Discovering Integrative Medicine After Surgery

Introduction and Steve's Cancer Journey 0:00

Hey, it's Nathan Crane, director of the Health and Healing Club and host of the Conquering Cancers Summit. And today, I am honored and excited to welcome you to a very special interview. And I have a really wonderful story, a very, inspiring person to to bring on with us today. And his name is Steve Wallace. He's going to be sharing with us his own journey through discovering the integrative approach to helping him deal and heal from deal with this cancer diagnosis and really heal on this journey.

And so he's going to be sharing with us not only some of the questions he's had along the way, some of the doubts, some of the fears, but also the protocols he's discovered that has helped him, the most. And what he's discovered from both conventional medicine and natural medicine, holistic and an integrative approach that has been helping him continue to see his markers just go down and down and down. So without further ado, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for being here to really, you know, share your story in an effort to to help inspire and educate and uplift others who are tuning in to the summit.

Thanks for having me. So maybe you can start a little bit, Steve, with just a little bit about your background, shares this kind of a little bit about your background. Maybe the condensed version. Sure. I live in Los Angeles, with my wife. I own a small real estate development management company where, we live in a historic area. So we would buy older properties that have been basically rundown, not very well-maintained. We would restore them. And, frequently we would keep them and then just rent them out to, to our own tenants.

And, we continue to do that. In working with old houses, it's quite likely that they have been exposed to things like lead dust and maybe some as fast as and that sort of thing. And when we first started, we weren't as really as informed as we are today. So of course today it's just like with Covid, we want to take every precaution. And so now of course we take precautions as we work on these old houses. The fact that we didn't. And so I don't know if that could be a trigger for anyone. It could just be, you know, the luck of the draw, roll the dice. But, unfortunately, I, I developed, cancer in 2004, early 2014.

So 2014. So you were what was the diagnosis and what was the prognosis at the time? Squamous cell carcinoma. It was HPV related.

Diagnosis, Biopsy, and Surgery 2:53

And, it was in the, it was left neck and was I could feel a, lump starting to grow, in my neck. And it turned out within a month that it, was about the size of a plum. And so, it, I went to urgent care about a month after I had, basically discovered it. It grew fairly rapidly, and I put a rat with cod, I think is cod liver oil on it, and that actually arrested it, and it stopped growing. And so I don't know if that had any effect or at all probably not. But I did go to urgent care. He referred me to, a doctor who was my surgeon.

And, we scheduled a Pet scan about, just a couple, maybe two weeks after, I had gone to urgent care and also a biopsy. The the Pet scan showed that. Yeah. It was definitely suspicious. There was a couple hotspots that we found. One at the base of my tongue, one a smaller one on in the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck as well. He also scheduled the biopsy, and scheduled surgery. What was really interesting is that only the tumor itself was not growing. It was not doing anything until I did the biopsy.

And then that just made it angry. And then it just it quickly, got larger and, within a couple days, I had had surgery to have the lymph nodes on the, many lymph nodes on the left side of my neck removed. Yeah. We know from, a lot of integrative medical doctors that I've interviewed over the years that, you know, discourage against a biopsy as, you know, as, cautiously as you can be, just because it is known that once you start poking into that tumor and you start, you know, as you said, aggravating it, making it angry, basically, you're spreading it, right.

You're poking at something that's encapsulated, that is trying to, you know, I as, as some doctors will say, actually is trying to save your life. It's trying to, you know, keep all of the cancer into one place instead of spreading through every organ in your body and totally, you know, shutting you down with renal failure, it's actually prolonging your life. And so we go in and we start poking and prodding and trying to, you know, and it often spreads it much worse. As you said, it wasn't growing biopsy.

And then all of a sudden it grew even more so. So then you had the surgery to remove the, the lymph nodes, the or the nodules. And then did you have the tumor removed at the same time. Yes. Yeah. So the, the the two were and I think it was like 7 or 8 lymph nodes were removed at that time. Okay. So you so you had that surgery and that was like how quickly after the your diagnosis, after the Pet scan, it was about a week and a half after the Pet scan. And, I think it was like the day after the biopsy is when I had had the surgery, but the surgery was already scheduled because, I mean, it was fairly clear that that's what it was.

So so there so they said, look, we just we need to remove this right away. And so they went in and encouraged the surgery. You said yes, you did the surgery and then and then what happened? So then my, my doctor referred me. You know, it's kind of it was interesting, the doctor who did the surgery, who's actually, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, which is really funny. Who actually who who has done this sort of surgery as well for other people. And so I was really happy to have him because he really never left a scar.

And he did a really good job about, avoiding most of the nerves that normally I think, any surgeon would just go in there and just start hacking you up. But I was really grateful to have him. He referred me to a couple of oncologists, one for radiology and one for chemotherapy. And so my wife and I immediately went to see those doctors. The first one was the one for chemotherapy, and it was probably the most frightening, experience I've ever had with a doctor. And he was basically saying, you need this.

Rejecting Conventional Chemo and Radiation 7:31

You know, you need to take this effing seriously. You need to go in like the Army and the Navy and the Marines and just bomb the hell out of it. And and so basically nuke your body to, kill the cancer. And, and my wife and I can clearly remember it in the elevator, leaving him. We both were just staring at each other, almost shaking, and and I said, this just doesn't feel right. It doesn't to go through that sort of chemotherapy. And I think we've all probably seen people who have gone through chemotherapy and it is horrific.

And I just did not intuitively feel that for me, that doing that with chemotherapy was right for me. We then went to see the, the oncologist for radiation, for, radiology. And she was actually wonderful again, Beverly Hills, I'm fortunate to live in Los Angeles and I had, insurance, thank God. And so I was able to take advantage of, you know, this great doctor, if I wanted to, and talk of the line equipment where she said that the radiation would be pinpoint, but I would still lose hair, I would still lose some taste.

I would say all of these problems associated even with the top of the line equipment. In 2014, that also did not feel right. You know, basically nuking with chemo and radiation to poison the body, to to rid the body of something that was in itself. I don't want to call it poison, but it's it's something that's foreign to the body, just did not seem right. So immediately after visiting them, my wife was doing research. She read the book that, Suzanne Suzanne Somers had written, and one of the doctors that she used was a man named Michael Gallacher in Santa Monica.

So we went to see him to basically detox, and I, I had high toxicity in the, of course. And Doctor Meltzer recommended instead of chemotherapy maybe IPT insulin potentiated therapy. So, so if I decided to do chemo that it would just be a fraction or one tenth of the amount that I would normally have. That seemed to make sense. So I started researching facilities, in Southern California that might be able to help me through that. I found center for New Medicine in Irvine, and so we immediately made an appointment and, gosh, within I think five days after seeing Doctor Gallagher and a week and a half after having my surgery, I went down to center for New Medicine for the first time.

I had already had a second surgery scheduled since my, squamous cell carcinoma was HPV related with that sort of cancer. The origin of the cancer that ended up in my lymph nodes would be at the base of the tongue. And since the Pet scan showed that there was a small hotspot, there, I reluctantly made the decision to have the surgery to remove that. And so it was this, like robot machine, like, they call it the Da Vinci. And so where they basically peel your throat in the end, they never found anything.

But likely there was something there, a tiny, tiny mass that they just never found. So I did do that surgery, but at the same time, I was putting my faith in the center for New Medicine and basically going through a more healthy journey to eliminate the cancer from my body. So aside from finding this, integrative doctor that you kind of learned of through the Suzanne Somers book right before that, earlier in your life, did you have any kind of affinity education background, connection to any more?

Natural way of living? More natural lifestyle, more kind of, you know, holistic, just I don't know if your parents, your family, peers, you know, friends, anything that kind of, gave you a little bit of that foundation to to support your intuition and going, look, this. Chemical approach, this war approach of destroying my body through radiation, chemotherapy, drugs. And so we're just doesn't feel right to me. Did you have some kind of foundation early in your life that that helped contribute to that?

Surprisingly, not really. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where as a kid, eating cereal, just, you know, that was extremely sugary and then putting sugar on top of that. And there's just so many things looking back and think, oh my God, I can't believe we ate that stuff. And fortunately, I mean, we did it rather, except for that we didn't really eat a lot of sweets, which was good, I guess, but it's really, I, I owe a lot of it to my wife. She, is a personal trainer who is really a attuned to the human body and what makes it most optimal, how to function optimally.

And so we've always eaten pretty well since, and I've been with Eileen for, gosh, going on 30 years now. And so

Finding Integrative Care and Testing Markers 13:06

we, you know, I never drink sodas and really don't eat a lot of sugar. And, really hardly any at all. I don't eat junk food, don't eat fast food. So that's been my lifestyle since, basically, I left Pennsylvania and moving here to California. And so I'm really grateful for that. But here we have a lot of other toxicities, in Los Angeles. You know, it's it's just that er there's a lot of the stress is toxic. And so that's been like the big negative. So we try to counteract that in ways. But intuitively the chemo and radiation just did not feel right.

It just everything about it just seemed wrong to me. I have a neighbor. She was really healthy as an ox. She got breast cancer, a form that apparently was not that serious. And she was probably in her late, late 60s, I guess. And you get extremely healthy. And then, she, she, I think had surgery, and then she started chemo and, after the second round of chemo, it killed her. She died. And it's just horrible to hear things like that. And again, we've all seen people have had chemotherapy, which could be, I'm told that chemotherapy might be the right choice for some people.

I don't know, I'm not a doctor. But in my case, it just it's something that I definitely did not want to do. Yeah. I mean, it's it's a good point. There are some cancers that respond a lot better to chemotherapy than others. I mean, there are some cancers. I believe in testicular cancer that has like a 50%, you know, effective rate with chemotherapy. It's like flipping a coin, but that's still pretty high when it comes to a cancer treatment. There are other most cancers that have about a 2.5% success rate with this rate chemotherapy, treatment protocol 2.5%.

So it's a pretty low success rate. And some cancers have 0% success rate. So that's why, you know, this conversation of an integrative approach is so important. No matter what somebody chooses like yourself that did surgery and then you found, you know, a much more, more things you can do for your, your health and lifestyle that can support your body and healing, which we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about, or even some low dose IPT, some low dose where, like you said, one tenth of the amount of chemotherapy is very targeted at the tumor, for example, or at the cancer, but you're also doing all the other things to enhance the body's natural mechanisms to eliminate cancer cells, like enhancing, the immune system, for example.

So, you know, that's why, you know, through this event and all of the, the conversations are primarily around, like, look, let's do what works, let's do what we know what works, and then let's do what everything we possibly can to support the body's natural healing ability. Right. We know that if we support the immune system or emphatic system, we support the nervous system. We support all these incredible systems in the human body with as many, you know, natural, holistic things we can do and then if we need a little surgery, a little Ipsy or a little something else, to support it, your, your chances and your odds of not only surviving the cancer, but actually having a better quality of life, which I'm excited for you to share about, Steve, because when we last spoke, that's one of the things that's been, you know, such a blessing for you is your quality of life has been so great because of the choices you've made for your own, you know, treatment protocols.

So, let's, let's maybe you can pick up from from where you left off there a little bit. So you found center for New Medicine. What were the and before that they still had said they were still concerned. Right. That you still had some hotspots. You still had, you know, your markers were still high. Is that right? That's why you were continuing to center for New Medicine. Yeah. And so, I was encouraged by my surgeon to have surgery on the right side of my neck as well, to remove lymph nodes there.

And I was not convinced that that's what I should do. So I, he said, you need to do it now. I need to quickly, quickly. You need to get radiation. You need to get, chemo. You need to have this other surgery as soon as possible. And my intuition told me that that was not the case. And so I never had that surgery. I did go to. And I did want to make a one last point on the chemotherapy that talking to that oncologist, I asked him, how do you know what chemotherapy is would be right for me? And he said, basically, I've been doing this for years.

And so it's basically I just kind of feel it out. And so it's just my experience will tell me that normally this will work for you. So it's basically he's rolling the dice on something that might have minimal effect, but might have maximum make maximum damage to my body. So that was extremely scary. So then in going to center for New Medicine, it was it I think I'm, I'm relatively analytical. So I want to I want to know, like with the chemotherapy, I want to know if I'm going to get chemotherapy, that it's right for me.

If I'm doing something, I want to know that it's actually working. I just don't want to just guess or hope for the best. And so at least we set up a new medicine. They immediately did, some tests to find out. You know what? How many, CTC count for? How many circulating tumor cells were it in my body? It was elevated. There's also nagila, which is, which is an indicator that, how it plays these masks, viruses and cancer. And so I had a high nagila count, and so I wanted to get obviously my circulating tumor cell count down.

I also needed to get my count down, and I needed to be healthy as possible. And through, Gautier, he has a test for toxicity. So my toxicity was almost pegged out, so I needed to get that down. So I was testing for toxicity. I wanted to test for, circulating tumor cells, and I wanted to test for glass. So there are, like you said, there are many different things that one can do to make the body

Natural Protocols and Tracking Progress 19:48

healthy enough to combat cancer. And as I understand it, everyone has cancer cells in them, right? A healthy body can keep that under control and keep those cancer cells to an absolute minimum if the body's out of whack, if it's not healthy, if it's toxic, then you go into imbalance in the body. Can't, basically heal itself. And so I wanted to make sure that I'm as healthy as possible. And, I wanted to do as many different things that I could afford to do and that I had access to to get that down.

So there's a lot of things that are fairly inexpensive, that I did again. It's really hard to quantify if what one particular thing helped when you're doing a lot of things. So, you know, green tea is always recommended, the juice from one lemon in the morning on an empty stomach to get toxicity down, things like that, and then, cancer for new, etc., for new medicine. There were many things that I started to do with them as well. The hyperbaric chamber, high doses of IVC. Gosh. There were, gosh, pe PMF and then go lake and, shot, injections of garlic, which would specifically go after the glaze.

And so those are some of the things that I was doing. My wife also, was giving these supplements of ip6, beta glucan and things like that. It was to help D3, and then center for New Medicine had me, I think was DHEA, pregnant, pregnant alone. So those things were apparently good for me and, and different there's different cancers and cancers were like, react differently to different people. So in my opinion, it's never the same for everybody. It's it's almost individualized. And everybody has to see what works for them.

Again, like you said, maybe, maybe IPT will work for somebody or even full on chemo for someone. Maybe it does it. And then maybe this might work. Maybe that might work. But I was measuring again, the circulating tumor cell count, my toxicity count in the Natalie's counts to make sure that they're going down and things that, you know, some things didn't work for me, and I dropped them. And, you know, again, it's an expense thing as well. Everybody, you know, who among us are so rich that you could do everything.

And there's just a few people. And so we really have we want to be better, we want to be healthy, but we have a finite amount of resources typically. And so just measure thing and just almost intuiting what you feel is working for you. So yeah, we kind of threw the, you know, threw everything out. We, we tried everything and start throwing out things that, that didn't appear to be helping my specific numbers. You know, I think it's so important what you just said around, you know, using your own intuition to help discover what works for you.

And so often you know, we have a hard time trusting ourselves. But if you can learn to listen to your your body, learn to listen to yourself, your inner wisdom more often than not, you'll hear people say, you know, I just felt that wasn't right and I felt I should do this. And they did that. And months or years later, they had the outcome. They were looking for. And it was a feeling. It wasn't logic, it wasn't a scientific report that they read. It wasn't, you know, listening to the doctor said, you have to do this.

You're going to die. It was maybe taking into account all of those things, but then taking a moment to go inside and say, okay, what what do I feel is right for me. Right. And that is, I literally just had a group session with a group of, cancer patients, who's a part of our Health and Healing club. And, you know, there was a wonderful woman who was there sharing hers, her story and her journey and her challenges and her fears and everything. That's that's coming up. But she's dealing with cancer and, you know, this is the exact topic that we that we talked about was, you know, learning to trust yourself, learning to trust that inner guidance. Yes.

We need to educate ourselves. We need to listen to interviews like this. We need to research. We need to absorb as much of this kind of information as possible. Listen to every one of these interviews and listen to every one of them again, and take notes and ask questions and like, that's key, right? To inform ourselves, to educate ourselves, to gain as much information, knowledge as we can. So we're more confident in what we're choosing to do, and then have guidance. But at the end of the day, we are the ones that are making the we're making the decisions, right?

If we just leave it up to somebody else to make decisions for us, sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't. But I really believe more often than not, if you learn to to listen to your own body and what you feel is going to work for you, and you follow that entrusted and stay open along the way, more often than not, things will work out. And you're a great example of that, Steve. So, maybe you can share a little bit more of that. So your, your CTC count, your Natalie's count were super high after surgery.

You started more of an integrative approach, doing all of the,

Improved Scans and Quality of Life 25:18

you know, doing more natural therapies and hyperbaric and all these different things. That's been, what, the last five years now. And where are your CTC and where is your Natalie's now? So I within the first year I dropped the IVC and the hyperbaric and the PMF. I found that for me, the goal was, working to get the Natalie's down. And what was interesting is my circulated circulating tumor cell count was dropping very slowly at first. For the first year it was coming down, but just little by little.

My CTC count was, in May of 2014, it was 12.6, which is super high. And my Natalie's count was 3.2. With the goal, my Natalie started to come down in a in a faster clip and and and so the clinic really worked for me. There were Bravo. There's like a bravo positron, which they had for a while. And then, I still eat a Bravo yogurt. And that seems to help a lot as far as a nag, like, so now I'm basically in, I have a normal count of, well, basically normal 0.6 or from 3.2, down 2.6. In those, I don't know, you know, six and a half years or so, seven years.

And so, the CTC count was going down slowly, but as soon as I got my Natalie's under control and it started to get close to normal, then it just it just dropped dramatically. And so, my CTC count in May of 2014 at 12.6, and then right now it's 4.8, which is still high, but it's, it's, you know, a third of what it was. So so again, that's, you know, a way that I was able to measure my health and then also my toxicity within a couple months, I got it down to basically normal. So from being pegged to being normal, and I think that all of these things kind of help each other and, and I had my second Pet scan was, I think a year after it was have been 2015 and so that I no longer had a hotspot on the right side of my neck.

So that was gone. So, yeah, no more hotspots, which I'm grateful for. Yeah. That's exciting. I mean, that's huge, huge, huge, huge progress, right? I mean, not even showing up on the scans anymore on the Pet scan. Natalie's down to normal range. CTC cut, you know, by two thirds down. It's at a third of what it was. I mean, incredible progress. And maybe talk a little bit about the quality of life you've had in the last, what, seven years now from 2014? Well, let's say after the surgery until now, what's your quality of life been like on this path again?

I feel, almost guilt. And I don't want to be too glib, but, my mother died of breast cancer aged 37, and so I saw what she went through. And I remember as a kid thinking, I just wish that I knew that, we would be able to better treat cancer sometime in the future. And unfortunately, it would not was not that technology was not going to help her. And so it was horrible to see what she went through. And then I had the benefit of technology, basically, and, and just basically information that helped me heal the way that she could.

And so I had, again, the surgery on, my lymph nodes, you know, so you have a scar that, you know, you have an incision that that heals fairly quickly. The, the throat, surgery was extremely, extraordinarily painful. But after that, it has been. I've had no life change at all. I didn't have any, issues with people who the people have with radiation. And certainly no issues like people that would have from, from chemo. And so I've lived basically a normal life since, I heal from those, original surgeries and, yeah, having seen what other people go through, I mean, today, what people go through with, chemo and radiation and their surgeries, and I, I had none of that.

Closing Reflections on Integrative Healing 30:18

And, there was a friend of a friend in Pennsylvania who had the exact same cancer that I did. And, in Pennsylvania, they've got, you know, their resources are very limited. And again, it's all chemo, radiation, chemo, radiation. And, that young man, he was, I think, in his late 30s, he died from that, the exact same thing. And I know that it doesn't happen for everyone, but it just it's a stark reminder of how poisoning the body to heal the body, to me, just doesn't make any sense at all. A healthy body can heal itself, in my opinion.

But a poison body just can't heal at all. Yeah. So powerful. Steve, I just, I want to thank you so much for for coming on and sharing your story. I, my hope with this summit and with all the work we continue to do, is that your experience is one that millions of others can experience as well, so that you don't have to feel guilty, that, you know, you get to live this normal quality of life while others suffer. Because this way of treatment, this integrative approach, this approach of utilizing the best in medicine that we have, whatever field it is, if it's working and it's effective and the individual feels good with that approach, and it's really about supporting the health of the body for the long term, that that becomes the norm for the future.

Not that these are the, the, few thousand cases that we hear of because there are thousands now that the data is collecting more and more of very similar cases and experiences like yours, but they become the millions of cases. It becomes the norm. That's really our hope with this. And, you know, and it's really about education. It's really about getting this kind of information out to more people around the world. And, congratulations, Steve, for, you know, where you are. I just wish you so much health and and, continued healing and happiness and, you know, just strength and courage on your journey forward.

And thank you for for coming here to share this with all of our listeners, so that they can hopefully glean a little something from your own journey to take into their lives, to to help them on their path of healing and health and longevity. So appreciate it. Thanks for what you do, and thanks for allowing me to be a small part of that. And I want to thank everyone for tuning in to 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.