Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes To Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host to the show and founder of the UK charity Yes To Life that supports people with cancer in finding out about them gaining the benefits of integrated medicine. Integrated medicine, as most of you will be well aware, is a far broader view than is currently espoused by our healthcare system of what healthcare consists of. A view that includes the well-being of body, mind and spirit. My guest today, as well as being fully grounded in the conventional world of medical oncology, has also fully espoused the need for the integrative approach. I’m speaking to Dr Robert Ellis in the US.

Dr Robert Ellis
Thanks.

Robin Daly
Robin. I was delighted when you contacted me recently as you’re a hematology and oncology consultant who’s made their way into the world of integrated oncology. It’s got a lot to say about the way that cancer is managed and treated. Maybe just for the record you can start off by summarizing your training and experience in oncology.

Dr Robert Ellis
Sure. I, initially out of college, I went to graduate school and did my dissertation in what would now be called immunology. Back then was just microbiology. And, you know, we were studying how animals heal, you know, fight infections, inflammation, things like that. So you get really into the nuts and bolts of the biology, the biochemistry, and, you know, and the physiology. My grandmother was an osteopathic physician, which in America is very much akin to allopathic licensure and things. And so I kind of knew the osteopathic philosophy, this holistic bend, the manual medicine aspects, but really this sense that people have this inherent healing capacity. And that fit right in with being an immunologist, you know, because if you don’t believe that people can heal or can fix things, then you can’t be an immunologist.

Dr Robert Ellis
That’s the whole science of that. So I went to osteopathic school. And then, although I didn’t quite always know what to do with all those concepts, I did know that the mind, the body, the spirit, and that there were tools and things that you had to incorporate in someone’s healing. I was a member of the MRB and the Army paid my way through education. So I went on active duty, did my training in internal medicine and oncology. But the Army taught me a lot about lifestyle, wellness, and keeping fit, and those kind of aspects that when I left the military in 2001, I really didn’t see practiced in conventional medicine at all. Interesting. It was very disease, disease and treatment oriented, you know, not just a disease, like I’m a cancer biologist, I’m a cancer physician, I take care of all the aspects of cancer from diagnosis to death or to cure.

Dr Robert Ellis
It was really just chemotherapy, you know, you have this disease, this is the evidence-based way of treating it. And we give it, and if for some reason you’re not a candidate, you don’t want it or whatever, then that’s the end of our exchange. And it just didn’t really sit well for me, but I always was working in large organizations like health maintenance organizations, the military universe, and things like that, where I was allowed to practice in that, you know, kind of way that if I didn’t think someone should get chemotherapy, but that they should do other things like metabolic therapy, so I was allowed to practice in that way.

Dr Robert Ellis
So I spent about 20 years of really clinical experience trying to figure out, okay, there’s a lot of things out there, tools and diagnosis and therapies, very little of it is based on evidence, you know, prospective trial evidence, but if you understand the biology of it, if you understand that mother nature herself is a lab, and that for 25 million years she’s been testing out and developing the optimal diet and all these things, then it doesn’t, you don’t always have to do double-blind placebo controlled trials, there is a lot of ways of uncovering truth, but then the question would come, well Doc, what should I eat? You know, what’s the optimal anti-cancer diet? I’m like, well, I don’t know that, and so when I would uncover things like, how do you handle stress, what’s the emotional regulation, you know, how do you factor in the spiritual views into a therapeutic plan?

Dr Robert Ellis
I mean, just pragmatically boots on the ground, how do you do this? There’s a lot of things, yes, yeah, it’s all important, and yeah, you should pay attention to it, but as a clinician, I wanted to help people. I wanted to write prescriptions, or motivate them, or give them tools or guidance to make it real. But around those early days, I uncovered the fact that we knew a lot about anti-cancer diets and the rule of diet and nutrition in preventing treatment and extending remission in the science, but I got tired of talking to people about optimal diets, and I thought, well, maybe they’re just not motivated, so I could motivate them. Cancer’s a pretty good motivator. It is. Yeah, you get people’s attention if you’re like, well, how’s your life working? You’re like, well, not well, because I have a prognosis of six or twelve months.

Dr Robert Ellis
I was like, yeah, okay, now I got your attention. I figured out they didn’t know how to cook, that somewhere around we messed up our agricultural food chain, we messed up the shopping and how people get nutrients, and people just didn’t cook at all. So I started into this fledgling hybrid of diet, nutrition, and cooking called culinary medicine, and I kind of love that because I love to cook. And it was really good to be able to sit down with people and say, okay, look, when they plant-based diet, this is what they mean. And this is how you can cook at home and cook these healthy nutrients. So instead of taking tururic, you know, in a pill, we can just teach you how to cook curry and those kinds of things. But then, you know, COVID hit.

Dr Robert Ellis
So then I got kind of old and COVID did a number on all of our systems, economic, environmental, the healthcare as well. And I just decided what I really loved about medicine was this one-on-one activating and working with people so that they could heal themselves, so that they could work on those things which may impact their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. So I left my full-time clinical practice and have my own little one-on-one consultative services of, you know, what would you ask an oncologist if they were your brother or your husband or your daughter? So no skin in the game. I’m not giving therapy to anyone. I’m just saying, well, this is where you’re at. And this is what you might want to look into and kind of being a bridge between these alternative, complementary, more holistic therapies and the conventional situation where risk may be with their cancer.

Robin Daly
Interesting, all right lots of stuff to talk about there. So going back to your days when you said you were practicing as an oncologist and you were in an unusual situation there and you had this kind of quite free license to do what you thought was best, which I don’t hear of that happening generally, people are fairly well railroaded aren’t they?

Dr Robert Ellis
Yeah. Well, in the, in the military, they were an evident space, single payer, just keep the soldier and his dependents healthy and all that. So, you know, they didn’t make any money on giving chemotherapy or doing anything. Their, their job was very goal oriented, very outcome oriented. Right. In, in joining, I mean, I did have a little stench in a private practice, fee for service on college where I tried to build an integrative network and a naturopathic teaching clinic and, and do that. And after about three years, they kind of asked me to leave the practice cause I lost, I lost like $6 million in revenue because I didn’t give as much chemotherapy to my colleagues. No one really, no one really looked at the health or the wellbeing or the outcomes or the survival that, that just, it was like, wow, you know, your colleagues in private practice down the street, they’re just, you’re,

Dr Robert Ellis
they’re given a, you know, 40, 50% more chemotherapy than you are. And I’m like, yeah, well, okay. So, so I joined a health maintenance organization, but even that had problems, but, but a big HMO like Kaiser, you can make a, a better run at it to say that what we’re doing, you know, it’s cost-effective or keeping people off medications and, and things. But even then I ran into difficulties because to just be frank about it, and we all know this, um, disease is big business. No one makes anything if you’re, if you can get off in school by eating a different diet.

Dr Robert Ellis
It is changing. There are medical schools teaching herbs and mindfulness and that. So there is a shift happening. We know through alkyl type and other kinds of algorithms that are driven that we do over prescribed chemotherapy that in many cases it has survival and has been associated with it. And there’s a whole new brand of therapy, precision, molecular targeting, and or immunotherapy that’s actually changing the, the nature of how we deal with conventional anti-cancer therapy. So that shifts happening, you know, as we speak, maybe not fast enough for my taste because we’ve known about the metabolic, um, Achilles heel that most cancers have a sense of Norbert in the forties we, we know that tumors can adapt and that nutrition and these other epigenetic factors have an influence.

Dr Robert Ellis
MD Anderson is doing a large prospective trial on cancer survivorship to figure out, quantify what would be the survival enhancement of adopting a plant based diet and mindfulness and these lifestyle things. Um, so things are, are changing, but I think I’ve had a unique, um, uh, projectory because at the get-go, I just never bought into the allopathic cancer as a genetic syndrome and that this immunological osteopathic kind of guidance always keep these files open. So I may not know what to do with something. And I’ll put it in this file. Um, and then research will happen or science will happen. Or you’ll run into a practitioner or someone who is a spontaneous remitter. I, I do some research work with the Institute of Nordic science and they’re a compelling database of all the literature of spontaneous remission for at, uh, or abnormally or, or, uh, exceptional cancer, um, outcomes so that we could at least figure out the magnitude, um, of that.

Dr Robert Ellis
And you know, again, if you can say that someone has potential to do something, then we could work to increase the possibility. It may not be a big possibility. You may not, you may say visual affirmations may be helped three or four or 5% or whatever. Uh, the placebo effect is something that I got fascinated on early on. Just as a researcher, we spend a lot of money and time and patients, you know, doing placebo controlled research. I’m like, well, you know, what’s, what’s the underlying side to be pending of that? And it’s like, well, patients can believe they’re on therapy and they can influence the benefit and risk of the medicine. I’m going to say, so, so let’s just, you know, freeze you right here. Uh, patients can so vulgar up the results of a pharmaceutical trial that we have to, we have to kind of fake them out.

Dr Robert Ellis
That’s what I mean. I go, well, what do you think the magnitude of this placebo effect might be? Well, it could be up to like a third. So you’re telling me that person’s belief in the therapy they’re getting might influence three or 33% of the outcome. But in the clinic, we completely don’t use the placebo. We actually know see more effect. We use in fear and relapse and all that. So we actually use it’s drunken cousin, the nocebo effect. Um, so it’s fascinating to me that the science is way ahead, but clinicians who should be way ahead because we see this every single day in our clinic. After 30 years of being an oncologist, I got really tired of only being offered someone chemotherapy that at most may shift their survival by six weeks. I mean, how can you do that day in and day out without saying, man.

Dr Robert Ellis
If some of these people are right as a scientist, I can be skeptical, but I have to test it out. I have to, I have to disprove or prove the hypothesis. So vitamin C mushroom extracts, uh, mistletoe, uh, ketogenic diets. Maybe they’re a wacky doodle. Maybe I think they’re crazy. Like Herbert Benson figured out in the sixties with transcendental meditation. He didn’t just say that crap that you can’t control your autonomic nervous system. He said, I’m a scientist. I’m going to test it out. And when he tested out that he figured, Oh my gosh, we were completely wrong. But people could be trained to control their autonomic nervous system, that revolutionized meditation, mindfulness stress, and now there are major hospitals and programs that have mindfulness meditation buried inside their integrated programs. Well, that started with one heroic, um, cardiologist who said, well, I’m a scientist. I’m going to see if this is true or not.

Robin Daly
It seems like a very interesting combination that in your experience of first of all having this osteopathic background seems to have had a big influence on the way that you’ve viewed all the training you’ve had and the experiences you had as a kind of a container of which you’ve looked at them and secondly this being employed by the army curiously seems to have been also a great piece of happenstance which allowed you to this free reign and as you say it’s stunning really that when you change the object of your work you know that clearly the army has their objectives is to keep people well and it’s quite obvious that’s not the objective for the public it’s shocking really to just say it as it is but it’s not the objective is to make money and it’s unfortunately if you want to make money then you keep as many people ill for as long as possible and look what we’ve got we’ve got a very sick population so yeah a stunning story really from that point of view.

Dr Robert Ellis
the system we have, this is my belief, the system we have and the people that are part of it is really a reflection of the status of the consciousness. I have a lot of patients in my practice that they just look for those healing influences from outside themselves. We think the system is disempowering, but the system isn’t that powerful. Patients are powerful. So it’s all a mess. So there were many patients I would counsel, and they weren’t going to change their diet. They didn’t want to change their diet. They were not in that state of consciousness. So I had to, as a physician, I had to meet them where they were. It’s not my journey. I’m not healing myself. My job is to help them on their journey. But I believe that our perceptions, our lenses, how we look at problems, that tempers our reality and the truth and how we approach things. So I don’t think I reject all the, it’s not going to be an extremist.

Dr Robert Ellis
You’re either in or out. It’s going to be this middle row. You know, we’re, I look at medicine as this phases of cycles, tides, whatever you want. In the forties, fifties and earlier, you know, we did a much more holistic, natural kind of wellness type of paradigm, but that’s all we had, actually. Okay. We were still blood leeching and doing all kinds of crazy stuff in that second to sixties and seventies, we got insurance, but more importantly, we developed antibiotics and vaccines and transplant technology, CT scans, PET scans. And we figured out that we could diagnose and intervene. And a lot of these, you know, when my grandmother would diagnose someone with cancer, which was a very rare occurrence, that was it, right? They had metastatic disease, they died. Now we’ve increased median survival compared to what she could. That’s what science has done, but we’ve figured out there are inadequacies and weaknesses and spots that science and clinical medicine can’t touch.

Dr Robert Ellis
It can treat well, but it can’t prevent and or recover or rehab or do all that. So I think the third wave is going to be putting those two together. What would it look like if we had a prevention wellness system and then when disease happens? Because disease does happen. I also reject this anti-aging. If you just eat right and exercise and take the right mitochondrial supplements, you will age well and you’ll live forever. I reject that as a spiritual being. I think that’s a fool’s error. But we can teach people to heal and to be spiritually whole, mentally, emotionally. Your body’s just a car. It’s just going to break down. You’re going to trade it in. And who knows what? But I think what we’re going to witness here is this integrate approach, you know, not just black, not just white, but it’s going to be a lot of gray and it’s going to be centered around the patient, what they want, what they need, what they’re willing to do.

Dr Robert Ellis
And more importantly, what are the non-physical factors which may influence their disease? Is it trauma or is it motivation or just what are those deeper subconscious things? Right now we have fragments and pieces of all that, but we do know that when cancer is survivors, cancer is survivors, people without active cancer are depressed or have other mood states, that they have inferior survivals. At the same time we know that if people, that body mass index, a degree of obesity, of overweightness, that plays into the survival of cancer as well. In fact, that consensus is so strong that the American political scientific body of clinical oncologists, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the NCI, the National Cancer Institute, they lay that on oncologists. They say if you’re seeing someone with a history of cancer and that they are moderately or mildly or severely obese, however you want to define that, you need to at least mention that weight has a lot to do with survival.

Dr Robert Ellis
And as an oncologist, your job is to enhance the survival of your patient. Now, that’s interesting to watch among my colleagues because all of them are internal medicine trained, but none of them know anything about metabolic control, weight loss, or diets or nutrition. But that’s a consensus view. The standard of care is you need to address it.

Robin Daly
interesting. So we’re getting there. Yeah, I mean, it’d be interesting to see how that does affect the system. And of course, there’s plenty of other things it could be saying at the same time. But it’s a start. And unfortunately, we have a situation where, you know, probably a significant proportion of the oncologists themselves are suffering from the same thing. And so it makes sharing the news to their patients difficult, you know, they don’t look after themselves.

Dr Robert Ellis
Well, you know, the interesting thing, Robin, as well in the military, all my colleagues were healthy. They’re active duty soldiers themselves. The interesting thing is, and I don’t know the statistics for this at all, but I’m just going to tell you, my experience and my HMO is my colleagues were what I would describe abnormally healthy individuals as physicians go. Some of them were vegan, a few of them were what I call plant-based, I mean, and they were active, they were exercising, they were thin or at least not obese. And I would have this conversation with a couple of them, I’m like, you know, why do you do all that?

Dr Robert Ellis
Why are you running and bicycling and eat? I mean, I can understand if you’re a vegan because of ethical or spiritual or even economic environmental things, but why do you do that? Well, because nutritionally in my health and all this is better, I’m like, okay, so you’re doing all this stuff, but you fail and are uncomfortable to tell your patients when they ask me what diet should I follow or what should I do? There’s a disconnect there, Robin, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I’m perplexed by this.

Robin Daly
I’ve got my thinking on it, but yeah, okay, no, there’s a massive disconnect and that is the problem in a way. It’s active in so many different ways in the doctor-patient relationship. There’s a disconnect of something very fundamental going on.

Dr Robert Ellis
At one point of that, Robin, I would tell you that in a prior generation, going back to Osler, Sir William Osler, the great English physician, the founder of John Hopkins, A.T. Still, the founder of osteopathy, and in previous generations, we used to believe that the physician was a healing instrument as well, that the physician-patient relationship had an inherent therapeutic nature. Absolutely. But when pharmaceuticals and drugs and things came about, we decided we could disjoin and disconnect this humanistic, subjective, messy little area of that, and got into an area where they purport that if I give taxol, any doctor gives taxol to a standardized patient, it’s going to have the same effect. Well, we know that’s utter regard.

Robin Daly
Yeah, and you’re completely dispensed with the placebo effect, which is potentially 30%. So you know, yeah, disaster, a real disaster. Okay. Well, look, maybe we’ll come back to that if we’ve got time, but I wanted to ask you about your view of cancer because you, obviously, you’ve been to regular training, but you’ve got this kind of container, this background of osteopathic view of health. And yeah, you’ve taught a lot of things in medical school about cancer. Everybody believes there’s certain dogma about it, but of course, an awful lot of the things that you’re helping people to obtain got nothing to do with that dogma at all when it’s outside of it. So I’m just interested to hear your view of cancer itself.

Dr Robert Ellis
Yeah, well, I think cancer itself is an integrated whole body experience, not just a disease. You can measure things like a disease, a biology. You can look at aqua gene activation and you can look at the staging of the tumor and its growth and its ability to get blood supply, all of that physical stuff. That’s very important. And you can even say, well, the immune system got turned off and suppressed and we got to work on that as well. But cancer affects and is driven by, and I think is affected by stress hormone, by neuropeptides, by what we would call our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs. And if you’re a physically based material doctor, you’re looking at that saying, yeah, when people are thinking crazy thoughts or they’re stressed or anger or fear, look at all these cortisol and immunosuppressive chemicals and all that.

Dr Robert Ellis
That is true. However, deeper, maybe the cancer is a messenger like from the subconscious of processes and things that they need to get a hold of. That cancer is finally getting old. And this is more clear, I think, in cardiology where they broke open this idea of personality type. You know, I eat the type eight personality. We all know what that is now, just driven business guy in a suit on Monday, drinking 10 cups of coffee, you know, a stressed maniac, and he has a myocardial arction. So much so that cardiologists talk about that, yeah, you got to get that guy some chill pills because his stress, his drivenness, his that is leading to a manifestation of cardiac disease. And so part of the picture is his diet and the statins and cholesterol.

Dr Robert Ellis
Cancer is not so. We haven’t spent a lot of that time in psychosocial oncology or that kind of depth of work. If you venture into the world of meditation, mindfulness, psychoneuroimmunology, hypnosis, Jungian therapy and things, you start to uncover some really interesting constructs about how to get in there and maybe help individuals unleash or change. You know, how do you motivate someone really? How do you give someone the courage, the strength and the value? What do you even call it? To be radical, to decide. In Dr. Turner’s book, it’s just I love it, called Radical Remission. And I’m not sure she actually knows the Latin or how powerful those words are. But remission, of course, is what we as physicians always strive for. Although I could never figure out what the biological construct of remission is.

Dr Robert Ellis
I’m just like, remission in Latin means repurposing, an outcome and a goal. So maybe they said, yeah, our goal is to make the cancer go away. But more importantly, if you get diagnosed, you could maybe look at aspects of your life which are going well and repurpose the lifestyle. Because these are lifestyle things. These aren’t like, I’m going to go on a ketogenic diet, lose some weight, get my tuxedos, so I can go get my daughter married. Now, these are things you’re going to do for five, 10, 15, 20 years. So how do you go in there at the root? Radical means a root. At the root of where cancer comes from, physically, mentally, emotionally, and yes, even spiritually. And activate someone in a heroic, courageous way so that they themselves can walk that healing path.

Dr Robert Ellis
And I think it takes an incredible lot of courage. And we in healthcare often are the opposite of that. We often disempower and use fear-based technologies. But all the healing myth of the world to include our Western modern myth, the Wizard of Oz, are driven on the hero or heroine’s journey. And cancer, I think, is just one of those, you know, that catechismic, cyclonic tornado that cancer is. So I think that I look at this through a span of, first, we have to keep the body alive and healthy enough so that you can do this deeper work. I mean, if you’re, overwhelmed with pain and, and, um, and, uh, uh, metabolic dysfunction, uh, we, we have to correct that, you know, and so I sometimes we’ll use my diet as a nutrition as a therapeutic, um, effect and then the lead into it.

Dr Robert Ellis
So I look at these templates and, and, and then put them on the table and say, well, okay, I gotta get back to that later. If you don’t teach meditation is the core tool, but then we’re going to later on as a patient, metabolically, their physical life gets stabilized and they don’t have that, um, that risk of dying or, um, cause when you’re in pain, uncontrolled pain, you can’t really do this work. You can’t sit and you know, meditation or hypnosis or good sleep or any of these things when you’re in excruciating physical pain there. Um, so I have a lot of these tools that I were taught, uh, osteopalpene manipulation, body work, lymphatic drainage, uh, body and energy healing. We were taught, you know, cranial sacral, not that we use those tools in practice, but I know when someone needs that, I can direct that person to a physiotherapist and I know when they’re not breathing right, because they breathe too fast and too shallow.

Dr Robert Ellis
As an osteopalpene physician, we need to slow down their breathing. We need to use abdominal belly breathing. So I can take that person not to a conventional respiratory therapist. We’ll just give them oxygen and tell them to blow it too. No, I can tend to, I can send in someone like a butyl tinkle, uh, breathing trainer and teach them therapeutically how to breathe right through their nose, you know, in deep and all that. And then that itself will increase peripheral oxygenation. So I, the biology of cancer says that you need to have an active healthy immune system, you need to decrease the drivers, the chemical and, uh, and physiological drivers of the malignant condition. Part of that is starting it from its, uh, nutrients.

Dr Robert Ellis
But the interesting thing about, uh, the work that’s being done now is that we know that there are metabolic phenotyping of tours and that tours, uh, can ship their nutrients that they can move. You know, the genetic theory was disproved just a long time ago, as, as someone who did microbial genetic DNA and how DNA is turned on. I knew a long time ago that genes don’t make you. If they did, we never could have evolved or developed this people because to go from a zygote, there’s a lot of switching on and off of genes.

Dr Robert Ellis
So there’s plenty of studies that show that the genetic expression of even multiple clones within a body are different, and that there’s no single genetic driver of cancer that’s ever been identified. The interesting thing, I think it’s Herbert Benson’s Mind Body Institute. They did a project where they looked at blood and oncogenic and pro- and anti-inflammatory gene expression before they taught these people mindfulness-based meditation. And after six weeks of practice, they redid that and found out that just the practice of mindfulness-based meditation can change the expression of no oncogenic driver and increase or shift the inflammatory media. So again, this is another one of these. When you read them, you stop and go, whoa, whoa, time out. What are you doing? You’re meditating. You’re just sitting in a calm situation, not trying to obsess or think about something, and your mind maybe goes into this more relaxing parasympathetic drive, and you’re screwing around with your gene expressions.

Dr Robert Ellis
That is the mind-body connection. So you’ve got to go back home and have a port in your backyard and think, all my training was good and evidence-based and necessary, but it wasn’t enough. I did not know what science has proven and that ancient healing technologies have always known that the mind, the consciousness, it drives a whole story.

Dr Robert Ellis
That means, A, I got to work on myself. I can’t give people what I don’t have. And my own theory, medicine has always been about people dying. People have wrestled in this long line of healers. I don’t think burnout has anything to do with corporate medicine or people telling us what to do. Because we’re the direct beneficiary of the business of medicine, I did very well as an oncologist financially. The burnout comes from your spiritual sense of helping people and being of service when you know you are not serving the universal truth or the ultimate. And you left brain can rationalize that all at once. But your heart, your soul, your center will never let you alone. And healers and physicians, they go to medical school and we beat that out of them.

Dr Robert Ellis
And meditation and retreat and all this stuff will not turn the burnout of doctors because we we decide whether we’re burned out or not. There are 18, 19, 21 year olds walking in dangerous situations in the world today in the military. And they have trauma from violence and a life of crazy experiences, but that is not burnout. It’s post traumatic stress, but when they’re engaged in the, so burnout in medicine just tells me that we have lost and disconnected our spiritual home. And I’m not talking a religious denominational medicine has always been a vocation, right? A spiritual calling. I think just that one thing alone, that A.T. still rejected the inadequacies of modern medicine at the time in the 1800s or early 1900s. He didn’t really form a new profession. That wasn’t his goal. His goal was to change and to broaden the view of medicine. And now if A.T. still was alive, there wouldn’t be osteopathic school because he would say, well, these MD schools get it.

Dr Robert Ellis
They’re teaching. So I think the single thing that I had different or along with in every integrative oncologist I’ve met and every integrative holistic doc I met who got through medical school and said, wow, something’s missing and then went back to do additional training and integrated medicine, holistic medicine, or whatever, like the American college of life found medicine. They were courageous, heroic individuals who said they looked at their life and said, I want to do good. And the universe is telling me that I got to go this way and that my ego in my mind, but it might not have been right. And I’m going to self correct myself and do better.

Dr Robert Ellis
And that takes a lot of heroism and courage as a physician to say, yeah, things have changed. That’s not right. I believe the wrong thing. But scientists have always been saying that. Scientists are always like, well, we were wrong about gravity. Whoops, we were wrong about the earth circling the sun. That took some ego of someone to say, yep, we were wrong. Now we got to do his things differently. So I think we start on ourselves. We diagnose our problem, and then we can help our patients. And then we will advocate, you know, I don’t know, the 60, 65 or whatever, when insurance started. My grandmother didn’t have insurance. She didn’t have Blue Cross Blue Shield. How did she do business? Cash? Well, you’re not going to pay chemotherapy with cash. You’re going to have to have some kind of insurance-based system. But if only a third of chemotherapy is necessary, well, that’s probably a doable society game to make that happen, right?

Dr Robert Ellis
I think so we as physicians have a lot of power. We have a lot of authority. And even in integrated medicine, Robin, you know, I got patients, they got the internet, they got podcasts, they got books, they got beautiful, they got a book written by Jane Llewellyn, you know, on how to starve cancer that I’ll be honest. Jane Mcleod. Yeah, Mcleod. I read the book and I’m like, wow, this is hard for me to read. And I’m a PhD trained on college. I mean, she has dug into research and amazing. So the real issue though, if people get access to that and they don’t know how to use it. So someone just called me the other day and said, I was reading some stuff that cannabis kills cancer cells. I’m like, yeah, that’s on the web now. But the guy’s like on immunotherapy and he doesn’t know how to use that. So if I as a college did say, I do what you want. Well, that’s not the right answer.

Dr Robert Ellis
We got to get involved. So there’s two pieces we as physicians have to embrace and get involved to help our patients figure out what, this is our job. This is what we profess to do as oncologists. And then patients already have access, but knowledge is not wisdom. So the good news is that we have a lot of knowledge out there, but we need a referee. We need adult supervision on what’s there so that we may, and maybe that’s honest to say, listen, Mr. I don’t know what the data says. I don’t know, but here’s my concerns biological. And this is how I would do it as a clinician, as a therapeutic clinician. So it’s not just getting access to the integrated medicine or even let’s say, let’s say that the insurance company pays for it, like pays for acupuncture. Well, I don’t know if you even need that. How would you even decide? Right. Who’s supposed to help you?

Robin Daly
You know, we really need that, we really need that. But it takes open-mindedness and that, yeah, unfortunately, open-mindedness is not a strength in oncology generally, as you know, but it’s so great to hear you talking about it. I just want to refer back to your talk. Thank you very much for talking about this kind of disconnect in oncology where people are actually not doing their very best as they could. And it exactly links up with what you were saying earlier about not really getting it as to why an oncologist was able to look after himself but not pass that information on. It’s because of that disconnect and it’s so important, the human connection between the doctor and patient and there’s so much in it. And guess what? We’re out of time. Yeah, it’s been really interesting conversation. Look, I don’t want to leave without you mentioning you’re now offering a service to exactly what you just said. Do you want to tell us about where we can find out about that?

Dr Robert Ellis
Yes, I will. So what I’m, what I’m doing and what I want to make clear is, you know, there are state and federal and international people all up in our business as doc. When you have a license, everyone’s involved in what you can and can’t do, just because our power and our authority is really, you know, powerful. So what I’m doing is I am not offering physician-patient relationship or follow-up. I can’t. And I just, I have medical and legal implications, but I can do education, coaching and recommendations and motivate and get people to where I think they need to be. Does that make sense? Yeah. So that service consultant survey is called, and this is, and it is a strict one-to-one consultant, maybe even follow-up, a way that patients can, let’s say they don’t understand their prognosis or their diagnosis, or they’re taking a drug and they’re like, well, he says it’s going to make me live long.

Dr Robert Ellis
Well, I can inform and educate and flesh that out for better understanding. Yeah. The second way is I can look at someone’s current situation and say, okay, here are the lifestyle or the linchpins. This is what you should work on first, and this is who can help you. And then if there are alternative, integrative, complimentary questions like, well, doc, should I go spend $20,000 to do high dose vitamin C? You know, I can maybe help them ferry that out. Not having any skin in the game means I’m not telling you to do something. You’re buying my time because it became really aware that if you had an intimate friend or a family member who was an oncologist, those hawks would be so in-depth, intimate, empathic in what? People can just look at that and contact me. And it’s a ma in pa, old school, you know, cash or check only, and low school where we can get people the information without the electronic charts and all that.

Dr Robert Ellis
And they can just send me a message and I will get back to them and ask them, well, what do you want out of this consult so that I can drive it into their needs? But by doing this education, coaching education, I can keep, because no state or country recognizes that coaching, education, and wellness instruction is part of the practice and medicine, which Robin, I don’t agree with, but I’m going to use this legal loophole to help people. I think that’s ridiculous, but we’ve talked about this during this podcast about the disconnect of medicine. So that’s what I’m offering individuals to do. And I would love to help anyone who thinks that would be of service to them.

Robin Daly
Well I imagine it would be to a lot of people. So look, there we go, ic3services.com, thank you very much indeed Bob for a very interesting chat. I think you’d be a wonderful person to have on anybody’s team, so thank you for telling us all about it.

Dr Robert Ellis
Thank you Robin. Have a good day over across the pond. Thanks.

Robin Daly
a fascinating talk and what an eye-opener it is to hear how the rulebook changes for the armed forces a place where they genuinely want the best health for their patients and the parasitic tentacles of commerce that have wound their way to every avenue of public health are excluded do check out Dr. Ellis’s website that’s ic3services.com find out more thanks so much for listening today I’ll be back as usual next week with another yes to life show here on UK health radio so I do hope you can join me again goodbye