Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
What If Healing Starts With Trusting Yourself with Richard McCuen
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A cancer diagnosis has a way of stripping life down to one brutal question: who’s really driving your health decisions? Joe Grumbine sits down with returning guest Richard McCuen, a military veteran who’s been through grief, injury, and a pancreatic cancer scare that forced him to rebuild his life from the ground up. We talk about what changed after watching cancer up close, why “wait and see” can be dangerous, and how recovery often starts with the unglamorous basics you control every day.
We dig into nutrition and lifestyle shifts that made a measurable difference, including cutting processed foods and dairy, focusing on hydration and minerals, and leaning hard into plant nutrition and chlorophyll-rich greens. Joe also shares how he used oxygenation, movement, and heat during his own cancer fight, then breaks down metastasis in clear language so listeners can understand what “spreading” actually means and why the body’s internal environment matters.
Then we get practical about the healthcare system, especially VA healthcare. Richard explains what it’s like to navigate rotating primary care providers, delays, and bureaucracy, plus the benefits many veterans don’t realize they can request. We also make a point that applies to everyone: evidence matters, sources matter, and the best plan is often a smart mix of Western medicine and supportive natural tools tailored to your case.
If you care about healthy living, cancer recovery, veteran health, or patient advocacy, hit play, share this with someone who needs hope and a clear plan, and subscribe, rate, and review so more people can find these conversations.
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Welcome Back And Why Now
SPEAKER_00Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and we got a really special guest today. It's been probably over a year since we've recorded an episode, but we have recorded many episodes together. Richard McEwen, welcome back. How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01Hi, Joe. We're doing a lot better, and we're glad to be back. And we promised this time that we we're gonna stay back and start tackling things.
SPEAKER_00I love it. I love it.
SPEAKER_01We've got a lot of information people want to need to know.
SPEAKER_00I think it's been probably close to a year and a half, maybe more, since we've recorded because I think one of the last episodes we recorded was after your mom died. And that's been more than a year and a half. And we you were dealing with your family and all the the grief, and you ended up moving. And and then you and I both went through a bout with cancer, and you've been dealing with your shoulder issues and so many things. We've decided it's time to get back into the studio and start recording some of the some of the things that we've learned and and experienced so that we can help other people. Anyways, it's great to have you back. We've been yapping away and I've been enjoying it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So to to bring up from where we where we left off the last time, as far as dealing with with my mom, I ended up with like what I've been studying and researching is hereditary inheritance. Like what what are residual effects that you know I possibly would have to deal with that you know our parents didn't deal with. So when my mom had got passed by the pancreatic cancer, I started developing the pay uh pancreatic cancer, and it started with a uh a blockage
Hereditary Risk And Diet Wake-Up
SPEAKER_01in my gallbladder. The main duct was clogged with a cyst to where it was clogging the gallbladder. Well, that's where it started, and I was able to cleanse myself, and I I got the I got the freaking the mutated cell is what I'll say. You know, I got it out of my out of my system, my gallbladder is fine. Nice. If I wouldn't have been able to do that, and they wanted to do surgery, you know, and they want to cut me open and do these things, and I just couldn't do it, Joe. And you know, I I paid serious attention to when my mom was going through things and just second by second, milliseconds, I was I was just paying attention to what everything was happening and what and why. And I I just instead of getting overwhelmed with everything, I started dissecting what the actual cause and reason was of why I'm having to deal with this. And it was just because of what I my intake of what I was putting in my body. So once I I stopped, I mean, I don't eat red meat, I don't eat meat anymore. I don't eat processed food, I mean, crackers, anything that's processed, I just my body can't hand handle it now. You know, even though it's healthy now, it just, you know, it was like when I did six months in boot camp and all I didn't drank was milk and water. And then when I got out, I wanted a Mountain Dew like crazy because I that was my favorite. And I I started down in it and I stopped immediately because it tasted different, it tasted weird, and then it felt like somebody punched me in my stomach. So it was like my body saying, Hey, we're healthy, we don't want that crap.
SPEAKER_00Isn't it wild? I I know that you know I've I've gone through a couple of different dietary phases, but one before I had the cancer, one after I had it. But it's weird that when you start giving your body good food, the junk food that you used to love, when you go back to it, it's just not the same anymore.
SPEAKER_01Nope, it doesn't taste the same. Yeah, it doesn't fire you up like I want some more.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Yeah, it's always like, oh, this is weird, you know. It's like there's something, something not right about this. Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_01So everything I was studying was, you know, lymphatic uh drainage, you know, your lymphatic system.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_01So I started thinking, well, what's like being back in my background of search and rescue, the Marine Corps, you know, with the sheriffs in search and rescue. I did a lot of you know medical, you know, in the field. And one of the things I started thinking about is what is the first thing that we're gonna do to you whenever you we attend to you, and that's either in the field or on the way to the hospital or at the hospital, is you're gonna get an IV.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're saline in it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, that's just salt water, and it's 9,000 milligrams of magnesium.
SPEAKER_00A whole bunch of salt, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So that's pretty much why we don't have a problem when we get there and they do results, and they're like, Well, we're not showing the same thing that you're complaining about as far as coming in. Right. We're just gonna monitor you and then send you home. That's because you've hydrated, they've already flushed the the toxin out of your body to where it's not identifying anymore. So I started thinking, well, how much more magnesium can I put into my body? And I started two tablespoons with 32 ounces of water and one lemon squeezed. And that will send you with a really good book
Processed Food Aversion After Healing
SPEAKER_01to the bathroom. So, and it's in an IV, they put it on a slow drip so that therefore it's hydrating your system cellularly. If you drink it fast, the 32 ounces of magnesium water, it's gonna go through and it's gonna like like how psychedelic medication does to your chakras, it's gonna scan your body and then it's gonna get rid of the waste. So that's what it does. And I've had people come to me and say, Man, I don't want, I don't want this crap anymore. I don't want that anymore. And what they have with salt water, you know, like I did it with my girl. She's like, I I want to I want to cleanse, you know, my body. I said, All right. So I 32 ounces of freaking water, you know, pH. We we use a copper jug and set it in the sun that charges, you know, during the day four hours, it'll mineralize the water like mountain water, spring water, take all the all the metals and everything out of the out of the out of the water, and it'll properly pH balance. Rain water is 6.0 to 6.2 pH balance. So anything between 6.0 and 7.0 is where your body can live acidic free and and be, you know, your blood will be thin and oxygenated to where there's no mucus can form to cause disease. I did it to my girl. I gave her 32 ounces of water and I squeezed one lemon. That's it. And I told her, slam it, drink it, don't don't sip on it, drink it, get it down, like they do in boot camp. You know, you get hydrate, get it. You know, you got 10 seconds to drink this, you know, liter of water. You know, and what that does is it's gonna oversaturate your entire lymphatic system and whatever mucus or anything that's attached to whatever cell or or vein or artery or anything, it's gonna flush it out. And she came back, you know, from you know her session, and she immediately said that she did not want any more of the half and half for her, which is what you know we use for creamer for coffee. She immediately that I said, How do you feel? She goes, I don't want any more half and half.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_01Well, that was her body during the cleanse telling her that this was one of the things that was causing the problem. Absolutely. You know, so on a cellular level, her body talked to her.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, dairy causes a lot of people, a lot of a lot of issues.
SPEAKER_01And and that's one of the things that I've done is I I've I've just ph balanced my body to see if that's going to, you know, alter any of my symptoms. And it has tenfold. My hair's grow growing back, my eyesight is improving, my skin, I I feel amazing. It's just and it's just minerally balancing your body. And I haven't had any any of the medications that the doctors have wanted to put me on.
SPEAKER_00Nice.
SPEAKER_01I'm only doing herbs, teas, and eating, you know, you know, leafy greens and vegetables and fruits. That's it. And the more chlorophyll that we can put into our body, that helps generate neurogenesis. Because chlorophyll is the number one building block molecule for life on a cellular level. It's what reproduces red blood cells and white blood cells. So the darker the green, you know, and if you can juice it, you know, your greens, that's even better because it's more of a concentrated
Magnesium Water And Lymphatic Flushing
SPEAKER_01form. And you'd be amazed that you even smell better. Like, I don't use deodorant that much. Like it's just different, you know. I feel different, and especially at my age and everything, I'm I'm 55, and everything that I've been through and put my body through, there's no way in heck, Joe, I should be in the condition that I am. I should be worse. But my the body is responding and it's changing. And when I wanted to the tumor that came out of me that they want was in my pancreas, in my small intestine duct where that that it was that it was partially in my intestine, and the other portion of the of the tumor was in my pancreas. They wanted to cut it out of me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a bad idea.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, God flushed it out of me.
SPEAKER_00Nice.
SPEAKER_01And it would have been a six to eight month recovery. And dealing with cancer alone, you like when somebody starts like when you started your treatment, I started my treatment. It it's pretty much about a year recovery.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because everything that the body goes through, it has to regenerate every single cell over.
SPEAKER_00They strip you down, and then you got to put it all back together.
SPEAKER_01Right. So that can be really hard, especially when our bodies are already going through the stages of aging, you know, in your later years. You know, we need as much ammo that we can in battle.
SPEAKER_00You know, just bounce back the next day anymore. Well, listen, Richard, we're we're we're touching on a lot of things, and I it's great. I I think what we're gonna do is we're kind of priming the audience for for the the elements we're gonna go deep in. We're gonna start a series, we haven't named it yet, but you and I are gonna go through and and talk in depth about the tools that you've discovered and that I've discovered about about healing, and it includes western medicine and and herbal medicine and natural medicine and prayer and all the good stuff. But I wanted to kind of start before we jump deep into all of these things is you're a military veteran, and you've been through combat, you've served your time, you're supposed to be taken care of. You know, they promise you when you sign up and basically sign your life away, become a G-man, that they're gonna do some things in return for you. And sometimes you up. Well, yeah, they don't tell you so much about that, but they definitely will do that. We all know that. And you kind of know that going into it. But when it comes to finding help, you have spent and and the people I know that have actually gotten help through from the military have done what you did and and just dug in and stayed digging in until they got what they needed. And I I almost think that the military does that on purpose for some reason. I don't know, I it might just be ineptitude, it might be bureaucracy, but somehow, somehow, I know half a dozen people or more that are military veterans that have fought their way through to where they're actually getting care. And they've got the system enough to where they're able to not be feeling like they've been cast aside and and and and let go. And you've learned a lot of things. I think I'd like to hear about your process through that system because you know you're part of my you're part of my team, you're part of my team with Willow Creek Springs, you're part of my advisory committee with the Gardens of Hope. And as you know, Gardens of Hope is all about helping veterans. I think if people can listen to your experience a little bit about uh how you found your way through the system and even finding practitioners, doctors, all the different people that you've dealt with. Why don't you share that story with us here so that our people can can maybe at least determine if they're on the right path or not? You know how it is when you're trying to navigate something and you're you're walking down a path and you sometimes you feel like you circled the same spot again. You're like, was that that same rock I just saw? Or is it another rock that looks like it? You don't know if you're lost, you're going around in circles, if you're heading right down the right road. And I think having somebody that can talk to you, you know, going through cancer and and dealing with injuries and ailments with somebody who's been through it has been remarkably helpful. That's one of the reasons I do this podcast. So people can, you know, find somebody that shares their situation a little bit. I know there's a ton of veterans that listen to the show, and maybe they can evaluate where they're at and go, oh well, I'm on the right road, or holy shit, I gotta do something different.
Chlorophyll, Greens, And Feeling Better
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, any veteran a lot of a lot of family members or people around a veteran are always going to say, Well, why why doesn't the VA help you? Or are you getting help, or why is it this, or why is this take so long? And you gotta understand that this is what I've learned and and what I how I approach the VA as far as helping me with with anything medically. I mean, they're gonna help you regardless because you have you know a VA rating, and that's where you're supposed to go for treatment. Well, one of the things the world doesn't know is the VA is a basic training medical facility because everybody that's a doctor that you see in there is pretty much like the doctors that you see in boot camp. They're just there, they're they're training and they're getting their feet wet within their field of work. So and I've had three PCMs since I've been here in the last two years. And what's a PCM? A primary care uh physician.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01So it's somebody that's doesn't have a doctorate degree but practices you know medicine.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_01And these these are all military doctors, and they they're just going through the process of like on-the-job type training, so they're with you for probably maybe a year, and then all of a sudden you get reassigned to another PCM.
SPEAKER_00Start all over again.
SPEAKER_01Well, you'll have like a year that you'll you'll be seeing because every six months you only see your PCM or your doctor twice a year.
SPEAKER_00Oh, wow, that's it.
SPEAKER_01Unless you have something that is an issue, then you you have to you know email them and say, Hey, I need to be seen, and then you go in for treatment. But to one-on-one with your doctor that knows it's supposed to help you with your health, you only talk to twice a year. Wow, or you're seen. Well, this doctor that was really helping me align myself to get the right treatment and done, I no longer have because he's his year's been up. So now, which is kind of ironic, Joe, because when I did the blood work, yeah, and then the that the very same day I had my blood work done, the doctor called me and told you told me everything was good. Yeah, that Monday, which that was a Friday that I did it, that Monday I was reassigned to a new PCM. Oh, geez. That's just too not like a coincidence to me. Yeah, like and I still haven't heard from or uh no one I'm supposed to see this new one. Wow, and it's like I have to contact or the veteran has to contact to find out what's going on. So that's pretty much the medical treatment that is available to us as veterans, and it it's pretty much no different than if we had a uh a primary, I mean a a person a private doctor through insurance. We may get, you know, they seen a little faster, but I mean, ever since my injury from the the sheriff's department in 2015, I haven't had medical insurance since then.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01Because of my incident. And it's because medical doctors or even the hospital, you tell them, oh, uh, it's work workmen's comp related. They don't want they don't want to touch you because they know they're not gonna get paid. Right. So, and that's the thing, you a doctor will not see you nowadays until they first know that you're gonna get paid.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hear that.
SPEAKER_01You know, and then the first thing they do is they run your insurance and and if it and write you a prescription for whatever you know ails you, which is just ridiculous. Yeah, so I've had to you know play the doctor, I've had to take my own health serious, and I've had to dig in and say, Well, this is what I have, it is what it is. How can we combat it? You know, which is what a doctor, you know, you're supposed to go over they're supposed to tell you what to do, right? Right. So I've had to literally do it myself, and I'm glad because researching the information and what is my condition, and then applying it has gotten results. And on a on a holistical level, I don't think that it's really being done, and I think that it can be done more as long as people know that the way that there is a way that you can utilize medical treatment without chemo.
SPEAKER_00Well, and what I want to what I want to share, and I've learned this with there's a group of of cancer patients that I meet with every Sunday with Dr. Hoffman, and we just sit down and talk and and we share our experiences. And there's a number of doctors in that group that are also
Evidence, Research, And Mixing Modalities
SPEAKER_00dealing with cancer. Doctors get cancer too. And there's this one doctor, his name's Emile can't think of his last name off the hand, but eczume. And he's a he's a retired surgeon, the guy's brilliant, the guy's smarter than ever the next 10 people I know just knows about the biology, the physiology, the molecular, the the protein switches. I mean, this guy just like you talk about a thing and he'll just like he'll know. But he doesn't know because he just got gifted that information. He spends a lot of time researching and researching sources that you can count on. And the one thing that he says, and I think it's important that people consider this at least, is that when you decide something is worth spending your time doing, what's the level of evidence that backs that up? And like there's people that talk about things all day long. People write books about things, people say, Oh, I cured my cancer with this, I cured my cancer with that. But the truth is they had a cancer, they did a thing and the cancer went away. But that doesn't necessarily mean the thing they did made the cancer go away. Right. It just means they did a thing and the cancer went away. And when you really start doing research and you go, oh, well, I did this other thing and I did that other thing, and those two things together probably got rid of the cancer. This thing had nothing to do with it. And there's a level of evidence that comes from studies, comes from research, comes from testing, comes from bodies of how many people have done it, and observation. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'm my own guinea pig. I'm the one who's tested myself. But I try to be careful about that. And where do I where am I going to spend my energy and and and all of that? So I think that as you're going through and you're you're you're meeting all these you know these different people and you're doing your own research, I learned that when I came to a doctor and I like I'm the one who told the doctors the chemo that I wanted. I wanted chemo because I knew it was gonna help solve my problem. My cancer was gonna kill me if I didn't do something drastic. And all the diet and all the minerals and all the stuff I was doing wasn't doing what I needed. And I knew that a combination of my diet and the oxygen therapies I was doing and some chemotherapy together were gonna knock it out. And I was able to do my research and I was able to go to the doctor and say, hey, listen, doctor, I'm fading pretty quick. I'm not able to, you know, sleep anymore. I'm in pain. I got this giant grapefruit sticking out of my neck. But I think if we did this, it might work. And I gave them three drugs that I think if they were to give it to me, I think it would help. Now they didn't know about all the other stuff I was doing that was gonna make it work even better. But it the research I did matched the research they knew. And they said, Oh, yeah, I think we could do that. And they worked with me. Now, if I would have just come to them and said, Well, I want to take a bunch of apricot seed extract, or I want to take a bunch of, you know, whatever, this mineral or that mineral, they'd say, Well, you go on ahead and do that, but this is what we want to do, because it wouldn't match what they what they've learned. And so I think it's important when we're studying things to really look at the source and the the repeatability and the amount of of the amount of evidence that says this is a real thing. Because there's a lot of good information out there, and there's a lot of okay information out there, and there's a lot of bad information out there all at the same time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And that that that's where it confuses a lot of people when they give up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Is because they're they're they're they're not following the right informational path. Exactly. And that can be fed from family, it can be fed from family friends. It it all it all comes down to the individual and what you're going to do, you're going to believe in. And if we can provide, you know, different tools that can assist somebody that they can do on a on a healthy way that's not gonna harm them. Oh, yeah. That's you know, pretty much what we need to go back to is just basic, basic medication or basic medical treatment. You know, we're we're going to a doctor for just about anything and everything, which is not what we used to do 20, 30 years ago. A doctor was only implemented because of you know uh extreme issues, not you know, a cold or something like that.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, you used to not go to a doctor unless some part of your body was hanging off, or yeah, you know, you you were running 108 degree temperature or something that you know, you're on the edge of death, and then you reach out to the doctor and say, hey doc, uh, I think I need some help. We used to take care of most of our own problems ourselves. I think that's a big difference too. You're right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because what what made me really realize it is my son he lives up in the in the mountains in Cali in Three Rivers, and they only have a volunteer fire department.
Self-Reliance Versus Doctor Dependency
SPEAKER_01Okay, you don't have a they don't have a hospital up there. He has to go down the mountain to go to the hospital, which is where I live. And if you think about it, that that's just based on the your environment and and what what your food intake is. So up in the mountains, you have a higher elevation, which it you're not around all the bull crap and frequencies and and bad food. You have a you're breathing in better oxygenated air, things like that contribute to not being as sick, you know, that you don't get a cold or anything. Because I he's been up there going on a little over three years, pushing four years. And I've asked him, I said, when was the last time you were sick? You know, you know, you're basically just sick, and he says, I haven't. And it's just because of he's out working in the in the environment, you know, he's spending time in the environment, he's eating better, he's he's feeling better, and that's because they they have a snipple, you know. Right, exactly. And that's how our our our grandparents lived and everything else. There was only a doctor came to the house because they were on like near death, not because, oh, I have a sick and I don't feel achy and I don't feel like working today. That was unheard of. Why? Because our feet was better. So, I mean, nowadays every single person, you know, you can bump your bump your head and you gotta go to the doctor, you know, or I feel like crap. Why is my temperature going up? I got I'm going to the doctor, you know. We're taking the basic needs of our own survival away.
SPEAKER_00I hear you.
SPEAKER_01Now we're having to go back to that, and when you're being you're opening up to teaching that, it's like you're a prehistoric dinosaur that is, you know, outdated because simple life and how our body makeup you know works seems to not, you know, nobody cares about.
SPEAKER_00I love it. I love it. You know, and and we I really haven't talked about that as to how how we approach professional health care. Like I hadn't, I maybe take it the other extreme. Like, I didn't go to a doctor until this lump got to a point where it wasn't going away, and I tried everything I could try and it wasn't going away, and and it was starting to be, you know, more than noticeable. I mean, I had people I didn't know asking me about it, you know, what's with that lump? And I was like, maybe I should get it looked at, you know. And what a lot of people might have, you know, as soon as they notice some little some little anything, they might have gone and looked at it. Maybe there's a wisdom to both sides of that, but I just know that when you realize you got a problem, it's not so much I think what's important, and I think you've you've learned this, and I and I talk about this on the podcast pretty regularly. I think it's important enough to keep talking about you're in charge of your health. You, Richard McEwen, yeah, are the only one that's in
Owning Your Health Decisions
SPEAKER_00charge of your health, and all the people that that give you advice or or offer you assistance or give you a prescription or or or a test or whatever, those are people that you've chosen to seek guidance from, and you're gonna weigh their input based on your own experience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's important to remember because I think a lot of people they go to the doctor, and the doctor, like you said, all of a sudden they're like, oh, well, you know, you need to do all these tests. Well, okay, think about that for a second, right? The doctor used to uh look at you and he'd look in your ears and he'd look at your tongue, and he'd look at your pulse and your your blood pressure, and he would look at any place where you said this hurts, or there's a bump or a rash, or whatever, and he'd observe you, right? And then he would make his determination of what the next step would be. Maybe it means you got to get some blood tests. Maybe he was able to figure it out by watching you. You know, nowadays I think they're just like go right off the bat, go get some tests done, pull some blood, go get a scan, go get this, go get that. But if you think about it, in my opinion, it's the doctor being kind of lazy, number one, because all he has to do then is read a report, and he doesn't really have to do that same amount of like detective work. A doctor's like a detective, they gotta they gotta go and figure out what's happening inside that body, right? And when somebody can hand them a report and say, hey, we've already got a forensic report, here's the problem, then you just go and go, okay, go to your book and say, here's what to do. And I think we have a lot of tools now that get maybe overused, but the other problem is a lot of times these these tools get interpreted wrong. I I don't know how many times people say, Oh, I went in and got a test for Lyme disease and it came back negative, but you know, I still have all these symptoms, or I went and got tested for this and it came back positive, but then it turned out I didn't have that at all, I had something else, right? And so I think it always comes down to you, and you your job is to figure out, and I had to learn this the hard way because remember a doctor told me, Oh, you probably don't have cancer because this lump is so big that if it was cancer, it probably would have had you shrunk down to nothing by now. Well, because I was a tough son of a bitch, I the cancer didn't get to me that way, and it was able to get bigger before it was able to take me out. Well, that doctor was wrong, and and I listened to him and I was like, Oh, cool, I'm good, I'll just wait longer. And I waited another nine months. And if I would have jumped into it and treated it at that time, maybe I would have been able to go through a lot less than what I had to go through. Who knows?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's based on what what they read, not what they're what they're diagnosing from finding, you know. So like I have blood work done, and they they said, Well, you have some red blood cells in your urine, you know, we we want to run a test to make sure you know nothing's wrong, versus to just saying, okay, well, now we have a treatment plan because we know what a diagnosis of your condition. Right. So therefore, there's no treatment plan is because it's like the military. And this is for every veteran listening that can agree. The military is only responsible for doing one thing, and that's training us. They are not concerned with dealing with our issues because of the training. Where the only mindset is to build us and train us, not to take care of us. And that's why every veteran you know suffers with the conditions we have, is because it they're not being treated. And it's based on a a textbook type ideology instead of on real training versus taking a symptom that you know somebody had, and then they put applied a certain treatment and it worked, okay, then we don't have to continue testing, you know. And if the doctor is you going in and say, Oh, I have you you might be subjected to you know having cancer. So we're gonna run. I'm gonna schedule for this test and this CT scan and this blood and this uh all they're doing is scheduling for testing, right? That that's not treatment, right? No, it's not studying you. That they're studying you, not helping you, they're studying you. So yeah, I was like, no, that I don't want to be studied, I want to do help.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I flipped it on them, and they tell me, okay, well, you have pancreatic cancer, and then I go, okay, thank you. And I go home and and and and start applying treatment because of what I was told, right? And then through that treatment that I put myself through, I got results. There you go. So therefore, only listening to the doctor because, well, yes, I do need a doctor to be able to look inside me because I can't we can't see what you know is wrong with us.
SPEAKER_00You don't have a lab to run blood work and be able to analyze certain things, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that's anyone anybody needs is just basic testing and can get it done from any doctor in in the world. It's just, hey doc, can we run some blood? You know, this is what how I'm feeling. You know, you get the blood results back or whatever x-ray, it's gonna tell you the results or of why you're complaining. So, therefore, there should be a treatment plan immediately put in place to combat those ailments, right? It's not done. They just want to keep continuing. Oh, well, it shows you you have this, so we're gonna put you on this pharmaceutical med and see if that helps. Yeah, you got all these purple demons chasing you around at night because of the medication, and you're like, I don't feel good. Yeah, what do they do? They put you on a different one to combat that med, not your symptoms, and then the cocktail battles begins, and that's well, they're just screwing you, and yeah, I didn't want to be the pharmaceutical guinea pig for nobody because, like you said, it's diet, it's it's our life, yes, not theirs. We just need them to to to assist us in a format that we can defend.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I think that in even pursuing and studying natural answers, we have to go through
Standard Of Care And Stepwise Risk
SPEAKER_00and try things and see if they work. I went through a dozen treatments that I thought were gonna work that didn't. And then I kept going. I'm like, okay, well, I tried that one. I wanted to see, kept testing. Nope, I it hasn't had any effect. Okay, I had to decide. I had to decide, am I gonna keep trying, maybe do it a little longer, a little more, or try something else? You know, but that was my decision. And as you're going along, you know, sometimes we get blessed and we get good results the first thing we try. Hey, good on you. Maybe God shining his grace on you, and you you got led to that right answer the first time. Me, I got taken the long way around. I got to go up over the mountain and down into the valley and around the forest and dig a trench and and and and and build a little home. And you know, I had to do all these things to find the answer, but I found it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Some people persistence. Right. And and and and and I wasn't gonna give up. I wanted to live, I wanted to to to get back to my healthy life, and that's that was my goal, and I was gonna stay to it till I did. Well, it sounds like you did the same thing, and fortunately, it seems like you found your answer a little quicker than mine. And it's important for people to realize that there are some answers that can help everybody.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know, like what the things you're talking about, you're talking about basics, you know, pH and minerals and salts and things like that, diet, exercise, sunshine, all the pillars, sleep, and all those things are important to everybody. But when you're dealing with a cancer, they can be caused from a dozen different things or or more, and and each one is unique in its own, where it's at in your body, and and and different mutations, different set things that cause it. Like in my case, it was caused by a virus, you know, a virus that everybody has, but for some reason it gave me cancer. Okay. But then at least they figured out that that virus was connected to it, and that helped me find answers. And if they would have done the test that said you have this from a virus, I would have maybe gone down some different roads. But I was able to get those answers from their testing that said, okay, well, I know what I'm dealing with now, and now I know how to go after it. At least I know how to try. When they figured out you had, you know, pancreatic cancer, you know, there's there's even more levels they can do. Like they ended up doing genetic work on mine and they sent it off to a genetic lab and they came back with with information. Fortunately, by the time I got that information back, I'd already solved the problem.
SPEAKER_01I didn't need their that's how it's been for me.
SPEAKER_00But but the point was, is if I hadn't have, I would have had more tools to go and chase it down. And we don't stop. You know, it's like if if you're really at war, like I don't know what the hell the government's doing these days with their warfare, but they're not they're not trying to win anything, they're just doing something. And then it used to be if you went into battle, your goal was you've got to win. And so you're gonna throw everything you have at it, you're gonna go at it every means necessary, and you're gonna accomplish the objective. Well, that's what you need to do when you're trying to find your health. If you got a disease or an injury or an ailment of some sort, if you're not gonna go at it with everything you got until you get your answer, then I don't know what you're hoping for. And and so, you know, it seems to me like you know, you've you've been able to go through, you just had a CT scan that that showed you you were all clear, right? So, you know, in in in my case, I needed to know in a very specific way that what I what they were looking at wasn't cancer, and I was able to get that. You were able to do it in a different way, which is so important for people to realize there's not one set of answers.
SPEAKER_01Right. So there are multiple range of ammo that is available to uh to to us that hasn't been tampered with or or tapped into on this type of level yet. And I think we we've we've done the research, we've done the hard work, we've we we've battled what we've had to do to do just to do that exact thing, is to help better implement somebody else with the same you know condition and give them more ammunition to say, well, you don't have to do it this way, there's other ways that can be done, and you have a wide variety of different platforms that you can use that that are healthy and good for you. And one it may be just one or it can be all of them. Who knows? Maybe you need to do a whole bunch of things at least. We're providing a better way for somebody to to understand that oh, this is available, I didn't know I could do it, do this.
SPEAKER_00Well, here's another point that I Trial by Air I bring up sometimes because especially with cancer, when you go to an oncologist and and they've diagnosed you with cancer, a lot of times what they want to do, they call it standard of care, which is their textbook box that they work out of. And they generally want to hit you with a lot of things all at once because that's what they know. The truth is a lot of those things might not be necessary, number one. And number two, they might cause you more harm than the good they're gonna give you. And if you don't do the research and you just do it, you end up getting beat up by radiation surgery, all the different things, maybe the chemo. And if you do your own research and figure it out, you can realize that what if I started with the least likely thing to hurt me?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And then step up to more and more dangerous things if that doesn't work. Doesn't that make more sense than start with the most dangerous thing and hope you survive it? I mean, it just like it's it's crazy to me the way that modern medicine with all of its infinite or or not infinite, but with with all of its wealth of information that it's gathered over the last several hundred years, and they still go, Well, hit it with the nuclear bomb first, because you're most likely to survive. That doesn't make sense at all. Like, why don't you start with the thing that might work and and might not hurt you? Right. You know, I don't know. It's it's important. Well, listen, Richard, we are running low on time, but I wanted to jump back to the the whole the VA thing with you a little bit. Would you think would you say to
VA Navigation And Hidden Veteran Benefits
SPEAKER_00the people listening that you have probably used the tools at your disposal through the VA the best way that you know how? Like, would you recommend that anybody that is in a similar situation kind of follow your pattern?
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's knowledge, knowing knowing how to maneuver around in the VA, not just around your your PCM is key. I mean, I I have if you have back issues, like I got I you can have massage therapy in your house. They'll come to the house. You know, there's all kinds of different things that you know veterans don't know that they are available to them. Right. I mean, I don't have to go to a massage uh, you know, salon and and pay somebody out of pocket for an hour. I they'll come to me in my own home and and and do the treatment. So there's a lot of things that are available to veterans that they're they're they just don't know and they're not gonna really get sitting and talking with their doctor and how to deal with the issues and formalities that they're going to you know use as treatment for whatever you know that ails you because none of the doctors say I mean my collarbone and and that and not having surgery for a year, now I have to live with this injury because of the VA. You know, and they said, Yeah, you're screwed up, you need surgery, and they wait a year for surgery because well, this PCM, you know, is gone now, and I have a new one, so now we gotta start treatment all over type mentality is just you know, it's getting out of control. So taking you know that testin' fortitude and applying it to ourselves and holding everyone else in the medical field around us accountable for what they do, you know.
SPEAKER_00I agree.
SPEAKER_01One of the things I could say, you know, as we end that can make a lot of sense, it's like what what we do, the gardens of hope, your environment, you know, just
Lessons From Nature And Plant Inputs
SPEAKER_01plants and herbs. You're totally surrounded by plants and herbs. And I started thinking, like, why doesn't Mother Nature need our help? Or does Mother Nature need our help? And if you sit there and look at like what I'm looking at from your view, is you're on your property, and all I see are green trees. Yep, but yet you you yourself or anyone else on your property are not out with a garden hose going to each tree saying, Oh, we gotta water this or take care of this tree. No, it never gets sick. If it does get sick, it knows how to deal with it, and it just stays green. So, how come mother nature can just stay so healthy? We're just deteriorating like mucus. So I started thinking, well, what does mother nature have? What that just to be healthy, and that's chlorophyll, the right sunlight, the right water intake, you know, these type things. Okay, so if I want my body to look like mother nature, I gotta start utilizing what mother nature uses as ingredients. And when you start doing that, you start feeling better, you start looking different, your health starts changing, and that's the only thing we did was put more plant-based nutrients into our body. Why? Because that's the visual of what we see that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis is Mother Nature.
SPEAKER_00Drink some good water, you know? Yeah, it makes all the difference in the world.
SPEAKER_01So, covering, I mean, we have four different systems within our body. So, like when a doctor says, You have cancer, okay. Where is it, doc? What what part of my body? Oh, it's in your brain, or it's in your bones, or it's in your kidneys, or how can it be in every or in any organ in our body? And still be called the same exact thing, cancer.
SPEAKER_00Well, they they they have more specific terms for the cancers, but yeah, they blanket, they they have a blanket term for mutated cells, but they do get they do get specific with with what each one is looking like, but then what happens is it's like you get one that'll metastasize, and all of a sudden it'll it'll start spreading into other places, and then the question is well, is it the same thing or is it now a different thing?
SPEAKER_01So explain what you mean, Joe. Like, I don't think a lot of people understand what metatastis means.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what happens is like with I had a cancer called squamous cell carcinoma. Carcinoma just means a malignant tumor, so you can have a carcinoma
Metastasis Explained And Anti-Spread Tactics
SPEAKER_00that can be anywhere in your body. It could be there's all different kinds of uh there's basal cell carcinomas, there's all different kinds of carcinomas. Squamous cells are a type of cell that you have in your body, and you have them in your head and neck, you have them in your lungs, you have these squamous cells on your skin, you have these, it's a type of cell. So what they identified with me was that the cancer, the tumor that grew on me was resonated from these squamous cells, and it created this malignant tumor. Well, what that malignant tumor, you can have a tumor that's just a growth that doesn't belong. Like you can have a fatty tumor, you can have a cyst, you can have all kinds of different tumors that don't do anything. It's just your body went a little funky, and it's not gonna do any more than that, just gonna sit there and be a lump. But if it's a malignant tumor, what happens is it has learned how to grow.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And it has learned how to feed off of you in such a way that it can grow and mutate so that it can grow better. And so eventually what happens is it starts to build its own city and it builds blood vessels and it builds it builds the the tools to have it like a home base where the primary tumor is, and then it starts sending out fragments. And so it'll and sometimes it'll send out like like little tendrils, like you know how a vine, yeah. These little little coily things that grab onto the fence and they keep or or like a tentacle and it'll reach out and it'll hook in over there, and then it starts to spread a little bit more like a root, right? And it can once it starts to do that, but it'll also break off little pieces they're called uh circulating tumor cells. So you have this mass, in my case, it was in the back of my tongue and in my neck. I had two of them, and parts of it are breaking off and getting into the bloodstream. Now it's floating through your bloodstream looking for a place to land. And the environment that cancer needs is very different from the healthy cells environment. Yeah, cancer wants it to be cold and have very little oxygen and not much movement, and then it'll sit in there and go, okay, there's a place I can start to grow, and it'll start to feed off of you there. If you have heat, if you have a lot of oxygen, if you have a lot of movement, cancer has a harder time getting established. And so in my case, it was trying to spread into my lungs, and it was trying to spread into my lymph nodes, and it was trying to spread into my brain. But once I figured out I had cancer, I started super oxygenating myself, and I started sitting with heat, infrared sauna, the regular sauna, sweat lodge, hot, hot showers, heat lamps. I mean, I was hitting myself with every kind of heat I could, doing oxygen a bunch of different ways, exercising as much as I could, and it made it to where it never was able to spread.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And then I malignant. Yeah, and and malignant means that it's growing and it's and it's gonna feed off of you. Metastasizing means it landed somewhere else, right?
SPEAKER_01That it potentially can spread.
SPEAKER_00And and if once it metastasized like into your bloodstream, like like pancreatic cancer is a particularly dangerous cancer that if it spreads, it generates 90% death rate. Yeah, it's gonna spread. It's it's one of the least curable cancers if it gets to a certain point, and it'll get into your bones, it'll get into your organs, it'll get into your bloodstream, and it just causes hell.
SPEAKER_01To tell you the truth, Joe, one more test, and they were gonna tell me that that they couldn't do anything. Exactly. And it was in my my my intestine and in my pancreas.
SPEAKER_00There you go. And so once it's spreading, at that point, then they go, Well, you know, there's not like if it's in a local place, there's a lot of things they can do. They can operate, they can try to cut it out, they can hit it with radiation because it's in one spot. Chemo, they can do kind of no matter what. They have immunotherapy, they have stem cell treatments, they got a lot of different treatments now than they used to. They even have heat treatments where they put a little heat probe right into a tumor and hit it with heat right from there. They have ultrasound, they have all kinds of things now. But once it starts to spread, it's it's almost impossible because once it once it gets a hold somewhere else and it starts to land, that means your whole body has like become a fertile ground for it.
SPEAKER_01And yeah, well, once it's in your pancreas, the reason why they say that it is terminal and there's nothing that you can do is because that's what the the no your pancreas is responsible. It's like the pharmacy of the body, right? Only job is to produce hormones.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it makes all that insulin.
SPEAKER_01If you have oil mixing into your blood, and then it that organ has to produce more hormones for the body, you're getting that production of the oil and water mixture in the same format. So if the disease is already metistic and it is in your pancreas, pancreas, your feed, it's like when they biopsy a tumor and then it spreads throughout the whole body. Your pancreas is already cancerous and detrimental, and it's releasing hormones doing its job to support the body and all your other organs, well, it's releasing all that bio and mucus and everything with it. So it's gonna spread all over your body and you're done. That's why when you get pancreatic cancer, you it's a 90% death death rate. Yeah, and it's because they know that, but they don't treat it. And I was in that position, right? I was already shown what it's going to do in the outcome from my mom. I went to my mom with it, and and they didn't help her, they didn't treat it, and she died. And now I was diagnosed with the same condition, and I didn't play the doctor's game. I listened to them, I knew I was dying, I just applied treatment, you know. And exactly what somebody needs to know is the treatment that is available to their own self to be able to combat and guide themselves through what a doctor is actually telling them that they need. Because if I were to listen to the doctor, I wouldn't be here.
SPEAKER_00No, I hear you. It's so great to have you back here. We touched on a lot of seeing you, Joe. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm looking forward to building this new series and going deep into some of the topics that we touched
New Series Preview And Closing
SPEAKER_00on today. We kind of touched on a lot of stuff today, so I'm I'm looking forward to really focusing on one piece of that and going deep into it and learning about you know some of these tools, some of these systems, some of these ailments, and how to go after them, and and you know, really sharing both of our experience and how we resolved our problems that would have taken us out. Neither one of us would be alive here if we wouldn't have done all the things we did. And I'm glad I'm glad to be here. I'm glad you're here with me.
SPEAKER_01And the what the one thing we did is we trusted ourselves, Joe. Yep, and that's what we need to help others do is trust in ourselves with the right information so that they can do the thing. 100% because that's in the end, we're the ones responsible, not a doctor, not anybody else. We're the ones that are responsible for correcting ourselves. That's by giving ourselves that fact that hey, we have a problem, it's all right, let's take care of it.
SPEAKER_00That's it. It's your job, it's your health, it's your life, it's your responsibility.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. So it's been really good talking to you. I what I have some good ideas to help, maybe a different mindset to help unlock things to help you know others kind of see their health and and intake a little different.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm looking forward to hearing forward to wisdom out of that. Absolutely. All right, well, we're gonna start this new series and uh we'll have a name for it by the time we come back. And I'm looking forward to meeting with you real soon to go on to the next episode. Yes, sir. All right. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and I want to thank all of our listeners for making this show possible, and we will see you next time.
