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Robin Daly
Hello, welcome to the Yes To Life show . I’m Robin Daly, your host for the show and founder of the UK charity Yes To Life that supports people with cancer in finding out about their options for cancer strategies, the many ways now available for people to contribute significantly to their own recovery. My guest this week is someone deeply embedded in this world of integrative oncology as it’s called. Dr. Kirsten West is a naturopathic oncologist supporting people with cancer in Colorado, USA. Hi Kirsten, delighted to be able to talk to you today.

Dr Kirsten West
Great to be here Robin, thanks for having me.

Robin Daly
So, you’re a naturopathic doctor, which is a title that doesn’t really exist in the same way in the UK. We’ve got naturopaths, we’ve got doctors, I’m sure we’ve got some doctors who are also naturopaths. But, in fact, because you specialize in supporting people with cancer, you’re termed a naturopathic oncologist, I believe. So, perhaps you could explain exactly what this title does mean in the US.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, so I went through four years of medical school. So it was naturopathic medical school. And then I developed a passion for oncology, probably, you know, I always had a passion for oncology, even pre-med. And then I just really stepped up for me when I got into medical school and got to know a lot of people in the naturopathic integrative oncology world and completed my four years and then went on to a oncology specific residency, which was in actually in a hospital. So I worked in a cancer hospital alongside medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgeons, we worked as part of a care team. And so I was really immersed in the conventional world, seeing how it all works, but trying to support patients through their therapies. So having completed that residency, it enabled me to move on to apply for my fellowship. So I sat for my fellowship and I gained my fellowship on the American board of naturopathic oncology. So not only am I an ND, but I’m also what we term a FABNO, so F-A-B-N-O. And so that is, allows us to practice specifically and be very specialized in oncology and integrative oncology.

Robin Daly
Fantastic. Well, it all sounds great. We don’t have anything like that, as I said, here in the UK. And certainly, nobody is a naturopath that’s getting any opportunity to work alongside a cancer team in that way. A role on the day when it happens, but yeah, not yet. Yeah. So yeah, that’s a great thing. And obviously, it’s allowing people to get support from people that are really immersed in the world of cancer and have seen firsthand what actually the issues are in oncology in the hospitals, what they’re dealing with, what their attitudes are, what their priorities are, and you can fit your work in amongst all that. So does that sort of make for a good level of respect coming from oncologists in your direction?

Dr Kirsten West
It does because I learned the language. I learned what it is that they’re looking at when they’re looking at treatments. I learned how to speak the research language to them when it came to natural therapies because you better believe we couldn’t recommend something unless there was a study backing it. We really had to do some deeper digging there. I also got a pretty great insight into what standard of care therapies actually offer patients. What does it mean when they talk about progression-free survival or overall survival or response rates. When we would sit at these tumor board arguments with the medical oncologist and hear about some of these studies, it was mind-blowing to hear that this treatment was approved as a significant treatment by prolonging life for about four to five months. Then you have to ask yourself, what is the quality of life of those four to five months? It taught me to dig into the research. It taught me to really understand. It also taught me that when we’re looking at studies and talking about medical oncology, we really want to talk about overall survival because that’s where the rubber hits the road.

Robin Daly
to be right. That’s the one that matters, to patients. Yeah. Overall survival, quality of life. That’s what they want to know about. Yeah. Yeah. The rest of it is good for drug companies, I think. Yeah. So anyway, all right. So you say you had this passion for oncology. Does that come from some personal experience or just that you, the work fascinated you?

Dr Kirsten West
personal experience. I, lots of cancer runs in my family. And in college, my grandmother ended up getting small cell lung cancer. And my mom was very high up at the hospital here in Colorado, my grandmother was in New Hampshire, and wanted to get her the best care. So flew her out to Colorado, she ended up living with us. I became one of her primary caretakers. I was 1920, trying to do everything. I saw her develop severe radiation burns to her esophagus, she couldn’t drink, she ended up having constipation, she started losing muscle mass, coquetzia, all of these things, doing my best to follow the lead of her doctors, give ensure give boost make milkshakes. And I just watched her deteriorate. And I felt helpless. I wish that there was more that I could do. And then when I graduated medical school, I started working I I was able to find Dr. Jacob Schor, who specializes in naturopathic oncology in the Denver area and shadowed him and saw him work with a patient who had radiation esophagitis, constipation, all of these things. And he was offering things simple as honey to help deal with these side effects. And I also learned that giving boost and ensure may actually hasten the muscle wasting. And so it was just so mind going to me that there was so much I could have done that I didn’t know about and what a niche we need to fill in this world of integrative oncology for patients.

Robin Daly
Right, right. Absolutely. Well, that’s a powerful personal experience. I can see how that would give you a lot of motivation. Okay, so you’re working closely with cancer patients, supporting them through treatment and after, but you’re also very switched onto prevention, I believe. Right. Something we need far more of, given the sparring figures for cancer incidents. It’s always struck me that integrative approaches, they’ve got a very satisfying consistency to them. The same kind of strategies are good for prevention, they’re good during treatment and for recovery and staying well. Basically, they’re all about being as healthy as possible. So, can you tell us what integrative medicine means to you and how you apply this to helping people before, during or after cancer?

Dr Kirsten West
You know, Robin, I know you know this, I had such a fortune and a blessing to be able to work alongside Dr. Nisha Winters. Right. Well, and I learned so much. So I basically took, I went from a very conventional based oncology practice, still learning how to support patients through treatment, but I basically had my standards, okay, give glutamine to help with mucositis or give zinc to help with taste changes. So I was like that person. But then when I got out of conventional hospital, I was able to broaden my scope and I started working with Nisha and learned what terrain really means. And terrain is working, you know, we’re, conventional ecology, we need them, we do. I mean, they, they focus on the cancer cells, but we need to ask what’s happening around those cancer cells and what enabled this to start in the first place. And there are certain patterns that you’ll see for many people. And, you know, I think that when we talk about prevention, which is my favorite place to work, because I love getting patients who want to prevent cancer, looking at the labs, talking about lifestyle, what’s stress life, what’s, what’s stress like in their life, what is microbiome, what is going on with them from a toxin perspective, what, what are they eating dietarily? What’s their community like? We forget that too. What is their, what are their social connections like? And all of those play into that terrain. You know, it’s not just one thing that causes cancer, it’s all of these things together. And sadly in our, you know, current society, we’ve gotten off on many of these as far as where our bodies truly need to be and where our minds truly need to be.

Robin Daly
Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, you’re right. Nature is just a great person for broadening things out. Actually, certainly encompasses the lot. But yeah, it’s interesting how this need to address what she describes as the terrain, yes, the overall condition of your body, if you like, has come about really through how lifestyle has changed so much in the last hundred years, isn’t it? It’s like something nobody ever thought about before. But actually, we have to think about it now. We can’t afford not to. We have to. If we live in a developed society. I mean, it’s just where terrain is assaulted in so many different ways these days. And as you say, so fundamental to our well-being. Yeah. And how we deal with disease or anything else. Yeah. So this is fundamentally what you’re dealing with is terrain when I asked about before, during and after cancer. That’s where you’re focused.

Dr Kirsten West
Betray not where my focus is, you know? And and I also, Rob, I feel like some of the role that I’ve played for people too is kind of putting together and guiding them down the conventional world or the conventional path to if it makes sense. What are the questions you need to be asked? Like when we spoke about rural survival statistics, if something’s being recommended, there’s questions you need to be asking your medical oncologist or your radiation oncologist to get get a better sense of, well, what does this really mean for me in the long term? Does it make sense for me in the long term? If there is a chance for a cure, absolutely. Let’s let’s think about it. Let’s use it. But you better believe we have to support your train through it because it is your immune function. It is the cells surrounding that cancer, which are your saving grace. We want to make your body inhospitable to cancer. And we also want I always tell people I want you to feel better than you ever felt prior to getting cancer. That’s the whole point.

Robin Daly
We also had to balance short-term gains against your overall health long-term. You can have a conventional treatment that may put things at bay for a while, but that doesn’t mean you’re in a good position in a slightly longer term, or maybe in a very long term some treatments can actually destroy your life 20 years later. There’s so much to think about in that way, which if you have a really considered balancing of all those things at the time, and take the right steps to protect your terrain, then you can address the longer term as well. Yeah, very good. So, integrative medicine means looking after your terrain, do you? Right. Right. But just to be clear, because these terms, they’re relatively recent, and not everybody even knows what does integrative medicine mean. It needs an explanation of the people, and the question is really, well, how does it relate to all these conventional oncology treatments which you’re being offered? Because it’s not so long ago, it was like one or the other, it was just all alternative medicine, anything that wasn’t being offered at the hospital was an alternative. And that’s the bad old days, and there’s a lot of preconceptions still hanging around from those bad old days. So maybe you could just talk to what integrative medicine means in terms of both conventional care and all the things you offer.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, and current age. Well, first of all, I wish that all of cancer treatment included a team that I was able to work under as a resident where we have all of the doctors of different specialties under one roof talking about patients and coming together. I liken it to, gosh, my favorite story is all the blind men with the elephant, right? All the blind men are standing around feeling an elephant saying that this is what an elephant looks like. It could feel like a big trunk or it could feel like a tail. But it’s when you put all of the perspectives together that we really start healing the whole and see the whole person. So that truly is what integrative medicine should be. And I think that when you can get enough like-minded individuals together and that like-mindedness needs to be, we want the best for this patient. We want this patient to survive. And if we are all in it for that reason, that is integrative medicine.

Robin Daly
Very good, very good. Well, we don’t have anything beginning to be like that in this country yet. I’m sorry to say, we have to go to another country if you want to get everything under one roof in that way. We have to do mix and match to yourself integration in this country.

Dr Kirsten West
Robin, that’s where it’s so important that, you know, like a naturopathic doctor talks to a medical oncologist. Yeah. Right. And we build that communication because it shouldn’t be one or the other, it should be that we’re working together to make this happen. So

Robin Daly
absolutely right okay so coming back to you um i noticed that you initially trained in psychology i’m sure that gives you an excellent foundation for your current work but i’m wondering what took you into psychology and then how do you get out of there into natural opposite

Dr Kirsten West
Well, I was originally going to go into traditional medicine. So get my MD in college and then realized I want to have a little bit more fun time in college. So I transitioned over to psychology and I loved psychology. I loved the science of the mind and how we communicate with each other. It was a better choice than philosophy. So my parents were better with psychology than philosophy is a degree. But I got into psychology and then I graduated and I said, what am I going to do with this degree? And going into being a psychiatrist or a psychologist, I shadowed some psychiatrists at the hospital and I watched how they worked. And I was like, this is not what I want to do, but I want to be in medicine. I kept wanting to go into medicine. And so I said, all right, well, I’m going to start setting myself down the road to go to medical school again. I’m going to go and get my prereqs to make that happen. And as I was online looking at other things, I also started to look into Chinese medicine. And when I started to look into Chinese medicine, I fell across naturopathic medicine. And that’s when I had the fortune to meet Dr. Jacob Shore and then the rest of the ministry. And my mom is high in, like I said, she’s done a lot of work in the conventional world. She was a nurse and then became head of risk management for the hospital. She obviously knew me as her daughter and she also started to get a pulse on what was happening in medicine in general and said to me, this is the future of medicine. Interesting.

Robin Daly
Okay. Yeah. Well, she was very forward-thinking. All right. So I also noticed that you’ve got plenty of other training under your belt. Would you like to tell us what else you trained in and why you trained in those things?

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. So I also, of course, the Chinese medicine bite did not go away through medical school. So I decided, okay, well, let’s finish that degree too. Well, so when I got out of medical school, I finished my license. I got my license in acupuncture. And then I went on to, I studied for my FABNO at that point too. So I got my fellowship at that time. And then I, yeah, so I had those three degrees. And then I decided that I wanted to pursue some more terrain training. So I know Nisha, you know, Nisha offered her course. So I did that. So that’s basically where it all comes together. Those are the main things that I’ve done.

Robin Daly
Yeah. Amazing. And so your work now, how do these things all fit together and what exactly you’re offering now? What are you doing right now?

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, so I work in a clinic. It’s called the Rearing Clinic out of Kansas. They have been around since the 1970s, very known for high dose vitamin C. Dr. Yu reared in, really kind of spearheaded that. And I don’t know if any people who are listening to this may be familiar, they see the pyramids or the circles. There’s these little domes that are known for the Rearing Clinic, but I practice for them and I focus on terrain based oncology. So I get people who want prevention, I get people in the midst of treatment, I get people after treatment. And labs are a big thing for me because that’s the body’s way of telling us what’s happening. We can right a lot of wrongs via labs and see what directions we need to push.

Robin Daly
Labs, by the way, for anybody who doesn’t know what we talk about, you meet lab tests. Short-hand form. Yes, so labs. Yeah, blood tests, yeah.

Dr Kirsten West
In England, they call it the bloods.

Robin Daly
No, a lot of people say, yeah, bloods they use, but they also use labs. But I mean, you know, yeah, a lot of others, as we’ve heard either term.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, so serum testing, plasma testing, things like that, we do lots of nutrients, amino acids, nutrients. I also think that looking at toxins is important in this day and age. I think we need to be looking under the hood and see, gosh, we live in such a toxic world. What are our cells being exposed to? Mold is also becoming a big thing that I did not pay as much attention to in the past, and I’m starting to see a lot of it now. And it is incredible when you start to really chip away at mold, how the body writes itself. And then, you know, there’s hormonal testing and things like that. I really, when you speak to people and you hear about their history, you start to understand what is it that we need to be moving towards and what is it that we need to be focused on as far as testing. It’s very easy for people to focus on the lab results or the chem panels or the toxicology results or the mold testing, but we also have to remember that there’s deeper work that needs to get done here, and that’s where trauma comes in. Even if we don’t have large traumas in our life, a lot of us have little, we call them little T’s, little traumas, and we need to be focused on that aspect too.

Robin Daly
Interesting. So you said you have people coming to you for prevention now These people who primarily say have another cancer in their family or they got a genetic disposition or what?

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. I mean, people who have cancer in their family, I have a lot of people who have, like, you know, I spoke to a mom the other day and she said, oh gosh, based on my patterns, I really want to get my daughter in with you so we can get, start hitting these off at the, at the beginning. And so seeing her daughter next week. So a lot of it’s coming through family. I wish as a society that we were more aware of prevention. I think that that’s an area that’s lacking. We tend to be, at least in the United States, I mean, we fix things once something goes wrong. That’s when we fix things instead of being like, well, what could we do to prevent this from happening? And I think sadly, if insurance companies realized how much money they would save by actually focusing on prevention, we would be in a much better place.

Robin Daly
Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, it’s completely skewed to the whole budget, you know, there’s virtually no budget for prevention at all. But I am very hard to hear that people are coming to you because they realize that, you know, they actually do have a very high chance of getting cancer, because that’s the truth about everybody now, everybody in Western society, we all do, but we’re all sort of pretending, got our fingers in our ears, pretending we’re going to be okay.

Dr Kirsten West
But we’re good, like blinders, earmuffs, you know? But the other thing, the truth of the matter is that since 1990, the rates of cancer in under 50-year-olds has increased 2% each year. Yeah, it’s amazing that. That’s astounding. And it’s not, you know, cancer used to be considered an old person disease, it’s not. And that’s what’s so scary for me. You know, when I started as a young resident, I was like, oh, this is something that, you know, is far removed from me. This is something that is an alter people and now I’m working and I’m like, this is not far removed from any of us.

Robin Daly
No, it’s not. Anyway, well, it’s good that, you know, that there’s a bit of reality sitting home and people are beginning to think in terms of prevention now that they need to. I mean, because that’s the truth. They really do. So, yeah, I hope that will play out in reducing the amount of suffering that’s certainly needed. Yeah. All right. And so, as you were saying, you work in Reardon Clinic, which, yeah, is rightly known for its advocacy of vitamin C treatment. I can’t believe that vitamin C, high dose vitamin C is still controversial, in Britain, as it stands out in America these days.

Dr Kirsten West
Uh, it’s still controversial, you know? But there-

Robin Daly
Amazing, isn’t it?

Dr Kirsten West
it’s, you know, but Robin, things are changing. When I got out of naturopathic medical school, nobody knew what a naturopathic doctor was. You say, now you say I have a naturopathic doctor, people are like, wow, that’s great. You know, it’s like people understand. But same with like conventional patients, this is the thing that we need to remember. And this is why we need to feel empowered and patients need to feel empowered. People need to feel empowered to ask for these things because it is the patients and our collective that are driving these therapies. So if enough medical oncologists hear from their patient, I want to do high dose vitamin C, I want to do high dose vitamin C, did you see this study about high dose vitamin C? It’s going to start opening doors and it is starting to happen. Not at the rate any of us would like, we would like it to be much faster. But it’s starting to happen.

Robin Daly
Yeah, you’re right. A lot of things are starting to happen, even in backward Britain, a few things are starting to happen. Yeah. So back to the rising rates that we were just talking about. So what that tells us is that we’re doing some things fundamentally wrong as a race. So one of the most important things that you think people are doing wrong and that you’re helping people to change.

Dr Kirsten West
I think stress is a big one, I think microbiome is a big one, I think toxins are a big one, I think poor dietary habits are a big one, and I think not being communal with our fellow humanity is a big one too. One of the things that’s been on my mind so much lately is the fact that cancer cells are almost a primordial state. It’s not like cancer is a new disease, it’s easy for us to say, oh, well, it’s a newer disease because it really started in the 1950s, 1960s, it was when we started to see more of it. Long and behold, that’s when we started to have more of that Western type lifestyle, more processed foods, living in houses, getting away from being in the dirt so much, using more things to clean our house, and become more separated instead of living in communal villages or walking places to do things, things really started to change. But cancer actually, when you think about it, all of the cells in our body have an ability to become cancerous, so there’s a seed there for every cell to become cancerous. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the fact that cancer cells, we call them, they evolved, they’re evolved cells, but I actually think they’re cells that have evolved backwards because they’re actually- Regressed. Regressed. They’re acting more like unicellular organisms and unicellular organisms, let me just tell you some of the caveats and you’re like, oh, that is cancer right there. So some of these are to grow, be immortal, move around, use glycolysis, so use sugar as the primary fuel, exponential growth, competition for resources and autonomy. That’s what unicellular organisms do if you put a bacteria in a Petri dish, it’s going to continue to grow once those resources are gone and it doesn’t care about any other bacteria. It’s going to grow as fast as it can. That’s what cancer cells act like. And we all came from unicellular organisms, we just developed into multicellular organisms eventually. So that unicellular coding got coded over so that our cells learned to commune together and to- Absolutely.

Robin Daly
They’re more sophisticated, yes.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. So it’s been in a reversion and I think that that reversion and cell behavior is because of all the stressors. Like we talked about microbiome issues, toxins, not enough sleep, not enough emotional, psychological wellbeing, all of those things cause stressors. And just like we do as people, we revert back to these habits that aren’t good for us, right? If we’re too stressed or something is occurring in our lives.

Robin Daly
Yeah, it’s true. No, it’s a very interesting observation. You’re right. It is a backward step. And out of the things you listed, the thing that’s really struck me recently is the figures that are coming up about isolation, about not being connected socially well, how much impact that actually has on people as well. I mean, it’s massive. It’s much more than many things that should consider very bad habits about your health. This is really bad for your health is to be disconnected.

Dr Kirsten West
We are social animals. We’re kind of big monkeys if you look at it, you know? Like, and look at monkeys. They need to be together. They’re like combing. We don’t need to comb through each other’s hair for bugs, but, you know, it may not be a bad idea for us to have that connection, you know? Like, it’s just, but we need to be together. We need to be talking to our neighbors. And so much of what we consider social is via social media, which isn’t social at all. It’s so separate. There’s so much interaction that happens between people just being in a room with one another.

Robin Daly
yeah you know hugely important all right so um terrain your big thing yeah it’s a big buzzword these days in our circles anyway but i’ll say in our circles because it’s not really a big buzzword done in the oncology clinic is it they’re not talking about terrain they’re without thinking about terrain

Dr Kirsten West
It’s just the thing, it’s like they have been trained to focus on what they need to focus on, right? And so they can’t focus on what they don’t know enough about. So that’s, I think that’s kind of the truth there. But I think that, you know, I spoke to a couple of medical oncologists lately and a couple of radiational oncologists who really are starting to see this. And a couple have said to me, I want to get out of conventional medicine eventually and get into more integrative treatments. Right. So that really speaks to a changing world.

Robin Daly
It does. The best thing would be of course they change the commercial treatments made them better, but rather than moving out, stay right where they are and change what’s going on. Yeah, but yeah, it’s just, it’s fascinating that there’s this sort of complete absence of interest in terrain, but to the man in the street, it’s a kind of, it’s a concept that has an obvious quality to it about looking after the general health of yourself. And of course, the science to show that it did actually really matter, the terrain, is actually what, 40 years old or something at this point? Yeah, they actually did the experiments we showed that actually the trade’s more important than anything going on in the nucleus of any cell anywhere. And so it’s amazing that that’s had little to no impact in the way that oncology is thought about.

Dr Kirsten West
No. And you know what, Robin is so mind blowing about that is they actually were able to identify and characterize 795 different cancer genomes, not National Cancer Institute set out to to identify, characterize 795 different cancer genomes. Billions of dollars were spent doing this. What have we shown from it? Not much. Nothing. Working at the genetics of the cancer is not going to give us the answers that we need. They started, they wanted to do that, not only to better understand, they were like, well, maybe we can understand the cause of cancer by doing this. And also maybe we can figure out personalized medicines to give to specific cancers based on these genetic mutations. Did it work? For 2%, 2%.

Robin Daly
There’s not a big success that whole thing, let’s face it, no it’s not. It does seem to be having some uses for some people at different times to actually know what’s going on genetically and they’re able to target it and in the short term that will make a difference but not for long of course because the genetics change.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. There have been a couple of diseases where it did really make an impact. Right. And those personalized treatments really did. You were like, gosh, if you add that, let’s use this drug. But for the majority of cancers, we’re losing ground.

Robin Daly
Funnily enough, it mirrors the story of chemotherapy almost exactly where one or two major successes which seem to say, oh man, we’re onto it now, this is really going to kick cancer’s butt. We can cure these cancers, we’re going to fix the rest, we’re just going to find the right chemicals and we’ll do it. But they never found them today. And it sounds like this is another rather futile exercise in going down the wrong path. Yeah. Yeah. So, coming back to the other side of the picture, the terrain, okay, well, this is a place where I’m pleased to say the science has been building enormously in the last decade. So I wonder if you just talk a little bit to that now and just talk about, well, what is the science like behind the work that you do, both for the specifics of it, but also it’s interesting, the thing about integrative oncology is a package, really, and you want to be able to say, well, look, this whole approach works. And so, well, also the science behind the approach of integration.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. So the integration piece, I mean, the studies have shown that people who actually do participate in integrative cancer care live longer. There’s better statistics. So that right there says something, right? Right. I think that terrain, I really, I do, first of all, getting a good history, like that is a big part of speaking with a patient. You need to understand where they’re coming from. And we can’t forget about, you know, the trauma questions, what’s happened to you in your life. How are you navigating those traumas or are you navigating them at all? Have you, you know, put them down where you don’t even think about them. The other aspect is labs. I know that I always come back to labs or blood tests, but those blood tests, I mean, inflammation alone, looking at inflammation in those labs tells us that that body could be set up for chronic disease, whether it’s cancer, cardiovascular disease, you name it, that inflammation is telling us something. Blood sugars are also a big deal. You know, we, our society has common theme here, but our society has progressed too quickly for our physiology. And so we used to go through periods of fast and famine and we don’t do that anymore. And we now know and studies are showing that things like intermittent fasting can have a profound impact on health because that’s how our bodies were designed to work. And now we sit at a desk and we’re hungry, we grab a snack, you know, and eat it. And that’s the other thing sitting, you know, we sit for long periods of day. We’re not moving around like we used to. So these are all aspects of the train. One thing I love to focus on for people, and I’m still so fascinated by it, is the marker IGF-1. Have you heard much about that marker, Robin?

Robin Daly
That’s it, isn’t that? Yeah. Go for it. Turn it some more then. Yeah.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, so it’s a little like growth factor. So they started paying attention to this because there are population dwarfs in Ecuador called the, I think it’s the, do you know the, I think it’s La Ron or La Ron, I’m never sure how to pronounce it. But they never die of cancer or cardiovascular disease. And it really caused researchers to ask why? Why is it that those two diseases, which are the most prevalent killers of, most of the rest of the world are not an issue for them. And they discovered they don’t make insulin light growth factor receptors. And insulin light growth factor is a growth hormone, which is why these people don’t grow. But when you don’t, if you don’t have the ability to actually, your body can’t sense the IGF-1, you don’t develop cancer and you don’t develop chronic cardiovascular disease or chronic disease in general. And so it just really begs the question, well, what do we do then? Like, let’s look at IGF-1 levels. Where are your IGF-1 levels? Are they high? Are they low? And if they are high, what do we do about those? And one of the best ways to lower those is with intermittent fasting. Another great way to lower it is watch your dairy intake. So these are all ways that we can, you know, these are just small drops in a bucket that lead to a larger view of the terrain. IGF-1 is not the only thing, right? But does it make a difference? It absolutely does.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, talking about fasting, I remember you mentioning when we were first introduced, you got, you love talking about exercise and fasting. These are two of your big things. Yeah.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah. I’m a big fan of exercise. I’m a big fan of getting our bodies to move. You also don’t want to overdo it. At least in America, I don’t know how Britain is, but America, we’re very much like black or white. You either do it all, you don’t want to do it at all. When I was in Boulder, I know you visited Boulder, but man, if you weren’t out there for six hours a day, you were lazy. But I think that there’s a point where you can overdo it. You don’t want to oxidize the system so much and cause that much information, but we do need to be moving. We were designed to be moving. So I think 30 minutes a day, five days a week, and I really am a big proponent of some type of resistance training. Instead of just walks are beautiful, we were designed to walk, but we need to be moving our muscles too, especially as we get older.

Robin Daly
Mm-hmm. So all of your clients get a good lecture on the exercise.

Dr Kirsten West
So yeah, I always tell people, I’m like, you know, if I had a choice between Christine diet supplements or exercise, exercise would be at the very top of the list.

Robin Daly
But, of course, that is something that’s good science behind as well, isn’t it? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Dr Kirsten West
I mean, there’s more studies on exercise and decreasing cancer recurrence and helping through treatment and providing overall survival, but we just don’t hear about that because we tend to be so focused on the pharmaceutical.

Robin Daly
Yeah, it hasn’t hasn’t really made it in this country yet. I mean, the evidence is stunning, but of course, now oncologists to speak of are recommending that patients get exercise program. Virtually, it could benefit just about every one of their patients, but, but they’re not telling them yet. And it’s, they’re still busy telling them about the very expensive drugs they’re giving them. So yeah, it’s exercise is bordering on free as well. So yeah, anyways, up to us to find out, unfortunately, we need to be telling each other about the good news about exercise.

Dr Kirsten West
We do, we do, and we, you know, there’s the community. Get out, get out with somebody and go for a walk, you know, get out.

Robin Daly
Absolutely, yeah. A walk in the countryside with a bunch of friends is ticked off quite a few of your lifestyle boxes in Mongolia.

Dr Kirsten West
and around and being around those trees, which you guys have far more than you can do here. Forest bathing. Those trees, yeah, forest bathing, those trees put off those, gosh, I don’t know, at least probably say it wrong, but I think it’s by tonicides. But those actually have been shown to increase our white blood cell production.

Robin Daly
Absolutely, I was hearing about this just recently, yeah, interesting stuff. So look, story time, would you like to tell us a story of a recent client? If you’re someone you feel you’ve really been able to help in a significant way, and you know, just tell us what difference you were able to make for them.

Dr Kirsten West
Absolutely. Absolutely. I have a couple. There’s one that stands out to me more than any other. Stage four colon cancer, young, early thirties, which we’re seeing more and more of. Three young kids, you would think everything, living the greatest life, happy, good family, comes around a well-off community and developed stage four colon cancer, spread to the liver when they found it. And they basically told her, we are going to just put you on chemo until one stops working, then we’ll try another one, but this is the rest of your life and we don’t know how long your life will be. So we started to work together, started to really dive into terrain, see what we need to do there, write patterns that were wrong, whether that was inflammatory, metabolic, getting her vitamin D levels right, getting nutrient levels right, looking at toxins, writing those wrongs. And then things started to turn around. It was almost like her body started to get back in the driver’s seat and things started to regress, not as much as we would have liked to see, but things were changing. And I had this idea, things were looking great in everywhere but the liver, which is what we tend to see with cancer. Once cancer gets into the liver, it becomes a very hard, it’s a difficult area to eat. Unfortunately, conventional treatments don’t do much. I mean, there’s radio ablation, but that only works for so long until it tends to come back. And also the quality of life with those treatments is not good. So I had this idea, well, we don’t have the standard hyperthermia like you have in Europe here in the United States. Let’s get you up to Canada and let’s do some hyperthermia on your liver. And she was also on an oral chemo at that point, Solota, which I think was a saving grace as well. And so she went up to Canada, got her situated with one of my colleagues up there who I also just love and was able to do local regional hyperthermia to her liver and also whole body hyperthermia.

Dr Kirsten West
So that’s what really did the trick. So everything that we were doing, it was already working to get everything where it needed to be. And it took that one treatment all of a sudden, her tumor shrunk so much. She went back to her medical conventional oncology team and they said, look, you are now they never, they never would have said this from the beginning and I think they were all surprised. They said, you are now a candidate for surgical resection of that liver tumor and the original tumor. And she is now disease free.

Robin Daly
Amazing. It’s certainly made a difference there. Interesting what you’re saying about that balance of treatments, and about the ways they work together and how you get the recipe right. Suddenly it makes the sum of the parts is much greater.

Dr Kirsten West
Now, and then the other case, there’s a couple of cases that I think about kind of lump them together, but with leukemia, lymphoma, smoldering multiple myeloma, those are also incredible cancers that we can really do a lot of service to from an atropathic perspective. And I have several patients who are now, they were told that they need a treatment and don’t, they don’t, they’re doing great. So.

Robin Daly
Amazing. Yeah, interestingly, you know, hypothermia on its own, of course, is like, well, it’s, it’s useful, but it’s not, you wouldn’t think of it as a, it’s a whole package together. That’s really what it’s all about.

Dr Kirsten West
have to tie together, and the more that you go through a patient’s history, the more that you look at labs, the more that you start seeing what is unique about that patient and what is unique about that patient’s cancer, that’s when you start to get the answers, and that’s when you can make the biggest impact as far as treatment’s concerned.

Robin Daly
Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. Yeah, okay. We’re interested. Now, I mean, as you pointed out, this is somebody very young. And you already mentioned how it was a short time ago, cancer was seen predominantly as a disease of the old. And that virus has come down and down and down rapidly. And, you know, now everybody needs to look out for it. They might have only just got started in life with young families, all this kind of stuff. And they’re suddenly facing very aggressive cancers. So what, what do you think are the main things driving that particular change?

Dr Kirsten West
I’m going to speak to that. I also forgot that with that patient, mistletoe was a big piece of that. I could leave mistletoe out of that picture. So that was part of also what we used for her, which I think had an incredible impact. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because obviously we really, I mean, I’m seeing it more and more every day. I think that so much of it, I know I’m coming back to this again, but separation, I think we’re having mental, emotional issues. I think since COVID happened, we became even more separated. I think that our microbiomes are really messed up and our immune system because of that does not know how to function. When you think about it, we used to sleep on the ground on dirt. We used to be exposed to microbes all the time. And now we’re using bleach. We have dishwashers. We’re getting rid of microbes every which way we can. Immune is supposed to converse with here because our immune system uses those microbes as teachers as to how we are supposed to function properly. When you see young cases of leukemia in children, there’s the hygiene hypothesis that they came from the house that was too clean because their immune system goes, I don’t know how to, the immune system goes, Hey, why are I don’t know how to function?

Robin Daly
I hadn’t heard that before.

Dr Kirsten West
Yeah, I think the microbiome is a big piece. I think that, like we said, stress is a big piece. I think toxins in our world, I think processed foods are a big piece. Our gut and that’s the thing is a lot of these cancers that are becoming more prevalent in younger people tend to be gastrointestinal cancers, whether that be colon cancer, reptile cancer, pancreatic cancers, becoming a lot more common. But our gut is in direct exposure to those things that we put in our mouth. And when we are putting in processed foods and chemicals, we’re causing a lot of chronic inflammation. And those cells, like we spoke about, are going to revert back to previous patterns in order to deal with those stressors.

Robin Daly
So yeah, in a way what we’re looking at, so we’re looking at people, you know, the younger they are now, the more they’re growing up in an environment which is over cleansed and over full of, you know, toxins and chemicals. And so their foundation is worse, basically.

Dr Kirsten West
Their foundation is worse from the start.

Robin Daly
It’s interesting, though, this balance in there, because I mean, it’s not so long ago, of course. I mean, the NHS was set up largely to deal with infections. That’s what people died of then. So we’ve gone from thinking, OK, infection’s bad. Kill those bugs. And now we’re thinking, oh, maybe we’re killing ourselves by killing the bugs too much. So there has to be a balance in here somewhere, doesn’t there? It does. You know, the things that are killing us is the cleanness now. I know. I know.

Dr Kirsten West
This is why I watch my little guys on the floor. My little girl Isla is picking up crumbs that have probably been there for, I don’t even know, and she’s putting them in. I’m like, well, okay, you’re working on something over there. The part of me as a parent now is I’m like, I don’t want to be that mom that’s constantly, you need to get clean or you need to take a bath every single day. Obviously, we should have personal hygiene, but I just think that we need to get away from thinking that we need to be using Lysol on everything or bleach on everything. And I think that’s what it did to service to us with COVID too, because all of a sudden people were so fearful. Absolutely. Bacteria and it’s like, well, guys, wait, wait a second. What are we doing? What is the long-term impact of this?

Robin Daly
Yeah, amazing how the majority of the planet is persuaded to put toxic chemicals on their hands several times a day. I just couldn’t believe it. I carried it around and done toxic one of my own. So I could at least be doing, you know, keeping up with the requirements of the law, but not having to go through that, which seemed like a, well, I’d never do that to myself. I was mad. as if that’s supposed to keep you healthy, toxic chemicals. Strange. But anyway, yes. Yeah. All right. Well, look, fascinating chat. I’ve so much enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Kirsten, and long live the terrain-based approach to helping people with cancer. We need it. Long live the terrain-based approach.

Dr Kirsten West
There’s so much more, Robin, we could dive into as far as training, but I hope that we can. I think we get some of the most important things, but I think if we can all start moving, I think if we can all, you know, intermittent fasting, I’d say, and I know that you probably are well versed in this, but 13 hours a night, three hours between finishing dinner and bedtime is key. If we can at least do that, we’re doing a service for ourselves and get out with our neighbors. It’s like, go meet with people, go talk with people, go be human beings together. I think that’s-

Robin Daly
Absolutely, right with you there, very important. All right, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.

Dr Kirsten West
of course robin thank you have a great rest of your day bye take care bye

Robin Daly
It’s so good to hear of someone like Kirsten being a part of a multidisciplinary team, planning the care of patients and bringing so much to the table in the form of lifestyle and complementary medicine. Of course, we now fortunately have many people with a similar skillset to Kirsten here in the UK, but there’s no place at the table for them in the MTT so far. So all their work has to be carried out separately. Far better than nothing, but clearly far short of what’s possible with everyone working together for the benefit of the patient. I hope you found this week’s show helpful and interesting. If you’ve got suggestions for topics or for guests you’d like to hear on the show, do please let me know by emailing radio at yes to life.org.uk. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back next week with another Yes to life show here , so I do hope you can listen again.