Activate Your Practice Podcast
The Activate Your Practice Podcast is hosted by the Chairman & Founder of Activator Methods, Dr. Arlan Fuhr. This podcast will cover a variety of subjects. Dr. Fuhr will interview guests from different backgrounds and professions, as well as talk about his 50+ years in chiropractic care.
Activate Your Practice Podcast
She Did It Her Way: Dr. Cindy's Amazing Cancer Survival Journey
What happens when a doctor becomes the patient? Dr. Cindy Howard, a survivor of Hodgkin's lymphoma, takes us through her remarkable journey from self-diagnosis to complete recovery, offering a master class in integrating conventional and functional medicine approaches along the way.
Ten years ago, Dr. Howard woke up with a golf ball-sized lymph node in her neck. Drawing on her medical expertise, she diagnosed herself with Hodgkin's lymphoma and made the critical decision to pursue both chemotherapy and functional medicine treatments simultaneously. "If I don't fix the terrain that cancer grew in, what makes me think I won't wind up there again?" she explains, articulating a philosophy that guided her through recovery and continues to inform her approach to health.
Throughout her six-month chemotherapy treatment, Dr. Howard supplemented with high-dose IV vitamin C and approximately 150 different nutritional supplements while maintaining a pristine diet of organic, whole foods. Despite facing resistance from the medical establishment—including being denied access to a less toxic chemotherapy protocol—she advocated fiercely for her health, refusing recommended radiation therapy after completing chemotherapy. Today, she remains cancer-free while managing the side effects of treatment, including reduced lung capacity.
Dr. Howard's personal experience has deeply informed her professional work with patients facing various health challenges. She shares practical insights on concussion treatment, emphasizing anti-inflammatory supplements like omega fatty acids, Boswellia, and magnesium threonate. For diabetes management, she recommends berberine HCl, chromium, and cinnamon as natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Her passionate approach to women's health stems from her belief that symptoms like menstrual cramps and menopausal discomfort are "common but not normal" and can be effectively addressed.
Ready to take control of your health journey? Listen now to discover how one doctor's personal battle with cancer transformed her approach to medicine and might just change your perspective on healing too.
Hi, I'm Dr Arlen Ford, the Chairman and Founder of Activator Methods International, and today I have a special guest here, dr Cindy Howard. Cindy has been through, I'd say, hell and back and I'd like to talk to her, and she survived cancer. She's a cancer survivor and we just thought it would be a good thing for her to help anybody that was dealing with cancer and that they may have learned something from her. So good day to you, dr Howard.
Speaker 2:Good day to you, and I have to tell you I might have been to Holland back, but I made it fun on the journey.
Speaker 1:That's the difference. That's the most important thing. Tell me a little bit about how it started and where you've come from there. Just let's take it in sections, okay, how did it start and when did it start?
Speaker 2:So a little over 10 years ago, I woke up one day with a giant lymph node sticking out of my neck. It was like the size of a golf ball and I thought that was kind of weird. I don't feel sick, and I waited a couple of days and I still didn't get sick. And I thought that was even weirder because usually you know there's an illness that follows when the lymph node starts to pop. And you know it was one of those things where I got a little nervous.
Speaker 2:And you know, sometimes when you're a doctor, you know too much and you know it's that.
Speaker 2:You know you go to school, you learn a few things and then you have every disease that you learned about in your microbiology book, right.
Speaker 2:So it was one of those where I went.
Speaker 2:Hmm, I wonder if I should overreact or if I should check this out.
Speaker 2:So I decided to check it out and through a bunch of blood work and an x-ray and a CT scan and eventually a PET scan, I got to diagnose myself with Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a little weird to not sit across the table from a doctor but to be the person who reads the test results and go oh shoot, I'm in big trouble here. So it was about 10 years ago that I discovered that and made a pretty huge decision, through a lot of questioning and research, to go ahead and get some allopathic treatment but really to co-treat myself on the natural side, because I knew that you know, in the world of medicine sometimes they as I like to joke kill you while they keep you alive, and you know there's a lot of bad stuff that they use to try to keep you alive, and I really wanted to clean up the mess that they created. So I incorporated really both avenues of medicine and, you know, a little over 10 years later I'm here to tell the story, which is great.
Speaker 1:Tell me a little bit what you say about the other side. In other words, I think you're talking about functional medicine.
Speaker 2:Well, actually I'd say functional medicine is the good side, right? So you know I.
Speaker 1:I was referring to it.
Speaker 2:yes, Right, yeah, so you know the whole philosophy. No-transcript root cause of why I think that I got there and what else wasn't working in my body well and fixing that while going through the treatment, I think is what gets us through better. Right, because even if we attack cancer and we get rid of the cancer itself, if I don't fix the terrain that the cancer grew in in the first place, what makes me think I won't wind up there again and I think that's a really important point for everybody to realize, no matter what disease process you're walking through is how bad was the terrain that you got there and we need to clean that up.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And what were some of the things that you? How did you start cleaning it up? Well, I went a little obsessive compulsive, you might say, because I have access to a lot of this stuff. So the first thing I did was run a bunch of tests. I looked for heavy metals, I ran gut function studies, I ran micronutrient tests to see if I was deficient in anything. I mean, I was looking for anything I could possibly find that could have been wrong in my body and started to supplement as such.
Speaker 2:But I also got really perfect with my food, and I'm going to take that back because I don't know how to teach anybody to be perfect with their food these days.
Speaker 2:You know, my joke is is if I, if I tell you to be perfect, you're kind of dead because I got nothing left to give you and I can rationalize almost anything out of somebody's diet. But I still cleaned it up where everything was organic or grass-fed or clean and there was nothing processed, no sugar, nothing that had a chemical in it, and everything was grown on a tree or a vine or in the ground or slaughtered or fished for. A little graphic there, I guess. But just getting back to whole good food, where I was a good eater before I became a great eater, it was really important to make sure that I was feeding the body things that it could use and not things that had to figure out how to process through. So with good supplementation and good food that really helped to support my environment better A to handle the treatment and then to recover and stay healthy, you know, for this 10 plus years.
Speaker 1:What was the treatment? The medical treatment.
Speaker 2:Chemo. So actually this is an interesting story. So when I was first, you know, diagnosing myself, I made a very important phone call to a friend of mine, Dr Michael Taylor, who practices out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, A very good friend, doctor of chiropractic who I trust with my life. And I said, Mike, I've got everything covered. I'm going to go to Germany. I need you to connect me to Clinic St George, which is a clinic in Germany. They're doing cancer very different than we do here in the United States. And he said to me Cindy, you're not going to Germany, You're going to stay in this country, You're going to do chemotherapy and you're going to live. And I said, Mike, I'm not doing chemotherapy, it's poison. I don't want this stuff in my body. I'm very opposed to this. I think there are better ways and fortunately, or unfortunately, Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is what I walked through, is 85% curable with chemotherapy. So I had to swallow my pride a little bit and after a lot of prayer, a lot of thought and a little more homework, I thought, okay, he's probably right.
Speaker 2:So I wound up interviewing a couple different oncologists, because the standard of care for chemotherapy is four different drugs and the abbreviation is ABVD and there are four different very strong chemotherapy medications and at the time I was diagnosed there was a great clinical study to get rid of the B drug, which stands for bleomycin. Bleomycin is probably one of the most toxic. It causes heart problems and lung problems and a lot of the side effects we get at the end. So they were running a study where they did it with the three drugs minus the bleomycin and I said, okay, great, At least sign me up for that. And they said you're not sick enough. And this is what's wrong with that world. Because I was diagnosed stage 2B and the trial was stage three or four, they wouldn't let me into the trial. So I said I'll tell you what don't put me in the trial, Don't even put this through insurance, I'll just write the check. I don't want the bleomycin. And they wouldn't let me do it. Wow, Right. So even as a cash patient, I was told you can't have that treatment. It's not standard of care, we refuse to do it.
Speaker 2:So unfortunately, I decided to go the ABVD route and along with that I was doing high doses of IV vitamin C. The day before, the day of the day after, I was popping about 150 different pills to support my nutrients and I went through the treatment and six months later I now have a couple lovely side effects from the bleomycin. It did cause lung damage. I'm at about 76% lung capacity and I've got this lovely thing called Raynaud's. That hinders me just a little bit and I've learned how to control that. So I did wind up with some pretty good side effects. But I guess, as the joke goes, I'm alive to complain about the side effects, which is better than being dead and not complaining at all. So I took that. But there's some pretty harsh chemicals that you put in the body and when you hear the word cure you know sometimes you change your mind as to what your belief system was prior, because until you walk that walk it's really hard to know what the right choice really is.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. Now, how long did it take you to come through the bad part?
Speaker 2:Six months.
Speaker 1:Six months.
Speaker 2:Six months was the treatment.
Speaker 1:Then it got better.
Speaker 2:It got better. So you know it's funny. So after my sixth, at the six-month mark, we did a full body PET scan, which is always really fun, because they put you in a room and they, you know, inject radioactive dye and then they walk out of the room because you're radioactive, so not very healthy, and you get the scan back and they say congratulations, you know there's, there's no more cancer. And on that visit the oncologist says to me okay, great, now we're going to refer you to somebody for radiation. And I said well, what are you radiating? And they said well, the area where the tumors were, because it increases your chance by 5%. And I said but if there's no tumor there, you're actually radiating healthy tissue. And I said to them you know the sequela when you read all the literature is that 20 years later you develop leukemia after you walk through lymphoma. And I said you know why, I think, people get leukemia? I think because you radiate the crap out of them every six months for the next five years and you damage the tissue that leads them down the path of leukemia. So I said you know what? I'm going to take my chances for that extra 5%, thank you.
Speaker 2:And I refused the radiation and walked out of the facility and never turned around. And I had a really good fight with the oncologist because I wouldn't go for the repeat scans every six months. And I said, you know what? I can run my own blood work. I still do it to this day every three to four months because I know what to look for. And I said you know, if something goes wonky I'll come back in and do the scans. But I certainly don't want to do it prophylactically, so that you know I'm back in your office and we're going through this again in a few more years and never look back. And that was really the end of the allopathic treatment on the cancer journey. And I still continue to run labs and supplement and eat right and you know, do all of those good things that can keep the terrain healthy. You know, for the next I'm going to live to be 112. So I got a few more years that I got to take care of myself.
Speaker 1:Well, exactly Now, what? How do you? I know you said it's all organic and it was all you know, like the beef was pasture, all that kind of stuff. But what do you do if you go out and eat?
Speaker 2:It's a great question the best I can right. So you know, I definitely try to stay away from a lot of the chain restaurants because you just know the source of food is not going to be as high quality right Like I try to go to restaurants that are more family owned, where at least they tell you that they're getting better sourced meats and you do the best you can. But at the same time I do eat home a lot. For that reason, because I have a little bit more control over what I put in my mouth than at a restaurant where you really don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, one of our doctors wrote a best-selling Times book and it was six things that you do to stay well, and number two was don't eat out. That was one of the main things that he said to do, and so I agree with you 100% and you're on the road, I mean, you know. So you have to deal with that Now. In your daily diet, do you take a lot of vitamins now?
Speaker 2:I would say medium amount. So after popping 150 pills again, if I never saw a capsule again, it you know it's too soon, right? So it was really hard for me after to continue that type of regimen. So I've got a little magic trick Most of my supplements I actually dump into a smoothie in the morning. I make a drink with coconut water and I throw my protein in there and all the supplements that I possibly can in a powder or liquid or open up the capsule form and I drink my supplements now because it's so much easier to get down than swallowing a bunch of pills. But I still follow a regimen and I still recheck my labs all the time to tweak what I need and what I don't, because I'm a big fan of also if you don't need it, don't put it in.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I mean it's common sense and so sometimes yeah, Also I understand that you have done some concussion work on athletes.
Speaker 2:I have. So you know, it's funny how you fall into things, right, you know, and how they become important to you. I have three kids, two boys, and both boys played tackle football and in my community, unfortunately, they start too young, right? Because if they start young, then they get the spots when they're older and that's just sort of the way of the world. So what happened is I was on the sidelines of the game and I was the team mom and the team photographer and I've also sat on. You know, I sit on the board. When I sat I don't anymore because the kids are older, but I sat on the board for the organization and on the sidelines I watched two boys, not my own but of the team. I watched two boys go head to head, hit the front of their helmets, both back on their backs on the floor on the field, and I immediately, you know, turned into a chiropractor instead of the team mom and I ran right out to the field.
Speaker 2:The boy from the opposite team turns out, he popped up, ran off to the side of the field. So I figured, okay, that team can be responsible for him. And I was tending to one of our athletes because there was no athletic trainer on the field for that game. And I looked at the opposing coach, who ran out as well, and I said please do not touch that child. He needs to be assessed not only for concussion but for spinal injury. It is inappropriate to move that child till we know it's safe. And he started to gank on that child's arm and says we have a football game to play and I said I don't think you heard me Like that is not a safe thing to do. I identified myself as a chiropractor and I said please don't touch him. He picked the child up in front of me and walked him off the sidelines. Now, after being completely livid and disgusted, I assessed the child. Thank God, no spinal injury Turns out he was concussed and we took good care of him and he wound up being absolutely fine.
Speaker 2:But as a result of that entire experience, concussion became really important to me and I thought you know we've got to do a better job educating people not only on the signs and symptoms of concussion but what to do when you're concussed. And because I have, you know, a specialty in internal medicine and nutrition, I decided to take that work and couple it where now I love to run around the country and educate other people on pre and post concussion nutrition and how to help not only kids but adults and then therefore professional athletes, because a concussion is a concussion regardless of what age you are, and there's so many great things that we can do to help speed up that recovery so that we don't hear those terrible stories 20, 30 years later of people who are really suffering neurologically as a result of improper care. And it was that impetus that really got me interested.
Speaker 1:Well, I'd like to know what, just roughly what kind of vitamins and supplements and so forth do you use for a concussion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So sometimes, again, it depends on tests, but just some basic things that we look at is we look at omega fatty acids, which are really great. We look at Boswellia, which helps to reduce the inflammation. We use a lot of magnesium threonate, which crosses the blood-brain barrier, so it helps from that standpoint. We also have to pull out any sort of food that can be inflammatory. So no chemicals, no aspartame food colorings, no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar. That's also equally important. On top of some of the supplementation, resveratrol is another great one to lower inflammation. There's some great studies on zinc, so we use a ton of zinc very carefully to make sure that we don't get the levels too high. But yet for that short term we'll supplement that way. Sometimes we'll use some amino acids as well, especially if there's damage or we start to see some neurological changes where there's anxiety or depression, and the amino acids can really cause a better balance of the neurotransmitters. So we don't see some of the mood or behavior changes as a result. So it's, there's a.
Speaker 1:There's a pretty good gamut of things we can pick from, depending again how severe, what the symptoms are that they're expressing, and then laboratory tests that we find you said no sugar, which brought me to think of something else, because there's so much on lowering blood sugar today in the United States, sort of you know, pre-diabetes part type 2 diabetes Is there. Do you have a regime for type 2 diabetes, for lowering blood glucose?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so food-wise it is just that right. And it's not just the sugar people think about, it's also some of the carbohydrates. So you know, if you live on baked potatoes, that carbohydrate is going to convert to a sugar in the body. So I always say it's white things, right. White sugar, white flours, white rice, et cetera. Anything that is typically white can also convert. Then we can start to do things like chromium percolonate, berberine. Hcl is really good at lowering hemoglobin A1C levels. Strontium may play a role.
Speaker 1:Tell me that again. Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry, the one that was so good in lowering ACE1s.
Speaker 2:Oh, berberine, berberine. Berberine, which is an herb that comes from golden seal, berberine, hcl, and it actually behaves very similar to the GLP-1s now that everybody's clamoring towards that aren't necessarily so safe. So when we use a regimen of things like cinnamon and chromium with the berberine, we find that that hemoglobin A1C, along with a good diet, can't get away without. That tends to lower that A1C level without the use of some of the drugs that people seem to get stuck on out there. So in the world of functional medicine, it's great because I'd like to think I have an alternative for every pharmaceutical out there.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a good thing. I mean, if you it is a good thing because if you're a practitioner, you run into all kinds of problems and you're also into women's health. Tell me about that a little bit.
Speaker 2:Oh, so you know, by default, right? I mean, most of the people that come into my practice are women and, let's face it, when the men come in, they're dragged in by the women in their lives most of the time. So you know, taking care of women mainly in a practice, you're going to come across things like fatigue, premenstrual syndrome, perimenopause issues, menopausal dysfunction, and you know, at some point you make the decision that you either have to take that on or you've got to find a practitioner that's really good at it to refer out and I'm not a big fan of referring unless it's something I don't know. I love to take things on. So the women's health became really important.
Speaker 2:I also had an amazing mentor. I don't know if you remember Dr Frank Strahl, he's been gone for quite a while now but Frank taught obstetrics and gynecology at National University, which is where I graduated, and I was in his very first obstetrics and gynecology at National University, which is where I graduated, and I was in his very first obstetrics and gynecology class and I thought it was the strangest thing that here I am going to chiropractic school and I wanted to be a sports chiropractor, like about 80% of my class, and Frank's up there talking about, like vaginal health and testicular health, and I'm like what does this have to do with chiropractic? It doesn't make any sense to me. Well, you know, it may not have a direct correlation, but at the same time it comes back to whole body health. And what's really interesting is, even if you think about it from a low back pain standpoint, how many patients walk into a practice with low back pain unresolved doesn't get better and, as it turns out, it's prostate cancer that's referring to the low back.
Speaker 2:So I started to gain an appreciation for pelvic health, both in men and women, and the relationship it has to low back pain, and realized this is actually really more important than I realized when I signed up for the program of chiropractic and just really, from that point on, with his leadership and his mentorship, fell in love with women's health, because I think there's so many of us out there that think what we go through is normal and it's actually common and not normal. Right, it's not okay to have cramps when you have a period and it's not okay to have hot flashes when you're in menopause and all of those different symptoms I think have become normalized and accepted in our society and women don't know what to do about it and I'd love to share that. You know there is something you can do about it and it's absolutely fixable and it's really fun to take that on and accomplish those things for, you know, for the women that walk into the practice, because they go from miserable to really happy, and that's that's a great path.
Speaker 1:What would you say? Do you have probably 70% women in your practice?
Speaker 2:Maybe even a little higher, probably 70 to 80, you know, and I I mean I treat kids, I treat elderly, but I do. I see a lot of young women, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, that are also having trouble with their periods all the way through. You know everybody who's in my club that's already menopausal and you know wanting to find that youth again, where you know it's not painful to walk through the hormonal changes.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the upcoming geriatric population?
Speaker 2:Well, you know what? They're just as important as our young population, right? You know, I think the shame of it is is, a lot of time, as we get older, we get written off and we even do that to ourselves, right? So there's people who will sit in my office and go oh well, it's just because I'm older and I never let anybody use that as an excuse in my office. So, as we age, things do change. There's no denying that, right. There's things that break down or things that are produced less of or more challenges, but I never let anybody use it as an excuse to accept the changes, right? So we can look at those things and implement something to halt them, to change them, to improve them. So that, really, at the end of the day you know, I have this joke I say I want everybody to live, to be 112 and one day lay down and you don't wake up. That's how we're supposed to go.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly how we're supposed to go and my number is 112, which is why I picked that. If yours is something else, that's okay and we can work with it, but I want everybody to know that they really can feel good, whether they're 10 years old or 90 years old. Neither is an excuse to say say it's okay that I have symptoms and I feel lousy.
Speaker 1:What's your greatest feedback and the most fun you have when you go lecturing?
Speaker 2:Oh, you know it's, so it's fun it's. You know what it's a? I love to stand on stage and know that somebody paid at least $5 to hear me speak. You know, after having three kids and you know you talk and you talk and you talk and you wonder if anybody's listening to you. It's really cool to stand up and be heard. I think what's really rewarding for me actually comes after that, and that's when somebody walks up to me afterward and says you know what I have exactly what you're talking about, or I have a patient that has exactly what you're talking about. Can you help them? And then we do. And it's nice to know because if they approach me that way, it gives me an indication they probably didn't know how to get help prior. And if that one presentation gives somebody that direction to accomplish something in a good way, then that's the high for me and I just love it. I love to educate people and take the information and, you know, go get everybody. Well.
Speaker 1:Well, that's where you get your enthusiasm from. It's it shows that that's where you're having fun. And have you ever had stage fright?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean I still get a little nervous sometimes, which you know, whoever they I'm still trying to figure out who they are in that sentence, but you know sometimes they say that even you know the highest level speakers still kind of get butterflies and a little bit of nerves when they go out. It's almost like more of an anxiousness just to get there and do it right, vers versus sort of that stage fright. I mean I probably had it the first time and then I think I got over it pretty quick because I just love it.
Speaker 1:I remember the day that I got over it. It was in Parker and I walked across the stage and it was like a full house and I think I was 28 years old or something and we had it at Madison Square Garden in New York and there were 6,000 people there. It was Jim Parker's heyday and I walked out there and I all of a sudden realized I wasn't scared and it was one of the best days of my life. But I had worked at it and, as you have worked at it, and so when you know your material, that's what gets rid of it. And so you know, speaking, public speaking, is the number one fear of people, and so that's why you've overcome it, because you've got a good message and you're not afraid to tell it and you know you're out there. You're a pro.
Speaker 2:Oh well, thank you. And I never get on stage and talk about something I don't know about. You know. So it's easy, right, when you know your stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you've experienced most of it. I have. I think that's the other thing. That's important is you experience it.
Speaker 1:Inactivator we're looking at the geriatric population, probably because I'm a geriatric but we're looking at that and we're coming up with some things to do when people have had a replaced knee or a replaced hip or you know something like that. And inactivator we don't hurt the patient, so they can be treated quite easily, and so that's one of the things that I'm into and that's why I asked you about geriatrics what you thought about it, because half the population in the country will be over 65 by 2030. Will be over 65 by 2030. And so that's why we're majoring on it. So you have covered a lot of ground here and I appreciate it. I know you're busy, I appreciate you coming on and I can't thank you enough for sharing, and feel free to use this with your people too, because we want as many people to find you know if they've got another problem and like you had, and you found a solution and you were brave and that was a great thing. So thank you very much, cindy, for being on the program.
Speaker 2:Oh, my absolute pleasure. Anything I can do to help you just reach out.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm here for. Thank you very much.
