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Robin Daly
Hi, and welcome to the Yes to Life show . My name’s Robin Daly, and I’ve hosted the show since 2015. I’m also founder of the UK charity of the same name, Yes to Life, that supports people with cancer in understanding and accessing the significant benefits of integrative medicine. My guest this week has certainly benefited majorly from learning about integrative medicine. In fact, so much so that she’s written a book to encourage others to follow suit. It’s called Alive, Surviving Modern Oncology, a provocative title. The author’s name is Ann Gimpel, and I’m speaking to her on the far sides of the US. Hi, Ann, welcome to the Yes to Life show.

Ann Gimpel
Well, thank you for having me, Robin.

Robin Daly
Right, this is going to be great. I’m very much looking forward to talking to you today. You’re an extensively published writer and I do mean extensively. How many books exactly have you published?

Ann Gimpel
Well, you know, I kind of stopped counting after 50, but it it’s well over 100 now. I started back in 2009, so it isn’t like I turned them all out yesterday.

Robin Daly
No, but that’s a lot of books in quite a short period, you’ve been working hard. What genre would you describe your books as fitting into in the main?

Ann Gimpel
Um, the, in, in recent years, uh, the fantasy sub-genres, urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, dystopian fantasy, um, and, uh, with kind of romantic sub-plots. In my earlier years when I was starting, I had an agent and I had lots of publishers, small and medium-sized presses, and, uh, I was writing mostly romance, paranormal romance, um, because that’s what they wanted. Um, a number of those small and medium-sized publishers went out of business, um, and they went out of business rather quickly, like in the middle of the night and they took off and they left and they never paid us. So round about 2013, I figured I knew enough I could do this myself. So I’ve been full indie since 2014 and I’ve never looked back.

Robin Daly
Okay, so this book we’re going to be talking about today, which is called Alive Surviving Modern Oncology, is then a bit of a contrast to your normal genre, so something a bit different.

Ann Gimpel
It is. I do have one other nonfiction book that I published in 2018. It’s called Grit is a four letter word and it’s the psychology of backcountry travel. And that’s another topic that is near and dear to my heart. So.

Robin Daly
okay all right so the title of this book is intentionally i’m sure a bit of a brash one i mean whose are you hoping to catch with it who are you hoping is going to pick it up off the bookshelf

Ann Gimpel
I am hoping that anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer or has had a loved one diagnosed with cancer might give it a read. Back in November of 2021, after an infusion center fired me for asking too many questions and taking too many supplements, I was in a motel in Carson City, Nevada because where I live, there’s nothing close, so I have to travel for everything. I just decided, damn it, I’m going to live. This is not going to be the end of my life. So, as a throwing down the gauntlet, I pulled up a continuing ed for my psychologist license, which would be doing a few months, and I started doing classes. I just picked myself up and moved forward. So that’s kind of where the title of the book came from.

Robin Daly
Okay, throwing down the gauntlet. Love it. Okay, so you just mentioned a psychologist there and yeah, you started your working life not writing books. I introduced you as an author but another thread stringed to your bow entirely. You just started life working in the medical system and there’s quite a lot about the medical system in this book we’re going to be talking about. Not always entirely flattering. So, do you want to tell us about where you started your training and your practice?

Ann Gimpel
I’m a psychologist by trade. That’s what I’ve done for, gosh, since really a long time. I’ve been licensed since 1997, but before that I was working in an administrative capacity running publicly funded mental health and alcohol drug programs in various places in the state of California. I’ve done a lot of things with my psychology license. I’ve had a private practice on a get off again. I taught at a family practice residency training program for a number of years where I taught doctors bedside manners.

Robin Daly
That has to be good.

Ann Gimpel
Oh, you know, so some of them are amazing, you know, because we got them the minute they graduated from medical school. And you know, the first time somebody said, you know, congratulations, Dr. Solventso, you know, here’s your white coat. And I mean, I’m still friends with a number of the residents that I trained and certainly with some of the faculty that I worked with.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. Yeah, the ideal opportunity to bring that subject in. It’s not easy to introduce 10 years down the line, is it?

Ann Gimpel
No, no, no, it isn’t and you know, we we we be in the faculty we we do from you know, the first few days Which which of our new? Residents were you know going to be compassionate Charing and you know which we’re going to turn into the kind of doctors that nobody wants to go see

Robin Daly
Yeah, okay, so your book, it’s obviously your story in the main, and that’s the heart of it, but you’ve actually given a kind of historical context, if you like, about, you know, you’re writing about cancer, your own experience, but you’ve put in a historical context there to the whole situation. Why did you feel that was important?

Ann Gimpel
you know, if we don’t know what causes something, how on earth can we pretend to treat it? So I think that all of the early theories, I mean kind of starting with Warbur, he was undeniably brilliant. You know, he’s the first one that came up with glucose feeds cancer, you know, so you should stay away from sugar. And then I believe that in some of the material that I got permission to quote from Sam Apple, he mentions an experiment where they’re growing breast cancer cells in Petri dishes, and the minute they take away the glucose, the cancer cells die.

Robin Daly
Right.

Ann Gimpel
So I thought that the historical backdrop was really intriguing. There are things for people to take to their oncologists and say, well, what about this?

Robin Daly
Right.

Ann Gimpel
Um, you know, why, why does the infusion center feed me cookies and cake?

Robin Daly
Ha, ha, ha.

Ann Gimpel
You know what, you’re trying to keep me a patient forever, you don’t want my cancer to go away.

Robin Daly
You’re stirring here, basically.

Ann Gimpel
So, that’s why I put that chapter in and Mark Linterne was kind enough to allow me to excerpt his paper from last February. I think his theory is incredibly clean and it’s the only one I’ve come across that actually explains all 10 hallmarks of cancer in later. I just, I hope he puts his book out in an ebook format, you know, to make it more readily available for people.

Robin Daly
have already happened. I’ll check on that, but it’s certainly available as a book. Yes, it is. There are six interviews I did with Mark in this series on the Yes Life show in which we go through his theory in some detail, again, for the layman, which is where he’s aimed all of his information. Yeah, great. It certainly is interesting. I’m fascinated by it.

Ann Gimpel
Well, it is. He’s done an amazing, you know, I mean, it took him eight years.

Robin Daly
I know.

Ann Gimpel
And yeah, my hats off to them.

Robin Daly
That’s off indeed, yeah. So one of the key features of your book is that you’ve got lots of other people’s stories in there alongside your own. So why didn’t you choose to do that? What do you think they were going to add to what you could say about your own story?

Ann Gimpel
Well, I did it for two reasons. The first was to highlight that there is not one single path, that the paths that we take are as individual as we are. So that was reason one. Reason two was, if I only put my story in, people could have chalked it up to, oh, well, hey, yeah, it’s too bad all that happened to her. But she didn’t want a bad life.

Robin Daly
Right.

Ann Gimpel
Um, so by including other people’s stories, it’s like, well, hey, if I had dad luck, so did a bunch of them.

Robin Daly
Well, that does mean so. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. You certainly strengthened the case, if you like, for the fact there are things that are wrong. OK, and so. In your book, you tell us that your integrative doctor, the excellent Dr. Sean Devlin, he set a target for the year after next, as being the date that you’re going to celebrate the successful end to your treatment, so which means, well, you’re still on the journey, that’s one thing it means, but so I wondered if you can just tell us about your story so far.

Ann Gimpel
Bye!

Robin Daly
The sure version.

Ann Gimpel
Yes. Not the six-part version. Back in February of 2021, I had a bleeding episode. I was 20 years post-menopausal, and so I knew that that wasn’t right. I’d also taken bioidentical hormones for 22 years. You know, the ones that were supposed to be safe.

Robin Daly
Yeah.

Ann Gimpel
So I went to a local OB here and she attempted to do an endometrial biopsy. She failed. She sent me off for a transvaginal ultrasound and my, not too surprisingly, my endometrial lining or stripe as they call it, was greater than the five millimeter standard. So I came back for another biopsy at which point I mentioned to her that she might want to prescribe misoprostol because it softens up the cervix. So at my suggestion she did and the second biopsy worked and lo and behold I had cancer, not any cancer, not the kind of slow, pokey, nice, usual endometrial cancer. I had serous carcinoma, which is considered an aggressive cancer. So that doctor wasn’t any help. She had nowhere to refer me, send me, I’m new here, I don’t know anybody, you’re on your own. Thank you. Okay. So I googled, I went to, you know, Dr. Google and I started looking for surgeons because I figured I needed one. I had two surgical consults, ended up having surgery in a nearby city and I’m purposely vague about this. On May 7th, the path report was real clean. There was no, there was some spread to my ovaries, but there was no spread to my lymph system or my tubes or my cervix or my omentum. So the surgeon said she was real happy with my path report. Even though she’s not the one who told me about it, my PCP is the one who found it because my surgeon kind of dropped the ball. So a few weeks after that surgery, I started having problems and it turns out that she got the tip of her robot, the heat tip. It’s one of the things the robotic device seals with. She got it too close to my right ureter and she tried it. So I ended up with a distula, which means basically urine was pouring out of me. I had no control over it.

Robin Daly
made a hole.

Ann Gimpel
Yeah, she made a hole, so after a couple of failed attempts to thread a stent from my kidney to my bladder, I ended up six weeks later with a second surgery that was way worse than the first because it was so much longer. The anesthesia burden from surgeries is what does you win? And so at this point I had like, gosh, I don’t know, seven or eight hours of anesthesia burden over a six-week timeframe. I came out of that surgery with a Foley and a stent. A Foley is a yellow tube that drains urine into a bag that’s strapped to your leg. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It was awful. Why? I had that for three weeks. I had a stent for five. Meanwhile, the minute the stent came out, the doctors are pushing chemo, chemo, chemo, and I said, no. I have to get my strength back before you put poison in my veins. And at that point I fired the surgery group and I’d moved on to Stanford. She was also pushing chemo. Finally toward the end of September of 2021, I had my first chemo infusion. That was four months after the original surgery. The recommended timeframe is six weeks. I had a full dose of Taxol and Carboplatin. It was hideous. I immediately started researching lower doses. I had a lot of doctors. I had the guide on at Stanford. I had the oncologist at the infusion center. When I showed up with my little PowerPoint presentation that I had made about different dose regimens, she gave me a walkie in five minutes, stood up, and ushered me out of her office. I was nice. I was respectful. This is my body we’re talking about, knockers. So anyway, I got hold of the Stanford doc and she clucked over me and she was very, she’d all talk to her. So they kind of duked it out. Let’s see. September, October, November, about two and a half months later, I had my second chemo infusion. There was a much low dose Taxol, full dose Carboplatin. It was much more tolerable. But right after that, the infusion center fired me. I guess that doctor didn’t like losing. I was devastated. I was certain they signed my death warrant. And I considered going to Stanford, but Stanford is an eight hour drive for me in the summer, a 10 hour drive in the winter over mountain passes that have a lot of snow. So I had been looking into integrative care. I discarded the first two that I talked with. And then I found Sean Devlin. The first thing he did was he ordered genomic testing on my tumor bits that were still in the pathology lab at the hospital. And guess what? chemo never would have helped me.

Robin Daly
All right.

Ann Gimpel
I mean, think about that. This is Taxol and carboplatin, those are the substances that one, two, three, four oncologists, if you count my second surgical consult, they would have fallen on their swords for those substances for me. And according to genomic testing, which is really accurate, there was absolutely, it makes that lack of benefit in a big red bar.

Robin Daly
Why?

Ann Gimpel
So according to Kerris, what I should have had was either immunotherapy or hormone therapy. But you know, my scans have been clear, my lab work has been good. So what Dr. Dablin and I came up with is I did our Tuscinate followed by intravenous vitamin C every two weeks for a period of a year.

Robin Daly
Okay.

Ann Gimpel
along with uh i i take i take a lot of stuff well that’s

Robin Daly
Until you’ve finished that year and how, presumably?

Ann Gimpel
I finished that year and I’m now on an every six weeks schedule.

Robin Daly
Right. Okay. And how do you feel generally in yourself? Do you feel like you’re heading for that success in 2025?

Ann Gimpel
You know, one of the elements of this whole cancer journey has been spiritual. I resurrected my badly neglected meditation practice. And I don’t get too far ahead of the curve. Today is good, you know. Today I feel good. Yesterday I felt good. Tomorrow will play out feel good. You know, when the one of it comes back, demons rear their heads, I meditate.

Robin Daly
Okay. Sounds like a very good plan. All right. So now let’s go on and talk about the fact you’ve got a chapter that’s dedicated to the business of cancer in your book. Yes. So for a lot of people this might be a strange thing to have in a book about personal experience in cancer. Suddenly you’re talking about the whole business of cancer. So why do you want to write about that?

Ann Gimpel
Well, let’s give John Horgan full credit. A lot of the material in that chapter is his and reproduced with his permission from a Scientific American article back in 2018. And he renewed his statistics after he and I talked. So I think that it is important, particularly in the US, for patients to recognize the cancer is big business. Though those chemotherapy infusions and, oh God immunotherapy, they’re like 40, 50 grand a pop. So doctors are not disinterested parties. Back in the days when I worked at the residency, every Wednesday, a pharmaceutical rep would come and sponsor lunch for all of us, about 40 people, a fancy lunch, a nice care lunch in exchange for about 15 minutes to pimp their latest new wonder drug. And even well beyond that, there was golf, there was ski trips, there were cruises, there were, back when I was working, which was around 2000 at the residency, pharmaceutical companies in this country were spending $12,000 per doctor per year. Why are they doing that? They’re doing that so that their drugs are in the forefront of each physician’s mind when they are prescribing.

Robin Daly
Yeah, well, it’s certainly good that people are aware of that. I mean, since 2000, I think there have been some steps to try and limit this kind of behavior somewhat, but I’m sure it’s not been completely stopped by any means.

Ann Gimpel
Well, you can find almost anything on the internet. And in my research for the big business chapter, I found a list of oncologists that took incentive money, I call it kickbacks, from pharmaceutical companies.

Robin Daly
Right.

Ann Gimpel
Interestingly, the one of you fired me was one of them. She didn’t take a lot of money. It was about 1200 bucks, but she had taken something.

Robin Daly
very interesting okay so that’s what okay so there’s a bit of context for your readers there about what they’re going into and what kind of the message behind it if you like when you’re trying to say by passing on this information to them

Ann Gimpel
Well, the other piece that I hope that chapter gets across is, despite the hype from the pharmaceutical companies, you know, miracle drug, blockbuster, game changer, we are not winning the war on cancer. We are not in any better shape than we were, what, 40 years ago. So, you know, contrary to what many oncologists want you to believe, we need other things. If you have cancer and all you do is chemo, radiation, and surgery, you might get lucky. It might not come back, but my belief is you need to institute lifestyle changes, you need to figure out why you got cancer in the first place. I mean, for me, it was my bioidentical hormones, but obviously I quit taking them, but I didn’t stop there because I don’t really want to go through this again. It wasn’t fun.

Robin Daly
Yeah, interesting. You’re right about the statistics and the hype, and you’ve given plenty of statistics in that chapter there to make the case that, yeah, cancer is not progressing in the way that you think by reading the hay lines. And probably the most important thing is that even though some progress has been made, and certainly with one or two cancers there’s a lot of progress being made, even though that’s happening, of course, the rate of incidence, the rate at which people are getting cancer, is completely and utterly out of control and is running away.

Ann Gimpel
Yes, that’s true. The other thing I want to highlight from that chapter is there are a lot of the new drugs that are multi-million dollar R&B research and development things that extend progression-free survival, which is the hallmark, by two weeks, three weeks, two months. Hey, that’s a real success. But you know, at what cost? Because the sign effects are grim.

Robin Daly
Yeah.

Ann Gimpel
So I believe in my interview with Robert Negorni, Dr. Negorni, he mentions a drug that got approved by the FDA that extended progression-free survival for two weeks.

Robin Daly
Well.

Ann Gimpel
or maybe it was three days, I don’t, it wasn’t much.

Robin Daly
Right, and of course that doesn’t necessarily even transfer to a longer life.

Ann Gimpel
Oh, no, not at all. No. It doesn’t.

Robin Daly
Yeah, yeah, scary stuff.

Ann Gimpel
It’s sad. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Robin Daly
no right so you’re making the case the fact that you have to cast the net a bit wider and whereas some of these treatments may well have their place as the bial and nandle they ain’t it

Ann Gimpel
Well, there is a methodology for chemotherapy, IPT, insulin potentiated therapy, where insulin precedes a very low dose of chemo, with the theory being that the insulin wakes up the cancer cells because they love it. And then you could use very little chemo and have it work. If you look at, oh, MSK, Memorial Sloan-Caterin, or any, they all poo-poo it, they say it doesn’t work, but a lot of people that have had it were, it did work.

Robin Daly
Yeah, there’s a lot of resources out there. Okay, so we mentioned Dr. Devlin, Dr. Sean Devlin, he gives a lot of good press in your book, not only from you, but also some of your other contributors I noticed. Clearly not everybody who’s listening is going to be able to consult him personally, but I wonder what it is about Dr. Sean Devlin, the qualities, the experience, the skills and knowledge that he embodies that other people will want to look for in another practitioner.

Ann Gimpel
Okay, Dr. Davlin, he’s an osteopath, he’s a DO, as opposed to an MD, but in this country they’re equivalent.

Robin Daly
Okay.

Ann Gimpel
He’s a very bright man. He has a number of PhDs, in addition to his doctor of osteopathy. When I first met him, his question to me was, what are we doing here? We is inclusive. So it isn’t, what am I, the great doctor, going to do to you? It is, what are we going to do working together? And I think that’s a very important point. He also, I mean, he had opinions. He told me what he thought, but he listened to me. I mean, he wanted me to have the Artesinate and IVC two days running every time I came up there. I couldn’t afford that. I mean, I probably could have, but I wasn’t willing to. It was, because it was really expensive. So I, in a lot of respects, you sort of have to listen to, we all have a little still, small voice with the end that tells us what we need. Like I said, Dr. Devlin wasn’t my first integrative practitioner. I talked to two others before him, and that still, small voice said, run.

Robin Daly
Right. Interesting. Useful thing, hey, that’s still small.

Ann Gimpel
Yeah. It is. Well, it’s hard because, you know, there are no worse things than hearing the words you have to answer. Sure there are. I mean, you can have a child die. I think that’s worse. But it puts you in a very vulnerable position, particularly if you don’t have much of the way of medical or heart science background. And so, you know, and you don’t know where to go to find information. Pouring through PubMed is not for the faint of heart.

Robin Daly
It’s not.

Ann Gimpel
So, I think that we all need allies, and we need allies outside of the standard of care, and you provide that in your charity.

Robin Daly
I hope to, yeah that’s definitely the case.

Ann Gimpel
I mean, you know, I looked at your site, you have consultations, you have beer to beer, you have a very enriched menu of offerings.

Robin Daly
Right. So clearly, in your case, John to Devon, he fitted the bill in terms of being somebody who you felt was going to be on your team, but be not locked into the system.

Ann Gimpel
Yeah, he’s definitely not locked into the system. He would prefer to work with an oncologist. My Stanford gynecologic oncologist moved to Southern California because her husband who was also a surgeon got a job down there and she, at least on paper, was willing to work with Dr. Devlin. I don’t know if they ever talked, but anyhow, it turned into a moot point because she ghosted me. After inviting me to follow her down to the clinic, she ghosted me after she moved. At the moment, I don’t have a gyne on because I hope I never need another one.

Robin Daly
Right. Let’s see. Okay. So, you were talking about the fact that people need to get educated, basically, and find out what they’re in for when they have to go into the medical system with a diagnosis of cancer. But you’re equally strong about what can happen on the other side. You just said you’re still a small voice, told you to get the hell out of a couple of practitioners’ offices. You’ve got a chapter devoted to what you call the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s kind of your buyer beware, caveat emptor chapter. So, do you want to just say a little bit more about that on both sides?

Ann Gimpel
But there are some wonderful online resources for people who are newly diagnosed with cancer. I mean, you can find groups specific to your kind of cancer, but Abby Mitchell’s group, Healing Cancer Study and Support on Facebook is wonderful. It has a deep file section that’s a lot more user-friendly than PubMed. So I really recommend her group. Ben Bendizole Cancer Support Group, the trend by Sahara Zeta is another good resource. And then there’s Linda Sinclair’s group, Always Hope. And if I were newly diagnosed, I would join all three of those groups. I have never asked a question in any of them that somebody didn’t answer. And, you know, not just other patients, there are doctors on Abby Mitchell’s group that will come and answer questions like Daniel Thomas, for example.

Robin Daly
So that’s a real community support there.

Ann Gimpel
It is a community, and let’s see, the other one is patient-led oncology trials that’s run by Mark Sean Taylor. So between those groups, there’s an answer out there for people who are, I mean, fear. It’s like, I don’t want to die, I’m only 50 or I’m only whatever, 25. One thing that didn’t shock me but it saddened me is how many young people are dealing with really serious cancer diagnoses. Breast cancer is out of control.

Robin Daly
tragic, isn’t it? Yeah.

Ann Gimpel
It really is.

Robin Daly
Anyway, so you feel those groups are helpful, not only for navigating the potential treatment markets, if you like, but also practitioners.

Ann Gimpel
Yes, absolutely. You can ask, has anybody gone to X clinic or has anybody seen Dr. X? What did you think? Somebody will have been there before you and they will have probably more than one somebody and they will have an opinion. That’s how I found Dr. Devlin. Somebody in Abby’s group recommended him and I looked, I thought, wow, he’s in Reno. That’s only three hours from me. I mean, that’s a plus.

Robin Daly
Yeah.

Ann Gimpel
So.

Robin Daly
Very good. Okay, well, it’s a great tip. So when I asked you earlier on, and about, you know, how you saw your potential of success, we stumbled across psychological emotional side of wellness. And, you know, this is something that is being there’s a more of a store set back these days by a lot of people as being something you should give attention to if you’ve got a cancer. And I wonder if you’d like to say a little bit more about it where you’ve got anything to pass on.

Ann Gimpel
Sure. Like I mentioned, I resurrected my badly neglected or actually non-existent at that point meditation practice. In my earlier years, I did a lot of meditation but life intervened and I just sort of stopped and I put that back together for myself. I meditate twice a day, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. You know, in the morning it provides a platform for my day and at night it winds things down. I also keep a gratitude journal.

Robin Daly
Uh-huh.

Ann Gimpel
that I write in every night to highlight the things I was grateful for that day. I do Wim Hof breathing and cold immersion, and let me tell you, I live in a little mountain village at 8,000 feet, which is what, 2,500 meters. It’s cold here in the winter, we get lots of snow, and the cold immersion is a challenge in the winter, but I do it because it creates an alkaline condition in the body. I’m impressed. I think that we all find spirituality in different places. I think anybody who’s part of an organized religion, that’s great. You can substitute prayer for meditation. I think just anything that gets us off center stage and reminds us that in the grand scheme of the universe, we’re really very small.

Robin Daly
Right. Perspective.

Ann Gimpel
Yeah, it gives you perspective and it also, so what is that saying, today’s the tomorrow you worried about yesterday? So there’s no point in kicking yourself for something that already happened or for worried about something that hasn’t happened yet. You know, your best bet is to live in the moment and I get told patience that for years. Yeah, talk is cheap. It is hard. It is hard to do. That’s kind of sad. It’s one thing. You know.

Robin Daly
You’ll even see the complete sense of it, but it’s quite another thing to actually find the way past all that.

Ann Gimpel
Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s hard. I mean, I’m, I’m what, two and a half years into, you know, my, my new improved meditation trip journey. And I mean, there, there are times when I sit there and my mind just won’t shut off. I don’t care how much breathing I do, you know, I focus on the breath, focus on that and the thoughts are just, um, so, but you know, there’s always next time and next time’s usually better. So the important thing is there’s no right or wrong with spirituality or meditation. You just, you accept what comes and you know, if today’s session was an ideal, eh, it’s okay.

Robin Daly
it’s like a very good response to life. Great. Anyway, these kind of things, that ability, if you like to take things in your stride in the way that you are, is one of the pluses of getting something like a cancer diagnosis. It pushes you somewhere you wouldn’t go otherwise.

Ann Gimpel
Well, and you know, some of the stories in my book, like Pedda’s story, for example, she had no treatment. She’s still alive and checking and doing fine. And you know, the doctors told her she’d be dead. They gave her an expiration date. Oh, speaking of which, so there’s a really wonderful book that I would like to promote, if you will.

Robin Daly
No.

Ann Gimpel
It’s called close to the bone, life threatening illness as a soul journey.

Robin Daly
That’s good.

Ann Gimpel
It is by, it’s by Jean Shinoda Bolin, M.D. She is a psychiatrist in the Bay Area and a Jungian analyst.

Robin Daly
OK, never heard of that. It’s a wonderful book. Sounds certainly a good topic. Great, thanks for that. It’s appreciated. So, I wanted to come back round to a card to be mentioned at the beginning. Mark Linton, first of all, it’s the reason that you know about Mark. Did you hear about him from Sean Bevin?

Ann Gimpel
But now, now…

Robin Daly
John was on the panel of course at the event when he presented his theory.

Ann Gimpel
No, I know about Barr from one of the other stories in my book, Greg Smith from Hong Kong. He told me about it and then I started reading. So you know Dr. Devlin.

Robin Daly
Yeah.

Ann Gimpel
Okay. Very kind of you.

Robin Daly
It came in quite late on. He agreed to be on the panels to actually assess Mark’s theory and he was great. It was brilliant to have him there. I was very impressed by him.

Ann Gimpel
And Dr. Dale is one of a kind, he’s really special.

Robin Daly
Yeah. Anyway, so back to Markland. And so the interesting thing is you came across Mark’s theory. Now, it’s a theory, right? There’s nothing more to it at this point. Nobody could say anything about having tried it out and knowing it’s true because they haven’t. But you decided to include it at the end of the book. So what made you decide to do that?

Ann Gimpel
Well, I mean, it explains a lot of things. Some of the repurposed medications that many of us take include antibiotics, antiparasitics, antifungals. And his theory explains why they work for us. Fenbendazole has gotten a lot of good press for people with cancer. I never took that one. And I still take Ivermectin, one month on, one month off.

Robin Daly
Yes.

Ann Gimpel
Interestingly, I buy it from a pharmacy in Delhi because if I was to get it here, it’s like $4 for a three milligram pill and you’re taking 12 milligrams a day. That’s a significant outlay over a month and I can get it from India for a buck a pill for six milligram pills. Yeah.

Robin Daly
Right. Makes sense. So anyway, you’re feeling that Marx findings could inform people in a way that they might look even further outside the box in terms of what treatment choices they make.

Ann Gimpel
Yes. Absolutely. I think in the best of all possible worlds, you have genomic testing, both your tumor genomics and your body genomics, because they’re different, to determine if there’s any standard of care substance that will actually impact your cancer. And you blend that with integrative care to support your body, and it’s hard to do that on your own. You have to find a practitioner that actually knows something about integrative care. And then there’s Dr. Nagorny, who marches to his own drubber. But what he does is, and he’s been doing it for, I don’t know, 20, 30 years. He decided the somatic mutations theory was bogus back when he was a resident. And what he does is, he needs surgical cooperation, but he gets like a lima bean sized bit of tumor, fresh tumor, from a patient. And then he’s got a whole lab, complete with all the fancy schmancy million dollar equipment. And he grows that sample, and then he subjects it to a whole lot of different things, not necessarily standard of care. And he comes up with what will actually kill it. So because he can do that, he doesn’t have to bludgeon you with maximum tolerated dose. He can give you the minimum effective dose, and it’s a big difference. He cured one guy with metformin.

Robin Daly
Bye.

Ann Gimpel
So you know, I’ve been following its blog for a while.

Robin Daly
Mmm, information is power, eh? Getting the right treatment.

Ann Gimpel
Yeah, information is power, and I believe, I’m pretty sure Dr. Negurni told me that that initial part of his treatment where he does the three-dimensional explants is free because that’s part of his research, and then he’s affiliated with major hospitals, so he does provide treatment, so anybody in the U.S. who’s got like standard insurance should be able to see him.

Robin Daly
Mm, how interesting. Okay, well look, that was quite a ride. We’re out of time, so I wanted to say the opportunity to thank you for mentioning Yes to Life in your resource section. That’s appreciated. And I also wanted to tell our listeners that the fact that you are such seasoned writer means the style of the book is totally engaging and accessible. It’s I encourage everybody to have a look.

Ann Gimpel
Thank you. The title is Alive Surviving Modern Oncology. It’s available in both eFormat and paperback from Amazon, Barge and Noble, Google Play, Apple Books, and Kobo.

Robin Daly
y thank you very much indeed Ann it’s been a real pleasure

Ann Gimpel
Thank you, Robin. Take care.

Robin Daly
So Ann’s book is once again a live surviving modern oncology and there’s a lot to be learned from Anne’s as well as many others experience. I want to remind you that there are well over 400 past Yes To Life shows still available and that if you go to yestolife.org.uk and click the Yes To Life show link on the home page, this will take you to the show page which apart for listing the shows and featuring the current one as a facility to search for shows by subject, guest or keyword. This all adds up to a massive free resource to learn from experts as well as to get a taste of a practitioner’s style if you’re considering consulting them. So you could listen to three or four nutritionists speak for example to help you decide who to go with.

Robin Daly
I also want to give a plug for our life directory that’s on the website. Again if you start from the home page of Yes To Life that’s yestolife.org.uk and you click the link to therapies and providers you get to the directory home page. The directory is basically extensive listings of providers i.e. practitioners and clinics and therapies but importantly the two are interlinked allowing you to find out about therapies and about who provides them. It has sophisticated search tools that enable you on the one hand to simply find something or someone by name with a keyword search or to find out what’s available within a radius of your home simply put in your postcode and specify how far to search say within 50 miles. Results are displayed both on a map and as a listing broken into categories. You can also search regions of the UK and the world for types of therapies and other options and further refine the results of your search. There’s also an option to include internet based providers who are of course available wherever you are and as well as practitioners and clinics the directory also includes suppliers, information and advice centers and other organizations. Since it’s such a powerful search tool there’s a handy how to use video available right near the top of the directory home page. This is well worth watching just to get the measure of what’s possible.

Robin Daly
Thanks so much for listening today i hope you can join me again next week for another Yes To Life show.