How Covid is Widening the Gap For Effective Cancer Treatment and What to Do About it

Nathan Crane 

Hey, it’s Nathan Crane, director of the Health and Healing Club and host of the Conquering Cancer Summit. And today I am honored and excited to welcome you to a very special interview. 

Dr. Christine Schaffner is a board certified naturopathic doctor who’s helped thousands of people recover from chronic or complex illnesses. Through online summits, her spectrum of health podcast, network of imminence health clinics, and renown online programs, Dr. Schaffner goes beyond biological medicine, pulling from all systems of medicine, which is exciting, this is what we’re gonna talk about today, from all different systems of medicine and healing modalities helping patients reclaim their wellness and reveal their brightest light, something I think all of us are looking for at some level, right? 

With her diverse skill set, Dr. Schaffner seeks to improve access outcomes and speed of recovery for patients struggling with chronic complex and even mystery illnesses. Patients travel from all around the world to reclaim their wellness using her EECO methodology, E-E-C-O methodology. Her website is drchristineschaffner.com. I do encourage you to go there and download her free report and get in touch with her and the great work that she does. And that’s D-R christineschaffner.com. Dr. Schaffner, thank you so much for joining us.

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I think the work you’ve been doing in the field for as long as you have been, and being really a leader and a pioneer is remarkable. I’m honored that you’ve joined us here for this event, and I know we’re gonna really cover a lot information that’s gonna help a lot of people. So let’s dive right into the topic of integrative medicine, right? Why is integrative medicine, from your perspective, why do you think it’s more important now than maybe ever in human history? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

I think it’s such a good place to start, and as we’re going through the challenges that we’re going through right now, Nathan, we can see the world becoming more and more polarized, right? And we can see that polarity show up in so many parts of our life. And unfortunately, we’re seeing that as we walk through the pandemic, and all the chronic illness work that I do, we see this polarity between conventional and alternative medicine. And I think as you and I are both passionate about is like how can we change this conversation of how can we take the best of both worlds and really merge them so that the patient really has the care team that we all want for them. And just a little aside, I grew up in a conventional family. My father is an oncologist, my mother has a nursing background and so I’ve been in that system and I’ve seen, unfortunately, the failures of that system but I also have seen some of the great pioneering work that many big hearted doctors and researchers have contributed, and I think like in any system, when the systems get big there can be, unfortunately, some of that passion or that information can get lost and so it’s almost like we have to re-inspire those people on the ground floor of conventional medicine how they are making a difference in people’s lives. 

And I often say ’cause I see patients who’ve seen, I was the one person’s 54th doctor and so I’ve seen patients who’ve gone to all the conventional, exhausted the conventional routes. They usually don’t come to alternative medicine because that’s how they grew up or that’s how they were naturally inclined, it came from a process of unfortunately being failed, not seen, dismissed, misunderstood by our conventional paradigm. And so I often say I see a lot of neurological illnesses, and I see that neurologists are some of the smartest people in the planet, right? All the schooling they go to, all the work that they do, and I think I’m like, how frustrated would I be if I was a neurologist and some patient that came to me had underlying causes that I don’t know yet how to communicate, and I’m only given like four or five drugs to actually help them, you know? And I’m like, that could be really frustrating ’cause on the flip side in the alternative world, our toolkit is so big to a fault. 

I often overwhelm patients because I share so many things, I give them so much information, and so I think about, as we were talking about the opportunity here as our healthcare system is in a healing crisis is how do we move forward with an integrative model where we can take the best of conventional medicine, and really, I think where alternative medicine shines is their therapeutic toolkit, there’s so many tools, so many ways to support people. and also this understanding of okay, what is the root cause? I had a teacher, a mentor of mine in school say nothing is random in the body, right? So we have to get away from this like oh, it’s just our genetic destiny, or this random event is happening, that we’re victim to. 

Like, we need to come back and reclaim how empowered that we can be and how no matter what illness that you’re facing or what the diagnosis is, there’s always a path forward and there’s always an opportunity to heal. And so I think that, you know, that that’s what inspires me, that’s what I’d like to see in my lifetime and my career, how we can really pave the way that we’re not in this polarized two camps, but how we work together. And I’ve had patients where I have really awesome neurologist too, who are really more open-minded, who are in the functional camp and we work together as a team. And those patients really accelerate their healing. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, I love, I love how you just framed that, and I think it’s more important now than ever, right? That we do come together, because we’ve had this, almost this unspoken war happening, right? Between natural medicine and conventional medicine, I think it’s unnecessary, because who suffers, it’s the patient that suffers. And it’s this war of like, and you see it on both sides there’s somebody, especially dealing with cancer or another chronic disease or a viral infection like COVID saying, “No, I’m only doing natural, it’s what I believe in, it’s the only thing.” And then they suffer because they didn’t get the extra support they needed from a quite safe off label drug that could have stopped the pathway that nothing else was helping, and then they died from it, unfortunately, or they suffer long-term, or vice versa, someone says, “No, I’m only doing conventional, I don’t believe in natural.” 

And then they suffer from that because they don’t get all the benefits of flushing the lymphatic system, and enhancing the immune system, and, you know, cellular regeneration, all these things we need to keep the body living long and healthy. And so it’s like, okay, look, if there are good, useful, helpful, effective resources from conventional medicine and it works and it’s not super toxic or it’s not gonna destroy you or kill you, you know, it’s quite safe, why wouldn’t we use it? And if there are proven herbs and supplements and nutritional therapies and energetic therapies and emotional healing and all these great things we know from a natural holistic approach that help you and have little or no side effects, why would we not use it? And then if they have a synergistic approach, oh my gosh, we have this new world. You and I spoke offline, you know, this vision for this new hospital, if you will, of truly integrative medicine, a truly integrative approach because it’s really about, let’s use what works, let’s stop using what doesn’t, and at the end of the day, who benefits, everybody, right? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, I love that. And I’m a naturopath and of course I’m gonna be more biased to natural therapies, understanding the body’s ability to self-regulate and heal, all of these treatment modalities, but I’ve been very humbled in my short career, I’ve been practicing for a little over 10 1/2 years and I feel that I’ve been humbled so much by my patients where, you know, when you kind of just, again, put the patient first and understand whatever is gonna be for their best interest, whether it’s a conventional therapy or naturopathic therapy, and again, that synergy with the right support at the right time. I’ve been completely humbled how sometimes the surgical intervention can be helpful or an antifungal, or an antibiotic at the right time, or antiparasitic medications, or what have you, but there’s a place for all medicine when appropriately applied at the right time, with the right support for a patient. 

Nathan Crane 

Absolutely, you know, I think one of the challenges we’re seeing right now as well with this viral pandemic going on is it seems that this gap has either become more prolific, or it’s just become more at the forefront of what we’re seeing more often now more clearly, or it’s even widened between kinda these two camps the natural camp, the conventional camp, because of COVID, and it seems that it’s like, you’re either really strongly for everything or you’re really strongly against everything. But my question is, how is that stance affecting people? Is it really serving the greater good for all of us or is it causing more harm than good? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

I think when we look around, I mean, my clear answer for my reality and what I know to be true is that it hasn’t been helpful for individuals or the collective. I see a collective field of fear and panic and uncertainty and disempowerment, and I feel that we have so many tools that people don’t have to feel disempowered right now. Again, no matter what is in our path, like this pandemic, again, there are so many tools that we can do to support our biology, our terrain, and again, I’ve shared in some interviews, I work with a lot of chronic illness and I work with a lot of Lyme disease, and chronic viral infections and so forth, and it’s kind of an unspoken understanding in the field that these are infectious diseases, these are diseases that are probably more contagious than any of us wanna realize. 

And there is a knowing that when you work with this patient population you are getting exposed. Whether you like it or not, there’s probably some respiratory transmission and so forth. And so, I had an awareness when I started working with this population that that was a possibility, and it was up to me instead of facing that with fear or just kind of the reality that, oh, I was gonna get sick because I was gonna be exposed to the same things as my patients, I met it with an empowering viewpoint, okay, it’s like, if I know that these things can cause acts and I could be exposed to them, how can I continue to strengthen my immune system, support my detoxification pathways, and also not to maybe go here too quickly, but having an energetic field of protection in that I know that I don’t have to suffer with my patients in order to help them. 

And so with that being said, it strengthened my reality and my understanding that it’s not just about the bug, it’s about the bug and the interaction with the individuals terrain. And when we say the word terrain, we talk about our, you know, I use the word ecosystem a lot because it’s about our immune system, but our immune system in the context of our microbiome, we are more, again, bacteria than human cells. It’s also in the context of a virome, right? You know, we have 380 trillion viruses in the human body and how can that just one interaction with one bug and not understanding that interaction between our microbiome, our virome, we even have a micobiome, so it’s, again, our fungal micobiome. 

So if we just think of that really paradigm, one bug you’re exposed to, you get infected, you do the one drug, and then either you get better or you get worse, we’re missing this whole, whole reality of feeling empowered and treating people. So terrain is not only this ecosystem of these microbes in our body, but then interaction with our immune system I think health is a big, a big part of help because what we’ve seen has shifted and changed so much over even the last 20, 50 years is our increasing environmental exposure. So we’re wildly overexposed to toxicants and we’re in this kinda grand experiment of how herbicides and pesticides affect the system, heavy metals, electrosmog, dental infections, and all the own things of conventional dentistry. 

Also, when we think about our immune system, we think about toxicants, and we think of course of that interaction with our genetics. So the more empowering view of genetics is epigenetics, so how do these things help to optimize and shift? And then I see of course a huge role in how trauma can affect our bodies. I think our physical bodies are a barometer for our unhealed and unresolved trauma. And so when you think about all those things, like how can we not feel empowered to look at all of these things to strengthen our systems and strengthen our fields, so no matter what comes our way, we’re resilient to that.

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, I love that you just said that. I mean, it makes me think about this kind of misinformation campaign that’s currently happened worldwide where if you’re asymptomatic from a viral infection, there’s something wrong with that. And asymptomatic typically means your body’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, it’s handling that viral infection quite well. Your innate immune system, your adaptive immune system, they’re both reacting, they’re kicking on, they’re effectively working, and you may have, you know, we all are exposed to potentially life-threatening and damaging viruses and bacteria every single day of our lives. 

I mean, literally you’re outside, and then they’re in the air, the water, on the desks, on the handles at work, on the drinking fountains at school. But why aren’t we dying from all of these every single day? Or getting sick every single day? Well, in most cases, it’s because most people have a generally effective immune system. When we see the long-term damaging effects of everything you just talked about, from high stress, to high toxic load, to poor diet, inadequate exercise, energetic pollution, so on and so forth, we just keep taking chips away at the immune system. 

Dr. Thomas Load, he said it so famously in my documentary about cancer, he said, “There is a cure for cancer. It’s called the immune system.” And when you really look at that data, and when you really talk with the experts on cancer, what you’re continuously gonna hear is if you have a fully functioning immune system, you’re not gonna have a cancer diagnosis. I think you can extend that to say also, for something like COVID or a viral infection, you have a fully functioning immune system, you don’t have to worry so much about getting infected because your body’s gonna do what it’s designed to do. Now, we need to do the things to support the body, right? We need to do other things to keep the immune system strong and to help the body to flush out, you know, the toxins and help the immune system to react and do what it’s supposed to do. 

So maybe you can share for a moment, some of those things what are some things that people can do to keep their bodies strong and healthy so they don’t have to fear something like a viral infection on one hand, right? Infection, meaning from outside in, or even how that relates to cancer and we can reduce our fear of cancer and help our bodies to do what it’s designed to do which is heal and remove cancer cells, which that’s the other hand, which is the body’s making cancer because of all of these pollutants and toxins and carcinogens and other things that cause cancer. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, it’s a great question and I could probably speak for another two hours of how we can support our individual health. And I think where I’ll start and I’m sure you’ve educated your community a lot on this topic, is where do, again, when we think about detoxification and supporting our organs of elimination and all of that that I can get into, always the step one is to avoid exposure where you can. So unfortunately the reality that we’re in on mother Earth today, we’re gonna be exposed to many things that we don’t have control over. But what can we control and what can we limit and reduce our exposure as we’re trying to empty our bucket, if you will. And so of course, clean food, clean air, clean water within your home environment, where you live, I think that’s a really empowering place to start. It’s like, how can you create a healing sanctuary and where we start with, of course, all of those things. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of patients whose lives and their health have been destroyed by mold exposure, and so making sure that you’re not in a moldy home. 

There’s a great lab from Mycometrics that I like to use called the ERMI test, it’s a desk test that you can send in. Dr. Neil Nathan is an expert in this topic and he has a great book called “Toxic” so if you wanna look at that, you can dive deeper. But again, remember when you’re exposed to mold, you inhale mold spores and those mold spores produce mycotoxins in your body. And mycotoxins are very carcinogenic, as well as neurotoxic. They can affect your liver, your kidneys, and so forth, your bone marrow. 

So if you really wanna lead a life of preventing cancer, just making sure that you don’t have a current mold exposure or if you’ve had a past mold exposure, it’s gotten less expensive to look at mycotoxins in the urine. And there’s two great labs, Great Plain Labs and Realtime Labs, and they both pick up different mycotoxins a little bit more specifically. So if you were really wanting to get a full picture, you’d do both and then you could evaluate. So that would be a place to start. Also, we are in, again, a grand experiment of how electrosmog is affecting us. So again, within your home environment, if you insist on using WiFi, which I understand, just turning off the WiFi router at night could be very important. 

We wanna also really focus on your sleeping location. This is the time for your body to heal, repair, for your glymphatic system to work, for your body to regenerate, all of these things and so we want you to be in a safe sleeping location. So that has to do with not having anything plugged in in your bedroom, again, turning the WiFi high off, try not to fall asleep with your phone on your face, knowing if there is a cell phone tower, a 5G tower, or a smart meter close in proximity. The thing with electrosmog, it can feel very overwhelming, but distance is our friend. 

So if we know where things are, we can strategize and also there’s more and more shielding technologies, and harmonizing technologies that serve a purpose. And so that would be as far as avoiding exposure, of course, there’s lots more things to do within personal care products, and cleaning products and water and all of that, but I’m sure that’s covered. And so then when I think about the next layer, when we think about having a healthy terrain, I love educating people on how do we just really kinda chip away at this toxic burden that we are, you know, again, all of us are gonna deal with differently in our bodies, so some of us are gonna be more resilient than others based on a lot of different factors. 

But if none of us are really immune to it, but again, people will deal with this differently. So when we think about our organs of elimination, that’s gonna include our liver, and bile excretion through the gallbladder, obviously those toxicants that get eliminated through bile, get eliminated through the stool, so having healthy bowel movements, your kidneys and having clean water, electrolytes, so you hold onto your water, your kidneys filter a lot of toxicity out through the urine so supporting the kidneys. The lungs are really important, of course, we’ve been very wary of the lungs with COVID. And so not only focusing on breathing exercises, or just being mindful of the health of your lungs, the lungs are a route of excretion too so we remove metabolic waste from our lungs. And again, the lungs when we connect our breath, that it also helps our nervous system and helps our lymphatic system and so we think about the lungs and then the skin. 

So sweating is a really great way to reduce toxicity over time. Home saunas are getting more and more affordable, and we know through studies in Europe and in Finland that really to prevent cognitive decline to support cardiovascular disease, and I think all of that goes in hand-in-hand with cancer as well, that the more people sweat, the healthier they are. And so those are really the main organs of elimination. And then I always bring into the lymphatic system. So the lymphatic system kind of gets a bad rap when you start talking about cancer, but it’s really one of the most important systems in the body, and I think that’s one of the– 

Nathan Crane 

It’s your best friend if you have cancer. I mean, it should be really. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Totally, and it’s the most overlooked system, I think. And I think when we realize how the lymphatic system is tied to our circulatory system, and then we realize that the lymphatic system drains our extracellular matrix, so all of that fluid and that tissue space where that’s where a lot of the action happens in the body that’s where toxicants kind of hang on to collagen and proteoglycans, and that’s where the immune system can get regulated if they’re viruses or stealth pathogens and mass cells can get irritated and release histamine. And so keeping that fluid draining through the lymphatic system, it can be a really key part of keeping our terrain health in. 

So the lymphatic system is basically a body-wide network but it has, unlike the circulatory system, we really have to rely on strategies to move it back to the heart so that it can return to the circulatory system. And so we do things like movement and rebounding and vibration plates and guashas. And I do a lot of lymphatic drainage at my office, and we have specialized equipment, but there’s a lot of things that you can do at home and different topicals and herbs. And so the lymphatic system, even if you just took one thing ’cause I’m sure I just gave you too many, one thing to really hone in on, to really support your health, it would be focusing on lymphatic therapies and strategies to do on a regular basis. 

Nathan Crane 

So what would you say are your top three favorite lymphatic strategies? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, it’s a good question. So I, you know, just when I think clinically, so I’ll just tell you in my office first and then I’ll tell you what’s probably more doable at home. So I have some skilled massage therapists that work on lymphatic drainage. And one of the things that we’ve learned, which I think is a missing piece in a lot of lymphatic drainage massages, is that there can be a buildup of lymphatic fluid in the abdomen. So we have a whole lymph system within the intestines, but then we can have a buildup of fluid behind the intestines. And so when people have a chronically congested lymphatic system, it’s all interconnected. 

So if you have stagnation in one area, it can affect the whole network. So my therapists actually work on the abdomen first. And so working on the abdomen first helps to drain the rest of the body. I also have a friend, Kelly Kennedy, who introduced to me to a woman Desiree De Spong, she created a piece of equipment called the FLOWpresso, and this is a wonderful, if you’re practitioner out there, this is one of the most awesome things that I’ve gotten in a long time, and it’s compression, but it also has infrared which helps to not only have a gentle heating in the body, but infrared also increases exclusion zone in the water, which actually creates movement. 

So my friend, Dr. Paula who talks a lot about exclusions on water, this fourth phase of water, I think this is one of the other big pieces of health, I think the more exclusions on water we have inside the cells and within the fluids in the body that we have more flow in the body so the infrared is a piece, and then it’s also PEMF so pulse electromagnetic field, so that helps to increase cellular voltage. And so people get into this really deep parasympathetic state, and then have their lymph move. And so those are strategies I use in the office. And then at home, you know, to help with that abdominal fluid buildup, naturopaths have used castor oil packs for years and there’s all sorts of reasons why they work. 

But I think a big reason is that wherever you apply castor oil, you get the lymph moving. So traditionally, putting it on the liver, which is great, but put it on the liver and also the abdomen. And don’t make it complicated, just put castor oil on your body and fall asleep. Or you could put basically a hot water bottle to enhance penetration of the castor oil, but it will absorb over time, it’s just sticky in the meantime. So that’s a great strategy. 

There’s different topicals. We have a friend Dr. Dietrich, who created a cream for us called the Flow Cream, and it has a probiotic that makes a peptide called macrophage activating factor. And so wherever you apply it, you actually, because we know that things that get through the skin, get into the interstitium into the lymph, and that’s where, again, a lot of those stuff pathogens and toxicants can be. So we focus really putting that cream on the neck so the glymphatic system rings, so to have a healthy brain. So I love that. And then there’s just a lot of different herbs. There’s traditional herbs, we’ve made other topical products, but again, just having this awareness of the lymph is the first step. And then I mentioned hydration, and hydration is important because our lymphatic system, the more hydrated you are and with the right type of water, with the right minerals, and the electrolytes, the more you can move your lymph. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, a lot of great things. I mean, both clinical, and then at home. You mentioned early on rebounding, I just wanna bring that up. You know, we have a little rebounder trampoline in the living room. I have my kids jump on it every morning. I put it there next to, you know, I grew up as a kid and most people I think today grew up and heard, “Don’t jump on the couch, don’t run, don’t climb, don’t do this, don’t do that.” I’m the opposite. I’m like, know a parent that’s like jump on the couch, please. I watch my kids and it’s, you know, I try to get them into the, we have a home gym and so I get them into the home gym once in a while and make it fun for them, but they’re not gonna come in there and work out with me six days a week, right? 

So like we put a little rebounder in the living room and I start every morning on there jumping I’ll do 50 to 100 jumping jacks on the rebounder, fantastic way to move the lymph first thing in the morning. And then my kids run around and they jump on it, they’ll jump on that and do front flips onto the couch, and they’ll jump from the couch to the other couch, it’s like, they’d would probably make some parents cringe but I know the value of it, you know, for long-term health so I encourage them to do it. But for those tuning in, I mean, getting a rebounder, it’s super easy and light on the joints, you can just, you know, just moving like this, this is a chigong movement actually, I practice chigong and you just, you move the body, you start moving the lymphatic system to help your body detox so much more effectively.

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

I love that, I’m gonna have to think about that for my. Love it, love it. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, so in terms of, you have a report on your website called “The Four Hidden Factors Keeping You Sick.” And maybe you can share just briefly, I know people can go to your website, download it to get more specifics, but can you share briefly what those four factors are, and how they relate to people dealing with cancer today, and what we need to know about them? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, absolutely. And so again, there’s so many things to focus on, but I felt like this was a good hidden factors because a lot of patients who come to see me, these are things that we investigate that might have been overlooked. And so one of them is the role of aluminum in our physiology. And so we are overexposed to unfortunately a heavy metal called aluminum. Aluminum is both neurotoxic and it’s also carcinogenic, and it can inflame our blood vessels, it can create a lot of cognitive issues because there can be a buildup of aluminum in our brains that can lead to neurodegeneration. 

A professor out of England has studied the brains of children with autism as well as the brains of people who passed of dementia, and have found a statistically significant amount of aluminum in the human brain. And so that is something that is really important to be aware of and avoid exposure as much as you can, again, clean air, clean personal care products, investigate if your medications have aluminum in them. And aluminum gets eliminated in the body through silica. 

So one study has shown that if you drink mineral water high in silica, that increases urinary excretion of aluminum. And so aluminum can be, again, we’re highly exposed and we can, again, avoid exposure, and then of course live a lifestyle to help eliminate it. If you wanna go deeper and then not just do silica water, the ionic foot bath actually works. And so that can be a really great tool to just help support the lymphatics, help to also excrete more through the kidneys after the treatment, heavy metals such as aluminum and so we use that as well. Malic acid can also be another tool to excrete aluminum. 

Nathan Crane 

What about diatomaceous earth? I know it’s really high in silica.

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, that I don’t use it as much, but it can. Any silica compound, we use the elite powders that are aluminum silicate, but the aluminum stays bound because there’s so much silica and then it can bind other aluminum more in the digestive tract. So diatomaceous earth can do something similar. And again, with both of those products just finding a clean source that’s been consciously made with knowing that. So, yeah, aluminum is a big one. I talk a lot too about interference fields. So I have been trained in something called biological medicine or bio-regulatory medicine that really came out of Europe and Germany. And again, the premise of that is to look at how does the body self-regulate and heal, and what is in the way, if someone has a pathology, there are obstacles, right? And some of those obstacles can be in the category of interference fields. And so interference fields can be what we call focal infections. 

So these reservoired microbes of the immune system cannot see it, but that chronically poisoned the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, and can stress of course, the immune system. And so focal infections can be things like the tonsils, can also be dental infections. So root canals can be a source of hidden infection in the body, root canals are dead teeth that the nerve is taken out and then it’s stuffed with non-biocompatible material. And then that can be a reservoir for different bacteria, not only bacteria, but also viruses, also parasitic infections, yeast. 

There’s a lab called DNA Connections that you can even floss around your root canal and send it into the lab and they’ll tell you the pathogens that they’re detecting that are not part of the normal oral microbiome. So interference fields can be focal infections, can also be things like scars on the body. Scars can affect our lymphatics or fascia, they can affect our autonomic nervous system, and then they can hold emotional trauma so we do a technique called neurotherapy. There’s also the role of electrosmog which I had already again, I want people to feel empowered ’cause it can feel really overwhelming very quickly. I have a friend Dr. Beverly Rubik who studied electrosmog and the impacts of that on the human body, and she reminded me when I did an interview like one of the most empowering things you can do around electrosmog is safe cell phone hygiene, right? So that’s gonna be probably the most, you know, highest source that you encountered in a daily basis and if you’re having it near your head, or on your body that can affect us over time. And then– 

Nathan Crane 

We do have, sorry to interrupt there, I just wanna let everyone know ’cause we don’t have time in this interview. I have an entire interview with Lloyd Bureau about the science of cancer and cell phones and EMFs and 5G. It’s a really empowering interview. It’s part of this series, it’s in the episode about 5G and EMFs and all of that, and I do encourage people go watch that whole episode you know, after this, because there’s a lot of science actually that I didn’t even know about, I knew some of it, but specifically with cell phones, with EMFs, with radiation and the science linking it to cancer, and then what we can actually do about it, empowering steps. You’re sharing a few here, I think we shared a dozen or more things you can do every single day in that episode too. So I’m glad you brought it up ’cause it’s an important thing, sometimes we overlook. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, and I’m so glad Lloyd is a friend and he’s really, you know, he’s conquered his own journey and again there’s so much more science than we realize, and when we think about things that are gonna affect our epigenetic expression and our protein transcription and how it can affect our DNA, there’s so many studies to show EMF can be there, also create free radical stress, and I’m really big into melatonin as well so thinking about kind of it’s part of the hidden factors in the role of melatonin in our healing, and I think we live in this really melatonin deficient time. 

So melatonin is produced by our pineal gland, our pineal gland helps with our circadian rhythm. Our pineal gland is unfortunately really vulnerable because of its blood supply to toxicants. So through friends of mine, they have taught me that the pineal gland can be affected by fluoride, aluminum, glyphosate, electrosmog. And again, even if you do everything right and live in your bubble, unfortunately there was some exposure. And so circadian rhythm again, is regulated by light and the pineal gland, and melatonin helps to put our brains to sleep, but it also assists the glymphatic system in clearing toxicants out of the brain, and then melatonin is often used too in cancer therapy. 

So melatonin in higher doses have been shown to really, it’s a very high antioxidant that has been shown to be protective in part of cancer protocols as well. And then again, from the neurological standpoint, it can clear toxicants and pathogens out of the brain and that’s why, you know, we’re big fans of melatonin and of course it’s not only avoiding those toxicants that affect the pineal gland, and avoiding electrosmog, but also light, so light can be a huge trigger to appropriate production of melatonin and unfortunately we’re all over exposed to the wrong light at the wrong time, and so our pineal gland can get confused ’cause at night, if you’re in front of your devices and you’re overexposed by blue light, then your pineal gland doesn’t get that communication. 

Nathan Crane 

It’s so true, so important, and there’s a lot of things you can do there. I did a great interview with Misty Williams all about the top sleep hacks. But what you’re saying is so critical, it’s a few things to take away here in terms of activating more melatonin naturally. One is, we’ve gotta try to go to sleep with the sun, now that’s not very realistic in our modern day but we changed all of our light bulbs in our house for blue light blocking bulbs, right? So at least we’re not getting the blue light at night. We turn off the devices around nine o’clock. Ideally you’d wanna do it earlier. That’s around where we are, nine, 9:30 in bed, usually around 10 o’clock and then everything blacked out, no lights in the rooms, blackout curtains, blackout everything, because you want, you know, you want all that light to be gone so as you’re saying, your body is producing more melatonin, it’s down-regulating the cortisol, right? It’s telling your body it’s time to sleep, to heal, to rejuvenate, you get into deep sleep, you enter autophagy, you get to the point where your body’s actually healing now. It’s key, but we’re so bombarded by so much fake light that the brain is so confused, and we’re producing melatonin, cortisol, melatonin, cortisol it’s like, it doesn’t know what to do and we’re not healing, you know? So I’m glad you brought that up, it’s super important. So that was three hidden factors, or that was the fourth? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

That was the fourth. 

Nathan Crane 

That was the fourth, beautiful. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, no, I’m like, I’m checking them on my head. And interference fields are also kind of like a big bucket where we do break that out with the scars and then also the dental infections. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, those are really important, right? I mean, we are energy beings, we are energy bodies, right. And we go into more, we have an entire kind of episode on like the mind body connection and energetics. And you know, I’ve been involved in energy medicine, if you will, for a long time. I mean, I was just speaking in energy medicine conferences in San Diego years ago, I don’t know, 10 years ago, maybe. Because we’re all energy, and so, you know, you’re talking about scars, but you mentioned emotional, emotional trauma. 

Emotions is a form of energy, and we know, you know, I have great interviews as part of this series and many I’ve done over the years where once somebody heals that emotional trauma, which emotion is not something you can necessarily physically, you know, touch it’s energy, but that heals and all of a sudden their disease goes away. It’s amazing, right? So it’s like, we have to look at every part of being human from physical, to emotional, to energy, and that’s why the holistic or the integrative approach is so critical. It’s ’cause we can’t just look at one drug or one therapy or one, you know, just exercise or just take this herb, it’s like we’ve gotta look at the entire human being, mind, emotions, body, environment, relationships, all of it. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

I think I’m so glad you said that, and it’s deep interest of mine as well, and I think this is also where not only this integrative approach, but the future of medicine, I think really lies in the realm of understanding and acknowledging that we’re more than our biochemistry, that we are biophysical in nature and we have, you know an electromagnetic field of our heart. We have brain waves that can be picked up through EEGS, and we have a biofield and that is measurable. And the more that we acknowledge that and understand also when we are sick, our light emissions in our body are non-coherent, and we lack that is a breakdown in communication. 

And so one of the therapies I’m most excited about in the realm of oncology is around photodynamic therapy. And that is the application of different wavelengths of laser-like applied with a photosensitizer, and so this is always something that boggles my mind and I’m, you know, always diving deeper, and by the way, Dr. Weber out of Germany, he has equipment that he’s taught this information to us, and he sells his equipment but it’s a combination of a photosensitizer, so those are natural agents or synthetic agents that are either interested or they are given intravenously and inflamed cells and cancer cells naturally take up these photosensitizers in more quantities, and then that makes them more vulnerable to light applications so then they go through apoptosis or they have an oxidative burst to treat a pathogen. And so I think really, and Dr. Weber treats a lot of oncology cases and has these like beyond miracle success stories, but how we can really integrate, and this understanding again, of how we’re wired to receive light, and we’re wired to communicate with light, and I think we just miss a huge toolkit if we under-knowledge that. 

Nathan Crane 

Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that. There’s so much that can be done and I think that’s the key, is one, is recognizing if we really approach this through an integrative approach with the mindset of look, I’m gonna learn and do everything I possibly can from whatever’s available that’s effective, low, or non-toxic that can help me heal and live longer and healthier and happier, then that’s the approach that I want, right? And if so, we approach it that way, and as people go through this series I wanna encourage you to just, you know, keep educating yourself, learn as much as you possibly can because the more you learn about what’s available and what’s possible, the more empowered you are to actually make better decisions for your health. 

If you don’t know what’s possible from either world, from conventional and then naturopathic, you don’t know what your options are, well, then you’re not moving forward for your health with the greatest potential for your healing. So, you know, I just wanna say, thank you so much, Dr. Schaffner for the great work you do, for being here and sharing such great wisdom. I wanna encourage people to go to your websites, drchristineschaffner.com. You can download her free report there, you can connect with her and her team, you can even go visit her clinic. Can people come to your clinic in person? Can they consult with you online? 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Yeah, we do both. We’re in Seattle, Washington, and then we also do tele-medicine. So it’s eminence health that you can find at drchristineschaffner.com. So we do all these things that I just mentioned . 

Nathan Crane 

Fantastic, well, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. 

Christine Schaffner, N.D. 

Thank you so much, Nathan. 

Nathan Crane 

And I wanna thank everyone for tuning into the Conquering Cancer Summit. Please share this with friends and family. Together, we truly can make a difference for the future of humanity in ending the cancer pandemic. Thank you, and I wish you ultimate health and happiness. Be well.