Summary:

Dr. Michael Robinson, a naturopathic doctor specializing in oncology, discusses the causes and treatments of breast cancer on the Wellness Your Way podcast. He explains that cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell growth and a failure of the immune system to eliminate these cells. Factors contributing to breast cancer include alcohol consumption, dairy intake, and exposure to toxins such as pesticides and plastics. Robinson emphasizes the importance of a healthy diet, including the consumption of soy and avoidance of grapefruit, to reduce the risk of breast cancer. He also discusses the role of stress and the importance of maintaining a strong immune system. In terms of treatment, Robinson advocates for a combination of conventional and naturopathic approaches, including surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and hormonal blockers, supplemented with personalized therapies such as diet changes and herbal treatments.

Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much Dr. Michael Robinson for coming on Wellness Your Way. I am excited to have you here.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

I’m excited to be here.

Megan Lyons:

Well, I said this in the intro, but your class in my doctorate program at the University of Western States was definitely so far and I’m almost done with the class that I have learned the most new information, so I really appreciate that and all of the energy that you put into teaching us and cancer was just a small fragment of that class, which kind of blows my mind how much I learned about cancer, but I am so excited for you to share all of that with our or some of that with our audience today. So let’s start with the very basics. How did you get into this field? I was going to ask, what is cancer? But how did you get into this field? Tell us a little bit about you and your career path to get here.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Convoluted is the answer. In undergrad, I was a phlebotomist and infusion and I got a job going to patients’ houses doing their IVs for them. And a lot of them were cancer patients because they were stuck in their house and I hated it. And every day these stage four patients would be grabbing onto me saying, save me, save me. And I’m like, I’m just here to do your iv, I’m not your doctor. Things like that. I told myself every day that I was never going to do cancer and I went through all of med school saying I was never going to do cancer, and then I got to internship, which is I don’t have control over. The patients that I’m seeing is just what the university is sending us patients. And I got a lot of cancer patients or my other colleagues I was in internship with got a lot of cancer patients and they all kept coming to me.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

They knew my background and knew I knew all this stuff about it. And it was life-changing for me because suddenly it was I could help them. I had answers as I was now the provider and could help them with all these things that I knew for a decade that they had been struggling with. So that was kind of life-changing and I realized, hey, this is my calling. There’s 50 other people in my class and they have no idea what’s going on and there’s these patient suffering and I do know how to help them. So I kind of fell into it.

Megan Lyons:

Wow. It’s amazing you tried to ignore the messages, but in the end you just couldn’t ignore them. You’re where you’re meant to be. So now let’s get into what I was going to ask, which is what is cancer?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Uncontrolled cell growth cells that don’t know that they should die and they just think they should keep growing and growing and growing? And there’s a lot of aspects to that in terms of why it happens, but every cell group of cells in your body is always growing, dying, growing, dying, growing, dying. Cancer is cells that become very bad at that they don’t realize that they should be doing. It’s called apoptosis or killing themselves off. And I do want to be clear, and it’s going to come up later on, it’s not like cancer just grows, grows, grows, grows, grows. There is some dying in that process that happens. And there’s byproducts of that is you also have a lot of dead cells constantly floating around in your body and it’s a lot for your body to handle, but simply it’s that it’s these cells are confused and don’t know that they should kill themselves off.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

And then the second part of it is your immune system normally should be cleaning this stuff up because truly everyone develops cancer cells in their body every day. Your immune system is supposed to take care of that. And in cancer patients, that hasn’t happened. So it’s a mixture of the cells themselves are broken and don’t realize they’re old and decrepit and should kill themselves off, and then the immune system isn’t recognizing them as these cells that are overgrowing and they’re not seeing it and not taking care of the problem. So these two things add together to turn into cancer.

Megan Lyons:

Excellent summary. And we’ll get into some of the many triggers that could contribute to those two major factors as we go. I know people are thinking why we’ll get into that, but we’re going to focus on breast cancer specifically today. Can you talk to us about the prevalence of breast cancer, if it’s on the rise, the prognosis, anything you want to share about breast cancer?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Yes. So breast cancer is incredibly common in America and North America. About one in six women will have to deal with a breast cancer diagnosis at one point in their life. That sounds like a lot to people and a lot of people are like, oh, I don’t know. Everyone’s not dying of breast cancer. How could it be that common? It’s because early stage breast cancers can be quite treatable, which is a good thing. But the scary part of it is that when you look at overall survival rates in breast cancers and you go back to the 1920s, really if you look at survival rates in the 1920s to the 1990s and two thousands, there was no change in overall survival in terms of how many people were beating cancer. We’re starting to do a little bit better in the last 20 years or so, like slight increases in survivals, but honestly, it’s also becoming a lot more prevalent. It used to be one in 30 back in the twenties of who would get breast cancer. Now we’re at one in six. So even though we’re better at treating it, it’s becoming more and more and more common and it’s just exploding. And it’s not like that all over the world. If you look at China or Africa, as they’re still in that one, out of every 20 or 30 women will get breast cancer. So it’s very clearly a western society disease and very highly linked to that.

Megan Lyons:

Really interesting. So it’s increasing in prevalence significantly in the US and up until very recent past we’re not getting that much better at treating it. Is that bummer? Well, we’re going to get into some things that we can do, but that’s a bleak prognosis to start out, although you have helped so many people through this diagnosis and there is a better way than just conventional treatment alone. And I’m excited for you to share some of that today.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Yes, I am too because like I said, breast cancer is kind of an odd diagnosis where if you talk about there’s four stages of cancer and really breast cancer also has a stage zero. If we’re talking stage zero or stage one or even in a stage two, you’re at over 95% survival rate is most likely everything is going to be fine and we’re going to beat this as long as we do some sort of treatment. People sometimes say, oh, it’s just stage one breast cancer. I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to start doing some juicing. And then no, their cancer grows and advances and that’s not what we want. But early stage breast cancer, incredibly treatable, which is the good news of this. The problem is if we don’t find it until it gets into stage three or stage four, that 95 to 99% survival rates in early stages drops down to in the 10 to 20% depending on other factors.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So there’s a big giant shift if we let things advance. And that’s what a lot of people don’t sometimes realize about coming to a naturopathic doctor like me that specialize in oncology. A lot of people come in with a tiny one centimeter little tumor, stage one tumor and they say, no, I don’t want to do surgery. I just want you to help me juice away my cancer. And I say, surgery is a 99.5% chance that you are going to beat this is I am 100% going to tell you to take that 99% chance. Right? I’m not going to tell you juicing can’t fix things, but it’s not going to give you a 99% chance. So we are going to take that while we can not let it get to the stage four and you drop down to 10%, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that surgery doesn’t suck so much and we don’t have so many side effects. We’re not left with long-term issues. And when they start talking about hormonal blockers after is what can we really do to make this more personalized to the patient? So it’s not a battle, it’s not me against conventional medicine or anything like that. It’s truly fitting in taking the parts of conventional medicine that really, really good at treating cancer, but then making it not just about destroying the disease and thinking about the whole patient and making sure that they’re happy and healthy and pain-free and all these things along the road.

Megan Lyons:

That was by far my favorite part about your approach that you’re very led by the data and you can see that a lot of these conventional treatments like surgery and in some cases radiation, even chemotherapy, some cases that these are the best situations in terms of prognosis. And so you’re going to do that or you’re going to guide the patient to do that and then support them in their recovery and making sure their side effects are not extremely significant. And then in making sure their terrain for future cancer recurrence is as healthy as it possibly can be. So I love that we’re going to get into some more treatments and some specific aspects of it, but let’s wind backwards. My favorite is nutrition of course. So let’s talk about the role of nutrition in breast cancer prevention and maybe even management once someone has that stage zero or one.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So there’s a lot that is very, very, very highly linked, and that’s part of my biggest problem with conventional oncology is that breast cancer, there is so much money funneled into breast cancer because it’s a very common disease that we’re, again, not getting that much better at treating. So we keep studying it and we keep getting really, really good data on things that we can do to increase outcomes. But none of it’s implemented into the conventional system because if there’s some study about turmeric and breast cancer, an oncologist can read it and say, well, that’s great, but I don’t know how to dose it. I don’t know what the tumor interacts with is. I can’t prescribe a therapy that I have no training in. So there’s a lot. There’s tons of really good data starting off with alcohol. I mean, everyone knows that alcohol is bad and I’m not going to, I don’t think anyone thinks alcohol is necessarily the best thing in the world, but sometimes people don’t realize that even one serving of a half a glass of wine can increase breast cancer risk by 50%, right?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

That’s a massive number with a tiny amount of alcohol. So really, really, really strong data that specifically with breast cancer, there is no safe amount of alcohol. And it gets confusing in medicine. There are other studies like one serving of alcohol is good for cardiovascular disease, and yes, that is true, and yes, heart health is true, but if we’re making this about cancer today, there’s no safe amount and it’s an incredibly highly increased amount. So alcohol, definitely when we look at other things that Americans are either doing a lot of that the other countries in the world or the other way around, what aren’t America is doing that people in other countries are doing is soy is one of those big ones. And soy is something that everyone is very, very, very confused with. And I know I’ve talked to you about it in the course, but couldn’t be more clear.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

There’s like 13 big giant meta-analysis that basically say the more soy you eat, the longer you live, the better your breast cancer outcomes are, the better your breast cancer treatments are, less likely you are to get breast cancer. And that’s where people are confused because they hear soy has estrogen and they hear that most breast cancer is estrogen sensitive, but people don’t realize that there’s something called phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens are plant estrogens, not human estrogens and plant estrogens and human estrogens are not the same thing. They basically look like estrogen where they can fit into the estrogen receptors, they can bind to estrogen receptors, but because it’s not a human, it doesn’t actually activate that receptor. Essentially what it’s doing is it’s sitting in that receptor and then blocking it from the bad estrogens from then going in that receptor and activating it the way that we don’t want it to.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So it’s very, very, very protective. And soy is not the only phytoestrogen food, it’s just the one that people know about and gets vilified. But sesame and flax and raspberries, raspberries are packed full. And we use raspberry tea for pregnancy for the same effects. It’s like, but it doesn’t get into the cancer world, and I don’t necessarily know why, but very high amounts of phytoestrogens are incredibly protective and Americans are just bad at eating some of these guys where you go over to Asia and we have billions of people eating nothing but soy. 50% of their diets are soy, and they by far have the lowest rates of not only estrogen sensitive breast cancers, but also uterine cancers and ovarian cancers and prostate cancers, other hormonal cancers. So that’s some of the big ones. And then my favorite one I always talk about, because it made headline news March, 2020 and then covid happened and kind of, I don’t know, it lasted for a day and no one talked about it anymore is dairy is we have a gigantic 53,000 American female study that says one glass of cow’s milk a day is a 50% increase risk of breast cancer.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Two glasses is an 80% risk risk of breast cancer. And then if you read further in the study, it says, if you just swapped your cows milk for soy milk, it’s a 30% reduction in breast cancer. So incredibly non arguable data is what I tell people about soy. Amazingly good dairy, very, very, very bad alcohol. Very, very, very bad. And the last thing that I definitely want to make sure that I plug in here, because everyone knows living on McDonald’s and donuts is not good. So I’m not going to spend a bunch of time saying, stop eating McDonald’s. Right? But I want to make sure we get through some of these things that people have never heard of or like the soy, they’re very confused on grapefruits. In the oncology world, we basically say, you should never eat grapefruit, and I am not someone to vilify foods.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

I think that can get unhealthy, and I think all foods have their place and things like that women should never eat. Grapefruits is kind of what I say. The reason you can’t take it with birth control and things like that is because it changes how your liver enzymes work and changes the specific liver enzyme of how you metabolize your estrogens in your body. That’s why you can’t take it with birth control because it interacts with your birth control, but it also interacts with your natural estrogens, your body’s ability to clear out the natural estrogens. And when we think of most breast cancer being estrogen and progesterone, positive eating, I think it’s a quarter grapefruit a day basically inhibits your estrogen clearance by about 30% and increases your breast cancer risk by about 25%, right? With a quarter grapefruit, meaning again, very hard to even have a safe amount. So I’m not a grapefruit fan when we’re in the cancer world.

Megan Lyons:

Really interesting. So I’m thinking, I don’t know if you ever remember the grapefruit diet. My dad literally ordered cases of grapefruit juice because he thought that drinking that before a meal would solve everything. It did not. So good thing that was shortlived, but I’m thinking about the audience thinking, oh my gosh, I just had grapefruit this morning, or I drank milk last week, or I haven’t had soy in the past five years. I just want you to give them some hope if you can, about the power of dietary change. So even if you are 40 years old and you haven’t had the healthiest diet, you still have the potential to change your future course of breast cancer risk and all kinds of other health by changing your diet today. Is that true?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Oh, yes. Certainly. We say that you are a bucket and everything bad is pouring water into the bucket. So pesticides, radiation, bad food, all this stuff. Eventually the bucket overflows and when that overflows comes, that’s you with your diagnosis of whether you want to say cancer, heart disease or whatever. When your body has become overwhelmed and you end up with disease, we want to identify as many things as we can bad pouring into that bucket, but you can’t get rid of everything. You are going to have stress in your life. You are going to have a bad day at work. You are going to have days where it’s a birthday and you want to eat some cake. You can’t run away from everything. And the people that do, honestly, they’re more stressed out than anything, and I’d tell you the stress will kill you faster than anything else.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So you can’t do that. You can just say, well, let’s identify the things pouring into the bucket, eliminate what I can and do as much as I can. And like I said, there can be some simple changes to reduce down risk gigantically, so stop things pouring into the bucket, but also what things can I do to get myself a bigger bucket so that when these stresses come into my life, I can deal with them, right? Is because impossible to avoid everything and we don’t want to avoid everything we need to be able to live our lives, but making the healthy choices can certainly turn things around and push us in the right direction.

Megan Lyons:

Absolutely. Love that. One of those things you said came into the bucket is toxins. And this is a buzzword these days. We’ve talked here on wellness your way about some aspects of the truth of toxins, but I’d love for you to give your take on what toxins are and how they contribute to breast cancer risk.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

The vast majority of the ones that we’re going to talk about in the cancer world and specifically breast cancer world are going to be fat-soluble toxins because a lot of water-soluble toxins, you pee out and it’s not the biggest deal in the world. Fat-soluble toxins get stored in your body, specifically in fat cells. And your breasts honestly are mostly fat cells. So they like to congregate in that area. And naturally we have these detox mechanisms. We have tons of lymph nodes in your armpit ready to deal with that, but then people in America wear antiperspirant which stop that from happening. So not saying we can’t wear deodorant, I’m saying we need to avoid antiperspirant that’s stopping the perspiration from coming out, but most of those fat soluble pesticides are going to be in the category of synthetic chemicals that we are exposed to in America. Pesticides is going to be a big part of that.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

I don’t truly know if it’s the name of the study itself or just a term that came out of the study, but it’s Googleable. You can find something called the Israeli breast cancer anomaly. Basically in Israel, what they did is they cut out three pesticides from their list of pesticides that they were using in that country. And over the course of the next 10 years after they did that, they had a 30% decrease in age specific breast cancer mortality in this 10 year period. And no other country in that area that basically Israel had the same occurrence rates and death rates as every other country in Europe. They made this change and then had a 30% decrease and no other country in that area had the same decrease. So it was very clear data that making this one change affected things. So pesticides are a big part of it, which I’m sure your audience is very familiar with eating organic and eating clean and doing what we can here, but it is America, we’re going to be exposed to a lot of stuff.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So pesticides and then plasticy sort of things. So BPA is the famous one that people know about. That’s why we avoid it in babies because it’s very, very, very estrogenic. Hundreds of times more estrogenic than actual estrogen molecule itself. It’s very good at activating those estrogen receptors. It’s fat soluble, so it likes to congregate itself inside of the breasts. And we eat and are exposed to tons of BPA in this country. A lot of people are good at buying BPA water bottles, but honestly, the biggest sources that people are, BPA free water bottles, the biggest sources that people are still exposed to that they don’t even realize is going to be lining of they get a paper cup from Starbucks or drinking fountain or whatever. It’s lined with that shiny material, that shiny materials, BPA, and if you put hot boiling coffee into it, it’s going to erode away a lot of that BPA and drink it in or receipts, same thing as receipts don’t have ink on them.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

They are paper lined with BPA and then they burn the BPA to get the words on the receipts. So they’ve done studies in cashiers where cashiers have 15 times higher breast cancer rates than other occupations just because they’re constantly touching receipts over and over again. So simple little changes like saying, no, I don’t want the receipt at the checkout aisle. Or even you kind of grab it from the backend and fold it over so your skin only touches the backend of the receipt, not the shiny part of the receipt can make major changes and it’s not really affecting, it’s not a difficult thing to implement into your life.

Megan Lyons:

I have shared that receipt study with so many people since we learned it in your course because like you said, it’s so easy a hundred percent of the time I would just grab the receipt and throw it in the trash can and not have any use for it, and that grab is something that I can easily reduce. So I appreciate that On the BPA free water bottles, tell me your take, and I don’t know if this will be driven by research, but my suspicion is that we’re trading that we know is harmful BPA for other plastic particles that will turn out to be harmful. So even if it’s a plastic water bottle that says BPA free, I’m still somewhat skeptical it’s better than the BPA, but I’m trying to switch to glass as much as possible and all that kind of stuff. What do you think?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Yes. So BPA stands for bisphenol A and bisphenol A, but there’s also bisphenol B and bisphenol C tons of other bisphenols, and they all probably do it. And yes, as BP, a free means it’s only free of bisphenol A, not the other bisphenols. So yes, avoiding the plastics as much as possible, sticking to glass and stainless steel, which I’ll say that too is people are good about that these days in America is getting a stainless steel or glass water bottle, but it’s mostly the heating of the BPA. That’s the concern. So they may have their stainless steel water bottle, but then they’re microwaving their tawa, which is probably full of it as well. So any packaged food, again has that lining of BPA in it and you throw it in the microwave and that’s what the bigger issue. I wouldn’t freak out about you grabbing a thing of ice mountain one day out of a vending machine and drinking it. Don’t leave that ice mountain in your car for three weeks and the blistering hot sun and then go and drink it. Right? That’s the way we need to be thinking about this.

Megan Lyons:

Love that I certainly, even though I’m trying, I’m way, way, way, way far from perfect and have lots of room for improvement, but something like the heat is a really good way for people to latch onto it. Okay, if it’s exposed to heat, that’s not for me right now. You also mentioned in there that we can’t avoid everything. We cannot avoid plastic, we cannot avoid glyphosate even if we’re trying to eat a hundred percent organic, but you said we can increase the size of our bucket so that we can handle more. Tell us more about that.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

A lot of it is identifying those big common concerns that exist out there and saying, well, what are ways that I can work around this concern? So I mentioned the alcohol earlier, how we even one serving alcohol is not necessarily the best. We think the reason that is, and there’s probably multiple factors, but we think the main reason it is is because alcohol is very, very, very good at depleting certain vitamins and minerals out of your body, namely folate and B six, so two B vitamins, and that’s where honestly, you can go on Amazon these days and there’s ton of hangover remedies and supplements and stuff out there, and they’re mostly just B complexes that you can get for five bucks, and that’s kind of, I’m not saying don’t go and have your bachelorette party and don’t have a glass of wine at dinner at Christmas, but if you’re going to have a glass of wine, take a B complex, take the folate and be six.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So you at least mitigate the effects in that one little scenario is give your body, build your body up what it needs, knowing that there’s going to be something coming in that’s going to be pouring into your bucket. So identifying each of those things and saying, well, what can I do? So to be complex is a good aspect of it. Honestly, the biggest aspect of getting your bucket filled is boosting your immune system and keeping your immune system strong so that you can deal with this stuff. I think Americans commonly are led to believe that you need a million supplements to boost your immune system or fight covid and take all this stuff to prevent covid and all these guys. I think it’s the stress, honestly, more than anything else. Americans are incredibly, incredibly, incredibly stressed, and you can take all the vitamin D that you want in the world, but if you’re sleeping five hours a night and you’re screaming at your spouse all the time and everything, it’s just you’re going to get sick and whether it’s with a virus or whether it’s with cancer.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So identifying those things is if you’re someone that is living this incredibly stressful life, finding out how you need to sleep more, whether that’s blackout curtains, whether that’s blue blocker glasses, identifying what the concern is and finding out how to fix it, whether it’s finding a counselor, whether it’s, I don’t want to do talk therapy, but I’ll go and do acupuncture once a week just so I can lay in a room with the lights off and have someone do something to me, whatever. It’s identifying those things so that you can have restorative time and Americans take one vacation a year or whatever it is for restoration, and that’s not what we need. We need constant restoration to deal with everything we’re exposed to.

Megan Lyons:

That is such a great point. And I might ask you about your personal practices once we get to the end, but I’d like to talk about two more things that go into that bucket. These are biggies, they’re hormone balance and genetics biggies, at least in the term of popular topics that we see flashed across Instagram or the news or something like that. So give us your take on genetic risk for breast cancer, how hormone imbalance plays into breast cancer. Anywhere you want to take that.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

The genetics part is somewhat easy because it’s very kind of black and white. Genetics is only responsible for 5% of breast cancers, meaning 95% of the time it has nothing to do with it, so we don’t need to spend a million hours on it because 95% of the time it doesn’t matter. That being said, if you have brca, the BRCA gene, which people are familiar with because Angelina Jolie cut off her breast because she had the BRCA gene. If you have the BRCA gene, your risk of getting breast cancer is like 80%. So it’s like if you have the genetics, then yes, you are at a big risk and you could do things like prophylactic mastectomy or at least if nothing else, screening is just make sure you’re doing your regular exams and screening as much as possible. But that’s kind of the main gist to genetics is either it’s not a concern at all, or if you do, you could get the screening done and then if you have brca, then you go and monitor very closely the rest of your life. It’s likely to happen.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

And I’ll quickly throw this out there because the internet be all about it with the Ashkenazi Jewish population, theoretically, the research says that Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry has an increased risk. It’s not the biggest in the world, but there’s also a lot of debate on that literature where basically there were Jewish hospitals that were doing a lot of this research and maybe the research made it seem like a lot of the patients were of Jewish descent because that was the population going to the hospitals and then getting the study done. So is that necessarily reflective of everyone in America? We don’t know. Okay. But that’s the genetic piece to it. Got it. Sorry, what was the other piece? Hormone balance hormones. Yes, incredibly, incredibly linked. And there’s a lot I could throw out statistic after statistic on you on whether it’s breastfeeding, is breastfeeding significantly reduces your risks.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So not only is it incredibly healthy for the baby and everyone knows that it’s great for the baby, but also very important for mom. So breastfeeding is critical and it’s basically the longer you breastfeed, then more the breastfe, you reduce your risk of breast cancer. So there’s not one number. It’s like the longer you do it, the better it is and it keeps getting better and better and better the longer you do it. Part of that is because literally you’re just regularly emptying the stuff that builds up in the tissues. And sometimes that freaks people out, like, does that mean I’m pumping my baby full of all these pesticides that it’s going through? And a lot of these guys are issues when they build up. So even if you are expressing it, and some of it is getting into the baby, it’s like, well, all food has little amounts of these pesticides too.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

It’s not necessary. It’s not any worse than the formula is, right? So for sure you want to be doing it. When is it a concern is when it sits there for 20 years at a time. That’s when it ends up turning into cancer. Emptying of the breasts is very good birth control, whether it’s birth control or hormone replacement therapy. So patients that do early menopause or things like that and they want to take estrogen to prevent the side effects of menopause and they start taking estrogen. Basically anything over five years of use, whether it’s birth control or whether it’s hormone replacement therapy has pretty big increases. It’s like in the 30% increased risk of developing a breast cancer later on down the road. The good news is if you stop it and the longer you stop it, that risk does tend to go away over time.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

But we know obviously synthetic hormones are going to be linked to that, having kids in general in the age that you have kids. So it’s kind of probably why some of the statistics are the way that they are in America is because genetically, thousands of years ago, we were having kids at 15 years old, and the data is very clear. If you have a kid under 20 years old and you have a really low risk of breast cancer, but once you start getting over 30 and having kids is we don’t really get the reduction in breast cancer risk. It’s not that it’s causing breast cancer, it’s that we’re not getting the helpful effect of when you have kids when you’re younger. And really the answer to why that is, and you could extrapolate this into then other aspects is when you’re pregnant, you don’t have a period.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

And when you’re breastfeeding, you usually don’t have a period at least early on in breastfeeding. And part of it is that is a lot of these hormones are under control and not raging like they are when you’re a 22-year-old female when your hormones are packed highest. So it’s kind of like the lesser, we can have these massive amounts of raging hormones, and if it’s because you’re pregnant or lactating, it kind of can lower your overall risk. So it doesn’t matter if we look at natural hormones, doesn’t matter if we look at synthetic hormones, doesn’t matter if we look at pesticides that are mimicking hormones is yes, they are all very related.

Megan Lyons:

Very interesting. And how about one extra twist to this, which is another buzzword these days, estrogen dominance and or the inability to clear quote used estrogen and continue recirculating estrogen through our bodies. Does that have an impact?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Certainly. And if you look at what’s called the sexual hormone pathway or steroid hormone pathway, it’s basically you eat cholesterol, 20 steps go by and turn it into all these different hormones and estrogen’s, the very last one, and the enzyme that does that called aromatase and all the drugs that they give you proof of breast cancer are aromatase inhibitors stops that last conversion of turning testosterone into estrogen. Your fat cells also make a ton of aromatase. So that’s the other part of this too, is Americans tend to have an issues with being overweight, meaning they have more aromatase, which means all of the hormones in their body, the testosterone, the progesterone, all these kidney hormones and adrenal hormones, their body’s going to take all that and create more estrogen out of it than it normally would. So that’s part of it too, is just in America, we’re really good at creating more estrogen in our body just because of weight is how metabolically unhealthy Americans can be.

Megan Lyons:

Yes. Okay, great. So now we’re understanding a lot of the things that fill the bucket. Hopefully the audience all gets this and makes some changes and never has to deal with it. But let’s say someone does end up with a diagnosis of breast cancer early stage. Let’s talk about their decision between weighing western medicine only and or some kind of western medicine plus a more integrative therapy. What are some of the things Western medicine does really well and what are some of the things that they might want to consider? Finding a different source of advice on

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Surgery is what western medicine does really, really, really well. And I don’t have the exact statistic, it may be like 10% or 12%, but roughly at that number where if a breast cancer patient does not get surgery, there’s only a 10% chance that they will end up beating their cancer. So you need the surgery, and that doesn’t have to be a total bilateral double mastectomy. Sometimes it’s a little tiny lumpectomy, meaning you’re going to take out one little centimeter of tissue and cosmetically everything still looks the same and everything’s fine. So surgery is the curative aspect and really, really you want to go down that route. The bad parts of it are bad. Parts of the conventional medicine side of things are kind of what comes after they’re doing a good job about looking at the cancer and trying to prevent cancer recurrence without kind of thinking about the rest of the body.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So there’s three main therapies that come alongside of surgery. It’s radiation, it’s chemo, or it’s hormonal blockers. And depending on staging and things like that is, you may use one of those, you may use all three of those. But important thing to note on radiation, we’ll start there is even in some stage zero patients, basically, and definitely into stage one, the oncologist will give you the choice. They will say, we can either do a total mastectomy, take off the entire breast, and you’re good to go, you’re cured, go home. I’ll never see you again unless you come in with a concern. Or they’ll say, if you only want to do a lumpectomy, we have to do radiation. And if you say, I don’t want radiation, then they’ll say, Nope, I won’t even consider a lumpectomy. And I tell people that sometimes you have to play the game.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Sometimes you have to say, okay, doctor, I will do your lumpectomy and do radiation after, and then you just don’t go to radiation after. A lot of patients will do that. And it happens all the time because when you look at the data on radiation, especially in DCIS, which is stage zero breast cancer, it’s when it is cancer, but it’s locked away in a ball still. It hasn’t started to break outside of the cells, the cell wall. Yet if you look at the data, there’s basically no change in overall survival. And you can find tons of studies on this where doctors look at this issue of saying it reduces recurrence, it reduces your risk that cancer comes back later on. But when you look at the actual statistic of survival.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So when you look at the data of overall survival in these stage zero, and even into the stage one cases, there’s not really risk in changing survival outcomes. So yes, of course, I don’t want you to get cancer to recur, but I say sometimes we beat it once. If we have to beat it again, we can. But if at the end of the day everyone’s dying at the same timeframe when they die, why do this therapy where we’re blasting them full of radiation, which we know is linked to all these other issues causes lung fibrosis, it causes bone issues when the laser hits the bone, increases your risk of leukemia. I treat patients that had breast cancer 15 years ago and now they have leukemia from all the radiation they got. So it’s thinking about the whole person and really making those decisions. When you get into some of the later stage ones, you’ll see like 3% reductions in overall survival.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

And that’s where I tell people, you have to realize it’s people that do radiation or people that do nothing, and then they get a 3% reduction. It’s like, well, when people come to someone like me, they’re not doing nothing. We’re going to do lots of herbs, lots of diet changes, lots of all these other things. And I might not have the statistic to directly compare it to patient that did radiation compared to people that drank five cups of green tea a day or whatever it is. But 3% is not hard to necessarily make up for, right? So there’s lots of options there.

Megan Lyons:

Oh, please go ahead. I’ll add my question on later.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

No, you go for it.

Megan Lyons:

Well, I was just going to say, you have so many tools in your toolkit. People tend to think, oh, a naturopathic doctor, they’re just going to tell me, take this one thing and hope that helps. But you really dive in with your patients. I’ve gotten the benefit of seeing some of your protocols. They’re extremely detailed. We are not talking just like a pat on the back and let’s rub your head and hope you’re doing well. You have so many tools that you utilize. So I think people can just be reassured by hearing that there are many things you can do to prevent or to reduce the risk of recurrence, to manage the side effects of current treatments. Whether you decide on chemo, which you’ll go into or anything else, whatever you do, there’s always something additional out there that can help you feel a little better and promote your health.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Yeah, certainly. And that’s what I’d say is if I have 15 different therapies that could be on the table, it’s like we can make up for these three and 5% numbers pretty easily.

Megan Lyons:

Yes. Amazing. Okay.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

That was radiation. And we got hormones and chemo. So hormonal blockers, and there’s a couple different ones, but I’m going to use anastrozole as the example. It’s most common drug prescribed right now every female in America gets prescribed one milligram of anastrozole, whether you’re 80 pounds or whether you’re 400 pounds. Every woman gets one milligram a day of anastrozole. And it’s like, that’s silly. It’s like, you can’t tell me my 80 pound patient and my 400 pound patient needs the same drug dosage. So it’s actually a movement in oncology where they’re now finally starting to do these studies where they say, Hey, why don’t you take your anastrozole every other day? And we look at the outcomes and we see side effect profiles dropping like crazy, and we see survival outcomes basically staying the same. And what I’m getting at is truly personalizing your medicine.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

It’s like let the drug do what it’s going to do and let it have its efficacy where it gets it. Of course, I don’t want you to get cancer again, but do we need to pump you full of so much of a drug that your bones are withering away and you’re miserable all the time? Not necessarily. So you would think that, oh, oncologist, you’re going to measure my hormones before you go and shut them off. And they don’t. And that’s part of the simple aspect that I do is I just measure their baseline hormones. I do liver clearance of seeing how their liver’s metabolizing their estrogens, and then based off of that, we help pick a dosage where if it’s really, really, really bad, I might say, sure, take your anastrozole every day. If it’s barely an issue, your liver’s kind of slow at it, but mostly it’s going okay.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Sometimes my patients take anastrozole once a week, and it’s like when you’re taking a drug once a week, there’s going to be basically no side effect profile to it at that point. So just personalizing. That’s it. Chemo is the most controversial part, and patients are the thing they’re scared about more than anything. I tell people all the time, a lot of times the internet leads people to believe that chemo doesn’t work, and I will dispel that myth. Chemo is actually really good at killing cancer. It’s just not good at keeping you alive. At the same time as the way that we say it. We use chemo as the equivalent of a pesticide. If you give a weed growing in a garden and you dump a bunch of pesticide on that weed, the weed is going to die. That’s not the question. The name in the game though is not destroying the whole garden at the same time.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

So a lot of the therapies we use, so we do a low dose chemo in office with the oldest low dose chemo clinic in the United States actually, but sometimes it’s even just sending them to their conventional oncologist to get regular old chemo, but protecting their body at the same time, to not let the rest of the garden get destroyed, put a shield over the weed, just dump the pesticide there, kill off the things we want it to kill off. Don’t let everything else be harmed. And then we get the best of both worlds. We get the efficacy of the medication without the disastrous side effects of the medication.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. I am shocked that throughout this whole conversation, you have not yet mentioned mushrooms. So I want to give you the opportunity to plug the power of mushrooms.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Mushrooms are great for everything in the course. I tell them if they put mushrooms on a treatment plant, it’s never a wrong answer because medicinal mushrooms are great for controlling how fast cells divide and making them not divide too quickly. They’re great for keeping your immune system as strong as possible. They’re great for keeping the stress as low as possible. It’s like everything that we need to have happen in cancer, mushrooms help with that. So there’s a little bit of bias with some of them. Like REI has the most research, or everyone talks about REI over and over and over again. Turkey Tail was recently on a Netflix documentary called Fantastic Fungi. So everyone’s all about Turkey tail right now, but honestly, I do blends. I do reishi, maitake, shiitake Turkey Tail is, there’s 90% overlap in the mushrooms, 10% difference on how they all work. So blend them together and get as much benefit as you can, but it helps everything. And outside of you being allergic to them, like some people allergic to shiitakes, that’s about the only side effect we have to worry about. So at the end of the day, it’s food, and food is, we don’t have to worry about side effect profiles.

Megan Lyons:

Incredible. Well, I would like people to know that you’re a human beside or behind all of this incredible information. So I’d love to just hear about some of your personal health routines. What are 1, 2, 3 things that you love to do to keep yourself healthy? And then of course, we’re going to tell people how to find you and learn more from you and work with you.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Well, my biggest problem is stress and overworking. I work in cancer patients, which stressful and I own in three clinics, which is stressful, and I teach, which can be stressful too. So a lot of my practices are around that. So I get massages twice a month as weekly, just again, even if my muscles aren’t sore just to turn off my brain. I’m a competitive sand volleyball player, and I don’t let anything get in the way of that. I even have an indoor sand volleyball place in the wintertime in Chicago that I will play at, and I never miss a game ever, and I don’t let myself, not because I love volleyball that much, it’s just because I know my body feels better when I move. So I’m very vigilant about not missing the exercise that I love. I’m very vigilant about not missing my massage. I do have an infrared sauna in my house. I do have a hyperbaric chamber in my house, and I try to use these things when I can, but honestly, more than anything else, and in a life like mine that’s so incredibly busy, it’s the simple changes of setting myself up to be successful. I know I’m going to go to work and be stuck with eight patients in a row over and over and over again.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

I will go to work and I know that I’m going to see eight patients a day in an hour, and I don’t take breaks between my patients. It’s go, go, go. But I will meal prep, I will have eight bottles of protein shakes ready to go so that if I have two minutes between a patient, I will make sure that I get the sustenance I need. And it’s a healthy sustenance because if you don’t prepare, then you’re going to want to order takeout or whatever it is, because the easy, fast option. And I just don’t allow those to be options. Right? It’s setting myself up. Literally a couple months ago, I bought a mini fridge to put in my bedroom that I keep stock full of green tea because sometimes it was, I wanted green tea, but I didn’t want to go downstairs and make green tea. I was so tired. So I took away that barrier and put it two feet away from my bed. So there was no more barrier. So whatever your issue is, whether it’s stress, whether it’s food, it’s finding ways, whether it’s going to the gym, as I always say, I don’t care if it’s a crappy gym, pick the gym closest to your house, take away as many barriers as you can so that these changes are implementable.

Megan Lyons:

Fantastic. I think people are going to be knocking down your door wanting to get some more information. So where’s the first place you would send them?

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Our website certainly has the most information. It’s nourish healthcare.org, but pretty much all of our social media is that. So on Instagram, it’s Nourish Healthcare on Facebook, it’s Nourish Healthcare. Sometimes. I don’t even know why Google puts us as Nourish Natural Healthcare. It’s not our actual business name, but we show up that way a lot of times. But I’m in the Chicago suburbs, and like I said, I have three different clinics here and I have other doctors that treat other things other than cancer. We’re not only cancer, but I only see cancer patients. But yeah, the website is definitely the best place. Nourish healthcare.org.

Megan Lyons:

The website I will say, has fantastic information, so I would go check it out if you’re listening to this. Even if you’re just curious about what working with Dr. Robinson or his team would be like, go check it out. And the Instagram as well. I don’t personally spend a ton of time on Facebook, but I can vouch for the Instagram being very helpful and very insightful. So we’ll put both of those links in the show notes. And thank you so much for your time and your wisdom today. I know you helped a lot of people and I truly appreciate you being here.

Dr. Michael Robinson:

Of course. It was great, and I’m happy to be able to connect with more people.

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