Healing Cancer Holisticly- Open Forum in The Villages, Peg Harvey, S3, #6

In this podcast episode, the host interviews Peg Harvey, a 13-year survivor of terminal cancer. Peg shares her experience of receiving a devastating diagnosis of Stage IV lung cancer that had spread and being given just months to live by her doctors. She describes the negative impact that the news had on her physical and mental health, causing her to isolate and deny the reality of her situation.

However, Peg's life changed when she visited a holistic healing center near San Diego called the Optimum Health Institute. The center provided her with education, tools, and techniques to help her heal herself, acknowledging the interconnection between the mind, body, and spirit in the healing process. Peg embraced their regimen and had a remarkable recovery in just 9 weeks.

Throughout the episode, Peg discusses the importance of hope and empowerment in the healing process, and how a holistic approach to health and wellness can transform one's outlook on life. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone dealing with a serious health condition, as it offers inspiration and practical advice for finding hope and healing.

My thanks to my supports for this podcast: Alvin Stenzel, Ed Williams amd K2 The Villages - Dr. Craig Curtis.

The show description was written in part by Open AI, Chat GPT

Transcript

 This is Mike Roth. Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages podcast. In this show, we're going to talk to leaders in the community. Leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to give perspective of what's happening here in the villages and Information that I think all villagers should have we hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9 o'clock How can your support our podcast?

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This is Mike Roth. I'm here today on Open Forum in the Villages with Peg Harvey. Thanks for joining me, Peg. Pleasure. Peg was the director of education at the San Diego Zoo and taught Thousands of people about wildlife and conservation for almost 30 years. In 2010,  she landed a different kind of a zoo.

She was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She learned she only had a few months to live. Determined to heal, despite the odds, she discovered a nearby holistic health institute. There, Peg learned how we can use the power of the mind, body, and spirit to heal. In five months, her cancer went from stage 4  She spent the next 10 years as the program director of the Optimum Health Institute, teaching others to live their healthiest and happiest lives.

Gratitude for a second chance at life underlies her life motto. Inspire, encourage, empower. I really want to thank you for being with us today, Peg. Peg, I always start the show with a little bit of a joke for my grandson, Evan. See if you can answer this one, Peg. Why did the cookie go to the hospital? No, I Because it was feeling.

A little crummy.  I thought that was a good joke for today's show. Peg, what, in your own words, tell us your story, how you went from stage four cancer, which is usually a terminal situation, to no more cancer in only 19 weeks.

Started in 2008 when I was diagnosed with stage two uterine cancer. My conventional Oncologist recommended a radical hysterectomy followed by 35 rounds of pelvic radiation.

And when I finished the treatments, my oncologist said, just go back to what you were doing. Eat what you were eating and drink what you were drinking and think what you were thinking. And I did. Uh, about two years later, uh, my husband and I had been accepted. For summer jobs with Prince's Cruises, we were going to be working at Copper River Lodge up in Alaska.

I needed a chest x ray as part of a pre employment physical. And in that chest x ray, they discovered the uterine cancer had metastasized. to both of my lungs. There was a lemon sized tumor in my right lung that was inoperable, a walnut sized tumor at the back of my left lung, and innumerable tiny tumors scattered like a shotgun went off in both lungs.

That's when new oncologists said, nine to 18 months to live, nothing we can do, nothing you can do. Get your affairs in order and live joyfully. So I went home and um, I'm married to an Irishman and I said, bring me the largest bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey you can find.  I self medicated for a week, didn't eat any food, just drank that good old Jameson's.

And on the sixth day I emerged, it was a Sunday, and I said, I'm going to do two things today. I'm going to go to church and I'm going to out myself to my church community and get some prayers coming in. Then I want to walk across the street to the farmer's market and get some good food because I was literally starving.

Mm hmm. And you were living in San Diego at this time? Living in San Diego at the time. So I went to church, a lovely friend named Phyllis held my hand, uh, when I used the words terminal cancer for the very first time. Walked across the street to a farmer's market, had large bags of lovely produce. And my husband said, well, we got to go down this last row of vendors.

And I said, oh no, our car is the other direction and I'm getting a little tired here. And he said, no, no, it's just a short little walk. John, down this row of vendors. So we did, we headed that way and we encountered a man selling wheatgrass. Do you know anything about wheatgrass? A little bit. One of my uncles was very in favor of eating wheatgrass.

Okay. So you, you actually drink it, you juice it and you drink it. And it's considered to be a health tonic in a way. And, uh, so I looked at this vendor and he had these flats, about 18 by 18 inches of wheatgrass growing. It looked to me like something you would buy if you had a cat and lived in an apartment.

I didn't know anything about this health tonic. And all of a sudden, without my saying anything about the cancer, this vendor looked at me and he said, if I had a serious health condition, I'd get myself to the Optimum Health Institute in Lemon Grove. Lemon Grove is a sub suburb of San Diego.  Struck me as maybe a message from the universe or something.

I went home and I did a internet search and found out that there is indeed a place. It was 12 miles from my home. They don't do any marketing or advertising. They don't make any claims about healing cancer, but they do teach people how the mind, body, and spirit are connected and they help people detoxify at all those levels and then you sort of Get out of your way and watch the magic happen. 

So since I'd more or less gotten kicked to the curb by my oncologist, I signed up, checked in, did the program, which is, as I said, a mind, body, and spirit program. So were you a live in patient there? Yeah. How long were you a live in patient? Uh, I was there for almost six months, but, uh, Results came very quickly with the radical diet.

Change, relaxation, meditation, having people pray for you, praying. Mm-hmm, . Learning more about healthy food, healthy water, healthy habits, getting rid of emotional, mental blocks that might be impeding your healing. And in eight weeks after being on this program.  I had a chest x ray. That large lemon sized tumor had completely dissolved.

The walnut sized tumor at the back of my other lung was about a third of its original size. So, remarkable. No, there wasn't any chemo, any radiation, any, this was all non medical. Mm hmm. This was after you stopped taking chemo? I did never take chemo. Okay. They said that for the metastatic cancer It wouldn't be effective.

Mm hmm. So the doctors had given me 9 to 18 months to live and instead I sort of beat the odds Okay, 19 weeks. It was all gone. So what year was that? That was 2010.  So we're in  2023. 13 years. Celebrating my 13 year cancerversary, free from cancer for 13 years.  Could you tell us a little bit more about what holistic medicine is all about?

Yeah, holistic, the concept of holism recognizes that we are integrated beings. Mind, body, and spirit are connected. So conventional medicine deals almost exclusively with the physical body. Holism, on the other hand, recognizes that our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our beliefs, our spiritual connections, belief in prayer.

Lots of studies have been done, in fact, at Oxford and Stanford universities about the power of remote prayer. So they've had test groups and control groups where patients Hospitalized patients who have undergone surgeries are prayed for, and their outcomes are far superior to people who don't receive those prayers.

When I first checked into the Health Institute, I met with the woman who was the program director at that time, and she wrote on a oversized yellow sticky note something that I kept in my daily planner and looked at. Literally every day for six months and what she wrote was this, what the mind can conceive and believe the body can achieve.

And so that I think is the essence of holistic healing, mind, body, and spirit connected. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. You know, are there any scientific studies that prove holistic medicine is a legitimate path to take for the treatment of cancer? There's a very interesting book, it was published in 2014, called Radical Remission, written by a PhD, uh, Dr.

Kelly. Turner. She started out her PhD thesis interviewing oncologists to try to find out the latest and greatest in conventional treatments for cancer. One of the questions that she asked those oncologists was this, have you ever seen a patient who was diagnosed with advanced cancer who you told they had six?

nine, 12 months to live. But, uh, despite your prognosis, that patient went on to heal completely and live a long and normal life. Every oncologist that she interviewed said, yeah, we have patients like that. And her follow up question was, well, have you ever done any case studies to find out why, what did they do differently?

That. change the outcome. And each oncologist said, no, we don't really do case studies like that. We have a lot of patients. We are on a schedule seeing them every 15 or 20 minutes. We have to read all the package inserts on new drugs. We have to go to continuing education and deal with insurance companies.

Now we don't have time for that. So she tore up literally her original theses and she decided that instead she was going to find a statistically valid sample of Patients who had healed  holistically, she found a thousand such patients who had been told you have a few months to live and yet they survived. 

And she interviewed them to find out what methods and treatments they used. And there was a wide range. Think about a bell curve. There was a guy who went down to Brazil and he was healed by someone named John of God, a spiritual healer. There was another man who took a bottle of shark cartilage every day.

Some of the patients had chemotherapy, some had radiation, some had surgery, some had none of that. But all thousand of these people that she interviewed Did have nine things in common. What were the nine things? Well, I'll share a little bit from the book. They radically changed their diet. That was clearly something I did at the Health Institute.

It's a raw vegan program. They took control of their health. That was true for me as well. What does that mean?  You don't accept the prognosis. You accept the diagnosis. I believed the diagnosis that I had stage four cancer, but I wasn't willing to accept  the prognosis. Nine to 18 months to live. I had an intuition that I could.

Change that outcome. Okay. Uh, these thousand people followed their intuition. That was true for me. They used herbs and supplements. So, um, on the Optimum Health Institute, uh, diet, there were a lot of, um, cilantro, parsley. These are detoxifying herbs. Some of the, uh, spices like curcumin have been known to affect cancer cells in a positive way.

A lot of studies have been coming out in the past five years about vitamin D supplementation, D3,  and people who have high levels of circulating vitamin D in their bloodstream seem to be more immune to cancer taking hold. Now, did you take vitamin D? I did. Are you still taking vitamins? I do. Okay. They released suppressed emotions, so this might be anything from a grudge, anger, or, uh, feelings of, why me?

It's not fair. I'm such a good person and yet I've been diagnosed with cancer. Mm hmm. They increased positive emotions that might be gratitude, for example, being grateful, looking around at all we do have, focusing on that rather than what we've lost. Embracing social support. When I went to the Health Institute, I had a basket of cards, get well cards from friends and family members.

And I would describe the love and the caring and the affection of my family. Friends as sort of a tsunami of love. Mm-Hmm. just, uh, remarkable how, and that helped. Oh, absolutely. Okay. Deepening spiritual connections. I mentioned before, studies at Stanford and Oxford demonstrate that the power of prayer, even remote prayer, can be an effective healing strategy.

Okay. And finally, having strong reasons for living. Uh, at the time of diagnosis for me, I had a one year old granddaughter. I lived in San Diego. She lived in Portland, Oregon. She's 13 years old now. And I remember as part of my strategic healing master plan, we could call it, I made a written plan for myself.

I decided that I could go no longer. Then intervals of about eight weeks between visits with her. She was at that peak of baby perfection. And when I would play with her or hold her or cuddle her, it was almost as if someone was putting a pick line in my arm and infusing me. With  oxytocin and all those, those, uh, helpful, uh, hormones and chemicals that are good for healing.

So cuddling babies is one of my all time favorite things. What are the most effective things that you use to heal? Well, some of those nine factors that I just mentioned from the book Radical Remission. So  radically changing your diet is something that's obtainable for most people. And for you that meant going vegan?

Going. Raw vegan, uh, so the theory behind raw food is, um, sort of brought to the United States by a woman named Ann Wigmore, who was a pioneer of a raw food movement. And her theory is that when you heat food above a temperature of about 105, 115 degrees, you destroy the enzymes in the food, and those enzymes are catalysts that help the nutrition be assimilated.

Mm hmm. Um, there are some religious traditions that eat all organic vegan food. Seventh Day Adventist would be an example of those and they're known that as a group to live longer and healthier lives than the general population. Mm hmm. So just out of curiosity, what will you have for dinner?  So dinner on the raw food diet might be, um, zoodles, zucchini noodles, raw, and then a raw marinara sauce made of herbs and tomatoes.

Mm hmm. And maybe a side salad, uh, with, you know, loads of vegetables and a few sprinkles of something like hemp seed for protein, broccoli sprouts, all the sprouts, in fact, are high in nutrition, uh, polyphenols, these phytonutrients that we tend to overlook. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. What can listeners do if they're diagnosed with cancer?

Or another health issue. I would say, use your God given gifts, I'll call them gifts, of intuition, body wisdom, and common sense. So when a doctor gives a patient a diagnosis, and says to the patient, as my doctor told We called her Dr. Pit Viper, said to me, nine to 18 months to live, nothing you can do and nothing we can do.

I would step back and question that. That, that may be statistically correct. That may be the predictive outcome for the majority of people. But you are not a statistic. You're an individual. And there are many things you can do immediately to take control of your health. So where was the doctor that gave you this kind of, the Pitbull doctor?

Dr. Pitbull was, uh, the leading oncologist at a large HMO, dare I say that? You can say the name. It was Kaiser. She was a Kaiser oncologist. So you didn't go to a place like Sloan Kettering or No, I didn't. I didn't. I, I, um, again, I accepted the diagnosis, but I rejected the prognosis. Good. Good. And in your, your current remission status for the past 13 years, what are the Things that you do on a holistic basis that most people, or that you didn't do before your cancer diagnosis.

Radical change in diet. So my husband and I are, we call ourselves primarily plant based eaters. Uh, the term vegan in its truest sense means that you don't wear leather shoes, you don't eat honey because it's a byproduct of bees, and we're not that extreme, but we eat primarily plants. We get most of our protein from beans.

Seeds, nuts, healthy fats like avocado. We do occasionally eat wild caught fish. There are some omega threes that are healthy for our bodies that are found in fish, but for the last 13 years, we don't haven't eaten any red meat or chicken or poultry or anything like that. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So, if our listeners want to contact you to learn more about holistic healing, how do they do that?

About 10 days ago, I resurrected my Facebook account. I've been off Facebook since 2016. They could find me, send me through Messenger on Facebook. And your name on Facebook is? Peg. P E G. Harvey. H A R V E Y. Okay. And so, leaving Facebook helped you heal? As a matter of fact, yeah. I went on a, back in 2010, 2011, I went on the Health Institute that I stayed at.

It's very determined to have people disconnect from media, uh, social media, uh, even cell phone.  Most of us nowadays, I think, our cell phone is like, Um, attached to us with a imaginary umbilical cord. Well, they certainly have a dependency on cell phones. So when you were in the institute as an inpatient for six months, did you keep your cell phone?

I didn't have a cell phone at that time. I sold my car because I didn't want to be tempted with uh, going off program.  I only had one, I'll call it a modification, not a cheat from, from the raw vegan diet. I,  I did get over, make my way over to Target. I needed some smaller clothes because I'd lost a significant amount of weight and my pants were literally falling off my hips.

But I walked into Target and the first thing I saw was this enormous display of lays, Classic potato chips. Mm hmm. And like an addict, I forgot all about buying smaller pants and I went over and I grabbed a family sized bag of these chips and I ate the whole bag. Right. That was it. That's right.  That was okay because it was a pure vegetable product.

Well, not exactly. My body didn't react too favorably to that, but I think it proves a point. It's not what we do once in a while with our health. It's what we do every day. Mm hmm. And if you have 95 percent healthy living practices, eating clean food, drinking clean water, exercising, meditating, getting rid of stress, you can make a modification once in a while.

Good. Beg, let me ask you this one last question. What made you move to the villages, being a West Coaster? We lived in San Diego for 45 years and for 40 of those years. It was a paradise.  But in the last five years or so, things have changed. Um, it butts right up against Tijuana, Mexico. You've probably been reading about the border crises  because of San Diego's almost ideal climate, perfect weather, literally 365 days of the year.

It's a magnet for a lot of homeless people, very little law enforcement. So we lived in a pretty nice neighborhood and one of the turning points was about 5 30 in the morning, a woman knocked on our door. She was obviously on drugs, wearing a wet white t shirt and no underwear. And we said, well, maybe this is a sign that it's time to move to a little bit safer, cleaner, more reasonable place like the villages.

Great. Thanks for joining us here today, Peg. Is there anything else that you want to tell our listeners before we go? Just use that intuition if you're ever given a serious health diagnosis and take a little breath and a pause to do some due diligence about what all of your options are. Great. Thanks again, Peg.

And listeners, you might want to read that book that Peg has with her, Radical Remission. Who was the author again? Dr. Kelly Turner. Say the name again, Peg. Dr. Kelly Turner. She also has a website called 

The Radical Remission Project. com in which you'll find all sorts of inspiring stories about people who have healed from cancer naturally. Great. Thanks again. Pleasure. Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9 a. m.  Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at Mike at Rothvoice.com. 

This is a shout out for supporters Tweet Coleman, Ed Williams, and major supporter Dr. Craig Curtis at K2 in the Villages.  We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week.  If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike at rothvoice. com We thank everyone for listening to the show. 

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