180. Healing Cancer: Brandon LaGreca LAc, MAcOM, on Integrative Oncology and Immunotherapy

In this episode of Limitless Healing, host Colette Brown welcomes Brandon LaGreca, a licensed acupuncturist and expert in traditional Chinese medicine, to share his incredible journey of healing from stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma using an integrative oncology protocol that included immunotherapy.

Brandon dives into the role of environmental toxins, and the emotional factors behind disease, offering practical strategies for detoxification, stress reduction, and strengthening the immune system. He explains how immunotherapy, holistic therapies, and lifestyle changes played a crucial role in his recovery.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking cancer prevention, healing, and optimal wellness.

Episode Highlights:

02:20 Get to know Brandon his exposure to Asian ways and before his cancer diagnosis 

06:33 Brandon's diagnosis of non Hodgkin's lymphoma

08:27 Chinese medicine and how everything comes back to being inbalancewith nauture

12:04 Personality types that tend to get cancer

16:35 Stresses if the day carrying over into night making us sick

20:05 Blood sugar regulation steps to balance well being

25:50 The importance of air purification in our world today

27:53 Lifestyle approaches we can all try to be healthier

More about Brandon:

Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM, grew up on the East Coast of the US and attended
Montclair State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in science with a
minor in religion, summa cum laude. He then moved to the West Coast to fulfill a drea he had from the age of 12 of studying traditional Chinese medicine. He was accepted to the prestigious Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, where he earned a master’s degree in acupuncture and Oriental medicine. His postgraduate work included studying and working at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in China. After 10 years of private practice, Brandon experienced firsthand the journey of the wounded healer when a series of small bowel obstructions led to hospitalization and diagnosis of stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He achieved remission eight months later following an integrative oncology protocol that included immunotherapy without surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. He now lectures and writes on the epigenetics of cancer and has dedicated his career to empowering patients through and beyond chronic illnesses such as cancer. His latest interests include studying indigenous forms of healing and eco-spirituality.

Publications:

- Cancer and EMF Radiation: How to Protect Yourself From the Silent Carcinogen of Electropollution

- Cancer, Stress & Mindset: Focusing the Mind to Empower Healing and Resilience.

- Cancer, Trauma & Emotions: A Traditional Medicine Path to Spiritual Wholeness

- Empowered Patient Blog

Website: http://BrandonLaGreca.com
Amazon: https://amazon.com/Brandon-LaGreca/e/B07LGB5ZTK
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/brandon-lagre
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18731846.Brandon_LaGreca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmpoweredPatientBlog/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brandonlagreca

______________________________________

Connect with Colette:

Instagram: @wellnessbycolette

Website: love-colette.com

Thank you for listening to the Limitless Healing podcast with Colette Brown! It would mean the world if you would take one minute to follow, leave a 5 star review and share with those you love!

In Health,
Colette

Transcript

 [00:00:00] Our next guest is a licensed acupuncturist and expert in traditional Chinese medicine with a master's degree from the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine and postgraduate training at Nanjing University in China. After being diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma, He achieved remission using an integrative oncology protocol that avoided surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy.

[00:01:25] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Brandon now lectures and writes on cancer epigenetics, focusing on empowering patients who are chronic illness and exploring healing practices like eco spirituality. He is the author of several books on cancer stress and healing and shares his insights on his blog, empowered patient. blog. com. is

[00:01:47] Colette Brown: my great honor to welcome Brandon LaGreca. Welcome, Brandon. 

[00:01:52] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Thank you, Collette. Thanks for having me on. 

[00:01:54] Colette Brown: It's great to have you. I'm all about all things wellness. And I read one of your posts about why do patients wake up at 3 AM? And that's how I found you and reached out to you to bring you on to talk a little bit more.

[00:02:08] Colette Brown: But first. What I like to do with all my guests is we like to go back in time to maybe a favorite childhood memory so we can get to know you that may have led you to where you're at today. 

[00:02:20] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: That's a great question. I loved playing the memory game when I was a kid and I had this unusual reputation of beating my parents when I was just a wee lad, maybe six, seven years old.

[00:02:31] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I would consistently beat them and my parents still had very good memories, but I had this kind of reflection later in life that I almost had this intuitive sense of what card was underneath. And and so I think I've, I have leveraged that over the years as a practitioner and relying heavily on my intuition in order to help diagnose and treat my patients.

[00:02:50] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So I think about that as a favorite memory of being a kid and saying, I had a really good intuitive sense back then, and I've learned to cultivate that over the years. 

[00:02:58] Colette Brown: That's amazing. It goes to show, I think, parents, right? Allow your kids to explore, encourage their talents and gifts, and don't put them in a box.

[00:03:09] Colette Brown: And I think that's great. So you had a, sounds like a great childhood. Where did you grow up? 

[00:03:14] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I grew up on the East Coast in New Jersey, basically an area outside of New York City. 

[00:03:18] Colette Brown: Okay. All right. I love New Jersey and New York. Great area. And then where did you go after you left home? 

[00:03:26] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So I left in my early twenties.

[00:03:28] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I went to college in the East coast as well and then left for graduate school in the West coast, which was in Portland, Oregon. So I was there for about five years both at school and then working in a clinic shortly thereafter with the little interim that I traveled to China and did some work and study there as well.

[00:03:43] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And then I eventually moved by way of my wife, of course, as these things go, to the Midwest. So I'm now, I'm in rural southeast Wisconsin, and I've been there since 2008. 

[00:03:52] Colette Brown: Amazing. So what was it about The Eastern medicine that drew you, was it a particular instance that you, cause you obviously you studied science and you're curious and what pulled you into that?

[00:04:08] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah, that's a great question. And as you say, my, my bachelor's is in biology and pre med. And so I do have a firm grasp of that and the footing there. But. I was really exposed at a young age to Asian ways of thinking and, for instance, the martial arts and philosophy. But the thing that really grabbed me, I think I was about 12 years old at the time, and there was a PBS special with Bill Moyers, if you remember him as a journalist, and it was a series called Healing in the Mind.

[00:04:36] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And in that series, we see Bill traveling to China and observing a great many things. And one of the things that really just opened me up as a young, impressionable person was seeing a patient getting brain surgery in China on the operating table. And Bill Moyers is speaking to this person. Through a translator because the patient has to be awake for brain surgery as they're poking around and this patient did not have any anesthesia.

[00:05:02] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: They only had a mild sedative that they had taken and all the anesthesia was being provided by electro acupuncture, which means there was needles placed in certain parts of the body. There was electric current stimulating those points, creating this constant flow of what we call endorphins, right?

[00:05:17] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: They're our body's natural pain relieving chemicals. And so seeing this, and you could still watch this video and this clip probably on YouTube to this day, was very eye opening for me, very impressionable, right? The second scene that I remember is then seeing Bill walked through a park in Beijing and seeing a qigong master teaching his students both tai chi and qigong And there's the scene where you see him doing these seemingly impossible things like holding back 10 people with his hands out because he's Projecting his life force his energy in a way that you know can create this defense and it looked like the Force and Star Wars, right?

[00:05:53] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It was incredible. And I just wonder, can people really do those things? And so that was enough to get me fired up to say, I want to figure this out. And it's been a quest ever since. 

[00:06:02] Colette Brown: Amazing. I grew up in Washington state, so I've been to Portland many times and what a beautiful place that is too.

[00:06:10] Colette Brown: So you began your journey and then at what point did you learn about your Hodgkin's lymphoma? 

[00:06:17] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah. So I was already in practice for about 10 years when I was diagnosed. So I was diagnosed. you? So this was, so this itself was 10 years ago. So my diagnosis was 2015. Okay. And I was 34 at the time.

[00:06:33] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So I was 34 being diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoma, a subtype called follicular lymphoma, which is [00:06:40] typically only seen in the later years of life, in the 70s or 80s. So I was diagnosed with a very old person's cancer and a very young person. And this happened in a time where I felt like I was in the prime of my life.

[00:06:53] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I was eating really healthy, I was exercising, I was trying to be, this paragon of health for my patients. Frankly, I was quite a bit blindsided by the diagnosis when it hit. In fact, I didn't really have any other symptoms of me having cancer other than what eventually brought me to the hospital, which is I was having episodes of a bowel obstruction.

[00:07:14] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I was having these intermittent episodes of severe abdominal pain and nausea and vomiting. When I finally went to the ER, I got a CT scan, and that's where they showed that my abdominal cavity was filled with tumors, the biggest of which I believe was about four inches, and was cutting off my intestines, causing these bowel obstructions.

[00:07:31] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: All of my blood work at that point was actually even normal, so the only symptom I had was these bowel obstructions that eventually got me diagnosed. 

[00:07:38] Colette Brown: Wow. And do you know the cause? Was it genetic? Was, like, is there any answers around that or? 

[00:07:47] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's a good question. I have some inklings going back into my history.

[00:07:51] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I don't have the answer. Um, I think your question actually is a much larger question is because I could go outside of myself and ask, what causes cancer? In general, not just in me personally, and I break that question, I think there's actually really two questions embedded in that, and it's both how we get cancer and why we get cancer.

[00:08:13] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And if you allow me to dig in a little bit, I can explain more of what that means. I'm going to take, I'm going to take a step back for a moment and just rely on my roots in traditional Chinese medicine to explain the cause of illness. And then I'll answer that question about cancer very specifically after that.

[00:08:27] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So in Chinese medicine, we say there's really only, at least in my interpretation of Chinese medicine, there's really only one cause of all illness, and that's an imbalance with nature and natural rhythms. That's it. Everything comes back to how we are in balance with nature and that can have many different manifestations You know You can't go sleeping three hours a night after night or eating junk food day after day without expecting something to break in your Body, right?

[00:08:48] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: You're just simply out of touch with what a natural rhythm for a human being is And we do that in very many ways in modern civilization. But suffice it to say, if we were to take that one principle of being in balance with natural rhythms, we can further break that down into a polarity. And so many people know this symbol of yin and yang.

[00:09:07] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's called the Tai Chi symbol, right? The black and the white. And so what that pictographically describes is the inner and the outer, right? This breakdown of duality. And What that means by extension is that there are internal causes of disease and there are external causes of disease.

[00:09:23] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And where those two meet for me is the art of medicine. So when I see a patient I'm always looking for where those two things interface, right? And so specifically as it applies to cancer now coming back to that, you know the how we get cancer I have a really easy, quick answer to that, and it's just carcinogens.

[00:09:42] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: We are exposed to carcinogens, and carcinogens are the very things in our environment that alter our genes in a certain way, alter their expression in a certain way. which causes mutation, which causes cancer. Okay, so that's the external cause of cancer. And we know that pathway pretty well. But there's also an internal cause as well, and that's the why we get cancer.

[00:10:04] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And I say why because why do some people get heart disease and why do some people get cancer? Or why do some people get autoimmune disease? And I think this is where we have to rely quite a bit more on traditional medicine. to get a handle on the situation, because traditional medicine talks a lot more about constitution and our perception of ourselves and our, and the illnesses that we get, how we react to them, right?

[00:10:29] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: All these things matter. And so there's this saying in Chinese medicine that all illness derives for an, from an imbalance of the seven emotions. How I interpret that in modern parlance is to say, All stress derives from an imbalance, particularly from stress and trauma. 

[00:10:46] Colette Brown: Can you go through those seven emotions really quickly?

[00:10:49] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah, so they correspond to the five major organs and the five major elements in Chinese medicine. Okay. And when it comes to, I'll just start with the liver, which is the wood element, and that's anger. But it's anger, it's frustration, it's those kinds of, poison that you have in your system from the From whatever, feelings of aggression you have moving into the heart, the fire element the motion that's where it's joy.

[00:11:12] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: But I think that's a bit of a misnomer. I actually think it's more like the kind of a frantic frantic energy, almost like a mania. Like you, you just think of a kid on Christmas day going nuts and opening up everything and then having this kind of manic energy about them that we say scatters the heart energy moving into the lungs and the metal element.

[00:11:29] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: We say it's grief. Grief is the element that is associated with that going into the spleen and the earth element It's worry and anxiety both those two So there's the two that go with that and then going into the water element, which is the kidneys It's fear and fright and the difference between the two is fear is this looming I don't know what's coming next and fright is the startling, i've been shocked the shock to the system So it's those seven emotions and the imbalance with them which again I would then label Stress and trauma is the two things that we experience as being the internal cause of illness, right?

[00:12:04] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And so those are the things that set the stage and I explore this in my most recent book we have a type a personality that describes the kind of people who get heart disease there's a type C personality that tends to get cancer and those are people who tend to be a little bit more Demure or meek.

[00:12:20] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: They tend to be giving a lot, but very seldom asking for help themselves. So there's a certain reticence that I think lends itself to a cancer personality. 

[00:12:30] Colette Brown: Wow. That's not 

[00:12:31] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: always true, of course. But that's 

[00:12:33] Colette Brown: fascinating. Like thinking of the people that I know that have had cancer, that the ones that come to mind immediately, that rings true.

[00:12:40] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah, and I think the thing I rely about the most in my writing is really exploring metaphor with people and for instance especially in the work with what are called aces or adverse childhood Experiences, there's this massive study by Kaiser Permanente about looking at adverse childhood events that happen to people and Then disease later in life and there are things that happen to us that I feel like create the seed of disease within us.

[00:13:05] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I'll give you one small example. I had a patient many years ago who succumbed to cervical cancer. That cervical cancer happened within a year or so after her son tragically died. I believe it was in a car accident. Now I'm sure [00:13:20] from the perspective of trauma that a part of that woman died that day with her son.

[00:13:24] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And I cannot imagine the grief of losing a child. And so think of the metaphor of having a cancer in an area where she literally brought her son into the world. I think about that often with women and breast cancer and their nurturing instinct and such. We think about that a lot with things like colon cancer and letting go.

[00:13:40] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So all these metaphors, they may sound airy fairy, what's the connection? But to me, they really in some ways set the stage for how our body is coping and where these weaknesses are in our body that disease can then manifest, if that makes sense. 

[00:13:55] Colette Brown: Yeah. And then also there's the yin and the yang, as you referred to before.

[00:13:59] Colette Brown: And if you are experiencing the trauma, there's ways that you need to release to let that out and go through whether it's therapy but some type of personal growth through that. So do you touch on that in your books as well? 

[00:14:14] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Absolutely. Yeah, and I have two separate books on this. One, I deal more with stress and the mindset of a cancer patient.

[00:14:21] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And I separated that out from my most recent book, which is on emotions and trauma. And the reason why I did that is because I think everyone could clearly benefit from understanding the stresses in their life and what it means to think about being a cancer patient and how to overcome that on a mental level.

[00:14:37] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: But maybe not. Everyone's ready to go a little bit deeper into their story and look at their traumas and the emotions that they store in. People can be ready for one book and not the other. But essentially, there are two sides or the two parts of the same story. So for people who are ready for it, one right after the other, they would give that complete picture of that.

[00:14:55] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Those two components, stress and trauma that contribute to illness. 

[00:14:59] Colette Brown: And can you just list the name of those two books for listeners right now? 

[00:15:03] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah. The first one that I mentioned is called Cancer, Stress and Mindset. And then the one that I just recently published the last few weeks actually it's called Cancer, Trauma and Emotions.

[00:15:12] Colette Brown: Wow. I love that. That's going to be on my top reading list. For sure 2025. So I'm going to dive into that. There's so much here. I could have you on for 24 hours just talking and sharing your wisdom. But I wanted to really quickly go into how I found you, which is people. I hear all the time. I wake up every morning at three in the morning all the time without fail.

[00:15:37] Colette Brown: I'm up and I can't go back to sleep. I don't know what's happening. And. In researching it, I came across your work and so I'd love for you just to share with us what's going on at three in the morning to wake people up. 

[00:15:50] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Sure. I'll give you the Asian interpretation first and then I'll backpedal a little bit and explain that more in Western terms.

[00:15:58] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So yeah. Thank you. In Chinese terms, we say that this time right around three o'clock in the morning is when the energy of the liver is most active, okay? The liver in Chinese medicine does a few things. In Western terms, we say the liver detoxifies and such, right? That's obvious. But in Eastern terms, we say it does more than that.

[00:16:15] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It also detoxifies emotions. It's also responsible for the smooth flow of emotions in the body. In short, the liver kind of mitigates stress, okay? And what a lot of people end up doing in the modern world is encountering a lot of stress through their day and not necessarily resolving that by the evening.

[00:16:35] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And if they carry their day's stresses into the night, there's a lot of things that can happen. One is, the things you're ruminating on you tend to dream about. And you tend to have very active dreams. And that's a time in the evening where people are dreaming more. They're having more REM sleep as opposed to deep sleep, which happens in the first half of the night.

[00:16:53] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So maybe the things that they have not resolved in their day or their weeks prior come back in, in a way that they try to start working themselves out. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we think of the liver in us in processing of these emotions as it's attacks to the body, right?

[00:17:09] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: The body has to needs energy to do that And so now this kind of circles back into the Western idea which one of the more common things that tends to happen is You know when we're stressed cortisol, which is a hormone that gets released from our adrenal glands goes up Okay, now cortisol should be highest in the morning, gets us ready for the day.

[00:17:27] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Cortisol, we want some degree of cortisol. We don't want it too high, we don't want it too low. And then we want cortisol to slow down and dip throughout the day until finally in the evening, it's at its lowest state and melatonin rises and we should get a good night's sleep.

[00:17:40] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: But we can have this phenomenon in western terms where cortisol spikes in the middle of the night. And there's two reasons why that can happen. One is cortisol will become elevated in the presence of stress. And a stressful dream alone can do that. But the second thing, and this is coming The other reason in western terms why people can get up in the middle of the night is because someone's blood sugar can be low, okay?

[00:18:01] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And cortisol, as a hormone, is a glucocorticoid. The gluco part means glucose. So how it actually helps our body, one of the ways it helps our body to cope with stress is by raising blood sugar. And so we could see this little spike of blood sugar that could come up to meet it. Either way, what I tend to observe with patients is that little wake up call around 3 o'clock in the morning tends to be accompanied by a little bit of cortisol, and then maybe, if the blood sugar really truly is having trouble regulating itself, maybe a little bit of a spike of epinephrine, right?

[00:18:32] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: The alarm hormone that we are, adrenal glands also elicit. And so if you put all of that together, You have, you paint this picture of I'm being woken up because I'm either stressed about something or there's a stress upon me as in a blood sugar dysregulation. And either of those two is again, the kind of the yin and yang of why people would wake up in the middle of the night.

[00:18:52] Colette Brown: That's really fascinating. And then you have ways to test it that you you shared that people can test. doing a protein or honey. So can you tell us about how one can test where that's coming from? 

[00:19:06] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Sure. The lab way to do it, if someone's really wanting to be super scientific about this, and I do this with patients, is I'll give them a saliva test that they can actually take a saliva sample when they wake up and see if their cortisol truly is high.

[00:19:18] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: But if you don't have access to a practitioner to really document that, a couple easy hacks that you can try. If we're suspicious that it is a blood sugar issue, and I'll tell you where I see this the most. I'll see this in a patient who maybe has a good diet throughout the day, but they tend to want a big bowl of ice cream, in the evening, hour or two after their dinner.

[00:19:37] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So what's happening in that case is that they get a pretty good hit of carbs or, sugars before bed. the blood sugar goes up, but it crashes and it crashes in the middle of night. And that's that alert stress to the system that I need to recruit cortisol to bring my blood sugar back up again.

[00:19:52] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And so if I sense that there's that kind of blood sugar dysregulation occurring, I will try one of two things. If [00:20:00] there's someone who is pre diabetic, I have a good suspicion that they're already having blood sugar issues. I'll say. Skip the ice cream by all means, cause you don't need that anyway.

[00:20:09] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Or whatever sweet treat that you're trying, you're eating and have something that's a little bit higher in protein and fat just to see good example, couple slices of cold cut turkey have that right before bed. See if you sleep like a baby. And if you do, you realize that you needed that little extra protein and fat to tide you over through the night.

[00:20:25] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And your blood sugar stayed stabilized. Now it's not a great long term solution fixing your. Your metabolic issue is the long term solution. That's just a test to see that if that's really at the underpinning. The flip side of that is someone who tends to eat very well, but maybe they're either malnourished or under eating or they're extremely active and Maybe they're just super hip to paleo diets, and right, they're on a low carb diet, what have you.

[00:20:51] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And they actually need a little bit more carbohydrates to sleep properly. We need a certain amount of carbohydrates to produce serotonin, and then by extension, melatonin. These neurotransmitters and hormones. So for that person, you can try the opposite principle, which is give them a little bit of carbs before dinner, and a teaspoon of raw honey.

[00:21:07] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Just does that beautifully. Blood sugar raises nicely. Again, this is the patient who's not having blood sugar issues. They just need a little extra something to tide them over, and suddenly they sleep like a baby. So they're doing great. And then the third thing I'll mention, just because I started this, answering this question with this whole stress piece, is For the person who really feels like they're having a lot of stress dreams, maybe they're waking up with headaches because they're quenching their jaw all night, right?

[00:21:31] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: They're still ruminating on all these things. One of the best strategies that I have found working with patients over the years is just to get them to journal before bed to just write whatever they're carrying with them through the day. Try to just as a means of catharsis, just get it all out of their system, write it all out get it out of you.

[00:21:47] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And then, if you don't carry that into your sleep, then that's one less potential for a stress that can be causing this. This middle of the night interruption. 

[00:21:54] Colette Brown: Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah that's great. And so if anyone is having that waking at 3 a. m., pay attention to it.

[00:22:02] Colette Brown: It's telling you something about your body. And you should be sleeping through the night. So really look into that. Let's get back to your story. of how you overcame your cancer. And I interrupted you asking a question about the the seven emotions. So if you remember where we left off, yeah, getting back into your story.

[00:22:22] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Sure. I basically, I was just, I was saying that I was living a fairly healthy life despite being blindsided by a cancer diagnosis. And that's becoming an increasing problem these days. We're seeing younger and younger people get cancers. We're seeing younger people get really dire stage 3, 4 cancer diagnosis.

[00:22:41] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So this is an increasing problem. And it speaks to several things. And I'm not, I'll say this, I'm not a one trick pony in the sense that I obviously write about stress and trauma and those are important things. These are ways of discussing what we call terrain of the body.

[00:22:55] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: What is the health and the resilience of the body? What makes it susceptible to disease and such? And to me, that's just giving credence to holistic medicine, which is my date of court, right? To help educate people that that is as important as the carcinogens that we are being exposed to because that's what makes us susceptible.

[00:23:13] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: But I still have one foot in the environmental medicine world and I look at the increase of cancer rates and I just have to shake my head and say, our bodies are really just mirroring the poisons that we are putting into this planet. And the more herbicides and pesticides that we use, the more heavy metals that we're exposed to.

[00:23:33] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Oh my goodness, I'm thinking about the people in L. A. right now and the fires, right? And that's not just pine trees getting burned, right? That is, we're talking about all these things getting released, dioxins and phthalates. And it's rubber, it's plastic. It's building materials that are going up that are causing Asbestos.

[00:23:50] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Right, asbestos, and the particulate matter that people are breathing from the last several years of just fires in general, right? Among other things. These are all the stresses that we, our bodies, are dealing with now. It's a really polluted food system, right? With processed and ultra processed foods that are filled with chemicals and such.

[00:24:08] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's body care products, again, that are polluted with hormones and in different chemicals. It's the packaging around our food. It's the building materials around our house. It's even electromagnetic fields, which was my first book, just calling attention to the possibility that non native EMF can possibly be a carcinogen.

[00:24:26] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's not any one of these things. It's the collective soup of all the things that we're being exposed to. And so like I said, I'm not a one trick pony. I want to get across to people that if we take this Chinese wisdom very seriously of the internal and external, it's both of them. Yes. And this is why it's very hard to get a handle on cancer.

[00:24:46] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's very hard to look for one cause of cancer because it's the collective exposure and it's the collective imbalance within us and the fears within us that come together to make, the epidemic of cancer and what it really is in the industrialized world. 

[00:25:00] Colette Brown: Yeah. I also think in your situation and others like that where you're doing everything right, that sometimes we need to go the hard, Path in order to come out and be a light to people as well that they can see that they can overcome.

[00:25:17] Colette Brown: And it's not easy, but you've shown that it can be done. And so just to get on the fires in Los Angeles where I'm at, I have my windows closed. I have air purifiers running when I'm going outside, I'm usually putting a mask on. Not always when I'm driving, I have the recycled button going.

[00:25:37] Colette Brown: Not breathing the air, but what else can we do? And there's, I know we can eat certain foods to help detoxify, but what else can we do to prevent that further damage that can happen from all these fires? 

[00:25:50] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah, so first, I like everything you just said. I've written several posts on my blog about air purification and, the ins and outs of that and really accessing medical grade HEPA filtration, which is, it's almost mandatory now living in the industrialized world.

[00:26:03] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So good for you for taking that step as as the, as we say, either you have an air filter or you are the air filter, right? So we want to put that off onto the filter as much as possible. And I can say the same thing about water filters and so on, right? Those are all great steps to take.

[00:26:21] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So there's obviously always going to be some exposure, even for me in East Troy. There's farm fields and pesticides and such, right? So then we go back to the question of terrain. So how do we bolster ourselves as much as possible? So the first thing you said is spot on. It, a lot of it comes down to the liver's ability to detoxify.

[00:26:39] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Again, now I'm [00:26:40] speaking more in western terms. Making sure we give the body, and in particular the liver, everything it really needs to be able to process toxins and toxicants as much as possible. Eating your greens. And what's the one of the most potent source of getting those chemicals, those phytonutrients, we call them, or phytochemicals, is from things like sprouts, just really live foods, you can juice them, you can eat them in salads but a lot of cruciferous vegetables is another good example of that.

[00:27:05] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Getting your greens, getting a lot of good organic produce just giving your body the raw nutrition that it needs. It also needs a fair amount of B vitamins and I mostly for most people propose for them that they should be looking at just a healthy nutrient dense omnivorous diet.

[00:27:19] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: So I'm not in one camp or the other in terms of whether someone needs to be vegan or vegetarian. And and people's constitutions are different. So we need a good amount of protein and B vitamins. And so look at really good quality animal foods to, to supply that as well. Making sure you're getting enough sleep.

[00:27:33] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Absolutely key. Solve this 3 a. m. problem if you have it, of course, waking up getting a regular exercise and a particular sweating, right? Because we detoxify a lot through sweating. So that could look like going to a sauna or a steam room, or even a hot bath will do it, frankly. You can get a good hot bath and get a good sweat going for the part of you that's above the water.

[00:27:53] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: All these things are great lifestyle things, right? We don't look at these as one offs. These are the things you want to incorporate into your routine, into your self care. Then there's targeted supplements. We can use things like milk thistle to help support the liver. Or in my case, I did a workup of myself and realized, and this may explain in part why I got cancer at such a young age, is that I have a gene deletion.

[00:28:13] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I don't make as much glutathione as the average person. Wow. Glutathione is, our, liver's master detoxifier, for those that don't know it, and so you can do genetic workups, and I do this with patients all the time, figure out, is there any specific SNP or gene deletion that might, if we address that with nutrition, now your body's ability to detoxify has been upregulated again.

[00:28:34] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: There's personalized things you can do, there's generalized things that everyone should be doing, and the combination of the two are usually what's going to give us the best best possible outcome with These things that we're being exposed to. 

[00:28:45] Colette Brown: Yeah. That's great. What are your thoughts on cold plunges?

[00:28:48] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Oh, they're helpful. Yeah. It's I've got well water YM. So all I have to do is turn the shower all the way to cold. And that does the job for me. It is absolutely really calming and centering to the nervous system. When you, I talk about this in my second book because it's one of the ways you can cope with stress and release serotonin, endorphins and such as getting that cold water.

[00:29:06] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: When you get a cold plunge, man, your mind is nowhere else, but in that moment, right? It is like instant meditation. And so for a lot of people it's what I call the, I'll break it down how we cope with stress, there's ways that we can mitigate stress, right? We can also avoid certain stresses and then we can stress proof ourselves, which means we, we put ourselves in the deliberate position of encountering a measurable amount of stress in order to, Grow more resilient in the face of it.

[00:29:33] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And so the couple that I talk about in my book, one of them is cold exposure. And the other is, form different forms of breathing that can almost put a stress in the body, like a hyperventilation that you'd want to do in a controlled setting. But the most successful one by far is, is cold showers and cold plunges, because if, and here's where I think all the benefit lies, you hit that cold.

[00:29:52] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And the first thing your body wants to do is hyperventilate. But if you can slow it down and calm yourself and your heart rate goes back down again, That's learning to nip the stress response in the bud. 

[00:30:03] Colette Brown: So 

[00:30:04] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: it's wonderful for that. Absolutely. 

[00:30:06] Colette Brown: Yeah. I know. I have a girlfriend that We were on a really good routine of going once a week in the ocean and and we would always say we can do hard things because it's really, it's mind over matter.

[00:30:18] Colette Brown: It's oxygenating the body and just the way you feel after and do you, I enjoy doing it. Absolutely not. It's not easy. It's like everything inside of you wants to say, what are you doing? But Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. When you get in and that breath work, you just start breathing and, slowing it down.

[00:30:36] Colette Brown: It's amazing that the therapy that it does for you in such a short amount of time, it's really beautiful. Yeah. 

[00:30:44] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah. 

[00:30:45] Colette Brown: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I could just keep talking to you on and on about all these things. But one of the questions that I ask all my guests as we get towards the end is if this is the last message that you could broadcast out to the world, what would that be?

[00:30:59] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Oh, heavens. That's huge. I love that you're putting me on the spot with that, I think one of the hits almost like a bumper sticker, but one of the things I really, as a virtue always keep coming back with is this idea of begin within and my main message to people, it's, my blog is called the empowered patient blog and my newsletter is the empowered patient newsletter.

[00:31:18] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Everything I do is around empowering my patients. And as much as possible, I want to teach them how to fish, right? I don't want to just give them help. I want them to really internalize it and own it. And there are so many things that I could make recommendations to patient and then I stop and I look at them.

[00:31:35] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I say You've got all this is so particularly true with cancer patients. You have a million options, right? You can spend hours Researching things you can drive yourself crazy But I think all of this is an exercise of personal empowerment in the sense that You're going to get a lot of ideas, a lot of opinions.

[00:31:51] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I don't care what you're going through cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease. There is a, we are suffused with information. That's not the point. The point is for you to rise above that and get into a place within yourself where you're still, and you take all the options that are before you. And just come to a place where you know what to do.

[00:32:10] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Where you just fully I'm gonna be still with this, and I'm gonna figure this out. That's what I'm after with patients. I want that one moment where they say, I get it, and this is what I need to do. Cause and frankly, this is again, so true in the oncology world. People have a lot of options. Some people want to do straight conventional.

[00:32:27] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Some people want to do all holistic. Some people want to do a combination of the two, integrative, which is where I like to be in the integrative world. And frankly, I don't care what a patient does. What I want to see from them is I don't want to see them waffling. I want them a hundred percent behind the thing that they're doing.

[00:32:41] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: I want their heart and their soul behind it. And that's true of so many things in life. So if they can begin with within and if they can just have a few moments of just I'm going to sit with this, I'm going to figure this out. I know the inner guidance is there on a spiritual level, right? And I'm going to just find that out for myself.

[00:32:57] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: That's where all the growth happens. That's where people, that's where spontaneous cancer admissions happens. That's where people really truly do miraculous things. So that'd be the message I'd get across to people. And I still do. I try. 

[00:33:08] Colette Brown: That's a beautiful message to share. And is there any other words of wisdom that you feel that The everyone like you're dealing with it over and over day after day.

[00:33:19] Colette Brown: People [00:33:20] are coming and it's just one little thing that, that somebody could do, or maybe it's three things. Yeah. And you've put a lot of information out today already, but is there some other like little piece of advice that you can throw out there for people to just up their health a little bit more to live a better life?

[00:33:37] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Yeah, I would say two things. One of them, and I say this to patients all the time, just try to make tomorrow a little bit better than today, really don't overwhelm yourself, be incremental in your process. Just think about making small changes that are sustainable, that you could, that you can do for the long haul.

[00:33:52] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: And then, With that also think back to this kind of Chinese medicine paradigm that I introduced at the beginning of our conversation Which is really truly look at both the internal the external really look at what's going on the inside your perceptions your stresses your traumas But also look at the things on the outside that you're exposed to the people around you, right?

[00:34:11] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: It's not just the things you're eating. It's what's eating you, right? It's not just the poisons in your environment. It's the poisons of your emotions They are both true do not forsake one for the other And so if when you can really blend those two together And maybe dip a little bit in each pot each day and try to improve yourself in that way You're going to make it, you're going to make massive leaps in your health and wellness 

[00:34:33] Colette Brown: Yeah, that's such great advice.

[00:34:34] Colette Brown: I really appreciate all of your information that you've shared here. Can you tell people how to find you? 

[00:34:40] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: Sure so my personal author website is just brandonlagreca. com, and my last name is spelled L A G R E C A, so you're welcome to go there, and that kind of has everything. If you want to just, if you like what I've had to say and you wanted to join my newsletter, which is probably the best way to get it's just a monthly newsletter to hear what I'm up to, book releases or places that I'm speaking at.

[00:34:59] Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM,: You can just go to cancermindset. com. There's a subscribe page there. You'll get a free meditation. And then you can just hear on a monthly basis what I'm up to. 

[00:35:07] Colette Brown: I like that. Thank you. And I'll put all this in the show notes along with your books so that people can bend your content because you have so much to share with the world and you're doing such a beautiful job of that.

[00:35:18] Colette Brown: And I really appreciate you being with us today. So thank you, Brandon. Thank you everyone for listening. If this meant anything to you, please share it with your friends because together we can heal and I want to thank you all for listening and until next time, be well.