Integrative IV Therapy and Immunotherapy for Chronic Illness and Cancer with Dr. Paul Anderson

 

 

Dr. Anderson is a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex chronic illness, and cancer. In addition to three decades clinical experience, he also was head of the interventional arm of a US-NIH funded human research trial using IV and integrative therapies in cancer patients. He founded Advanced Medical Therapies in Seattle, Washington, a clinic focusing on cancer and chronic diseases and now focuses his time in collaboration with clinics and hospitals in the US and other countries.

Former positions include multiple medical school posts, Professor of Pharmacology and Clinical Medicine at Bastyr University and Chief of IV Services for Bastyr Oncology Research Center.

He is co-author of the Hay House book “Outside the Box Cancer Therapies” with Dr. Mark Stengler, and the Lioncrest Publishing book “Cancer… The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment.”. He is also co-author with Dr.’s Osborne and Carter of the IV textbook “A Scientific Reference for Intravenous Nutrient Therapy”.

Pamela: hi this is Pamela worth with the encourager Wellness podcast and today I have Dr Paul Anderson he's a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex chronic illness and cancer in addition to three decades of clinical experience he was also head of the interven arm of the US NIH funded human research trial using IV and integrative Therapies in cancer patients which is just awesome he founded Advanced Medical Therapies in Seattle Washington a clinic focused on cancer and chronic diseases and now focuses his time in collaboration with clinics and hospitals in the US and other countries thank you so much doctor for being here.

Dr Paul Anderson: Thanks for having me so where do you want to get started in this you've done so much when people think about chronic disease and think about cancer when they come to you and say I don't know what to do next how do you like to get started in this journey of kind of unpeeling the onion if you will well that's that is a great place to start um I think that if I think a good place to start is where there's similarities because obviously if I have a non-cancer chronic illness I don't think of myself obviously having cancer if I have cancer I might think of it as a chronic illness or I might think of it as its own uh entity um but one of the reasons that my practice started this way but I kept it this way over time was pretty close to half oncology cancer patients and half uh complex chronic illness patients and sometimes it's more of one or the other but that's basically it uh but other than the fact that I didn't want to get too over specialized which happened anyway um but I look at the sort of holistic or integrative approach to each of those groups of problems very similarly now what when we get down to specific things there might be very you know a lot of differences or some differences Etc but but when you have when you start out um the first thing is where where is the person you know on their Journey with whatever illness group they they have and you interact often very differently with somebody uh for example who is just diagnosed with a autoimmune condition or a complex chronic illness but they're very much on the front end of the journey uh or you might interact very differently for example with somebody diagnosed with a very you know low low stage lowgrade treatable cancer that you know is going to go one way with treatment versus maybe on the chronic illness side somebody who's 10 years in with no great answers and their case just gets more layers to it more complicated similar approach there to actually somebody who has a stage three or four cancer it's gone in multiple places in their body and you have a lot of other you know a lot of other things to kind of Juggle in approach so while the entities may be different what makes us healthy or have a lack of Health there's a theme that runs through all of it so approach wise the first thing is you know what if if the patient hopefully is in front of you or maybe electronically in front of you nowadays um where do you meet them you know what do they want out of you know what we're going to do together but also what have they had a lot of really good treatment and they just need little tuneups or are they new to this and they really don't have much you know uh much to go on treat.

Pamela:  doctor we can't hear you all of a sudden

Dr Paul Anderson: oh okay

Pamela:  okay you're back you were talking with your hands

Dr Paul Anderson: oh well how long it depends how long I was talking whether it was good or not um so I'll just I'll back up a couple sentences maybe um so just depending on where you meet that person that predicates how much and how broad and and how many areas we look in as I say are the places where we can either hold better health or or get sick in those areas and we can talk about the main areas that we see but that's kind of the top- down approach that I like to use and it's a melding of a lot of years of doing this and then what do you want and need and if those can come together it's you know then then we get specific.

Pamela:  okay you're back you were talking with your hands yeah I like what you're saying about wanting to understand where the patient wants to end up so what is their goal and then from there do you have a certain protocol that you like to follow do you have a certain uh group of lab tests or certain types of markers that you're watching first to determine the severity of where is and then is there certain things that you like to touch on first around detox or nutrition or anything else that you kind of like to put in the beginning middle and end.

Dr Paul Anderson: yeah so that once you have that kind of meeting of the minds hopefully and you know you develop a big picture plan then the next level of granularity is defining where are where is your body at with you know the process and so um in in the world of cancer I'll use that because it's um believe it are not a little bit more linear than a complex chronic illness pathway there's basically four phases that a human goes through with cancer and so the next thing that I do once we come to this kind of you know mind agreeing on what we want to do is to say are you in you know Phase 1 two 3 or four and this doesn't necessarily have to do with the staging and grading which is uh more of pathology but the four phases are primary prevention which is most people who don't have cancer we all make cancer cells every day many people who have cancer don't know it yet this is the time where you have like a lot of options because you're trying to prevent something and so I was tell people you know 20 to 30 years ago nobody came to see me for primary prevention it was just not a thing I I'm sure it was a thing somewhere but nobody came to me for that um but it mirrors the fourth phase which is secondary prevention we'll talk about in a second in that your whole goal is to make yourself a tiny Target for cancer right and to live as long and and as healthfully as you can but let's say you missed that window where a lot of people come to us is in the first uh the first active portions so phase two we which is their diagnosis through their active treatment so biopsy Imaging uh maybe chemotherapy radiation surgery or maybe that's not appropriate and they're told you have this cancer but there there's not a good treatment for you or you're too weak for the treatment which we hear sometimes so if they're in that phase what you can see is we have a million things we possibly can do at every phase but allocating time and resources is very important and if if my body is trying to deal with cancer and I just got diagnosed and I've been through a surgery for you know biopsy purposes or getting all this Imaging or whatever I'm doing I may only have so much time and and to do other things and also um energy and and finan right so if that's in that phase diagnosis reactive therapy what I'll tell people is there's lots of things that we want to start doing but we might wait till when you're done with some of these big heavy things before we start them because what I want to do let's and just for the sake of discussion this doesn't mean it goes this way all the time but let's say a classic case person diagnosed they've got all the you know Imaging biopsies whatever whatever they did and they come to me two weeks into chemotherapy cycle and they say I'm doing this chemo or this radiation whatever that's really common because they'll say well I've I've heard I can make myself you know healthy through this Etc and I say yes that's exactly our Focus so my discussion with them would be I want to use your time your energy and your resources really wisely here want to use them wisely always but what that means is I can do things to help you with your standard treatments whatever they might be so that they work well but they don't hurt your normal tissues and you recover well on the other side and so that's where our Focus has to be here so it's a little more narrow but then that allows us should you know all all go well here it allows us a healthier you on the other side and then we can broaden out our scope right and what a lot of people don't realize uh but it's becoming a little more talked about now is the so I'm going to say this is one of those things that has a dark side and a light side to it so I'm G give the dark side first um it's been in the research for over a decade uh and one of the books that a colleague and I wrote about cancer for patients was the first book to publish it in a book form uh because it's that we published the dark side which is chemotherapy and radiation are really good at knocking down your initial tumor burden which is great that's fine they're also really good later on of making stronger cancer stem cells so that either a new cancer comes back or strong something like that that's the dark side of it but here's the thing if you look at that that is all Based On A system that doesn't do anything else for you right I mean obviously they if you get an infection treat your infection or whatever but they're not looking at you you know traditionally holistically they're not looking at keeping your healthy cells really healthy and keeping the cancer stem cells from getting too.

Pamela:  yeah so this is where I want to ask you about a couple of things yeah one um IV therapy because when my mother was going through cancer uh a very well nationally known and internationally known entity had told her not to do that because it would interfere with the chemo and I told her to quietly do it on the side anyway because I said you can't kill every cell in your body and expect to be okay at the end so you know she heed some some of my advice on that one um so I'd love to kind of hear a little bit about the types of things that you really love doing in IVs um there's lots of controversial ideas around B17 and vitamin C and things that some people believe are helpful some people you know don't believe are helpful and um and then I would also love to touch on when people use the word immunotherapy it's not the same word everywhere and so would love to kind of touch with you on both those.

Dr Paul Anderson: yeah so so this is It's a good segue so trying to go from the Dark Side of that that whole you know chemo and radiation thing to what would we do to make it the light side one of the things if somebody can do it that and and keep in mind I've been doing this a long time and I I continue to do things that show a track record of being helpful and I kind of Let Go by the wayside things I may be used to do but it's like let's let's focus on the maybe things with a higher value if somebody can do it and they come into me even if they just got their biopsies done or they're going to start chemo or radiation whatever if I can do inter venous therapy  with them through that time and I time it appropriately what I have seen over and over and over again and and what more and more research is showing you know that it gets published is that that person stays healthier through the process of whatever treatment they're doing and the way the tumor biology works with this cancer stem cell becoming stronger and stronger idea you make that less of an issue you can't make it go away but you make it less of an issue and so yes if it's possible for the person to do intervenous therapy so people might say well okay let's say all things being equal why would you prefer intervenous therapies there over just doing a lot of oral therapies for example or whatever so which I'm not opposed to the reason certain intervenous therapies probably make that window of diagnosis and treatment work better is you're kind of meeting the intensity of the other treatments kind of on a Level Playing Field there are things that I can do if I can put say vitamin C intravenously into you that it can't do orally there's a big difference there are some things that just aren't going to work orally very well or their toxicity maybe is a little too high the other thing though is you may not feel real wonderful when you're going through radiation and or chemo and so I might have to be very careful how much you we give you that to to take orally you may have intention of taking more but you may just feel so badly you can't do it so an IV is a way around that now the the focus during that time is is truly on making the rest of the body as protected as possible but the side benefit we used to only know the part one which is make your healthy cells strong the side benefit of doing that is the tumor bed the tumor milu where it lives and the cancer stem cells are less likely to get real resistant and become an entity unto themselves if we do that um and so by doing IV Therapy in particular ways during that time we can do it and the way I talk to a patient is I'll just say you have a lot more cells that don't have cancer than do okay now obviously we care about the ones that do have cancer we want to beat them up but I Care As Much or more about your healthy cells because that's what we want to keep healthy length of life in cancer and quality of life are directly related to the healthy cells and how they're working really and most people you know that kind of makes logical sense I think so to be specific about therapies if I only had one therapy to do during that time where they're getting active treatment or recovering from surgery Etc it probably would be hos vitamin C uh which is the number one well-known kind of you know Ivy in cancer outside of chemo now you bring up a good point which I think because people hear 11 million things and as soon as they go to I would say in in North America n and a half out of 10 oncology centers will tell them don't do any of that because it's going to interfere with you know the chemotherapy or or the radiation or something um that research I was talking to you about before or that you actually mentioned um was funded by the National Institute of Health here in the US and one of the parts so I I did anything that in invaded a person Interventional parts so IVs injections all of that stuff but we did everything um we were partnered in a big a big group through the University of Washington and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance which is huge and very famous uh and some other entities and so I had to in the beginning answer the question literally every day to our our medical and radiation oncology colleagues of wait a minute we we don't think vitamin C IV is a good idea because won't it get in the way of our our chemotherapy for example um and I've been answering that question for a long time before but what I started to do and what exists now is uh a research a re resource that I uh put together for the oncologist and it went through all of the major types of chemotherapy and what research there is with vitamin C and two I never had an oncologist even now now all these years later who was not surprised number one that there was any research at all and number two the big shock was it wasn't what they thought it was actually positive it showed Synergy or you know something something good right and of uh and keep in mind this is a is a research summary so it's very like there's a lot in there it's over 30 pages long uh I would send them the parts to remain to whatever chemo patient was getting and normally it was like oh this is all positive H so there's only two responses to that one the one I liked better uh was didn't know there was research didn't know it was positive yeah great we can be friends and and I'll refer more patients to you the other was more just well okay that's fine but I I I don't like what you're doing or you know some like emotional thing that was like well whatever um so that really did help now it was interesting because we had a lot of uh we had a lot of patients who were employees of the University of Washington phds MDS things and their doctors would push back and they would go back with the research summary and directly fight the doctor and and they would give in uh otherwise I was doing it so generally speaking uh it's not what people think you know it's not going to magically make all that chemo not work I mean if there was actually an agent that could do that and there's a few in that are used in research it it would work very differently than vitamin c does uh but here's the other cool thing the way that that happens if you give someone conversely if if if I give you uh a platinum chemotherapy or a taxan or some standard you know um tumor killing it's going to hurt your normal cells and it's going to your cancer cells can't can't go away over if I give you hyos vitamin C your normal cells have enzymes to use it just as an antioxidant even though it's a prooxidant when it goes in so they get a nice vitamin C treatment your cancer cells mostly lack those enzymes and so it creates an immune uh response against the cancer cells so it literally goes in it does two totally different things depending on who what who the cell is right so that's why I like that therapy it's not I use many many things but if somebody says I can come in one time a week I've got this one day I'll I'll you know devote to this or two or whatever um sure I'm going to do some I'm going to do some dietary advice do some other advice but I'm going to say let's through this window let's maybe focus on Hos vitamin C um and the other thing is people come out the other end and they're healthier so then all the other phases we go through with cancer you know the third and the fourth phase are easier to deal with because they're not so wrecked right and you know kind of like I think it sounded like you told your mother um and I probably still do this but I especially in the earlier days I would just tell patients look it's still your body here's the facts you get to decide what goes in your body or not if your oncologist is just going to have this giant emotional problem about it then it's up to whether you want to tell them or not because it's you know this is not their area of expertise by the way like I don't I don't dose the Platinum drugs for them and they don't get to do this for me right and now it's a little bit easier but in the olden days they would literally fire patients for getting you know anything from me so yeah so it's it's one of those things but that's and that's not to say that's the only thing you do and it's the only but it's like to get that much Ben benefit from like one treatment a week or maybe two it's quality of life any other thing it's it's it's pretty hard to to match up you know now you get done with chemo and we're in the recovery phase you're not feeling quite so bad there's a lot more oral things that we can do a lot more detoxing we do a lot of other stuff yeah.

Pamela:  yeah okay immunotherapy yes when some entities say they do immunotherapy it's not actually imuno therapy so maybe you could just kind of touch on what is immunotherapy how it's interpreted and potentially used?

Dr Paul Anderson:  yeah so the the way that the way that especially North American oncology uses the term immunotherapy and the reason they can use it the way they do is it's it's so broad of a term it could include almost anything okay but what people need to kind of Step Back From and see is and it's changing a little in North America but very slowly is in the North American oncology mind an immunotherapy is really more of a biologic drug therapy okay targeted therapy they call it which sounds a lot cooler than biologic drug uh biologic drugs which are used in autoimmune conditions Cancer and a few other things are the largest money producing part of Pharma okay it's over 3 billion dollar a year or or way more now it's also the biggest uh one of the biggest areas of growth of new drugs that are being produced because this is you the upside financially for Farm is huge and if they find one that actually works you know the the therapeutic upside can be huge but here's the contrast that that I think you're getting getting at that is an immunotherapy often because it like Targets this one little piece of the immune system and either turns it on or turns it off right now our immune systems are so complex sometimes turning one piece on or off can get a little dicey okay so that that's all lot of thing but then there's immunotherapy such as a lot of the autologous immunotherapies meaning they would take my tumor and build uh a uh you know dendritic cell therapy or natural killer cell or some other subtype cell and say we don't just want you to be you know against to that tumor in general we want you to be against this particular tumor with all of its markers right and in um a lot of the work I've done outside the US in big universities tied to Big hospitals where they do this um that is really the frontier where I see more benefit happening especially for cancer patients because you're building their immune system to be more aware of their tumor which is the the reason my tumor got bigger or my cancer got bigger is I was unaware of it immunologically

Pamela:  and it's personalized it it doesn't come out of a blood bank it's it's your blood your body.

Dr Paul Anderson: it's you yeah which is um which is what we wanted our body to do in the beginning right so it's just reacquainting your body there uh so you could call both of those things immunotherapies but one is literally like turning switches on and off globally speaking and you know sometimes that can help in a piece of cancer therapy it certainly doesn't cure anything but it certainly can help whereas the other is taking your immune system and training it for your new problem you have that it wasn't know maybe aware of and something that because people will say well I don't understand like I've had my immune system before I knew I had cancer isn't it already trained because that's how it's supposed to work well one of the reasons cancer develops in people is that many cancer types have immune cloaking devices you know literally like you know on the old Star Trek when they cloaking device you can't see them they have that biologically that they can produce in the case of many cancers especially the invasive ones so your immune system never gets a chance to see it in fully so what this does the the personalized you know human autologous type of of cells is takes your cells takes your cancer builds up enough and then acquaints them with no cloaking and so they see the whole thing um so and like everything you know I think there's a long a long way to go of re search it's certainly way different and better than it was 10 years ago but I see a really big upside in the future um and we're you know if you look at North America they are doing some studies here and there to try and prove concept and get it in the pipeline um but like many things I wish we were a little bit more aggressive there and and maybe put more of our resources there because I I TR think it's got more of an upside than many other things that we do.

Pamela:  uh do you I mean I have to imagine there's people that come to you that don't want to go through chemo at all I've I've had a lot of them contact me um over time and ask me what would you do and I said well I mean I can share you know the the research that I had done you know my I was going to take my mom to Europe and then I ended up taking her to Mexico and we tried to get her into Panama but couldn't get in and I mean there's lots of lots of different um potential places do you partner with anybody outside of the country and if you have to be careful answering this question given your licensing I completely uh respect that yeah

Dr Paul Anderson: um so the to the first part which is well what do you do if someone says they don't want to do chemo or radiation or whatever the in in this country regardless of where else they might go the converation I have is a more specific one to the one we talked about in the beginning and that literally is and this is this is how I would think of it personally if it happened to me or my sister or my L uh there are pretty well documented published statistics for how well this stage and grade of tumor responds to the standard of care treatments right and normally we have like a first line and a second and maybe a third fourth line so you can get the statistics on those right if you have a cancer that is you know 85 90% plus responsive like actual fiveyear you know cures which there are some not a lot but there are some my personal experience is you would be very ill advised not to do that because it's just like take those take those odds right let go to the other end of the spectrum and it's getting better in the US not everyone will do this for liability reasons but a lot of oncologists now are saying if you're at the other end of the spectrum let's say I have a very aggressive pancreatic cancer oncologist will say I've got a 4 to six% fiveyear survival that's four to 6% I have 100% chance of giving you all the side effects if it was me I wouldn't take a four to six% thing the oncologist literally will say you know you need to do what you want to do but I wouldn't do that to myself okay and obviously there's Shades in between but when people say oh well you should you know always or never just don't work with humans because that's not how we work if you have a really high chance what I tell people is okay take the high numbers but then let's do all of this other stuff to make your make you a very tiny Target for recurrence sure do that if you're on the real low end you know single digits low double digits no nobody legitimately is going to say oh you should have you know you should have taken a a 4% roll of the dice um and that's the calculus that I try and go through with people now they still get to make up their decision about what they want to do and I generally try and support them no matter what the the tougher ones are what if it's in the middle you know like um then you have to because here's the thing let's say it's a middle 50 60% five years survival this you know it's about 50% what I've seen with people is the person that treatment it's the same with natural stuff but the person that cancer treatment goes into makes the difference in how well well they weather those 56% odds because you can have people who are really sick their immune systems don't work anymore they're very beat up you know they're likely just to get side effects and they may need some other help you got people who go into it who are very robust have good immune support and they're doing all these other things to support it they're more likely to make the best out of that right so I think when it comes to chemo and radiation you really have to look at what is my cancer got going for it or not with those treatments right I still if it was me personally I would still do all of the other natural stuff even if even if I had a 95% cure rate I would do all the stuff I do to make me super healthy I'll take the Cure and I'll make me as healthy as possible now if people say which this happens a lot when you get to stage four cancer patients where you have metastases and the chemotherapy often is more kind of let's slow it down if we can you know the goals are different if someone like that comes to me and says I want to do you fill in the blank therapy we just talked about Autos immunotherapies um there are other types of therapies that might not be too available here in the US yes I uh I won't say who and where but uh I I either have consulted for and work with or I partner with not in a Financial SS but just I know them and I trust them and I will tell a patient a lot of times especially if they've got a little bit of time to make some decisions look at these two facilities yeah and one is going to maybe work better for you than another or if there's a particular therapy where I might have to go to a country like uh say Canada um I might know two or three depending on the location and say I want to meet with you and the people that run and we'll we'll figure out a way to get this done so that you can go do that um now and then if someone's going to Europe or some other place then there are options but yeah it's you know it especially in the case of people were here we see this all the time the first line therapy slowed it down everyone thought things they going to go really well maybe there wasn't as much you know adjunctive care to keep things going positive or maybe it was just too aggressive and then comes back and the new the new standard of care in the US isn't going to do much I would probably go and and uh certainly check into you know a modern immunotherapy of the kind we talked about.

Pamela:  yeah awesome um well thank you this is incredible information incredible support uh if you could share with people how they can find out more about you and then uh anything that any last words anything I forgot to ask about anything you want to share

Dr Paul Anderson: well when when it comes to cancer and chronic illness we could talk for 40 days probably so um I think a couple of things one is uh for almost everybody I've ever met there probably are more options open to you than you than you realize so getting good information is number one um and and obviously some apply to some people some apply to others but find out because you know the more empowered you are as a patient the better you're going to do anyway so that's that's number one uh number two there's a lot of things at the real which we didn't have time to get into at the real core level such as keeping your body moving uh how you feed your body uh all of those things and then working on Your Mind Body Connection very important you know there's things those are things you can do just with yourself and your own resources um and there are more and more practitioners out there who are better trained at what we've been talking about today kind of putting and they may not do everything but they might help you kind of like uh like the Orchestra conductor help you find the right resources uh to work on and so I think you know you you probably have more going for you than you think think and it gets very scary when you go you know to the hospital and they tell you you know what they tell you but just remember that's that's a piece of the pie it's not not the whole pie.

Pamela:  well and we haven't even touched on detox you know all the I mean she had off and on for five years

Dr Paul Anderson: right yeah

Pamela:  it was finally in now in almost year six that she spent the last year um doing more and more of the IV therapies and you know having like I me mentioned we you know went and did something a little bit more alternative where they took her own cell and made a dritic cell vaccine and and um she's been doing a lot of things that help her body detox and now she feels great because a lot of toxins get built up and you feel really tired and you feel really sluggish and you feel really sore and then once you start to release some of those um one of her favorites is the ozone IV she says she feels like a million bucks after she does one of those you know it's just very interesting how we can kind of help our bodies pull some of that stuff back out again

Dr Paul Anderson: so um yeah just the process of being treated for cancer is generally very toxifying to your body and you know it okay so we had to do that doesn't mean we have to leave it all in there like that's a huge part of you know prevention and Recovery um so yeah there's there's just so many things depending on where you're at as far as getting a hold of me uh there's a hub website which is easy to find it's just d n wow.com and I have have a a very large and growing uh patient education YouTube channel where I record fairly short B- siiz things on different uh topics cancer chronic illness focused uh but also on there our resources of those the books and things I've written and uh other stuff so just D row.com and you can almost find anything about me you want there.

Pamela:  awesome thank you so much doctor really appreciate having you on thank you.