This Doctor Is Using Vitamin C to Fight Cancer—and It’s Working! Dr. Steve Rallis | Ep. 75

Introduction to insulin, inflammation, and cancer 0:00

Insulin and inflammation are the two killers. And yet, in most primary care settings, insulin's never checked. Inflammatory markers are never checking. That's scary. If you were to define cancer, how would you define the cancer? As a metabolic disease. As metabolic? Yeah. Joining us today is Dr. Steve Rallis, Chief Medical Officer of Drip Bar, founding member of the American IV Association, author and widely known as the Wellness Doctor. Specializing in high dose vitamin C IV therapy for cancer treatment.

Stay tuned for his insights on proactive wellness. Vitamin IV therapy is so poorly understood and hopefully part of what we're doing today is going to shed light on the misunderstanding and why it's misunderstood. What most people don't know is the mitochondria is also responsible for cell differentiation. The more nutrition you get, the more nutritional you use. The drug therapy training you got, more drug therapies you used. If six of your courses in medical school are on spinal manipulation, guess what?

You're going to do more spinal manipulations. Functional medicine is the only model that allows us to see the patient properly.

Podcast intro and guest background 1:00

Taking that deep dive, you utilize high dose vitamin C for cancer patients. Have you had any patients that come to you and say, I just want to give you natural treatments, have you actually seen the cancer ever reverse itself just going that route? What you see is that you Welcome to another episode of a Healthy Point of View podcast. I'm your host, Sam Tahata. And as usual, we're bringing experts from all over the world to talk about health, wellness, beauty, and mindset. Today, this is a special guest.

He's on the Scientific Advisory Board with the American Idea Association, which you guys know, I am the chairman of the Leadership Advisory board with American idea association. He's putting a lot of great science behind what we're doing in the IV therapy space. He is coming all the way down from Canada, the Chief Medical Officer of Drip Bar, one of the largest IV Therapy companies in Pleasure, man. You know, that is an intro. Thanks, guys. I've been waiting to have you on the podcast. Oh, you know what?

I been wanting to do this because we get to work together through in in the American IV Association and not exactly in, we have our department, your department. But the beauty about you is my kids were actually saying this. They're saying, how the hell does Sam know all this medical have all of this? Medical knowledge. Mike, because he's informed, he is educated. And I really appreciate what you're doing too. Thank you. For the industry and for giving us a platform so that we can do really great work in the American IV Association.

We've launched that journal. Right. Not officially launched yet, but this is for the podcast listeners at least. This is kind of like an early bird sort of notification that will have the Journal of American Ivy Association We are working on studies, we are creating position papers, We're just doing cool shit, man. A lot of it is because of you. And I know that we're doing a lot the work as well, but we can't... Yeah, were really changing the industry. It's amazing. Yeah, and we're doing it because, you know, a lot of people look at us like, oh, these guys must be doing that for the money.

And I'll be the first one to say, it's like number one, A lot. Of the stuff we do, like even with the American Ivy Association, we are volunteering our time, not only volunteering her time but we'll contributing financially every single month to the to. The association. That's because we were really passionate about this. Like we really want to change the course of medicine. Yeah. We were volunteering so much of our. Time and so. Much even of, You know. IV medicine, especially vitamin IV therapy, is so poorly understood.

And hopefully part of what we're doing today and chatting about high dose vitamin C is going to shed light on the misunderstanding and why it's misunderstood.

Functional medicine and medical training 4:00

Because really a lot of the research in high-dose vitamin c, and especially when we talk about pharmacokinetics, It translates to all nutrients or most nutrients. So yeah, I think it's really going to be informative for the listeners, um, for sure for today. I. Think that what we're doing again, in terms of the research and to your point, it is volunteer work. We're not getting paid to do this. Uh, and we've, the doctors on these boards are to their credit are volunteering a lot of their time. A lot.

Yeah. And you know, i always tell people that the way I get paid is by. having this opportunity of having the most rewarding job possible, which I thought the fire department was at, but it really wasn't. But when you could actually help so many people change the course of their health, to me that's rewarding. When you get those testimonials to patients and you really see them change that trajectory of the health. That's where it's at for me. So Dr. Rollins, man, you are the expert in high dose vitamin C.

Vitamin C, man, it is such a powerful thing. I know that. But a lot of the listeners and viewers of podcast are probably wondering, why are these guys gonna do a podcast on high dose vitamin C? So today, I wanna start off with like, how did you even get into the functional medicine space? Ooh, my undergrad was in biology and biochemistry at Western University. And from there, I was actually, when I graduated, teaching the MCAT program at Kaplan. OK. Believe it or not. I had a chiropractor that my dad used to hunt with.

We went hunting with him, and he gave me a copy of the Deepak Chopra's book, Quantum Healing. And I read it, and I'm not sure what happened, but it transformed my perspective. And, I thought at that time, functional medicine was just chiropractic in terms of, you know, complementary or alternative medical fields. So, did my four-year chioopractic degree. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship. My research in chioropratic was actually on looking at vasomotor changes with spinal manipulation. So I was already ingrained in terms of looking at the autonomic nervous system, looking nutrition, again, cardiovascular system changes.

And then as my practice evolved and the primary care need of my patients changed over the years, I knew that I needed a second medical degree. That's when I did naturopathic medicine. Once I finished my four-year degree, my prescriptive authority and my IV license, and I wanted to use nutrients in as many ways possible as I could. Because we were using diet and lifestyle and nutrition, not just drug therapy, because we are trained to do, like I said, we have our prescriptive authority. But I knew that there was more beyond medicine.

And we're seeing this in our industry. Most of the physicians in out field are conventionally trained. but they all see it too. So this movement towards functional medicine is just the way medicine moving. It's no different if someone has lower back pain. The analogy that I always use is that In conventional medicine, we're trained to just take an X-ray, see if there's pathology on that X ray. But if you talk to a good personal trainer or a physio, they'll say, well, no, it's because there is weakness in the glute medius, or they have valgus strain on their, where the kinematic chain of the foot is off, and that's causing the sacroiliac joint to be dysfunctional, that is where pain is coming from.

So that a functional medicine model. But conventional is just looking at it myopically and owning in on it's just pathology SI joint, take a muscle painkiller and a Muscle Relaxant. Why is there such a big difference between both? Because even when you look at medical doctors and you start talking about nutrition, They weren't formally educated in nutrition. You go to a chiropractor, completely different. They understand vitamins, minerals, amino acids. Yeah, and I'm lucky enough too, because we train, we're one of the only, if not the, only clinic that does rotations for medical students.

So I am very familiar with the curriculum. You know, for medical students so that they can pass their respective boards. We do integrative medical rotations and but from. Medical training and obviously, I know the natural path to medical school training because I've done that. And I know the chiropractic medical school training, because I've done that also. And, I now that the difference between the nutrition component in conventional medicine, which is zero, it's only in elective to chriopractic, Which is pretty good, to naturopathic medicine which, is frankly phenomenal.

You know, and you can see sort of the difference because then those providers use nutrition depending on how they were trained. And the more nutrition you get, the most nutrition use. The more drug therapy training you got, more drugs therapy use, if you take six of your courses in medical school are on spinal manipulation, guess what, you're going to do more spinal manipulations. So it's really what you're trained. And there's such a demand to kind of compress medical education and then get them just to pass the boards that they begin to lose sight of what the big picture of how do you actually treat a patient?

And functional medicine is the only model that allows us to see the patient properly.

Cancer as a metabolic disease 10:00

Taking that deep dive. Taking a deep dive, because it could be, if it's IBS, is it foods and it is IgG related? Is it their stress which is affecting, Is is a methylation pattern that's affecting their neurotransmitters in their gut? What exactly is causing that irritable bowel? And when you talk about chronic complex diseases, the magnitude of effect is just magnified that you can simply not look at or apply a conventional medicine template onto chronic complex diseases like cancer. And part of that is this, our medical model is basically based on an infectious disease model.

Effectively, we're looking at one cause, one cure. So it worked if it was a bug causing a disease and you could apply a very simple treatment. Chronic complex disease doesn't look like that. But when you try to apply that to cancer, which we are going to talk about, it breaks down because in that model, the tumor cell is the bug. At all costs, you have to kill the tumour. So chemotherapy is the most effective. Issue is that it wipes out the patient's immune system, wipes up their healthy cells, and they're no longer, moreover, it doesn't actually affect the stem cells.

And it does mean that chemotherapy's bad. It's just that you can't apply a infectious disease model to chronic complex disease. That's true whether it's heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, metabolic diseases. You name it, you cannot simply apply that model, so it's broken. Yeah, that's very true. Doc, obviously you've taken a direction when it comes to clinical treatment where you're utilizing this functional medicine approach primarily, not just cancer patients, but you have a hyper focus on cancer patient, and then other patients that have like auto-immune diseases and whatnot.

You know, with the cancer, if you were to define cancer how would you define a cancer? As a metabolic disease. As metabolic diseases. Yeah. And again, back to our medical school training. Our medical students are taught that it's a somatic mutation theory. So are the chiropractic students, so are our naturopathic medical student, and so our undergrad students. cancer has a tremendous amount of what's called heterogeneity, which means that if you took two cases of identical, let's say estrogen positive breast cancer, and then map the genome, they would have all sorts of different genetic variations in one patient versus the other patient.

So the mutations are actually occurring downstream, but yet we're still teaching our patients or our students somatic mutation theory. This is interesting. Your listeners are going to love this. The person that is most tightly connected to that theory never treated cancer. So the fact that we're using this SMT somatomutation theory as the dominant concept in cancer treatment It begins to make sense when you peel back the curtains. Why 50 years later from us, from Nixon declaring a war on cancer, that cancer rates continue to escalate because we're not actually looking at it properly.

Can you imagine in your business, you're able to solve the problem only when have the correct lens. Right now they're filming you on a podcast. If Losa Ricardo puts the wrong lens on, you're out of focus. Right. It doesn't matter how many times we try to continue this podcast, it's never going to be in focus until you change the lens. Yeah. Yep. Yup. So the disease, the condition, chronic complex conditions need a different lens that requires actually an entire new way of teaching medicine. Good luck.

That's why what you are doing In terms of podcasts like this, the work that you do, actually why it makes so much sense, because you realize the gaps and you're trying to educate. Yeah, I mean, we really have a broken medical system. And I saw it, you know, 12 years doing emergency medicine as a firefighter paramedic. You know just, it was a rotating door of the same people going in. I, saw their health just continuously decline. That's why I told myself, this is what I can't be part of this broken, medical, system Now, with the cancer, You defined it as, a metabolic disease.

What is metabolic health? I think the easiest way sort of the way I kind of describe metabolism is essentially how we how your body uses nutrients for fuel. Okay. You know how you basically convert food to fuel so how that tumor cell uses fuel is much different than our normal cells. So we know that some of the most aggressive and deleterious cancers are, for example, highly glycolytic, meaning that they use sugar in a much difference way. Under normal circumstances, you eat food. That food turns into glucose.

Glucose is running in our bloodstream. Pancreas releases insulin. The glucose in the blood stream goes into the cells, So far, so good. If we eat a bigger bolus of carbohydrates, there is secondary release of insulin. So insulin gets shunted into the cells. Glucose enters the cell. It's a six carbon nutrient, gets broken down into two molecules of pyruvate. Pyruvate goes into mitochondria. The mitochondrion is the energy producer in the sell. In cancer, cells stop using the mitochondry. Okay. So pyruvate doesn't go to the mitochondria.

It goes to lactate. The enzyme that converts that is lactated dehydrogenase. Again, it's one of the reasons why when we're doing blood work, we are looking at LDH levels. LDh levels of greater than 185, risk for disease free progression goes down. In other words, the risk of death goes up. patient stabilizes, or it's one of the markers, one the metabolic markers. So is fasting insulin, so is inflammation, because what happens if happening in that environment, in a metabolic environment it is very characteristic, it true for all diseases, metabolic diseases.

You get increased inflammation. You get changes to insulin. You change how glucose is being used. Then you get to how the cell is differentiating. Parts of it turning on, parts of turning off. The characteristic of this is cancer. Once you shut off the mitochondria, you're no longer using sugar or glucose the same way. What most people don't know is that the Mitochondria is also responsible for cell differentiation. What does that mean? That means, as a cell, a liver cell becomes another liver cells, it uses the mitochondria as part of that cellular differentiation, so that the stem cell become a livers cell as it's going through its replication, because all our cells are replicating rapidly.

But if the liver becomes liver, then I shut off the Mitochondria, that liver doesn't know how to differentiate means it becomes an undifferentiated cell.

High-dose vitamin C basics and safety 18:00

That's what a tumor is. It's an un-differentiate cell It sounds like, almost like it, it become a domino effect at that point. And it just keeps on growing and growing, and that's when the tumor starts to grow. Right? That is when tumor start to growing. A lot of these mutations that are being studied, we'll use an example, like a KRAS positive mutation in aggressive colorectal cancers. If they, if the KRAS gene gets turned off, so where we say that that colorectal cancer, let's say an adenocarcinoma is aggressive, then that becomes more, that different, undifferentiation just gets ramped up.

Right. So yeah, so eventually at some point we're going to figure out how to turn the mitochondria back on. Yeah, because I mean, that's where my head's going right now. It's like, well, how do you stop it from going into the domino effect where it just keeps on growing, growing and growing? But what would be the first step? You know, but that that is probably a question for brain way bigger than mine. But here's what we can do is we could put metabolic pressures at all the different steps. So if we know that KRAS positive adenocarcinoma, the colorectal cancer is highly glycolytic, we can maybe reduce blood sugar, maybe ketogenic diet.

Sorry. Cause that fuel that is not very good at using ketones as a fuel source. Um, You could use an off-label medication like metformin, again, which makes it difficult for that to accumulate sugar, puts a metabolic stress on it. You can use a plant medicine like berberine. And those are typically like, met form is utilized for like type two diabetes, right? Yeah, that's right. So what about the GOP-1 drugs? Do those help with that? They will help. I don't know exactly how. Yeah. But I haven't heard about that either.

They won't help because you're affecting that metabolic state. And that's why berberine again will work. That's what changing the, changing your fuel supply, because again, like you made this great post on glutamine. So that cell is gonna preferentially use glucose, then it's gonna switch to glutamate. But if you can potentially switch it completely to ketones, it just isn't gonna use those effectively. So now you utilize high dose vitamin C for cancer patients and other types of patients as well.

But with the cancer patient, what is the high-dose vitamin c doing? Before we even go that route. What is high dose vitamin C because you got regular vitamin c and then you have high-dose vitamin. Yeah. I know that's such a good question. Let's let's start off talking about vitamins start from the beginning, right? Yeah, we'll almost start From the Beginning. So vitamin see is an antioxidant, Right. That's what we're taught and it's powerful antioxidate and that true it is and When vitamin C is administered intravenously at a certain dose, it switches from being an antioxidant to being a pro-oxidant.

So it's like an oxidizer. It becomes an oxidizer, much like chemotherapy is an oxidation therapy. I mean, that's the complete opposite of an anti-oxide. That's right. And it is at that transition point where vitamin C becomes high dose. Okay. So it's not really clearly defined. It can be 10 grams to be 15 grams. Like we say loosely between around 15 is going to, is considered high-dose vitamin c. And we know that because at that oxidative potential, it can damage cells. Vitamin C at high doses normally doesn't damage our healthy cells, that's one of the beauties, is that it's selectively cytotoxic, affects tumor cells at higher doses, doesn' affect our normal cells And the reason it doesn't affect our normal cells is our normals cells have this enzyme called Glucose 6 Phosphate Dehydrogenase or G6PD.

The G-6 PD test. G 6 PD tests. So never under any circumstances should Vitamin C ever be administered at greater than 15 grams let's say without a G six PD Test. Who has Who would test you know in a negative way with the g6pd test like who wouldn't test yeah? Yeah, well like what happens when you do the G6 pd tests and someone has that deficiency the moment you administer that the red blood cell bursts So if your red, blood cells do not have adequate g 6p d that causes lysis which can cause death Wow like literally death That's almost like when if someone were to like inject sterile water directly into the vein Exactly.

You know those blood cells will burst, right? Yeah, and you know this And I talked about this in the book too when The story of high dose vitamin C really goes back to the 1970s and There was a Scottish surgeon named Ewan Cameron who was treating end-stage cancer patients. And at that time, this is early 1970s, they were defining end stage as less than two months to live. They've exhausted all treatments. He was using IV vitamin C and finding that they seem to be living longer and they seemed to have a higher quality of life.

Linus Pauling got wind of this. And Linus Pauling was a very strong advocate of vitamin C. And he found Dr. Cameron's work compelling, went to Scotland and proposed that they do a research study together. He was a scientist. In fact, won one of four two-time Nobel Prize winners in science. And this is, when you look at that list, it's a short list of legends. This is the Pantheon, this the Mount Rushmore of scientists. Yeah. and he said, let's do study to together and they looked at They took a thousand patients from Dr.

Cameron's hospital, the Vale 11 hospital in Scotland, administered 10 grams of vitamin C IV every day for 10 days. And then they took it with a control group. What they found was that the IV vitamin-C patients lived considerably longer. 90% of them were living something like 100 to 200 to 300 percent longer, significantly longer. Doubling and tripling their life expectancy. 10 percent were living even longer so they were all responding statistically. Interesting. Published in 1976, the Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, which at that time was, that was a huge journal.

That was huge. And specifically Pauline, I believed used that journal because it was the science journal at the time. Tons of positive press, tons of blowback. There was big movements against anything related to natural medicine emerging at Uh, undeterred, Pauline said, let's do the study again. And they did it again, they found even greater results.

Vitamin C research and pharmacokinetics 26:00

The patients were living 300, at least 300 plus days longer than the control group under much tighter controls. 10 grams, IB vitamin C for 10 days. Again, in terms of what we're doing, That's almost nothing. And statistically, again, living way longer. Then the story takes this turn. In the book, I say, you know, enter Charles Myrtle. Charles myrdle worked for the Mayo Clinic at that time. He was the OG quackbuster of the time, The quack buster. Like this was complete bullshit what Pauline and Cameron are doing.

And you know, it's not medicine. You can't use vitamins to treat cancer. Complete bullshit. Under the aegis of the Mayo Clinic, he said we will redo Pauling and Kameron's work to the letter. And they did. Sort of. Why sort of? They followed it. They didn't administer the, they didn' administer IV vitamin C. they had 10 grams orally. So I was going to ask you, you mentioned high dose vitamin c intravenously. Well, why can't we do the high-dose just oral? I'll get to it, so they redid the study. which is what a lot of people that are out there think.

Which is why we do the work we in the American IV Association, because it's a totally different type of medicine. So they administered the, they did exactly, followed Pauline Cameron's outline, research platform, and they got zero results. published in the New England Journal, 1980. All these studies are still available in full text, by the way, which basically dropped the nuclear bomb on vitamin therapy for cancer. It was almost end of story. What was wrong with that study that they repeated? They didn't use IV vitamin C.

It wasn't until the early 2000s when the pharmacokinetic studies actually came out that the really began to understand why Pauline and Cameron were right. They were given 10 grand for orally. Orally? And that sounds like a very bad day for whoever was going through that process. Can you imagine for a cancer patient who's already losing weight? Yeah. I mean, you'd lose the rest of your weight from the severe diarrhea you get from it. Yeah, because it's an osmotic laxative. And in the early 2000s, when they did the pharmacokinetic studies, and again, for the listeners, pharmacokenetics is just in very simple terms, how a drug is absorbed, How it spreads in a body, has metabolized and how it's excreted.

That's all pharmacogenetics. It's just really the journey of the drug in body. Right. So. Under normal circumstances, we have around 80 micromolar concentration of vitamin C in our blood. When I say micromolar, and again, the way I describe this to my patients is basically this. If you have one liter of lemonade and you want to sweeten it, one leader and, you put 80 granules of sugar in that one-liter of fluid, that's 80 micromolar. if I added 10 granule of sugars, it'd be 10 micomolars. So 10 in a thousand, 1000 mils, 1 liter.

Okay. So our resting serum concentration of vitamin C is 80 to 100 micromolar. No matter how much vitamin c you consume, because it's so tightly controlled, the pharmacokinetics are so highly controlled by the GI system, that's why you shit yourself, you never will exceed 220 micromolar In a great study, I think it was Padiati et al, 2004, they administered four, three grams every four hours, never exceeds 220 micromolar. Here's the kicker, however. Vitamin C is not therapeutic until it crests 300 micromolar, and in other words, vitamin C exerts no therapeutic effect.

until it crests 300 micro molar. In other words, it wouldn't have mattered how much vitamin C they administered orally. It was never going to be therapeutic. And in cancer, we're actually looking for a minimum of 10,000 to 20,00 micro-molar. Wow. Levels that are only achievable through IV high dose vitamin c. And it's obviously bypassing the digestive route when you go intravenously, right? Vitamin C does not, and this is where a lot of doctors kind of like go tilt. Because vitamin C, like a lot of nutrients, don't follow first order kinetics.

And again, to explain first-order kinetic in a really simple way, we are taught small molecular weight drugs, essentially. If you double the dose of the drug, it doubles the dosage in your bloodstream. That's first or kinetics. Most small-molecular weight drug like vitamin c, zinc, etc. should fall under that first ordered kinets. Vitamin C doesn't, most vitamins and nutrients don't. Our body has this interplay where they regulate it way differently. Doesn't follow first order kinetics. So again, oral vitamin C for the most part, especially in terms of cancer, is useless.

Right, right. I remember when I worked at the fire department, I started getting a little like sniffles. And I was like, you know what, heck, i'm going to take as much vitamin C as I can throughout this like 24 hour period. In the next day I had the worst canker sores in my mouth. I would only assume that something had an effect that wasn't positive from it, right? But when it comes to vitamin C, so we talk about the oral version, you know, administration of vitamin and intravenous. Now, there's other types of routes of administration as well.

Not really for vitamin c. OK, like you're never really going to use vitamin. I am again. You're really gonna you will never exert a therapeutic effect. What about the, do they make it like liposomal vitamin C? Be better. Still not the same. No. That's typically being absorbed by the mucous membranes. Yeah. And the fat as a carrier, generally fat's always going to be a better carrier. So a lot of like large molecules, like curcuminoids that are found in tumeric, carotenes. They're always gonna be absorbed better in fat.

So any type of liposomal milieu is gonna increase absorption because fat is just more easily absorbed. It's not as tightly regulated by the enterocytes in the GI tract. But again, not the same as IV. And IV is, IV medicine is a completely different animal. And when you, if oncologists were to really look at the research and begin to realize how at high doses, it becomes oxidative. So if it's oxidated, just like chemo is the two should work synergistically. Right. Oh, and by the way it does. Yeah.

And by way, does you do, um, humans naturally produce vitamin C. No, we have to. That's why we can get scurvy. Hmm. Are we the only mammals that don't produce a vitamin C or are there other mammals? I think the. Only vitamin that we actually produce is vitamin D. Right. Interesting. Yeah. Vitamin D is again. Require sunlight and again, even vitamin. D, you know, the supplement is not the same as vitamin, D secondary exposure from sunlight. Not the say. Yeah, so it's incredible when you begin to look at it, and when begin look sort of the applications in oncology, or even in infectious diseases like sepsis.

You know, how vitamin C works synergistically with how it affects tumor cells is really incredible. What kind of results are you seeing with your patients when when do the high dose vitamin c, specifically like your cancer patients? They're always going to outperform the standard of care alone. Really? And I don't really think at all someone who's practicing integrative oncology should not be doing the standard of care or ever convinced in a patient not to do the standards of it has nothing to with that.

It's that the studies that are done together chemo becomes less toxic. And it becomes more effective. So you can imagine, vitamin C is almost not toxic enough to kill shit. But it's so, that oxidative effect depletes the tumor cells, it deplete the tumors cells glutathione stores, and it so weakens the tumour cell, yet not affecting our healthy cells at all.

Integrative cancer care and treatment combinations 36:00

that once chemotherapy is administered, it becomes far more lethal at far lower dosing. And vitamin C is also supportive to our immune system, right? And it's ultimately, your vitamin c, or it is ultimately your immune systems which does the final kill. That's true whether it a bug, or cancer. It's your immune system and chemotherapy, because it attacks rapidly dividing cells, that includes your system. So it's what's called myelosuppressive. Suppresses bone marrow, so your vitamin C level, your immune cells go down specifically, specifically your lymphocytes, natural killer cells, T cells and that's why AIDS, or that why HIV patients were dying of AIDS because they didn't have T-cells.

And what we see with chemotherapy is the patient's lymphocyte go-down. One of the markers we always look at is neutrophils to the lymphosite ratio and as that ratio goes up, in other words lymphocytes godown, the risk of death goes-up. And again, vitamin C can protect against that. So throughout that process, you're really monitoring everything. All of those lab biomarkers. Right. And the one thing we always tell our cancer patients is very simple. Simple is that we don't fall in love with the therapies.

We fall love. With the results. Our responsibility is to each other. In other words, to look at the scorecard and are we making progress? Because if we're not making. Progress. Good medicine is achieving a better result at a lower price. In simple terms, so if you can achieve something more simply. That's a better strategy, right? So you don't really want to be just doing exhaustive therapies. And again, that's one of the issues with that. There's people just do shit without actually measuring the results.

Because if you're not making progress and improvement on your patient, just stop doing it. Right, right. Have you, you know, obviously you've done a lot of supportive care for cancer patients with high dose of vitamin C. Lots, lots. have you had any patients that come to you and says I don't want chemo, I want radiation, and I just want to do natural treatments, so I wanna do vitamin c. I have. Try to talk them out of it Have, have, um, Have actually seen the cancer ever reverse itself just going that route?

What you see is that you prolonged it depends because oftentimes we'll see very aggressive cancers. Okay. You know, and I have this example of it was a triple positive breast cancer and the patient really didn't want to do either a lumpectomy or mastectomy. And of course I have to respect my patients wishes. We're there to support them, but you also want them to make good informed decisions. So every few visits, I'd say look, much easier if we just have a skilled surgeon just cut this out. Make everybody's job easier.

Right. You know, you have less heavy lifting to do, but she was listening to people that were giving her false hope because they don't actually treat cancer patients. They theoretically treat patients online, which again is total bullshit. Right? So they'll, they they say, Oh no, no you can, can cure just with this X or Y. Can you, have you? because I haven't seen it and eventually the tumor cell was coming out of her body. Wow. And eventually she died. Did we keep her alive for way longer than she should have been?

Yes. But it would have had a much better success. I would cut it out and then we could do our work. Yeah, so this is where, like, conventional medicine and functional medicine really take a good play together. Yeah. Like, this idea of lines in the sand is just such bullshit. You know, that's one of my pet peeves. There's still doctors out there that we've sent blood work to. And they'll say, I'm not going to read the blood work. I need to, and I like, it's bloodwork. Like, are you really so biased and so small minded?

Yeah. And it reminds me that I always think like it sort of like the analogy. It's like you won't drink out of the fountain because I I am the colored kid that drank from it. Hmm. Change is coming, and there is nothing more powerful than idea whose time has come. You know, like the Victor Hugo quote, right? And I think that when I of change, my wife, you met Michelle, we got married in Dallas, Texas. She was teaching in a private school. she taught English. Her, Mrs. Willoughby, beside her, taught American history.

Mrs. Willoughby taught at a segregated school. Not went to a segregation, taught it at segregated schools. And she taught with my wife and you think, holy smokes, how much has changed? in a short period of time, medicine is gonna have that same massive change. Yeah, I believe it. Because you cannot continue this whole process of us and them. Like we are, you know, type of functional medicine, is different from conventional medicine. No, conventional medicines is not complete. It needs functional medicines.

Well, let's talk about that because right now we have a big movement happening here in the US, the MAHA movement, Make America Healthy Again. which in my opinion, it's part of that change that we wanna see in the course of medicine. So do you think, well, let me ask you, what do think about the Baha movement? I think that it will transform medicine and healthcare. Because everything's on the table. For either proponents or detractors, It's always the evidence and the outcome that's going to make the difference.

And what you're going or diabetes or cancer, it's not gonna be any one treatment. It's gonna a combination of treatments. You know, when COVID hit my town, I sent a memo and a letter and an email to my hospital, Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ontario, and I said I can triage, we have oxygen. I say we will do high dose vitamin C, because right now, well, triaged the patients, will assess the patient and will treat them for free. Wow. Or free. Crickets. And instead, patients were getting COVID.

Being told vitamin D is bullshit. Zinc is bull shit. You can't do anything. Then you had to wait and they were dying until a vaccine was released months into the process. Right. And did our immune system suddenly transform that it was no longer positive? Zinc didn't work anymore? Glutathione didn' work any more? Or vitamin C at high doses didn work for this particular infectious disease? Of course it did. Yeah. You know, and it's not the bug, it is the terrain. And it not just the bugs, its the terrains, which affects everything.

So this whole functional medicine movement, Sam, I know I'm preaching the converted man, is going to make a big difference. The Maha movement is really allowing for transparency. Yeah, within the context of the transparency, look, there's going be some bullshit. That's okay. But it also means that we're not gonna be force-fed a model that is broken and kowtow to a hegemony and a system that's no longer serving everyone and is leading to the perpetuation and propagation of an epidemic where all of our healthcare systems are crumbling.

But it's part of the corrupt system. I hate to say it, but it is a corrupt systems. You know, the people with the deep pockets, Big Pharma, and yeah, there's a lot of great things that Big pharma has done, a lotta lives that they have saved, But at the same time, There's whole different sector in medicine, A different approach that has to be taken. And I'm with you on it. I do think that this Maha movement is gonna give us some of that change in the course of medicine that we've been looking for.

Specifically, you know, RFK Jr. is pushing for a lot of these things. He believes in a lotta the stuff that were doing, but you start seeing the people that have been nominated, the doctors, right? To lead the FDA, to lead to CDC, as the surgeon general. These are people who have what we have talking for years. That's right, and a lot of our patients are, a lotta my patients in particular, are frightened of this movement. Which is weird. Yeah, it's kinda interesting. And not only that, though, but also, like, It should be a nonpartisan movement, right?

Of course it should. Right? And all of a sudden, just because it is under the Trump administration, people just, they think the worst. It's politicized. Yes, yes. Its politicizing. The way I look at it, is the more freedom you have to make decisions, the tools you more tools have in your toolbox, It doesn't change vaccine research. It brings to the table more than just vaccine. You know, was glutathione effectively studied because that disease killed because it became inflammatory and every chronic disease that's metabolically driven, including infectious diseases, it drives up inflammation.

Insulin and inflammation are the two killers. And yet, in most primary care settings, insulin's never checked, inflammatory markers are never check. That's scary. It is scary, yeah. In my opinion, that's almost a form of malpractice, if you don't do that as a physician. Yeah, it's scared. So with vitamin C, is there any other type of nutrients that goes very well in conjunction with Vitamin C? Almost all antimicrobials seem to work effectively with high dose vitamin C. And I think that's why it works well in sepsis and infectious diseases.

But when you look at things like IVs, like artesanate, which was used traditionally for wormwood, in a lot of like hormone positive cancers, you could see artesenate when it's administered before that seems to make. that even more effective. We'll use alpha lipoic acid sometimes. Mistletoe used effectively because mistleto affects the immune system. And mistleto is the most commonly prescribed cancer drug in German speaking countries. I had the luxury of being at and observing at three cancer clinics, German-speaking cancer clinic, one in Switzerland, two in Germany as part of a contingent of naturopathic physicians that were invited to go.

And it was incredible because they were using the mistletoe or the high dose vitamin C completely in concert with the standard of care. It wasn't like one or other.

MAHA movement and healthcare reform 48:00

And a lot of times when we were in the rotations, when were doing the grand rounds after, I kept thinking, man, we would have given up on that patient to just go home and die. They're like, no, just changed the chemo, increased the Mistleto. cancer came back, increased the mistletoe, changed the chemo, and that patient was alive under like, we just would have given up on them because we don't have enough tools in our toolbox because were only thinking one way. And remember when you use chemoe because it doesn't affect the stem cells, the stems cells just come back and guess what?

They're now not susceptible to the same chemotherapy. That's why you need your immune system. So really, from what I hear from you, it's really enhancing your own natural ability to fight off a lot of these illnesses and diseases. And weakening, all of that. Weakening the tumor. You can use these therapies to weaken the tumour. you can affect the inflammatory cascade. The metabolic cascade, the way it receives information, The way receives nutrients. Like, you're putting metabolic stressors, and when you begin to couple all these, You could have a very profound effect.

But the future is going to be that they're going unlock the way the mitochondrial metabolism works, inflammatory cascade, and then the immune system. And then your body's going clear it and it's gonna reset the Mitochondria and your cell is gonna stop being undifferentiated. It's go back to being a liver cell or a colon cell. What other illnesses are you treating with high dose of vitamin C? Skin conditions, Inflammatory conditions autoimmune condition. You know, we had a severe case of colitis.

We see that a lot. And again, at a certain dose, it seems to affect the inflammatory cascade, and partly because the enterocytes, which are the cells which line the GI tract, actually have vitamin C transporters. Partly it's a tightly regulated, but when you give it intravenously, It can affect those inflammatory bowel conditions. Okay. You know, because our main exposure to the outside world is through our gut and people's gut, and their gut health is total. I guess, shit, that's the pun. Yeah.

That's, the truth. I mean, it really is. And gut health is so important. So, you know, we always hear about, especially now that people are tested more for like type of gut issues, You start hearing more of like leaky gut. How does vitamin C take a play with people who have leakey gut? I think in leaky gut, you're basically getting an increase in the gap spaces, so it allows those nutrients and allows bugs and it allow other components to ... migrate into the peripheral serum, which is going to begin to affect the inflammatory cascade.

Effectively, everything that we eat is screened by our GI. Like when we think of our immune system, right? Our immune systems is just in simple terms, protects us from the outside world. Where are we most exposed to the You would think here, like our skin, we have barrier. Our eyes have actual secretions, our oral pharynx has secretion as well. It's really from what we eat. We're literally taking a foreign something from this outside world and putting it into our body. So clearly our immune system has to be most highly concentrated in our gut.

And that's why it's constantly being screened and it is either up regulating or down regulating. And the moment you get an upregulation, an immune reaction in the gut, like when you eat foods that your body doesn't like, or that has an increased immunoglobulin IgG reaction, then you that whole immune cascade which then causes increase in gap junctions, which can cause the movement of those pathogens into the systemic circulation. What the vitamin C is there, um, are there different forms of IVC that are out there?

I mean, I would say this, we chatted a little bit about this in the past. Um, use a reputable lab that's compounding properly. Okay. And then you won't have to worry about the forms, the types. There really is only way to one proper way, to compound IV like vitamin, C, a sorbic acid for compound. It's going to be sodium sorbate. It will be high in sodium. And again, that's why I cringe when I'm auditing files and I see clinics using sodium chloride, like saline bags or high dose vitamin C. Right.

That's insanity because again the osmolarity is so high. In vitamin c in comparison to other nutrients that you're again affecting. Um, and you know, you can burn out people's veins too. Yeah, yeah, and that's where they really should be utilizing the sterile water and create it. You're you're affecting them osmolarity in a positive way. We had a client that reached out to one of our drip bar clinics in the US and she said, well, you know, I can. I can get vitamin C, you know, cheaper, IV vitamin, C cheaper at this clinic.

I'm like, go for it. Like fill your boots. We're not here to sort of control the market. But do they use sterile water? Did they balance it with magnesium, potassium and calcium? Do they have experience administering it? Where's the vitamin c coming from? Yeah. Like don't screw around with your health. Yeah, and people will continually buy cheap supplements. Go to discount IV providers, go to IV, providers that aren't properly licensed. And if you're putting something into your body in, in hopes of it affecting your.

Health and you don' know the quality or the training. Like that's crazy. Especially when you start thinking it, this is going directly into your veins, right? Directly into the cellular system. So you're already bypassing certain defense mechanisms, defense routes. Yeah, completely. Whatever they're putting into that vein, you better really make sure and hope that it's the right stuff. Yeah, completely. Yeah. Completely, man. And it's, they're not. It's part of the reason why the work that we're doing with the American Ivy Association is so important because we are raising the bar.

We are shifting policy, right? We aren't making a difference. At least, I mean, like to think we making the difference anyway, but I think that the more we do it, the research we publish, uh, more clinical work we, um, look I have people that attack me too. But every time I am, I'm like, well then let's debate it. Because I know what I've doing is right. And I it's right because it is always changing. It's not anti-historical. I keep modifying the protocols. We keep making things better. You gotta stick with the times, right?

You've gotta be up to date with some of these things. Now with vitamin C, people have talked about the different forms that are being made in these reputable compounding pharmacies. You have some that our corn base. Right. And then others that have made from like the top tapioca vitamin C. That's from the cassava root. Is there really a significant difference? And the reason why I ask is I've heard a lot of people, you know, want to go more the natural route from something that's like like that tapioka base Yeah.

I think that if you're using high dose vitamin C for cancer specifically, um, or specifically for autoimmune conditions, you generally want to the known, the old school naturopathic food allergens, like before there was IgG testing or IgA testing, but like the school like that, we're talking the 60 seventies was eliminate wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, corn, and orange. Those were sort of like the known food allergens that are just generally consistent with affecting people. You want to essentially have, especially in an autoimmune condition, a preservative free as much as you can.

Yeah, and to me that's very important, especially when you go on high dose vitamin C, where you're administering sometimes multiple vials of vitamin c, or if you have the preservative in the benzo alcohol, it kind of defeats the purpose of when we say, hey, we want to reduce oxidative stress, We want reduce inflammation, if your introducing things that are toxic. You need to work with reputable labs, I will say this too, being part of both the American and Canadian side of things, IV nutrients, especially vitamin C, is way overpriced in the US.

I believe it. It's it's. And do you think you're listening out there? Stop price gouging the patients because, yeah, it' cheaper in Canada. Do you. Think it speaks of all the regulation that's put on? No, I don't. On the pharmacies. No. I think it s just commerce and. We harvest our olives every year in Greece. Well, and I'll invite you And Ben, um, and, uh, for all of oil. Anyway, my, we were, My brother was indulging.

Vitamin C for infections and general wellness 58:00

He's a kidney transplant recipient. Can't really indulge very much. Right. had goat goat flared up. So I said, you know what, I'm just going to run to the pharmacy and get you some alpurnol just to lower the goat. And, and I went and bought a packet of, And I gave her, uh, 10 euros. I think I had in my pocket or 20 euros, it was literally coming from the olive grove. And I went to the pharmacy and I said, man, just go home. Rest your foot because his ankle was swollen. I. Went into the. Pharmacy gave her 10 euros or 20 euros and she was I can't really break it.

So how much is the pack of how. Much is. The you know, the carton of alopecia and all. She said it was like. One euro and 26 cents. Wow. That's not what I'll appear in all costs here. No, not at all, right? So. I think that we, we need to rethink a lot of things. And that's again, the whole maha movement is asking us to re-think things, you know? And I that that, how can that be bad? How could being more inclusive in terms of, and providing patients with more options for questioning the status quo, when the swastika is failing, it's failing.

Yeah, I agree, and this is why it really has to be a nonpartisan thing and we all have to really support this whole movement. Completely. Now, Doc, we talked a lot about cancer patients, other patients with other type of chronic illnesses receiving vitamin C intravenously. What about the regular person like you and I who are pretty healthy, you know, can they benefit from vitamin c intravanously? They can. I don't think you'd want to do high dose though. Right. Unless you were doing like a parasite cleanse.

You know, like once a year or twice a years. Or if you have like cough or something that comes on. Yeah, you would want probably around 20 cc's, around 10 grams is the dose that you want. And for cough you also want do glutathione, which again is an antioxidant. The master antioxidant. The Master Antioxidant, that's right. And you'd want to use glutathione for a cough. You'd probably want do that glutothione with N-acetylcysteine, both IV and nebulized to get into the lung tissue. OK. Um, you would want use zinc in higher dose, and you want vitamin D in a higher dosage.

So you're almost kind of like maximizing the antioxidate capabilities of the tissues in an early onset cold or a non-responsive cold, or flu. Right. And only if the virus, like Epstein-Barr, is where you need to go, those viruses or COVID, Epsteen-Bar, where it takes over is when you would want to do 25 grams of vitamin C. Right, okay. So Doc, you have this book here, we gotta talk about it. When Oranges Become Apples. Yeah, what your oncologist won't tell you about IV vitamin c and cancer. on the heels of us doing research on vitamin C and high dose vitamin c and chemotherapy.

So I wrote it in a period of 90 days and, but the writing is, was in the editing. I re-edit it and reedited it over and over again because I wanted it to be user friendly. So that patients have those exact same questions that everybody has. How does this work? How do I communicate with my oncologist? Like how does it work with chemo? Why does work radiation? What else can I do? And these questions needed to answered in a very simple way. And I'm super proud of this. I really, really am. It's a book that I've given is doing great on Amazon.

I've given tons of copies away, and every patient that reads it gets it. So I'll say, before you come back for your report of findings, I'm gonna run the blood work, we're gonna go through the imaging, gonna through all your CT scans, all of your MRIs, want you to read the book. And I said, promise, it's easy to. It's super easy and it will answer all the questions. And if you're out there and you want to know how and why IV vitamin C works for cancer, this is the book to read. I think I love it.

And we'll include the links and stuff here on the podcast to make sure people get access to it so. As we start wrapping up here, we have a lot of medical providers that tune into the podcast and a lotta consumers as well. If someone resonates with today's message on high dose vitamin C, what is one thing you can leave them off with? Use it. use it. You will be surprised, test properly, run a panel, always run. A panel before doing a high dose vitamin C always include do GS six PD, never cut corners, but use.

And you will. Blown away at its simplicity. In part of when I wrote this book, even in the introduction, I said it is not to oversell vitamin c or to undersell it, But to give you the research and the understanding of how and why it works. And I think we're only beginning to peel back the layers of the onion of why and how it work. But just use it. So if people want to find more and learn more about you, what do they find you? They can reach out to WellnessDoctor.ca and oftentimes that's I think both our website and our Instagram handle and stuff like that and I'm happy to always, I really like when people reach it out.

This process, especially at this stage in my career, it's my 26th year in practice. It's amazing, man.

Book, closing advice, and where to find Dr. Rallis 1:04:00

Yeah. You don't even look old enough to be in the practice for that many years. And I'm just learning. I can't tell you how much I learned from everybody. Not just physicians at conferences, not just through books, through my patients, though my colleagues. Right. But I learn from you. Glutamine post and I target glutamine and there was a nutrient that I wasn't familiar with and i'm like Damn, that's awesome. And I instantly did a research review on that nutrient. That I didn't know And i go there it is like you have to be open that part of this is to learn And when we stop learning, That's when you should get out of the game.

that is the truth man, you know, and think that when We all work collaboratively and You know, especially medicine, it has to be heart led. I agree. And one of the reasons I love you is because you're heart lead. You now, and if you are leading with your heart, its not always, will get to the right place. Appreciate that. Yeah, so yeah, reach out to me, man. So if you're out there and you want to communicate, you wanna reach, I'd love to hear from you. Awesome, man. And we'll include all the links and stuff, too.

Doc, it was this is very, very valuable information that you've shared today, and it's an episode that I've been waiting to actually put together. So appreciate you for coming here on a healthy point of view podcast. We'll bring more to the people, Matthew, what we're doing. Appreciate you too, Matt. Thank you. Absolutely. Guys, you heard Dr. Rollis, vitamin C, it's a powerful tool. Not just an antioxidant, but it can be an oxidizer, which has its own different powerful effects, especially for people that are very sick, that're fighting some of these diseases that we continue to hear and sometimes don't see the actual solution that want to see.

He's pretty much has really got it to a certain place where he's cracking the code. He put the book together to empower you to be able to take control of your health, especially when you're dealing with these type of illnesses. So make sure you check it out. Make sure that you share this with your friends, family. Follow all the pages and we'll see you for the next one.