The Dr. Hyman Show - The Functional Medicine Approach To Cancer and Cancer Recurrence with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. What we're talking about in functional medicine is true prevention. Whether you've already had it and you want to prevent it from coming again, or you have a family history you're worried about, you actually can map out what's wrong and fix those things, and it makes a big difference. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to this special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Starting point is 00:00:24 That's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've got cancer or anybody in your family has cancer, you better listen to this House Call mini episode because in this series of special episodes of The Doctor's Pharmacy called House Call, I sit down with the Ultra Wellness Center Physician Medical Director, Dr. Elizabeth Boham, to discuss how we as functional medicine doctors tackle specific conditions that we see at our practice every day. And Dr. Boham is an incredible doctor. She's been my colleague for over 20 years. She's an exercise physiologist, a nutritionist, and a doctor, which is a rare combo. And I'm so pleased to have her here on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me. Cancer is a very big topic and we can't cover it all in 30 minutes, but you have a unique experience that has informed your way of thinking about cancer. Because when you're 30 and you're now, can I say 50? 51, yeah. You can say it. You had cancer. And when I first met you, you had really short hair because you just had chemo and all the treatments that cause you to lose your hair. And, and you actually figured out how to make sure that you weren't going to get cancer again. Uh, and a lot of people knock, knock.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Well, it's been 21 years. I think you're good. But you know, it's interesting when I, I remember these patients coming to the practice and one of them had like breast cancer and she had colon cancer and she had three cancers. And the doctor's like, well, we're just going to like, you know, do screening. You know, we're just going to like see what happens. Like, good luck. You had your chemo radiation surgery and now there's nothing you can do except wait.

Starting point is 00:02:01 And we'll, you know, do a surveillance, active surveillance. It's not active, nothing. It's active, nothing. You do nothing. And there's no plan of what to eat or how to figure out why you got the cancer or what to do about it. You know, so whether you're wanting to prevent it or you've had it and you want to prevent and get it again, you know, it's important to do a holistic look at your biology. It really because that you know all of us are individuals you know and for me my undergraduate and graduate degree was in nutrition and I was an exercise physiologist and I love to eat right and exercise right so I was doing those things but there were aspects that that I needed to really focus on in terms of

Starting point is 00:02:43 me being able to prevent a recurrence of cancer or another type of cancer. So yeah, I was 30. I had a triple negative breast cancer. I don't have any family history of breast cancer. It was aggressive. I was very lucky that I found it early as I did, but I did go through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and- All the fun stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Poison chemotherapy, radiation, and- All the fun stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Poisoning, burning, and slashing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:09 And then came out on the other side and I was like, okay, I've got to really figure out why did this happen to me and what can I do to prevent this from happening again? Or how can I help my patients? And when I first went to AFMCP, it was after I started working at Canyon Ranch in Lenox and where I met you. That's the functional medicine training program. Exactly. And it was just like this light bulb went off in my head where I was like, okay, this

Starting point is 00:03:39 makes so much sense. I want to think about this in a totally different way. We've got to look at how all the different systems in the body impact if you're going to develop cancer or not. We've got to pay attention to the terrain in the body, the soil, the things that are feeding the cancer cell. And so each person, it's different. For me, I had to really focus on supporting my microbiome and detoxification and stress.

Starting point is 00:04:05 But for somebody else, it might be really working on reversing insulin resistance. Or diet. Right, or diet. And so it's really important to have a real personalized approach here. I agree. And it makes a huge difference. Yeah, it does. And I think what I want people to understand is that we strongly support the use of traditional

Starting point is 00:04:24 cancer treatments, whether it's chemo, radiation or surgery, but it's not enough because it's treating the cancer, not the patient and the soil in which the cancer grew. And so functional medicine is an approach that really treats the soil so the cancer can grow back or that you won't get in the first place. And I think that's a really unique approach. It's not either or, right? It's not like, oh, just have green juice and your cancer is going to go away.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Forget that. You know, you need to deal with it. But using supportive treatments, it works better. We have a colleague and a friend who recently had throat cancer. And, you know, it's 50-50 on that. But he did a ketogenic diet when he was going through treatment.

Starting point is 00:05:07 Now, there's a lot of science on this. And one of the top cancer specialists, Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote The Emperor of All Maladies, is doing a lot of research on ketogenic diets and cancer. And he came up to me once and he says, Mark, we made an amazing discovery about cancer. I'm like, what is that? I said, is it sugar? He's like, how did you know? I'm like, yeah, well, it feeds the cancer. And he said, we're finding that using chemotherapy along with ketogenic diets or even the fasting mimicking diets, different approaches, intermittent fasting can actually help the chemo radiation work better and have higher cure rates. Because it puts those cancer cells, they're stressed in those situations, so they can't survive as well. And so the chemotherapy kills those cancer cells, they're stressed in those situations, so they can't survive as well.

Starting point is 00:05:45 And so the chemotherapy kills those cancer cells when somebody's on a ketogenic diet or a fasting mimicking diet. Those cancer cells are more at risk, and so they die off. Because they only eat sugar. They can't live on fat. Right. So we're hybrid. Yes.

Starting point is 00:06:01 So we can run on gas or electric, right? Right. Well, same thing with your body. You can run on carbs or on fat. And when you run on just fat, it changed your metabolism and the cancer cells only run on sugar. So they starve. So this is just one example of the kinds of things we do in functional medicine to help our patients do better through treatment and actually prevent it after and to actually not get it in the first place. So people feel sort of helpless about this, but there's so much we know about what causes cancer, the things we can measure and test for, the things that you sort of discovered on your own. And I think it's sort of shocking for people to understand that traditional medicine just

Starting point is 00:06:39 doesn't even talk about this, right? Right. They're so focused on the cancer at the acute time, which is important. But we've also got to really work on, let's prevent it for coming back. Let's prevent it from coming in the first place. And the dietary advice is terrible you get in cancer centers. I have a friend who was a top radiation oncologist at MD Anderson, which is like the top cancer center in the world. And he was like, our nutritionists, I'm just struggling because they say, if you have breast cancer, don't eat tofu, but you can load up on ice cream.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Right, which is so backwards. And I'm like, what? Eat the tofu, forget the ice cream. They don't say stop drinking wine or don't eat ice cream or sugar, which is driving the cancer cells. Right, right. Creating a terrain in the body, which is feeding cancer, right? Right. So absolutely, we're looking for all those things that may create a terrain that

Starting point is 00:07:29 will feed cancer, whether it's high insulin, high, you know, high blood sugar, high insulin levels in the body, high inflammatory markers, so high inflammation in the body, which will drive cancer. Yeah, cancer is inflammatory. People don't realize that. Absolutely, right? So we look for that. We test for markers that measure inflammation, and then we'll try to figure out why is there inflammation and what can we do to lower it. For some people, it might be the insulin resistance that's driving the inflammation. For somebody else, it may be the gut and imbalances in the microbiome that's driving the inflammation. So we really want to look deeper.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Or toxins. Absolutely. So, so when you go to a traditional oncologist, they're just looking at the pathology and not looking at the biology, right? And they, they don't actually look at the terrain, which is your nutritional status, your stress level, your level of toxins, your sleep, your microbiome, your genetics around. I mean, they look at some genetics, but it's not the kinds of things we look at, which are more functional things. And I don't know, not the BRCA gene, which is, but you know, it's interesting, you know, the BRCA gene, you know, back in the forties, they sort of had records around this. And then, you know, the risk of, of cancer was like 30% if you had the BRCA gene. Now it's like

Starting point is 00:08:43 70%. Right. Why is that same gene? Cause the BRCA gene. Now it's like 70%. Why is that? Same gene, because the environment's different. Your diet's different, toxic load is more, stress is more, all these other variables are affecting the gene expression. So even if you have the genes, you're not necessarily predestined to get something. Right. So we call the BRCA gene like a high impact gene, right? It increases risk substantially of breast cancer, but so many women don't have the BRCA gene and still go on to get breast cancer. So we also look at these low-impact genes, genes that we can really influence with the environment, genes that aren't going to cause

Starting point is 00:09:17 a huge increase in risk of cancer. But if you've got multiple different ones together, they can influence your risk. And what's most important with those low-impact genes is we can really influence how they express themselves with our environment. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Hyman here. Now, I know we're all focused on being as healthy as possible during this unprecedented time. And that means drinking clean water, eating loads of anti-inflammatory foods, and it also

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Starting point is 00:11:16 So head over to drhyman.com forward slash filter to access the deal. Thanks for tuning in. So we can influence, you know, the expression of some of our genes by eating a diet that's really rich in our cruciferous vegetables and sulforaphane. The broccoli family. Yeah, the broccoli family. So, and we can maybe influence how these genes work by different supplements or different changes in diet. So like I had a woman who came to see me, she was 42. And she had an estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. So and she went through surgery, and then they did tamoxifen. And she came to see me because she wanted to prevent this from coming back, right. So she's like, I really want to figure out why this happened and want to prevent

Starting point is 00:12:00 it from coming back. And so we did multiple different, you know, evaluations on her. And one of the things that showed up was when we did some genetic testing, again, those low-impact genes, we found a variation in the COMT gene. And the COMT is a gene that encodes for this enzyme, catechol-ol-methyltransferase, which is that. The big mouthful, but it has to do with what? Yeah, it has to do with methylation, right? But it's been found that methylation just means the transfer of these methyl groups,

Starting point is 00:12:32 which come from a lot of our folate, our B vitamins, like folate, which is in all of our foliage, our green leafy veggies, you know? There's a carbon and three hydrogens that has to be shared between different chemicals in the body. And if it's not working, you get all kinds of problems, whether you get cancer, you get dementia, you get heart disease, you get depression. So these have to be working. Yes. And so if this enzyme doesn't work as well because of your genetic predisposition, then your estrogen in your body doesn't get broken down and gotten rid of as well.

Starting point is 00:13:07 It can become more cancer-producing. It can change in a way that's less healthy for the body. And so we know that we can influence that gene when we give a diet that's rich in folate, all those green leafy veggies. We can sometimes influence that gene with, we often give like methylated B vitamins. I think this is- Special forms of B vitamins. You know, go to your grocery store, you get folic acid or B12. It may not be the right form to actually activate these things or to bypass these enzymes that aren't working so well in the body. Yeah. I mean, we have a concern about folic acid,

Starting point is 00:13:45 which is the synthetic form of folate. So folate can be what we get in our food, right? Our foliage, our green leafy veggies, lots of other foods too. There's a synthetic form called folic acid, which actually has been associated with maybe an increased risk of cancer. There's some concern about this synthetic form. And that's found in a lot of not the highest quality, not the vitamins we use, right? So it's found in some B vitamins and multivitamins that we're not going to

Starting point is 00:14:15 choose to use because for some people they can't utilize it in their body. What you really want to look for is a methylated form of folate. So this type of folate that's activated, that's found in a lot of our food. Like when we're eating folate-rich foods, it's going to be high in this methylfolate. But if you're taking your supplements, if you're taking a multi or a B complex, you want to look to make sure it's a methylated form of folate. Because the body, for certain people, that's more necessary than folate because the body for certain people that's more necessary than others but the body is it has an easier time utilizing it yeah and that helps with this whole estrogen metabolism process back up on that you know some people think there's something

Starting point is 00:14:54 called estrogen there isn't there are estrogens yes and they're all a little different and some are more prevalent in you know early life some reproductive years, some in menopause. And they all have to be metabolized by the body. And it's sort of like going down a pinball machine. You don't know where it's going to go. And some people don't have good detoxifying mechanisms for all this estrogen. And then they get sort of estrogen toxicity. Right.

Starting point is 00:15:21 And I think one of the things that's really striking about what you're saying, particularly in terms of breast cancer, is that this woman had estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. And what that means is that this is an estrogen sensitive breast cancer. It feeds on estrogen. And so the beautiful thing about functional medicine is that we can, one, test for all these metabolites and figure out how to change the pinball thing so it's going down the right pathway to be anti-cancer versus pro-cancer. And we use lifestyle diets, supplements, all kinds of things to do that. But what's really important to understand is that a lot of us are out of balance and we have imbalances in our hormones and we make too much estrogen and maybe not a progesterone. And that leads to symptoms of

Starting point is 00:16:03 estrogen overload. And I remember, you know, and that leads to symptoms of estrogen overload. And I remember medical school, it wasn't a very nice way to talk about patients, but we remembered how do we remember the profile of someone with uterine cancer? Fat, 40, and fertile, right? Which is essentially saying high estrogen. And if you're overweight, you make higher estrogen. Obesity is linked to cancer. It's linked to breast cancer. Insulin resistance and predesity is linked to cancer. It's linked to breast cancer. Insulin resistance and prediabetes is linked to breast cancer and many other cancers. We have this enzyme aromatase in our fat cells. And aromatase takes other hormones and turns it

Starting point is 00:16:35 into estrogen. And this happens in men and women, right? So when you have more fat cells, you have more aromatase, and so you have more estrogen. And so that then is why, or maybe one of the reasons why, that obesity, having more fat cells is linked to estrogen related cancers, which would be breast, uterine, prostate is definitely related to this higher estrogen level in the body, for example. So one of the things everybody can do is make sure their body fat percentage is lower. Yeah. Right. Because that helps with lowering estrogen levels. And we actually have a whole strategy for when assessing this in functional medicine, which is not what your traditional doctor will do if you go to breast cancer treatment.

Starting point is 00:17:19 And we have a whole strategy for how to balance out your hormones, right? Yes. So things like diet, exercise, stress reduction, working on your microbiome, the right nutrients, getting rid of toxins that screw up your hormones, all these things fixing your liver. Right. These can all really help. Fiber. Yeah, we really want to pay attention to those xenoestrogens, right?

Starting point is 00:17:41 Those are those toxins from the environment that act like estrogen in the body. So those are environmental toxins, things we know about like BPA, plastics, parabens, pesticides. So you put your sunblock on, you get all these parabens, maybe you're causing cancer. Right, right. And because they can bind to their xenoestrogens, they're chemicals from the environment, but they can bind to the estrogen receptor in the body. So they're like hormone mimickers.

Starting point is 00:18:07 Yeah. And they're effective and powerful at extremely low doses. So I'm not that exposed to pesticides. I'm not getting that much parabens or whatever. They work in a microscopic dose to have a macroscopic effect. Yep. And they're synergistic. Yes.

Starting point is 00:18:24 So people say, oh, this one chemical, maybe it's not so bad in animal studies, but we're exposed to hundreds and maybe thousands of these chemicals all at the same time. And our different abilities to detoxify them affect our risk. And particularly in cancer, we know that these chemicals are associated with cancer. So how, when someone comes in with, let's say breast cancer, what are the kinds of tests we'll do? What are the recommendations you'd make? And you have a whole incredible DVD I encourage everybody to get. Tell us about the DVD.

Starting point is 00:18:52 So it's called Breast Wellness, and it's tools to prevent and heal from breast cancer. And it looks at the functional medicine approach to breast health. And where can they get that? They can get it at my website, drboham.com. They can also download a free e-book there. I think it's also on Amazon and Vime it at my website, drboham.com. They can also download a free ebook there. I think it's also on Amazon and Vimeo. It's everywhere, right? Actually, it's on our ultrawellnesscenter.com too, yeah. So what do we do? But so you're looking at that comprehensive approach and treating that individual patient, right? And we're focusing on,

Starting point is 00:19:23 is there toxins that we need to lower? You were mentioning that aspect of toxic load, which I think is really important, you know, because we know that sometimes it's not just one toxin, but it's a little bit of a lot of different toxins. So we can look at things, we can measure things like, is there high oxidative stress, right? That's like free radicals, right? Yeah, right. Which would right, which would indicate an imbalance between the antioxidant levels in the body and the free radical production, right? So sometimes when somebody has oxidative stress, that just means that they've either produced too much free

Starting point is 00:19:59 radicals because of toxins or infections, or they don't have enough antioxidants, right? Because they're not eating enough of the phytonutrients that are the plant foods that are rich in antioxidants. And when we see that, when we see that oxidative stress, which we can measure, we really work to lower it with a phytonutrient rich diet. Sometimes we then have to look to see, well, why is it high in the first place? Right? That's asking that question. Is there some infection? Is there some toxin? Because you've got to figure out why so that you can help with- Insulin resistance, prediabetes. Insulin resistance, yep. Weight, that belly fat. Gut issues. You know, you talk about how you measure the poop of patients with breast cancer.

Starting point is 00:20:40 Why is that relevant? Right. Because there's, I know, right? Like how is the poop connected to, well, in fact- Well, there's a microbiome in the breast. Yes, right. And they're finding that the microbiome in the breast is different in women who have breast cancer. So there's so much more we're going to learn here. But in the gut, we know that if there's an imbalance in the microbiome, there can be

Starting point is 00:21:01 an imbalance in this enzyme called beta glucuronidase. It can increase which can then lead the body to absorb back more of the estrogen and then put you in this situation where you're more estrogen dominant or overloaded. So basically there's like overgrowth of these bugs that shouldn't be there that produce this enzyme that then when the estrogen is detoxified by the liver and dumped in there in the bile which is how how your body gets rid of excess estrogen, it sort of unpacks it a little bit and then you end up reabsorbing it. And so you get this increased reabsorption of estrogen, high levels of estrogen in breast cancer. So we're looking at that level. We can measure that and we can measure just the imbalances in the microbiome, which are impacting that level as

Starting point is 00:21:42 well as multiple other things in the body. Yeah. I mean, you know, given the view of functional medicine, which looks at root causes and systems, you know, the fact that antibiotics cause breast cancer is not a surprise. No. And I had, as a kid, I was on multiple rounds of antibiotics for urinary tract infections again and again and again. And then that just was probably the thing that, along with some of my genetic predispositions and some toxins, you know, really allowed my body did not work in an optimal way, you know? Yeah, it's so powerful. So we actually, through things like lowering sugar and starch in the diet, through things like adding certain fibers to help with gut flora, things like certain anti-cancer foods like flax seeds.

Starting point is 00:22:30 Yep. We can actually, and broccoli family vegetables you were talking about, we can really have an impact on exercise and stress reduction. We put together a whole plan for people. Yes. It doesn't leave them feeling so hopeless and helpless. I'm like, I just have to wait around to my next scan or my next mammogram and cross my fingers and stress out for the next six months or a year.

Starting point is 00:22:50 Right. You can actually be empowered to understand what your biology is doing, what the imbalances are, how to fix them. And is there a guarantee you're never going to get cancer? No. But you're stacking the deck in your favor. Yep. And you're understanding the imbalances that are driving cancer and you're changing the soil. Changing the soil. And that actually won't allow

Starting point is 00:23:09 the cancer to grow. Yeah. Right. So that's a, that's a really powerful model that should be part of traditional oncology. And there are some centers of oncology that are integrating this, but it's, it's unusual. So let's take the next, you know, a little bit and talk about the next case of a patient who, who hasn't had cancer, but was terrified because it was tons of cancer in their family. Right. So this was a 48-year-old gentleman, and he had not had cancer yet, but he had a sister with breast cancer. There was stomach cancer in his family.

Starting point is 00:23:38 There was colon cancer in his family and prostate cancer. And so, you know, he wanted to do whatever he could. He wanted to create that terrain where cancer was less likely to grow. And we also did genetic testing with him. Again, not the big genes, but some of those low-impact genes. And we found a variation in one of his genes called the GSTM1 or glutathione as transferase gene. Yeah, I got that problem.

Starting point is 00:24:08 Yeah. And me too. I'm in that club too. Well, it's interesting, you know, people who have this specific gene actually are much more likely to be in hospitals and sick and have issues, right? And just to back up before you get too much more into it, I just want to sort of help people understand, you know understand what genes are. So you have like 20,000 genes and it's basically this genetic code that is a three-letter code is a gene. So you have, let's say, four letters. Computers are one to zero. Your biology is four, like it's four

Starting point is 00:24:38 A-C-T-G. So if there's a variation in that code, it may not be a mutation. It's just a slight variation. In America, we spell color C-O-L-O-R. In the UK, they spell C-L-O-U-R. So similar, but it has different effects. And that is something we can do something about. If you have the gene for Down syndrome, you can't do much about that. If you have a gene like for the glutathione, you can influence its function, hence functional medicine, and change the way those genes are expressed through things like diet and exercise and lifestyle and supplements and detoxification, all kinds of strategies that we use. And so we check genes that typically aren't checked. And we see where does this person have the potholes and how do we help them avoid them? Yeah. So this, you know, glutathione is this master

Starting point is 00:25:31 antioxidant and detoxifier in the body. And we know, like you mentioned, when people have a defect in this gene, in the GSTM1, they don't tolerate toxins as well from the environment because their body is not as able to make as much glutathione and then use the glutathione to get rid of the toxins. Yeah, so glutathione is like sulfur, smelly, sticky. It's like flypaper. And all the nasty toxins stick to it and then your body gets rid of it. But if you have low levels, you're screwed. Right, right. Like me. And one of the reasons you can have low levels is because you have some variations in these genes. And so for people like that, we really want to support, we really want to support, I mean, we want to support detoxification with everybody. But with those

Starting point is 00:26:21 people, we really focus on supporting how well they can produce glutathione. And so we will really focus on things like sulforaphane. Sulforaphane comes from your cruciferous vegetables and it helps- Broccoli, collards, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage. This is like basic stuff in food that actually has powerful anti-cancer compounds. And sulforaphane is one of those. We've studied at Johns Hopkins, they have supplements you can take. We have that on our online store. It's really effective. Yeah. That's actually one supplement I take every day. I mean, there's a bunch I take every day, but that's one I always take because it really, it helps the body with production of that

Starting point is 00:26:56 glutathione. And that really, as we said, helps with pulling those toxins out of the body. And there's other stuff that you could take, like aside from things like garlic and onions and the crisp surface vegetables, there's a lot of supplements we use in functional medicine that they're not replacements for a healthy diet, but they help to produce different molecules in the body and help different functions. So N-acetylcysteine is one of the building blocks

Starting point is 00:27:20 of glutathione and helps increase it. In fact, when I was in the ER as a doctor, because I worked in the ER for years, I learned that if someone came in with a liver failure from Tylenol overdose, we gave him this quote drug, which was called Nucramist or N-acetylcysteine, which smelled terrible, tasted terrible. We made him drink it. I guess the suicide attempt wasn't enough. And so they, when I started doing functional medicine, I'm like, wait a minute, this is incredible. This is just a supplement that you can get in the health food store. And they even are studying it for kidney failure that's caused by dye when you get an

Starting point is 00:27:57 x-ray. And they actually can prevent kidney failure by giving them this cheap supplement. And I see, right. I mean, I think that's really important about supplements. You know, I think that what's, what's really, they can be so beneficial when they're targeted and used for that individual person and what their needs are. And I think that's really sort of a take home here with supplements is that, that, you know, we can't, well, some people take the kitchen sink, they take a lot of different things and just hoping that one of them is going to be the right one for them. But one of the things we can do, especially with some of this genetic testing we're talking about, and some of this evaluation that we're looking at from a functional medicine

Starting point is 00:28:38 approach is we can really focus on, okay, for this individual person, what are the ones they really need to focus on? What's the ones they really need to focus on? What's the food they really need to focus on? What are maybe some supplements that they need to focus on to help them get to their optimal health? And that's, I think, when we see them work even better. Yeah. And there's amazing stuff that also is being looked at in terms of detoxification and cancer treatments like high-dose vitamin C IV, which we do at the Ultra Wellness Center, can be extremely effective as an adjunct treatment to traditional cancer therapy to reduce the risk of the cancer not responding

Starting point is 00:29:12 to the chemo or afterwards to prevent it from coming back. So there's so much that can be done. And I think, you know, one last point I want to make is that, you know, we think of the tests we do in medicine as prevention. So a mammogram is prevention. Colonoscopy is prevention. The prostate exam is prevention. They're not prevention. They're early detection. So you have to actually already have the problem before you find it positive, which is good. It's a screening test and you find it early enough, you won't die. That's great. But it's not true prevention. And what we're talking about in functional medicine is true prevention. Whether you've already had it and you want to prevent it from coming again, or you have a family history

Starting point is 00:29:53 you're worried about, you actually can map out what's wrong and fix those things. And it makes a big difference. Absolutely. Yeah. So just to recap here, we are so inundated with cancer. There isn't anybody that hasn't been touched with it. My family, I had my sister and my dad both have cancer. And they were sort of late stage when they discovered them, which is hard to do anything about. But I don't want people to feel disempowered because with functional medicine and using that lens and the kinds of work we do at the Ultra Wellness Center, we can map out what the imbalances are, what the risks are. We can design a personalized

Starting point is 00:30:30 treatment program for you that actually tests the things that matter, whether it's your nutritional stuff, we're looking at baby glucuronates in your poop, we're looking at heavy metal levels or pesticide levels, we're looking at insulin, we're looking at the methylated nutrients that you need or your glutathione levels. We check all of that. And that helps us to create a personalized roadmap for you along with other things we recommend, dietary recommendations, because we know so much about dying cancer. And that is such a big, I mean, at Cornell where you went, and I remember I took a nutrition course and I had a book, it was like from the National Cancer Institute called Dieting Cancer. And this was back in the seventies. And we know a lot about this. I remember speaking to my oncology

Starting point is 00:31:08 attending when I was doing my oncology rotation in medical school. And I said, what percentage of cancer do you think are diet related? And I thought it was going to like 10%, 20%. He's like 70%. I was like, whoa, cause that's good because it means we can do something about it. We can do stuff about it. Absolutely. So if you have cancer or you know someone with cancer and you want a different approach, I would encourage you to check out somebody who's trained in functional medicine. Again, we're happy to see you at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox. You can go to ultrawellnesscenter.com.

Starting point is 00:31:38 We have great resources on our site. You can go to drhyman.com forward slash UWC, where we'll give you a handout on the kinds of things we're talking about so you can sort of get started. And that's it for this week's case study in the house call with Dr. Elizabeth Boham. If you enjoyed this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, please share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thank you, Mark. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor

Starting point is 00:32:22 or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

The Dr. Hyman Show - The Functional Medicine Approach To Cancer and Cancer Recurrence with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

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