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
Hi and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, your regular host to show and also founder of the UK charity Yes to Life that supports the adoption of an integrated model of cancer care, one that embraces every aspect of well -being, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. In today’s show we’re going to move our attention to the Middle East to the United Arab Emirates or UAE, where we’ll be speaking to Dr. Heidi Kussman, a naturopathic oncologist who’s pushing the agenda for integration in the UAE in significant and pioneering ways.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Robin Daly
Well, this is your second time on the show, so I want to remind our listeners that you’re a Canadian naturopathic oncologist, an unknown species here in the UK. So I want to remind you by starting out by reminding everyone exactly what a naturopathic oncologist is in terms of training and expertise.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Oh yes, of course. We are medically trained, so that would mean you would get a tier one medical advanced medical assessment education similar to your general position. It’s a four year full -time in -person program through the Canadian College of National and Epic Medicine of which there are two campuses now. There is the one in Toronto that I went to and they also have a bank and work in. Upon graduation from this program you then go through the national licensing exams called the naturopathic physicians licensing exam step one and two where upon completion of those successfully allows you to practice in the USA and Canada. The last final step for general license is of course your specific state or provincial examinations and the you know the individual requirements. They do differ a little bit by state. From there if you wish to stay a generalist you can or you could also work towards specialization which is what I did.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
I worked towards getting my board certification in naturopathic oncology through the American board of naturopathic a fellow you could say with 2010 and I really certified in 2020. And so those are the past there’s other specialties there’s pediatrics there’s endocrinology there’s gastroenterology there’s environmental medicine reports there’s regenerative anti -aging medicine but a lot of naturopathic medicine is based on root cause analysis advanced medical assessments and then using therapeutics that are sometimes the basis of modern pharmacology even speaking of botanical medicine when I when I bat for homeopathy clinical nutrition then there’s also physical medallions sports medicine exercise therapy those types of things.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And in in the UK this is not a program that exists actually to my knowledge at this time it exists as an online program but it’s not through an accredited institution. So if you were to find someone who says they are an acrobat the best way to verify would be to ensure that they have gone to an accredited school and you could look that up online through the American council of naturopathic medicine.

Robin Daly
So yeah, we’d love to have that here, of course, because, you know, people do actually take some notice of you when you’ve qualified in that way. A lot of hoops you’ve jumped through. And there’s a lot of specialisations, which is obviously excellent, because, you know, a lot of answers for people there. I understand you’ve added your expertise recently by attending the specialist training set up by Dr. Nature Winters. Do you want to tell us about that? And what made you choose to invest in further training?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes, actually, continuing education is always part of something that is required in order for me to maintain my license. And in order for me to maintain my board certification, there’s a long list as well. And so some of my work involves staying current in terms of the evidence. And so I just finished a course on global clinical scholars research program with Harvard. And I wanted to do a bit more with regards to the research application in my profession. And so through nation’s course, I was able to apply a little bit of those research techniques and study evaluation to help my cohort, cohort nine, get some of the more recent evidence with regards to different treatments for diagnostics, natural therapies, in regards to a specific type of cancer, and to help some of the people who may not be naturopathic physicians or not oncologists who are taking this course,

Dr Heidi Kussmann
but still helping people with cancer, help them understand what this means, you know, in terms of relative risk versus overall survival outcome measures that we’re using these days in studies, and how there’s, you know, there’s a publication bias, there’s a few other biases going on. But there’s also good evidence now, like, you know, level one and two evidence in human trial data for using natural therapies with cancer and in conventional therapy. So my, my benefit from taking the course for me was it was a bit of a, it was a review in terms of the different systems and the assessment pathways. It really helps for me to create, you know, an add an added layer, you could say to the system that I already use in assessing my patients, and it helped fill in some of the questions I had, and I also made some really good peer quality relationships.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And I think that’s also an important part to be quite isolating in oncology when you’re practicing day in and day out. And I think that we sometimes can lose touch of just staying social, in a professional sense, and having that network to rely on when we had a good day or bad day. So I think that’s also an important part of our own, you know, caring for our own mental health as providers.

Robin Daly
I’m aware of what a rapidly moving field it is as well. So I can see the need for the continuous development because just to keep up with things. So that’s about what you do. But another unusual and interesting feature of your trajectory is where you do it. So can you tell us about that and how you came to be where you are?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes. So I know I’m Canadian -trained, and I originally started out practicing in Canada. After my board certification, I was sponsored by Cancer Treatment Centers of America and the USA to work there. I met my husband, and we moved with his company. They moved around the world, and so we ended up moving to Alaska, and then Houston, Texas, where we had our daughter, and where COVID started, and then partway through COVID, we were to the United Arab Emirates. So I have a telemedicine practice, of course, which allows me to be flexible in this way, and moving to the UAE actually benefited Einzo -wise. It actually made me more central, ironically, to people in Australia and in Europe. And so I see my patients, for example, from North America in the evening, and from Australia in the morning, from the evening, usually midday kind of things. So it’s kind of an interesting thing. Yeah.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
For the most part, my work at the UAE is still oncology. I do a lot of work with consulting oncologists here, who, of course, people are always, you know, they want to do more than the conventional care. I get the occasional person who doesn’t want to do any conventional therapy whatsoever, and we still work. I still work with them. We try and, you know, we aim for the best outcome with the best evidence possible, and that it might not be a specific type of conventional therapy that they’re being asked to do. It might be something else based on further tests. But my work is still in oncology in the UAE, and we’re working. I work with Novomed, and I work with Bergell Cancer Institute, and our goal is comprehensive cancer care all around. So whether you’re in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, and you know someone, or you yourself are fighting cancer, you have resources, and you have options.

Robin Daly
Okay, so, well, just in case some people are listening and thinking, well, what’s that got to do with me living in Cornwall treating people who come from the UAE? And I’d like to make the point that the world actually is a lot more joined up than it used to be. You’ve just described how you’re treating people all around the planet. And this interview probably wouldn’t have happened at all just a few years ago. And that kind of total disinterest that was displayed by medics and scientists and work from any other country other than their own. Well, it doesn’t hold water quite like it used to. Certainly the old standard we used to run out here of Britain has the best health service in the world. It’s beginning to wear a bit thin in the face of some of the international statistics.

Robin Daly
So being interested in learning from other countries, I think it’s an important way of finding out what’s working and what’s not within all sorts of different political and social environments. So I wonder if you’ve painted some sort of picture of the situation where you are in regard to health care and in particular the attitudes towards and the progress of integration in cancer care.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Okay, so unlike the UK, the UAE has a mixed insurance model here, and that we have some socialized care models, where it is completely paid for by the government, or it is included in your healthcare policy or whatever. And then there are others that are private, and they go up in increments in terms of premiums based on the plans that you choose. So, an insurance premium is a lot like a healthcare payment that you make every month towards insurance covering the cost of your health expenses, should you have an emergency or anything. And there can be various different combinations, right, you’ll pay about 50 dirhams per visit, you may have a percentage split, you may have a deductible that you need to meet in order for then your insurance cover 80% of the remaining amount that’s not covered, or that has after deductible has been met.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
These also exist in the US where I was working, although in a far more disadvantaged manner for the patient. I think I just read a statistic from nature today that on average, 42% Americans within two years of cancer treatment has become bankrupt and no longer assured the home they live in. And so this is an example of a for profit system in healthcare that has taken it too far and for which there needs to be more of a standard towards comprehensive care, especially when it comes to cancer because medicines cost so much. The average nuclear dose is around 6 ,000 US dollars, and that’s not chemotherapy, that’s just to keep your nuclear bills up because you took chemotherapy as a preventative. And so there are elements of preventative care in cancer, but you know, you’re avasting this route 64 ,000 dollars of the dose.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And so when you look at the cost of these, you also see where majority of them are concentrated and in terms of market share, what I’ve learned is that the economics of drug delivery can also be negotiated from market share in that the US has a large population, they get more discount because of their volume that they have on drug purchasing. And so this is part of the problem that we’re trying to tackle in the Middle East is that a lot of people will simply need and go to where it’s cheaper for treatment based on these drug volume based markets. We don’t have that population here in the UAE. We often see a lot of patients who simply can’t afford their care. And we treat them for free. There’s a really good, I think it’s a very good way of looking at it in that if you’re an expat or if you’re someone who’s here on a work permit, you bring your family and you’re living here based on your ability to work and then you get sick.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Sometimes you get sent back home for home treatment, home country treatment. Sometimes you stay here and your employer will cover your costs to a certain extent and you will cover the remainder. And then there’s a lot of different organizations like Friends of Cancer, I think .8e. And there’s the Al Jalila Foundation. And we have different charities basically that set up that are set up to help people during this time of need so that they aren’t in their head out of pocket to pay for groceries, for example. So in the UAE, we don’t have a high volume of population like the US. We can’t compete with these market prices. We also have a population that knows traditional medicine. We have a lot of Indian and Bangladesh and Pakistani workers who are very familiar with homeopathy and Ayurveda and Onani medicine and the different traditional forms of medicine that are widely available in low and middle -income countries. And so they often request that before they want to drive.

Robin Daly
So out of interest, would some insurance cover any part of your costs for doing integrative oncology work?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
At this time, the answer is no, but I remain.

Robin Daly
you’ll work here on it.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes, I’m working on it. This is exactly right. I’m proposing legislative changes and regulatory changes with the Department of Health and I consider myself fortunate that they have invited an actual perfect doctor to the table. Okay Yeah, because most of the time we’re left out of the discussion and fire and dismissed that matter what so this is this is fortunate and it’s coming I just don’t know when and that it requires some changes to legislation because they would like naturopathic doctors to be physician regulated in the UAE But they also want to grade education for that locally in the UAE because there’s a lot of Emirati Nationals who are going through the medical care programs whether it be nursing or medicine or other forms of ally care but they still want to know more about natural pathic medicine and what’s how it fits into you know,

Dr Heidi Kussmann
a patient care model that They may be working in so they wanted to license here, but they want to educate at a different level and so we’re working on You know making that meet in that sense So there’s some strategy involved in that but what happened if I can possibly influence it to create something that allows licensing insurance coverage and You know root cause medicine treatment in combination with comprehensive cancer care. I think that we’re living in the right direction

Robin Daly
and tell me a bit about attitudes towards integration.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
so we have a number of doctors from all over the world here. Um, they’re all also here because of work -based visas and sponsorships and different things from the hospitals that want them to come. Some of them are very well -educated level consultants. Um, and they have strong leadership and research goals and a lot of the interest is in drug development contracts, of course, because again, that’s, that’s where the money is for hospitals. They’re, they’re becoming clinical research organizers for pharmaceutical companies so that they can create, um, the patient base and the pharmaceutical company provides the test item and they run a study that way. So you’ll find a lot of doctors who have research skills. You’ll find a lot of doctors who are interested in evidence -based medicine. You’ll have a lot that have already been told something that is inaccurate.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So for example, at my mall, she just started a tumor work meeting that I’m, um, attending, I attend those three times a week at Virginia Cancer Institute. I’m presenting on the next one or a few minutes with regards to fatigue, cancer -related fatigue and how to manage that. Because they simply don’t, they don’t know what’s possible. And they’re also, I wouldn’t say they’re skeptical. There’s a lot better welcoming and open to it because they understand their patients are either blind or go and take it on their own and there’s risks inherent with that process, or they can find someone like myself who’s working in the same institution, they can learn about what I do and understand and trust the process of what I’m doing.

Robin Daly
Okay. And do you feel that’s making good headway? Yeah, so that’s really great. So it’s brilliant, obviously, you’re part of those multidisciplinary teams, and you’re actually getting the word in correcting misconceptions, that kind of thing. So great. I mean, those things last for years without somebody like you to put them right. They’re kind of like wild rumours, aren’t they? They just hang around.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yeah, and a lot of misperceptions. And I don’t know if it comes, you know, it can come from people who are not qualified, giving that advice. It can come from all sorts of things that have to do with unlicensed professionals on YouTube and Instagram and this, that and the other. And so I can understand that if you are someone fighting cancer, you would want to learn as much as you possibly could every which way. Um, but it’s hard to gauge what level of evidence there is when you’re getting your information from new teams.

Robin Daly
Okay, and does standard oncology look much the same as elsewhere on the planet in the UAE? Very much so, yeah.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
We all follow the NCCN guidelines. We have all the different, you know, staging criteria, side effect adverse event criteria, and everything is the same in that regard.

Robin Daly
Okay, so I’m gathered that you are actually unique in being the only qualified natural perfect oncologist in the UAE, is that right?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes, I’m the only one who is board certified with the American Board of Natural Health and Oncology.

Robin Daly
so you’re in a pretty unique position. So you’re effectively offering services that no one else is offering. So tell me, what do you have on offer?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So a lot of what I do is there’s three parts to it. You could say in that it depends on where the patient is and that’s our journey. I do a lot of preparation work and that someone who is newly diagnosed but has not yet started treating. So I call that like a preparation or a prehab phase where we work on directing your nutrients. I’m a big fan of nutrients over galleries and we work on assessing. We do a number of different types of testing, the first measure to gut microbiome, using the information you may already have and in terms of your histochemistry, your molecular genomic profiling of your tumor if you had in, for example, ferrous testing or aqua type, any of those types of traditional forms of testing are available. We look at those, I look at what else there is that you may have in terms of recent blood work and then we look at your constitution, where you are in terms of your energy, your appetite, how are you functioning?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Where’s your stress level, where’s your anxiety? We know a lot of people have anxiety and depression secondary to this kind of a diagnosis. Some people in early stage are actually in denial. They don’t believe they have cancer. It’s a big company for our second opinion and then when you are in treatment, I work to support it. So it’s more of a synergism at that point. I’m here to make sure your side effects are minimized. We’re maximizing your chemotherapy’s effects. We’re trying to do everything possible to keep you functioning, to maintain your muscle mass and to keep your nutrition as optimal as it can be and that if you’re doing chemo radiation or just radiation after that or surgery, of course it gets you ready for all of that. And when you’re finished with conventional treatment, your oncologist usually says, I’ll see you in three months for scanning or six months, whatever it might be. It’s called survivorship here. What I do is active recurrence prevention.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So I am hitting things hard at this point in terms of the metabolism and the immune drivers’ cancer so that we’re not allowing any type of recurrence at all if we can and I have good success with this approach and it’s very much individualized and it takes work to understand what’s in front of you and the molecular pathways up and downstream of that that I’m influencing. But it’s worth it because I’m seeing the results in patients that they themselves weren’t expecting and it’s a rewarding time in that recurrence prevention phase. I like the other phases as well. I really like getting people ready for their treatment kind of like training for a marathon, especially when it comes to chemo and long standing chemo therapies. But there’s a lot of rewarding and I think that it helps people feel empowered when they understand what their body’s going to experience and they can get ready for it. You know, sometimes that kind of knowledge is.

Robin Daly
Very much so. That prevention of recurrence, I think of, is probably the biggest single win that integrated oncology has to offer, because there’s not much on offer from standard care. They just tell you to go away, come back and they’ll look and see if it’s recurred. It’s completely useless, and of course it does often recur, and then when it does, it’s usually much worse than it was the first time. So you can stop that from happening, that’s massive.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes. And we can shift the tide in that sense because a lot of what we’re doing, we do our own surveillance alongside the imaging, but I’m looking at it on a much larger scale. So if you think of a tumor, it’s necessary size that needs to be picked up by something like an MRI or a CT scan or any type of other imaging. It usually requires a certain net science for a nodule to happen, especially in solid tumors. Hematology is a different level of analysis, but when you’re looking at a tumor nodule as your first indicator of recurrence, I think you’re too late. You’ve already missed the majority of immune and metabolic inhibitions. And so they’ve been either hijacked or turned on or co -opted to support cancer at that point. And we already have tools that allow us to measure recurrence much earlier in the bloodstream through DNA and RNA fragments.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
There’s a number of testing companies out there, even covered by insurance that do this type of thing. And I think that we need to combine both. We need to combine the imaging intervals at three and six months along with this type of mental residual disease testing or circulating to your DNA or art, whatever you prefer to call it. But you need to combine both because when you can see your cells in circulation start flying, it’s usually months ahead of what the imaging will show. And I think that’s a crucial thing for people to understand is why are we waiting for something to show up on a picture when we could influence it in your metabolism and your immune system? There’s a value. Sometimes that doesn’t always happen, but I think for the majority, these need to be combined. We need to change the way we practice our recurrence evaluation.

Robin Daly
Very much so. So all of this that you’re doing, you’re doing it under the auspices of the Oncology team, basically, they know everything you’re doing, you’re informing them, so it’s a proper integration.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes. And if they don’t know, they will find out because I’m telling them. Thank you.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So every week I send out little tips and things about, did you know, this is also what I do. And in a way it’s not meant to, you know, I’m not meant to be offensive or anything, but I’m just keeping myself on their radar in that sense so that they don’t forget. Oh yeah, we, we’re a comprehensive cancer center. It’s not just, you know, the trilogy of chemo radiation surgery. We have physiotherapy. We have massage therapy. We have rehab. We have medicine. We’re trying to find an acupuncturist to who has all college training. You know, so we’re, we’re seeking this type of work because they all have been.

Robin Daly
Right, fantastic. So any notice beginning to be taken about how well some of the patients are doing, like not having recurrences, for example, it’s too early for that.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
I haven’t, I haven’t been there long enough, but, um, with the patients that I have been treating over a year now, um, that have been through their conventional treatment and we’re at phase three, the recurrence prevention phase, we’re doing well. I have several since moving here to the UAE that are on the, you know, on a strong path.

Robin Daly
Great news! Well hopefully you’re going to make a big dent in the general attitudes towards what integration can achieve. Okay so do you want to say something about the challenges that you experienced there?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yeah, I think some of the challenges are, um, they come from an organizational lab that I’m working in a, in a hospital environment. They are unsure how to schedule patients with me and that I don’t work like a typical provider seeing oncology patients every 30 minutes. Um, and so when they schedule patients for 30 minutes, my reply is if patients are going to be scheduled for 30 minutes, then I need to come weekly because I have the first 30 minutes is talking about nutrition. Then the next 30 minutes is talking about their immune system and helping them understand what’s going on in why we’re doing a baseline assessment. And from there, what we’re going to do to influence things in their favor when it comes to immune drivers.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And so they, um, you know, we’re working on trying to help our organization understand that patients are not covered by insurance for what I didn’t, um, I shouldn’t perhaps working on an insurance based scheduling model is probably not the best room, but we’re working on trying to find what works best for everyone in that regard. I understand patients don’t want to spend a lot of time in my office. You know, I think an hour is tops. And so I think that would be ideal, but we still have to work on figuring out, um, from a, a volume based practice model, if that is what they want. There’s a few, you know, I think that there’s a debate on volume versus quality based models of care that exists for naturopathic oncology versus conventional oncology. And I know why conventional oncologies, my, my doctors, they would love to have more time with their patients because there’s just so much to discuss.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And there’s the mental and emotional aspect that. Careful patients or patients who are just not feeling well and nauseous and you want to reassure them, but you don’t have enough time to. So I know I’m not the only one in this matter.

Robin Daly
Definitely not. Half an hour sounds generous by UK standards, I don’t get a feeling they don’t get that much here. So yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
models, right? And so yeah, I think we need to look at maybe not just in the UAE, but we need to look at a quality based model up there and let those metrics look like over volume.

Robin Daly
Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, so you already talked a little bit about your connections with the outside world in terms of other people working like you. I’m guessing this is quite an important part of being such a sort of lone pioneer out there, is that you have connections, well, with other organisations, you know, like the SIO or somebody, I don’t know. And with other practitioners, is that something you make a point of maintaining?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Yes, I do. I think it’s an important part. I have a good LinkedIn network that I communicate with on a regular basis and This part of the world uses whatsapp quite a lot and so I am in contact We have here in the in the Middle East the naturopathic doctors Association of the Middle East And while I may be the only specialized one there are 12 of us and the rest of us are scattered from Bahrain and Egypt and all the way into the UAE Up and in my self time on Georgia that area and so there’s a good There’s I think it’s a good positive group of us to be having that many already I mean, I think when I came three years ago in 2021, there was only six So we’ve doubled our numbers in three years, which is lovely We have some obstacles to the licensing in the way meaning that you were happy to have experience.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
You can’t be a new grad You know, there’s some things in that regard that if you’re starting a business It would be great to start it right here in the UAE as opposed to start a business and then move yourself after a couple Years experience just so that you can be licensed here. Yeah, so it’s a you know, there’s some things I think in some ways that’s a good thing as well. I see that they want no experience for infants or their patients that elevates care But I think that there’s other ways we can do that So I’m also working on building residency programs right and rotation sites through Georgia Cancer Institute Because it’s an optimal environment for that type of comprehensive immigration. Yeah

Robin Daly
Yeah. So, these 12 practitioners you have, what’s the proportion of nationals? Are they a lot of foreign nationals in that?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Most of them are Canadians.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
about six that are from the Canadian school and then the remaining amount come from the U .S. schools. There’s five accredited schools in the U .S. and so there’s some that come from Bastier University, from National University of Naturopathic Medicine, Sonoran University, and I think there’s a couple others, but that those are the main three. Most everyone comes from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine.

Robin Daly
I wanted you to give us a sense of your work with patients by giving us one or two examples sort of briefcase histories where you think you’ve been able to help a lot.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So I could speak to one of my patients who was diagnosed at this time last year, she had just, she had given birth, her son was four months old. And she was diagnosed with HPV strain 18 endocervical cancer. And whereupon, she heard about me was referred by her oncologist to see me because she had questions about what she should be taking in addition to her standard of care. So she was set up for carbotaxol, then then radiation with cisplatin, and then brachythera, or two, that’s your standard treatment protocol for endocervical dysplasia like this, this was a stage 3C. So we had some lip note involvement in just outside the uterus, but nothing spread elsewhere. So there was what you would call local, it was a localized type of cancer. So she went through her treatment, we offer for the comprehensive baseline tumor DNA testing.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And then we went through hormone testing, we checked the HPV strains to make sure there were none that were not nissed. And we proceeded to work on the metabolism. So her receptor fasting insulin levels were elevated as well. And picomole finator, which is kind of high, you want it at the maximum 4 .7. And so some of the cancer is driven a bit by insulin resistance. I know that a lot of people talk about sugar and cancer, but I think that’s been taken out of context. I think it’s insulin that comes out as a result of elevated glucose levels. And insulin, as we know, is an ocogenic hormone. It supports tumor growth, just from the studies and the outcome with diabetes research and insulin therapy. So when we look at his patient specifically, he went on a lot of metabolic therapies, we instigated exercise, and exercise is not a flavor that people appreciate when the right for came on, they have fatigue, they would call it an event for fun.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And it’s literally, it’s whatever you can do, that’s fun. That makes you want to do it again tomorrow. And that’s my bottom line. You don’t have to do laps, you don’t have to run a marathon, you just need to move your body, so that you are maintaining your muscle mass. And if that means, you know, 15 squats an hour, and then laying down the rest of the time while you recover, that’s okay. It means you won’t lose muscle mass. If it means we’re doing body weight resistance in an isometric fold, like planks, that then that’s fine too, you don’t have to do contractives strengthening and do eccentric strengthening, you know, still making your muscle mass. And we worked on nutrition in terms of low glycemic Mediterranean, and I didn’t advise keto, because they’re studying them, they really have a lot of evidence for this type of cancer. But we worked on low glycemic index, that’s below 55 on the glycemic index rating, and polyquinol cyclabenyls.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
We also did IV vitamin C, and ozone there. And so a lot of what I worked at was a gradual plan. I’m giving it to you all at once, but this didn’t happen in one day. I want to be sure that everybody understands there’s a pathway for each individual that shows up when you do a proper assessment. And so you don’t have to do anything besides use the objective data and your patient symptoms. And then you can proceed in a manner that addresses the root cause and helps them with their blood counts, their fatigue with the things that they need. And then we moved from there. So we started with nutrition, we started with supportive therapies with the ozone, but the vitamin C when it didn’t contradict, it’s actually additive versus spot effects. And so there’s different ways you can minimize renal toxicity. So we worked at that with the platinum rubs. And she did saunas, but it wasn’t on site. And she did hyperbaric oxygen therapy also, because specifically towards the end of the breaking therapies sessions.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
So this full duration of therapy is about 10 months. And so when she had sinus, she actually had a radiation cystitis going on, which is a bladder wall irritation from radiation to the cervix. So this is called something like bystander effect or a bit of, you know, radiative damage to the nearby tissues. Now the good news is the lymph nodes outside the uterine wall were also treated by this radiation immunotherapy program. So she got their scans at the end of this treatment, but she also got radiation cystitis, which turned into a chronic thing. So we’re managing that with D -manos while making sure that she’s not delaying urination. She’s not causing more irritation to the bladder or the erythral sphincter because there can be damage as a result if you’ve got that level of inflammation going on.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
We work on just making sure that we don’t have any problems. Now I didn’t see her over the summer and then in September, she came back. She does labs monthly and she does her scans every six months. So we’re just finishing up getting ready for the next set of scans along with minimal residual disease testing. So it’s that tumor testing or tumor cells and bloodstream combined with new genes that I was talking about earlier. So this big thing came back in September for her free scan check -in. It had been summer. Most people in the UAE go away for the summer. And they go north to get out of the heat. So she was away for the summer, I think. And then when she came back in September, we did labs and her insulin had gone back up. And so I called her back into the office and I was like, what happened over the summer? Where did you go? What’s going on? She was traveling. That’s the bottom line. And I used Weberine or insulin management specifically. It also has other pathways in cancer, but she had stopped taking it when she was traveling. And so her insulin levels started picking back up again. And it doesn’t mean her cancer came back, but it means that we were not targeting the right metabolic driver that I feel is involved with her cervical cancer. We’re also, of course, I didn’t say this earlier, but we were working from the beginning and we had a little viral load, but it comes to HPV. You want to keep that viral load nice and low and inactive. So we did a number of other botanical therapies specifically targeting that virus. And then we go from there to bringing her back onto Weberine. We’ll do for another set of labs this month, towards the end of this month. And then she goes from her PET CT in November. So we’ll be running her CT DNA test again at that time. So that’s what it looks like.

Robin Daly
comprehensive programme. Obviously, these things are hard to measure, but in terms of your input into a case, what do you think were the things that you had the greatest effect on in terms of either symptoms or the success of a treatment?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
I think that it wasn’t me. I think it was her she was able to stay motivated She had lots of support from her family and I can’t discount the effect I just tell people what to do, but they actually have to go out and do it and this is the hard part It’s not me. You know, I think that when you have the right supports in place um, and you have people who Support and help that person get out there and do something fun every day so that they can take their mind off of the fact that they’re in the middle of chemo and they got another six rounds to go and it’s just Feeling nauseous and metallic and everything is off, you know Those those are really interesting bots.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
And so if you can take their mind off of it spend some time with family friends spend some time laughing Moving, you know dancing whatever might be that they like to do for me. I found that Work that worked really well for this patient and she had her family her mom who’s a nurse and she came over and helped out Um, these were important things, uh in that support network And of course, you know, it helped for me to visit with her on a more frequent basis So if she was in for an ivy i’d stop in and say hello for five ten minutes and just check in on her You know, it’s yeah, I know you’re feeling awful and you feel anemic and your red blood cells obtain You’re going to be okay. No, this is this is temporary. This is not your cancer doing this. This is you’re not there doing this

Robin Daly
So good to hear those things, but you don’t know, do you, a lot of the time?

Dr Heidi Kussmann
you think you’re getting worse.

Robin Daly
about everything yeah of course it’s natural. Yep all right well fascinating thanks for that insight into what you’re up to there obviously you know you’re interfering in a lot of ways and targeting a lot of the things that are going on so and able to be enormously supportive so great care and very envious of the amount of integration you’re pulling off there. We want some of that here.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Fingers crossed it keeps going. I’m not sure. Well, we’ll we’ll just keep hoping we’ll see. Yes, as they say here in shalom it comes through

Robin Daly
Yeah. Okay, so we’re out of time. Thanks really very much. It’s been fascinating to hear about you pioneering out there in the UAE and also a chance just to compare that with what’s happening elsewhere. So very interesting. Thank you.

Dr Heidi Kussmann
Thank you. You’re welcome, Robin. Pleasure as always. Bye -bye.

Robin Daly
If you’d like to find out more about Dr. Kussman and her work, her website is www .integrativecancersupport .com It’s impressive what she’s achieving and I think it demonstrates that things could begin to move quite quickly in terms of integration once we have a foot in the door. We must take note of and learn from examples such as Dr. Kussman if we want success. Thanks very much for listening to today, next week I shall be back with another guest expert for you so please do make a point of joining me again for another Yes To Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.