Why Treating Cancer May Require More Than Targeting Tumors

Hello and welcome. My guest today is Doctor David Minkoff. Doctor David Minkoff is a board certified physician and graduate of the University of Wisconsin Medical School, where he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Medical fraternity for academic excellence.

He completed advanced training in pediatrics and infectious disease at the University of California, San Diego, and served as a clinical faculty member and co-director of a neural network intensive care unit.

In the late 90s, Doctor Minkoff transitioned into integrative and functional medicine, ultimately co-founding Live Works Wellness Center, now one of the largest integrative clinics in the United States.

He is also the founder of Body Health, a nutrition company known for science driven solutions to modern health challenges and accomplished endurance athlete.

Doctor Minkoff has completed 43 full Ironman reactions, and he is the Amazon best selling author of The Search for the Perfect Protein. He is about helping people achieve optimal health, performance and longevity, and he leaves a lifestyle.

It is welcome, Doctor Minkoff, and I'm delighted to have you to the Cancer Breakthrough Semi. Thank you. I'm honored to be here with you. You're all mine for at least 25 years.

Yes, I think we met at an integrative cancer conference in the 90s. We were introduced by. I think, wasn't it at at Thomas Roar? No, I don't think so.

I don't think so. Okay. But I mean, you were I mean, it was pretty rare back in the 90s to to transition for a doctor from classical training to integrative and functional medicine.

What led you to to make that this big change, and what does it meant for you professionally to do this? I change. Well, my motivation was that my wife, who you know very well, is also a big fan of yours.

He's a registered nurse and she got interested in nutrition and health, and she was doing some counseling for the school system in San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, to help people with their diets.

And she actually started a company called Better Life Plans, where she was coaching people on how to live healthier. This is back in like middle 90s. And she was going to seminars to learn about this stuff, and she was very excited about it, and I wasn't very excited about it.

At the time. I was a full time emergency room doctor, and she dragged me to a meeting with Doctor Jeffrey Bland, who was a nutritional biochemist. He had worked with Linus Pauling and we went to his lecture.

It was a day long lecture, and he impressed me as maybe the smartest guy I'd ever met. He had a reading rate of over 1000 words per minute. He had a photographic memory.

He had the largest collection of natural medicine and natural nutrition nutritional biochemistry journals of anyone in the United States. And I came home and it was like, wow, she got my interest.

Now, unbeknownst to me, one of the things she learned was that the silver fillings in your teeth contain mercury. Yeah. And she had proceeded to go to a dentist and get them all drilled out.

The way the dentist makes a mercury filling is they take liquid mercury, and they add zinc and silver and copper and tin to it. It makes an amalgam. It's very hard.

The problem is that the mercury at room temperature is liquid, but it boils at 110 degrees. And if you have a cup of soup or coffee, that's 160 or 170 degrees, the mercury in the filling will bowl.

It will go from a sort of liquid amalgam state to a gas. And you can inhale the mercury, or the mercury could go into your soft palate. You can swallow it, it can go to your stomach and it's very bad.

So she went to a dentist and had them all taken out. And she had a lot. She probably had ten silver fillings in all her molar teeth, and he wasn't experienced with doing this.

He just took his high speed drill and he drilled it all out. It was no protection for her. And the mercury went all over. A few months later, she was very proud of her now white teeth, because he had been great before.

But some months later she started to experience some pain over her thyroid and she came to me with it. And I. I'm the emergency room. I know all the good doctors at the hospital, and I send her to the thyroid specialist, and he looks at her and he doesn't ultrasound and he does some blood tests and he says, yeah, you've got an autoimmune condition of your thyroid called Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Your body's attacking your thyroid, but we don't really have a treatment for this. Your thyroid gland appears to be working just fine. And we're just going to observe you.

There isn't anything you need to do. Okay. A few weeks later, she started to get some funny pain over her right side, right below her rib cage, and I sent some blood off for her, and it showed that her liver tests, her liver enzymes were elevated.

So I sent her to the liver specialist, my favorite liver specialist, and he saw her and he did an ultrasound of her liver. He said, there's no cancer there.

It looks like the same auto. There's no virus infection. It looks like the same autoimmune disease that's affecting the thyroid is affecting the liver.

But we'll just watch it. There isn't anything to do. Another month or two goes by and she wakes up in the morning. Now she's a very good triathlete. She does swim, bike, run.

She does events. She does. I do the Ironman level. She does lower level, but she's very good. She was very dedicated. And she wakes up one morning and she said, my arm is weak.

I can't lift up my arm. She was going to brush her teeth. She said, I can't look. So I'm a little befuddled by this. And I send her to my favorite neurologist who does a brain MRI and doesn't exam on her and says, it looks like you've got a continuation of this autoimmune condition, but when it hits the nervous system and when the myelin around the myelin coating around your nerves gets attacked, we call that multiple sclerosis.

And now this is a serious condition, and we need to do something with you. And the standard treatment at the time was to give her high dose corticosteroid drugs.

And another very serious drug called interferon, which makes people sick. At this point, I woke up with this whole thing and I didn't know what to do, but it sounded like what was going to be done to her was not.

There had to be a better. There had to be something better. So she owns a home health care nursing business, and I went to pick her up one night, and a dentist had moved in right next to her space in the strip mall and on the marquee it said Natural Dentistry.

And when I drove to pick her up, he happened to be it was like 530 or 6:00. He happened to be walking out of his office, and I thought I'd just go in and do myself.

She wasn't quite ready to come and he said, I'm Doctor Ray beam. Great to meet you. And I said, I'm intrigued by the marquee. It says natural dentistry.

What does that mean? And he said, well, we're a group of dentists who believe that the teeth and the mouth are actually part of the body. Surprise. And you wouldn't do anything in the mouth that you don't do in the body.

For example, if the if a dentist does a root canal procedure, nobody leaves in dead organs. You know, when a root canal procedure is done, the tooth killed.

Nobody leaves in dead organs. We wouldn't do that. He said similar with like Mercury. Now, at this time Mercury had been in contact lens solution. It's called thimerosal.

It was in vaccinations. And there was an awareness of this, that it was now being pulled out because mercury was very poisonous, probably number two on the list of poisons.

You know, uranium is maybe worse, but this is very bad. So he's telling me about this and I'm thinking, Holy cow, she had her mercury taken out of it.

Aerosolized. Maybe this is what's wrong with her. So I tell him the story that I just told you, and he says she's mercury toxic. Absolutely. Mercury is a major cause of autoimmune disease, but there's nobody in this town that's going to help you.

And there is a guy in Seattle who trains doctors in this stuff, and you better go see him. And the next weekend he happened to be offering a course. And I got on a plane and I went to Seattle, and I did the course, and I learned how you could test in Detox Mercury.

And I came back home and I tested her. And she was mercury toxic. Her blood level, Mercury was very high. And I did the things he told me how to, you know, what to do.

And with which I assume was an. Well, it was. Yeah, it was a herbal mix in libre detox and and and it's interesting because in the middle of this thing, I met a kind of a suburban biochemist who was working at Harvard, and we partnered in making a liver, a mercury heavy metal detox product called Metal Free.

And so I started this, this nutrition company called Body Health. Our first product was Metal free, and it was an oral product, and it would really well and very safely.

And we gave that to her. And in six months all her symptoms had gone away. Her liver went back to normal, her thyroid went back to normal. All of the neurological stuff went back to normal.

Now I wasn't really going to work, you know, do anything else with anybody else. But our friends kind of started watching this thing and they started to call me up like, I've got chronic migraine headaches, I've got ulcerative colitis, I got rheumatoid arthritis.

Can you help me? And in the emergency room, it's shift work. So it's, you know, it was 12 hour shifts, either seven in the morning till seven at night or seven to night, seven in the morning.

And I would work about 14 shifts a month that I had days off in between and, and in her nursing office she had an extra room. So I said, meet me at the nursing office at 2:00 and we can play.

Wasn't charging anybody. I wasn't sure I really knew what I was doing, but I was applying what this doctor taught me and it really worked. And people started to get better.

And within about six months I had a booming full practice, literally. And we had to we had three little rooms in a nursing office and we had to rent the space next door.

It was about 3000ft², and we and we rented the space out, and we hired some people to help us. And I was, I was I had gotten tired of the emergency room.

I was it was, it was I just was over that and this was fun. And so we we then got like committed to this. So we were going to seminars, you know, a couple times a month who knows.

Stuff we don't know. Learn collation, learn biological medicine, learn herbology, learn homeopathy, learn ozone, learn training for you know, all type screening.

And so I've learned all these things and the practice is just continued to grow. So we now have about 40,000ft² of clinic space and five medical doctors, foreigners, practitioners, a staff of about 120 people.

We really specialize in people who have serious chronic illness. Probably 75% of what we see is cancer. But people with neurological disease or autoimmune disease or chronic fatigue or long Covid, you know, there's just tons of these people who and with our sort of experience.

So I've been doing this almost 30 years. We've learned a lot. And we can really help people that have these conditions so that they can get their lives back.

So me, a little bit through the journey of a patient has been diagnosed with cancer at the hospital. He or she makes the decision to get a second opinion, to see an integrative doctor, and it calls your clinic.

And then what happens? So usually the people have already done traditional therapy. They've done radiation, chemotherapy, surgery. They're sort of railroaded into that.

They're afraid and they do it and it doesn't work. Or in three months it comes back or they're afraid if they do any more of it, they feel like they're going to die and they're looking or they're put on hospice like there's nothing more we can do for you.

And so all of these people are reaching out for, well, is there any is there anything else that you can do? And so the vast majority of people are in that condition.

They're usually stage 3 or 4 disease. They're kind of medical wreckage. You know, they've been harmed by the treatments that they've had. So that's mostly who we see.

So the average patient comes to Clearwater where we're basically water Florida. They do a consult on the phone. They learn about what we do. They come for an in-person consult.

And the average program is about 12 weeks. So they come to Clearwater. They spend pretty much Monday through Friday with us in the clinic. We have we have, you know, I think I've got the biggest collection of modalities to treat the body, you know, pulse, magnetic field and human regenerator.

There's only 25 in the whole country. I've got five of them. You know, this is a plasma therapy that really heals the body. Hyperbaric oxygen cocoon baths from Hungary.

We've got five baths. You know, we do low dose fractionated chemotherapy. So iPPt we've done about probably 25,000 IPT treatments since 1997 when I learned it.

It's the most it's a terrific therapy. People don't lose their hair. They don't get sick. They when you add that to the other modalities of what is the correct diet for them, what's the right anti-cancer repurposed drugs, you know, whether it's been vendors, all ivermectin mice and, you know, so we've got a whole thing with this.

When you add low dose chemotherapy, IPT, insulin potentiated therapy. I learned this from the guy who invented it. He's a he's a on in Mexico. It's a it's a phenomenal therapy.

It's very safe. We've never had someone get a treatment and go to the hospital. We've never had someone get a get one of these treatments and die. But it really makes a difference.

And it shrinks tumors. And when you do these, all these other things at the same time, we get a much better effect. So depending on the cancer and the person because it's always very individual, usually the breast cancer and the prostate cancers are pretty easy.

Like they respond. My sister two years ago was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Stage four. She had a big mass in her pancreas, big mass in her lungs, big mass in her liver.

She was about 60 pounds overweight and very diabetic. Her hemoglobin A1 C was over 11 when she was diagnosed. She went to the cancer hospital. They actually refused to see her.

They said there's no we can't even help you. So she's my little sister. And I said, well, let's see what we can do. So we're now celebrating two years.

You would not notice anything wrong with her now I just did. It's probably her fourth Pet scan. There's still masses. They're they're shrinking slowly.

She has no symptoms. It's in her lungs. She has no shortness of breath or chest pain. It's in her liver. Her liver functions are normal. She's, you know, on a ketogenic diet, her diabetes is almost gone and she's lost about 60 pounds.

And if you saw her walking around, she just looked bright. She's a medical professional. She's an occupational therapist. She has a big practice. She's like perfect.

And we we see that from time to time. And people who are are especially in France because it's a socialist medicine. Sometimes you have to wait for months and months and months before you have the surgery.

And we have a number of people who decide to take the supplements of Vittoria while waiting for the surgery. And when the surgery happens, the surgeon tells them, well, the tumor was there, but it was only caused.

The tumor is still there, but it has kind of dried and and died without being totally eliminated by the body. But it has stopped being an active, growing tumor.

Right. So I'm not anti any therapy. Sometimes surgery is needed or helpful. Sometimes radiation is needed or helpful. High dose chemotherapy I you know we don't I just haven't seen that work.

But if you have someone that's got a metastatic lesion in their spine or in their hip and they have a lot of pain, sometimes local radiation can be helpful.

So I work with other professionals, but usually the sort of program that we do is quite successful with people. And we're not promising them a cure, but positive life and longevity.

And, you know, I've got some people now 11 years out who are you know, she was a stage three breast cancer and she has no evidence of disease. So I think that I just wish more people would see us quicker when you get diagnosed.

And even before you go through all the biopsies, it looks like, hey, you've got prostate cancer. There's a breast up there and it looks like you've got cancer.

I just wish people would come to us sooner because it's way easier to handle if you get them earlier. Absolutely. They have a chance to get better. I've got a gal now. She's.

The other thing that we're seeing is that the cancer now is not an old person's disease. We are seeing people with breast cancer in their 20s and colon cancer in their 20s.

And I have a gal now. She's a professional golfer. She's amazing, fit, like amazing. And she had a breast mass that was probably bigger than a between a golf ball and probably small tennis ball in her breast as a stage one.

And in ten weeks, doing IPT and the other therapies, her scan is negative. There's no lump there and I can't even find it. So there's no reason to even do surgery on her because she's going to need to be followed and we will do that.

Keep her on a regimen. She doesn't have to be in the clinic anymore. She she can go back to her home. And, you know, periodically we need to see her and we do some things to keep them, to keep their natural killer cells high and keep their lifestyle straight so that they can contain this whatever cancer cells are left in your body.

And you are also the founder of Body Health, which is a nutrition company. So how do you incorporate nutrition into your cancer approach, cancer treatment and cancer prevention.

So body health started with battle free. That original product and the we don't have a cancer line of supplements. We have methylation. We have a lot of things for people for fitness and athletes.

One of the things that cancer patients need really a lot of is to be able to build their body protein. And so we have a amino acid product called Perfect Amino.

And it's a way to get in the amino acids that you would get in animal proteins without actually taking animal proteins. And so these cancer patients are anemic and they need protein.

And their serum proteins are low. And this is a way to give them a supplement so that we can build them up. We have 35 or 40 products now with body help we have you know, we have reds and greens and amino acids and pre-workout and post-workout body health.

Com if anybody's interested, there's a lot of you know, so that's all incorporated into the program including your stuff. You know we're using these products because you know they're really good.

They really work. And prostate Bell you know these and the products for when they get anemic and when they're white House go down your products are they're like a mainstay.

So we are you know we try to use the best available stuff. Body health has a lot of good stuff. But we're not in this in this cancer area. And so we use other companies like yours to shore up our, our program.

I never heard of I mean, our products for anemia. Can you share what you have observed and blocking on the name. It's the it's the little the little things to to build up your red blood cells.

Because the abilities mostly to help white blood cells. Well, and white blood cells. What's the product's name? But build something. Build real, build real build types with white blood cells and platelets.

Yeah. Fantastic. I almost everybody we see is on we put on that product terrific product. But thank you. So since we were together in in June I'm using Anchor Bell on all all the female cancers and prostate and all the you know all the guys with prostate cancer.

So the their these are very unique and they're very you know they're they're just great products. And you know, the cancer industry's sort of thought process is, you know, it's chemo radiation and surgery.

And those are kind of the equivalent of a nuclear attack on the body. You know, they're all very strong, very harsh, and they cause a lot of damage. And what I tell patients is that we're doing a different a different philosophy, which is death by a thousand paper cuts.

If I give you prostate Bell and I give you repurposed medications, anti parasitic and I give you hyperthermia local heat or whole body hyperthermia. These aren't and I give you low dose fractionated chemotherapy.

And I give you high dose vitamin C and high dose curcumin and IV ozone glycerin. And I put you on the human regenerator. These are like paper cuts. But if you hit the tumor with enough paper cuts, you could kill it.

And these things are all things that otherwise build up the body. So then the body isn't killed off by your therapy, and none of the none of the therapies, none of the chemotherapies will kill 100% of the cancer cells.

The best drugs maybe kill 8,084% of the cancer cells, but they're also going to kill 84% of your natural killer cells, which are the lymphocytes that are supposed to protect you.

And pretty soon when you when you do those harsh therapies, the cancers get more aggressive, they get angry, they metastasize. And if we do the paper cut, if you do low dose chemotherapy and high dose things that are saved vitamin C, curcumin, artemisinin, which is a wormwood oil extract, or resveratrol or quercetin, these are all available IV and we test the person's circulating tumor cells to find out what they're sensitive to.

You know, sometimes vitamin C doesn't work. What kind of tests do you do for that? Well, the the Greek test, the GCC test is really excellent. And sometimes vitamin C and curcumin are really good, but sometimes they're not.

So if I'm giving it, I want to have some indication that it's going to actually work. So it might be vitamin C and resveratrol are the best things that kill that particular cancer cell.

And then we're you know, we're trying to make this targeted toward the person and their cancer. All colon cancers are the same and all breast cancers aren't the same.

They are unique in each individual. And if you just have standard therapy that you do, which is what the US do about 60% of the time, we find they're going to have the right thing, but about 40% of the time they're not.

The drugs they're using aren't the best ones. And so we can do better. Yeah. And so beyond cancer, I mean, can you you say a little bit more about more specifically what others a chronic illnesses that you see mostly in your clinic?

Yeah, we're seeing a ton of long Covid. One of the things that we've learned is about 80% of the world was vaccinated, but the people who got vaccinated shed their vaccine.

This vaccine was encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles. These are exosomes. And they shed them through their breaths, through their sweat. And their friends got vaccine Covid as well.

And so what's happening is that those particles are causing their own bodies. It's a genetic therapy. So the gene therapy causes their body to make spike protein.

So for the last 15 months we've done antibody levels on every patient. If you got the vaccine your antibody level should be zero, unless you had Covid in the last six months, which very few people have and the people who got the vaccine, it should be zero range from 5000 to greater than 25,000.

This is five years later, almost six years later, people who didn't get the vaccine run in the low hundreds to low thousands. I've only had five people now this we've seen thousands of people in the last 15 months.

I've only seen five people who had no spike protein antibody. And so that is making spike protein. And when you look at their blood under dark field, you can see the spike protein residuals in their blood.

They look like self-assembling nanoparticles. They look like a rector sets in 99% of people's blood. It's still there. It's highly inflammatory. It causes clots.

It the spike protein crosses the blood brain barrier. It can get into the nervous system and cause neuro inflammatory disease. And then, you know, you add that to the rest of the stuff that people run into chronic Lyme and reactivated Epstein-Barr, you know, and a parasite load.

So a lot of the other people we see are coming in with those kind of complaints. I'm tired, I can't think, I can't sleep, I can't remember. My joints are killing me.

My gut is followed up and and so this is the this is this is these people can be helped, but they just have to have a place where they can go, where there's enough appreciation for all these things going on, where you can handle each of these problems.

And then people start to get better. You can handle the Covid and you can handle the Epstein-Barr reactivation, and you can handle their Lyme disease and their parasite load, and fix their leaky gut and boost up their nutrition.

They're deficient in vitamin A or selenium or I don't see why not. If anybody would like to have a kind of a s retreat in your clinic, well, it should be.

Look, I'm still trying to get optimum performance myself. I'm all red today because I'm doing a half iron man in three weeks, and I was. So it's 97 degrees here in Florida, and I was on my bike for four hours today outside.

And then I came home and ran for an hour. And I can do it. I'm 78 years old and and I feel fine. I got little sunburned, but I feel fine. And so I look at myself as I do all the patients, and I run myself through all these things about every 6 to 9 months, and you find things my exact level was low or my selenium was lower, and I picked up a parasite somewhere, or, you know, and then when you look at the body of this way very completely, you can fix it before it breaks down.

Most of the people we're seeing have broken down, but the problem is the same. They have things in their body that aren't supposed to be there, and they have things missing from their body that are supposed to be there.

And many of the people need dental, you know, they've got root canals or cavitation or mercury in their teeth. So we work very closely with local with three really good biological dentists here at Todd.

And it worked very closely with upper cervical chiropractors because this atlas bone and many people is off. And if you have people who know how to fix it and cranial sacral therapy and colon therapy, these are things that are long term in medicine or para medicine.

And boy, they really make a difference getting people back. And someone comes down with a symptom score. We have people. Right. There's a there's a list of do you have gas 1 to 5.

Do you have pain in your joints. How's your sleep. And they come in with a symptom score of 120. They are a mess. And then 6 or 8 weeks later we do all the fixes and then we get the symptom score and it might be in half.

Now they don't remember what they wrote down, but the things that they are grading themselves on now are not there anymore. And when they get under 30, it's like you're kicked out, you go home, you know, keep up the diet, keep up the nutrition, keep up the supplements.

Let's see you in three months. We'll recheck these things and then you can live. You can get your life back. Well, thank you for everything you are doing.

I think a lot of people will really feel that they need to visit your clinic. So tell us again where you are located and how to reach out to you. Okay, so we're in Clearwater, Florida.

This is Tampa Bay. Tampa's on the east side and we're on the west side. Our clinic is called Life Works. One word LIFEWORKS Wellness center. So if you go to a Life Works wellness center.com, there are probably 600 videos on there of all different topics.

So you may want to learn some about that. If you want to talk to someone at our clinic if you're interested or your friends that are interested that have chronic illness, you know, the things that we talked about, they can call in, submit the form.

One of our people will talk to you and then see if it's the right fit. And we're, you know, we're seeing new patients and we're happy to try to help. People sank you so much.

Doctor Minkoff, it was Doctor Minkoff with How to Heal Cancer and Illness.