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 Yesto Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, hosting the show for more than eight years. I’m also the founder of YestoLife, the UK charity that’s been promoting the adoption of integrative medicine for cancer for almost 20 years.

Robin Daly
My guest today is a naturopath who specializes in working with hormones. As someone who’s been through cancer herself, Nicola Corcoran also specializes particularly in cancer support. Hi Nicola, delighted to welcome you as my guest on the Yes to Life show.

Nicola Corcoran
thank you for having me.

Robin Daly
Today we’re going to talk about hormones and cancer and I want to start out by asking well a lot of people understand that hormones or things that act like hormones have quite a bit to do with cancer and it’s progressed but as someone who’s focused in this area for quite a while, how important a player in the field would you say hormones are?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, I think there’s a danger that we demonize hormones and the reality is we need them. Um, but the truth of the matter is, is it’s a very personal arena. So I think everyone who’s had a cancer diagnosis with hormones involved should be looking at their own propensity as to how they use hormones and what their level of hormones is, if they’re in balance, but really it’s about the pathways that we’re using to detox.

Robin Daly
Okay well we’re going to dig into all of that stuff. Just before we get to the hormones, you’re a naturopath and there’s a lot of training in that, I understand. What made you want to go in that direction particularly?

Nicola Corcoran
So, well, as you know, I had a cancer diagnosis, which is, I’m coming up to 14 years past my diagnosis. I was very lucky on my diagnosis to be looked after by a very close friend who was a natural power and her way of working just resonated so fully with me that it was not about hammering my body or refocusing on cancer but it was about bringing balance back to my body and supporting that and taking responsibility for my health.

Robin Daly
Right, okay, an important aspect. Yeah, so just to be clear for anybody who’s never consulted a naturopath, maybe you’d like to tell us about the resources a naturopath draws on and summarise the kind of basic tenets of naturopathy.

Nicola Corcoran
Sure. Well, a big part of it is about education. It’s about asking the body to heal. So using your own natural innate resources to heal. I tend to focus quite a lot on root cause as well, which I know most naturopaths do.

Nicola Corcoran
So why is this happening in your body specifically? And it’s about asking the body to heal and come back into a state of balance. Right. I would tend to use diet, lifestyle and supplements as ways to approach healing on an individual unique basis.

Robin Daly
Right, OK, that’s very clear. OK, and obviously you’ve talked about it being something that very much resonated with you as a modality for helping people. In this particular arena we’re going to be talking about today, hormones, how effective do you think you can be in helping people with hormone imbalances or hormone problems?

Nicola Corcoran
it’s hugely effective to work this way. So when we’re, when we’re doing specific testing alongside a full consultation and listening to STIMC terminals and listening to history, but particularly I would say when using something like the Dutch test, which is the dry durian testing of the complete hormones, you can see someone’s propensity for how they’re shifting hormones and their imbalances beautifully.

Nicola Corcoran
And it’s very, very easy to change. Well, that’s not easy. We have to work, but we can change those. I see it all the time with people and people will have clues about whether they have hormone imbalance.

Nicola Corcoran
Let’s talk specifically about women with hormone-ally driven cancers. Many women have had difficult periods their whole lives. The way they move through menopause is interesting. Environmental factors, how they’re living is interesting.

Nicola Corcoran
That really impacts hormones. So we can have a huge impact on hormones. Yes.

Robin Daly
Interesting. I’m sure people would be interested to hear a little bit about your story of what happened and what part naturography played in giving you this amazing long remission and good health.

Nicola Corcoran
Well, my cancer was oestrogen and progesterone positive cancer of the breast. I had a quite diseased breast. So I had DCIS, which is ductile carcinoma in situ. I had two tumors of actual carcinoma and I had Paget’s disease of the nipple.

Nicola Corcoran
So for me to have a mastectomy was quite an easy choice. But I was quite ill at the point of my diagnosis. I had had swine flu and I was very underweight. So I actually went for my mammogram with no knowledge of mammograms, of cancer or anything, but I went in a wheelchair. I was very poorly and the idea of having standard therapy to me, I didn’t feel that I would survive that if I’m really honest. I was in a very unwell state and I had been for a long time but what appealed to me about naturopathy was this idea that I hadn’t been listening to the signals my body had been sending me.

Nicola Corcoran
I was totally out of touch with my body, I didn’t know anything about food, everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I was doing, I was a vegetarian, you know, I was getting it wrong, I was getting it wrong for my own unique body type, for my own biochemistry.

Nicola Corcoran
So what naturopathy taught me was, well hang on, why are you not listening to these symptoms? And I started to feel better very very quickly and that to me was like okay well let’s just keep going with this, let’s keep going and seeing how far, how well I can get and I never really stopped doing that.

Robin Daly
Right, amazing. Well this is very striking when the picture you’re painting there of being seriously unwell in the state where you wouldn’t even think you’d survive treatment and then your long remission and you’re looking incredibly healthy and well today.

Robin Daly
It is quite a testament really isn’t it to what you can achieve with listening. That’s a very important message really people. I think you’re right. It’s all too easy not to listen isn’t it and just about from the way either we’re used to going or the way we want to go or that’s something driving us on in the same direction relentlessly despite all the messages of our body protesting at what we’re doing. Interesting. So in a way you as a natural path are helping people to listen to their bodies.

Nicola Corcoran
Absolutely. 100%. And you know what I love, Robin, is when we start to work this way, because we’ve been almost cornered by chronic disease. I noticed that when people start to listen to their bodies, the whole family dynamic shift.

Nicola Corcoran
Because there’s a reeducation. So some of the things like you’re saying, some of the reasons we are propelled forward, not listening is because of the language we use in our families, or the way that we’ve been brought up, or our education, or our job, or our response to stress, or whatever it is, we keep treading a path.

Nicola Corcoran
like you say, it can be challenging to unpick that. Yeah. I mean, I find exciting and re-energizing work. But when you’re faced with chronic disease, and particularly with a cancer diagnosis, it can feel like too much work. if you’re used to historically handing the responsibility if you’re healing to a doctor or another, the easiest place to go.

Robin Daly
it’s two things. It is work. There’s no doubt about it. Any change takes quite a lot of effort to create some momentum in another direction. But also, of course, there’s usually something hiding there that you didn’t really want to look at, which is the reason you’re carrying on doing the same thing, which suddenly comes to light when you start to make changes and you have to face up to something or other. I think that’s another huge aspect of it, a kind of emotional sort of deal in the whole thing.

Nicola Corcoran
I agree with you. And actually, I see for many people, it’s not only their diet, their nutrition, but it’s about the environment they find themselves in. And that could be in a relationship. You know, it could be lots of things that are difficult to extract yourself from.

Robin Daly
So these things go alongside then. Do you find yourself working with other practitioners to help in other ways at the same time?

Nicola Corcoran
I feel like a beautiful network of practitioners that I work alongside and that is whole body healing isn’t it? It is body work, it’s energy work or psychotherapy or you know there’s lots of different modalities that I think work beautifully alongside naturopathy.

Robin Daly
today i was kind of hoping you’re going to educate me on a topic that i’m very ignorant on the dutch test now it seems to be amazing to have your work uh it’s being referred to over and over again on this show people are always mentioning it and uh i think oh yes that dutch test for hormones and that’s about all i know about it um yeah i never got beyond name if it’s a well-respected hormone test in fact it’s only in preparation for talking to you today i even found out what it stands for what the acronym dutch means so anyway so uh abig admitted that can we uh get straight in there can you tell us what it is and uh how you go about it

Nicola Corcoran
as you just said, it stands for, well, Dutch dried urine testing for complete hormones. as such, it’s a urine test. It measures metabolites of hormones loosely. Um, but so much more than that, which I’ll get into.

Nicola Corcoran
But, what I love about the Dutch test is, I mean, I do like testing, but I like testing to look at patterns. The problem with serum testing as we go is it’s a moment in time and the state of homeostasis.

Nicola Corcoran
So testing in isolation is not necessarily helpful. But something like the Dutch test, we’re looking at the body over a 24 hour period, and it very much shows propensities and what’s happening. And it shows us that through metabolites of which come out of the body in the urine.

Robin Daly
Let’s just pick apart a little bit of that. So you’re saying, okay, most tests, serum tests, which means, you know, blood tests, say, are a moment in time and you just see what’s happening at that point.

Robin Daly
if you did it in the morning, it might be different to if you did it in the evening. So this is a test which is a bit more comprehensive than that in that it’s taken repeatedly over time. So this one aspect. The other thing is you used the word metabolize. Okay, so what’s a metabolize?

Nicola Corcoran
this is how the body breaks down hormones into excretable components, I guess is the best way to say that. So it gives us stronger clues. So a good example is B12 testing and serum can show us how much B12 is in the blood, but doesn’t necessarily tell us how much B12 is in the cell.

Nicola Corcoran
you can get false positives. This happens for lots of different things in blood testing. Okay. But the Dutch Tester shows us the metabolites of B12, which is more helpful for seeing what the cellular uptake is.

Robin Daly
B12 is not really, neither here nor there, it’s just floating around doing nothing. If we actually take it into the cells and it gets used, then it’s helping us. And in getting used, you get an excretion of these metabolites which, and so you see those, it’s a good sign that the B12 is getting used and so you’re actually metabolizing it.

Robin Daly
That’s nice and clear. Thanks very much. there’s something else about this test. I noticed that, you know, you just said it’s a dried urine test. Now, most tests aren’t, are they There’s some liquid or others going off and there are problems with that in itself, aren’t there?

Nicola Corcoran
the thing about the dry durian testing that’s brilliant is you, you basically urinate on test strips and then you dry them out and send them. So yet they’re much more stable. And if you get to the point that you for some reason can’t post them, you can freeze them.

Nicola Corcoran
So I find this is helpful for my patients who, what I like to call them patients, that’s called the people I’m working with, who maybe can’t get to a post office and that’s difficult when you’re doing at home serum testing.

Nicola Corcoran
You have to post it on a Wednesday, you have to get the first post. It becomes a stressful thing and I don’t testing to be stressful. We don’t want to raise stress with this way of work.

Robin Daly
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve done that myself, and yeah, you had to get in the right post of the right day. So they get it to the lab on the right day and all this stuff. And quite often your little samples traveling to the states, say, for a test.

Robin Daly
So the whole thing is quite a balancing act, really, which is obviously much simpler. You’ve got something that really doesn’t matter if another day goes by.

Nicola Corcoran
Exactly.

Robin Daly
Okay, I’m going to ask another basic question now, right? The Dutch test always seems to be referred to in the context of women, but of course us men, we’ve got a few hormones too, although which of them and how many is an important facet of the differences between men and women?

Robin Daly
Is this test at all relevant to men or is there another one for this?

Nicola Corcoran
There are the tests that may be more relevant to men, but in the context of me working with people largely with cancer, I see because of my cancer history, the Dutch test for men can be incredibly useful for men with prostate cancer.

Nicola Corcoran
Really, really useful. I should clarify, with the Dutch test, there is more than hormones. We can see lots of different body systems. So we can get an idea about the adrenal health, thyroid health, maybe gut health, its patterns throughout the test.

Nicola Corcoran
And I have a couple of people I’m working with with prostate cancer where their hormone patterns are really not great. And I can see that as a causative or partially causative factor towards their cancer.

Nicola Corcoran
So it’s brilliant work. And also, Robin, it’s worth saying at this point, the people who are on blockers, aromatase inhibitors or the men who are on blockers, it can be really helpful to show if it’s properly blocking those hormones.

Robin Daly
with the medications working, right? Okay, very interesting. So yeah, you will use these tests for general health anyway, but let’s just talk about cancer for a minute. So you’re saying there are particular applications, particular ways in which the information that comes from these tests tells you something about cancer and its progress and its momentum. So do you want to go into that a little bit?

Nicola Corcoran
Sure. So oestrogen, well, oestrogen progesterone ideally needs to be in a good balance. So oestrogen is a hormone which tells the cell to go, you know, grow, proliferate. And progesterone is a, is a hormone which opposes oestrogen.

Nicola Corcoran
So the first thing we have to look at is, is someone has someone got a lot of oestrogen and very little progesterone. And by the way, I would always be looking at why that might be like that bit more later.

Nicola Corcoran
But so that’s the first thing. But the second thing is, many women in menopause, as we know, get hormone-ledrogen cancers at a time where they have low oestrogen. So then we can look at what is happening to the oestrogen in your body.

Nicola Corcoran
So the body moves oestrogen out, it detoxifies the body from oestrogen through pathways in the liver and begets.

Nicola Corcoran
Now, phase one detoxification of oestrogen creates quite hokey unhelpful metabolite and so we need those metabolites to be protective rather than potentially problematic. So this is how we try to encourage the liver to use better pathways to move oestrogen out more efficiently. Does that make sense?

Robin Daly
Yeah, you said we need them to be protected. What did you mean by that?

Nicola Corcoran
So the two OH estrogen pathway can be thought of as a more protected pathway because of the way it moves out through the liver and into the gut. Okay. Whereas all OH pathway is the most problematic, it can cause reactive oxygen species in the body, the 16 OH pathway can also be problematic.

Nicola Corcoran
So when I see women who have fibrocystic breasts or tender breasts or uterine fibroids, we often see that they’re moving estrogen down that 16 OH pathway, which is highly helpful. It’s a very potent form of estrogen metabolite.

Robin Daly
So those pathways are the less helpful ones, so they kind of back up methods for the body to deal with accessible meds.

Nicola Corcoran
Well, it’s curious. I mean, I think the 4-OH, I would say, is an overspill and I could be wrong about that. But that’s my reading of that. The 6-OH, we need some, you know, nothing in the body is an accident, is it?

Nicola Corcoran
No. That for healthy bones, hearts, you know, we need it, but we don’t need, we need the ratios to be good.

Robin Daly
Right, it’s a balance question. So balance keeps coming up, this word, we said it a lot of times already. Do you want to talk about all my imbalance a bit and why imbalance occurs in the first place?

Nicola Corcoran
Sure. So balance, what estrogen dominance is a real problem now in this day and eight, because so many things mimic estrogen. So we have zenoestrogens, which are synthetic estrogens, which come, you know, from all sorts of things.

Nicola Corcoran
We have them in our toiletries, we have them in our cleaning product. And those things will sit very strongly on estrogen alpha receptors in the body. So where I’ve said to you, estrogen is like a go-go proliferate.

Nicola Corcoran
The zenoestrogens are more powerful. And also the contraceptive PIB is another version of that. So synthetic medical hormones are very, very powerful. And they will nearly always come down this unhelpful 16OH pathway.

Nicola Corcoran
It could also be that you have a natural propensity, I mean I have this, to clear estrogen slowly. So historically that wouldn’t have mattered because you would have probably had limited amount of estrogen in your life.

Nicola Corcoran
But now we’re living in this situation where there’s an estrogen overwhelm. So people like myself can find that quite difficult to move.

Robin Daly
Right, so the imbalance in this case is acquired, it’s not something you’re producing, you’ve actually acquired it from the environment and it’s not proper as estrogen, but it has the same effect.

Nicola Corcoran
Yes a more potent effect and something else I’m seeing that’s really interesting to me is that people who are gluten intolerant or potentially opposed to a lot of glyphosate which is you might know as Roundup you know but yeah toxic herbicide they also move a lot of their estrogen down this 16 OH pathway. So you can see that in the text, it’s really interesting.

Robin Daly
Okay, very interesting. So look, let’s go back to another very basic question and we sort of gone straight into this whole arena talking about hormones, but we haven’t actually really described what our hormone is and what its role is in our body, why we had these hormones and what function they perform.

Nicola Corcoran
So they essentially are chemical messengers in the body that instruct cells to work in certain ways. People answer to that.

Robin Daly
Okay and as we’ve just been saying the important thing is not, well it’s about the ratios between them that seems to be the most important thing as I write.

Nicola Corcoran
Yes, absolutely. Because you can have low levels of oestrogen, but still be oestrogen dominant. Or you could have low level ions, but still be detoxifying them poorly.

Robin Daly
So, if balance is the most important thing, is level important as well? I mean, if we have all modes are low, but they’re in balance, is that fine?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, it becomes potentially problematic as we get older because heart health and bone health for women is really important factor for longevity. You have no hormones, that’s a problem. So after menopause, I realize I’m in this arena very much for women at menopause, but I work a lot with women at that age who have had cancer diagnoses, so that’s really my area of fatigue.

Nicola Corcoran
But as you get to menopause, your ovaries stop producing hormones and your adrenal glands take over. So for this to happen, there needs to be, guess what? In the body balance, we need to have adrenal glands that are functioning optimally, we need to be eating adequate fat, we eat adequate B vitamins and protein.

Nicola Corcoran
So again, this is the way that the body will compensate because we do need those hormones. And so sometimes when I see people who are on hormone blockers, sure, we’re blocking the cancer from using the estrogen, but in the long term, this could cause more problems for the body because we need the hormones.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s right. You can’t just turn the tap off on something which is part of our essential functioning. Yeah, that’s very interesting. So, obviously, people these days consciously make decisions to change the balance of their hormones by taking hormones.

Robin Daly
What have you got to say about that? Is this broadly okay, or is it a bad idea, or what’s your take on it?

Nicola Corcoran
think it’s a terrible idea if you’re not looking at how we’re using it. It’s a really very dangerous idea for people who have never had cancer to be doing that without seeing how they’re using it. And I see this all the time.

Nicola Corcoran
When you do a Dutch test, and you can monitor how you’re using those hormones, I don’t have a problem with HRT actually at all. Well, not body I can call HRT, which mimics exactly the hormones that we naturally make.

Robin Daly
Right, so it could be okay for someone’s general health, provided it kind of fits their body and the way things are, their status, hormonal status, and it’s not going to just completely put them out of balance, in fact.

Nicola Corcoran
Absolutely. And there are other things we can do, obviously. So when I’m working with people who have terrible pathways, we would work firstly to improve that, but then we might use plant-based oestrogens.

Nicola Corcoran
So where I said to you that the synthetic oestrogens are very potent and they sit on those alpha receptors, oestrogen receptors. Plant-based oestrogens are much more gentle and they sit on what’s called an oestrogen receptor beta, and that’s much more gentle on the body.

Nicola Corcoran
So it gives you the benefit of oestrogens, but in a much more gentle way.

Robin Daly
so understanding a little bit more, so maybe could you give us an example of someone you’ve helped recently who’s come along to you, preferably somebody with cancer, so as it relates well to our listeners here, and you tell us about what you found out about their hormonal status and what you did about it.

Nicola Corcoran
Okay, so I have got someone I’m working with at the moment who had breast cancer, she had very fast phase one detoxification of oestrogen and very slow phase two. So what that means is the phase one metabolites are very toxic and we need the phase two to be optimal to move those toxic metabolites out of the body quickly.

Nicola Corcoran
She also had poor gut health so she was not passing a stool every day so that’s also important because once the oestrogen is bound up and moving through the gut we wanted to move out quickly. We don’t want it to have a slow transit and be reabsorbed or that can happen through slow movement or through dysbiosis.

Nicola Corcoran
So with her we increased fibre in her diet and hydration. She had curcumin to really slow down that fast phase one detox. Now curcumin is great and we hear that a lot don’t we with cancer, curcumin is not for everybody when we’re thinking about hormones.

Nicola Corcoran
If you already have a slow phase one you don’t maybe necessarily want to be taking curcumin.

Robin Daly
That’s interesting. I think you’re the first person who’s ever said there’s situations where it’s bad news. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, carry on.

Nicola Corcoran
So she did find that she, firstly, we can measure things with mood. So this was a pre-menopausal woman. So she could measure that suddenly she felt lighter, less PMS, her breasts were less tender, but then when we did the Dutch again, we could see that the Dutch, the hormone component of the Dutch test is, is nice and visual.

Nicola Corcoran
So those pathways that I’m talking about are visually in a pie chart and her pie chart was much improved. So I see this all the time. We can absolutely have an effect. The way that we implement through the body okay and so and the effect on her and the progress of her disease

Nicola Corcoran
But the work that I do is really underpinning general health. I have a belief that if the body is in balance, if the systems are replete, that the body can do the work to healing, or at least it can tolerate with treatment or whatever you’re doing for cancer. So it’s about lowering risk for me.

Robin Daly
Yeah, well that makes complete sense, yeah. I mean, one thing we can all do is to be as healthy as possible in the face of that chronic disease and it’s bound to be good news.

Nicola Corcoran
Hey though, Robin, where were you talking earlier about referring to other people? So I do find that people who go for maybe thermoscanning find that they have stability when we’re working with hormones.

Nicola Corcoran
So they might report initially they have less breast tenderness, but then when they go for a thermoscan, they will say, oh, there’s stability there.

Robin Daly
Okay, maybe just for anybody who doesn’t know, tell us what a thermo scan is.

Nicola Corcoran
in thermoscanning is using heat to detect vascular changes in the tissues. So it’s not a replacement for a mammogram, but it’s a different way of measuring. So as we know, cancer cells often have increased vascularity. So you can see that through heat monitoring.

Robin Daly
Right, because cancer itself puts out lots of blood vessels in order to feed itself, so you can actually see that. Yeah, okay, great. So I noted with some dismay that the Dutch test isn’t just one thing, there’s going to be lots of variations on the Dutch test, so that is something you get into, and if so, what are they?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, I like to use Dutch complete testing because that works very well with the demographic I work with. So the Dutch complete doesn’t only measure sex hormones, but it also looks at the cortisol response.

Nicola Corcoran
There’s also an organic acids test component, which where we were talking earlier about B12, it measures metabolites of B12, folate, glutathione, oxidative stress and some gut markers, some neurotransmitter markers. So it’s really, really helpful to get a good whole picture of the body and what’s happening.

Robin Daly
Okay, so the other tests are sort of part of that. This is the all-inclusive number that includes all the information you could get from it, is that all right?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, there’s a cortisol awakening response test, which is slightly different. That has a saliva component which would measure cortisol. So that’s more if you’ve got someone who has adrenal issues or long-term stress issues, and I use that less often.

Nicola Corcoran
There are other tests which you may be used for someone who’s trying to get pregnant, so a cycle mapping test. And then for monitoring some of my people that I work with use just the sex hormones test, which just reports oestrogen progesterone and testosterone.

Robin Daly
Right, there are reasons to do that. So in particular situations, you don’t need that much information, but information is always nice to have, of course. So there’s quite a lot of things you listed in this complete test, so what are you finding out from it?

Nicola Corcoran
oh so much and the more I work with it the more I find out because it’s a test where you’re looking at patterns in the individual so recently I could quite clearly see some PTSD in someone their cortisol was flat throughout the day um they repeat their cortisol is flat throughout the day this is a learned response to trauma that can be really useful when we’re working with people. There’s an idea maybe that people with cancer have very high cortisol and we need to bring that down. That’s not always helpful. If you have really, really low cortisol, that’s not very helpful to your body systems.

Nicola Corcoran
You need the world to be rising and falling.

Robin Daly
So that’s actually a kind of suppressed situation, where just out of habit, it’s now kept down. And in the case of cancer, it could be actually under responding to what is actually a dangerous situation in reality.

Nicola Corcoran
Exactly.

Robin Daly
Yeah, how interesting. Yeah, anything else in there that you’re learning from all those different things that are being measured?

Nicola Corcoran
I see quite often thyroid health is poor, that can be seen by the way you’re breaking down cortisol. Yeah, there are lots of body systems that you can really get an idea what’s happening. Sometimes that means we refer for further tests, sometimes we work with what we have, but also it’s really important to work with a full consultation so we can understand some of the symptoms.

Nicola Corcoran
There is a panel at the bottom of the test where you can list if you’re taking medication as well as or supplements, which is really helpful.

Robin Daly
And that’s important from your point of view because those things may be inappropriate.

Nicola Corcoran
Sure. And you know, for example, I’m starting to see antidepressants can have quite a blunting effect on cortisol production.

Robin Daly
Right. And there’s still more things that you mentioned there that you’re testing for. Why would some of those be relevant to an investigation of hormones?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, I think hormones is part of it. You know, why are hormones in battle? So if we’re looking at the gut, we can maybe see there’s dysbiosis, which is causing a problem with the hormones. Um, if we’re looking at thyroid, we can see there could be problems with metabolism and hormones, but it’s a bigger picture that I love that.

Nicola Corcoran
That’s what I like to see with it. So for example, if someone’s got very poor thyroid function, we would expect over time to see low bile production. And then we might see some guts, dysbiosis. This is all relevant for cancer because we want to make sure that everything’s working.

Nicola Corcoran
I think, Robert, I should clarify. When I was doing my healing from cancer, the first couple were very much looking at cancer and it got to a kind of microscopic level of looking at cancer. I was doing the RGCC, you know, the Greek test, looking at certain human cells.

Nicola Corcoran
And in the end, I felt overwhelmed because 14 years ago, there was less information for the layman, you know, to do with this information. And I came to the conclusion that my body is infinitely wise.

Nicola Corcoran
My body can heal a cut, heal a bone, grow a baby. Amazing, isn’t it? Yeah, I can’t intubate that healing response. So at that point, I went, hang on. I haven’t even looked at my hormones or the bigger systems.

Nicola Corcoran
I haven’t understood that I have hypothyroidism and that I have a gluten intolerance. So I guess what I’m saying is, the things that I hadn’t looked at were the ways in which I was sabotaging my own healing.

Nicola Corcoran
My own pathway to cancer, really. That’s how I’d got there in the first place.

Robin Daly
very interesting comment. So you’re talking about all the things that are underpinning the situation that took you to where you got cancer. And of course, yeah, those are the most important things to change in the long term, if you want to be cancer free and free of other chronic diseases.

Robin Daly
So yeah, I can see that and cancer has that effect, doesn’t it, of taking up people’s entire attention in that way. And of course, Ozdok’s medicine gets obsessed with tumors. But, you know, looked at from the standpoint you said of stepping back.

Robin Daly
Well, there are symptoms actually that they’re just what’s happened as a result of all the things that have been wrong.

Robin Daly
with that picture you painted of your health situation before you were diagnosed, I mean, it was, you were clearly very unwell, and so there are a lot of things must have been out of balance.

Nicola Corcoran
if I look at it from so at 15 years old, I was put on a pill for incredibly painful periods. And I realized very early on in my cancer journey that if I’d been given magnesium, that would have helped.

Nicola Corcoran
That would have helped the cramps. But now I know that magnesium helps us to move estrogen down more beneficial pathways. So again, we can pull back out, we don’t need to know the science of how we move compounds through our liver.

Nicola Corcoran
To understand that we need certain food compounds or certain minerals and vitamins that we have evolved through time to need. We’ve grown along this planet and these things we need in our diets and we’re not getting them.

Nicola Corcoran
And what that does to the body is it starts to shift things down non-beneficial routes, or it starts to create imbalance in organs that we need to be working for our health.

Robin Daly
Yeah, and how fascinating that you were having a hormonal issue at 15 now, which the solution to it at the time was kind of like, it’s pretty heavy duty, really, for a 15-year-old. And they are years later dealing with cancer and being very unwell.

Robin Daly
And yeah, as we said, probably pretty out of balance by that point. And so how you mentioned earlier that, well, hormones are all very well, but you need to know what the environment, the context is you’re putting them into before you just wham them in there.

Robin Daly
And obviously, that wasn’t the case when you were 15. You just were given them, and that was that.

Nicola Corcoran
And equally, the pill is a very potent estrogen. It’s a fake estrogen. It causes all sorts of problems and imbalances in the body. And I was on it for a very long time. I don’t doubt that that had something to do with my, my eventual cancer diagnosis because I’ve asked the problem.

Nicola Corcoran
My favourite, actually, now is working with young girls who are having painful periods because I think we can tip their journey into a different direction.

Robin Daly
Right. That’s interesting. Do you want to just say a little bit about how you go about that?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, I would probably do a Dutch test and I would look at how they’re moving their hormones and, you know, are they vegan? Are they getting enough B vitamins to move these hormones in the proper direction?

Nicola Corcoran
is their diet rubbish? What’s happening? When young people do, you know, actually quite a small amount of work, small amount of change, and they start to feel the benefits, they no longer crippled with period pain or they’re not having terribly heavy periods or missing college once a month for whatever it is, when they see those changes, it just gives them, it gives them an empowerment to make further changes and those are huge because they’re not grinding their bodies into the corner that is correct disease.

Robin Daly
Right, that’s right. It sees a change of direction, doesn’t it? It means you just don’t keep heading down the route that’s going to end up in you being sick. Yeah, hugely important. Okay, just now, could we say a little bit about who could most usefully come to you, the kind of people that you feel you’ve been able to help a lot in the cancer sphere, people can get an idea, oh, this might help me.

Nicola Corcoran
So particularly women with breast cancer, because I’ve been through that and I really understand that and a lot of the work we do is, like I said, to your diet, supplement lifestyle, but a lot of the work we do also is talking through the language of cancer, the fear around cancer, the life choices that you maybe need to make to make a change away from a cancer diagnosis, decisions around surgery or treatment plans within the hospital.

Nicola Corcoran
It’s about empowering people with cancer to know they have choices and I think you and I both know this, the fact that I’ve been cancer free for 14 years in itself is a great thing. I look to people who had been, who had longevity after a cancer diagnosis.

Nicola Corcoran
I look to people for advice or information because they were still here. That to me was hopeful and I think that’s important.

Nicola Corcoran
Definitely, sorry, to answer your question more accurately, people who have had a cancer diagnosis with a hormonal involvement.

Robin Daly
Well just expand on that because they’re involved in quite a lot of cancers as we know now.

Nicola Corcoran
Sure, that’s true. So, um, well, it’s codon cancer, breast cancer, uterine and ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, all of these cancers are, lately, responding, I guess is the way to put it in.

Nicola Corcoran
Prime State Cancer, I have quite a lot of experience. I don’t work so much with men, honestly, but that’s not a choice, that’s just who comes to me.

Robin Daly
Yeah, but it’s good that men would realize that such a thing could be helpful to them if they’re dealing with prostate cancer, which is very typically dealt with with blocking drug treatments, which can majorly change the balance here almost.

Robin Daly
There’s something to be looked out for here, isn’t there?

Nicola Corcoran
Definitely. And I think a lot of men on prostate cancer treatment have a really tough ride of it.

Robin Daly
Why are you saying that in particular?

Nicola Corcoran
I think it can change, well, libido and weight and physicality. And I’ve met lots of men who say they feel quite uncomfortable on the hallway treatment, but they feel they need to be on it.

Nicola Corcoran
So there’s an irrelevant there of not knowing there’s an option, which again comes back to this empowerment of choice.

Robin Daly
Right. OK. And so if you say there are options, what kind of thing would they look at them?

Nicola Corcoran
Well, firstly, we would do a Dutch test to see what is happening with their hormones. And if that is relevant for them, all treatment is bespoke. So there are so many generalizations we make about cancer treatment, but it really needs to be bespoke to the individual.

Nicola Corcoran
And that’s another thing that took me on this path, because I remember sitting in my ecologist’s office and saying, what’s the chance of chemotherapy working for me? And he gave me the answer, and I said, well, and how many women do you have who are my age?

Nicola Corcoran
You know, you have my lifestyle and my height, my weight, you don’t smoke. And of course, he couldn’t answer that. And I realized this is not going to be a bespoke treatment. This is going to be a there will be a collateral damage.

Nicola Corcoran
Yeah, this treatment. And that could be me.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s right. You want to know which side of the line you fall really, didn’t you? Yeah, you’re right. I mean, this is the whole thing about integrative medicine in a way is that all the figures that are coming out of mainstream science don’t take any account of the patient’s own involvement in their treatment.

Robin Daly
Some people do absolutely nothing other than what they’re told to do and is done to them at the hospital. Other people do everything they can get their hands on and the assumption is that that doesn’t make any difference.

Robin Daly
That’s implicit in the statistics like the one you’re presented with. And we know that’s not true. So, yeah, it’s important to realize that. When you’re given information, that’s well, something you have to take into account yourself.

Robin Daly
It’s that the person giving you that statistic doesn’t realize there’s a lot you could be taking to help yourself.

Nicola Corcoran
Absolutely.

Robin Daly
there’s one thorny question at the other end of this which you have to ask because it’s very important to some people i mean testing is great there’s no doubt about it knowledge is power it’s really good but it costs money um i don’t know how expensive the dutch test is but i do know that some tests are horrendously expensive how does this one rank

Nicola Corcoran
I’m probably not the first person to ask because I spent a lot of money on testing on myself. I think it’s, well, it comes, when I do a full report with it, it comes in at about £293, I think.

Robin Daly
Okay, I’ve heard a lot worse.

Nicola Corcoran
I spent a lot worse and I think valuable tests and I don’t love lots of testing. I mean, I always ask the people I work with to get as much free testing as they can from their GP. So, you know, I understand the implications of testing.

Robin Daly
Yeah, no, it’s really tough for some people. So in terms of ranking this, I mean, my guess is that you would say this is a very important test for some people, not for everyone, but there are some people for whom there would be reasons to think that they should prioritize this one if they’re only going to do one or two.

Robin Daly
Would you want to say a bit about that?

Nicola Corcoran
It really depends on the individual. It depends on what symptoms you’re experiencing. It depends on your type of cancer and your age, your history. That’s why a good consultation with any practitioner is important.

Nicola Corcoran
Because if you’ve never had any symptoms of, of dysregulated hormones, maybe we wouldn’t do that test. Maybe we wish that on symptoms.

Nicola Corcoran
what it does do is it helps to really hone a treatment plan. So rather than try some things and say, well, that maybe doesn’t suit you, or, you know, there are things I wouldn’t give to someone if I didn’t know what their hormones are.

Nicola Corcoran
So for example, for a postmenopausal woman, I wouldn’t necessarily give dim, you know, like a brassica compound, because I don’t know what their hormones are doing or what their levels are. And that can really grow a systolic levels, which may or may not be helpful.

Robin Daly
Yeah, he’s just acting in the dark, brother. Yeah, I can see it’s obviously great to know, especially from your point of view as a proactive practitioner who’s trying to do things to help. Well, you want to know exactly what you’re trying to change.

Nicola Corcoran
I think there’s a real danger when you’re using good quality supplements as well, which I, by the way, think it’s very important. So no fillers, you know, well absorbed, good forms of vitamin. If you’re making guesses with that, that’s going to cost a lot of money in the end.

Nicola Corcoran
If these are not the right forms. Right. Actually, we, sometimes it’s best just to be clear. And also I like the idea from the auth working well with somebody and you can do that if you don’t really know what’s happening.

Robin Daly
Yeah. It is interesting. Yeah. So the investment in the test could save you money in the long run by not doing things which are just not going to help. Well, that’s quite clear. The other aspect about the test, which you’ve mentioned during the time we’ve been talking is that, of course, it’s useful to know what’s changed, and therefore retesting comes up.

Robin Daly
And what’s the frequency with which you would say it was useful to do a test like that?

Nicola Corcoran
round about six months if it’s needed and depending on what we’re looking at if it’s just horned then the sex awareness test is much cheaper.

Robin Daly
Right. Okay. So not too bad. It’s not something you want every month. It’s bloody hot. No, good. Okay. All right. Well, look, that’s been an education. I’ve learned a lot today. Thank you very much. I hope our listeners have appreciated it too.

Robin Daly
I’m sure many of them have. I think it’s hormones is clearly a subject that’s worth understanding when it comes to avoiding or managing cancer. And yeah, we do well to wise up on it. So it’s been really helpful to talk to you today.

Nicola Corcoran
Thank you. That was a really fun conversation.

Robin Daly
Clearly hormones are an enormously important topic for many people with some of the most common cancers. So I hope that many of you found that discussion helpful. Thanks a lot for listening today. Do try and join me again next week for another Yes To Life show. Goodbye.