treatment. And in those 10 years, her health had deteriorated to the point where she had developed couch potato syndrome where she felt so poorly that she was barely able to get off the couch. The little energy that she did have she spent running around doing errands for family members and for friends and her church group. And then she would come home and feel horrible and be on the couch. So it took a couple weeks of her seeing me weekly. And we started with the healing smoothie and we immediately changed her nutrition. Notice I don’t use the word diet because it’s not a diet. It’s how we look at food and how we nourish our body with food. That made a dramatic difference. Within five days, her constipation or her IB irritable bowel syndrome had dramatically reduced and her sleep had improved. So because she wasn’t having energy, she was drinking too much coffee in the daytime and eating too much sugar.
So just making some simple changes, within two weeks she already began to feel differently. And then we gradually started incorporating positive movement, and she had a treadmill in her garage which she was never able to get on. So we started out with five minutes a day on the treadmill. Now this is where mindset is so important because you could say, oh, five minutes. What’s the matter with me? I only did five minutes. I’m hopeless; it doesn’t matter. That’s one perspective. Or you could do five minutes, that’s fantastic. I hadn’t been able to do five minutes three weeks ago. I’m really proud of myself. So getting in touch with how you talk to yourself as a woman is really helpful. And some of that comes up when you meditate because we have this little incessant voice always in the back of our minds, right? Oh, you didn’t do this. You should have done that. Or you forgot to do this, or why didn’t you do it this way? This wasn’t perfect.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Well, it depends on your Enneagram type.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Oh, okay. You know what, you’re probably right. That’s a modality that I believe in but I’m not that familiar with, very good point.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Your Enneatype has a critic that never goes to sleep .
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Some people’s do. Mine does, but yeah, but I’ve worked on it, right? Somebody told me what my number was, but I’ve forgotten. I’ll have to look it up. I think that’s a wonderful method to use to assess who you are and within a nonjudgmental perspective. So she was a self-critical person but I really helped her realize that we could turn the volume down on that. And so within a week, she was doing 10 minutes, and then within two months she was doing 20. And then she came in one day and said, “You know, I love bike riding.” And I said, “Well, this is great.” She said, “But my bike is, you know.” I said, “You know this is a moment to go and treat yourself to a really good bike.” So she went and future forward the quality of the bike because she told me she wanted to do long bike rides. I said, “So get a bike that’s going to take you on those long bike rides.” So she went to a local bike store and she got exactly what she needed. And it was a lot of money. And she had never spent that much money on herself. That’s something right there. But it brought her a lot of joy and she started out five minutes a day, five miles biking. And that was a huge accomplishment for her. And at the end of three weeks, she was doing 25 miles. And not only was it great for her, it was her son who was a teenager who you could barely pry him away from his computer, he started biking and her husband biked.
So it was this family activity that they were going on these long bike rides and out in nature over the weekend. And pretty soon she was up to 50 miles a day over the weekend. And then there was a breast cancer bike fundraiser from San Francisco to Los Angeles. And that had been something that she’d always wanted to do but she never thought she could. And she joined and she did 25 miles a day four days in a row to raise money for breast cancer. And that took 10 months, that journey, from being a couch potato and being nonfunctional to being able to attend this wonderful event for raising money for breast cancer, 25 miles a day, four days in a row. It was a transformative, life-changing experience for her. She lost weight. Her diabetes was nonexistent anymore. Her attitude changed. She bought new clothes. I mean, she felt empowered. And her relationship with her son and her husband improved. And they had to be brought up, you know, ’cause the family was no longer eating fast foods and down the street, so take out. So it was its wonderful journey for her and it’s very reaffirming that it doesn’t take a lot to recover your health. You just need to do it in a systematic, slow order so you don’t get overwhelmed. It took a long time to get sick. It’s gonna take a while to recover.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
That’s really important to realize. And I always call the place where people are willing to get there is the misery to motivation ratio.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Yes, right.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Fortunately, like human nature kind of makes us be really miserable before we’re motivated. And I’m just gonna say to our audience, please don’t do like I did because .
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
To really just give everybody a little break, the messages we get as a society are not about what you and I are talking about, right?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I know.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
The messages are take a pill and you’ll be fine.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yep. No pain, no gain.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Right.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah. So in the era that we live in right now, how can we use energy to stay on our path of wellness and healing and loving ourselves enough to engage in self-care in the way that we’re talking about?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Watch as little television as possible. You know, it’s a waste of time. Spend that time where you would be watching television reading or knitting or doing yoga or listening to podcasts that really nourish your interest. Find a few minutes every day when the weather is nice to be outside in nature. Even 10 minutes can make a difference. I make, I have this beautiful garden.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
90 minutes a day. 90 minutes a day I do outside every day.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Well, that’s wonderful. I mean, that’s.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
It’s so important. I mean, that is my sanity and my health formula for me. Yeah.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Well, I love looking at the photos you post on your walk for your hikes with your dogs. I mean, you can just feel that nature energy. And that’s what we need to bring back into our beings is the nature energy. And connecting with nature is really connecting with your soul, as you just said. Get an animal.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
You know, dogs are, you and I have a colleague. Anytime there’s a problem, she gets another puppy. And you know, they’re just these little love bundles
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Are you talking about Deb Silver?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Yep.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Oh, adopted another puppy.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I have three dogs.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
There was a problem. We got another puppy.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah .
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
They’re like these, or a kitty if you’re a kitty person, they’re like these little love buckets, you know?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yep. That’s so funny. Yeah. They also keep you honest, I think, if you choose to allow that from them where, you know, they see you as the person you’re meant to be, first of all. And secondly, they need to be cared for. So it’s important. Like the caring for them has you caring for yourself.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Absolutely, 100% right. The dog needs to be walked. So you get to go out whether it’s raining or freezing out, you are out there.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Mm hm, and they need to be fed really healthy. And so, you know, hopefully you’re not just feeding your pet healthily. You’re also feeding yourself healthily, so yeah. Good, good advice, good tips. Is there anything else that you want us to know before we sign off?
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Health is a journey. Life is a journey and you need time to integrate what has happened to you in the past. I always say to women, “Have you ever had any upsetting or traumatic experiences that have brought you to this moment?” And they go, “Well, you know, this happened 25 years ago, but it couldn’t be that.” So what has happened 25 years ago, as a protective measure if we can’t deal with it then, we put into our cells and our soul. And we get life piling up. And then the quotient of being able to deal with that, the scales tip and all of a sudden your psyche is saying, nope, you can’t not deal with this anymore. So I think that I know this may sound strange, but when you are ill, it’s really an opportunity to get things better in every little corner of your life. And it doesn’t have to be a horrible thing. It could be as pleasant. Even going through chemotherapy, if you’re prepared, it could be pleasant because you’re in the right framework, you have the right support and you know what to expect and you know how to deal with the symptoms and the side effects that come up. And that’s what you are proposing with your wonderful summit is like, let’s slow down and learn about who we are and get the right energy into our life.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Beautiful. Yeah. What you’re saying, you know, like 25 years ago, something could have happened and I don’t think that has anything to do with what’s going on today, I always think about it like building an elementary school on top of a landfill. Eventually that toxicity from that landfill is going to seep up through the floorboards and, you know, and it’s gonna cause problems. And so
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Absolutely.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
you don’t wanna build a school on top of a landfill .
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
No, no. You don’t wanna build your really positive life that you deserve and want on top of a toxic landfill in your mind, in your body either, right?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Exactly. Yeah. That’s the metaphor. Yep.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
I know, I’m agreeing with you.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I know, yeah. So this is really important, right, to clean that out. So I appreciate you pointing to that. Well, Dr. Laurie, we are going to point to how to get ahold of you and everything with this talk. And I so appreciate you spending your time sharing some of your wisdom about reversing breast cancer and the energetics of cancer. Thank you so much.
Carol Lourie, ND, LAc
Thank you.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
All right, everybody, until next time, be well.
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