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

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes To Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, regular host for the show and founder of Yes To Life, the UK charity that’s been working for two decades to change cancer care in the UK and to make the integrative model of care in which people are supported in a truly holistic way that addresses their many challenges and needs, accessible to all.

Robin Daly
My guest today is Amy Robinson, who heads up a virtual group set up to support women with breast cancer and called Radiant Healing Together. Amy is highly motivated and has created a rich and diverse resource that many people are finding a significant help.

Robin Daly
I’m speaking to Amy in the US. I am delighted to welcome you to the Yes To Life show.

Amy Robinson
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here with you today.

Robin Daly
So, a growing topic on this show and actually throughout the yes-to-life space is the power of community to provide meaningful support and avenues to recovery for those with cancer, probably for most other things as well, to be honest, but we’ll stick with cancer for today, that’s enough.

Robin Daly
So you’re the hugely energetic founder and leader of one of the many valuable groups that are operating on social media, Radiant Healing Together. How do you come to be in this role?

Amy Robinson
Well, thank you so much. It’s really so powerful to see how community can transform our experience of the cancer journey. And the way I came into it was really, I kept being asked by people who were on this journey for a community.

Amy Robinson
They really needed that. And in my own experience, I was diagnosed in May of 2018. And I found all of the Facebook groups that were available at the time, those growing Facebook groups that we’re all familiar with, to be such a solace and such a wonderful place to connect with others on this journey, to learn, to just really improve that learning curve as we were all learning so much about all of the different evidence-based information in our cancer care and managing side effects and finding the support that we needed along the way.

Amy Robinson
But what I also found in those is it’s asynchronous support. And that was a place where, after my own journey, I was showing up a lot to help other women answering questions that they might have. But often, you would lose the thread of how things actually ended up unfolding for people.

Amy Robinson
I teach meditation. I’m a longtime meditation teacher and teacher in a variety of areas of integrative health. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and did master’s degree studies at Maryland University for integrative health and integrative health and clinical nutrition.

Amy Robinson
So this has always been an area of great interest for me. And so what I kept finding when I was supporting other women on this journey, whether it was through coaching or meditation classes, that they kept coming to me saying, what I really need is a community to heal with.

Amy Robinson
I could just see that so many people on this cancer journey feel alone with their symptoms. There’s some aspects of this experience that can be, quite frankly, physically brutal and socially isolating.

Amy Robinson
so I just, I kept finding again and again, and it just was a culminating experience where there are multiple beautiful people in my sphere across the country and the world who are coming to me saying how much they needed a community.

Amy Robinson
so I created Radiant Healing together for them and for all of us on this journey, because I just, I wanted us to not walk this path alone or feel alone on this journey. I wanted us to have a place to come together, share what was meaningful for us in that journey, to learn from one another.

Amy Robinson
the outcome has been phenomenal and just so beautiful to witness. I’m the one who created it and I’m holding the space for it. But what I see every day in our events is a woman will come in who’s getting ready to start radiation, for example, and it just happens that another woman has just finished and can help share with her what that journey was like so that she doesn’t feel alone and she can feel reassured on the journey and get all kinds of just practical tips and information that her medical team might not have the time to be able to share that can actually be incredibly supportive.

Amy Robinson
I see this happen practically every day, literally every week on an ongoing basis. So it’s very, very powerful. And and that’s something we just experience all the time. And right now, what one of the initiatives we have for 2024 is to start using those stress scores of where people are in their stress levels from one to 10.

Amy Robinson
so we started doing that for some of our support events, for our nutrition, for our meditation, for our therapeutic art experiences and things like that. And we’re finding in every event in which we’re recording this, stress levels are going down a minimum of 20 percent.

Amy Robinson
But sometimes, like in the meditation that I led last Sunday, people stress levels went down 50 percent. And you know, the cancer experience is stressful for all of us, even if when, right? It’s the worst. It’s a very important tool.

Robin Daly
Amazing. Well, look, as you mentioned, the reason you found yourself here is because of your own experience of cancer. But you just told me also that you’re already well into the integrative field before that.

Robin Daly
So you actually arrived at being diagnosed with cancer, kind of with a good grasp of the whole integrative field, which most people don’t, of course. So just be interested to hear a little bit about how that affected the way that you met the challenges that came towards you.

Amy Robinson
my diagnosis was, I was diagnosed with, actually, it’s very rare to have three different kinds of breast cancer diagnosed as it was for me. I was diagnosed with stage 3c breast cancer. That primary area seemed to be triple negative, but also there was HER2.

Amy Robinson
then at the time of surgery, it was an estrogen positive. So for those outside of the breast cancer world, it’s pretty unusual. So I ended up wanting, obviously what I had was very metabolically active.

Amy Robinson
So I wanted to really engage with the process, really get a lot of great input. And so I consulted with my team. I live in New Mexico in the United States. So I consulted with different doctors here.

Amy Robinson
I flew out to Stanford to consult with the head of breast cancer oncology at Stanford at the time. I ended up consulting with multiple different integrative and conventional doctors on my own process.

Amy Robinson
I went through the usual conventional experience before I was also in integrating integrative tools as well. I loved acupuncture on my journey, but my oncologist at the time said, for example, I went in, I was citing documented evidence about fasting around chemotherapy.

Amy Robinson
my oncologist said, absolutely not. You cannot be fasting around chemotherapy to absolutely stop all of my supplements, even the vitamin D. I was just going along with what they said. now of course, we know there’s so much more data about how fasting can really impact the outcomes and the side effects that we experience with chemotherapy.

Amy Robinson
so that was one of those impetuses for me. I’m a single mom. I had to care for my daughter while going through chemotherapy. And that was often quite difficult. And so I just, that was one of those call to actions for me.

Amy Robinson
I want everyone on this journey to have all the tools and all the information to make things easier for them. I also, after I had finished going through all of my process of the chemotherapy, the surgery and the radiation, I started testing my circulating tumor cells for a period of time.

Amy Robinson
at one point, they hit a very high number while I was in remission during the year after my treatment. And for triple negative, especially that’s a great concern, because that’s often something that will come back quite soon after initial diagnosis and treatment.

Amy Robinson
that is the point at which I started consulting with integrative doctors across the country and really engaging with that process. And one of the things that I kept hearing from one integrative doctor after another, whether it was the block center in Chicago or Dr. Pie here in New Mexico and other doctors as well, was that they were looking at my situation and analyzing that some of the outside stressors that I was under in my life were a big contributing factor to what I was experiencing as a potential driver of a recurrence for me. that was all the more impetus behind using all of those integrative tools, all of the meditation tools, all of the things that I’d learned in my studies and afterwards and putting them practically to use for my own healing.

Amy Robinson
so I did. that allowed those circulating tumor cells to go down to zero within a short period of time, using all of those tools. And so again, that was another call to action.

Amy Robinson
I mean, we all care about everybody on this journey. We want to make that journey easier. And so again, I wanted to make all of those tools of the stress management as well as shortening the learning curve available to everybody.

Robin Daly
stage three is not a light touch cancer treatment, this is something where you had to really, you know, put everything into it in order to come out the other end with any degree of success.

Robin Daly
It looks clearly like you’ve done that. Just tell me a little bit about how you achieved that success and what situation you’re in now in terms of staying well.

Amy Robinson
Thank you. Well, if you’re asking about the conventional treatments, I had six months of chemotherapy. I went through Adriamycin for three months, which was really rough. They don’t call it a red devil for nothing.

Amy Robinson
That was tough. And then I went on weekly Taxol for another three months because one of the breast cancers that had been found was HER2 positive. I also was on immunotherapy. So I was on Herceptin and Progetta as well.

Amy Robinson
those continued the Herceptin for a full year. And then I had surgery, went through the process. That was a process of discovery of interviewing a bunch of different surgeons to end up with the right surgeon as well.

Amy Robinson
ended up with the person who I feel did the best possible job for me. And I’m very grateful to Dr. Smith here in New Mexico. And then, and then after that, I went through radiation. I had seven and a half weeks of radiation, including electron radiation, which does more burning of the skin.

Amy Robinson
that process was not simple. There were times on the Adriamycin when I was literally sick every five minutes, I would wake up during the night and just have my little sick thing next to me and then try to go back to sleep and then up and up.

Amy Robinson
there were days I literally could not drive my daughter to school. I had to call in reinforcements of friends in the neighborhood because I wasn’t safe to drive because I was so ill. I’ve really been in the trenches.

Amy Robinson
I feel like that adds to that level of compassion and care for other people. I know what it is to walk the staff and I know what it is to stand in those shoes when you’re caring for yourself and family members. It’s a struggle. So we just want to make that easier for people as much as we possibly can.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. just as an example, you did all that radiation treatment, were you able to treat yourself in a way to give yourself protection, to recover quickly from metal?

Amy Robinson
One of the things that helped me most was acupuncture. So during, at a certain point in the chemotherapy when I was just really dragging, I reached out to an acupuncturist locally who I had worked with previously.

Amy Robinson
I started working with her between three and four times a week. And I did that through the rest of my treatment all the way through radiation and beyond. And, you know, seven and a half weeks of radiation is quite exhausting.

Amy Robinson
at the end of that, it took time, you know, it took a period of time to be able to rebuild my energy again. So, you know, I was using multiple supplements. I was resting. I was using sauna.

Amy Robinson
I was using different detox things. And I was getting a lot of acupuncture that was just really helping things to move for me. Another thing is I have a daily meditation practice that I’ve had for decades.

Amy Robinson
time in nature, getting that sunlight, and then meditation is, that’s a go-to for me on an ongoing basis, because it helps me just return to that sense of connection and purpose and joy that we can have no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Robin Daly
Great. All right. Thanks for that. So maybe we can talk a bit more about the group now, like the basics, like when you set it up, how many members, who’s this open to?

Amy Robinson
Yeah, absolutely. I’d love that. we started at the end of 2022. Again, it was kind of a call to action. There are several beautiful women who had stage four breast cancer and they really needed a community immediately.

Amy Robinson
I really felt that call to action. I wanted to give them all the tools that they were looking for. So I started it then. And we began with a number of different teachers within the group. So I’m teaching meditation regularly throughout the week.

Amy Robinson
I’m doing research reviews and discussing those with people. I’ve taught in the areas of nutrition. And then also like, for example, just recently there was some research that came out of the US a couple of weeks ago, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Research Center that showed that for breast cancer patients, once their T cell levels reach a certain threshold, that those T cells will go out and scavenge in places where they’re dormant cancer cells and eliminate them to prevent future metastasis.

Amy Robinson
I saw this research and then I put together several days of research myself to determine, okay, well, these medications and vaccines that they’re talking about in the study, those are not available to all of us now.

Amy Robinson
what is available? What are the ways through diet, lifestyle, stress management that we can boost T cells right now? And so I presented that to our group. So that’s the kind of things that I’m doing within the group.

Amy Robinson
We have a spiritual director, Vanna, who leads a listening circle once a week, just a place where people can speak the truth about how they’re doing. We have a Dr. Nantasha, who is a therapeutic arts practitioner.

Amy Robinson
she’s been recognized actually by the British Association of Therapeutic Artists. And so she teaches transformational art and creative self expression within our group every week. And that’s just been a beautiful place of self discovery for people.

Amy Robinson
We have different doctors coming in on a very regular basis. We have Dr. Heidi Lucas, who’s an integrative oncologist and naturopathic doctor. She comes in very regularly and gives talks to us now as well.

Amy Robinson
We have global experts, whether it’s on, you know, the signature task of circulating tumor cells, an EFT expert from Australia. We have different global experts coming in to speak with us on a regular basis.

Amy Robinson
we had terrain experts from the metabolic approach to cancer, who show up regularly for different connection events that we have as well. We have yoga, we have things virtually every day. This is a breast cancer group.

Amy Robinson
it’s for the one in eight women worldwide who are diagnosed with breast cancer. And so it began like that. It’s continued on. We’ve grown to almost 400 people within the group right now. And then in our Facebook group that supports the group, we have over 1000 people now.

Amy Robinson
we had this just beautiful, robust community of women who are there supporting one another. And what I love so much about that is then there’s the events where people come together, where they’re looking for information, they’re looking for support.

Amy Robinson
invariably, there are other people there who are telling them, you know, that message in all the different ways, you’re not alone with us. We’re here with you. And here’s some tips to help you make your way through road.

Robin Daly
So it’s for women with breast cancer. Is there ever any thoughts that it should be anything else other than that? I mean, have you thought about wide things at all or is it not on the cards?

Amy Robinson
I absolutely have. I absolutely have. I feel like because I know the area of breast cancer so well, that’s where I’m really focusing on our expansion right now and just really bringing it to all the women who have breast cancer.

Amy Robinson
again, we have people from all over the world. We have events sometimes of people joining us from England, Ireland, Central, Eastern Europe, from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and across the US, of course, as well in Canada and Mexico.

Amy Robinson
we’ve got people joining us from all over the place. But so my first step is really to expand this area for breast cancer. I do recognize, as you’re saying, that there’s so much within the group that would be applicable to other people with cancer.

Amy Robinson
We do have, for example, we’ve got 200 plus medication recordings. I feel like that potentially could be something that we could make available to people.

Amy Robinson
these are all meditations from five minutes to 60 minutes that can help people just find that place of peace and calm. And as I said, reducing people’s stress by 20% minimum, but we hit minimizing it by 50% last week.

Amy Robinson
people were asking, can we introduce a bliss scoring system instead of a stress scoring system? Because it can just bring us to that blaze of connection and happiness, no matter what the circumstances are that we’re in.

Robin Daly
breast cancer is all about women, but of course men do get breast cancer as well. Are they eligible to join your group and have you gone and they met in your group?

Amy Robinson
at this time, no, we do have some doctors that have joined our group, so practitioners. So if there are practitioners who are listening to this and would like more information, they could just reach out to me.

Amy Robinson
I give practitioners free passes to the group so they can come and check out exactly what we’re doing because we want them to learn about all the amazing offerings to make that available to their patients as well.

Amy Robinson
we do have some practitioners in the group who are men just kind of, you know, they’re supporting the group. However, at this time, it’s been really that safe space for women to be able to share everything that is going on for them.

Amy Robinson
As you’ve heard, I’m sure so many times, the impacts of breast cancer treatment and the impacts of any cancer treatment are head to toe. It’s not just isolated to the area in which people are experiencing things.

Amy Robinson
I think having a safe space where, for example, we have pelvic health experts coming in and talking about how the alignment is changed, which can affect the pelvic floor or, you know, different kinds of function that people may be experiencing or changes with that.

Amy Robinson
at this time, it’s really been a place just for women to be able to safely express whatever is going on for them in this group of other women.

Robin Daly
with some Facebook groups, I mean, what you see is what you get, basically, and but in your case, it seems to me like the Facebook group is more like a kind of storefront and you’ve got all the action happening around the back where there’s a kind of ecosystem of places to interact you’ve built around the back. So can we talk a bit about, what’s on offer, what the resources are that you have for women.

Amy Robinson
absolutely. the way the platform actually works, it’s very different. I mean, we have the Facebook group and there’s information we put in there because that’s just a natural place where people show up and are looking for information, right?

Amy Robinson
we have things to do. But all the excitement actually takes place on our app. So we have the Radiant Healing Together app, which is through the Circle platform. that was a platform that was created for community to support community.

Amy Robinson
so people can sign up through our links and then they download the app onto their phone. So people can join our events. We have live events virtually every day of the week and they can join those events either on their computer, on their phone.

Amy Robinson
that makes it just really easy. So people, if they’re taking a tablet or a phone, say to the Cancer Center with them for an infusion or to appointments or they’ve got to do a school run or whatever they’re doing, they can bring it with them.

Amy Robinson
We have people taking us on walks with them. So if they’re getting the sunshine, they’re getting the fresh air and they’re getting the learning and healing information at the same time. So the action takes place on the platform and the app.

Amy Robinson
It’s live events primarily. So people show up for these live events. We’ve got things, as I said, virtually every single day of the week for people to show up and find support and find that learning that they’re looking for.

Amy Robinson
we’ve got special events every single week throughout the month. And then we have the recordings of all the experts that we’ve had on in the past. And so we have between three and 400 different recordings.

Amy Robinson
I’ll need to go back and check because we’re just adding every single week. But there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of recordings from everything to the different aspects of terrain in the metabolic approach to cancer, to the research on using emotional freedom techniques with Dr. McCoster out of Australia, who’s one of the leading world experts in this field who has done clinical trials and research in emotional freedom technique. She came to talk with us. She showed us precisely how to use this in our healing protocols.

Amy Robinson
We have all kinds of experts. We have people in mindfulness who have trained with John Kabat-Zinn. We have lymphedema experts, occupational therapy experts, physical therapy experts, and then a wide swath of doctors from all over the world who have come and spoken to us.

Amy Robinson
we also have people from radical remission. We have a radical remission healer who works with us once a month as well. So we really want to provide the whole wide range of what is going to be most supportive.

Amy Robinson
We recognize that what’s supportive to me or to you may be different for somebody else. So we want to provide that wide range that really addresses what’s most helpful for people. For example, one thing that is a big favorite for many people is our story medicine class.

Amy Robinson
This came out of an event that we held last summer. I reached out to a world leading author and workshop leader in the area of expressive writing, and she led a workshop just for our group. We had, I think it was almost a hundred people attend that event last summer.

Amy Robinson
our story medicine came out of that. So I’ve continued those classes between twice a month and once a month. Those are always available free to everybody on the platform. I want everyone to have access to that for free, no matter what.

Amy Robinson
those are an opportunity for us to just let out those feelings that may be sitting inside that we’re not aware of through writing prompts, short writing sessions, longer writing sessions, and it’s an opportunity to share writing or not, or just hear what other people are writing.

Amy Robinson
it’s so supportive, and it actually resulted in our publishing a book of story medicine from 40 different women from all over the world, from a lot of different cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds in different countries, and just sharing that commonality of experience of what it is to walk this path.

Amy Robinson
one of the things that I think has been very powerful about this book is I’m hearing I’ve given it to some people and heard of some people purchasing it who have other cancers. And I just heard back from somebody last week.

Amy Robinson
He is a former judge in New Mexico. And he told me that it was one of the most impactful books he’s ever read. He’s reading every single passage in it. He has a totally different kind of cancer, but the voices that speak to him are the same in that commonality of experience.

Amy Robinson
it’s the appoint of an upliftment and transformation. that’s what we want. It’s that post-traumatic growth. We’ve all been through the trauma of this experience. We want to be able to experience how we can transform out of that experience to the next steps on our path.

Robin Daly
It’s really helpful also to look for commonalities because I mean, medicine seeks to filter everybody off in different directions, you know, there’s not just breast cancer, there’s 83 different kinds of breast cancer or something, you know what I mean, there’s so many ways in which we get divided into smaller and smaller and smaller factions where actually you’re right of course, the experience of cancer,

Robin Daly
it doesn’t matter that much what kind of cancer you’ve got, there are many things about it that absolutely everyone shares. And yes, it’s important to acknowledge that and to use it as a resource.

Amy Robinson
it absolutely is. And I will just the last thing about the story medicine book is that all the proceeds from that support scholarships for women with metastatic breast cancer. So all the proceeds are going to support women on this journey as well.

Robin Daly
And that’s available in general bookstores is it?

Amy Robinson
That’s on Amazon. we actually reached number one in new breast cancer releases for a few days when it came out. And that was all pretty exciting.

Robin Daly
You’re the author of it, who’s the editor?

Amy Robinson
I’m the editor, we had an editing team, but I’m the primary editor who put it out into the world and we just gathered those voices from so many women. And it’s been a very full experience.

Robin Daly
people will find it under your name anyway

Amy Robinson
Yes. You can look for Story Medicine and Amy Robinson, and you’ll find it there.

Robin Daly
So it talks about you’ve got the kind of shot front and then round the back, which is obviously all based around your app. So people can apply to be a member of the Facebook group like they would any other group.

Robin Daly
It’s a straightforward process. A lot of people have tried and done. What’s involved in becoming a member of the group that’s using the app?

Amy Robinson
Yes. So for that, we have we have a link that people can follow. There’s three different sections right now. And I just have to give a shout out to my friend and colleague on this this path, Maria Bakhtil, who she started the breast cancer pathways worksheets along with Abby Mitchell, who, you know, and he has her two positive breast cancer group on it’s a private group on Facebook.

Amy Robinson
also a nutrition practice. And so she joined our group and we’ve been working together with what is on offer there. And so we now offer three different sections on radiant healing together. The first section is our kind of free sample section.

Amy Robinson
So that’s where we always have certain live classes on an ongoing basis. So we have like our story medicine classes are always free in that section. And then we have other things like a couple of weeks ago, I did a talk on all of these amazing free breast cancer vacations that are available to people who are going through this.

Amy Robinson
Everybody needs a vacation after this experience, right? But most of us funneled so much of our finances into the cancer experience that it can be hard to be able to finance something like that afterwards.

Amy Robinson
I just want to make that a little bit easier. So things like that, I just want everyone to have no matter what. So that’s in there. I heard recently about someone who is needing some extra help and support in radiation.

Amy Robinson
I have a radiation event in there. We have a breast cancer surgery meditation that’s in there that was recorded not by me, but by a leading hypnotist. So she’s a hypnotherapist and also has gone through the cancer experience.

Amy Robinson
that’s a really powerful breast cancer meditation for surgery that I’ve used, that many in our group have used. And I’ve heard of people going through mastectomy and even not having pain afterwards because of using this so regularly.

Amy Robinson
Results may vary, but it’s been very powerful. So we have this free area that has a bunch of great resources in it and ongoing live events for that as well. Then we have a community area that really was spearheaded by our wonderful Maria.

Amy Robinson
she has brought over this whole breast cancer research library into our group. So we have different topics like you’re familiar with Abby’s site where people can want to learn more about art to medicine or they want to learn more about hyperbaric oxygen or they want to learn more about protocols around getting MRIs for detoxing that contrast and other things like that, just making things a little bit easier on this journey.

Amy Robinson
we have a whole library of resources now within the group as well. And that’s all available at that community level. In the community level, we have member led events. We have stage four stories of hope, which has been a really beautiful addition to what we have where there’s interviews with women who have gone through a stage four diagnosis and are now no evidence of disease or progression has stopped and just sharing their experience of how they got there.

Amy Robinson
There’s also early early stage groups and treatment support groups and different things like that that are all led by members as well as a couple of different events per month with Maria herself. So that’s one level that’s a community level and that’s currently just under 10 U.S. dollars per month. And then we also have what we call the all access level that has access to just the 300 plus recordings, all the doctors that are coming in, all of the things that I’m organizing to bring in for people. that we have around twenty five dollars right now when we’ve got that a free full month for people who want to try it out. So there’s free trials of everything. You can join the free group or you can get a free trial of either the community side or the all access side.

Amy Robinson
there’s scholarships available for people who need it as well. We have the story medicine building that scholarship arena for the women with stage four breast cancer. And anybody, you know, we have multiple people in the U.K. on scholarships and partial scholarships right now. So people who need that can reach out to me about that as well.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. So, there’s a subscription that it’s modest.

Amy Robinson
Exactly. Because we know everybody has a lot of costs on this journey as well. We want to make it as easily accessible for people as possible. And we’re trying to get seriously the best experts we can find all over the world that are going to be providing the most actionable resources and tools for people on this journey. we want to make it accessible for everybody.

Robin Daly
OK, so I wanted to talk a little bit more about science. I know you’re very keen on the science behind all the things you’re doing. You’re always digging around there for new research. Do you want to say something about where the science has got to now and where it’s heading? when you’re talking about the science you’re talking about science of community or just community in particular but also some of the other initiatives within that, the old promoting.

Amy Robinson
Right. the science about community, I think, is very powerful. And I’m reminded of some science that’s been shared by Dr. Gabor Mate in The Myth of Normal as well, where they were looking at women who were under severe stress, and then women who felt either supported in their life or a lack of support.

Amy Robinson
what they found was that women who had a biopsy for breast cancer, who felt stressed, didn’t have a hugely greater degree of breast cancer. And women who didn’t feel supported in their life didn’t have a huge increase in breast cancer.

Amy Robinson
But when they combined women who felt stressed and also didn’t feel supported, it was like a nine-fold increase in positive breast cancer biopsies. And so that is something that I found very powerful.

Amy Robinson
For many of us, you know, everybody is experiencing a certain degree of stress in modern life. That’s just part of this life now, I think.

Amy Robinson
It sure does wherever we may put ourselves. And yet, having support along the way can transform that experience and boost our immune function in ways that can help change what the metabolic approach to cancer calls the cancering process.

Amy Robinson
That terrain that we have within us, is it moving us more towards health or disease? And I think it’s very clear from all the data that we’ve seen is that this can be impacted in every single moment by the choices that we make.

Amy Robinson
making choices to seek out the support we need, as for the support we need, and including joining communities where we can feel really supported, can dramatically transform our experience and quality of life on the cancer journey, as well as our outcomes.

Amy Robinson
In fact, one of the doctors who was a medical director of an integrative center who came and spoke to us said that in the research that she’s done, women with stage four breast cancer who feel supported have twice the longevity of women who don’t.

Amy Robinson
for me, honestly, it was one of the calls to actions that I felt in this journey. I thought, oh my gosh, if we can double the longevity of women who are on this journey, that is incredible. And I thought about all the other women, like when I was going through my own breast cancer experience, my daughter had a friend that she had grown up with since kindergarten.

Amy Robinson
Her mother died of breast cancer just as I was diagnosed. And I just think about all those kids, all those moms, I want every mom to have that support, every woman to have that support. So she can get double that longevity impact of that community and also have the lessening of the cancer process that comes from feeling supported.

Amy Robinson
I think two of this quotation from Dr. Gabor Monte where he says that disease is a process that reflects our life experience once you impact that process that impacts your disease outcomes and that it’s just science.

Amy Robinson
The science reflects that, the medical science reflects that. And we know that it takes that 10 to 15 years where the medical science, once it’s published in research, to really catch up with what you’re hearing in the doctor’s offices and what’s being taught in medical schools.

Amy Robinson
That’s just the natural delay that’s shown for just about everything coming out in medical research. But we know that now. So if we know that now, we can make choices based on that. And we know that that impacts so many different levers of our health.

Amy Robinson
that boosts our immune function. If you look at things like therapeutic art and creative arts therapies, we had an expert on this, Susan Headland, who is the director of oncology patient services at an Oregon medical teaching hospital and cancer center.

Amy Robinson
she was talking to us about how the creative arts therapies, they really improve your immune function and they boost your endorphins so that you feel better with whatever is going on. Creative arts therapies, which we offer within the group, they lower anxiety and depression and they make people feel so much better along the way.

Amy Robinson
we want to look at these the soft ways. And that’s again, one of my missions is that equity for people on this journey. Not everybody has the opportunity to go and the resources to go to the ones that are doing all the amazing clinical trials and things that are just really changing the landscape that may not be available to them.

Amy Robinson
They may not even be able to go across town and get that IVC or the hyperbaric oxygen or even the really expensive supplements. But what I want to really make clear to people is how the things, how the choices that we make now really impact our wellbeing.

Amy Robinson
One bottle of curcumin can cost $40 to $80, right? Depending upon where you get it. But for $20 a month or less, depending upon how we work it out, we can have people get this community that is so incredibly supportive from the therapeutic arts that is shown to boost immune function and lower stress and improve quality of life.

Amy Robinson
The meditation that we know also really boosts immune function meditation has been shown in breast cancer to really impact our sense of wellbeing, lower that anxiety and depression. And as I was sharing earlier, when we’re looking at our own data within the group, we’re lowering that stress as much as 50%.

Amy Robinson
I was just seeing some recently published research that was showing that in the tumor environment in breast cancer, that cortisol is really promoting a cancering process. So anything that we can do across the board to lower that cortisol push, that exacerbation of cortisol that comes from the stress response, we want to engage with that because that can actually impact our cancering process.

Amy Robinson
we want to do that in all the most gentle ways that we can. And I’ll just share too, when I was going through my master’s program, I studied directly one-on-one with Dr. Liz Lipsky, who is one of the foremost experts in the United States on nutrition.

Amy Robinson
she literally wrote the book on digestive health, the first book in the United States written on digestion. And so what I studied under her, this was before anyone else had heard of the microbiome, but I was doing independent studies with her on the microbiome from multiple semesters because this was an area of my passion.

Amy Robinson
we see that the microbiome is very impactful in breast cancer and other cancers as well. You can do biopsies of the microbiomes of the area of breast cancer, for example, of the breast, and that there’s a certain microbiome that goes with that, with the cancer diagnosis and outcomes.

Amy Robinson
We can impact the microbiome in any moment with the choices that we make, either through our food choices, our supplement choices, also through those soft choices of the meditation, gently taking care of ourselves, turning that sense of love and care towards ourselves on this journey, and also finding the support that we need in community.

Robin Daly
Amazing. Yeah, really great. I was just thinking to myself like 20 years ago when I started doing this kind of work You know, you’re a pretty wacky if you’re talking about stress as having much to do with illness really is this way You know, you’re a fairly far off beast doing that kind of thing But now it’s really heartening to see how many people just talk about as a common sense now actually in in the mainstream media as well and you know,

Robin Daly
this is a lot of this has Really come to the fore during Covid I found Well-being has actually emerged as being a real thing, you know as opposed to what hippies do so It’s a great to see that and to feel that some attention is being given to this area

Amy Robinson
Well, and it’s not a new area in terms of research when you think of the ACEs scores. We’ve had that for decades, the adverse childhood event scores that can draw through lines through that towards heart disease, towards cancer, towards a lessening of people’s longevity.

Amy Robinson
that’s the traumas that people have experienced, but there are ways of working with that through all of these tools and again, through supporting the individual in a place where they feel like their needs matter, their heart matters, their experience matters and they’re held with care and upliftment in a place where people, you know, can love on them, you know, because that’s what we’re doing over here.

Robin Daly
Well, that’s a great note to end on. We’re out of time. Thanks so much for joining me today. Really fascinating to hear about your important work, community building.

Amy Robinson
Thank you so much. It’s been an utter delight and thank you to you for all the beautiful work that you’ve done for the cancer community for so long. It really has such an impact and we’re so grateful for you as well.

Robin Daly
Thank you Amy. Bye bye. I hope listening to Amy has had some of you wondering if you couldn’t set up a similar resource for another section of the community of those with cancer. Coming together in a group is such a marvellous way of meeting the difficulties that cancer presents and really is one of the single most important steps we can take towards our recovery.

Robin Daly
Of course if you have breast cancer then why not take a look at Amy’s offering, Radiant Healing Together. Thanks very much for spending this time with me. I hope you found it rewarding and will want to come back for more.

Robin Daly
Remember there’s a whole back catalogue of around 450 shows to browse through and you can search these by guest, topic or keyword on the show page which you can get to by going to the homepage of YesToLife.org.uk, scrolling down and clicking the tile that takes you to the YesToLife show.

Robin Daly
I’ll be back again next week with another YesToLife show so please join me again. Goodbye.