Understanding Cancer: Genetic vs. Metabolic Disease

In this episode of Ultra Life Today, Dr. Melinda Schottenstein shares her insights on cancer treatment, emphasizing the importance of hope, understanding the body's terrain, and the integration of conventional and alternative therapies. 

She discusses her unique approach at Mitogenesis Clinic, highlighting the significance of comprehensive testing and personalized treatment plans. The discussion also touches on the challenges of collaborating with allopathic doctors and the empowerment of patients in their health journeys, along with inspiring success stories from her practice.

“Tune in” to the full episode for an in-depth exploration of Dr. Mel's integrative approach to oncology, and learn how to navigate personal health journeys with innovative and holistic therapies.

Listen here or watch the episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Q_jEAqXBknU

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): This person had such a high level of stress, but wasn't vocalizing it to her family. And she had thyroid cancer, nodules all over the thyroid. And she didn't have a lot of time that she was able to stay at the clinic only about a month. And then after that, she was going to have to come back later. So halfway through treatment in the month, she had to go back home to be with her family. And I said, this is your opportunity to address this stress and just get it out there. You know, don't. Don't hold on to this.

0:00:32 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Just say what your pieces and move forward. And she's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. And I said, nope, you've got to do this. I said, this is critical to you getting better. So she comes back, she. She's like, you know what? That was great. I told everyone how I feel. She says, I feel so much lighter. I just feel like I've been, you know, just a major burdens taken off of me. So we finished two more weeks of treatment. I told her I want to retest and also get some new imaging for baseline before she leaves so that we have an idea of where we're picking up and what we're going to do for her at home.

0:01:04 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So she retests and the imaging comes back. No tumors. I mean, just gone.

0:01:10 - (Josh Bellieu): Wow.

0:01:11 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I couldn't believe it.

0:01:22 - (Josh Bellieu): Hey, everyone, welcome to Ultra Life. Today, you know, rewind the tape a little bit. We've been having a fascinating conversation with Dr. Mel. Melinda Schottenstein of Mitogenesis Clinic out in Scottsdale, Arizona. You know, we've covered this incredibly inspiring story of hers, which I think I'll probably listen to and sleep learn. We moved into a little bit touched on mitochondrial health a little bit. But, you know, we want to talk about some nuts and bolts and some practical things related to Melinda's treatment philosophy and cancer treatment because she sees so much of this at her clinic.

0:02:00 - (Josh Bellieu): So again, welcome Dr. Mel for mitogenesis and Adam, I'm so glad we're here.

0:02:07 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, I am too. So, Doc, let's, let's. Is there hope for people with cancer? What. What's your approach? A patient comes in, they feel like they've been given a death sentence from the oncology community, saying, well, we can do chemo and you'll live for nine months or without chemo, you're only going to be here for six months. What do you want to do, Mr. Or Mrs. Patient? And that's not a discussion. I want to have with the doctor.

0:02:39 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. And, in fact, I see that really often. And I. I hate it when death sentences are given because I feel like that nobody knows. And, you know, none of us can predict the future. I don't have a little crystal ball that I can pull out here and, you know, and look to see what destiny is going to bring or some Magic 8 ball I can shake and go, okay, yep, six months. There we go.

0:03:01 - (Josh Bellieu): Great point.

0:03:02 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And that is one of the most frustrating things, because I feel if someone internalizes that ticking time bomb, so to speak.

0:03:10 - (Adam Payne): Yeah.

0:03:10 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Then they make it a reality. And that's the first discussion I have with them before even discovering what's going on, what the source is. And that's, you know, don't internalize what you've been told, because nobody knows. And they're basing everything on just generalized statistics, and nobody is a statistic. We're all unique.

0:03:32 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. And you've seen.

0:03:33 - (Adam Payne): Amen.

0:03:33 - (Josh Bellieu): Very different outcomes. So you can actually spark and infuse some hope into their life. And just as a quick aside, I have literally seen so many individuals who had that, and some of them were like, you're not hanging that moniker on me like you did. Others that kind of accept that I've seen their health decline so rapidly. So what you just said is such a great starting point. Continue, please.

0:04:01 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And I even realized that personally, not just with the. That diagnosis or prognosis, rather that I was given when I was 15, but when I was 12, because I had such terrible chronic headaches, I did. They did a MRI on me and thought that there was a brain tumor. I was beside myself when I thought that this was the diagnosis. And then I went back to my room while we were, you know, waiting to go back to the doctor the next day.

0:04:31 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And I thought to myself, no, they don't have the power to tell me whether I'm going to live or die. And I decided, nope, I'm going to have them retest it, and I'm just going to visualize that this is going to not be there in the next scan.

0:04:47 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:04:49 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So I made them repeat it, and that's when I learned about the large amount of error that can occur with reading scans because there was nothing present when they rescanned it.

0:05:00 - (Adam Payne): Wow. Yeah. You must have felt so vindicated at that moment, like.

0:05:06 - (Josh Bellieu): Well, yeah.

0:05:07 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah.

0:05:08 - (Josh Bellieu): And. And, Adam, sadly, I've heard this story so many times as it relates to reading scans and other things that, you know, probably do fall out of the miraculous realm and into the hands of user error.

0:05:21 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, it happens. Yeah.

0:05:23 - (Josh Bellieu): Wow.

0:05:24 - (Adam Payne): I. I believe it.

0:05:26 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So, yeah, I couldn't believe it when I was told that it's something like 20% error in terms of reading.

0:05:34 - (Adam Payne): Now, you've been in the medical profession now for over a decade, is that right?

0:05:39 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah, about a decade.

0:05:40 - (Adam Payne): So you've seen misinterpretations. What do you really chalk it up to?

0:05:49 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): You know, I think that sometimes I think it's that people are trying to be so over cautious in terms of the diagnosis just because we're in such a litigious society.

0:06:01 - (Adam Payne): Oh, that's true.

0:06:02 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And it's better to be over cautious and over diagnose it than give. Give maybe something that might be a little more gentle in terms of the diagnosis. I've seen that as part of it. But then I think also there's human error. And, you know, we're all human. We make mistakes in terms of reading stuff. And if you're looking at, you know, 100 scans a day, you're. You're bound to misread something. And, and that's why if I see something that's from a report that's coming back that really doesn't make sense.

0:06:36 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I have people do the imaging again, because I don't want to base it solely on. I don't want to base my treatment solely on something that I'm not certain if that's really real or it's, you know, or it is something that has rapidly changed. So. So it's always. I think there's. There's a combination of things that you have to look at when you're. When you're really assessing where people are. And, and that's the number one thing I tell people is we have to do imaging, we have to do testing, we have to really confirm what's going on versus just accept and jump into treatment because we're not gonna help anything.

0:07:14 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): We have story.

0:07:16 - (Josh Bellieu): Well, Adam led off with this kind of idea of allopathic and then integrative functional as it would relate to looking at a particular patient through the eyes of Dr. Mel. I think it's a really great segue to begin to talk a little bit about the difference in the type of testing that you might do compared to what is the standard allopathic world out there and what that tells you and then allows you to build a roadmap toward a health journey for someone.

0:07:48 - (Adam Payne): Can I start with a basic question? Is, in your opinion, cancer a genetic disease or is it a disease of metabolism?

0:08:01 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I think it's a disease of. I think Metabolic function is part of it. I think it's the overall terrain that is dysfunctional.

0:08:09 - (Adam Payne): So help us understand how you define terrain, because most people think of terrain as that part of the. When I go on my 4x4 Jeep up into the wilderness, I'm off the road and on difficult terrain. But what is it medically?

0:08:27 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So terrain is like the environment that's in your body. And when we have. So think of like our planets. Our planet is. We have an environment that we're living in. And when that planet, well, which it is, it becomes polluted, then essentially the planet becomes sick, our internal ecosystem.

0:08:46 - (Josh Bellieu): Is that okay to say? Okay.

0:08:47 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wow. Okay. That's a great way to describe it. So how do you approach even understanding what's dysfunctional in the terrain?

0:08:55 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So first, when I talk with people, I like to hear their history of where they lived, what their dental history is, what they have been exposed to, what their job is. Do they do night shifts, for example? Have they taken exogenous hormones? And if so, is it synthetic or natural, what they have, what maybe medications they have taken, what vaccines they have been given, what viruses they have been exposed to, what infections they may have had, surgeries they have had in the past, or any of these things to get kind of a comprehensive history of where things have been since they've been a baby up through now.

0:09:32 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:09:33 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Because when you. When you hear the story, you start to see a trend. And there's this theory of homotoxicology, and which I feel really, it really resonates with me in the sense that you. You've been. Let's say you've been exposed to something as a child and maybe that thing wasn't really addressed. So then it gets deeper in the system. So now later on, it's. The body is adapted to it, it has become a little sicker because of it.

0:10:04 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): But maybe you're not totally dysfunctional. So over time, then something appears again and then again, it's kind of like a little warning sign from the body that something's going wrong. But maybe that really doesn't get addressed. Maybe you're just given medications to support it again, and then it gets deeper and then so forth until we get to a point where it's really significant dysfunction. Like cancer.

0:10:24 - (Adam Payne): Yeah.

0:10:26 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And that's. And, and you really start to see that trends when you start to hear the whole history. And there's pretty much. I. I can't think of a person that I've worked with where there hasn't been something, some glaring thing that they've been exposed to that that we can't tease out from their story. And then test.

0:10:48 - (Josh Bellieu): Brilliant. So again. And Adam, that was a. That was a great little detour we did there. So you do a lot of things at mitogenesis, Some things I've never even heard of before, which I'm fascinated about, studying more about. But, you know, at your clinic, you've gone through this kind of exhaustive health history with someone. And for you, having done this over a decade, seeing hundreds and hundreds of people, you made it sound as if it's like the master detective that begins to see a pattern emerging in an individual's life, isn't it?

0:11:25 - (Josh Bellieu): And then from that point in time, you do have testing modalities, but then you also have treatment modalities. Can you kind of give us a. The yin yang of that?

0:11:36 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. So once I can figure out what the major exposure is, then we'll start doing tests. I do my best to narrow it down as much as I can to really target what it is that I think is the biggest thing that's going on. I tend to order also a really extensive blood panel so much that I even get complaints about it. But I think it's important to have a really strong baseline to know how the immune system is really functioning, because that's one of the first places we see major dysfunction, whether it's a person with cancer, Lyme mold, or some other chronic, complicated thing going on.

0:12:14 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And various inflammatory markers, too. And when I say inflammatory markers, not just like your sed rate and crp, other things like mmp, for example.

0:12:25 - (Adam Payne): Interesting.

0:12:26 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So I like doing pretty expansive test and to see if I can see a major trend. And then those ends up being a great baseline for us to monitor and see changes over time.

0:12:41 - (Josh Bellieu): Is this really expanded blood panel? I want to go back to that because I know you've got. You may have a percentage of patients where you can do certain things through insurance, but we understand in the integrative, functional, orthomolecular world, it's cash pay. When you talk about a comprehensive or really expanded blood panel, what are you learning from that? And does that fall under the normal tests that you can actually get done done where insurance might pay for that or.

0:13:08 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): No, great question. Actually, a lot of my can get covered by insurance in terms of that major blood panel. Okay. The specialty tests, which are looking at more of, like, your toxic exposures, those unfortunately not. But the. But the ones that are looking at the immune system, looking at the various metabolic markers, looking at some of the inflammatory Markers, all of those things. I can usually get that covered by insurance by sending the people to one of the major laboratories.

0:13:40 - (Adam Payne): And then there's the organic acid test, which I think is. A lot of people don't know about it, but I think it's one of the most revealing, telling tests that people can get because it actually looks at the metabolites that your body is creating or other, and you can see metabolites from fungus, from some bacteria, et cetera, that are better clues of things going on in the body than a blood panel can sometimes give to you.

0:14:15 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I agree. I agree. I think that when you combine all of those together, you get this really full picture of what's going on and where the dysfunction is.

0:14:25 - (Josh Bellieu): Is there an aha moment that you get from doing a comprehensive blood panel? I know it's going to. There's no one size fits all. Everything's unique. But is there something that you have found, especially as it relates to cancer, that when you get this expanded blood panel done, you're like, yep, check the box. Yep. Check the box. Yep. I'm curious, what. What. What might that be?

0:14:48 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Definitely cytokine panel is a really big one. That one. That one. Right. Right away, when I see that, and I know the history, combining the two, you see it right there, it's all of a sudden in black and white saying, look, this is what's going on with your immune system. Either it's suppressed. It's, you know, it's stressed by some pathogen, and it looks like you have a chronic infection. So you. You can see that immediately.

0:15:14 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): The other thing would be, I would say some of the other more specialized, I call them inflammatory markers, but I know they have other major uses, too, but stuff like your mmp, transforming growth factor, beta tumor necrosis factor. What else? I do C3A, C4A, some of those.

0:15:38 - (Adam Payne): B, Apolipoproteins.

0:15:39 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah, I'm so glad you're mentioning those, because so often when an individual is at their practitioners, whether they be allopathic or other, the individual doesn't know how to drive the conversation. And so you've just mentioned some things that our viewers could then say. Mr. Physician, Mrs. Physician, I would like for you to go ahead and order these because I find sometimes that even integrative doctors I know don't order some of those.

0:16:09 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): They don't.

0:16:09 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay.

0:16:10 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah, I've. I've had it where I've written panels, and then people have gone to their primary care or the oncologist, and they're like, okay, what is your Naturopathic doctor ordering. And they look at this and go, oh, this is way too expensive. You don't need any of this. It's not going to tell you anything.

0:16:26 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wow.

0:16:28 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Call me back and go, they said I don't need this. I'm like, well, are you happy with the treatment you're getting currently at the hospital? You know, and they're like, no, no.

0:16:38 - (Josh Bellieu): That's why I showed up to see you, Dr. Mel.

0:16:41 - (Adam Payne): Okay, yeah. We need to uncover the terrain. Right. And if we don't, if we don't know where the defect is or where the problem is, it's hard to target an approach to dealing with this.

0:16:54 - (Josh Bellieu): Maybe you could. And again, I know there's no one size fits all, but maybe we could take a general category that's highly recognized, such as prostate cancer. And you've done this expanded panel. You've learned certain things that like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This, this is cancer. You learn it's prostate cancer in your clinic. What are some of the different therapies that you utilize that might even cross over into the way you treat other types of cancers, like breast cancer, like endometrial or an ovarian cancer, things like that?

0:17:28 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. Great question. So we do a. Depending on how the labs come back and if we need to really stimulate the immune system, or if we're working on detox, or if we're working on, you know, all the above, or we're working on maybe calming down major inflammation, that's going to really push the certain direction that it goes in. And that's why even you could have five people sitting in the same room doing for the same condition, but all have very different plants because of that.

0:17:58 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): But in terms of general generalized. Some of the therapies would be botanical IVs like curcumin, resveratrol, quercetin, doing light based therapies, photodynamic therapy, doing sonodynamic therapies.

0:18:15 - (Adam Payne): Oh, interesting, huh?

0:18:17 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Doing hyperbaric oxygen, lymph treatments are important. Detox. Sometimes people need chelation. So. Mistletoe, various immunostimulatory things, therapies like that. Using peptides and polyphenols too. Exactly.

0:18:38 - (Josh Bellieu): She started with the main one, but she mentioned IV curcumin.

0:18:42 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, we have. It's a, it's for photodynamic therapy. Hands down, being able to get that large amount of curcumin into the body quickly so you can be ready for photodynamic therapy. Great. You know, the Webers have been Using our N acetylcysteine bound curcumin as an alternate, that you can give the patient two capsules of Ultracur Pro and they'll have 120 milligrams of circulating curcuminoids.

0:19:14 - (Adam Payne): So yeah, it's a great alternative, especially when patients don't have the time to get the IV and doing all that stuff.

0:19:24 - (Josh Bellieu): So you are a class example of, classic example of what I'm seeing today out there. Adam and I, over the last several years since we have developed at Ultra Botanica something to support individuals on this type of journey. One of the things we've seen, and really it is on the heels of the, of what I kind of call the COVID revolution. Individuals feeling empowered to take health into their own hands, they're no longer trusting, especially a lot of the conventional three letter agencies and the health community.

0:19:57 - (Josh Bellieu): What are your thoughts on this revolution revolution of people that are following in your footsteps as a young woman? You basically said, by golly, I'm going to do this, I'm going to find out answers, I'm going to go to the libraries and stuff. People are very empowered these days and they're doing that. And I think that's a double edged sword at times. What are you, what are your thoughts about that? But then also so many people are using off label pharmaceutical applications these days and some are seeing doctors like yourself, some are seeing allopaths and some are actually just not seeing either camp of doctor and just doing it themselves.

0:20:39 - (Josh Bellieu): Tell us a little about that because that's a huge thing that we see with people doing off label therapies. We see a lot of integrative, functional doctors recommending some of those things. And then we also see a lot of people just doing it on their own. Give us some pros and cons there because I really want people to key in on this so that they can at least navigate that road effectively and safely.

0:21:01 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. I think the, the number one thing when people are doing it on their own is first you need to know what direction you're going down. You don't want to just throw a whole bunch in and you know, like a combo soup of stuff without even really knowing why.

0:21:19 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, okay. So there would be at the very least some basic testing from someone like yourself that could order that really expansive blood panel and say, okay, you're going to be doing some things at home. I know, I understand that, Mr. Mrs. Patient. These are the things that are telling me this is the way you begin your journey. These are some of the things that you implement.

0:21:43 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Okay, I think that's important. I'll give you an example. I had a gentleman come in once, and he brought in literally two crates of supplements.

0:21:54 - (Adam Payne): Two crates?

0:21:55 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Two crates. And I said to him, are you. Are you taking all of these? And he said to me, yeah, you know, I seasonally kind of rotate through all of these, and I mean, two full crates. And I said, oh, my goodness. I said, this. This is a lot. I said, I'm really worried about your liver. And we did tests, and right away his liver enzymes were terrible. They were off the charts. So I said, the first thing we're doing is I'm stopping you on everything, and we need to really get a solid baseline of where you are not on this.

0:22:29 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And because, yes, you can do a lot of good yourself, especially if you're not getting treatment or support from those around you or maybe don't have access to it. But the other thing I would also caution you is be careful, because some of these can cause major side effects. The most, I would say the worst side effect I've seen from someone taking stuff that they. Combining too many things was a combination of ivermectin and mebendazole.

0:22:59 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And the person's liver enzymes were. Were terrible. And we had to. We had to do a very serious. Not just detox, take them off of it, but also work on restoring the liver for a couple of weeks because of that. So it's not to say these. These are harmful, but everything. Everything needs to be used carefully. And. And I think it's, you know, being cautious and careful with what you choose and looking at contraindications with medications that you may be on. And because herbs themselves are no different than pharmaceuticals in that sense that they still can have contraindications, they can still interact with things that you might be currently taking.

0:23:44 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And I think that's something that people should be aware of, that even if it is sold over the counter, it doesn't mean that you can load up on everything and it's 100% safe.

0:23:54 - (Josh Bellieu): Right?

0:23:55 - (Adam Payne): Exactly.

0:23:55 - (Josh Bellieu): Right, yeah. How do you marry the world and incorporate conventional therapies with what you do as a regenerative, natural, functional, integrative type of practitioner? Because I know Adam and I have encountered hundreds of people in the last few years that actually are walking down a parallel path. They've got an allopath, they've got an integrative, or. They're looking for an integrative or functional practitioner like you.

0:24:25 - (Josh Bellieu): How do you. How do you do that? And work with the allopathic doctor to navigate someone toward health. And it's. And it's a loaded question, right. Because some practitioners are like allopaths, oftentimes through cytotoxic, you know, chemotherapy, and things are actually doing potentially, in some people's opinion, more harm than good. Anyway. Yeah, go ahead.

0:24:48 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So, yes, it can be particularly challenging. Mostly it's challenging when the other provider doesn't even want to acknowledge any of the things that we're doing and shames the patient and tells them that they shouldn't be doing and they're going to cause harm.

0:25:04 - (Josh Bellieu): We've heard that.

0:25:05 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah. Despite the fact that I'm always willing to supply research and talk with the other provider and share labs and share notes and, you know, have open communication, the amount of times that I actually do have other provider that is willing to do that, unfortunately, is very small.

0:25:24 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:25:25 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I wish it was the other way because I think people would have better outcomes if it really was the other way. And I think that it's really criminal if, you know, if doctors, you know, regular, conventional doctors aren't willing to even read the research that supplied it.

0:25:44 - (Josh Bellieu): Huge red flag, right?

0:25:46 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah.

0:25:47 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. Well, you're actually, you. You started the club called I was fired by my doctor club. That's what I'm going to call it. I want that T shirt, by the way. And then with that having happened, I guess these days there's a lot of people that are joining your club because I have heard the same stories. I've heard of allopaths, and I know they're constricted by the actual system that they work in and litigious society that we have to. Where oftentimes they kind of have to just say, from their perspective, they're trying to protect themselves, and they say no, which literally excludes the patient from someone they had a lot of trust and confidence in. I'm so it's glad there's people like you out.

0:26:31 - (Adam Payne): It's a horrible betrayal. I mean, the story I hear more often is the. One of the family members has been asking the patient to, you need to add or try this natural approach. You need to do this. And the family member's like, no, we're going to do just what the doctor tells us to do. And then they get fired from the doctor because they get that meeting where the doctor says, well, we've exhausted everything that we can do for you.

0:27:02 - (Adam Payne): We don't really see that there's any other options. Here's a script to go into hospice when it Gets too painful.

0:27:08 - (Josh Bellieu): Well, and the other firing from the doctor is the ones that then go to their doctor, as Mel said, they go to their doctor and say, hey, I've looked at this, I've read this, I have friends. This is working for. What do you think? And then the doctor says, if you do that, you won't be my patient.

0:27:25 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, yeah.

0:27:26 - (Josh Bellieu): Which is completely.

0:27:28 - (Adam Payne): These are, these are difficult societal question troubling. They're based on decades of misinformation and campaigns against a holistic approach to wellness. But it's becoming more and more impossible to ignore.

0:27:46 - (Josh Bellieu): Yes. You're the perennial learner. So this is a great question for you. What advancements in integrative oncology, functional medicine as it relates to oncology that have really gotten you just like charged up and excited in the last few years? Like, oh, this is going to be a game changer. Or these are going to be game changers.

0:28:08 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): I got to know, boy, there's too big of a list, but.

0:28:13 - (Josh Bellieu): Oh, well, that's nice.

0:28:15 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah. But I would say that the biggest issue we have is whether we can actually bring some of the therapies into the U.S. hyperthermia, for example, is a therapy I think is fantastic.

0:28:28 - (Josh Bellieu): Really? Give us an example of. For first, tell people what hyperthermia is, because it sounds like cold plunges to me.

0:28:35 - (Adam Payne): It's the opposite.

0:28:36 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, tell me what it is.

0:28:38 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. Hyperthermia is basically boosting your body temperature to induce a fever.

0:28:43 - (Josh Bellieu): Oh, yes. Okay.

0:28:45 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah.

0:28:45 - (Josh Bellieu): Yes.

0:28:46 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And you can do it several ways. You can do it with things like mistletoe therapy. You can do it with actual hyperthermia devices, local or whole body hyperthermia. And then there's even places that do a version where your blood is taken out, heated and brought back in.

0:29:02 - (Adam Payne): Oh, interesting.

0:29:04 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And, but yeah, we don't do that part at the clinic that's actually done at a hospital. But as for the other types of hypothermia, here in the US we're actually very limited with the available types. Local hypothermia that is easy for us to find. Whole body hypothermia, because most of the machines are not approved, even though they're widely used in Europe with a ton of research. They're. They're not approved by our fda.

0:29:35 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So this, these machines that are actually approved for hyperthermia, they will have the, the person will sit inside the, the system or lay down, rather raise their body temperature and then induce them into fever. What you'll find at some places that they're doing is they're using saunas to do it. I think there's problems with that too because if you're keeping a person in that stressful state for about six to eight hours, I think it's very hard on your cardiovascular system and it's just a very strenuous treatment. So I'm not in favor of that. But true hyperthermia to induce fever, especially if we go back to like the whole idea of Coley's toxin even, which that has such an amazing history.

0:30:23 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): You know, again, inducing fever to push the body, to push an immune response. So that's one thing. Light based therapies. I love light based therapies in many ways. I mean we, our, our cells depend on lights. We need light. We, we generate light when we produce energy. Yeah.

0:30:46 - (Adam Payne): That's so fascinating.

0:30:47 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Yeah, we're, we're like plants as well, you know, we, we need light to survive. And I think there are so many different ways that light therapy is incorporated. Whether it's a topical thing, whether it's intravenous, whether it's intratumoral. Light therapy is. I love the results with that.

0:31:08 - (Josh Bellieu): Take taking a daily stroll for about 20 or 25 minutes during peak sun time. Yeah. So, so inspire us maybe with one or two success stories or things that have happened within your, your care at your clinic that have been inspiring. Like your story has been with you implementing some of the testing and then some of the actual practical tools that you use from your toolbox. Can you, I know you have HIPAA things you would never mention any names, but you probably can think of one or two things that's like, it will leave our viewers with, hey, there really is hope and there's inspiration here and there's, there's a way for me to find a way out of what I'm in right now.

0:31:51 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Sure. Okay. I'll give you, I'll give you three people that, yeah. That I think are great. One, the first one I'm going to start with is actually where the toxin was, emotional health. And that one is something that, you know, you can't just, you know, hey, I'm going to do this test and see, see, you know, hey, you have high levels of stress other than cortisol and you know, looking at your adrenal function, those sorts of metabolic markers. But talking with the person you, you knew that she had tremendous stress.

0:32:25 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): This person had such a high level of stress, but wasn't vocalizing it to her family. And she had thyroid cancer, nodules all over the thyroid. And she didn't have a Lot of time that she was able to stay at the clinic only about a month. And then after that, she was going to have to come back later. So halfway through treatment in the month, she had to go back home to be with her family. And I said, this is your opportunity to address this stress and just get it out there, you know, don't hold onto this.

0:32:58 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Just say what your piece is and move forward. And she's like, oh, I don't know, I don't know. And I said, nope, you've got to do this. I said, this is critical to you getting better. So she comes back. She. She's like, you know what? That was great. I told everyone how I feel. She says, I feel so much lighter. I just feel like I've been, you know, just a major burden's taken off of me. So we finished two more weeks of treatment. I told her I want to retest and also get some new imaging for baseline before she leaves so that we have an idea of where we're picking up and what we're going to do for her at home.

0:33:30 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So she retests, and the imaging comes back. No tumors. I mean, just gone. I couldn't believe it. In fact, I even asked her to retest it, get new imaging again, because I didn't want to just say, hey, there's nothing there. And then it'd be an error because that'd be a major letdown. So retest. And again, nothing was there. I was blown away.

0:33:59 - (Josh Bellieu): Emotional release. Also, I've heard the power of forgiveness have similar things as someone shares their problem with a family member and the family member goes, oh, I'm so sorry. And then they make nice with each other and they forgive from the heart. And then all of a sudden, the person's health just has a completely new trajectory. Brilliant. Okay, that's one. How about another one?

0:34:23 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So a young woman that came in, teenager, and she couldn't walk. She was in a wheelchair. She had seen again, a huge number of specialists all over the country. We did testing, Lyme mold, long Covid Valley fever. I mean, whole bunch of co infections. I mean, just her system was overtaxed. So we did about three months of combination of IV hyperbaric ewod. I mean, just a combination of many therapies, eboo.

0:34:59 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): So extracorporeal blood, ozone, oxygenation, a variety of things on her. After three months, after the first month, she was already able to really start walking around, moving the wheelchair by herself. By month two, we were able to actually take her off of a lot of her medications. We knew that just when all of a sudden her blood pressure and heart rate were skyrocketing super high. And then I said, you know what? I think when you start taking off this medication is causing it.

0:35:30 - (Josh Bellieu): Right.

0:35:31 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And then start removing her off of medication then month three, she, she was.

0:35:36 - (Josh Bellieu): Doing great and off medication and ambulatory. She was actually then walking around and.

0:35:42 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Stuff and able, oh gosh, by herself without any issues.

0:35:45 - (Josh Bellieu): Incredible. Okay, we have time for one more and then I have to give your contact information again.

0:35:53 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And then the third one, I'll say, I'll tell you about a brain cancer patient. This person was given basically one one week to live. She called and said, hey, what, what can you do for me? I said, you know, I'm, I don't know. I said that, that's really my honest answer. I don't know what I'm going to do. But I said, that's the best thing I, I can do is try to give you the best quality life with what you have right now.

0:36:21 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And because you know, again, I don't have a crystal ball and I don't want to make promises that I can't keep and I want to be realistic. And by after we did about three months of pretty intensive treatment and after about three months of combination of IV therapy, hbot, ozone and mistletoe and other and peptides as well, her tumor shrunk by 25%. It was in a place that was completely inoperable and she could not have surgery to remove it. She wasn't a candidate for any conventional therapies.

0:36:56 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): And so from a person being given a one week diagnosis, I mean we were, we ended up making it all the way to month five.

0:37:06 - (Josh Bellieu): Brilliant stuff. You've been listening to Dr. Melinda Schottenstein. We call her Dr. Mel. She's our friend, new friend to us. You can reach out to Mitogenesis clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona at 480-781-4800. That's 480-781-4800 or you can go to her website to learn more about the interesting approach that she has for cancer, for Lyme, for mold, for heavy metal and other types of things that are really environmental struggles these days for people.

0:37:43 - (Josh Bellieu): Mitogenesis health. That's M I T O G E N E S I S dot Health H E A L T H Mel, I know we're going to have you back and I know we're planning on doing some things behind the scenes because we may do some collaboration between us and your clinic and learn some things together about what we do here and what you're doing there to help people get better. I cannot thank you enough for coming on. You're inspiring.

0:38:12 - (Josh Bellieu): And I. I haven't not stopped thinking about you since I met you. Because it's like people need some hope in their life. And your story is brilliant. Thanks again.

0:38:23 - (Dr. Melinda Schottenstein): Thank you for having me.

0:38:26 - (Josh Bellieu): Ultra Life today.