Contrary to mainstream rhetoric, the treatment and prevention of cancer in patients is much more layered than a simple diagnosis and chemo, for example. Things such as past trauma, mold exposure, allergies, and metal toxicity exposure can truly impact how one recovers and even how one reacts to chemo.
Watch the full video as Dr. Hoffman dives into some of the complexities of a multi-level approach to treatment of cancer in patients.
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Transcript
Hi everybody. I received an email today from a colleague who is posting his case history on a cancer patient. He detailed the specific oncology issues that had arisen, his approach, and what he believed to be the correct treatment. I was thinking as I was reading this report from an integrative medicine physician about how far integrated medicine, medicine that incorporates many different layers and levels and dimensions of a personal experience, has come. This patient was managed impeccably by her oncologists. Insights were derived from post oncology or peri oncology type issues. When I read through the presentation of my colleague, I was struck by how we can bring so many more diagnostic and therapeutic features to the patient’s experience. When we consider the layers and levels that any individual person brings to the consultation, the history given by my colleague on this patient just touched on a few issues and could have been further expanded upon. I’d like to expand upon the history to provide a road map of how the seven levels, or the seven stages, to health and transformation can be incorporated when thinking of strictly biologically-based medicine.
In his history, he mentioned that this patient had breast cancer. She was treated with chemo and radiation and developed side effects. He went on to mention a few things, such as that she was sensitive, that she had experienced early developmental trauma, that she was a poet and artist, and that she had post chemo fatigue. He also happened to mention that she had a supportive framework, a loving husband, and was very involved in her own patient advocacy. In addition to everything else that he was bringing to the table, he wanted to treat her mast cell activation syndrome. He was looking for further triggers as to why she was still fatigued and anxious, things such as mold exposures or possible Lyme disease.
In looking through this history, things came to my mind. Whenever there’s a history of early trauma, you have to look upstream to ancestral Inheritance. We know now that individuals carry the experiences of their forefathers. This is well researched and well studied and is now being incorporated into clinical medicine. Whatever the ancestors, particularly the mother, father, and grandparents had emotionally experienced gets epigenetically transferred into the proteomics and metabolomics. This is the cellular expression of that patient’s life that can’t be ignored. Secondly, when a person is born into a dramatic scenario, when they have interrupted bonds between them and their mothers, particularly their mothers in the first ten, twenty even thirty years, there’s a price that’s paid. Particularly if the patient isn’t entrained with the mother’s right prefrontal cortex in an empathic entrainment, one sense of self that inhibits early anxiety and stress or fear doesn’t develop a robust mechanism or the ability to inhibit should anxiety and stressful events arise in the future. So in early developmental trauma, when the child’s developing brain doesn’t entrain with the mother’s development, the mother’s external prefrontal cortex and just a side note, the mother may not have a very robust right prefrontal cortex either, but the child pays a price. They pay a price of potentially a fragile sense of self or even a very undeveloped sense of self and an inability to self regulate.
This is very obviously seen when you do NeuroQuant MRIs or qEEGs. You can see these fingerprints on the qEEG and on the NeuroQuant MRI in the form of increased amygdala size and increased thalamus size. The evidence is there. On a qEEG you can see heightened amplitude of the beta brainwaves, what’s called the anterior cingulate area, and you can see diminished alpha brain waves. You can see these fingerprints of biographical data on biomedical equipment. It’s important to know that. So if somebody has cancer and he’s had a very bad chemo experience with many symptoms post chemo, one does look upstream to any possible inherited trauma from the ancestral realm. One looks at early developmental trauma because all of these get affected through what’s called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, in the form of a heightened stress response. The height and stress response can create permeability of gut membranes, mitochondrial membranes, and blood-brain barrier membranes, leading to a flood of potential autoimmune disease and/or inflammatory compounds. So it’s important to take that particular history to look at the brain through a NeuroQuant MRI and to look at the qEEG to see if there are any fingerprints and then therapeutically to assist that individual in self-regulation through various techniques, whether they be inside therapy, m-wave training, vehicle tone stimulators. I always recommend that people get an insight into the underlying dynamics, not just downregulate the biochemical or physiological pathway.
When there’s early trauma and when there’s early developmental trauma we usually suggest family constellation therapy insight or family constellation workshop to look at the unconscious dynamics of that inheritance. For early developmental trauma, again we use family constellation therapy but sometimes we have to be more advanced. In those cases instead of doing a technique like DNRS, which just downregulates the expression of the anxiety that’s being felt, you need to do more advanced psychological techniques like ISDP. This looks at the defenses the individual developed as a child who wasn’t safe in their environment. They’ve developed the provisional self in order to cope with the slings and arrows of modern life, or just their early life. So you’ve got to look at the family system that’s inherited, look at early developmental trauma, and the defenses that were developed by that person. Then you’ve got to look at the ego strength and structure of that individual to see if they have a robust sense of self. This determines if they can cope with sometimes what’s required of them to get their physiology and their health back online.
So with oncology and cancer, yes we can give chemo, we do radiation. We do those plus all the natural therapies but if you don’t look further upstream to all these potential mediators that keep a person somewhat off kilter, you don’t complete your healing interrogation and your diagnostic interrogation. So it’s very important to shine your light upstream to look at these potential inherited issues. We know from clinical experience that when you heal at a deeper level, the downstream metabolites and the downstream effects are profound. The body tends to express those consequences of the new images and the new insights and the new narratives in a more cohesive fashion. We say in this work that nobody truly heals until they have a new image or a new narrative or a new story to tell about their past and their present. This is vitally true to understand people who present with extreme complex multi-system illness. It’s never only at level two,which is the physical level. You can do all the most sophisticated functional medicine workups, you can give them every supplement in the book, you can send them to wherever you want to detoxify, or you can do bioidentical hormone therapy. But it doesn’t land in a robust place if that sense of self is fragile, if the ability to self-regulate is poor, if the defenses of the individual are too fortified and won’t allow you in. If a child has had an early experience that keeps them from trusting parental figures, do you think they’re going to trust medical authorities? Unlikely since we’re just external representations of parental figures. No healing occurs without a deep sense of trust. This is deeply profound. I’ve been called out over the years for not taking this seriously and developing an empathic trusting relationship with the patient because if that’s not established you might as well give up the rest of it. It’s not going to occur. Patients will resist your efforts to help them if there’s not an empathic relatedness between you and them whereby you understand their dynamics, you understand the fortifications of the psyche that prevent healing from occurring, and you relate subtly to what they’re asking you to do. Sometimes it takes time to establish a therapeutic alliance and a trusting relationship. If you bulldoze your way in and try to tell somebody what to do who has high resistance, something called projection of will, which means they’re asking you to fix them without any advocacy of their own, you’re in a precarious position and success is very limited.
So in this particular case I was struck by the fact that:
A) she had early trauma
B) she had heightened anxiety
C) she had post chemo fatigue
And the whole world of post chemo fatigue of course has lots to do with mitochondrial dysfunction. In traditional medicine we’re not taught anything about mitochondrial dysfunction unless it’s a genetically inherited mitochondrial disease. Even in functional medicine you know mitochondrial dysfunction is paid lip service and people are given you know coenzyme q10, carnitine, lipoic acid, vitamin C, magnesium, and so on. But through the work of Robert Naviaux and the cell danger response we know that the mitochondria also need to be approached with a certain elegance, a certain sophistication, a certain patience because you can’t coax a mitochondria back to health by just throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it, hoping it’s going to recover. You have to understand the timelines and the movement through what they call the cell danger response, where there’s an inflammatory response and the mitochondria shut down
to protect the host. Then there’s moving through a healing response, which takes time. Our bone marrow turns over every four months and the mitochondria too have their own timeline, their own seasons so to speak. If you’re interested in the subject I’d suggest you read anything by Robert Naviaux.
So this patient needed chemo, she had post radiation, post chemo fatigue, she was highly anxious, and wasn’t sleeping but she also had resources and she had some insight into her case. With these issues in mind it’s always important to expand our diagnostic and therapeutic base and try and bring everything to the table, to assist that person moving through their present symptomatology of anxiety fatigue and gut issues. This particular individual had gut issues. You have to do a full functional medicine workup with food sensitivities, gut permeability, hormonal HPA axis assessment, and methylation micelle detoxification. That’s just a given, a basement workup. I was struck by how far we’ve come in the understanding of illness and the fact that illness isn’t something that just requires a therapeutic drug. That concept of n squared, d squared, name of disease, name of drug, is so far advanced. We’ve come so far over the last thirty years in this understanding. Unfortunately the healthcare systems that exist are still very mechanistically based, disease based, which is fine. But when it comes to a true transformative healing experience, all layers, all levels, and interpersonal relatedness with trust are now available to us. It behooves us as therapists and medical personnel and healers if you wish to use that word. We have to do our own work and we have to know how to navigate the nuances and subtleties and levels and layers of a person’s experience and how to read the hidden signs. How to access unconscious dynamics and how to make conscious that which is being asked to be made conscious. Symptoms are often in a person’s life in order to bring to consciousness that which is hidden. It’s been said before that all sickness is homesickness. Even though this could be considered a sort of glib metaphor, especially when somebody’s suffering severely. It’s been my experience that if you really lean into that possibility, the full potential of the person’s self-expression can be realized through a sensitive, insightful and broad palette of diagnostic and therapeutic insights. So these were my musings on a Sunday afternoon and I just wanted to share those with you. Thank You.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.