Dagmara Beine introduces her genuinely groundbreaking book on integrative cancer care for children.
Dagmara Beine is a parent who has ensured her daughter, diagnosed with cancer tragically young, has become an exceptional survivor.
To achieve this, she has taken a deep dive into the science of Integrative Oncology, enabling her also to now share her findings with other families facing similar difficulties in the form of a new book, ‘A Parent’s Guide to Childhood Cancer: Supporting Your Child with Integrative Therapies Based on a Metabolic Approach.’ This is a genuine ‘first’ emerging into an ongoing disaster in which, as the incidence of cancer in young people is rising steeply, parents and children are being “wildly underserved” by conventional healthcare services.
This new book makes a bold beginning towards addressing this situation by collecting together a broad range of well-researched resources for all the main challenges that families are likely to face following a child’s diagnosis.
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Robin Daly Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity, helping people with cancer take control of their health and health care through the use of a wide range of lifestyle and complementary approaches that go under the banner of integrative medicine. On the show this week, I have a very special guest. She’s made the time to come on the show today to share her passion for improving the situation of children with cancer despite hugely challenging personal circumstances in her own family. As you may already know, I’ve been making efforts to highlight the immense difficulties parents of children with cancer face and to sign those resources that could help them. Well, Dagmara Beine is one such resource and a massive one.
Robin Daly She is determined to bring positive change to the situation and today we’ll be hearing about her achievements to date and her plans. Dagmara, wonderful to meet you and to have you as my guest on the show.
Dagmara Beine I am honored to be here and I’m glad we could finally make it happen.
Robin Daly Brilliant. So today we’re going to be speaking about the book you recently published, a book that’s been desperately needed for decades, providing help and guidance to parents facing what’s described on the cover of the book as the most difficult scenario a parent will ever face, a child’s diagnosis of a life -threatening disease. So the title of your book is A Parent’s Guide to Childhood Cancer, and I have to say I would have given anything for this volume of collective wisdom 20 years ago when I was facing that situation without even the internet resort to. So it also states on the cover that you argue that the greatest tragedy of conventional oncology is its failure to incorporate safe, effective and potentially life -saving integrated therapies. So while I would concur 100% with that, there are many within oncology who would put forward a very different you, maybe even more so here in the UK than in the US. What would you say to them to justify your claim?
Dagmara Beine Yeah, so that is a great question and something that just recently came up with one of my patients can help answer that, have always had with my families going through either hard chemo or a bone marrow transplant, high doses of vitamin A, D, and K because it helps our immune system, it helps support the chemo and the transplant and have always been shut down with the families who choose to share the plan with their teams. And just recently had a consultation with a family preparing for a bone marrow transplant for a child going through leukemia. And the family told me that the team is giving high doses of vitamin A, D, and K because the studies are just now starting to support what we’ve been doing and what we know for, I would say, at least a decade.
Dagmara Beine So I would say to conventional oncology, they are just behind. We know that what happens in research takes 17 years to maybe make it into clinical practice. And our kids don’t have 17 years. Many of those studies, because they aren’t big pharmaceutical drugs, will not have the funding to have a big study to be able to say this was studied on pediatric cancer. We compared vitamin D giving it versus not giving it. And so that’s just one tiny little example of these very safe, very non -toxic therapies that don’t get in the way of conventional care but very much so support it and help our kids get through these necessary but very toxic treatments.
Robin Daly So you’re saying that they were basically they were giving those vitamins without your advice anyway, is that right?
Dagmara Beine they’re now starting to do what we’re saying.
Robin Daly Amazing. Well, I can’t say that over here, but let’s hope it gets to our shores eventually. So, I know that you’ve got a highly personal reason for gaining the knowledge that you have and for wanting to share it in the form of this groundbreaking book. Would you mind telling us a little of the background story that’s brought to you to where we are today?
Dagmara Beine Yeah, I was working as a physician assistant in the emergency department for about a decade when my daughter, then three years old, was diagnosed with a rare and poorly prognostic leukemia, acute myeloid AML. We often hear of kids having leukemia, but it’s the different form ALL, which has a very good prognosis. And I, even as a health care provider, felt like I was drowning for the first month in not understanding, not knowing, being thrown into this world of oncology. And I desperately also needed this book 10 years ago. But I could not, not only could I not find a book, I couldn’t find anything online. I couldn’t find a provider. There’s lots of integrative, holistic, functional medicine providers who help support adults on cancer journeys, but there was nobody who wanted to venture into that world with pediatrics.
Dagmara Beine Because in most countries, like in the US, there’s a very big difference between being diagnosed as a child and as an adult. An adult gets to choose how much conventional care they want to pursue, therefore they get to choose how much integrative support or treatment they want to do. In the United States, you don’t have a choice if you’re under the age of 18 in the conventional protocol that’s given to you. And I wanted desperately to know how to support it, because I knew these were toxic drugs. I sat through the conversations, as many cancer parents have, going over all the terrible side effects, all the terrible late effects, all the secondary cancers that can happen because of this treatment. And I just knew deep in my heart that there needed to be a better way to go through it, but I didn’t have the tools. And so that’s, my journey really began then, 10 years ago, knowing that I wanted to become the practitioner that I needed then.
Dagmara Beine And so that’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s an ever -evolving process because answer is hard and our world is pretty toxic. And I think the pieces are starting to come together for many practitioners in the world. But you’re right, it’s really not making its way into conventional, or at least pediatric, conventional oncology’s world, yes.
Robin Daly Right, yeah, it’s the same story here about what is allowed for a child here. Basically it’s a life -threatening situation. The treatment is prescribed by the health service and they have to have it, but no resources whatsoever to support them. Okay, well this is the third radio show in which I focused on the particular difficulties facing the parent of children with cancer. It’s a situation I think only a tiny minority are even aware of, the one which you accurately describe as wildly underserved. So it needs far greater attention if the situation is going to improve. Now I described your book as groundbreaking just now without any hint of hyperbole. I’d say it’s the biggest thing to happen in this arena to date and at one stroke it’s raising awareness and it’s answering some of the massive needs that exist for resources.
Robin Daly So the books are kind of repackaging of the concepts of metabolic therapy as extolled by Dr Nash Winters for parents to apply to their children going through cancer treatment. Now in one of these earlier shows we already explored some of the legalities surrounding cancer care for children, but what I thought might be useful now would be to talk about the range of objections to integrated medicine that parents are likely to be faced with and how they can best respond. So do you want to say some of the things that are put in the way if you like objections to children being supported with integrated approaches?
Dagmara Beine Yes, there are so many objections. I think the first, at least my light bulb, and a lot of parents who maybe don’t even think they want to or know that there’s anything beyond conventional care, many times it’s nutrition is the first thing that comes up for care. Whether it’s a little one that needs a formula or an older child who now has become so malnourished that they need maybe an NG tube, so that’s a tube that goes inside your nose into your tummy to give you extra nutrition, and oftentimes hospitals are prescribing only what’s on formula at the hospital which is often supported by, you know, it’s usually like a Nestle or, I don’t know, some really crappy formula with high fructose corn syrup, no protein, maybe a little bit of like artificial dye. I mean, it’s just ridiculous what’s considered nutrition for these kids, and you don’t have to be holistic or integrative to realize that, so I think that’s why it’s a big light bulb.
Dagmara Beine And medical doctors do not get nutritional training. They have maybe a couple days where they learn that, you know, if you have too little vitamin C that that can be scurvy, but they definitely do not have nutritional training, and they oftentimes tell parents nutrition doesn’t matter. Just have them eat anything, even if it’s ice cream that they’ll eat. And we actually have tons of studies. If we just go to Google or PubMed and we put in pediatric cancer nutrition, there is lots of data and lots of support that nutrition, not even, you know, I will argue that more of a metabolic approach, so less sugar, less carbs, but I’m just talking about good nutrition at this point, not even adjusting for whether it needs to be ketogenic or not ketogenic. It’s a really big difference in a child’s journey. The moment that our child enters cancer treatment, which often involves chemotherapy, antibiotics, steroids, their guts get ruined. And we know so much about the microbiome.
Dagmara Beine There’s been so much research about just taking ibuprofen or an antibiotic ruins a gut, let alone what a child goes through. So to disregard nutrition and to disregard the terrible impact that these medications have on these kids’ microbiome and their gut, it’s borderline malpractice at this point, because this is very much not holistic or integrated. This is just general knowledge now that’s not being utilized in pediatric oncology.
Robin Daly No, I’m absolutely right. It is acting as a bit of a Trojan horse, the whole microbiome issue, because it is being studied in conventional research, isn’t it now? And it’s been noticed what an effect it can even have on regular drug treatments, basically, but how much effect they have. So it is beginning to make a certain degree of waking up occur about diet, but not nearly enough, but yeah, so that’s a case where there’s a claim that there’s no evidence or something. It’s not inborn, there’s no evidence. Also, there are objections around safety, quite often, aren’t there, when it comes to introducing something different.
Dagmara Beine Yeah, I think that a lot of conventional oncologists hide behind saying things aren’t standard of care or things aren’t safe when they don’t understand or don’t know. I would say 90% of the families that I work with, their team’s reaction is, I don’t know if this is safe. And so they kind of put the fear into the parents, you could be doing something to mess up this treatment. But a lot of this research is there. So, you know, some of these things like we talked about already, vitamin A, vitamin D, a quality fish oil, something like low -dose naltrexone, we do have the data. We do show that, for example, a medication called low -dose naltrexone that I believe every cancer patient should be on does help in many instances with specific chemotherapies make them work better.
Dagmara Beine It helps our immune system be smarter. There are certain types of cancer where mistletoe therapy, which is utilized more so in countries like Germany or France, even with conventional treatment, can be even more effective than chemotherapies for certain types of pediatric cancers. So the data is there. It is disheartening because I don’t feel like a lot or most conventional oncology practitioners continue to educate themselves, continue to do the research for their patients. And so they just sort of get stuck into this, like, this is the protocol, this is all we’re going to do. Anything else you may want to add is not safe. In their defense, there are a lot of integrative, quote unquote, holistic oncology practitioners who don’t know what they’re doing and who are sometimes prescribing supplements or practices that are not safe.
Dagmara Beine And I’m sure that conventional, you know, a conventional oncologist doesn’t know the difference between me and maybe somebody else who just, I don’t know, had poor training and a different understanding and wants to use some kind of herb and doesn’t understand the interaction. So I also, in a way, understand their fears because I have had patients come to me after working with other practitioners where I was looking at what they were on. I said, no, like, this can interact with your chemotherapy. So I think it is important that you really know who you’re working with.
Robin Daly and important. Yeah, it has got quite lazy, really. You know, 20 years ago, when I started the claim that there was no evidence, well, there was some grounds for it. But it’s changed so much in that time, the amount of evidence that’s pouring in now, for all sorts of ancillary interventions that can support treatment, you know, they shouldn’t be ignoring it at all.
Dagmara Beine Yeah, and it’s very much so ignored to the point where we know so many little studies have shown that vitamin C actually helps most chemotherapies, but the first thing an oncologist will tell you is that it’s an antioxidant and it’ll get in the way of treatment. There’s just these very hardcore kind of passed down ideas that are being disproven, but the oncology world is just not opening up to it because they want the best for your child too. It’s not that these are bad people, it’s just that the concept really should be using the best tools from both worlds. That’s how a child is going to have their best chances of thriving.
Robin Daly Yeah, that very heart of integrally medicine. Yes, absolutely. Same for all of us. Yeah, absolutely agree. And yeah, one, one of the things I’m also aware of the fact that parents who want to do something unusual to help their child, they’re not only necessarily up against the medics, but they may also have to deal with other members of their family who are, you know, totally petrified of going slightly off -piste in some way. Do you have anything to give them as advice on how to deal with that?
Dagmara Beine Yeah, I deal with that a lot. It’s pretty stereotypical in my situation, that it’s the mother who wants to meet with me, and do everything integrative to support her child and a father who I would say is maybe against any kind of support. And in many ways, I understand, you know, they have a local team, often men in white coats and big institutions, and then there’s me on Zoom, no white coat, like asking this family to trust me to go against what their conventional team is saying oftentimes by using some of these supportive therapies that their team is just blankly telling them not to use. You know, I have learned at this point, that I have learned through the process of working with so many families, that it is not my job to convince anybody of anything. And I really, at this point, have an application to work with me for people who are like minded, where that’s not, that’s not an issue.
Dagmara Beine Because it is also such a medically, legally sticky area. I only choose to work with families at this point that understand and really are there to learn to trust me just as they are their other team. I’m always very eager to be part of the team. I write a letter to the conventional oncology team that I’m involved. I just get very varied responses. And there are some really cool docs around the world that are very open to learning and saying, hey, I don’t know what mistletoe therapy is, but teach me, how can this help my people? But I would say rarity.
Robin Daly you need more of that. But I mean if the work was started in oncology to just actually build up a reservoir of information about the things that people want to do I mean they could knock off mistletoe pretty quickly and say oh yeah it works with anything and it’s safe you know it wouldn’t take much to know that with it and you know and then you could go out from there and there’s plenty more that would be easy low -hanging fruit to say yeah this is perfectly safe you can use mushroom extracts they’re not going to cause any trouble there’s as much evidence as you want to say that they’re completely safe and they’re only helpful so uh yeah that’s why I feel it’s just sort of become laziness at this point and as you say bordering on malpractice not to be doing these things
Dagmara Beine Yes. I mean, even a really easy example is red light therapy in the mouth to prevent mucositis or to heal mucositis. Right. There’s absolutely no reason for kids to get mucositis. It’s one of the most painful side effects of chemotherapy with ulcers in the mouth. You can get them in your esophagus and all the way down into the anus. And I have proven and over and over again with certain key supplements and red light therapy, you can avoid it. And I have tried to share this with my local team. I have shown them it would cost them $2 ,000, which is nothing for a hospital to get a red light and put a plastic cover on it and give it to all the kiddos. There’s a few hospitals that are doing it, but yes, it’s just laziness. Just like the fact that every conventional team in the world at this point when a child is done with conventional medicine can give them a packet that says, this is how you heal your child’s gut. We know it’s needed.
Dagmara Beine We know they need probiotics. It’s so simple. Just to make them aware that there is something, they’re not done, right? People are told like, you rung the bell, you’re done. And like, you’re not done. So that is laziness because the research is there for these things, 1000%. And I don’t know. They’re just, they’re overworked. They have a lot of patients because it’s the number one cause of death by disease in kids right now.
Robin Daly Right that’s a sobering fact. Okay so um I want to now contrast and compare the scenarios of using conventional therapists to treat someone in their 70s and the child of five or maybe even less it’s not something that everybody appreciates in anything where it’s just cancer treatment but could you explain why the two are so different?
Dagmara Beine So what’s really frustrating is that a lot of funding for cancer, well, first of all, a lot of funding for cancer goes to the wrong places, but beyond that conversation, pediatric cancer gets less than 4% of any money raised. And I really feel that while everybody deserves to be here for as long as we can with quality of life, our focus with funding for better conventional medicine and integrative support really should be focused on kids because they are the ones who have so many more decades of being here and 90% of kids who go through cancer treatment have life -threatening late effects 15 to 20 years later. By the time if a child goes through cancer treatment when they’re like 5 to 10 years old by age 45, they have a list of life -threatening chronic diseases from that treatment, I truly believe that if kids went through treatment with the right integrative support, which I outline in my book, and that’s a lot of things.
Dagmara Beine It’s not one thing. There’s no magic potion here. It’s how you eat. It’s what you take, what you don’t take. It’s how you detox. It’s how you gut heal. I really believe we could reduce that statistic of kids suffering later on in life. So that’s the big difference.
Robin Daly So it is a big difference, isn’t it? It’s a horrendous statistic, that one, 90%. I mean, it’s huge, and it just says that, okay, you fixed the cancer at the time, but look, the treatment has taken an immense toll, basically. And as we know, the treatments are extremely damaging, and they do have these really long -term effects. And that argument about long -term effects is, in a way, it’s one of the most powerful ones in favor of integration. My daughter died of radiation, more than a decade after successful treatment of her primary cancer. That’s what happens, basically. It’s success, great, it’s all dealt with, but actually, radiation sticks around forever. And yeah, 10, 20 years later, what’s gonna be happening with that radiation? Same with chemotherapy, the damage from that is a carcinogen, basically, and it will give you cancer later on. So it’s great that they’ve managed to achieve more life.
Robin Daly I mean, in my daughter’s case, only a few years earlier, she would have died. They would have taken her leg off, and then she would have died. So I had to honor the fact that they kept her alive for quite a long time afterwards, but the cavalier way in which these very toxic treatments are delivered without any warnings to the people who are getting them, that they have these long -term dangers, and that they should maybe think about doing something to mitigate the risks. And that is, well, it’s terrible. They just shouldn’t do that. They should be much more circumspect about the ways that people are advised about these treatments and the resources that are available to them when there are people like you who know so much about what could reduce that damage and that risk.
Dagmara Beine And I think if parents understood, truly understood that, and if they looked at the list of things that needed to be done to mitigate,
Dagmara Beine It’s easy. I mean, we’re really talking about nutrition and some supplements. It’s nothing crazy expensive or not something everybody can do for adults and for older kids. Just fasting through chemotherapy can mitigate a big percentage of acute and late term effects. That’s free and relatively easy to do, especially since most kiddos through treatment don’t want to eat anyway. So the effort isn’t huge. It’s not like they’re asking for these huge meals during chemo.
Robin Daly Okay, so there’s a lot too much in your book that I’d like to talk about, but I wonder if you could do your best to briefly summarise what’s in there and then pick out one message to parents you’d like to say a bit more about, maybe the one that you feel is most pressing and important for them to take in.
Dagmara Beine Yeah, so the book is really the reason it’s referred to as a parents guide is I really wanted to write something that when you get diagnosed and you go to Amazon frantically looking for any kind of support, I want you to find this book because it takes you through the first moment of that trauma of hearing my kid has cancer and stopping and breathing and like taking a moment. I think that especially in the US, a child gets diagnosed and the next day they start treatment and that is way too fast. There’s very few examples of situations where that needs to happen. And I would say in 99% of cases, a family should be given at least a week to take in the message, think about how they want to approach this. Think about how their partner is reacting. Do we want to do integrative? Who do we want on our team? Let’s get a second and third opinion. All that should happen before that first chemotherapy hits your child because that can make a big difference in their prognosis.
Dagmara Beine And most people don’t even think to get a second opinion and that second opinion can be drastically different and potentially such a better option for your family. So I talk about building out a team and how to do that. I spend a lot of time in the book explaining what is cancer. I think there’s a very big misconception perpetuated by conventional oncology that cancer is just bad luck. And we know that 90 to 95% of cancer is not bad luck, even in kids. It is a mixture of our epigenetics in our environment and the toxins in our environment and what we’ve been exposed to. Figuring that out is not impossible. What caused this cancer in my child? Because whatever contributed to your child’s diagnosis is what we’re going to focus on in addition to supporting conventional treatment, in keeping it away, or getting into remission, or having a quality of life.
Dagmara Beine So explaining that, and then I go through, I think the really easy, important chapters in the book are, how do I read my kids’ labs? What does this mean? If it’s high, if it’s low, how do I manage side effects? What if my kid’s getting mucositis? What if they’re getting diarrhea? What about this rash? You can just look up the side effect and it tells you right there what the natural, non -toxic alternatives are because we always think of, yes, chemotherapy is toxic, radiation is toxic, but so is an unnecessary MiraLax and too much Tylenol and anti -anxiety meds. All these things that we can do a better job with less toxic, when it’s appropriate. And then I take families through what happens when you’re done with treatment or what needs to happen, which is gut healing, detoxifying, continuing to look into the environment, what helped contribute to this.
Dagmara Beine And the hardest part, the last chapter, how do you heal as a family? Because this is traumatic. This siblings are not okay. The parents are not okay on different levels. And how do you become okay again? And that goes way beyond, in my opinion, of just seeing a talk therapist. I think that there’s so many different ways, especially now. I think the mental health world is changing and we’re looking at all these really wonderful ways of different ways for us to heal our trauma. My message is just that there is a better way. So you may not feel comfortable going all the way to using high dose vitamin C and mistletoe in your child. That’s okay. You can take baby steps of just doing better nutrition, or just using a few of the supplements. So there’s a spectrum of how to support your child and what you’re comfortable with. And you are your child’s, the CEO of their health. It is up to you to build their team. It is up to you to become brave and research.
Dagmara Beine I think too many parents, I coach so many parents and so many mamas to be mama bears. This is your child and you know your child better than anyone else. And it’s really easy to get intimidated by people in white coats and doctors who’ve been doing this for long, but you are hiring them. And so that’s my message. There is a better way and it’s up to you to decide how much of what I recommend and what your conventional team recommends, like how to make it the best picture for your child.
Robin Daly Well, I think it’s a fantastic book, I mean the fact you can just look up any difficulty your child’s having and find a non -toxic thing to help with it is just amazing. Yeah, so it’s got a whole range of potential approaches, therapeutic things to combat side effects as well as approaches for specific cancer diagnosis. It was so amazing to find our daughter Brian is super rare cancer, not only mentioned in there, but given specific recommendations. Fantastic. But, you know, I was thinking to myself, you just can’t begin to describe the helplessness of watching your precious child, who in our case, she’d previously been almost entirely unmedicated before being diagnosed with cancer, then being fed a steady stream of toxic chemicals and bathed in ionising radiation with absolutely zero resources to protect them from all this.
Robin Daly It’s a terrible situation to be in. And hopefully at least the parents who are listening will gain a bit of insight from this interview with you into some of the difficulties that those who’ve got a child with cancer have to face. It’s so important that the word about your book gets out there and spread as quickly as possible and as widely as possible. So, yeah, you’ve mentioned your chapter at the end there where you talk about the potential of a childhood cancer to change everybody in their family. And I think that’s true. It does take them to bits, but it does also, as you mentioned, it gives them the potential to rebuild in another way. But if you don’t do anything about it, it doesn’t happen, of course. You can just stay in bits actually and pretend for the rest of your life. So, this is something that I understand all too well and can attest to. Do you want to say something about this rebuilding?
Dagmara Beine Yeah. I call it like a beautiful shattering. Our family, I can speak about our family and I get to witness this in many of my families across the world that I support. You are shattered and you get to decide how to pick up those pieces and how to rebuild. You’re right, many families will choose not to and they will numb their pain with whatever alcohol, busyness, work and choose not to heal. But we’ve been on this journey for so long with Zuzah. We put in a lot of work as a family to heal in the right way and put the pieces together in the right way because it’s been an ongoing journey for us. Zuzah has been on a cancer journey for 10 years and the last four years have been incredibly intense and she actively has cancer. We do things as a family like breath work, cold exposure therapy, sauna, nature. We do it all just to be able to get through our days because we want to… As hard, as much as there’s been so much suffering, there’s been so much beauty and so much happiness in between and you can have both.
Dagmara Beine You can have both suffering and trauma and you can have beauty and I feel like I owe it to both of my kids and to myself in this life that I have here to rebuild in a beautiful way. In the last chapter, I try to give families the tools that we have found as a family the most useful for us.
Dagmara Beine Yes, so Zusa went through chemotherapy when she was three, she was told at three years old, if she doesn’t have a bone marrow transplant, she’ll die. And we chose not to do a bone marrow transplant at that time. Just everything in me screamed no, and we did the research. She was in remission for five years, which is usually considered quote unquote the cure, just for her disease to come back five years later in the last four years. So her disease came back a little over four years ago. At that time, we were offered palliative care. And we have been being offered palliative care for the last four years, and the opportunity to be put on hospice, which means that your team believes that your child has less than six months to live. And Zusa continues to defy the odds. She is a walking miracle. And so we just literally have needed to learn, people always talk about this, but to live day by day, and enjoy her being here and her and focus on her quality of life and make the best decisions for her.
Dagmara Beine And while conventional medicine has been a big part of her life, because for leukemia, I have learned in acute leukemia, it has to be integrative medicine and is a huge part of her life. And I really do believe that in addition to the spirit that she is, a lot of what we’ve been able to do for her in the last 10 years is the reason why she not only is still here, but has a good quality of life, which I think is very important.
Robin Daly So, there’s kind of two sides, if you like, to the picture here, quite obviously you’ve gone out and you’ve found the most immense number of resources which have obviously played into her situation and given her this extraordinary life that she here at Séglicia and have had. And but, on the other hand, you’re enormously positive and hopeful, and it sounds like she is too, chip of the old block. And I reckon that that must play maybe an equal part? What do you think?
Dagmara Beine Yeah, you know, the last time we were in the hospital inpatient that I had the big talk with the team that they don’t feel like there’s a cure for Azusa and that they would like to put her on hospice and she’s 13 now, I came in the room and I was tearful, I don’t hide it. You know, we have these conversations openly and I told her what they said and she just like comforted me and said, mom, it’s not time to be sad. I just know deep inside of me and I don’t think I’m making this up, mom. I don’t think I’m in denial. I just feel something so deep inside of me that I’m going to continue to be a miracle and I need you to believe that. I think that her belief in herself, knowing that she’s going to be okay, I trust that.
Dagmara Beine I want to obviously trust it and obviously there’s doubts when tests come back contrary and disease moves, but yeah, that is such a big part of why she is here. This kid not only has had to go through a decade of conventional treatment, but poor kid, I am constantly poking her, giving her hanging IVs nonstop, making her, the kids scream at me that it’s child abuse, I make them do cold, you know, like she’s had to put up with me, doing all her stuff and sometimes saying, I don’t know if this works, but we do a lot of talking about the frequency that we carry of truly believing that she’s going to be okay has to be now and not something we hope for or something that’s going to happen in the future. So we do try to practice that as much as we can as a family.
Robin Daly mm does sing so you’ve got a lot to focus on close to home right now but i also sense the drive in you to change these crushing injustices of childhood cancer care irrevocably uh your book is the most amazing start already the goalposts have moved but i’m guessing in the back of it your mind you’ve got some other plans anything in there you want to share with us now
Dagmara Beine I did just publish a pediatric oncology course, so in addition to the, you know, the book is lovely because it’s inexpensive and everybody can get it within days. If somebody wants to take a deeper dive, I do have a course that is very in -depth and allows me to go beyond what they even let me put in the book, right? There’s some limitations to also what they wanted to publish, so I did create a course where I could really just say everything I wanted to say, and then there’s always the opportunity to work with me one -on -one. I’m very limited because my time right now is my family in Zusa, but I am still taking on new patients. Yeah, so those are the ways to work with me. We also are in the process with my husband of finishing building a retreat center that will be ready this spring, and the retreat center will be a beautiful place for lots of different types of healing, but obviously focus on oncology and being able to utilize a lot of the,
Dagmara Beine you know, IV therapies and the emotional therapies that I talk about in the book for families to visit and actually work with us one -on -one in person.
Robin Daly I look forward to being able to share the information about that. Fantastic, great. So look, our conversation has kind of scratched the surface of what I could talk to you about. I feel there’s so much in what you’ve written, there’s so much my own experience that I want to bounce off you. But suffice it to say, I think I can safely represent all patterns of shoulder bone cancer in thanking you really sincerely for your precious book. It deserves to be read everywhere and not just by parents, but also by families, friends and perhaps most importantly, of course, oncology professionals.
Dagmara Beine I agree. I think it’s a really even a good book for a parent. I have a lot of families who reach out to me and say, how do I prevent cancer in my child? They read the first half of my book, it talks about what contributed to these diagnoses. Yes. And if anybody wants to see more of Zuzah’s story, she is in a documentary that was just published in the UK.
Robin Daly Called Kids Like Us.
Dagmara Beine Yes. So that documentary just went live a month ago. We unfortunately were too sick to travel. We were supposed to travel to London, but we didn’t. But that is a very beautifully made documentary on kids living with or through cancer. And she was able to be one of the two American kids in that.
Robin Daly It’s been such a pleasure to talk to Dagmara. Thank you very much indeed
Dagmara Beine Thank you for having me.
Robin Daly Bye bye. Dagmarra’s book is indeed a godsend to parents of a child with cancer and I’ll be making sure that the details of it go along with the show and are also added to the resources section of our website, that’s yestolife .org .uk. Additionally, you may be interested to hear we have plans to collect together further resources for parents in the UK and I shall continue to work to raise awareness of their blight. If you are the parent of a child with cancer or if you know one, order Dagmarra’s book right now, there is nothing else like it. Thanks for listening today.
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