Beyond Mammograms: What Women Need to Know About Breast Cancer with Dr. Jenn Simmons SUMMER REBOOT - Episode 280

Important links:

Get in touch with Dr. Jenn Simmons' team here: https://www.realhealthmd.com/

perfectQTion Imaging:  https://www.perfeqtionimaging.com/

Ever wonder if everything you've been told about breast cancer is actually true? In this riveting conversation, former breast surgeon turned functional medicine physician Dr. Jenn Simmons shatters conventional wisdom with evidence-based insights that might just save your life.

Dr. Simmons doesn't hold back as she reveals how her own health crisis and family history of breast cancer led her to question everything she'd practiced for 17 years. "The tumor is not the problem," she explains, "it's the symptom of the problem." This fundamental shift in perspective forms the foundation of a completely different approach to breast health.

Prepare to be shocked by Dr. Simmons' candid analysis of mammogram screening programs. Despite the ubiquitous claim that "mammograms save lives," she presents compelling evidence suggesting they may actually cause harm without reducing mortality rates. She introduces listeners to QT scanning—a radiation-free, pain-free alternative with 40 times the resolution of MRI that promises to revolutionize breast cancer detection.

The conversation takes unexpected turns as Dr. Simmons connects breast health to everything from dental work to parasite infections. She debunks the myth that estrogen causes breast cancer, explaining how environmental toxins and poor detoxification pathways are the real culprits. Her practical advice on alcohol consumption, toxin avoidance, and hormone optimization offers women actionable steps to protect their breast health.

Whether you're concerned about prevention, navigating a recent diagnosis, or supporting someone on their breast cancer journey, this episode provides essential knowledge that mainstream medicine often overlooks. Dr. Simmons' unique perspective bridges conventional and functional medicine, offering a comprehensive approach that honors the body's natural healing capabilities.

Don't miss Dr. Simmons' book "The Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer" and her podcast "Keeping Abreast with Dr. Jenn" for more life-changing insights that put you back in control of your health.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Sandy K Nutrition
• 1:32 Dr. Jen's Journey from Surgeon to Functional Medicine
• 18:10 The Truth About Mammogram Screening
• 33:42 Dense Breasts and Alternative Screening Options
• 46:37 Environmental Factors and Breast Cancer Prevention
• 1:01:40 The Estrogen Myth: Hormones Don't Cause Cancer
• 1:12:33 Biological Dentistry and Parasite Connection
• 1:24:44 Resources for Breast Cancer Prevention and Support

Transcript

Sandy Kruse: 0:02

Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy K of Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen. For years now, I've been bringing to you conversations about wellness from incredible guests from all over the world. Discover a fresh take on healthy living for midlife and beyond, one that embraces balance and reason without letting only science dictate every aspect of our wellness, and my guests as we explore ways that we can age gracefully, with in-depth conversations about the thyroid, about hormones and other alternative wellness options for you and your family. True Wellness nurtures a healthy body, mind, spirit and soul, and we cover all of these essential aspects to help you live a balanced, joyful life. Be sure to follow my show, rate it, review it and share it. Always remember my friends balanced living works. Friends, balanced living works.

Sandy Kruse: 1:31

Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition, health and Lifestyle Queen. Today with me, I have a special guest. Her name is Dr Jenn Simmons, and Dr Jen spent the first 17 years of her career as Philadelphia's premier breast surgeon. After attending Jefferson Medical College and completing a general surgery residency at Albany Med, she was selected for Philadelphia's first breast disease fellowship. As a breast surgeon, she served as chief of her department at Einstein Medical Center. She was also the medical director of the cancer program.

Sandy Kruse: 2:09

Her experience as a patient in 2017 led her to discover functional medicine. She received her functional medicine certification from the Institute for Functional Medicine in 2019, and she was so enthralled with promoting health rather than managing symptoms that she left her esteemed position in 2019 and started Real Health MD, a functional medicine oasis for anyone on a breast cancer journey who is looking to take charge and reclaim their health. Dr Jenn is on a mission to help millions of women restore their health following a breast cancer diagnosis, so that they may live in their best health for as long as possible, and today we are going to be discussing this vast topic of breast cancer prevention, screening, diagnosis, all the things, and who better than to talk about this with Dr Jenn? So, with that, welcome, Dr Jenn.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 3:16

Thank you so much. It was such a nice introduction. I always get embarrassed and I think about like, get embarrassed and I think about like, oh my God, I did all that. And I think the one thing that functional medicine teaches you the most is if you're not embarrassed about something that you did six months ago, then you're not learning enough. And so as you read that, I like look back on all the things that have happened over my career and like die a thousand deaths over and over again, because when I was a surgeon, you're so blinded.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 3:50

You're just so blinded by the system and by the standard of care, and this is how we do it, and it's still so paternalistic.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 4:02

And I think about the people over the years that asked me for more, that intuitively knew that there was more, that intuitively knew that they had power. And I was so conditioned to say no, there's nothing more and there's nothing you can do to prevent breast cancer or to reverse breast cancer other than this. And breast cancer is just bad luck and there are no modifiable risk factors and nothing that's within your control. And so as I look back on that time, I'm kind of like cringing inside, like I can't believe I did that for so long. But I've had this tremendous privilege, this enlightenment, and for that I'm super grateful. And I know that this is what I was put on earth to do, and I was just on the wrong path before in how to help millions of women, because I could have never done it as a surgeon. At the same time, that education was invaluable because I have a perspective that no one else on earth has.

Sandy Kruse: 5:20

Yeah, I know, and that's the thing. So, even though you believed in a very strict and specific dogma that you were taught in medical school, you also learned from that and that took you on this, let's say this voyage where I don't think I know anybody who does quite what you do.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 5:49

No, I mean, of course, there are other people that are cancer doctors and there are other people that are integrative oncologists.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 5:58

And there are even ones that specialize in breasts. There's, you know, one or two that specialize in breasts, but none of them are coming at it. From my perspective, having been a cancer surgeon and running a cancer program for 17, 18, 19 years something along those lines and, on top of it, being from a breast cancer family and witnessing every single step of that journey personally and professionally for as long as I did and continue to, and you did so, you also became a patient.

Sandy Kruse: 6:39

Was that your turning point, when you said you know, I got to change the way that I practice medicine?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 6:49

Yeah, I very much come from a breast cancer family. I've never known a time in my life where I didn't know about breast cancer. Growing up, I had a first cousin. Her name was Linda Creed. She was a singer, songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. She wrote all the music for the Spinners and the Stylistics. She was beautiful, brilliant, larger than life, the queen of Motown sound in Philadelphia. She wrote 54 hits and her most famous song was the Greatest Love of All. So she wrote that song in 1977 as the title track to the movie the Greatest starring Muhammad Ali. But it really received its acclaim in March of 1986 when Whitney Houston released that song to the world and at that time it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts. But my cousin Linda would never know because she died of metastatic breast cancer one month after Whitney released that song.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 7:49

After Whitney released that song and I was 16 years old when my hero died and she wasn't unlike all the other women in my family who got breast cancer, with the exception of I was a child growing up witnessing her journey, and so that no other woman and no other family, no other community had to suffer the way that mine suffered, I decided that I was going to do whatever I could to change the conversation around breast cancer, all the while knowing that this was going to be my fate too, because at that time we believed that this was a story of pure genetics. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I went to medical school. I became a doctor, I became a surgeon, I became the first fellowship trained breast surgeon and I did that for a really long time, long enough to diagnose my aunt and my mother. And it was in my probably 15th year of practice where I went from being probably one of the most high functioning humans you've ever met in your life and people's heads would spin with the amount of things that I could accomplish in a day, in a week, in a month. And so I went from this really high functioning human to literally I couldn't walk across the room because I didn't have the breath in my body and I had a three-day really intensive workup. And at the end of that time I'm sitting in the office of my friend and colleague and physician and he tells me that I need surgery and chemo radiation and that I'm going to be on lifelong thyroid replacement hormone because what I have is Graves' disease, which is an autoimmune disease of the thyroid. But because it attacks the thyroid gland and floods your system with thyroid hormone, what happens is that you become so hypermetabolic hypermetabolic that your heart literally overworks to the point of stopping. So people die of sudden cardiac death with untreated Graves' disease.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 10:17

What I couldn't wrap my head around at that time were two things. First, it was kind of during a time where I was becoming more religious and really thinking about my relationship with God all the time and I didn't understand why God would give me an organ that I needed to live that I had to remove and then replace with the synthetic hormone for the rest of my life. So I was really struggling with that. And the other thing that I was struggling with was my aunt who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, but 10 years before that was diagnosed with Graves' disease and my entire career I really saw the writings on the wall Like I knew that I was going to be a breast cancer patient at some point, because that's just how my family rolled. So this was quite a reality check for me when I'm kind of facing that precursor diagnosis and in case people don't know, the thyroid and the breast.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 11:30

There are canaries in the coal mine.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 11:33

They are the organs that are the most sensitive and the most affected by environmental disturbances and they are the indicator that something is not going right in our body.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 11:50

They are the first signals that things are not going right in our body and it's no accident that we have the amount of thyroid disease that we have in our society. I mean up to 25% of women have thyroid dysfunction. This is a crazy amount, but we're living in toxic times. We are not living on our grandmother's earth, we're not even living on our mother's earth. We are living in a time and space where things are exponentially off, exponentially more toxic, and we are not built to deal with all this toxicity. So for me, my diagnosis was a wake-up call and even though it was frightening and even though my doctor told me that I would die if I didn't go the conventional route Just like I said to women countless times, what will happen if I don't treat my breast cancer? And I would say that you'll die of your disease and my doctor was saying the same thing to me but something and thank God I lived through this decision but something told me that there's more and go find it.

Sandy Kruse: 13:09

And.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 13:09

I did, I did. I went on a journey to find it and like every healing journey, it was not linear, it got way worse before it got better, but that I was so fortunate and this is God's work more than anything else that in the very beginning I happened to listen to Mark Hyman speak. And at the time he walked on the stage with those lanky legs and that toothy grin and introduced himself as a functional medicine physician. And I had been a doctor for like 20 years at this point and I thought there's no such thing as a functional medicine physician. What is this quack talking about?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 13:56

And then I remember that I was sick and I was there for a reason and I tuned in and listened up and thank God I did, because that was really the turning point for me, because that was my very first exposure to how wrong we were getting it, and that especially in the world of cancer, where all your focus is on the tumor. But the tumor is not the problem, the tumor is the symptom of the problem. And nowhere in my 20 years of being a doctor had I ever said I wonder why this is happening, I wonder what's happening. I've just focused on the tumor because that's what I was trained to do, and you know the people that ask the why they're the difficult people. What?

Sandy Kruse: 14:47

are you?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 14:47

asking why? For there's no answers there. And so this was my opportunity to take my blinders off and see the world, see medicine, see health in a whole different light. Because really, as a conventional medical doctor, we're trained that and people believe that health is the absence of disease, so if you don't have a diagnosis, you're healthy. That's not true, simply not true. And so health is optimal function. But our doctors don't know how to help people have optimal function. Our doctors know how to diagnose disease and treat symptoms.

Sandy Kruse: 15:35

That's exactly yeah. So I have to ask I'm fascinated with your history, your story, fascinated with with your, your history, your story. So do you still have your thyroid? I do you, do I still? Have my thyroid so you have to do the radiation, the ablation, any of it, nothing.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 16:05

No, that's amazing. Yeah, there were some scary times and I think if I called my doctor tomorrow and told him that you know I wasn't feeling well, he would say I told you so even though it was like seven years ago.

Sandy Kruse: 16:17

So seven years. Because one thing I will say too is for five years they suppressed my TSH, so it was virtually at, it was undetectable, and so I was living in a hyper thyroid state for a long time, and it's not a fun place to live. It's a little bit scary, you know.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 16:38

With heart, yeah, so I've been on spectrums of zero to 32 TSH.

Sandy Kruse: 16:49

Yeah, so I've been on spectrums of zero to 32 TSH. So with medication changes it's hard but talk to us a little bit about the connection of thyroid to breast.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 16:56

Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, we know that both of their functions is centered around iodine. Both of their functions is centered around iodine, and so you have to have healthy levels of iodine. And iodine is one of those minerals that I call a Goldilocks mineral, because you have to have it just right you can't have too little and you can't have too much, and our bodies have become amazing at adapting to low levels of iodine. But there are areas in the world where they have really iodine rich diets, world where they have really iodine rich diets, and, like in Asia, those people have adapted to very high levels of iodine so they absorb very little, and we and people who are not good people who live in areas where there's very little iodine, they become excellent absorbers. So I'm very, very careful with iodine supplementation, because you can get into trouble really fast one way or the other.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 18:18

But that is one thing that the breast and the thyroid have in common. The other thing that they have in common is that they're both extremely environmentally susceptible and sensitive. And it's easy to understand why the breast is so sensitive, because even breast is made up of four primary tissues. So there's the glandular tissue, that's the tissue that produces breast milk. There's fat, there's connective tissue that holds everything together and it's all inside of a skin envelope. And even if you are someone that has dense breasts, meaning that you have a high proportion of glandular tissue in your breast, you're still going to have a lot of fat. There's always going to be a lot of fat cells in the breast, and fat is where we store our toxins.

Sandy Kruse: 19:19

Yes.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 19:20

And so think about being the neighbor of a hoarder. So you know, eventually that hoarder is going to fill their space and it's going to start creeping over onto your lawn. That's the same thing that breasts have Breast cells, the glandular cells they're living next door to hoarders, the glands of their cells they're living next door to hoarders. And when you are in contact with toxins, you are far more likely to get damaged. And that's essentially what's happening Now in a vacuum. That alone won't do it, because we do have repair mechanisms that are supposed to recognize these damaged cells and either repair them or tell them to undergo what's called programmed cell death, so to just kind of involute and go away.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 20:15

The problem is that our way of life, our existence, is so toxic that those immune systems aren't working. 70% of our immune system is housed in the gut, and if you are on a steady diet of gluten and dairy and ultra processed food, your immune system is exhausted. It doesn't have the bandwidth to go around your body and do its repairs because it's stuck in the gut working way too hard. This is why diet is so important, this is why eating organic is so important, and so it's the combination of. We store toxins in the breast. So the environment of the breast is kind of toxic and our immune system is so challenged by diet, by poor sleep, by chronic infections, by pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, phthalates, xenoestrogens, antibiotics I mean we could go through the gamut of what is damaging our immune system, and it's the combination of those two that is the perfect recipe for cancer.

Sandy Kruse: 21:41

So I have to ask you this because I can't. I honestly can't remember where I read this, but it was something relating to, and I'm totally paraphrasing that alcohol has become like the new smoking in terms of risk factors for midlife women, and I can't remember Without question. So what are your thoughts on alcohol? Because I mean, you mentioned okay, there's so many factors here you mentioned the diet, and then we didn't talk about exercise, but of course, not moving your body.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 22:17

That's a risk factor in and of itself. Sitting is also the new smoking.

Sandy Kruse: 22:21

Yes, yeah. And what are we doing right now? Right yeah, recording.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 22:27

But but for what it's worth when we're done. I'm getting right up on my treadmill.

Sandy Kruse: 22:32

There you go.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 22:32

I, I. I work at a treadmill desk and I I walk anywhere from six to 12 miles every single day, because I walk and work at the same time. Yeah, but it's annoying when you're recording to watch the person bounce up and down.

Sandy Kruse: 22:49

Well, my husband bought me a rebounder at Christmas and so I try and go on my rebounder. Yeah, it's amazing, right, like a few times a day. It's like my little mini exercise snack.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 23:05

Yeah Right, amazing. And if you can get 20 minutes in a day in different sound bites, it that that is awesome for lymphatic health, for some for circulation, um, it's awesome for your core. I love a rebounder. Yeah yeah, I saw one of your posts. Actually I'm like, oh, dr Jeff likes to rebound too. I love a rebounder.

Sandy Kruse: 23:23

Yeah, Love a rebounder. Yeah, I saw one of your posts. Actually I'm like oh, Dr Jen likes to rebound too. I love it.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 23:30

I do, I do. I love a rebounder, so back to alcohol, alcohol?

Sandy Kruse: 23:34

Yeah, because you know, during COVID especially, this became a big thing where there were all these memes on TikTok and everywhere, of all these women drinking at each other's houses and sure it's like I'm all for fun and I'm all for balance, but do you think this is?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 23:56

coffee, by the way. I just want everyone to know.

Sandy Kruse: 24:03

But yeah, like, what are your thoughts on alcohol? Because I personally don't abstain. I did do a show on sober living and I respect everyone's decision for whatever their choice is. I drink only on occasion, on social occasions. That's like that's when I drink on social occasions. That's like that's when I drink, so not commonly what are your thoughts on alcohol and breast health?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 24:33

So let's not. First let me say that I respect anyone's decision that they're going to make right, and the decision is yours. At the same time, as a physician and if I am treating someone for breast cancer and they are actively cancering there is no room for alcohol, any of it. It is so toxic, so it's a xenoestrogen it is. Also. It has to be metabolized by the liver. That's a fixed amount of time that it takes to metabolize alcohol. Women are not nearly as efficient at it as men. It will take women eight hours to metabolize an ounce of alcohol and during that eight hours that's all it's metabolizing. So whatever other toxins that you're coming into contact with at the same time, they're just getting stored. There's no room for dealing with them. Your body is always going to prioritize the thing that's going to kill you first, so it's always going to work on the most toxic thing, and alcohol, for most people, is the most toxic thing and there's no catching up.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 25:58

So think about a laundromat that the next day you just reset. So whatever you don't get through. So if you just have a little bit of laundry and you can get through it in 24 hours. Awesome. If you have a ton of laundry, you know that that washing machine only works at one rate, right? You can't make it faster, you can't make it, you can't overstuff it. You put the right amount in and it works for a certain amount of time. So if you have a huge amount of laundry and you can't make it, you can't overstuff it you put the right amount in and it works for a certain amount of time. So if you have a huge amount of laundry and you don't get through it, you don't have the next day, because the next day the same amount of laundry is showing up. So it just gets stored. So toxins just get stored. So this is why alcohol makes people fat because they can't get through the toxins. That is our body's protective mechanism. That's how the body protects you from toxins. It makes a fat cell and it stores the toxins in it. It's a way to get it out of the bloodstream so that it can't damage your vital organs. And this is also why, when people lose weight, they send those toxins back into their body and sometimes they don't feel great right away until they clear those toxins.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 27:19

But alcohol we know it's a known carcinogen. We've known that for a long time. There is really no safe amount of alcohol for women, according to the American Cancer Society, but my feelings about it are that it's been in existence since the beginning of time. I mean, we know, in biblical times we talk about wine and bless wine, and it's a sacred, it's a sacred substance and I think that there is a time and a place, if you're healthy to to include alcohol, if you choose, in. I don't, I don't even want to say moderation In. I don't even want to say moderation. One glass once in a while is not going to hurt you unless you're actively cancering. If you're actively cancering, absolutely not. But you shouldn't be drinking two days in a row. And because you have to give your liver a break and its ability to catch up, and it won't yeah that laundry just keeps building if you're constantly drinking.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 28:29

That's right. So if you're drinking every day, you're forcing your body to make more fat cells, to store more toxins. And where are you going to store your toxins? In the breast. And where are you going to store your toxins In the breast? No-transcript.

Sandy Kruse: 28:52

So let's begin with some stats on breast cancer. Is breast cancer on the rise and we kind of covered the toxins. We kind of covered, you know, the way that we live now versus you know, we're not living on our own homesteads, growing our food, you know, taking care of our own animals and getting our eggs from our chickens, and most people don't live that way.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 29:20

So people don't live that way, that's true.

Sandy Kruse: 29:22

Right, but is it on the rise or is it that there are more of these diagnoses that are not, as? I don't even know if dangerous is the word.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 29:39

Well, but over-diagnosis is a real problem. Okay, it's a real problem. Now, I'm not going to say that we don't have more toxins in our environment. We do, yeah, but one of the major toxins that we have in our environment is radiation. Toxins that we have in our environment is radiation, and if you think about it, we have a whole program designed to develop breast cancer, because we're telling our women to start at 40, go and have your breasts radiated once, or some women twice, some women three times a year. We are basically setting the stage for breast cancer. And that's not the only problem. I mean, mammograms will cause thousands of cancers a year. Just mammograms alone will cause thousands of cancers a year.

Sandy Kruse: 30:37

How is that, jen? How, how? Because I know people are going to stop on that, you know, yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 30:46

So when you talk about x-ray, x-ray is a known carcinogen. Radiation is a known carcinogen. We know radiation causes cancer yes, we do. But we decided that we wanted to screen women and so we gave it a different name so that it would have a different connotation. So we called it a mammogram. We called it a nice name instead of calling it what it is. Called it a nice name instead of calling it what it is, which is a breast x-ray.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 31:24

And if you break a bone and need an x-ray, you need an x-ray, right? That is an entirely different thing than screening for a disease, screening a normal, healthy population. When you break a bone, you're no longer healthy, right? You have something that's broken. When we use a test that causes cancer to screen for cancer, if we're going to do that, there has to be a significant benefit to doing that, and they believed in the beginning that there was. That's the premise that the screening mammogram program is built on. So we started to screen with mammogram in the 1970s and the screening program was based on this assumption. Breast cancer growth is linear and predictable, meaning that it's something that starts small, grows to some critical size, at which time it's more likely to metastasize. So if we catch it before, then we can have women undergo less treatment and we can save lives, and it's a lovely theory.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 32:35

It just doesn't happen to be true. And we can save lives and it's a lovely theory. It just doesn't happen to be true. Breast cancer growth is neither linear nor predictable, so it does not have to go along an obligatory path. It doesn't start small and then get to some critical size and metastasize. Breast cancer is what it is from the very beginning.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 32:57

The biology is the only thing that's important with breast cancer and it's either going to be biologically aggressive or it's not. And the biologically aggressive cancers we're not doing that well with those. And the ones that are not biologically aggressive, it almost doesn't matter what you do to those, because those women are all going to be fine. We have. No matter how many women we screen every year with mammogram, we see the same number of women present with advanced disease. No matter how many women we screen every year with mammogram, the same exact number of women die of breast cancer every year. We are not impacting the bottom line at all, but what we're doing is causing more breast cancers, because you can see when we started to go from 2D mammogram to 3D mammogram in 2012, 2013, 2014,. That's when the rates of breast cancer really start to rise. Because we are over-diagnosing, we're causing some of these cancers and we're over-diagnosing. We are finding cancers on mammogram that would probably never have become clinically relevant. And then, once we do that, we're committing these women to breast cancer treatment.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 34:31

And if breast cancer treatment were a benign entity, that would be one thing. Breast cancer treatment, we're a benign entity, that would be one thing. But breast cancer treatment accelerates heart disease, accelerates dementia, accelerates depression, anxiety, accelerates bone loss. These are major, major issues. And, lest we forget, women die exponentially more of heart disease in every generation of their life, past the age of 30, than they do of breast cancer, exponentially more. So we're taking a disease that, for the majority of women, would not have cost them their life, and then we're making them two to three times more likely to die of heart disease, and they're already exponentially dying of heart disease. So we're actually, by screening with mammogram, shortening women's lives, not saving lives. Shortening women's lives. This is a problem, and it's because of this that countries like Switzerland have abandoned their mammographic screening programs, because not only do they not save lives, but that we will materially diminish the quality and the quantity of women's lives if we screen them over a lifetime.

Sandy Kruse: 35:59

So Switzerland has banned this screening.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 36:04

I'm not going to use banned, because if you want to go have a mammogram there you can, right right, but they have abolished their screening programs Program yes, abolished their screening programs Program yes. So, unlike our doctors in the United States, their doctors are not recommending that women get screened with mammogram because they know it does not save lives.

Sandy Kruse: 36:28

So here we still got the quotes and I'm in Toronto, so, similar to in the United States, you know you get the quote mammograms save lives. Yeah Well, the Canadian study proved it didn't Well it's interesting because I get a letter every year in the mail from the government reminding me to have my mammogram. Now that's, that's politics.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 36:59

Oh, that's politics, because women believe that mammograms save lives, so they want it. They want it and that's their politicians making them happy. And remember this is very good for the system. The system wants mammograms because right now we don't have a system that rewards health. We have a system that rewards sickness and disease.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 37:29

Yes, doctors don't have a way of getting paid if you're healthy, which is, please know that I am not coming down on doctors. This is how they were trained. This is the only thing that they know. I am not coming down on doctors. They are doing exactly what they're trained to do, and most of them are doing it very well and with good intentions. But the problem is that we live in a time where health is not rewarded, only sickness is rewarded, and the doctor has to put food on his table too and has to send his kids to school too. So until we redesign our system to reward what is truly important, this is going to continue to happen, and a radiologist who is trained now believes that mammograms save lives, and so they're going to push really hard and they're going to. They've drawn their line in the sand and they're going down with that ship.

Sandy Kruse: 38:43

Right, and along with the radiologists, every I'm going to say almost every woman that gets that letter goes. Oh, I better go, I better go and get my mammogram.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 38:56

That's right, Because they're misinformed and they're under the false impression that mammograms save lives. But it's not true. It's a lie. It's a lie.

Sandy Kruse: 39:10

I have ignored and honestly and here's where the whole shame comes in People look at you like you're crazy. People look at me like I'm crazy Because I have ignored my letter now for over two years. Yeah, and it's not listen. And they're like shouldn't you see what's going on with that tumor that you had in 2011? Shouldn't you see what's going on with that cyst that you had in 2011? I'm like, well, I actually don't feel any issues with it. I take good care of my health.

Sandy Kruse: 39:51

This is a good segue to get into not thermography as a diagnosis, but maybe and this is you might find this interesting as a physician so the thermography. I recorded a podcast on it. She does not really believe in breast thermography only. She believes in just whole body, just to see how is your whole body functioning as a whole. So, uh, right, like you know what's going on with your you know lymphatic system or what do you? You know, do you see issues there? Anyway, I know I've done a lot of research on thermography. I know that it's not a diagnostic tool, but do you think like a good practice? Just to say, oh, you know, I did feel a little bit of issues with and I'll tell you, I do have issues with this wrist, and it was like glowing red very so. It kind of almost just solidified what I already knew was going on. But what are your thoughts on it?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 41:02

So, let's call it what it is. I mean, it is a screening tool for inflammation. It's not a screening tool for cancer, right? So the reason that it got such negative connotation, in the United States at least, is because people were using it as a screening tool for cancer. That's not what it is. Let's use it for what it is, which is a marker of inflammation. But most of the doctors, in the US at least, don't know what to do with that information. They don't know what to do with that information. They don't know what to do. They think inflammation, take an anti-inflammatory. They're not thinking oh, what's causing the inflammation? Let's look at that, let's figure that out, let's get rid of whatever that nidus is, that stimulation is, whatever the etiology is, but they're not thinking that way. If you are going to use it as a screening tool for breast cancer, then it needs to be coupled with some other imaging modality, like an ultrasound. So if you want to use it that way, that would be a far more sensitive screening tool and, quite frankly, none of this is going to matter, because there's imaging that is FDA cleared, that is going to forever change the landscape of breast imaging and then body imaging, but in the meantime.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 42:30

I love thermography, I love a whole body thermography. I think we should all know where. If we have inflammation, and if you see inflammation around your thyroid gland, if you see inflammation in your joints, if you see inflammation around your body, that's your opportunity, that's your invitation, and I think we should all have that kind of awareness. And I think we should all have that kind of awareness. It's also why I believe in self breast examination, because I think we should all know what our body feels like. No one is going to know us better than we know ourselves. Yeah, no one. And so I really believe in self exam. And people say to me all the time yes, but mammogram is going to find something that's three millimeters or four millimeters maybe. Yes, that's true, do I care about that three or four millimeter thing? No, because if that three or four millimeter thing is going to become a one or two centimeter thing, then I'll deal with it.

Sandy Kruse: 43:37

Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 43:38

Yeah, but if I can see that on thermography and it doesn't show up anywhere else, I can say maybe we should figure out what's going on with you. Maybe we should figure out before you get that diagnosis that condemns you to all those treatments that actually ruin your health rather than increase it. Let's figure out what's going on in your environment, because we know that cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. So what's happening in your environment? What do we need to do to make that environmental shift? Get out of stress chemistry, get back into the chemistry of joy, and so that those cells that are on high alert because they're under stress chemistry can relax and say oh my God, we're fine, everything is safe. This is one of the reasons why meditation works, because it tricks your body into thinking that it's safe, even if it's not. If you can take over your breathing, if you can take over your mindset and get into that place, that Zen place, where that saber-to saber tooth tiger is no longer on your tail, that shifts your chemistry.

Sandy Kruse: 45:02

Totally. Have you read the biology of belief, dr Bruce Lipton?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 45:07

I haven't. It's all my list that I know. I know I need to do that.

Sandy Kruse: 45:12

Yeah, maybe that's. Yeah, it's. It's meant to be right If you've heard his name before but yeah, I'm a big believer.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 45:18

No, I definitely have. I'm trying to get him to come onto my podcast.

Sandy Kruse: 45:22

Oh yeah, now, that's so. Fear in my mind. Fear breeds more fear, so I remembered literally one month before I knew I was having a total thyroidectomy, being told they found a mass being called back in, being told I have dense breasts which I want to definitely tackle. That whole dense breast topic, I don't know. I think I had two mammograms and then the core biopsy and you know the whole being called back. And then they said well, it's horrible. It's a horror. And then the core biopsy.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 46:05

It's a horrible system.

Sandy Kruse: 46:07

Sure, they numb you, but I had a scar there for years and it was like almost traumatizing, like that staple gun, like the, where they're pulling out. You know what it's like, you're no joke, and I'm awake sitting there going, holy shit, like is this cancer?

Sandy Kruse: 46:27

Am I going to have two surgeries? You know simultaneously, like what's going on here, but the fear was so huge and then afterwards being told we need to monitor this, you might want to take it out. I ended up leaving it, so this was in 2011. You know, I I didn't do anything with it, but I was told this term you have very dense breasts. You have very dense breasts. You must have a mammogram every year from now on. Yeah, what does dense breasts mean and how. You know why more mammograms and why does that put me at more risk, or?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 47:13

does it even put me at more risk? No, it doesn't, but they would love for you to think that it does. I mean, you know that scare tactic is very real. That's their marketing. That's the way that they make sure that you come back, because they use fear.

Sandy Kruse: 47:26

Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 47:27

And let's talk about what dense breasts are.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 47:30

Yeah, so we talked about what makes up the tissues of the breast. So when they say that you have dense breasts, they mean that you have more glandular tissue than fat in your breast. And the reason that it's relevant is because that determines how sensitive their test is. Because in a dense breasted woman whose tissue is mostly glandular tissue and just a little bit of fat the minority is fat. That mammogram is going to miss 40% of cancers in dense-breasted women. And because of the way that the imaging machine works, it gives enough radiation to try to penetrate. So women with dense breasts can get up to 10 times the amount of radiation that someone who does not have dense breast has. Wow, yeah, so the machine will automatically dial up that radiation.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 48:35

There's an amazing documentary called Boobs the documentary. You don't want to just search for boobs because you won't like what you get. But if you search for Boobs the documentary amazing documentary about women's imaging, and if you just want the shortcut, I interviewed Megan Smith, who was the producer of that documentary, on my podcast, keeping Abressed with Dr Jen, and you can just listen to that podcast. But first of all, women are not being told how much radiation that they're getting during the study and it does vary. It does vary from person to person, so the issue of informed consent is simply not there. When we talk about women who have dense breasts, we have to divide that into premenopausal women and postmenopausal women, because premenopausal women, whose bodies are prepared to feed an infant, they're supposed to have dense breasts.

Sandy Kruse: 49:41

Yes.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 49:42

Right. I mean, that is just biology, and a premenopausal woman with dense breasts is not at increased risk of breast cancer. However, as you go through menopause, that changes and the breast tissue involutes because you no longer have to feed a child and it becomes fatty replaced. And so, as the further you get away from menstruating, the less dense your breast should become year after year. And so doctors looked at that trend.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 50:21

Now, if your breast didn't become less dense, that was for two reasons. One is you're on hormone replacement, which you know. That's fine. I mean, that's the reason why your breasts aren't getting less dense and there's no association with that and breast cancer. The other reason, if you're not on hormone replacement, is inflammation, and anyone with a lot of inflammation in their body is going to be at increased risk of breast cancer. And so that is the relationship and that is the tie-in and that's what no one's telling you. So premenopausal, it's normal and we should not be alarming these women who are premenopausal, who have dense breast tissue. That's normal, and it's only in the postmenopausal population that is not on hormone replacement, and I'm a full advocate of hormone replacement as long as it's bioidentical. If you are postmenopausal, not on hormone replacement and your breast density is not decreasing, it's because you have significant inflammation and that is your risk factor for breast cancer. It's not your dense breasts, it's that you're inflamed and you should use that as motivation to figure out where that inflammation is coming from.

Sandy Kruse: 51:55

So let me ask you this Is there an actual place for a mammogram in your mind as an expert in this area?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 52:03

So I'm an advocate of QT scanning. So QT is a technique that they're an FDA clear device that has the first FDA clearance in 50 years to screen women with dense breasts. Everything else was grandfathered in it uses sound waves to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the breast. That without radiation, without compression, without any pain, and it has 40 times the resolution of MRI. So in my opinion yes, that's massive.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 52:45

Yes, 200,000 times more data points than MRI Holy smokes. Yes, yes, yes. So I almost feel like it's not even worth having the conversation anymore about mammogram and MRI, because inside of five years these are going to be everywhere, because I'm going to make sure that they're everywhere and that it's just, it's not going to matter. But in the meantime, I want to say this about mammogram there is no reason ever to have a screening mammogram ever. There is no benefit to it, no one is helped by it, and you know I get flooded with women who say mammogram saved my life, and I know they think that because that's exactly what the system wants them to think. But the truth is that mammogram either caused your cancer because you never would have had it in the first place, or it picked up a cancer and caused you to be treated for cancer when you didn't need to be, and the only people that benefit from treatment are the people that would have presented anyway.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 54:04

They didn't need mammogram to bring them to treatment because it would have become clinically obvious. And we're not saving people from less treatment. It's just not happening. Treatment is based on biology. So if you're going to get chemo, you're going to get chemo because you have aggressive disease. And we don't take people who, well, they have really aggressive disease but the lesion is small. We don't say you don't need chemo. That's not what happens. We say you don't need chemo to people who don't have aggressive disease. So we're not. We're not saving anyone from anything and in fact we're. We're only causing problems on the other side. So no one needs a screening mammogram ever.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 54:50

But I am not saying that you're never going to have a mammogram again, because there are, because there are going to be situations and circumstances where we're going to need it for diagnostic purposes. Like if we need to localize something before surgery, right now, mammogram is the way that we're going to do that. Or if you have an abnormal QT scan or if you feel something in your breast, you're going to go and have a diagnostic study. So I'm not saying you're never going to have a mammogram again, but just like that x-ray for the broken bone. I'm not talking about the normal population I'm talking about. In situations where there's already an abnormality, then it's okay to use a diagnostic study. That's what it's for. It just has no place in screening. We should not be taking healthy people and subjecting them to something that causes cancer. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't save any lives and we are hurting people. We are hurting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

Sandy Kruse: 56:09

There's more and more physicians like yourself and obstetricians who are actually speaking very similarly about mammogram, like in the sense of, yes, you may want to have a mammogram if something shows up in another test or if you feel something. Yes, yes, it does make sense to me. Now I want to get into this QT scan because you're saying that it's going to be available everywhere, even Canada. Yes, yes. Now what is it? Is it like a photograph, like how is it done? How long is it? Is it invasive? Do they have to?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 57:03

touch your breasts. It's completely non-invasive, there's no compression. You lie down on a table. There's a hole cut out into the table on a table. There's a hole cut out into the table and there's a water bath that comes up and your breast gets submerged in the water bath and, depending on the size of the breast, each breast takes anywhere from four to 10 minutes to scan. So at the most you would have a 20 minute scan. But you know you're just. You're just lying on a table listening to either waterfall or you know some kind of meditative music and by the time 20 minutes flies by, you go home unharmed on. You know it's just. It's a beautiful experience, uh, and women are so deeply relieved because it's so unlike any other breast imaging experience they've had before.

Sandy Kruse: 58:07

Yeah, because even with ultrasound anybody who's had, because I've had so many different ultrasounds they have to press and it's not the same, as you know, squishing your boob with a mammogram.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 58:20

No, but they still give pretty good compression on an ultrasound.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 58:24

So for someone who has tender breasts or sensitive breasts, it's not that comfortable and you know the gel is disgusting and not that comfortable. And the gel is disgusting and not for nothing and I know most ultrasound techs do their very, very best to be as compassionate as they can. But I know for me had a lot of ultrasounds. You watch their face and, depending on how good their poker face is, you're terrified the whole time. You're watching for a little bit of emotion and they're typing away and you're freaking out like what are they writing? And it's not. It's not a pleasant experience, it's a terrifying experience. It may not be painful but it's scary.

Sandy Kruse: 59:18

Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 59:19

Yeah, that's true. This takes all of that out of it. All of that out of it. It's more like going to a spa than anything else.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 59:29

I love it else, and it will forever change our experience around breast cancer screening. And I'll tell you what I believe the best part of it is. This is the only functional testing on the market. When it sees something, if it is an obvious cancer, that's one thing and we tell people it's an obvious cancer and then they go have a diagnostic workup. But if it is something that is nonspecific or more ambiguous, we tell people to come back in 60 days and at 60 days we rescan them and we count the cells, we measure a doubling time and we know that cancers have a doubling time of 100 days or less. So those people that have that faster doubling time, we tell them you need to go and have further evaluation. But if you have a doubling time of greater than 100 days, we say see you in a year, at which time we'll measure another doubling time.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:00:39

Now what this is going to do is identify those people that need a workup, that need a biopsy, that may need treatment. But what it's going to avoid is all of those biopsies that are done for benign disease it completely eliminates those and for these slow, growing, non-meaningful cancers, these people are just going to get followed. So it's saving them from the biopsy. It's saving them from the pain and hardship of that diagnosis when they don't need it, and it saves them from treatment that they don't need. That will only shorten their lives and diminish the quality of their lives. This is why it's so meaningful and this is why it's so important, because it gets rid of over-diagnosis and over-treatment. Now people may still choose to go have more evaluation, and that's fine, but you're taking away the power of this test, which is to save people from over-diagnosis, from over-biopsy and from over-treatment.

Sandy Kruse: 1:01:56

That's my thing is that I want to do what I can to ensure that I'm well, I'm protecting my own nervous system, because I get such severe anxiety system, because I get such severe anxiety when I have to go for a mammogram, because I know what to expect and I know the pain that that it causes me.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:02:22

Yeah, it's horrible.

Sandy Kruse: 1:02:23

It's, traumatic it is, and then on top of it, I'm like do I even need this, you know?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:02:30

And do you even trust it? Need this, you know, and do you even trust it? Do you even trust it? I mean, how can you trust a test that's wrong 40% of the time? Right, is that the stat then?

Sandy Kruse: 1:02:40

40% of false positives or false alarms Like is that what you would call it so?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:02:48

40% are false negatives in dense-breasted women, meaning that there's something there that it doesn't pick up, holy crap. And that doesn't even speak to the false positives, and the false positive rate varies around the country, but it's anywhere from 25% to 50% of them are false positives. It's a huge issue. It's a huge issue.

Sandy Kruse: 1:03:23

And here's the other thing. I didn't ask about this because I've read about this. If you already have, let's say, a cancerous mass and you are compressing that tumor, you are compressing that tumor. Okay, I happen to know probably too much about cancer. My daughter had cancer at five as well, so I've learned from her oncologist about how cancer has blood supply, how it has arms and legs and it's holding onto other tissues and there is blood supply. So when you're compressing it, it's almost like you could be spreading it as well.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:03:59

Yeah, so I don't know how much I believe in in that theory, um, whether or not it actually disseminates it. I don't think so, because when we think about all of the women who get mammograms and all the women who get breast cancer diagnoses and then all of the women who die of breast cancer, that number stays so consistent that it makes me think that the biopsies are probably okay, the compression is probably okay. I don't think that that's what's changing the biology. I think that there are just a certain percentage of cancers that are going to have aggressive biology and I don't think that's influenced by biopsy or compression. I hear what people are saying and that you know, will that fracture the capsule that is around a cancer? I don't know. Those cancers are pretty hard.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:05:09

You know, having having had my hands on thousands and thousands of cancers, I don't think, I don't think that's happening. I mean, I've never put 50 pounds of pressure on it, um, but I don't, I don't think that that's happening.

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:29

Okay, that's good to know. And then, what about people who have had or who have implants?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:05:36

Yeah, Now that's real. So mammogram will rupture people's implants, which is in like what percent?

Sandy Kruse: 1:05:45

what percent of cases?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:05:47

I don't know. I don't know those numbers. I should really. I'm going to look up those numbers, but most women with mammograms, or most women with implants, are avoiding mammograms for just that reason because they don't want their implants ruptured.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:06:06

Old, you can screen and it's valid because it's not harmful. You can screen young women at any age, whereas it's really unethical to do a mammogram on someone who's 25, but not so much when you're not doing radiation. And then the solution for many people was thought to be MRI. But MRI is fraught with issues. But MRI is recommended. I forget what the recommendation is. It's either every two or three years for women with implants, and you know it doesn't confer a rupture risk. But MRIs are useless without gadolinium.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:07:00

Gadolinium is a heavy metal that's stored in the body and anytime we store something in the body, we store it at the expense of what is supposed to be there. So gadolinium causes a host of medical problems and I know in my practice. I see people and I tested their urine for toxins and I see people spilling gadolinium at levels 100, 1000 times normal years after they've had an MRI. So gadolinium is a real, real problem and is not safe and should not be used as a screening examination, for the same reasons that I talked about mammogram not being safe and not being used as a screening examination.

Sandy Kruse: 1:07:50

Well, I need to clarify this. Yeah, so gadolinium.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:07:56

Gadolinium. That's the contrast medium that's given along with MRI.

Sandy Kruse: 1:08:01

Okay, Okay. So when you do a breast MRI you have to have contrast.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:08:07

Yeah, it's useless without it, unless you're looking for nothing. But if you're just looking to see if the implants are intact, then you don't need contrast. But if you are looking to see the state and the health of the breast tissue, if you're looking for lesions in the breast tissue, if you're looking for a diagnostic exam, then you need gadolinium.

Sandy Kruse: 1:08:34

So you need the contrast. So is contrast something that's easy to detox out or no? No, no. Like, what are we talking?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:08:45

Like, if you went and had an MRI, the best thing that you can do before you have the MRI is take zinc, because gadolinium will compete with zinc for uptake, so if there's plenty of zinc around you won't uptake as much gadolinium. And then, so I tell people, after a gadolinium, before a gadolinium study, and for a few days after, make sure that you take zinc. I usually recommend 60 milligrams of zinc picolinate for an hour before, day after or for two or three days afterwards until your body is able to clear that gadolinium through your kidneys and hopefully not store it kidneys and hopefully not store it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:09:35

You're brilliant. I've never heard this before and I know a lot about MRIs and I did not know how toxic the contrast was. Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:09:43

Yeah, and you know we're starting to see the data on on um MRI technicians and them having early onset dementia, because it's not great to be around that magnet all the time either. But you being exposed to the magnet every now and again is different than the person that's around the magnet for eight hours, five days a week, for eight hours, five days a week. But none of these things are terribly safe and that's why we need to think about screening and diagnostic tools completely separately. Whereas screening, you have to be very intolerant of risk because you're taking a population that is presumably normal and healthy. So you can't put that population, that healthy population, at risk, right? So we should not be using a test that causes cancer to screen for cancer. We can't put a healthy population at risk. That is very different than the non-healthy population in which we're using these tests for diagnostic purposes, to figure out what the something that already happened is. Those are two very different categories and we really need to distinguish between them and separate the two.

Sandy Kruse: 1:11:11

I want to oh gosh, I could talk to you forever, I really feel like I could, but I want to get into this really quickly, because at the start of our discussion, you mentioned two different types of breast cancer. Basically, I know there's many different types of, and they're categorized and but basically you've got a non-aggressive or an aggressive, and we talked about lifestyle interventions, we talked about screening and, of course, you work with women who have breast cancer now from an integrative physician perspective cancer now from an integrative physician perspective but is there anything that we as women can do to prevent an aggressive cancer other than all of the lifestyle and diet and all of those other things? How do we? Of course, then there's genetics right.

Sandy Kruse: 1:12:15

Then there's genetics, but how can we influence this, or can we?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:12:21

We can definitely influence it, without question. Now I would love to talk about genetics a little bit, because I think that people put way too much into that basket, and I know that you know that's why I thought my entire career that breast cancer was inevitable, because everyone in my family got breast cancer and I thought it was absolutely for certain. Now I know that genetics is a tiny part of the picture.

Sandy Kruse: 1:12:52

Yes.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:12:53

That it is merely the suggestion right, and genetics may load the gun, but the choices that you make pull the trigger, and so it's the epigenetics, it's all the things that we can do to control our genes and decide which genes get turned on, which genes get activated, which genes get turned off. That is under our control for the most part. So you know, of course, I talk to people about diet and I don't think that there's one diet for everyone. I don't really believe in orthorexia or diet dogma or this is the way that I'm going to eat for the rest of my life, because I don't think it's true for anyone. I think that there are times in your life where you're going to be more plant-based. I think that there are times in your life where you're going to be eating differently, and I think it's necessary. For instance, whenever I first diagnose someone with an aggressive cancer, I get them on a keto diet really quickly, a plant-based keto diet, because I know that that's what they need right then.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:14:00

Are they going to be on that plant-based keto diet for the rest of their lives? No, no, they're not, because there's going to be a time for something else, and so I think we need to get out of that thinking that there's only one way for you to eat for the rest of your life. It's not true. It's not true. This is season for everything, and eating seasonally is also really important because we need to stay in connection with nature. So you know, if you're eating a lot of fruit in the winter and none in the summer, you're going to get real fat, because that is not what was meant to happen, right? So diet is really important Overall.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:14:44

If I had to pick one way that I think most people do really well with, I talk about a whole food, plant-based or plant-rich, low glycemic, grain-free diet, and almost everyone will be healthy if they follow those guidelines. And where you get your protein from is where you get your protein from, and I don't get into those protein wars because I feel like it alienates people, and you know, the only people that don't agree with me are the pure carnivores who think that vegetables are bad, and I think those people are just lost, and so you know, that's what they believe, and that's what they believe, and I'm not going to convince them and they're not going to convince me.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:15:34

Then movement is so important. As we talked about, sitting is the new smoking and what that movement looks like changes, because you can get away with doing all cardiovascular until you're about 40 and then things start to shift, and then you have to have to have to put that weight training in.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:15:52

And as you get to 50, you have you have to have to have to put that weight training in and as you get to 50, you have to do that balance work. You have to do that flexibility work or else you're going to lose it, because if you don't move your body in the way that it was meant to move, you're going to lose it. Sleep Sleep is where the healing happens. If you're not sleeping, you're not healing.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:16:11

And we know from tons and tons of data that people who are short sleepers, who sleep less than six hours a night, are at risk for a host of chronic diseases. People who sleep at the wrong time, people who do shift work, are more likely to be overweight or obese or have heart disease or blood pressure problems or lipid problems or even cancer. Right, so sleep is very important and prioritizing sleep is very important. And sleep has to come as natural sleep because taking sleep inducing agents like you know, sleeping meds they don't allow you to cycle through the sleep cycles that you need in order to repair your body Toxin avoidance, minimizing what you're putting in on and around you so that that liver doesn't have to work as hard. Remember, you know that laundry, that your liver has to get through. We want to give it less to get through.

Sandy Kruse: 1:17:15

Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:17:17

And then, um, there are. There are other things that I think about all the time that are not necessarily at the forefront of everyone's brain. For instance, you know, for years the dental industry has created a ton of disease for people, and that whole drill and fill mentality has left people with heavy metals inside of their mouth that are just poisoning them every single day. And we know that mercury is a xenoestrogen. We know that it acts like a toxic estrogen in our body, and so mercury is responsible for a considerable amount of breast cancers.

Sandy Kruse: 1:18:00

So can I just say something I know because you're going to find this interesting. I had a thermography as you know, full body, and guess what showed up. As you know, full body, and guess what showed up Inflammatory, yeah yeah, an old root canal. That's exactly right. From 2005, after. I gave birth to my second child and guess what came after that? Thyroid cancer came after that. Is this the causative factor?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:18:32

after that, is this the causative factor? 100%. We know that there are parts of the mouth that are on the thyroid meridian. We know that there are parts of the mouth that are on the breast meridian, and when we biopsy these tumors, we see these organisms. We know that they're coming from a chronic infection in the mouth. And why the dentists aren't talking about this, I don't know.

Sandy Kruse: 1:18:59

Oh, jen, I did a whole show with Dr. Do you know who, dr Kelly?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:19:02

Blodgett is no, but you're going to introduce me to her.

Sandy Kruse: 1:19:07

To him.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:19:08

It's a him.

Sandy Kruse: 1:19:09

Dr Kelly Blodgett. You will love him. He's a biological dentist. I forget where he is he's in the us, but he's wait a minute.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:19:18

I think I do know who he is you must know him, he's got, he's he's amazing. He's the one with the toothpaste that, um, that uh, encourages the good micro oral microbiome growth. I think, I don't know. I'm almost positive. I don't know, I'm almost positive, I don't know. I think I've seen him on Instagram.

Sandy Kruse: 1:19:34

He's amazing, yeah, but he's the one who I just learned so much from him. So in the end I had to get an implant and I didn't. I chose not to do another root canal, but it was because of dental work that was done that shouldn't have been done and my enamel was completely destroyed. I had a condition called condensing osteitis, all the way down to the bone as soon as you take the tooth out. It's fine. I took the tooth out, I did an implant, but now I am going to year two. I'm like I can't do it all at once right it's dental.

Sandy Kruse: 1:20:14

It's hard to do it all at once. Not only is it it's it's painful, but it's expensive yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:20:19

All of it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:20:19

Yeah, I am going to pull this root. Can old root canal?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:20:25

this year, which is exactly what needs to happen, and then treated with some ozone and yes, and then let um let it and let it heal yes, that's the advice that I was given. Yeah, let it heal put a spacer in its place yes, and then and then, do an implant.

Sandy Kruse: 1:20:44

Implant, yeah, next year, yep that's what needs to happen yeah so, but I wouldn't have known because it hasn't been giving me problems like I. I don't, I don't feel it.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:20:55

I know so many people that the only reason they knew about issues in their mouth is because every single person that I see for breast cancer I say you have to go have I have them get a cone CT of the mouth, which is a 3D like the live on your camera. It's like a 3D clip of your mouth looking for cavitations, because people can be totally asymptomatic and have these low grade infections in their mouth. They're walking around with white counts in the threes or in the twos because your body is trying like hell to contain this infection so that you don't feel bad, so that you don't feel symptomatic. But that's what is totally draining your immune system and at the same time, if it's busy working here, it's not going to work on the breast and that's what's happening for so many people. This is a huge, huge, huge issue that is completely being ignored. So everyone needs to know if you've ever had wisdom tooth extraction, if you've ever had a root canal, if you've had, if you have metal amalgams in your mouth, if you've had cavities in your mouth, you need to go have a workup with a biologic dentist that does a cone CT of the mouth and ensures that your mouth is healthy. You can also test your oral microbiome and I have to say, if you have enamel issues, I love the products from Primal Life Organics. They have a dental detox program. They have an enamel building program. The products are amazing. If you have bad breath, if you have any, any oral issues, this will change your life, change your life. I her products are unbelievable. So dental issues is a huge is a huge one.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:23:10

The other one that is almost ubiquitous, that no one talks about is parasites. I always go back to you know people say oh, I don't eat sushi, I don't eat raw meat, I don't. There's no way I have parasites. Nearly everyone has parasites. I saw this disgusting video on Instagram where they were slicing into a banana and they took the banana slice and they put it under the microscope and you see the little things crawling. It doesn't matter, if you eat strawberries, you can have parasites. If you eat blueberries, you can have parasites. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. They're everywhere, they're ubiquitous and they can be causing that same chronic infection. So I start off everyone in my program on a parasite cleanse and I get calls like five or seven days later, people horrified at the things that are coming out of them, like you know, 10 inch tapeworms in their stool.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:24:09

Yeah, yeah, but you know, totally asympt had no idea.

Sandy Kruse: 1:24:14

Okay, jen, I have to tell you this because I grew up, so my parents are Croatian, very old country farmers, and my mom tells me stories about how everyone had worms.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:24:31

Yeah and so You're so funny, you're whispering it like it's a secret and we're on a podcast.

Sandy Kruse: 1:24:38

It's so gross right. But she would tell me these stories about how every once in a while, you know like they would throw up and there would be worms in their vomit, and it was a real thing. But this is like farmers like, but their bodies would naturally expel it. But parasites are very real and they're everywhere.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:25:05

Yeah, very real, very real everywhere. So my recommendation to most people is that you do a parasite cleanse once a year. You always want to start around the full moon. That's when they're the most active love it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:25:18

Do you like cell core?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:25:20

I do. I love the cell core products yeah um, I usually add in a little berberine, yeah, um, but I love the cell core products, um, and if you see lots of critters, I usually have people do it for three or four weeks. If you see lots of critters, you need to keep going for six or seven weeks and then you need to do it twice a year until you don't see lots of critters. Yeah, yeah, and they're tough, they're. They're really really happy inside of you. They don't want to leave.

Sandy Kruse: 1:25:57

Right, and I guess the thing is is that even if you do these cleanses, it's more about keeping them at bay, right? Because don't we live in symbiotic relationships?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:26:08

We do, we do, for sure we do, but you don't want overgrowth.

Sandy Kruse: 1:26:14

Right, right, just like bad bacteria in the gut, you got to make sure that the good outweighs the bad.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:26:20

Yes, yes, and and on that note, you know, I I think people should be checking every single year check your gut microbiome, check where you are, make sure that and and and for what it's worth, check where your nutrient levels and make sure that you are getting adequate levels of, uh, dietary vitamins and minerals. Um, I always want people to get as much as they can from food, but when you live in places like where you and I live, you're not going to get adequate vitamin D. Doing that, right? Uh? So measuring, knowing knowing what your vitamin D level is of utmost importance for everyone, because that is one of the ways that we stay healthy. Um, and I I think that everyone should have a CBC every year and look at your white blood cell count, and if your white blood cell count isn't above five, you have something going on that is suppressing it.

Sandy Kruse: 1:27:28

Some sort of inflammation or Inflammation infection.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:27:34

Metals you should start looking.

Sandy Kruse: 1:27:38

Now, what are your thoughts on, because most of the people who listen to this are women over 40,. What are your thoughts on the Dutch test?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:27:52

I think it's a useful tool in postmenopausal women because their hormone level should be in a fairly steady state. Their hormone level should be in a fairly steady state. It's a tough test for a premenopausal woman because one day your hormones are going to be one thing and one day they're going to be another thing. So I don't know that the hormone part of it is that useful. I think the cortisol part, the adrenal part, is useful.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:28:20

But we have to remember that these are only a snapshot and what we need to be doing more than anything is listening to our women. They can tell you where they are. You know where they are according to what their symptoms are and you know what they need according to what their symptoms are. So the first, second, third, fourth, fifth thing that we should be doing is listening to our women. Yes, is there a role for testing? Yeah, sure, there's a role for testing, but we have to remember where that person is, and in someone who is 40 to 50 years old, you can get different results on a different day that are totally in conflict with one another. So I think we have to be doing way way way more listening than anything else.

Sandy Kruse: 1:29:12

Yeah.

Sandy Kruse: 1:29:13

I agree with that especially as it relates to hormones. Like I can tell I am, I'm. I mean I just had a period on March 1st, so like the last couple of years, it's like I'll have that one a year that just kind of shows up. And so I find it really interesting when you say that. But I knew I was gonna get a period. I knew from my symptoms, I could tell from my skin that my estrogen levels were a little higher. I could tell. But this is what I mean. So it's individuals like yourself as a physician and myself as a nutritionist and an educator to just educate women and say, hey, there's symptoms. If you actually look at how you feel, whether you hate your husband, whether you love your husband right, no, it's totally true, and not for nothing.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:30:07

but my entire family could tell when my cycle was coming on. My husband would go to the closet and bring out the broomstick and say here you go.

Sandy Kruse: 1:30:20

Here's your ride to work. Yeah. But he's never allowed to say you must be getting your period. Never do not say that to me, yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:30:30

Well, yeah, my, my, my days are gone from there, yeah, but but he still goes to the broomstick a couple of times a year and, and I deserve it, yeah, okay.

Sandy Kruse: 1:30:42

That's okay. Okay, we, we have that right. Okay, I have to ask you. Oh, my gosh, I have to ask you about sulforaphane. Okay, cruciferous, cruciferous cooked vegetables. As you know, as a as a thyroid queen yourself, you know we want to have cooked cruciferous vegetables. Do you believe sulforaphane helps redirect estrogen to a better place, or shuffle?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:31:13

Well, we know that when we break down estrogen, there are three different estrogen pathways which we use, um and when we break down estrogen it's a two step process. So the first what we need to do is we need to take something that is lipophilic, meaning that it is um, oil based, and we need to make it into something that is water-based or hydrophilic to excrete either through our urine or through our stool. So the first step in the process are by what we call the CYP enzymes. These are enzymes in our liver and there is one pathway that we know is let's call it the less toxic or safer pathway, and one pathway that every step along the way is more toxic and we always want to encourage in any way we can to use the safer pathway rather than the toxic pathway, can to use the safer pathway rather than the toxic pathway. So we know that cruciferous vegetables that contain sulforaphane, endothreacarbonol and DIM. We know that those chemicals are involved in increasing the speed of that safe pathway. So if that enzyme is more efficient, then it's like looking at lines to go in, you're going to go into the shorter line. So basically, what the sulfurous vegetables do, what the cruciferous vegetables do, is they make that line shorter so that more hormone gets detoxed down that pathway.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:33:12

The thing is, if that second part of the pathway is not working, it's not going to ultimately help you. Not working, it's not going to ultimately help you. Or some people have genetics that already quickly go through that first step and they get stuck on the second step. So I always I look at people's genetics to see what their proclivity is, what their genetic makeup is more drawn to doing, and then I try to support them. So if someone already has a fast CYP1A1 enzyme, that's that first part of the estrogen detoxification pathway on the safe route If someone already has that enzyme working quickly not that I'm going to discourage them from eating cruciferous vegetables, I wouldn't but I would never supplement them along that pathway because then they're just going to bottleneck on the second part. Does that make sense? Did I explain that well enough?

Sandy Kruse: 1:34:20

It's a little complicated it is complicated, because I know exactly what you mean, because I'm envisioning the Dutch test right and the three different yes, so it's the line to the left.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:34:38

Yes, yes, so there's, it's the green pathway.

Sandy Kruse: 1:34:41

Yeah, I was just going to say, because the Dutch is great in that it does show green, and then there's red. So that's we known. We known, however you want to pronounce it that's the danger zone that you don't want to have too much of.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:34:54

And then because those will cause direct DNA damage, right, that's the problem along that pathway. And quinones, we know, are highly inflammatory. So we want to minimize that pathway and the only way to do it is to really open up the other two pathways. So the first part of that pathway we talked about, and you can open that up if people are stuck with the cruciferous vegetables, with DIM, with endothreacarbinol. But then you have to make sure that methylation is working, glucuronidation is working, your COMT enzyme is working, because that's the major way that we're converting that 2-hydroxyestrogen to 2-methoxyestrogen and making it water-soluble so that we can get rid of it. And then I think about the things that make COMT, that second part of the pathway, work. So it means that you have to have adequate levels of B6, of B9, which is folate of B12. And so it's all a symphony and we need to be in balance, because that's where health comes from.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:36:22

Yes, and then I guess the third part of that would be if you're not pooping regularly, right For sure this is why constipation is such an issue and why we need to talk about pooping so much more.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:36:36

I mean you know, even you, you were whispering about the, about the worms, and people whisper about the poop. We need to scream about the poop, we need to shout about the poop, because that is what is keeping people healthy. I mean, I just I cringe so much when I ask people you know how often do you move your bowels and they say, oh, I'm regular, I'm like okay, what does that mean to you?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:36:59

Yes, oh well, I go at least once a week and I'm like, what yeah, what yeah, if I went once a week I would be so toxic my brain wouldn't even work, me too. And we all need to be going every like two or three times a day and we need to be talking about it Like we can't be embarrassed about pooping. Everyone poops, everyone needs to poop. We need to poop. It's how we get rid of our toxins. And if you're not pooping, you're reabsorbing all those toxins, including the estrogen. Yes, including the estrogen that needs to be treated. Yeah, we're done with it when that comes back into circulation. When we talk about estrogen dominant states, it's not because your ovaries are making too much estrogen. That's not what's happening. Estrogen dominant states come when you're not getting rid of it and you're reabsorbing it and you're reabsorbing the metabolites of it. The metabolites are the problem. No one ever got sick from having too much estradiol in their system. That is not what's happening.

Sandy Kruse: 1:38:09

Okay, well, as a breast cancer physician, former and integrative medicine doctor, does estrogen cause cancer? I think you just kind of answered it, but Absolutely not.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:38:25

Thank you, absolutely not. It's been a very convenient statement belief and it's very easy to blame things on estrogen, especially when you have drugs to block that right, like people like to tie things up in neat little packages whether or not they're true. So the whole estrogen causes breast cancer is such a convenient explanation when you look at cancers and 70% of breast cancers will have estrogen receptors on them and so like it helps to tidy up that explanation. Well, let me tell you something 100% of normal breast cells have estrogen receptors on them. They're supposed to. Estrogen is part of our signaling pathway. We want estrogen receptors on ourselves and if you have a breast cancer with estrogen receptors on it, even upregulated estrogen receptors on it that is a variation of normal.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:39:31

That cell is telling you I'm not too far gone yet. I'm not too far gone yet. When you have a cancer cell that doesn't have estrogen receptors on it, that doesn't have progesterone receptors on it, that cell is rogue, that cell is gone. That cell is not listening to signaling pathways. That cell is on its own, practicing by its own rules. These are the tumors that are more dangerous, because these are the tumors that are no longer following the laws of nature, they're not behaving in the way that they're supposed to behave. So we need to get out of that mindset. Just because we have estrogen blocking drugs and there's estrogen receptors on the cells doesn't mean this is an association, maybe, but it does not imply causation at all. And if you believe that estrogen causes breast cancer, then by that definition every woman was put on earth to get breast cancer Exactly Because we've had estrogen, that cannot possibly be true?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:40:36

Yeah Right, that cannot possibly be true. Beyond that, breast cancer is exponentially more common in the postmenopausal population, where, if you've seen Dutch tests, you know the amount of estrogen in a postmenopausal woman that is not on hormone replacement is barely measurable barely measurable. You can barely find it. How could estrogen be the causative factor if it's barely there? It's actually exactly the opposite that estrogen is protective, and I'm using that word to describe the family of estrogens. But there are three estrogens, maybe four if you count the one in pregnancy. But there is premenopausal estrogen, which is estradiol. There's postmenopausal estrogen, which is estrone. There's a third, weaker estrogen, which is called estriol, and they are all. They're all produced between the ovaries and the adrenal glands, and the production shifts postmenopausal, because postmenopausal you're making much less estradiol because your ovaries are no longer functioning. So there is no way that estrogen is the cause of breast cancer, that estrogen is the cause of breast cancer.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:42:05

That said, we know that the breakdown products of estrogen are, and can be, toxic, and so we need to make sure that those pathways are open, that we are able to break down our estrogen effectively and that we are effectively secreting it, so that we are getting rid of that used estrogen, those estrogen byproducts. But probably more important is to make sure that we minimize our exposure to those synthetic estrogens, to those xenoestrogens, those environmental estrogens, to those xenoestrogens, those environmental estrogens and I'm talking about everything from birth control pills to antibiotics, to anything with fragrance, to anything plasticized, to any protective coating, to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides to heavy metals, fungicides to heavy metals. These are all falling underneath that umbrella of xenoestrogens and these are the main problem. This is what we really need to worry about, because those xenoestrogens are almost all metabolized by that dangerous pathway, that 4 hydroxy pathway, and that is what's really causing the problems for us. But estrogen, estradiol, estriol, estrone, these are not. This is not the problem, and blocking those hormones is not the solution.

Sandy Kruse: 1:43:39

I actually recorded and I can't remember who it was. Do you know who Dr David Rosenzweig is? He does the menopause method. Yes, yes, I recorded with him a while back. I think it was him that said that it is the lack of hormones that put you at a greater risk for cancer.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:44:06

Absolutely One hundred percent, because they're protective, they're protective, they're protective. And then, and not for nothing, but when we look at what happened in the world after the Women's Health Initiative was released so overnight three million women stopped taking their hormone replacement and the the number of prescriptions written for hormone replacement dropped off by like 90% and look at the breast cancer trends They've only gone up.

Sandy Kruse: 1:44:41

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:44:43

So the hormones were never the problem. They continue to not be the problem and the very best thing that we can do for women is to talk about this and start talking about this for women in their 30s so that they know, when they start to develop symptoms of heri-menopause, that we start to replace them and that will actually end up being protective. We know that it protects against heart disease. We know that it protects against bone loss. We know that it protects against dementia and I believe there's enough data there to support it protecting against breast cancer. Certainly, we saw that in the mining not happened in the women's health initiative. I believe that we would have had also proof that the combination is protective as well.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:45:54

So the best thing that we can do as a medical society is start to talk to women about this early and often about all the lifestyle things that we talked about today to protect their health, about avoiding toxins primarily alcohol, since that is such a huge issue but then to make sure that women start to supplement with bioidentical hormones as their ovaries stop functioning and in premenopausal women. When you're doing that supplementation, you need to check up on them fairly often so that you know that you're adjusting appropriately because there are going to be huge changes in their own endogenous hormone production, and then, when appropriate, when they've stopped menstruating, to have them on full hormone replacement because this is what is going to protect their health going forward. And my friend Anna Kabeca says it best when she says menopause is mandatory but suffering is optional and the more we suffer, the more we suffer. Is optional, and the more we suffer, the more we suffer.

Sandy Kruse: 1:47:22

And and, just like what you were saying, the connection to from your body speaking to you. Your body has symptoms because there's something going on, like the fact that you so I have a, a doctor who's amazing because she knew that as soon as I started to have hot flashes it was a good time to start a baby. She called it a baby dose, which is a baby dose of bioidentical estrogen.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:47:55

You're so lucky.

Sandy Kruse: 1:47:57

Yes, I am lucky. I am lucky, so lucky, because she does the research and she also knows that once you have those symptoms, it typically means there's something else going on. And it's interesting because during that time I had a more elevated HSCRP, which I never had in my life. I had elevated triglycerides, I had a higher HbA1c, and all of that has stabilized.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:48:26

So that's estrogen. That's what estrogen does. Estrogen is the hormone of life. Estrogen will never rob you of your life. It's the hormone of life and we need to unlearn that estrogen causes breast cancer, because it's not true and it's very, very dangerous messaging. And you know, I spoke at A4M this year on hormone replacement in the breast cancer population, because breast cancer patients are people too and they don't deserve to suffer either.

Sandy Kruse: 1:49:01

I'm so glad you mentioned this, because another physician was saying that there are more and more oncologists that, instead of putting former breast cancer patients on complete hormone blockade, they are watching them and giving them a little bit of hormone. Right, is that right?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:49:24

Yes, and for years we used estrogen and we used progesterone to treat breast cancer, and that shift has only happened towards blocking hormones, because there are pharmaceutical companies that made hormone blockers. But it's not the right thing to do.

Sandy Kruse: 1:49:45

No, because then they suffer. Not only did they just go through radiation, chemotherapy surgery, now they're going to go through menopause. Listen, I watched it. My mom didn't have breast cancer, but she had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma right at 52. So she was going through menopause, she was going through chemotherapy, she was going through radiation all at the same time. So there's a lot of suffering there, and then add on top of it right the menopausal symptoms.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:50:14

Yeah, and less anyone think otherwise. You know, the thing that drives cancer and dysfunction of all types is inflammation, and all of those things that they do to treat cancer only increase inflammation. We are only lessening people's health with this approach and we need to change. We need to rethink this and we need to spend as much time protecting people's health and promoting people's health as we do thinking about the tumor, because at the end of the day, like we started to talk about in the beginning, the tumor is not the problem. It's the symptom of the problem, and we need to start to think about what the problem is. Where are the imbalances and how can we identify and eliminate the imbalances while, at the same time, giving people what they need?

Sandy Kruse: 1:51:15

Yeah, okay, before we wrap things up, I have to ask how you work with women at your clinic. You no longer do surgery. No, I don't. You do get patients of women who come to you with active breast cancer or after, or all around, all around.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:51:38

So I would say 25% of my practice are people who are just diagnosed, who are trying to navigate the landscape, 25% of my practice are people who have metastatic disease and are just living with their disease, and 50% are somewhere along their way. They're either already getting treated or they've completed treatment. They're wondering now what, or they were treated years ago and they don't want to have a recurrence. And so I work with people one-on-one. But we have my book is out. It's called the Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer, and I do have a course that goes along with that book. And that book is basically everything that you need to reclaim your health after a breast cancer diagnosis, and it can even be used to prevent a breast cancer diagnosis, and it can even be used to prevent a breast cancer diagnosis. So it's kind of the perfect Mother's Day gift. If you care about your mom, if you care about your daughter, if you care about your sister, your best friend, this is the gift that will literally keep on giving. And I really wanted to make sure that women, at every step along the way, from screening to recovery from breast cancer, were fully informed. So I wanted them to know what that mammogram really means. I wanted them to know what that biopsy really means. I wanted them to understand what your pathology report means and I wanted them to be informed about all of the treatments, because I don't think most people know that when you get radiation, that does not improve your survival. No, I know that it may decrease your risk of the cancer coming back in the breast, but it doesn't impact survival and it puts you at risk for more cancer. So I don't think most people would sign on for a treatment that's not going to increase the likelihood that they're going to live, but we're not talking about it enough. So that's why I wrote that book.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:54:03

I wrote that book to help the millions of women that are struggling at any place along that breast cancer journey to understand what's happening and to be able to make a truly informed decision. And then I help them all with diet, with movement, with all the lifestyle things, because obviously I can't meet with everyone one-on-one. I don't have the bandwidth. I would love to be able to do that, but there's only one of me. Hopefully by this year there will be two or three or four of me, because people need more of providers who are really helping make a difference in the breast cancer space. So I have a course that goes along with that. It runs for eight weeks and we'll be doing it over and over again. So if you catch us in the middle, just know that we'll, we'll get you in the next one, um. And then there's tons of free information out there that I'm putting out on social media, uh, on YouTube, um, and so I'm everywhere, at Dr Jen Simmons and my Jen has two ends and my gen has two Ns.

Sandy Kruse: 1:55:28

This has been probably one of the most important and amazing recordings I've had for women's health, and I've been doing this for over four years. I just want to thank you so much for your wisdom, your authenticity, your sharing. I thank you so much.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: 1:55:43

It's my pleasure. Make sure you listen to my podcast too. It's called Keeping Abressed with Dr Jen and you can get it anywhere that you get your podcasts.

Sandy Kruse: 1:55:53

Yeah, and I will put everything in the show notes. Thank you so much, Dr Jen. My pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit and always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bringing these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.