Preventing Chemo Brain: How To Approach Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Chemo brain, demystified: How mitochondrial stress and systemic inflammation drive brain fog, memory lapses, and slowed thinking—and what helps.

Food as a therapeutic tool: A simplified, modified Mediterranean approach (gluten-free, low-sugar, organic) to lower inflammation and feed the brain.

Support during treatment: Why timing matters for intermittent fasting, what to avoid during radiation, and where melatonin and select botanicals may fit.

Cachexia vs. “just eat anything”: Calorie-dense, therapeutic smoothies as a smarter alternative to ultra-processed shakes when appetite is low.

Home detox made doable: High-impact swaps (fragrance plugins, dryer sheets, plastic foodware, bottled water, microwaving in plastic) to cut hormone disruptors.

Stronger bones on AIs/Tamoxifen: The right form of calcium plus D3, K2, collagen precursors—and bone-loading movement—to reduce osteoporosis risk.

Mindset & the “cancer train”: How to pause urgency, build a healing team, and use breathwork, meditation, acupuncture, and graded exercise to steady emotions.

HRT after breast cancer—handle with care: Why this decision must be personalized (oncology, BHRT specialist, Dutch testing, vascular screening, tight lab follow-up).

To learn more about our guest, visit: 

www.carollourie.com

Transcript

Dr. Lourie, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. You know, you've really built a lot of your career around helping people who've been through chemotherapy, you know, whether they're starting it, they're in the middle of it, or they're after it for breast cancer. Now, there's a big reason people come see me at my clinic who've had breast cancer, and it's for very... Different reasons, you know, like I don't get people who are in the middle of it like you do, but I get people who are on the opposite side. They have chemo brain. So that's a term being thrown around a lot. Can you explain a little bit about chemo brain first? Well, as you said, it is a term that is thrown around a lot and it is not a throw around term. side effect of chemotherapy. It's actually a very serious consequence or side effect, and it has been well researched, and there's a lot of articles about this in PubMed, and it is a known side effect that medical oncology is aware of, and they can't do anything about it. But from an integrative standpoint, there is a great deal you can do to protect the health of your brain during and after treatment. If you are just beginning chemotherapy, there have been well-researched tools, evidence-based strategies that you can begin to employ right away. And even if you're in the middle of chemotherapy, for example, intermittent fasting has been shown to protect your healthy cells while increasing the uptake of the chemotherapeutic drugs. What chemo brain is, cognitive decline induced from chemotherapy side effects, is that when chemotherapy is in your bloodstream, it goes after supposedly the cancer cells, but it also impacts the mitochondria of your healthy cells. The mitochondria is where you get your energy from. And that then impacts your ability to think clearly, to remember names. You're forgetting tasks. You walk into a room and go, why am I here? You forget appointments. And it has to do with this overall inflammatory process that's established in your system as a result of chemotherapy. So from an integrative standpoint, what I do in my practice and with my online community, excuse me, is to reduce inflammation. And we reduce inflammation with very specific protocols. Let's start with what you're eating. There is such thing as an anti-inflammatory diet. I'm sure you might've heard about it, but basically I call it a modified Mediterranean diet and it is gluten-free. it is sugar-free and it is the opposite of the standard American diet, which has a lot of processed foods, non-organic produce, non-organic meat and chicken. So we want to switch over to organic food because you don't need the chemicals that are used in standard food and you want to go gluten-free. That means you don't eat bread, you don't eat crackers, you don't eat regular pasta and you don't eat cookies or cakes because you're low sugar. All of the foods in the standard American diet contribute to inflammation. So as you decrease the inflammation, you increase the ability in your brain to think. And then the opposite, you want to continue to feed your brain the nutrients it needs to to be able to make those connections. So what are the nutrients that you need? Because the standard American diet is mostly nutrient deficient. Don't you agree, Dr. Zimmerman? Yeah, I mean, the standard American diet is the opposite of what it should be. I mean, it's given us the results we have in our society when you look around. Yeah. The results being we have a very high rate of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. And it's starting at a younger and younger age now too, which is extremely alarming. So what is the opposite of the standard American diet? It's nutrient-based whole live foods. That means organic vegetables. When you look at your plate, it should be at least fifty percent filled with vegetables, either a salad and or steamed vegetables. And then you have like two to four ounces of organic protein. And then you want healthy fats there. What are healthy fats? Avocado, olive oil, ghee or butter. And you want to really begin to simplify how you're eating. It doesn't have to be complicated. You don't need to spend a lot of time in your kitchen, but you do need to switch around the quality of the food that you're bringing into your home. Yep. And I'm going to, you know, challenge some of this a little bit because people are going to be like, Hey, you know, my oncologist says, you know, nutrition really doesn't matter. And you're telling people gluten-free where where's the studies with gluten-free and, and cancer. Um, you know, how do you respond to stuff like that? I love this conversation. Um, I think one of the most unhealthy statements a doctor can say to anyone is eat everything in moderation. That is not true. There actually are a quite large amount of studies about the impact of glucose or sugar on cancer. And it started in nineteen eighteen with the scientist Dr. Otto Warburg. He discovered that cancer cells, given a choice between sugar or oxygen for what I call the cancer gas tank, will always choose sugar. even though it has to go through a much more complex metabolic pathway and it gets much less ATP or gas for the cancer gas tank. And that is now known as the Warburg effect. And he won the Nobel Medicine Peace Prize in nineteen twenty four for this discovery. Now, that is the foundation of cancer is a metabolic disease. We lost that concept for many, many years. But I'd say in the last fifteen years, it has had a resurgence. And if you go into PubMed and you put metabolic cancer, studies, you will have thousands of articles. And my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Neysha Winters, wrote what is known as what I think one of the most important books of our time. It's called Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. And she goes into this extensively. And I'm in the process of writing my book in which I use these same processes to help people understand why you want to choose to eat this way. And I said those words very emphatically because it's a choice. And it's one thing if, you know, you're going out to dinner or you're at your friend's house and everybody's eating all this stuff. which is unhealthy for you having had cancer you need to choose in that moment what you're going to do and this is where new habits come into play and i think if you're going out to eat one of the secrets is to never show up hungry number one and if you're going to people's houses your friends to find out what they're serving And then you can say, you know, I'm eating a special way now that I've had cancer and I'm in recovery. I'm going to bring my own gluten free crackers and some snacks and then I will bring my entree, but I'll have your vegetables. I hope that's OK. So if you don't make a big deal of it, your host won't make a big deal of it. And other than going to a pizza joint. There is no restaurant that you can't go to where you can't order some form of grilled fish with sauteed vegetables and a salad and enjoy the company while not eating unhealthy food that is going to promote gas in that cancer gas tank. So as far as gluten is concerned, gluten is an inflammatory disease and it creates inflammation in your body. And it doesn't mean you're gluten intolerant. It's part of lowering the foods that you eat, which contribute to inflammation. Okay. And going along with this, you know, I've seen some people comment and, you know, I've seen some really ultra processed stuff that in cancer centers and other things like that i'm like but you know these people they just feel so bad because of their nausea and everything else they're they're going you know they're not getting enough calories you know so they should just eat whatever they want to eat and i think you've already covered that so not sure if there's anything else you want to say but that's another thing that's commonly thrown out there as a justification for eating things that you know, pretty clearly aren't healthy or good for us. Well, one of the first eye openers to me when I accompanied my dear friend through the eighteen months of every appointment for her breast cancer at UCSF, was when we went into the infusion room and they said to her, oh, you look a little thin. Would you like some Ensure? And then as she's getting the infusion, would you like a cookie, a cupcake? And then the candy cart walks by. And I'm not kidding. It was like, oh, my goodness, this whole system is extremely disconnected from the reality that sugar feeds cancer. So what you alluded to is there is something called cancer related cachexia or CRC. This is a very serious disease and can lead up to a forty percent mortality rate. So from an integrated perspective, the people that I'm working with, I want you to not go to that slippery slope. So if a woman, and this is something that the oncology team needs to be aware of, and it's also the woman and her family's job to understand these symptoms, sometimes they're not aware of it until she's lost, you know, ten, twenty pounds, which is serious. If you're not able to eat, if you're throwing up all the time, if you have lack of an appetite, and you're just getting very dehydrated, that is the beginning of cancer related cachexia. So ideally what needs to happen is the oncology team needs to become involved and the chemotherapy needs to be halted until this is reversed. Now, the people that I work in my live group coaching program, they're not drinking Ensure. Ensure is glucose, Ensure is feeding cancer. What they are doing is my proprietary healing smoothie recipe, which I provided as a free gift for you to provide to your community. And we load it with avocado. We load it with nut butter. We load it with unsweetened nut milk. We load it with an egg yolk. We load it with lots of protein and whey powder and other nutrients. So it is calorie dense and it tastes good. And if all that you can do is drink a couple of those throughout the day, you are getting healthy fats, you are getting protein, you are getting nutrients, and that can actually reverse the slippery slope of cancer-related cachexia. And are there things that, you know, because obviously with chemo, different treatments with radiation, as we've talked about with the things that cause the cachexia, the nausea, the vomiting, are there things that can be done to prevent it? I'm not talking about, you know, what they may be offered, fenugrin, Zofran, and other things like that. but are there things from you know research on intermittent fasting i could have sworn i saw something in the past on even melatonin helping maybe i'm completely wrong but are there different things that when done in conjunction with a chemo that actually reduces the likelihood of having those side effects. So now because you've done a better job minimizing those appearing, you don't even have to worry about progressing. And it really allows you to focus on a healthy nutrition versus just essentially calorie stacking. Well, the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation are a different chapter. So radiation is what I call the gift that keeps on giving. It creates an enormous amount of a very specific type of inflammation known as oxidative stress, in which there are an increase of these unstable molecules called reactive oxygen species. And those molecules, they bump into each other and they create unstable cells, and that can lead to more aggressive cancer. So radiation leads to fatigue and externally burned skin, but there are a lot of side effects that are happening on the inside that a woman cannot see. It does not usually lead to cancer-related cachexia. Melatonin is one of the supplements that I have for what I call my radiation protection protocol. Now, when you're doing radiation, it's very important. You don't want to take antioxidants. And most radiation oncologists will say absolutely no supplements. Actually, there is research that has shown that certain nutrients and herbs are safe during radiation that are not antioxidants. So You don't want to be taking any form of vitamin E during mediation. Vitamin C is an antioxidant. But for example, you mentioned melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone. It's not an antioxidant per se. And how it works in addition to what everybody thinks of as melatonin being connected to, oh, it's going to help me sleep. Melatonin keeps the membranes in your cells from becoming rigid. And that is very helpful. So I do recommend drinking a miso soup before radiation, which is entirely safe before you go in to radiation. And when you come out from radiation, you can drink eight ounces of miso soup. You can take three to ten milligrams of melatonin. After the radiation, it will help keep your cells from becoming rigid. And there is also the Chinese herb ashwagandha, which decreases the side effects of radiation. And it is not an antioxidant and is research-wise safe. There's research in PubMed about this. It will not interfere with radiation. I'm an integrative practitioner. I wanna be respectful of medical oncology's treatments, and I don't want anything that I'm recommending to my community to potentially interfere with your medical oncology treatment. Okay. Now, I wanna go back. We started with basically the end result of all the treatments and the way people would walk into my clinic. But let's go to the other side. You've got someone, let's just say they're a forty-two-year-old female, And they just get the diagnosis. What would you say with them about how to process it? Because we know, right, cancer is probably one of the scariest words out there, especially for like females, right? Breast cancer is it gets more attention than anything else. I still disagree with that because Alzheimer's is a greater risk for females. But, you know, that's a whole nother conversation. But it is still a very scary thing. And we know when things are scary, we tend to get a lot of emotional based responses versus, hey, let's be logical about this, right? We know logic dies when there's emotions. So what advice would you have to help someone process something that really hits them so powerfully? So they make logical decisions, you know, versus doing things out of fear. Yeah. I think decisions from a fear place perspective in the long run will not serve women or men. It doesn't serve you from fear. And I think there is a lot of fear connected to cancer. And part of it is It is a serious chronic metabolic disease. And oncologists tend to say, well, if you don't do this, you're going to die, or we can just remove your breasts. There is research about the benefit and the non-benefit, meaning improvement of longevity from removal of breasts with mastectomy. And that decision needs to be made immediately. It's not a medical emergency. Breast cancer is not a medical emergency. It's not like you were in a car accident and you have a ruptured organ or a broken bone. That's a medical emergency. A diagnosis of breast cancer or any form of cancer, it's taken a while to develop. And I think it's important to gather all the information. Make sure you're getting the all the tests that you need to understand the parameters of what showed up in the pathology report. There is when you have a diagnosis, it's either it's discovered on a mammogram and then there's a diagnostic ultrasound. And then they want to do a biopsy. Now the puncture biopsy can lead to more spreading of cancer stem cells. So you want to make the right choice about the biopsy. And then, or sometimes they look at the size of the tumor and they say, you know, we need to do what is known as neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which means chemotherapy before you have a lumpectomy or a mastectomy to shrink the size of the tumor. And I think that that can be very helpful. The benefit of medical oncology is they do an enormous amount of research, but that research is on the drugs and the standard of care. And I am not disputing that, but the standard of care is the same for depending on what type of breast cancer you have. And I think breast cancer is very individual for each woman. Yes, she may have hormone positive, HER-II negative, or whatever those positive, negative events show up on the pathology report, which you don't have the ability to control. You can't control what appears on your pathology report. That's just not up to anyone. But once you're given that information, taking this under your control is one of the best things you can do for your outcome and to make sure that you get the right treatment. Unfortunately, in my group, live coaching, I talk to women all the time. And they said, well, the doctor told me to do X. And I said, well, have you had this test done? Did they do this test before they recommended that? And they went, no. And I said, so you need to go back to the oncology team and say, excuse me, I think you forgot to order this test at standard of care. Before I do whatever it is that you're recommending, I would like this test. So Education is empowerment. And empowerment is a very special word. My program is called Empowered Against Recurrence. And I'm all about helping women discover their voice and make sure that they are receiving the best care possible. And so, you know, one of the things you said at the very beginning of this last section was, you know, it's not an emergency, you know, it's not like, okay, someone's hemorrhaging out, we have to do something now. But Are you finding that that's really the way people are acting though? It's like they get the diagnosis or are they like, no, cool. I've got time, you know, like I've got three to six months. I need to truly act. Or is it just like, no, I've got it. Oh crap. I have to do something now. And so they're rushing to it. And if people are rushing to it and that's what kind of is happening in the breast cancer world, what are things that people can do emotionally to help them through this process? So, The emotions don't dictate rash decisions. Well, I don't think women have three to six months to wait. I think they have two to three weeks to gather information and gather their healing team. I think the healing team concept is extremely important. Yes, medical oncology. Yes, acupuncture. Yes, someone such as yourself. Yes, someone such as me. It's a healing team. Yes, get your neighbors involved and your friends and family to help pick up the slack that women do eight million things a day without even thinking about it, especially if you have young children. Who's going to pick them up from school? Who's going to manage all of that? Get your spouse involved. It needs to be a family thing. moment. It takes a village. Emotionally, I think it's difficult not to get on what I call the cancer train in which everything is urgent. Handling your emotions is one of the most important components of going through cancer treatment. That's where you can start listening to some meditation apps. Mindset, Dr. Joe Dispenza is, I think, a genius of our time. There is yoga that you can do online. Meditation does not necessarily mean sitting there with your eyes closed and being tortured by how quickly your mind is going a mile a minute. You can listen to somebody guide you through breathing and relaxation, and it really does make a difference. You can start doing acupuncture along with the chiropractic care they're getting from someone such as yourself. All of that helps calm down your nervous system. Okay. So we've got that mental and emotional side. Now, are there things that people can do to build themselves up physically? Because we know so many people when they go through this process, you know, they leave drain, they become very fragile, especially the longer the process goes on. So are there things people can do with exercise either right before chemo, you know, or even during it, that's going to help them. And ultimately the end result, which is rest of their life you know i don't necessarily want to focus on just oh cancer's in remission versus not it's about hey are you still glad that you survived cancer you know at the end of it um I think doing simple things like changing how you're eating and what I call divorcing the standard American diet is the beginning, creating new habits, detoxifying your home. What does that mean? If you have those air plugins, if you have those sticks, if you're using standard laundry detergent, if you're using dryer sheets, if you're using Febreze on your sofa, Every item I mention is an estrogen or hormone disruptor, and that makes inflammation in your body. And it leads not just to cancer, but polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, painful periods, migraine headaches. Those chemicals in your home, which we buy without thinking about it, need to be changed over to eco-products. And your home is your sanctuary. It's where you have a hundred percent control over what you're eating, drinking, and the smell of the environment. Your home does not need to smell of that stuff that you're brainwashed through American advertising. If it's not smelling well, open up the windows, wash everything, go through a deep cleanse, find out where and why it's not smelling well. I open up the windows of my house, even in the winter, just for a few minutes to air it out. I have an air filter in my home. I make sure the air is pure. I filter the water I drink. I eat organic produce. I use organic dishwashing detergent and laundry detergent. I don't use dryer sheets. I mean, These are gradual habits that you can develop over a period of time. It's just the way I live. I was over at a friend's house and she was using a standard brand to put it on in her dishwasher. And I went, oh, like finish that up and go buy this. And I showed her a picture from my phone and she said, oh, thanks for telling me. So these are gradual changes you can make and they're new habits and they will decrease gradually. your inflammatory load and create towards long-term life. Now, as far as movement is concerned, the more muscle we build and muscle replaces fat, there is a lot of research about longevity. And there are these areas in the world called blue zones. And one of the things they discovered is that people who were like, are walking up these, what I call killer hills. And so they walked up these hills every day of their life several times and they had muscle and they also ate not the standard American diet, but they're the diet of their culture, which was sort of Mediterranean style. So movement, gradual movement, replacing fat with muscle is a critical component. If you start to exercise, and I'm sure you are much more expert about this than I am. You can't start like looking like a twenty five year old who's there at the gym lifting eighty pounds. You need to start very slowly if you're deconditioned. When I first started to exercise, I live in a neighborhood that's extremely hilly and I walked out of my home and there's this killer hill right there. And I walked up that hill for eight minutes and I went, oh, OK, I'm done. And I turned around and walked back. And two things happen at that moment. You could say, oh, it's hopeless. I'm just going to be out of shape all my life. Or you can say, okay, I did eight minutes today. Tomorrow I'm going to do ten. So I started with eight, ten, and now I can easily walk up these killer hills. And I do it four times a week. I walk between two and four miles. I have a weighted vest. I have my weights that I bring with me sometimes. You need to find two forms of exercise that work for you. If you ask me to go swimming or ride a bike, not happening. I do my power walks and I lift weights and go to Pilates. So you need to find what works for you. Everybody's requirements are slightly different. Okay. And so I've really got two different sets of follow-up questions. We'll do one that's going to be a little bit shorter. And You may have something out of this or not, but you had talked about really changing a lot of the environmental stuff, the things we interact with. One of the things that I found when people start getting into natural health, and this is very much true for providers as well as it is for the general public, everyone wants to detox. But I'll tell them, Look, you know what's better than detoxing is not putting it in your body to begin with because we don't know how some of this stuff comes out. You know, like all this research on microplastics and everything. Like, I don't know if there's actually studies that shows any nutritional supplements that are being sold to deal with it actually do anything. And so, you know, really avoidance. is critical and should be kind of a initial step not a down the road step so so how to avoid microplastics is never ever ever spend your money on water in a bottle uh or juice in a bottle or anything in a bottle because unless it's been refrigerated because we don't know how hot that water or juice got in transport and when plastic is hot that's when the microplastics um get into the water. Or also I used to love this. Notice the phrase used to love this organic salsa that was sold in a plastic container. And then one time after I finished eating it, I noticed the inside of the plastic was red. And then I did research. It's part of my online program that vinegar acid causes plastic to leak. into the food. So now if I buy anything, I never, it's never, I don't use buy food in plastic. If it's in plastic and I want it like hummus, I'll make it myself. Um, so you have control of that when you're at home that decreases your internal environmental exposure to microplastics. Um, and never, ever, ever microwave food in plastic. That is unfortunately extremely dangerous. So, um, You have control over as far as detoxing. It's to do a true detox. You need to prepare for it. You need to gradually go into it. You need to really understand that it can be not pleasant, not just physically, but detox happens on a physical and emotional basis. And you need to work with a practitioner who has a lot of experience with detox. I was introduced to this natural world of natural medicine through Somebody was a chiropractor in New York in the seventies, and he was helping people detox using iridology as a diagnostic tool. Now in the seventies, detox was not a household word like it is now. And I witnessed how he helped people through his very specific dietary changes, really go through detox that made a huge difference in the nature of their illness. So I am a believer in detox, but it's not like a three day thing. And it is a gradual process and you need to be working with somebody who understands the body signs of when it's saying, okay, this, Detox is done now. And when you start a detox and when you stop a detox, there needs to be a beginning and there needs to be a reversal to bring you back to no longer detoxing. In other words, you're not eating a certain way and doing certain things to detox today. And then you go, okay, I'm done. And tomorrow you're out there, you know, eating organic steak that will make you sick. so you need to be very careful how you come out of a detox yeah and then the second part was you know you were talking about you walking up and down hills you then talked about a weighted vest and that brings us to kind of another side effect that people can have from breast cancer treatment especially when we're talking about basically the annihilation of female hormones and that's going to be is basically breast cancer treatment induced. I don't even know if this is a true medical term, right? But from the treatment, you end up with osteoporosis. Well, yeah. You end up with, first of all, most women in the fifties have some beginning osteopenia, unless you've been exercising a lot in your forties and you go to the gym and you have weights. Most women who are older go into breast cancer treatment with osteopenia. The breast cancer treatments can contribute to bone loss, but it's the hormone blocking therapy that happens afterwards in the form of tamoxifen, lesser somewhat, but also it's the aromatase inhibitors that are known medically to contribute greatly to osteoporosis. And that is because the blocking of the aromatase enzyme, which stops the general androgen hormones from being converted into estrogen. Estrogen is involved in the creation of healthy bones. So when there is no estrogen, the healthy bones creation stops and the bone demineralization increases, and that can lead to osteoporosis. Now there are very, This is a sad story. A woman said, I asked my oncologist, what calcium should I take? But she was on a rheumatase inhibitor known as an AI. And he said, I don't know, go to Walmart. So this is a very unfortunate response for several reasons. First osteoporosis is a known medical side effect. It's not a go to Walmart moment. And if the doctor doesn't know, and at least he said, I don't know. It needs to be said with, I'm sorry, I don't know, like, let's refer you to somebody who does. But she went to Walmart. She asked some young person, where is the calcium? She was shown an aisle and she ended up, there were fifteen different forms of calcium there. All of them were the wrong form. And she ended up with calcium for a twenty year old. So it's not just calcium that a person needs for bone health. we need to create an environment which is conducive to bone remineralization. And it's a very specific form of calcium known as the MCHC. It needs to be given also with certain K-two. You need to have a certain higher level of vitamin D-three. There needs to be collagen precursors. Notice the phrase precursors. So it's an entire environment that you need to create to reduce the risk of osteoporosis in addition to bone jarring exercise. Okay. You know, because I can't help but think about it, right? As I deal with a lot of people who've had falls and concussions and everything else, you know, and this is kind of why we're doing this conversation is all the brain side, but also, you know, it's hard to have a good brain if the rest of your body's not good. You know, there's nothing worse than being like, oh, well, you survived breast cancer, but you fell and broke your hip because your bones got shredded to pieces and no one did anything about it. And there's all these different things and it's, unfortunate because some of them have doctors who are checking into some of this but then others don't and they're like i had no clue that's what was going to do it you know and then kind of going along with some of the other symptoms um those that have already been through menopause and they had the whole perimenopausal symptoms when they go through treatments, they can almost feel like they're going through that again. Like, like is there other things people can do to help with the hot flashes, the temperature regulation, like when they're either getting treatment or some of them, they just have it even after they're done with treatment because of how much things have been thrown off. So what can they do if there's anything? Um, foundational foods and targeted supplements. And, um, getting that healing smoothie in there every day, and then working with somebody such as myself who really understands what are foundational supplements that you need to really reduce the inflammation because the heart of everything that we're talking about, cognitive decline, osteopenia, osteoporosis, menopause, or I call the menopause component speedy menopause, in which menopause, as you know, is usually a very gradual process, takes between one and two years where there's a gradual decrease in your hormones. But when you're put on these hormone blocking therapy and you've had chemo and or radiation, it makes that happen very quickly. And it is very jarring emotionally and physically. And the hot flashes can be unrelenting. This is where integrative care comes in. Acupuncture is excellent for that. Hot flashes, homeopathic medicine. I have taken a woman from having, and I'm not exaggerating, fifty hot flashes a day down to ten with certain homeopathic remedies. Those are individual remedies. It's not like there's one remedy everybody should take. Eating certain ways, doing exercise. So I guess my message is that it's a whole system. Your body is a whole system and it's not just, well, I only have cognitive decline or brain fog or I only have joint pain, or I only have, you know, hot flashes, everything works together. So you need to have a protocol and a lifestyle and habits, which support your overall health. Yeah. And I know some people are going to be frustrated when you said foundational supplements and then you didn't list any, but I'm okay with it because I'm one of those people. I'm all about the nuances and the specificity. I'm like, look, if you want generic stuff, you're going to get generic results and you're going to leave with a ton of things. If we go to Google or now it's the world of AI and we say, AI, what's great for this? You're going to get a really long list, but know there's a lot of nuances there's a lot of tests and the data helps point in a much more specific way so people don't leave frustrated so i hope people understand you know that's it's actually in my opinion a sign of a good practitioner who doesn't just say oh yeah here are the supplements i use for that because those are usually the people who generic everything and they just bring everyone through the same thing versus hey you know there's nuances like you, you've got to understand there's, there's layers to this. It's the same reason why when, if you take a college class, you do an entry level class. Everyone's like, Oh yeah, I think I've got a concept of this. And then you, you're on class number five. You're like, man, I knew nothing. Like I saw it way too generic in a way that didn't exist. And yeah, Supplements are very complicated and people waste thousands of dollars on supplements. The products that I recommend are made to pharmaceutical quality standards. So what does that mean? It means that I can guarantee you there's a SKU card on that bottle. And if I would call the company and I would say, I have this SKU number, they would be able to go into their research database and they would be able to track every ingredient that was put into that bottle. where it was sourced from. It was third party tested on this date. It was found this. It's not something that you want to buy from CVS or Walmart, like the doctor recommended for the calcium or Costco. I mean, or on Amazon, because somebody likes the way the bottle looks. I mean, there are nuances to the products that you spend your money on. So that's where, you know, people say, well, it's expensive. What's expensive is buying products that you think you need that aren't made to pharmaceutical quality standards and you are you're wasting your money. So when you're working with somebody such as myself or Dr. Spencer, and we have deep understanding about this, you're actually saving yourself money because you're only getting what you need. And it's real products, not something that you cannot guarantee the quality of. Correct. And I tell people never label compare. right because there's been enough articles published on things like oh yeah this supplement didn't even contain what it claimed at all or contained it in a much lesser quantity and then the other thing that no one talks about in the supplement world is where did these ingredients even come from anyways like like that's another really big thing but you know as we're coming to the end we probably, you know, let's just bring in a little bit of controversy. So there's a lot of people, right? They've had breast cancer and Now, right. They've got all those side effects and they're wanting to explore. And you can always punt this question if you want to, but they want to explore hormone replacement therapy because they have other people who never had breast cancer, you know, and they're doing it like, Oh my gosh, like my brain fogs are doing better. My hot flashes, I'm sleeping better, you know? how has that conversation had? And, and if you want to break it down between someone who had estrogen positive cancer versus not. I'm happy to have this conversation. This is a really important conversation because there are practitioners out there saying it's fine. And I have some people in my program who are using an online program to get their hormone replacement therapy and they've had breast cancer. So there's a couple of things I want to say about this. First of all, it really needs to be taken on an individual basis. And you need to be working with your oncological gynecologist. You need to be working with somebody who is very adept at BHRT, bioidentical. And even if it's bioidentical hormone replacement, it's still processed by your body as hormones. Number three, you need a Dutch hormonal panel before you even start that. Number four, if you haven't had hormone replacement therapy and you've been in menopause for more than two years, you must get a carotid ultrasound before you even consider it. Because what happens is with lack of estrogen, you get carotid artery buildup. And if you start taking hormones, the estrogen reduces this carotid artery buildup and you can form a clot and die. So these are critical things that people who are out there marketing with their hype are not discussing. This needs to be done on a very individual basis. Not only do you not need to know what kind of breast cancer you have, but you need to do a deep dive into very specific diagnostic blood work markers. What's happening, and you need to track all of that over every three months. Circulating tumor cells, cancer stem cells, IL-VI, C-reactive protein, hemoglobin A-I-C, EGFR, TNF-alpha, and beta. You can understand What I'm talking about, if you want to do hormone replacement therapy, and I'm not disputing some of the physiological benefits, but if you've had breast cancer or ovarian or endometrial, you are in a different category. And you need to find somebody. So in my opinion, your team to do that would be your oncological gynecologist, somebody who is expert in BHRT, a practitioner that you see, not something that you buy from an online program. And someone such as myself, that can cover the blood work. And we all work together as a team to make sure that you're safe. I'm not opposed to it under those circumstances, but I think doing something with an online group and getting generic, even though it may be well formulated, and I know that company, they do have high quality products, but you're not getting the underlying care that you need and which I think should be required. Yeah, and what I tell people, because I get asked about this every now and then, definitely not as much as you do, is that we have a severe lack of research when it comes to hormone replacement therapy post breast cancer like like there's just we we just don't know actually that's not true there is a lot of research about it there's the book called estrogen matters in which they have extensive studies about it and some of those studies i find controversial because a lot of the studies show there's no um increased risk but I have some issues with that. So, and you need to, it's very, it's difficult in my opinion to generalize from these studies because the people driving factors of breast cancer are very different. So it's, it's a complicated study, in my opinion, and it's a complicated decision. But there is the book estrogen matters, which shows all the studies. And I've read that book many times, and I was shocked. And I actually went into PubMed and started reading a lot of those articles that they referred to. So there is, there is research about the benefit, but it needs still, what I said needs to be taken. You need to individualize your decision and your care. Yeah. And you know, and then once again, correct me if you want to, but normally I just start slow. Like even with people who've never had breast cancer, cause that's most of what I'm treating. I'm just like, look, your body's been without it for a little bit. Like we're just going to go slow. We're going to build up. I'd prefer you to tell me I'm taking too long than to way too high doses because I get females coming all the time. I'm like, there's at no point in your twenties and thirties, your estrogen and testosterone would have ever been this high. And, you know, and they just get put on these astronomical doses by places that only do hormones because they're just hoping that the hormones, the magic bullet. So that, that is something to really be careful of. Hormones are not a magic bullet. I mean, if you're not feeling well, and this happens a lot, if you're not feeling well and you're perimenopausal and you're out of shape, you're overweight, you have the standard American diet, you have an enormous amount of stress in your life and you're not exercising and you have a toxin home and you think, oh, I'm just going to go on hormones. It's going to fix everything. That is medical messaging that we have been brainwashed about. And that is advertising messaging. That is not an accurate statement. If you're not feeling well, you need to address the underlying root causes, which is what you and I do in our everyday life with the people we work with. We're a root cause practitioner. We want to go deep. If you do that and then you want to add hormones on top of that, that's a different story. Your body will respond better. However, you need to be working with somebody who is a bioidentical hormone specialist. And you do not want to be taking what I call the bull in the china shop approach of hormones. And before you go on hormones, whether you've had breast cancer or not, you want to do a Dutch hormonal panel. Because what that shows is how your body is breaking down estrogen. So there are different pathways that estrogen can go down when it's metabolized. And if you are not breaking down the estrogen into the non-carcinogenic, non-toxic form, if you take bioidentical hormones on top of that, you are giving yourself an increased risk of developing cancer. So you need to be working with a root cause integrative bioidentical hormone specialist who has certain protocols in their practice. You come into their office, you start with lifestyle, you start with weight management, you start with your standard American diet. You look at how your hormones are being metabolized through the Dutch hormonal panel. And then after all of that is organized, then you can start somebody on low dose bioidentical hormone replacement. But it's a mistake. to like we are brainwashed it's not really america's fault you have a disease problem a you take a pill and it gets better and there's lots of advertisements there's an obese man really obese who's eating a juicy greasy cheese hamburger with bacon on it or something and he has an overhanging belly and he takes tums He shouldn't be eating like that. He's going to have a cardiovascular event. Or there's a woman who's depressed and she takes an antidepressant. And the next thing you know, she's serving her family picnic lunch. I mean, this is unfortunate messaging of American advertising. And when you're exposed to it time and time again, you unconsciously begin to think that's how it should be. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we've covered a ton of stuff today. If people wanted to learn more about you, where should they go? My website is my name, carollaurie.com. And I have a contact me option there. And I respond to every message I get personally. And that is how you can find me. Okay. And then do you have any content out there that people could you know, that they can interact with on social media? Oh, yes, absolutely. I have a large social media following. I'm on Instagram. It's at Carol Laurie Healing. I'm on TikTok, Carol Laurie Health. I think I'm on Snapchat. I mean, yeah, I think Instagram is a really great place and easy. I always have Facebook group, Facebook page, but just TikTok. I mean, Instagram is really Carol Laurie Healing. You can find me there. All right. Well, thank you so much for being on. I hope our listeners got a ton because we covered a big, diverse range of things with all things really breast cancer, just kind of the whole journey from start to finish and even some of the controversial stuff in it that we know people have questions about. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. Reach out to me. I'm happy to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Zimmerman. You're welcome.