From Stage 4 to Stronger Than Before: Steven Koeppel's Fight to Heal

Host Dr. Micol Neely sits down with Steven Koeppel, a true fighter whose story proves that resilience, mindset, and the right support can change everything.

Originally from New York, Steven lived a life centered around discipline and strength, including martial arts. Health and fitness had always been part of who he was—until his life took an unexpected turn with a diagnosis that would shake anyone: stage 4 cancer.

What followed was a journey that most people wouldn’t survive. Along the way, Steven also faced a ruptured appendix and multiple life-threatening challenges that pushed him to the brink. Yet through every obstacle, he kept fighting. Doctors have even called him a medical miracle.

Rather than letting the diagnosis define him, Steve used the experience to transform his life and his mission. Today, he works alongside professionals like Dr. Neely in the health space, helping people understand how to support the body, rejuvenate cells, and create systems that allow the body to heal and thrive.

Steven shares how lifestyle changes, consistency, and innovative wellness tools became part of his recovery and ongoing health journey. From red light therapy and sauna use to supplements, hormone balance, and cellular support, he explains how these approaches and equipment helped him maintain strength throughout treatment and ultimately reach complete remission.

Now runningThriver Wellness Supply where he shares the equipment and methods that supported his journey, Steven says he actually feels better today than he did before cancer. His mission is simple: help others understand what’s possible when you commit to your health and refuse to quit.

This conversation is powerful, hopeful, and deeply human. It’s about fighting for your life, finding purpose through adversity, and discovering that sometimes the hardest battles lead to the greatest transformations.

Steven’s story will remind you that strength isn’t just physical—it’s a mindset. And when you surround yourself with the right people and tools, incredible things can happen.

Follow, subscribe, and stay connected for more powerful conversations on strength, healing, and becoming the strongest version of yourself.

Stay Sassy and Strong with Dr. Micol

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, this is Dr. McCole Neely, and thanks for listening to our show. We are here to talk a little bit about mindset, movement, and muscle, and maybe a few other little fun things along the way. I want you to start out first and tell me a little bit about what you're doing. I've I've been on your showroom. If you see some of our posts, I've um kind of entoured and tried it all out. It's the pictures, uh the cameraman. But tell me a little bit about Thriver.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

So Thriver Wellness Supply is the very first experiential luxury showroom in North America, so being the US and Canada. So we are a resource for the best of the best wellness equipment, both prefabricated and custom, everything from saunas, infrared, and traditional, coal plunge, red light therapy, hyperbaric, PMF, vibration plates, uh LEMI massage tables, like the Ferrari of massage tables, as well as the best of the best supplements and hair follicle analysis.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Cool. And your story is really, really interesting. What got you into this space of wellness?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

So I've been in wellness going way back to de uh decades. So I was a competitive martial artist, um, everything from Shotokan karate to boxing, kickboxing, and eventually uh amateur cage fighting.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

So I was always the go-to wellness guy, uh always in shape, always took care of myself, the last guy you expected to. Yeah, well, I trained all that, but but through outside of the martial arts and everything else. Yeah, I just learned. I just was a people who were experts in their field or knowledgeable, like you were just like a magnet for me because you know, I wanted to learn and just absorb and be a wealth of useful and useless information. So I sold my last business in 2020, it was acquired by Lifetime Athletic Fitness Club, and moved back to Arizona. I think it's a good one. I want to take a couple of years from New York, yeah, from Long Island. Uh, want to take a couple of years to just kind of reset. It was the first time I've I hadn't worked six or seven days a week for decades. 35 years I've been starting and building businesses. So uh taking some time, figuring out, figured I had one last really good run to build and scale something, and I'll only do something I love. Yeah. So I just kind of figured I'd get a feel and see what it was. And 2023 went to get my labs done. And uh doctors said, well, you know, your lymphocytes are slightly elevated, your white blood cell count is slightly elevated, your platelet count is pretty low. Probably just have a virus. Let's run some tests.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So ran some tests, turned out to be a little more than a virus, turned out to be stage four mantle cell lymphoma, which you likely know most people have never heard of it.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Which is crazy because usually that's one rare and then a lot older males.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Older white men. Yeah. Very rare, only about 2,000 cases a year. It is getting a little more prevalent, but but very rare. Really, only doctors have heard of it.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

So uh surprise, as you can imagine, not a single symptom.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

What was your first thought when they told you that?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

I'm going to do everything I can, not only to fight. It was another fight, I'm a fighter, so this is the my biggest fight yet, but at the same time, I'm very organized. Um I and I said I'm gonna just put everything together because if it's going to kill me, then I want, you know, my wife and my kids to be situated and prepared and whatever else. So um, yeah, I knew I had a fight ahead of me. So, but you know, I'm not a quitter. There was never a thought where, you know, maybe I'll just let it. I my first thought was let me learn everything I could possibly do to beat this.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

I mean, above and beyond the chemo and everything else I went through. So I started chemo in August of 2023. Um really, I mean, like 11, 12 hours at a time, like death for four to five, three, four, five days afterwards. Literally like dying that bit, couldn't move, dry heaving, no energy. By the fifth, sixth day, walking the dog, seventh day, back in the gym. Two weeks later, same process. And it did that, you know, a few times. Uh, October Halloween 2023, they were doing a did a CAT scan to check my progress. Just want to see how my because the lymphoma checked my lymph nodes. And I got a call uh from my one of my oncologists in the Mayo Clinic two hours after CAT scan, said results look great, but you've got a bigger problem. I said, bigger. What's bigger than stage four cancer? They said you have a ruptured appendix.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

So I said, Well, that would explain, you know, I I the agony I've been in for six weeks and lost 18 pounds. I mean, they thought it was the chemo, they thought an old ulcer had opened up. Uh so long story short, check in the hospital, three doctors treating me there, said, We have no idea how you're still alive. Turned out they walked around with it for six weeks.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

They said, we've never seen anything like this. They said, that's they said you're a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Medically, I want to be like, that doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yes. They said they literally said I was a medical miracle, which I've heard before in other situations, uh, good or bad, and uh didn't even take it out. They said we can't operate, it's it's completely encapsulated, can't get a clear picture of it. There's no abscess. We can't operate an affected tissue because there's no way to suture it. You're obviously past the danger zone. So we're just gonna monitor for a couple of days, put me on really crazy antibiotics through my chemoport four times a day. Um, and first round of antibiotics they gave me, oh, my pain went away. Felt great. Two and a half days later, I said, if if you don't take it out, I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm not saying the hospital. My wife was in Europe visiting my daughter, who was studying abroad. My son came home from LA to watch my big dog. So uh next day they said, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna send you home, we're gonna have someone come to your house and we're gonna leave your port access. We're gonna teach you how to do your own IV antibiotics, did 32 IV antibiotics in eight days to myself. Uh waited uh five weeks to resume chemo, all the drugs had to be, you know, uh antibiotics had to be out of my system, and resume my second round of much more intense chemo.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

And two years this month, I am in complete remission.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

My last maintenance infusion, not really chemo, just like every eight weeks, my last one next week. Feel better than I probably have in 25 or 30 years post-cancer. And I attribute that to, you know, the the few changes I made and mostly the equipment that I now utilize on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Aaron Powell Tell me about those changes, because obviously you need and are thankful for modern medicines, chemotherapy, oncologists, and and I believe in medicine. But there's also a lot of the non-traditional holistic that you've really taken to heart and done well with. Can you explain some of that and how you've combined the two therapies?

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Yeah. So a lot of it, I mean, I really I I modified. So everything became primarily above and beyond wellness was cancer, fighting cancer, preventing cancer, recovering from cancer. Yeah. So everything from my diet was already very, very high level, my supplementation was always high level. So it's just modifying. Um, but I I truly believe that because that was just tweaking and just going you know from a higher level to an even higher level, but the equipment, so the sauna, the cold plunge, the red light, the hyperbaric, the PMF, I believe, because a lot of those now have been established to actually kill cancer cells, boosting healthy cell health, killing cancer cells, boosting, you know, everything. Yeah. So using those regularly is really where I attribute to uh you know this this stealing.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

So you already had supplements that you did, you were hormones balanced, and you stayed with that through your treatment.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Yes. Well, of course, my doctors at Mayo Clinic said, I'm on very low-level TRT testosterone for probably about 11, 12 years at that point. I didn't want to stop it, but of course, my doctor said, you know, you can't do it, it could promote tumor growth and blah, blah, blah. Uh, a very good friend who's a very, very brilliant doctor in New York or New Jersey said the same thing. Another doctor I knew told me the same thing, and I said, You're all wrong. You're quoting old research. It's not correct. Testosterone is actually beneficial through treatment. My my oncologist at Mayo clinic, brilliant guy, Dr. Javier Munoz, head of lymphoma at Mayo, he's a researcher. He said everything I told him, because I was always telling him something every three weeks when I saw him, and he said, I'm gonna look into it as he did everything, and he came back and he said, You are right. And our friend in New York looked into it and he said, You are right. So I get a lot of that, not just with not just with my cancer, but with with doctors overall, because very few go to the levels that you've gone through to educate yourself and train on peptides and hormone replacements. And it's not a one size fits all.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Like each situation is different, and sometimes we do find. So you did really well staying on that with the collaboration with your doctors.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Tell me about the peptides you use through your treatment.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

So I started peptides after treatment. I started peptides earlier last year. So I have to be careful because anything with his which is growth hormone stimulating, yeah, it if it specifically interferes with a with a medication I take now that I take a pill every day that blocks a specific enzyme that feeds cancer cells. So those specifically contradict that. So I can't do them yet. But so BPC is safe for me. I recently started MOTS C.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Um, not really getting the effects yet, because it's relatively new.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

And I'm about to start microdosing with uh retotrutide.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

For more for inflammation, just clarity, just the all the overall benefits, not I'm not so much weight loss. That's not my concern, but all the other benefits.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Those are three of my favorite. I love BPC long-term for bringing down inflammation, help aches, pains, um, good gut health. Um C is repairing mitochondria. So your cells are healthier and putting out more energy, um, which, as you mentioned, um, all about keeping those cells healthy to destroy the cancer cells and promote healthy cells. And then I do think there's a lot with retruitide right now. Um, I know it's newer and not officially on the market from pharmacology standpoint, but compound pharmacies were getting it. And I'm seeing some incredible results with maintaining muscle, but keeping it healthy, fat, um, balance, and bringing down inflammation. I think the studies are really showing it's preventing heart disease, early dementia. Um I think the anti-inflammatory effect is really, really neat to see with the retatrotide. It's going to be a game changer.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Absolutely. Well, it's just like statins. I say statins, really, the biggest benefit people achieve, at least from what I know, is it reduces inflammation. That's where people are getting even bigger benefits than the intended benefits. Yeah. And I know with the GLPs, it's the same thing. And another one I should mention, which you'll laugh, uh, I just tried first time is PT-141. Oh, good. That is good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

How do you like it?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I like it a lot.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Definitely one of my favorites. Yeah. Yeah. Have you tried it with oxytocin?

SPEAKER_00 11:39

I have not.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

So PT141's great one for sexual enhancement and proving libido. Right. Um, can give you a little flush. Did you get that flush with the one? It just worked.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

It worked.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

The neat thing is male and female can use it, which is really nice. And I'll be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

We'll get into that because my wife won't kill me, but it's very good for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

I love combining it with oxytocin. I gotta try to do that. It just combines this bonding experience too. Um, so I'm glad you've had a great experience with your peptides.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

This is why I love speaking to you. Whenever we have a conversation, you're one of the few people whose word I trust and whose knowledge I trust that you speak from experience and you teach me. You're one of the few people, and I learn, and I every day I'm I'm just learning good and bad, what to do, what not to do. But every time we speak, I learn something and I take away from it. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

That's what we're supposed to do. That's it. Tell me about your red light therapy, because that's one of those that I'd love to bring on. Um, how often are you doing it and what benefits are you seeing with it?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

I do red light at least typically six days a week. Um, ten minutes aside, ten minutes front, ten minutes back. So red light therapy is at the very top of my list. It's like two or three modalities, which are a must-must have, and I sell everybody on it because people come in for saunas and coplunge and other things, and everybody where possible leaves with red light in addition to, and they all come back and they love it. So red light, you know, most people not not knowledgeable about knowledgeable about it think it's just for you know skin health, anti-aging, tremendous benefits there.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

But you can.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

But first you feel it quickly. I mean, you feel it after a session or two in terms of mobility, re- inflammation, recovery, circulation. If you have any injuries, it's tremendous. So you feel it pretty much immediately, and then you start to see it. So, in terms of your skin health, skin spots, irritation, your eyes, or eyes are mostly collagen. So keeping the eyes closed, I get asked this question all the time, keep your eyes closed. The eyes are so thin that they filter the light, gets through, stimulates collagen in the eyes. My eyes have actually improved in the last two years.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

By doing the red light.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

By doing red light. And there's I haven't seen an adverse reaction to it yet. I know there are people who somewhere, somehow, have some reaction, very safe, um, but just easy and so, so, so effective.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Yeah. And I think it gets down to that cellular health again, too. It's really promoting, again, those mitochondria, which by the way, you get all from your mother.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Very good.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Think your mom. Another thing I learned from you.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Yeah, you know what? The lower wavelengths are shorter. They're more skin topical, very shallow uh penetration. And then the higher wavelengths, some of them penetrate all the way to a cellular level. So it's boosting ATP or energy production, um, cellular health, everything.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Inside and out.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

What other modalities? Tell us a little bit about the PMF.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

That was one of my favorites when I was at your showroom.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Yes, and you went pretty, pretty high level on it. Yeah. So PMF is is, I mean, the way I always explain to people, like when you they talk about grounding, when you lay on the grass, you get the magnetic energy from the earth.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Talking about many, many thousands of times that efficacy in terms of the power you're getting from these. So, you know, there, that's like recharging again, mitochondrial, ATP, um, healing, activates your parasympathetic nervous system, um, recovery, mental, physical. You're just stimulating your entire body, but it's very, very, very restorative.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

So I love it. I um I was getting a bit of tendinitis in my elbow. I'm very active. I had some tendinitis in my elbow last couple of weeks. Started using the PEMF on it. It's gone.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

So, you know, between that and now I could compound that with BPC and and whatever else. And it's it's like a miracle. It really is. The the my ability at my age to recover this quickly. I've had so many injuries over the years. But it's almost, you know, that's why they call the the blend, not what we're talking about, but the wolverine. Yeah. Because you're just regenerating at amazing.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Um and your GHKCU. Yeah. And sometimes I'll add in KPV for the clo. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

So I can't use those yet because of the growth hormone issues, but even with the BPC and the PMF, and then coal plunge is another of my absolute favorites. But the P EMF in different modalities, the most common is the PEMF mats. I always tell people, because some people buy the mats, you go on Amazon and go on online and buy these mats for $800,000, $1,500. I haven't seen one yet. The truly effective mats that work, and I know that they work. You know, they can start at like six or eight thousand dollars, so they're not cheap, but you're getting what you're paying for. Anything below that, I mean, everything I've seen, I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but everything I've seen is just a waste of money below that.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

What I found with using a session for you for the PMF you have is it's very restorative and quickly. Um and then my favorite is that Vimi bed. So I ran that hundred-mile race. Um I saw you the day after, like limping in, and you're like, who is this girl?

SPEAKER_00 17:02

That was the first time we met. And I said, I said, She's a vitality doctor, she can barely move. My legs are swollen.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

I had to explain. I'm like, I'm sorry, I just ran yesterday.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Yeah, so VEMI, VEMI stands for vibroacoustic, electromagnetic, infrared. So you're getting vibroacoustic, which is sound waves and vibration, excellent for inflammation, lymphatic drainage, tremendous. Um, you have the PMF, which we've just discussed. Yeah. And then infrared. So mild heat wavelengths. So those wave length wavelengths, very deeply penetrating. And I just learned, I didn't even realize, it's hitting over four billion cells per minute.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

So and then we had the acoustic.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

So that's part of the violence.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

It was very relaxing and healing. But when you put that together after a session, I literally immediately had less pain in my legs and hips. Um, and I felt like I was standing up straighter, like just one session.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Yeah, it everybody wants today's day and age, instant gratification. It's like, you know, we're scrolling, everything's had to be instant gratification. And what's so great about many of our modalities, especially the Vemi table, in a 30-minute or 60-minute session, a 30-minute session, you're getting it's the equivalent of three hours of the highest quality sleep. Yeah. So you get off that table, and it's funny, you, you know, other people have utilized it. We always ask people, hey, you want to do a testimonial, talk about it? And everybody says the same thing. They say, I can't even explain what I'm feeling right now because it's so different than everything you've ever felt. Mentally, physical, uh, mental restoration, physical restoration, again, activating your parasympathetic nervous system, uh, just healing, getting your everything, your frequencies in alignment. I mean, all your cells, literally, every, you know, all of our trillions of cells have to be in alignment frequency-wise. It just has so many benefits. And it's really inexplainable. That's the way to explain it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yeah. So if you were telling someone who's just been diagnosed with cancer or going through it, what would be the biggest thing you would tell them to start doing, taking care of themselves? In addition to seeing their doctors, the chemo, what would make the biggest impact getting them through their treatments?

SPEAKER_00 19:14

I'm going to stick above and beyond diet supplementation, because that's a given. And we know that. Everybody should know that. But so PEMF has been now established to effectively kill cancer cells, which is tremendous. So the NIH, National Institute of Health, government organization. But um, they did a study, they released a study uh specifically on breast cancer and PMF. It's you know, more and more common, a lot of people suffering from it or have gone through it, and they found that PMF effectively killed breast cancer cells while boosting healthy cell health, which is, you know, chemotherapy, as you know, destroys a lot of good things as well as your cancer cells. So the PMF was effective at not only killing cancer cells, boosting healthy cell health. Um sauna, very effective. We've had this discussion before. Yeah. Because it really you release heat shock proteins. Heat shock proteins basically kill, you know, boost our immune system, fight virus, bacteria, sickness, but heat shock proteins also have been established to kill cancer cells. I was just reading something recently. So I mean at a very high level, definitely that PMF, the VEMI table, more than anything, because it incorporates a number of those things, sauna usage, um, red light therapy, boosting mitochondrial. You know, we need to make our body the least conducive environment for cancer cells to thrive in, and the most conducive for our body to be able to fight this battle that it's going to fight. So, you know, those are red light, sauna, PEMF, even coal plunge really boosts immunity, stimulates our vagus nerve, which I've read extensively about yesterday. Absolutely off the chart. But um, so anything we can do to enhance our bodies, well, using this certain level of dials, which are actually killing the cancer cells.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

I think it's pretty amazing the tools we have now. So we've got modern medicine, but combine that with yes, you've got to have your core, and I preach this over and over get your nutrition right, get proper sleep, get movement, work on your mindset. But then on top of that, we've got these amazing tools, bringing in peptides, bringing in red light therapy, PMF, Vemi Bed, Sauna, Cold Plunge. I think it's a little different for every person, and that's why I do recommend doing that in conjunction with someone who knows these modalities. Um, because we want the right thing for each person. But I love, love these modalities, want to bring even more in for my patients.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

And um Well, I tell I I tell anyone listening or anyone who will hear this podcast at any point in the future, between what you're doing, your medical background, and your extensive knowledge of all these other Things and what we're doing, you could feel, you could live. I mean, our slogan, our slogan is life optimized. So, I mean, you want to truly live life optimized, you want to age well, you want to feel well. There's no reason, again, conversation we've had about decreasing on a metabolic age or cellular age. Um, you know, what we're both doing lends right into it and it's established to work. This is not, you know, hocus pocus. This is not something that someone says, well, you know, try it. These are things you feel, you see, and you notice very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

It's not about living forever, but it's a living with energy, or we say quality, live with power.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

But if you can live longer and live a great life, it's better than you.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

Yeah. Definitely. Quality over quantity. And we've got the tools to do it.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

We've got them all.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

Thank you so much for joining me. I love talking with you every time. And uh can't wait to bring in some more tools to our place.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Thank you.