Peer Into The Future Of Cancer Care

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, Mike, it is a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yes, we have been friends and have also worked together for several years. I am very excited about your new program and look forward to participating.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

For the audience out there, Dr. Steven Iacoboni has been practicing medical oncology for over 40 years. During that time, he has had over 200,000 patient encounters. During his long career, he has seen the practice of oncology evolve into its present state from its primitive state back in the 1980s. Towards the end of the third decade of his career, he decided to become more familiar and educated with an integrated approach, including naturopathic remedies added to chemotherapy. 

To that end, he studied abroad and did primary research on truly integrated cancer care, especially overcoming chemotherapy drug resistance with naturopathic remedies. This does not even touch on the breadth of knowledge, training, and accomplishments that you have had during these 40 years. You have taught at some of the most prestigious places, which gave you a little bit to add to that bio so people understand where you are coming from.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, sure, I will try and be humble about it. That is the most important thing. But I did go. I went to medical school in San Francisco, which many people regard as one of the top schools in the world. Then I did my training in oncology at MD Anderson, which many people regard as the top cancer center in the world, certainly in the United States. I did my training there and then was offered a professorship, which I did for some time. But then I got a little disillusioned by the whole process, which was not, in my opinion, patient-centered. It was pharmacology-centered. I have a great interest in pharmacology. 

However, the pharmacology approach in medical centers is designed to bring new drugs to market. Not so much if that is the primary goal. The care of the patient is important, and it is, of course, undertaken. But it is not the primary goal. A lot of people do not realize that. I also have a deep love for being at the bedside with the patient. I could not do that in academia. They want you to let the trainees do the patient work while you sit and read papers. I just decided I was not going to spend my life doing that. I went into private practice.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

With that also, that is an interesting point for people to understand when they go to places like MD Anderson and you come with the understanding or thinking that they have the most cutting-edge tools available, and they truly do. But at the same time, their focus may not be solely on your care. It may be biased in a way to focus more on the development of the drugs and see what the drugs can do. I am sure they are funded quite a bit by the pharmacy and pharmaceutical companies to support the research and studies that they are doing at that location.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, exactly. I do not mean to sound critical. I hope I do not. What I think is the finer point to make is that the mission of an academic institution is to do research. That is their primary mission. The mission of a doctor in the community is to take care of the patient. I had to choose between research and patient care. I just fell in love with patient care, and research is hard. There is a great burden on the industry to bring drugs to market and comply with all the regulations. They have to do it; they invest billions of dollars doing it, but it still did not filter down quite perfectly to the bedside. My priority was care at the bedside, so I had to leave and do my own thing. I made that choice. But I know what it is to be at a research institution. Some of the comments I will make later about how that impacts community cancer care I will make some more comments in that regard when we get into that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

In addition to functioning as a medical oncologist, you have also heavily researched the integrative aspect. You were the head of the oncology department at a clinic in Mexico. Then you also ran the Dr. Forsyth Clinic for a couple of years; you have quite a breadth of knowledge in both areas.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, I do. I think of myself as one of the more important integrative ecologists in the country for the reasons you mentioned. What happened was that a lot of us believed that we would be curing cancer by the year 2000, and that did not happen. I had to ask the question, Why? I could not get any answers within the confines of conventional medicine. I started casting about for answers. To be honest, that made me a little unpopular with my colleagues, who feel committed to towing the line and not asking questions. But it is hard to not meet the needs of your dying patient in favor of the needs of the industry. It was just impossible for me to ignore the needs of my patients. I asked the simple question: Why isn’t the chemotherapy working? I found that there were answers that no one else was interested in. With all due respect to the illusion that this creates, I had to leave the reservation and go off into the wild. That is what I did to talk about that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I want to get into the chemo and the other pros and cons because it does play a role. But to understand what the role is and what the limitations are, then also immunotherapy, which is more a newer direction that medical oncology has gone. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of medical oncology? Since the 1980’s, what has changed? We were at that time, and how are we different now?

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, you can think of the 80’s. I think a good analogy would be the history of space flight, which did not begin until the mid-50s. It was very primitive. We got all excited because you put a dog in orbit for an hour, but within 15 years we were walking around on the moon, and a lot of people might not be aware of the fact that medical oncology did not exist as a specialty until the mid-70’s. There was already cardiology, gastroenterology, nephrology, kidneys, everything. The idea that you could kill cancer with medicine was considered a bad idea. The treatment was radiation and surgery. Then there was a breakthrough in the 1960’s, not by oncologists because there were not any, but by gynecologists. Then some breakthroughs came in the late 1960s treating leukemia and lymphoma, and then the idea was, maybe we can do this. However there were very few medical oncologists in the United States, even in 1975, and the specialty did not get going until the 1980s. You could say that at that time we were putting a capsule in orbit to go around the earth once or twice. Then it is a long way from there to going to the moon and back, the space shuttle, and everything else. It has been part of the reason why I went into oncology because it was the frontier and I was right there. 

I graduated medical school in ’79, and it was the birth of this specialty. I have been with it almost the whole way, and it has been very exciting. But we started in a very primitive fashion, and of course, that had to be refined for the first 15 years or so. I thought, Okay, well, we are in the primitive stages. We will break out of the land on the moon, we will come back, and we will have a parade that never happened. When it had not happened within 15 years, I had to ask myself, What is missing?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Do you feel that we are? You are talking about being primitive. Do you feel the tools we are using now? We have dialed down and are doing better. We have dialed down the frequency, how and when to do it, and so forth. But do you feel, other than that, that there have been advances in that field?

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, there has been substantial progress, but most of the progress has been either during the early-stage disease or extending the life of late-stage disease, not curing people with late-stage disease. If you have stage two or three breast cancer or colon cancer, we can cure that. If you have stage four breast cancer or colon cancer, we can keep you alive for several years, but you are still going to die. The same is true for the colon, breast, lung, and pancreas. Once the cancer reaches a certain stage, it develops a certain extra ability to resist chemotherapy. This gets back to the question I asked at the beginning. How do you take a patient with stage 4 colon cancer, with a cancer in the liver that leads to the colon? You can give them chemotherapy and make it all disappear on an X-ray and in the blood. In nine months, it is back. Why is that? Of course, the answer is that one fraction of the cells have a native resistance, and they grew back. Just when you kill dandelions in your garden, there are always flowers to grow back. I asked myself, Why did those cells not die? Why aren’t we addressing that? Because that is what causes death. I realized that the industry had no interest in addressing that, which I found disconcerting because it was, to me, the biggest problem of all.

The reason they did not want to address it is because they had not changed their model of what they were doing. You can think of the Vietnam War, and they were carpet bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail and all sorts of places there. We still lost the war because you can bomb it until there is nothing; there is no shrubbery left. But the people are underground, waiting for the bombs to stop dropping. Then they came out again, and so there was a form of resistance. We were not dropped; we were not addressed. However, the industry seemed only interested in more and more drugs rather than finding out what was happening with the drugs. 

What a lot of people also would not realize is that most chemotherapies work the same. There are different drugs; they have different names, but they are not antibiotics. If you have a penicillin-resistant strain in your throat, we can choose another antibiotic, and it will work. That is not the way it works for chemo. You choose ten different chemotherapy regimens, and if the cancer is resistant to one, it is resistant to all of them. From that, you can understand that the mechanism is not drug-specific, but the cancer has developed a different set of armor, and that should be addressed. But since it is not a drug, the pharmaceutical industry felt they did not know how to address it. I thought, well, there’s got to be something done about this. That is what I focused on.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Talk a little bit about immunotherapy. Also, you have hormone deprivation, as well as two different therapies that are part of the arsenal. How important are they in the battle against cancer?

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, that is the second part of the answer I was just giving. I did not want to talk too long. But what about the pharmaceutical industry? Maybe they were interested in the question I was asking, but they got off on a different tangent, which was the discovery of immunotherapy, which is the evolution of airplanes in warfare. In other words, before the Second World War, airplanes had almost no role in air warfare. In the First World War, they used them a little bit. By the Second World War, airplanes had dominated the war. As a whole, new technology is a whole new way to fight a war, and immunotherapy is just that. It does not work the way chemo works. I think the hope was that we could use immunotherapy to get rid of the cancer and that the chemotherapy was not working. But the problem is that it is the same thing. The cancer is still resistant to the immunotherapy. It works differently. But the cancer is ultimately still resistant if you have stage 4 disease. The other thing, and I do not want to sound cynical, is that I am just stating a fact. Immunotherapy costs, get ready, $200,000 a year or more. 

Again, this is an industry that is making a lot of money and is making some progress. But no one would consider it cost-effective: 200 grand a year for everybody; a 78-year-old person with colon cancer has a year and a half to live, and you deplete their life savings or you deplete Medicare for the extra three months. Well, I am not trying to judge the effectiveness of that on a human scale, but it is a big money deal. That is where their focus is. It would be fine with me if it cured the cancer, but it still does not. It slows down. Why is the cancer not being finished off? Again, we know that if you have early-stage disease, stage two, stage three, colon cancer, breast cancer, or lung cancer, we could cure you once it gets into stage four, when the cancer morphs into a different beast. We need to figure out what that is and cure people with cancer. I came upon a rather unique solution to that problem, which I have been using. We can talk about that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. That was my next question because, as a next step, if you went to Mexico, you would have had more freedom regarding the type of care that you were offering to the patient. You were able to explore additional tools that, in a medical oncology setting, would not be doable. Please tell me a little bit about your journey and exploration, what you saw seemed to have an impact, and what you tried and did not seem to have the effect that you wanted to have, or maybe had a limited effect.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

But I will be glad to do that. I will back up just a second. Before I went to Mexico, I worked with Dr. James Forsythe in Reno at the John Forsythe Cancer Clinic, previously known as Sensory Wellness. Working alongside Dr. Forsythe, I learned a lot about integrative medicine, and he was doing something called Insulin Potentiated Therapy. The focus of that was lower-dose chemotherapy with higher efficacy. It had shown a lot of promise. I wanted to see what I could do beyond making it even more effective. When I was in Mexico, I was recruited to go there and do that and start that program. I was at a place called CHIPSA, which is on the coast of Baja. It was a beautiful place with very friendly people and great food. They did several things. It was the old Gerson Hospital, where Gerson had perfected his diet and cured a lot of untreatable diseases through diet in the 50s and 60s. Quite revolutionary. They carried that out. We also did insulin-potentiated therapy there, and then they had something that I had learned along the way from another group of researchers, which was hyper-oxidative therapy, which I think holds a key to a breakthrough in oncology because the fact is, when we were talking about these stage four cancers that cannot be cured, you can get rid of cancer. If you give the patient a lethal dose of chemotherapy,  it does not do the host any good if you kill the host in the process of killing the disease. Everyone understands, I think who is watching this, that chemotherapy is poison; it is a metabolic poison that interferes with key metabolic pathways that you need for life. I tell everybody I have a pill I could give you, and it will kill every cancer cell in your body. It does that by shutting off the ability to metabolize oxygen at the cellular level. It is called cyanide. If you take it, every cancer cell in your body will die. The problem is that every other cell in your body will die. That is a non-starter. But what is chemotherapy? It is cyanide-lite. We are going to kill a lot of your normal tissue, but not all of it. You will keep breathing, and we will kill the cancer in the meantime. 

When we bombed Germany or Japan into rubble in 1945, the nations were not extinct. They built themselves back up. Now, West Germany and Japan are two of the most thriving economies in the world. That is what happens in oncology. You treat somebody hard, you make them bedridden for a year, and they slowly bring themselves back. If they are stage two or stage three, if they are stage four this day, bedridden until they die, except that they live a little bit longer, it is not a bargain. What we do is take advantage of the difference in vulnerability of a cancer cell to a drug compared to the rest of your body. Yes, and with cyanide, there is no difference, but with chemotherapy, say you have 100 cells, which you give in a petri dish, 50 of them are normal cells and 50 of them are cancer cells. You will kill 30 cancer cells and 20 normal cells, and then you do it again and you kill the same proportion, and you end up with no cancer, and you have a few cells left over that peak their way back. Well, I thought, why not find a way to give less chemo with the same benefit, with less harm, and which would be less harmful but with a benefit? I said that, in collaboration with another group, we came upon another vulnerability the cancer cells have that no one seemed interested in the way that I have exploited and been very successful, and we can talk about that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Because the whole idea in regards to insulin potentiation therapy is to be able to have a stronger impact with less chemo, you have felt that, since you were exploring additional means, you did not feel the IPT was enough by itself to be able to do that.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

However, there are a lot of variations on the theme of IPT. One of the things about the people whom Dr. Forsythe and I treated at Reno was that they did not want those chemos under any circumstances. IPT was the right thing for them, and for some of them, it worked well; for others, not so much, but that was their choice. People, I am a libertarian, and people need to decide how they want their bodies to work. Dr. Forsythe has published his results and deserves for anyone to look up to see what he achieved. For me, it was quite impressive. I had some of my ideas, and oftentimes, like two rock stars in the band, the younger one who comes on decides to start their band. Eric Clapton left The Cream. But I am not Eric Clapton. I am just using an analogy. However, I was in contact with the group that was focusing on another vulnerability in the cancer cell that no one in pharmacology seemed to have any interest in, which was technical chemically. It is called the oxidative state of the cancer cell. But I was able to break it down into analogies. That is not that hard to understand, and we can get into that if you would like.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

If so, yes. What were some of the tools that you learned while exploring? Because I know one of the ones that you are working quite a bit with is vitamin C and K3 in a 100:1 ratio. I know you were doing that both intravenously, and then you just that as an oral protocol along with chemo.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Again, the whole idea is that if you are going to put something into somebody’s body by injection or by mouth, the body does not know where it is going. It is just going to distribute throughout the whole tissue in the body. When it runs into a target, that is not something that happens. Now it is true with monoclonal antibodies. That is the big difference that is getting, again, technical. However, there is targeted therapy in oncology. But aside from that, just with chemotherapy itself, which is not targeted, it gets to the cell, and then the cell has to do something with it. 

Now, if you can think of a community in Meridian, Idaho, where the homes are 10 to 30 years old, the trees are tall, and people have been living in the homes for a while, You may see someone replace a roof here or change some siding there. There is a little bit of repair, but not much now, and everything is stable. That is the way most of your body is living in the adult form; the body’s built, and it just needs maintenance. then you can think of Caldwell, Idaho, where they are throwing up homes crazy and you have all this energy going on. You get rid of the wheat and the corn and you plow it down and you put in plumbing, and you have lots of construction workers, lumber, trucks, and everything else running around and all this business going on. That is what a cancer cell is doing. It takes a lot more energy being spent very quickly to run a cancer. 

Cancer is just a high-energy input-output entity compared to the rest of the body’s just sitting there. When we try to treat cancer chemically, we want to look for things that differentiate the cancer from the rest of the body and then find targets in the cancer that are not there in the stable part of your body. In the developed community of, say, Meridian, there is not a lot of activity going on so there are not many targets. But if you are building a subdivision, if you run out of lumber, if you run out of electricity, or if you do not have a water supply, the thing shuts down. Cancer cells are running at a much higher metabolic rate than normal cells. 

The consequence of that is that they are burning energy like crazy. It is not an oversimplification to say that when a cancer cell burns energy, it is not much different from burning gasoline in your car for the few remaining gas-consuming cars that are still out there. You burn the gasoline, and out of your pipe comes CO2 and other oxides of carbon from the combustion. It is hot, and cancer would be running your car at very high rpm constantly, as opposed to a car when I even drive my truck, which gets ten miles an hour in town. It is an old truck. Sorry, but I do not drive it much, and I go on the freeway and cruise at 2500 rpm. I am getting 15 miles per gallon because I am just cruising in overdrive. There are chemicals that the cancer has to generate to cool its engine that the rest of the body does not need because the rest of the body isn’t running at that level. If you shut off the cancer’s ability to cool its engine, it will die. 

We have identified a whole host of these medicines. We call them pro-oxidants, not anti-oxidants. It is quite the opposite of pro-oxidants because the cooling off of the cancer cell is through antioxidants. In other words, a cancer cell generates a lot of oxidation by burning fuel to build the construction, to run the thing, to grow new cells like you are a child, and it is burning all this energy, and it has to get rid of the waste, and it could overheat. In the movie Ford versus Ferrari, the engine shuts down, it generates huge amounts of antioxidants, and it needs those to survive. We have identified the enzymes that generate those antioxidants, and if you inhibit those enzymes, the cancer will die. A lot of people, even identical ecology colleagues, do not realize if you ask a medical oncologist, how this drug works. They go, well, it attacks the DNA. That is true. But that is not what causes cell design. 

The DNA is damaged, and it calls on another part of the cell to repair it. Only if the cell cannot be repaired, if the DNA cannot be repaired, will the cell die. If you block that process, the cell will die. It turns out that you can give quite a bit less chemotherapy and still get DNA damage. If you shut off the rest of the cell’s ability to repair that damage, the cell will die. We have found a way to give half as much or a third as much chemo as you would otherwise, causing very little side effects, and still getting cancer cell death. It is quite revolutionary. The problem is that the medicines that we are using have not seemed to spark any interest in the pharmaceutical industry. We are left doing it on our own, and we are doing that. I am very excited about what we are seeing.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

The cooling down, one of the things that people think about in regards to cancer is that they want to make sure that we bring in the antioxidant glutathione, which is a common one that people want to do IVs and take supplements of. From my understanding, glutathione is what is produced within the cancer cell at a high rate for that cooling-down effect to help calm down some of those oxidants. Am I correct for that?

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, you are entirely correct. Let me back up a minute there. I take a lot of antioxidants, and that is because, as far as I know, I do not have cancer. Antioxidants almost certainly prevent cancer, although no one’s proven it because you cannot put humans in that study. But people who take antioxidants seem to be better off in many respects, health-wise. That is because when a cancer cell is trying to turn into cancer, antioxidants will prevent it from taking the steps it needs to take to become an outcriminal. The antioxidant will rehabilitate the juvenile delinquent and say, Do not do that. Once the cancer is full-blown, taking glutathione will make the cancer healthier, and it will hurt you to do that. So this dichotomy is sometimes not well understood by certain people. I have my favorite analogy, and again, forgive me, but having been a boomer whose father fought in the Great War and also just because of the way it is, we think of oncology and cancer as a military operation where killing cancer cells or bombing them with bad things When you bomb things, you are hurting everything, not just the cancer. 

Anyway, on December 6, 1941, the United States’ approach to the Empire of Japan was a negotiation. Well, let’s see. In a few days, if you do this, we will do it to avoid war. That is what taking antioxidants is. We are trying to avoid war; try to avoid all the difficulty that that entails. We are trying to prevent the problem. The next day, the diplomats were expelled, and instead of talking to the people on the other side of the Pacific about how to make things better, we were shooting at them. They were shooting at us. The war was on, and there was no turning back. So once you have cancer, you have to forget about antioxidants and turn to oxidation because that is what is happening. There are several nutraceuticals that we use that cause hyper-oxidation to kill cancer cells, and one of the things that got me so excited about moving to Mexico, which is a big deal, was that we had a patient there. I was just consulting, and I was going down once a month, and there was a patient who had been elsewhere, had a rare cancer that failed everything, and was down there seeking a remedy. We initiated the protocol on her, and his rare, refractory, untreatable cancer disappeared. I said, Okay, I am in. I have never seen this before. This is going out in the woods 10,000 times, and then all of a sudden you see Bigfoot, and you go. This is new. 

This changes everything. I have got to learn more. I was hooked by that, and we have learned a lot since then, and I think the process is very promising. The other thing is that the nutraceuticals that we use in comparison are dirt cheap. Vitamin C, vitamin K, and a few other things. A few hundred dollars a month, not $20,000 a month, which is a lot. I just gave a patient a drug the other day, and we are trying to get to the pharmacy. I am still practicing. In my hospital practice, I have to stick with the standard of care because those are the rules. I had a patient who was not responding to conventional care. So there is some research on a new model, a new pharmaceutical drug. I wanted to give it to her, but the insurance company denied it. Everything we do has to be authorized by insurance. The interest tonight was thirty thousand dollars for a one-hour infusion, and I was all set, so we went to financial services. I am going to put in a plug for Good Shepherd Hospital in Hermiston, Oregon. They said, Steve, the hospital is going to cover the cost. Go ahead and give her the drug. I swear to goodness that that builds loyalty; you cannot imagine we gave her the drugs. She did much better. But the point of that is that it is $30,000 once a month for these drugs that the big pharmaceutical company is throwing around; we are giving supplements. It costs $800 a month. You can see where the money is. It is not in the nutraceuticals. I am not interested in the money. I should be wealthy and retired at my age, having worked as hard as I have, but I live comfortably. I never focused on becoming a millionaire at the age of 50 the way some people do, because that is not why I became a doctor. I do not care, because I have talked to a lot of rich, retired doctors on their yachts, and they are not miserable, but they are not happy; they are bored. Yes. You got it a yacht; nobody cares about you. If you are out here by yourself with your family. Okay, that is nice. But people ask me, is oncology depressing? I do not know. The people are extremely grateful for your being there, I happen to work in a rural area, and most of the people are religion-centered. But I am not going to name a religion because it does not matter. But they have faith and hope, and they are grateful for what you do for them. I am going to probably keep working until I cannot get out of bed because no matter how much money I have, I cannot spend it. The point I am making is that we could make a revolution in oncology and save a lot of money. Since Medicare is going bankrupt, I am hoping to do that. You and I have talked about other projects that we will collaborate on, hopefully in that regard.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I am very excited about those projects, and I want you to give me a little bit of a plug. You have written two phenomenal books. One, yes. One that directly relates to your profession and your experience with patients. Can you just let the audience know? I can just tell a couple of minutes about each book, what they are, and how people can find them.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Well, I would love to. The other thing was that, in the process of my work, I thought I had something unique to say. I wrote two books now, one that I published in 2010 and another that I published just a year ago. The first book is extremely popular. It is called The Undying Soul. I mentioned how to get a hold of these books when I was done with the summary. But it is my first-person account of being a medical oncologist in the second half of the 20th century and the trauma of thinking we were going to cure cancer and not cure it. The underlying theme that was that in the second half of the 20th century, we thought that DNA held all the answers to the riddle of life and that atheist scientists had proven that. I am very upfront about this, abandoning my faith in favor of science. Maybe one excuse is that my parents are both past and my mentors were my professors, who are all atheist scientists. It is not an excuse; it is just a circumstance that might offer some context. But by 1995, I realized that that fairy tale was not coming to an end; it was going to make us all happy. The book is about 1 to 1. Each chapter of the book is my interaction with a patient. The theme of the book is to contrast the patients who died without faith with those who died with faith. It is a book about death and dying, as well as a book about my journey towards redemption and recapturing my faith. It is very personal and emotional. It is an easy read, except that it will make you cry. Everyone has raved about it. It is out of print, but I have my supply, and people can email me for a copy. The other book is a lot like a book that Eric Metaxas published a year ago. He published many books. One of them that he published was Is Atheism Dead? My book carries subtle meanings. I was on his podcast a year ago. He said we had a good time together, and you could look it up. If you want to go through his podcast, you will find my name there. It is called Telos, and it is the scientific basis for a life of purpose; meaning, Is the science of purpose? Now you may say, Well, that is silly. Why would you have to have a science of purpose? Most people are not scientists. They do not deal in hard science, which is why it was so easy to manipulate them during the epidemic with bad science quarantining healthy people; that has never been done before, and it did not work out so well. We recovered. I know that in the beginning drastic measures were necessary, but over time they should have let up a little bit. That was my opinion. A lot of people are now coming around to that, and there is strong data. Sweden. You have heard of Sweden,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

in Dakota, where they did. Yes.  Florida, where they did not quarantine and the economies did not crash. You did not have to print a bunch of money that had no substantial basis for people to keep living. So that is one thing. The point is that most people do not realize that if you talk to any college science professor in a secular setting, that is, not a Christian school, a Muslim school, or a Jewish school, they will say that. The fact is that science has shown that there is no God of Abraham. The God of Abraham means Allah, Yahweh, and Jesus Christ, and everything that goes on is a chemical reaction that is perfectly understood by all smart people. I believe that 50 years ago when they sequenced DNA and said, This is it, it seemed plausible. Now we know that that is just a fat lie. They may have thought that for a time, but they should have figured out that it is wrong and they should reverse their point of view, but they will not because they are entrenched. They have their paradigm, and they will not let go of it because then it would threaten their doctors and their careers. God forbid that you would make a sacrifice for the common good, even if it costs you a little something.

So the book Telos, well, it is the science of purpose. The scientists who say purpose is apparent say it is not real. When the wolf pack goes, it gets something to eat. They are not being purposeful. They are just responding to chemical signals in their brains. They are motivating the machines to go put food in their stomachs and shut off the chemical process, telling them they are hungry and they are just chemical machines. That is pretty macabre. But they go so far with all this talk about AI that it is even worse. They go so far as to say that when you, the human being, fall in love and the most precious things that have ever happened to you—the kiss of your mother when you go to bed as a child and when you kiss your child goodnight in their bed—that is all. It was just a chemical reaction. We could build a machine that feels everything that you feel and that there is nothing special about you. There’s no God. God is a fairy tale. That is what they are teaching as a fact. The fact is, it is a lie. It is proven false. My book explains why they do it, why they are wrong, and what the answer is. So if you want to know about the meaning of life from not a religious point of view but from a scientific point of view, to help you give you the faith you need to keep your intellectual, scientific, or philosophical basis to maintain your faith so that you do not doubt it. When someone says your belief is a fairy tale, you say, Oh, no, your scientific atheist is a fairy tale. This book will tell you everything you need to know. The way to get either of those books is to go to my website, which is stepheniacoboni.com. I know it is hard to spell all that, but Stephen is with a PH and it is an I-A-C-O-B-O-N-I and com. With Google, if you misspell it, it will still get you there. Then you will see a video of me, a trailer, podcasts, and all of the endorsements. I got the endorsement from the top intelligent design person in the world, Stephen Meyer, who runs the Discovery Institute. I am affiliated with them and a member. I am on an advisory board with them, and you can email me through the website, ask me questions, and order books.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, Dr. Iacoboni,

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Order both books, yes. But you have to email me too.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, it is for the first one. Yes. I read both; they are both spectacular. Yes, I urge the viewers to take a look at them and read them. Dr. Iacoboni, thank you so much for sharing all this information. I know that this will be extremely valuable for people to understand their journey as they are considering what treatment may benefit them the most. You brought forth so much information and help for what you said, 200,000 patient interactions that that is not a small number. Thank you so much, Dr. Iacoboni.

Stephen Iacoboni, MD

Thank you, Michael. God bless you. Thank you.