Mederi Care: Your Guide To Managing Cancer With Botanical Medicine

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, thank you for having me.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

For everyone out there, Donald, also known as Donnie, is a Clinical Master Herbalist and Certified Nutritionist, renowned for his extraordinary knowledge and deep understanding of the healing properties of plants and nutrition, as well as epigenetics, laboratory medicine, oncologic pathology, and molecular oncology. He lectures nationally and internationally on his pioneering work in the fields of botanical and traditional medicine and cancer. He is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild and the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. He is the founder and president of the Mederi Center, a nonprofit 51-C3 organization for patient care, professional education, clinical research, holistic medicine, and integrative oncology. 

He is also the President and Formulator of Natura Health Products, a line of advanced botanical nutritional products for health care practitioners. Donnie conducts clinical practice at the Mederi Center in Ashland, Oregon, utilizing his unitive and integrative model known as Mederi Care, which evolved over more than 20 years of successful patient care. The Mederi Care model elegantly combines his passion for the latest scientific research with the wisdom of ancient healing traditions, resulting in a compassionate, creative, intelligent, and effective approach to healing.

As a visionary, leader, mentor, teacher, author, and healer, Donna’s mythology has transformed thousands of lives and has been taught to healthcare practitioners worldwide through the Medari Academy, an online program of modular courses focused on whole systems integrative oncology principles and clinical applications therapeutics. He is the author of Herbal Medicine, Healing and Cancer, Adaptogens and Medical Herbalism, Elite Herbs, and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging, and Chronic Disease. It publishes a weekly blog at donnieyance.com. Well, I am excited about this interview. This is going to be so cool.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Thank you, Michael. My pleasure.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Tell me, you have been working with cancer patients for so many years. When a cancer patient comes to you, what do you look for? Where do you start that journey?

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, I want to look at the situation through three distinct lenses. One lens has nothing to do with the cancer. One lens is all about the host, or the person with the cancer. We start there, and that lens is more based on traditional methodologies, such as interviewing, letting the patient give you their narrative about their health, asking all your questions, and observing things, whether it be their eyes, their tongue, or their skin health. You take this big step, you do this big interview, and you develop a relationship. Because everything is based on relationships, this is a little bit more subjective, but this is a big piece because often I say, Make your patient healthier and forget about cancer, and your patient will live longer and better. That is the first lens that we use. We call it a host lens, and it is based predominantly on traditional modalities: traditional Chinese medicine, Western medicine, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, and a little bit of Ayurvedic medicine. It is none of those in and of itself, but it is a convergence of those and also brings those systems of medicine into a real-life contemporary model. That is the first lens.

The second lens that we look at is all the laboratory tests we might take on a patient. There are two ways that you look at laboratory tests. One is that you are looking at it about the host. How does this blood work lab test that we are looking at reflect the health of the person? The second way we look at it is how is this blood work conducive to the onset of disease, most notably cancer. The third way we look at it is in more aggressive, advanced, or active cancer. Has the cancer hijacked what we call the microenvironment? Because the second target is the microenvironment. If it has, what is it manipulating, which we can determine in the lab test that we need to change? 

Now we are looking at how we maximize the health of the person in the host, how we alter the microenvironment to maximize it for the health of the host, make it the least conducive to cancer, or analyze it about cancer and then change it. Then the third lens mainlines we look at is the disease itself, and we are going to look at cancer, which includes all of that, looking at it through all the typical pathology, but now also doing a more in-depth look at what we call the molecular characteristics of cancer. What is driving this cancer? What mutations does it have? What growth factors does it have, and what does that have to do with the optimal way to treat this patient?  now that we have looked at it through their host, through the microenvironment, and through the disease itself, we are going to apply six toolboxes. Those toolboxes: the first toolbox is botanical medicine, which is the heart or the soul of Mederi Care, which is the system of medicine.

The second is supplemental nutritional medicine. What you give your patients to take in the form of a supplement might be a combination of nutrients. The third toolbox is dietary, or food as medicine. The fourth toolbox is lifestyle as medicine. The fifth toolbox is modern pharmaceutical medicine. That is its toolbox. How do we utilize drug therapies and different things that are present? That toolbox that most people are leaning on is the predominant toolbox. For Mederi Care, we are often using it in a different way than the standard of care would recommend. Then the sixth toolbox is what we call spiritual care. Spiritual care is both: how do you meet the needs of somebody? Often somebody will come to our center or come me who had cancer for a long time, has exhausted a lot of different treatments, is very aggressive, and has a deeper need to go about the relationship we have with that person. Spiritual care is nourishing the patient in that spiritual way, but it is also applying your spirit to how you decipher how to support that patient. Because of their mind, there is so much complexity when you start looking at it through all these different lenses that the mind itself cannot figure it all out. What I often tell people is to fill your mind with as much information as you can and then go to your heart. Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a humble servant.”

I always say wisdom, courage, and love are the great healers, not fear. Often, patients are fearful. Often, the system of medicine is fear-based. We have to pave our way away from that. We have to start with a place where we are fearless and filled with love, and that is the overview, in a nutshell, of how we start to go about things so those are the schematic elements. The first element is the philosophical element. The first is wisdom, which is ancient and comes from traditional medicine. The second is knowledge, which is modern and scientific. The third is common sense and logic, and the fourth is musical intuition. Then we have, most importantly, prayer and love. What we would say is providing faith and hope as well in a realistic way to our patients, and always knowing that the most important thing is not always eliminating the cancer or having the most effective way to shrink the tumor or eliminate the tumor. People get too impressed with that. The most important thing is helping people live longer, helping them live better, and sometimes taking a very aggressive approach. For example, may eradicate cancer only to see it come back and put a patient in a very poor state of health and have them live a shortened life span rather than ultimately having them live long and in a very healthy way, possibly never eliminating their cancer.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, and that is the thing: with traditional oncology, they are very good at shrinking tumors. They may not be so good at adding longevity and increasing quality of life, but they are very good at shrinking tumors. That has become the focus that they want to project on the patients as a measure of success. You are coming at the end of the day, and we see this in animals. We see an animal that dies after a long, healthy, and enjoyable life. Then you do an autopsy, and you see that the animal died with a bunch of tumors, but it did not affect their quality of life or their length of life. They just lived with those tumors, and that was not a big deal. Then, to look more exactly at what you are doing, shifting the focus away from the tumor and then shifting towards more longevity and health becomes so important.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Yes. I always tell people that cancer is a unique disease across the board. There are no two types of cancer. They are identical. There are so many types and subtypes of cancer. Then every patient is unique. You have a unique patient, a unique host, and a unique disease. Do not get too caught up in anything in a patterned way. Every time you go from one patient to the next, you have to start all over again. Maybe you think you apply some of the same things, and you will find that you need to go in a different direction with one patient and every way, even how you talk to them. One patient is very emotionally-centered; another patient is very intellectual. They have done a ton of their research. Wherever you need to meet them, you meet them because I am a research fanatic. I spend 1 to 2 hours every single day of my life compiling, researching, studying, compiling, and writing papers. I have a monograph on every single plant I use, some with 400 to 500 citations now, mostly centered around cancer, but not entirely centered around cancer. Because, again, when you are dealing with an aging population, you are not going to just treat cancer; you are going to maximize their health. A lot of people with cancer die of heart disease. They had cancer, and the heart disease is what got them. Our ultimate goal, as I said, is to make people healthier, keep them healthy, and help them live as long as possible. That is always the goal.

Now, sometimes you have to forget—not forget—but you do need to shift the emphasis on the cancer. I deal with the idea of pediatric cancer with very fast, aggressive, fast-growing tumors. I do not have time to say we can ignore your cancer and just work on you. We have to put all these pieces together. I always see it as a puzzle. You put all these pieces together, and that is what you need to do. Part of the initial pieces is our targeting of cancer. Often, that means utilizing the modern pharmaceutical toolbox. But again, maybe in a slightly different way, the standard of care is not the best way. The first line that is often given for a type of cancer is not always effective in every situation. How do we determine what people are going to benefit from, what treatment, and what people are not going to benefit from? Part of what I do is because, to tell you the truth, I learned it a long time ago, 30+ years ago. I have been working with cancer for almost four decades now, but I learned a long time ago that I can do everything right. I can give people the best diet and the best herbs, but if they are on an aggressive treatment that is doing no good and only harming them, the outcome is still not going to be great. The only way the outcome is consistently great is when all the pieces are unified. That is why I call Mederi Care not an integrative system nor a collaborative system, but a unified system. Everything is purposefully put together to work in a unified way to synergize. 

Through that harmonization, we go to the musical terminology and say that the outcome is great. It is not something we do. It is because we use a lot of what we call non-cancer therapies, even drug therapies at very low dosages, whether it be an mTOR inhibitor, a COX-2 inhibitor, or an H2 inhibitor. There are different ways of using metronomic chemotherapy that are very different from using standard-care chemotherapy. It is a very low, constant dosage of a drug that is no longer meant to be cytotoxic but rather psychostatic. It is angiogenic-regulating and immune-regulating because cancer hijacks almost every part and every system of the body it needs to manipulate to grow.

We are talking predominantly about the immune system. Cancer takes over your immune system. It suppresses the cells that are going to be alert to it. It helps produce all of those chemokines, those different cytokines, the neutrophils, and the macrophages that enable it to thrive and grow. We have to do, as I said, all kinds of things to see that consistently, you can see people over and over again who are not supposed to be getting well are getting well. That is what motivates me more than anything—just seeing people apply this system and seeing them get well over and over again.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, when do you? Because a lot of patients say you have some patients who say, I just want to do natural things, and that is all I want to do. Then they are not unifying all these different therapies you are talking about. But they are doing wheatgrass juice, they eat plant-based, they are taking some herbs, and then all of a sudden they come to somebody, yourself, myself, or the doctors that work in this field, and they get to stage four, and it is all over the place, and they, when do you feel that an individual should look at chemotherapy and some of the uses of that toolbox that you are talking about? Maybe I can lean on more of the traditional oncology to just shrink the tumor and then, at the same time, support all other factors?

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, we have to look at that toolbox about all the other toolboxes and know that everything in that toolbox is more of a sledgehammer and, for the most part, has a very strong concept of blocking something. When you look at modern pharmaceutical medicine, it is very strong and anything but harmonizing and unifying. It works, I will say, like a sledgehammer. The way botanical medicine works is in a network fashion. It is doing any one compound, and one herb will be metabolized in the body orally ingested into a multitude of new compounds in this biotransformation. One compound creates a dozen new compounds that enter our bloodstream and act in hundreds, maybe thousands, of different ways. This concept of network medicine is so beautiful that we can look at plant medicines, how they affect organ systems, how they affect cellular networks, and how they affect molecular networks, it is endless. Then you put lots of plants together, it is even more endless. I always tell people, that herbs are endlessly supporting your body, trying to regulate, trying to create better efficiency, trying to help the body auto-regulate, and being epigenetic modifiers. But drugs are very specific, and they are very functional. They are not harmonizing. They do not have a way of bathing our bodies and communicating as plant medicines do. But they will serve a purpose that frequently natural medicine will not do. 

Sometimes you need something strong to get in place while everything else starts to work. But you have to be sure that you are picking the right kinds of drugs and giving them at the right dosage. Most of the time in modern medicine, they are using the wrong drugs frequently, or they are giving them at dosages way too high. You take a great drug  Everolimus that was approved. Maybe 10 or more years ago for breast cancer. It was approved at 10 milligrams. It is an mTOR inhibitor, mostly a mTOR1 inhibitor because there is mTOR1 and mTOR2, very strong mTOR1 inhibiting. It was approved at 10 milligrams a day for breast cancer. No woman can tolerate it. They get mouth sores; they just cannot take it. It was too toxic. then the CDK4/6 inhibitors came out, and IBRANCE and all the oncologists abandoned ship with Everolimus. They made a big mistake because it is a very effective drug, particularly for people with specific mutations, and it can gain a reputation. But even without that mutation, it can be very effective. I often get to try to get people to get on either 2.5 milligrams and take it only three times a week, which is less. It is seven and a half milligrams per week, rather than 10 milligrams per day. You only need a little bit. When they finally researched two and a half milligrams, it was just as effective as 10 milligrams with none of the adverse effects. 

But all the doctors abandon ship because they got the CDK4/6 inhibitors and none of their patients can tolerate it. Whenever I recommend it and talk to an oncologist, Oh, my patient cannot tolerate it. I said, It is dose-dependent. I said they were given an overload. Remember, when you take a pharmaceutical drug one day, like an aromatase inhibitor, I often have people recommend it rather than not take it because they are getting too many side effects, which often happens. Oh, Donnie, I cannot take that; that Letrozole: It just messes with my body in every way and my joints hurt, all of them. I said that it was because you were taking too much. It can still be very effective. Let us challenge your system and find it. The only mechanism is to lower your estrogen by blocking the aromatase enzyme pathway. Once that is blocked, it does not need to be blocked more and more. Every time you take a drug; you take a drug today at 9:00, you take the drug tomorrow at 9:00. That drug was not cleared out of your system. Letrozole takes up to a week to clear out. Now you are piling drugs on top of drugs 

People get toxic with these drugs. When you find the right drugs, you have to dose them. As people get older, they need even fewer and fewer drugs. But a doctor is not free to do that. That is the crime of our system. When a drug is approved at a certain dosage, as an oncologist, you have to prescribe and tell your patient to take it at that dosage. That is just the way the system was set up. If you say, tried challenging it, I do that. They now are liable, legally they can be held accountable, and all sorts of stuff starts to be drummed up. But that is why our system has to change. We have to be able to adapt our medicine better to the patient. We have to be able to know what patients are going to benefit from based on the various testing methodologies that we have. Certainly, we have ones now; you test for HER2, but even that is not that accurate. There are all kinds of deletions within HER2. Sometimes a tumor is heterogeneous. It has heterogeneity, which means that, particularly in cancers that have been treated a lot, you can take a sample from one tumor and take it from another, you have two different types of cancer.. You have three different kinds of cancer. Even within a person, particularly with advanced cancer, they can have three, four, or five different types of cancer. Their first type of cancer is still present. They are virgin cancers. But now it is been mutated a multitude of times and gone through different stages. What it becomes completely different, or very different, from that first cancer and what we have in some cases, as well as more advanced cancer in older people. I want them to think about a concept called competitive release, where you are not trying to eradicate their cancer because, believe it or not, they are virgin, slow-growing cancer. That is still around, competing against their aggressive cancer.  

I often say, Sometimes you have to make friends with the enemy. That is not the worst way to get rid of the worst enemy. I said, Sometimes, and it is a whole concept in oncology called competitive release where, take prostate cancer, in an advanced case in an older man, they are overtreated all the time. They are giving heavy hormone blockade agents just in a disease that is not that aggressive, that is accentuating all the other diseases they are getting, neurological disease, heart disease, bone disease, depression, all the things that you would not want to an 80-year-old man to be getting because they are over-treating their cancer when it is cancer is not going to kill them. It does not mean you ignore their cancer, but you have to be very gentle with how you treat it and not overtreat it. I know, I have gone in a big circle around everything. But hopefully, I am covering what you were asking.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

You are doing great now, and all of this is fascinating to me. One of the components that is been talked a lot about is that when you remove, you are talking about the slow, original, slow-growing cancer, and let us say, you do surgery and you remove that, and then all of a sudden you have all these daughter cancers that pop up that become very aggressive. Just cutting out the cancer is not the solution. But you are saying, become friends with it and then support the environment that it exists within.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Yes, In Mederi Care, it is never optimal to do surgery as an upfront therapy. If we look at the surgery toolbox, we want to treat cancer systemically, always first, whenever possible, unless it is an emergency. There are three main reasons, and I should have written about this in my book 25 years ago. There are three main reasons why you want to do that. Since then, Neoadjuvant therapy has become more and more popular. 25 years ago, nobody was doing it. Now it is becoming more of an approach to cancer. But there are three main reasons why. Number one, you treat a systemic disease systemically, first because it is a systemic disease. Nobody’s ever died of breast cancer. Nobody’s ever died. It is always a metastatic disease of the brain, the lungs, and the liver, not so much the bone anymore. But those are the main sites where breast cancer metastasizes. Again, you have to treat the systemic disease systemically. That is number one. Number two, if your systemic approach is working, guess what happens? Your tumor shrinks. Sometimes it disappears. Often, it disappears. When people and all the pieces are put together in over two or three months of therapy. It is not unusual for me to have a tumor just vanish. It is gone.

Now you just say, Do you have surgery or not? That is the question. That is the second thing that happens. The third reason is when you have shrunk your tumor by 50%, you have far less invasive surgery now. Your surgeries are much simpler. Surgery in and of itself is cancer-promoting? Why? Because you are weakening the host. The host is weakened now, and cancer’s already weakening the host. Second, you are creating an inflammatory environment and a pro-angiogenic environment, which is just what causes cancer loss. You have to be very careful. Often in the Mederi Care, we say, Let us treat systemic issues early. Let us see what happens over the next two or three months—four months, maybe even longer. Once we feel things have regressed, well, then I think it is permissible to do surgery. In some cases, if you can get your tumor small enough, I am a big fan of Cryoablation, which is freezing the tumors. I have had a lot of people do that,  a breast tumor. If you can get it down to 1.5 centimeters or smaller, they just stick a needle in it and freeze it, and that has it. Not only is it noninvasive, but it has a localized immunological effect. After six months or a year, that ice ball that is left disappears, and you have a breast that looks like it was never touched. I am a big fan of Cryptoablation in many situations, but not without the systemic approach. To me, systemic treatment is the most important thing. People have had great surgeries. I have everything. It is all gone. Six months later, they are dealing with cancer everywhere. That is a common theme that I have heard often.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. I just spoke to a patient, before you did the surgery, she had a lumpectomy, and then two weeks later, she had a big tumor that just grew on her sternum, then her hip, and then her breast. It is just two weeks after the surgery. The surgery was successful. It was all gone, clean margins, all of these things. We talked about the dangers of these daughter cancers. If you were treated systemically and you have been able to shrink the cancer, making it a smaller target, there is not as much risk as for things to take place distal for metastatic activity at that time.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Correct. Now you have got a much healthier patient. You have positioned them with a  good protocol, and already we have seen that things are extremely quiet systemically based on maybe the regression of the tumor. Now that you have reanalyzed the microenvironment, maybe you saw it. We saw all kinds of things. We saw that, to me, a simple CBC is maybe the most important thing when looking at a cancer patient. People do not understand how important a CBC is because if your patient has high neutrophils-A and does not have a bacterial infection, they are in a hot, inflammatory state. After all, cancer can be hot. It can be cold, it can be intermediate, it can be in between. But whenever you have high neutrophils and low lymphocytes,  you have a bad situation as a cancer patient. 

Again, unless they are fighting some acute infection, that is the only case. But if there is none, then their bodies are pro-inflammatory. Tumor-associated neutrophils are big promoters of a cascade of events in cancers. You have tumor-associated macrophages; all these collaborative cells that are promoting the cancer. You have to see those things improve. Maybe you have done some angiogenic markers:  Fibrinogen, D-dimer, and Plasminogen activator inhibitor. Those were elevated. Now they are not elevated anymore. Maybe we did growth factors; Lycopene, HER2, VEGF, and maybe a tumor marker as well. All of those were elevated before we first got the patient. Now they are all quiet. They are all where they need to be. I am pretty confident that if I have gotten all the blood work looking the way I want it and it is all getting moving and everything’s moving in the direction, then I am totally fine with surgery taking place at that time.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, that was my next question as regards adding to the patient; they are doing all this care. They are seeing that there is still a tumor there. Maybe it is shrinking, but it is always that thing in the back of your mind—what is happening in the rest of my body? Is it ending up elsewhere? Is the treatment successful? Are we moving in the right direction? Medically, it is usually imaging; that is where they always go. You have to deal with all the dye, which is toxic in itself. You mentioned, CBC? You mentioned neutrophil lymphocytes. I know there is a neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio that is optimal. Then, many people do lymphocyte-monocyte ratios that are optimal. Can you talk a little bit more about the different things that you look at over and above what you just expressed? What are some of the numbers to be between to add to know that you are doing better?

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, one thing is that all of it has to be adapted to the individual. Nobody knows what their perfect balance is. We each have our own ecosystem. Everyone’s microenvironment—two-thirds of your microbiome—is unique to the individual. Only one-third of all humans share that when we are looking at bloodwork, we are not trying to look at it; we are a machine. Everyone has the same perfect bloodwork. The first thing we have to do is when we start to look at baselines, ask ourselves what part of the bloodwork is just part of it. I have had patients with white blood cell counts of two for 30 to 40 years. Everyone I would ever want even wants to keep sending them to a hematologist. They are totally fine. I have had a person with MDS with hemoglobin that fluctuates around seven and a half to eight. He has more energy than anyone, so we cannot just always interpret bloodwork like everyone is the same. We start, we take our baseline, and we look at things. We will look at the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio. 

I always look for trends, which is the most important thing. We get a baseline; we can tell when things are active, and things are deflecting that. But sometimes we cannot always. Now we are going to start looking at the trends. What are the trends? Tell us about this. Also platelets. It is not good to have high ts. Platelets are also cancer-promoting; a lot of the angiogenic dependency is around platelets and aggregating platelets, and then even inflammatory cells, say histamine. That can be some cancers, like neurofibromatosis type 1, which is a very histamine-driven tumor. Some mast cells are involved in breast cancer. Everything we have to look at depends on the individual. Not even anemia. Some people have a 10 or 15. They are completely fine. Another person who has always had Ferritin has been 50 or 100, and now it is 15 and they are severely anemic. 

People have different blood works. For vitamin D levels. In someone’s case, vitamin D was 10, and now it is 20. It is far better than it was. It is not; we do not have to get everybody up to this perfect range. We are just looking to see if things are moving. Often, we are not in a hurry to move things either. Sometimes we are in acute situations. When some things happen acutely, then we need to change that acutely as well. When something is part of a chronic pitcher, to me, slow and steady wins the race. We do not have to give people hot masses of dosages of vitamins because they have been deficient; we want to nurture them slowly back up and let them keep adapting, even people with methylation defects. I think they are always overtreated. People with low thyroid function are overtreated. Some people have; everyone’s THS is always in a different range. Everyone is a little bit different. We just see what this tells us—this blood work about what the patient’s health is—and what this has to do with their disease. Now, what do we want to move, and how much do we want to move it?

These are questions that we ask ourselves all the time. But generally, I am a vitalistic practitioner. I am interested in building a life force and doing things as gently and slowly as possible, knowing that sometimes I have to abandon that and not do that because we have to always adapt to everything in each situation that we see. We do not know that our philosophy is one of adaptation. Sometimes we have to be very aggressive up front. But generally speaking, I follow that because every system of medicine follows the same premise. Why is every system of medicine built on building the patient’s vitality as the most important thing, and we keep abandoning that? We keep people asking me, Donnie, where and when are you going to give me cytotoxic herbs? I do. I said I need to build you up first and foremost. We will get to that. Do not worry. It is that thing, I said—that is, I want to get you stronger than ever imaginable because part of cancer is a catabolic disease. Aging is a catabolic process. You have surgeries—catabolic, chemo is catabolic, and radiation is catabolic. If you do not do some anabolic restoration, you are not going to get to where you need to be. These are very fundamental things that I focus on and then layer things in. We get different herbal formulas that are designed to be either alternatives or very specific.

I have a formula that is based on chemotherapy, and you have Madagascar Periwinkle, you have the Pacific Yew, and you have the Camptotheca, where Irinotecan and Topotecan are from. Plants have, you take the Madagascar Periwinkle, thathast 80 alkaloids in it all with anti-tumor activity. But now we have made three drugs from that one plant; Monoterpene, Vinblastin,e and Vincristine and we isolate compounds, but the plant has so many other compounds—the Pacific Yew has 27 toxins alone in that plant—all with anti-tumor activity. But we just isolate one and then make Taxol, Taxotere, Abraxan,e, and others. Other related toxins now that are now available. I will give people whenever someone’s on a chemo that is of plant origin. I frequently give them the whole plant extract to go along with that and other synergistic and supporting herbs. But again, I am always asking, What am I doing to make the patient healthy? I am analyzing their microenvironment, and I am constantly looking at all these parameters about the tumor, whether we can do circulating tumor cells or liquid biopsies, of which there are numerous labs now.  They all have a little bit of different technology. I have my favorites. I think, it is the Wild West with these labs testing nobody, there is no great oversight. People are often making mistakes by going to labs where their methodology does not translate over to what we need to focus on.  I question a lot of that. But I am, fond of certain testing methodologies. I am always doing tumor testing as well. You have tumor testing; you have liquid biopsies now. You have circulated in tumor cells, you have the standard tumor markers, and you have the microenvironment markers. By the time we look at this, it is better than looking at scans. 

You had mentioned scans before because scans can miss things as well. Scans sometimes cannot always differentiate between what is a tumor and what is not a tumor. If there is a lot of fluid, if there is a lot of air,  in the GI tract, scans cannot see very well all the time. Scans do not pick up micro-disease or stem cells because it is the stem cells, chemotherapy does not kill cancer stem cells. If you have smart and intellectual cancer, it is going to have a stem cell population as soon as the coast is clear, and that is going to be re-differentiated through mesenchymal transit or transformation, where the EMT occurs, where it recruits the epithelial cells, and all of a sudden you have cancer growing again in your body, and that is resistant to what you often did before. If you did Paclitaxel now, that is not going to work again. You need to go to your strongest, your next strongest line of chemotherapy, and then your next strongest. That is not a good place. You have to identify your cancer stem cells. Again, the natural toolbox addresses cancer stem cells. That is why we need to do a lot of combinations and things. We need this unification to see all of our patients getting well and staying well.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

You mentioned the liquid biopsies, and I know there are a bunch of different labs you want to test for the CBC, I recognize that this does not mean that other labs are bad, but which one is your favorite out of them from all your research?

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, I am fond of NeoGenomics, where they do both pathology testing and then some liquid biopsies. The way the system is working now that everything in medicine is very profit-driven comes down to money. If I have a liquid biopsy and I have a big sales force and I have a lot of money invested in my sales force, Guardant360 does or FoundationOne, I go knocking on the door to the hospital and say, Let me give you a presentation. Now look at how much money you can make on these tests. Then the hospital adopts it, and that is their testing. They are going to pick, and there are lots of things that are done that should never be done. Patients should not be given these growth factors or these bone marrow growth factors. Say, Neulasta and Neupogen. They just promote cancer growth, too. It is a travesty. But the hospitals make 10 to $2,000 for every shot that they give to stimulate their neutrophils. 

That is what it is doing. They stimulate the neutrophils and suppress their patients with these shots. I wrote a whole paper, so I wrote papers on everything. If you want to understand fibrinogen and cancer and why that is an important biomarker, I have a 200-page paper with well, with 150 citations on Fibrinogen and Cancer-level, Copper-zinc-ratio in cancer. Why that’s important? Everything in neutrophils—I have a whole paper on that. I write papers on every single thing. VEGF and Cancer, VEGF Levels in Cancer, Galectin3 and Cancer, Why these biomarkers are so essential? Why serum HER2 new is better than pathology HER2 new?

I like NeoGenomics. There are other ones. I do not mind looking at the other ones, but the methodology of, well, it is called next-generation gene sequencing through RNA technology is not as good as DNA technology. There are these different things. Even the old cell search, the FDA-approved CDC, I still think is very good. It has been, but that is only approved, I think, for breast, lung, and maybe colon. I mostly go, but there are numerous other labs out there that are pretty good too. I am not interested in what is called great testing or a lot of that testing. I do not feel that that translates at all to reality, and it often tells people to do things that do not work, and they have steered away from the right things to do. That was testing. I am not for it at all.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

You mentioned a bunch of different things, fibrinogen. I know we have talked about ferritin. There are a lot of these other markers that are easily available through CBC, CNP, and yes, C-reactive protein, Sed Rate, you mentioned D-dimer. All of these are very simple numbers and an analysis of the basophils in interleukin six, you have eosinophils, and you have so there are so many different numbers that you can look at that are easily available.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Yes, LDH is another good-looking lactate dehydrogenase that is important. Sometimes it is done on a standard cancer patient, but most of the time it is not. But I think that is important. I and o PH, urine first thing in the morning because I  want people to keep their PH up at around seven. I frequently give people potassium bicarbonate as a part of the treatment protocol that we do. These are very straight, more straightforward things that I use for fibrinogen and d-dimer. Of course, a lot of blood-moving botanicals are important. I like heart rate variability and looking at the nervous system. My feelings are the most important thing you can do for a patient. The number one most important thing, and it comes back to that spiritual care, is to nourish the vagal system or the vagus nerve. That is the most important because the sympathetic nervous system is the main driver of cancer, particularly metastatic cancer and cancer reoccurrence. It is not an initiator but a big-time driver. I am also doing a lot of work on the nervous system and the endocrine system. These are part of the core, I think, of where we need Probably the biggest mistake breakthrough in cancer is that accidental in many things, the association of beta blockers and cancer growth slows down and reoccurrence rates are much lower, and people are on beta blockers only because they are antagonizing the sympathetic nervous system. That is the only mechanism there.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

These are all the things that I do again, that are pieces to the puzzle that we do. But I would say if someone pushed me and said, What is the most important thing to do for a cancer patient? I nourish their nervous system help them to understand the importance of that and make sure they are doing things, whether the breathing techniques, prayer, music, chanting, whatever we can do to help them in that way is, to me, the most important thing you can do.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. I could not agree with you more. I love what you said, in the earlier section of our discussion that you fill your mind with all these pieces of information, all this knowledge, but then you need it to be organized. The more intuitive heart is component intuitive. It is beyond your cerebral and executive thinking. You need to allow these pieces of information to correlate with each other and become a network of information and each piece will fit in its specific location. You cannot do that with executive thinking, it is more of an intuitive process, and that is a deeper knowing that exists. Then, that is where mediation and music, being in that parasympathetic state, all of that becomes important.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Yes, when I teach, I always tell people I am a musician first and foremost. Not only do I think music and sound are very important for healing, but conceptually, the application of being a musician and the complexity of the mind are all working simultaneously. Because, let us face it, you are listening, which is a key component. When you are working with a patient, you are listening to that patient’s narrative; you are listening to yourself because you are trying to decipher what I am going to be doing to support and help this patient. Now, you are also acquiring all this other information at the same time, and only, I think, a musical mind can decipher that, because if you are a jazz musician, you have a chart, you have a melody, you improvisation you have own sound, and you have own way of interpreting what is going on. But you are also listening to all the other musicians and working off of them. That the mind, the heart, and the spirit all work together because when you go to play an instrument, hopefully you are not thinking anymore and you are just feeling. You are going to your heart because all the work was done. I always tell people, Do all your studying, without your patients. It just flows; it just flows through you, and that musical mind is very appropriate to medicine, in my opinion. Otherwise, it is too difficult. As a musician, all parts of the brain are firing together.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. Is that part of what they call unconscious knowing? Which is the highest level of knowing. Well, Donnie also knows people can listen to your music, you are also known as a funk monk.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Yes. I have you can listen to some of my music on all the sites, including  Spotify. If you just put my name in Donnie Yance, I-E, with Donnie, always remember that. Then you could also go; my CD is called Heaven Awaits. I wrote that song as a reflection of all the patients I have worked with who have passed on. It is this meditation song, but there are ten songs on that album, and I wrote nine of them. Gino Vanelli wrote the 10th, called Hope Alley. Then, I have a new one that will come out by the end of this year, which I call Cosmic Force. I am finishing the last song on that one, so a lot of them are melody-driven. Maybe the song Heaven Awaits is bass and clarinet. Yes, music is a very important part of my being. It strengthens me in medicine. I guess, the more music I do, the better I get at medicine, for sure.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I love it. For people to be able to get access to all the research that you have done, where do they go for all of that?

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

My blog has something, it contains a lot of information; donnieyance.com. We have MederiCenter.org and in there,e people can learn about the academy that we just launched a couple of months ago, where we have six courses up and online, including three on cancer. That is where I teach this methodology. We have students now from all over the world, from pretty much every continent, in that academy for the last 25 years or so. I have been teaching week-long courses that people have come here to Ashland, Oregon, but I have way too much to share. It is overwhelming. We have developed, hopefully, what will be a two-year program, but it is set up in a modular way so people can go at their own pace, they can jump in whenever they want, they can even pick and choose what courses it is; it was not my vision. My vision was to have a classroom and have people all go through the program, a full two-year program together, and then certify them for Mederi Care.  I hope to get there. But now, there are some great courses up, so people can get a lot of information that way. We have about 35, or 40, what I call ATMS practitioners that are part of a network that I teach and send a lot of data out every two or three days to this group, but they have all taken the courses that I have done.

I think once people take the courses, they get access to a lot of my information. But as it stands, the best way is through my blog website, which is donnieyance.com. I have got lots and lots of stuff on botanicals and cancer and cancer metabolism, and, all the misconceptions that diet misconceptions. Everybody is, I think often going down the wrong road, putting people on aggressive ketogenic diets, and things like that, are not the way we want to be going you want to. I write about all this stuff: Glucose and Cancer. I have got one that I have not published yet on Glutamine and Cancer. Cancer is hijacking these things. You have to let me know; that is where the blockage is. You cannot eliminate all the energy sources of cancer and get anywhere because it keeps finding new energy sources. You have to find a new way and in this combination way, you can do that. I often tell people that people are often looking at the baseball and not the pitcher. When a pitcher throws a ball and hits a batter in the head, does the batter go running after the ball and try to punch the ball? I said, No, it goes to the source. I said, You have to go to the source. You have to go out for that cancer. That is a little bit of an overview of things, and we have recently published a Breast Cancer Retrospective Study, which is now available that people can get through our website.

I am going to do a blog on it as well that gives an overview, but it is, I think, 35 breast cancer patients. Then we are about to launch a study on dogs. We have tried so hard, Michael, to launch clinical trials with big institutions like Ohio State, only to have the final IRB, knock it down, and say, No, we cannot do this because we are quote-unquote concerned about this theoretical herb-drug interaction. Even though in Ohio State, I said, Give me your sickest patients. I only want stage four cancer patients who have failed everything. Now this is going to be a clinical trial waiting for them to go into. Even then, all the oncologists said, Yes, this is great; we can do it this way. We can do a lot of botanicals in the drugs because they are buying into this. Then, and then, they get to the final IRB. I will be out there for seven years trying, and the pharmacists, not the oncologists, will knock it down. Pharmacists are more problematic than oncologists because they all go to the same website and read the same information. That is not accurate or true. It is theoretical information, not accurate information. It is all based on theoretical pharmacokinetics, which has nothing to do with pharmacodynamics or pharmacogenetics. In the real world, what happens?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, it always fascinates me, as a simple example for patients, I just want to get off antidepressants, and then you are suggesting something like St. John’s Wort, and then they read on a site that, well, I am not a depressant; I cannot take that St. John’s Wort? It is going to have a serotonin storm, and I am going to die. It always fascinates me because exactly what you are saying is a theoretical assumption. After all, it has been used in that area. Then they think they function similarly when they do not.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

Well, I love St. John’s Wort and I go with that one because it is an amazing, amazing plan for so many things, including cancer. I can tell you now that for 35, or 40 years I have used St. John’s Wort to get people off SSRI and always with great success in all research. Even in the last two or three months, meta-analysis research has compared St. John’s Wort to see if it is equal to or outperforms all SSRIs with a much better safety profile. St. John’s War is an amazing plant. What they worry about is not so much the serotonin storm. They worry about the fact that it is such an aphetic detoxifier through the 2D6 pathway and the 384 pathway that you diminish your drugs and your blood levels of drugs. But the interesting thing is that probably 30 to 50,000 women died because of a drug-drug interaction of using an SSRI in combination with Tamoxifen. SSRI inhibit 2D6, and tamoxifen is metabolized through 2D6. All women put on tamoxifen and SSRI, and we are not benefiting from their tamoxifen. They were not getting any benefit. The ticker of that is that St. John’s Wort is a 2D6 inducer. It would have been able to correct that. 

That’s the funny thing about it. It is you are avoiding St. John’s Wort and taking your SSRI with your tamoxifen when the SSRI is the problem in every way, with one last thing, I will just say because I know we are ending, but the irinotecan is another one. When you take a high dose of St. John’s Wort, 900 or 1500 milligrams, with a standard dosage of irinotecan, which is a UGT1A1 metabolizing enzyme pathway, that herb will upregulate that and eliminate that drug from the blood, maybe up to 30% more. You will say, interaction, this is terrible. It does send out a potential interaction, but just because blood levels are diminished does not mean a drug is not working. In the case of St. John’s Wort, no study shows St. John’s Wort diminishes the beneficial effects of irinotecan if anything, the study shows that it mitigates the adverse effects and potentiates the action of the drug, even in the light of it, bringing down blood levels of that drug.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, see, and that is what I love about the work that you are doing is that you are bringing in the science, instead of just making assumptions. That is huge. Well, Donnie, it is been such a pleasure, and thank you so much for everything that you are doing. Thank you so much.

Donald Yance, Jr., CN, RH(AHG)

You are welcome. It is wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much, too.