The Truth About Breast Cancer Recurrence Most Patients Discover Too Late

After a woman finishes her breast cancer treatment and is ringing the bell, a quiet concern often remains: the possibility of recurrence. Even after successful cancer treatment, early-stage breast cancers can return in 30% of cases. 

This video aims to provide essential patient education for any cancer patient facing this reality, emphasizing the need for continued vigilance in oncology.

🎯 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why breast cancer can return after treatment
• What “watch and wait” typically means
• The difference between early-stage and metastatic disease
• Why tumor biology varies between patients
• The role of immune function in cancer care
• What deeper testing may include
• Why monitoring matters beyond imaging
• How to think about long-term survivorship

📍 Envita Medical Centers – Scottsdale, AZ
🌐 Learn more: www.envita.com
📞 Speak with a care coordinator: 866-830-4576

“Finishing treatment isn’t the end — it’s the beginning of long-term strategy.”

Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your licensed healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Individual results will vary, and Envita Medical Centers does not guarantee outcomes. Some treatments discussed may not be FDA-approved or available in all locations. Testimonials are shared with patient consent and may not reflect typical results. Do not delay or disregard professional medical care based on the podcast's content. Certain treatments may be available only at Envita’s international clinic in Hermosillo, Mexico. No specific outcomes are promised or implied.
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Outcomes Disclaimer
The results referenced from Envita's Precision Cancer Care: 35-Fold Improvement in Response Rates are from a retrospective analysis of 199 late-stage cancer patients treated at Envita Medical Centers between 2021 and 2023, as published in the Journal of Cancer Therapy. These outcomes are not guaranteed and will vary based on individual factors such as cancer type, stage, genetics, immunity and prior treatments. Any comparisons to standard care or clinical trials are based on published data and internal analysis, not head-to-head studies. Individual results will vary.

You can read the full peer-reviewed study at: 

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=132493

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

So a woman finishes treatment for breast cancer. She walks in and rings a bell and she hopes it's all over. Everybody claps, the family and friends are really excited, and they have a party. The cancer's gone. And then there's like a pause when you start thinking at night, well, quietly, what if this cancer shows up again? Do I have a plan? What if it comes back? Because in 30% of breast cancer diagnoses, early stage breast cancers can come back with reoccurrence. And now you have a different cancer. The breast cancer survival numbers may look amazing overall, but the second breast cancer becomes aggressive and it spreads and it changes the entire game. And this is what I want you to avoid from even having any of this. That's what this episode's about. And that's why so many women feel blindsided because they're told by their standard oncology that they take the hormone blocker, they finished the chemo, did the radiation, the surgery, the HERC 2 drug, well, watch and wait. And yes, those therapies can be helpful. They slow things down, they can buy time, they can help control the disease, but they don't often hold long-term remission because they're missing key components, which I'm going to be talking about in this episode. If you're dealing with that higher risk breast cancer that's now stage two, three, four, it's spread already. You don't want to be stuck in the one size fits all model of just 24 markers, a tumor marker, biopsy, and imaging, and maybe a next generation sequence DNA marker gives you a few hundred markers. You want a thousand plus markers. The secret here is deep precision testing in my clinical experience. It gives you a custom immune strategy. That's the key immunotherapy. I've seen this over the years time and time again. Once you have an immune system targeted to the cancer and adaptive monitoring, so you can see leading indicators, not lagging indicators, that whole breast cancer, really for a lot of cancers, the story changes. You're in control, you know what's going on, you're not just waiting, and you're actually preventing things from reoccurring. That's what breast cancer patients need to be doing when they're told they're in remission. Not just watching and waiting, but dialing everything in so their immune system is working to help them. So I'm gonna show you today from start to finish what a great cancer treatment plan looks like. You can really put this to any cancer, but today we're gonna focus on breast cancer because when you have precision immunotherapy and a roadmap, you usually will have a huge advantage to anyone else that's really doing nothing but watching and waiting. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked with patients, thousands of them, that have failed to top cancer hospitals across the country. Yes, many of them breast, prostate, colon, you name it. And we did it through precision targeting. We're able to help patients, giving them exactly what they needed at the right timing and dose for the immunogenic cell death strategy where the immune system was front and center helping the patients heal. Now, before I go any further, make sure you're working with a doctor before you change anything. Let's get started. Breast cancer is not just one disease, it has multiple diseases. Think of it this way: somebody has a hormone receptor positive disease, another one has a HERC II driven disease or a triple negative, a metastatic disease versus not. And they all actually will have different markers. If you have two breast cancers, the same stage and type, and you test them thoroughly, like I'm talking about with precision oncology, they will have different markers. Their heterogenicity, they're unique. And that's the part that standard oncology is missing. The one size fits all care that you get at all the top hospitals, it's all the same. The national cancer comprehensive network guidelines. You'll try regimen one, fail, go to regimen two, fail, et cetera, because it's not targeted. Most early stage breast cancer has victory because of surgical removal. When you really look at the radiation and chemotherapy and hormones, these are blockades, they're buying time. But the ultimate game to winning breast cancer is immunotherapy. And there are not many, if at all, good immunotherapy drugs out there for breast cancer patients. That's why they need to be customly built. So, depending on the breast cancer you have, some can be more aggressive, some less aggressive, some move in different ways, but the immune system is the key because the strategy for each person is different and their immunotherapy needs to be different. You hear me talk about immunotherapy, but just like your cancers are different between two people with the same type and stage, their immunotherapy targets are different. And that's why testing is so important because then we can build a custom medication, not something you buy off the shelf. Custom build it and custom deliver it for that patient so their immune system is involved. Change diet, lifestyle, remove causative factors. That's what every breast cancer patient should be doing when they're in remission. So let's take an early stage breast cancer. It's often a local problem. We like to freeze those. We don't even do surgery. We're just, they're small enough, we cryoblade them, they're gone. We have clean margins. You don't need surgery or radiation. Change diet and lifestyle and do adaptive monitoring. That's how we've been very successful with early stage breast cancers, avoiding a lot of the pain and suffering. But in advanced breast cancers, anything that's already spread, and we already know it's spread before we do surgery. We don't need surgery to tell us it's spread. We have circulating tumor cells, methylation score, CT-free DNA. We have all kinds of data that's tell told us that this cancer is metastatic. And if we know it's already metastatic, then we go into deeper testing, RNA transcriptomics, DNA biomarkers, next generation sequencing, immune profiling, and immune spatial biology, essentially now we know the entire pathway of this cancer, the tumor microenvironment, what's evading the tumor's ability to be killed by your immune system. Your immune system wants to kill it, but it doesn't have the right information to do that, or it's being blocked. Those are the things that we can get with precision testing. And the difference for survival in my clinical experience is knowing this information and incorporating it at the right time. So let me say this carefully. When people hear breast cancer survival's high, they assume that the modern drugs cured everything. No, they slow things down for the most part. But the biggest driver of those numbers is early detection and surgery. And thank God for that. That's not an insult to oncology. That's just a reality. If you find it early, your cure rate goes up. But even some of these cancers can return because they didn't know it was already metastatic. You may have had micrometastatic seeds that they didn't catch with early testing because they don't test for that. They do the surgery and you're in the watch and waiting game. Even then, you can do adaptive monitoring to see if the cancer comes back before you actually see it in imaging with advanced testing. So if you're watching this and you're a patient or family member and you wonder why this isn't being done for me in standard of care oncology, that's a question I get all the time. And the answer is really simple. Oftentimes it's a decade behind precision oncology testing. Insurance companies don't cover it, they don't want to get involved. Standard of care does not have the testing available. And if they do, they don't have the treatments because there's really not a lot of money in prevention, unfortunately. And they don't make off-labeled drugs that are customized for each patient. They buy them from the pharmaceutical companies, mix them in a bag, and give them to a patient in chemotherapy or surgically remove or have radiation. That's pretty much the game of oncology. But here I'm talking about custom care. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't use a smart drug, and I'll go into this here in a minute to slow things down, but you need to get the immune system involved to get the results you want. Now, I'm gonna say something that I hope will save patients years of confusion. Hormone therapy, chemotherapy, herceptin, radiation, these can be helpful in the right spots, but they don't solve the whole problem. That's where standard of care ends. But in many advanced cases, they have a problem with their immune system. These treatments slow things down, but it doesn't actually eliminate the cancer. But here's the problem: if the strategy is only to slow things down, you're only buying time. Our goal needs to be long-term remission so people can get their lives back. If you want to get your life back, you need to get your immune system to see the cancer and get rid of it. That's been my clinical experience. And so the real goal of doing that is custom-built immunotherapy. Even if you're one of these patients with breast cancer and you're a candidate for a ketruda because maybe you're an MSI, PD1 inhibitors only work long term for 10% of the patients. That means for 90% of the patients, they only buy time because it's not a comprehensive immunotherapy. To build immunotherapy correct and precision oncology, we run all the tests, then we custom build the immunotherapy, doing what? Going on and off label in a pharmacy. These medicines are made for each patient. So we have a full immunogenic cell death. This is important. Now the T cells, natural killer cells, they're all working. We're taking cold tumors and making them hot, and we change the tumor microenvironment so the patient can respond. And this is critical for late-stage breast cancers, anything that's stage two, three, and four. In fact, for all stages, the immune system is really important. So standard of care misses this because breast cancer immunotherapy is primarily ketruder or not. But in that case, you have metastatic, PD1 positive, triple negative breast cancer in combination with chemo, and it may work for 10% of the patients. We're talking about for all patients with breast cancer, really all prostate, colon, many cancer types, they need immunotherapy cancer cell vaccines. That's what I've seen be most effective. And using techniques like SIPI, chemoimmunoprecision injection, where we can go straight to the tumor using interventional radiology oncology. Now, the problem with interventional radiology oncology is if you go straight to the tumor and give a PD1 inhibitor, that's not going to work long term. You still have to custom build the medication, then go direct to the tumor with the right medicine that is right for you. That's why deep testing is so important. We need to look at the DNA mapping. These are called multi-omics testing, DNA next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, spatial biology, and immune profiling. And then we build a custom treatment that's designed for each patient. Two patients with the same type and stage of cancer will have different treatments. Once we deliver the immunotherapy in a custom manner for that patient, then we monitor with adaptive monitoring to see that they're responding and then holding remission. This is the part that's really important. So even if you're an early stage breast cancer patient, you want adaptive monitoring. You want to look at circulating tumor cells, methylation scores, CT-free DNA to see if the cancer is going to come back before you're waiting for imaging. You want to change diet and lifestyle, get your immune system strong because those are going to be the key to helping hold long remission. Now, here we get to the core. Some people are on hormone therapies and they are good because some cancers have hormone drivers or HERC II therapies because they have perceptin markers. But this slows things down. It does not cure the cancer. I'm gonna repeat that again. They slow things down. In my clinical experience, they don't cure the cancer. The long-term responses come when we establish immunotherapy alongside those. The problem is immunotherapies become like a buzzword. It needs to be custom built so that your tumor that has all these little antigens, think of it like a fingerprint, these neoantigens, can get exposed to your dendritic cells and you get damage associated molecular patterns and help the dendritic cells mature so that then it can pass the information to your T cells and natural killer cells and now find the micrometastatic cancer cells throughout the entire body, like a cancer cell vaccine, and shut it down. I want to repeat that again because this is important. To shut down the cancer, you want a custom-built immunotherapy that helps your body recognize the cancer. In my clinical opinion, that's the piece that's missing for many people. Now we can do that in many ways, but everybody is unique. And so you want the right testing, and then you can come in with systemic care, like genetically targeted fractionated chemotherapy, or SIPI, chemoimmunoprecision, injection direct to the tumor, or AIT, etogulous adoptive immunotherapy. These are all state-of-the-art immunotherapy strategies uniquely built for each patient. But it depends on your mapping. It depends on what your targets are. And when you add that, that's the piece that's missing to long-term responses in breast, in prostate, in colon, you name it cancers, because that's the key. The immune system is the first and last defense. And if we give the immune system what it needs and target care correctly, we can build the vaccine in your own body where your own immune system recognizes the cancer cells and gets rid of it. That's the key. That's the vision we need to have in treating patients so we get long-term outcomes. That's an immune-centric oncology, immunogenic cell death. That's an immune-centered care program that's missing for the majority of cancer patients. And that's what we need to work on together to change. We need doctors to recognize it, test for it, and custom build the care so that people can have access to precision oncology. In early stage disease, no problem. You monitor, change diet and lifestyle, and build the immune system. Again, you're building the immune system in a different way so that you can hold remission. In later stage disease, you need deep mapping. That's anything that's beyond stage one. You need to map it, target it, and custom build the treatment, not just pull an immunotherapy off the shelf for the patient so that it can help them respond. So I hope you found this helpful. You don't have to worry, is my cancer going to come back? How am I going to treat it? If you do not have the immune system on board and most patients don't, you're missing the most important piece in my clinical experience that's going to give the best chance of long-term remission. Please help us to get this information out there. 90% of you watching haven't subscribed. So please subscribe, share it with somebody you know or you love because we want to get precision oncology out there to change the way people think with real clinical experience. I'm doing my best to share with you my years of experience, and I hope you found that this episode was helpful. May the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.