014_Cancer Diagnosed & Cowards Part II

The Toe Talks Podcast discusses navigating a cancer diagnosis, emphasizing finding evidence-based healthcare providers. The hosts share their experiences advocating for ivermectin treatment with a resistant primary care physician and oncologist. They highlight the importance of doctors staying informed and open-minded to research, pointing out challenges faced due to medical and pharmaceutical influences. The conversation delves into the struggle of accessing alternative treatments amidst standard medical protocols. You're listening to the Toe Talks Podcast. You have cancer. You, a loved one, a friend, have just been diagnosed and you're left floating on a sea of confusion and uncertainty. You're asking yourself, now what? What do I do? Will I be okay? Will my loved one be okay? How do I help my spouse, family member, or friend? Well, today, my husband and I will answer all these questions and more in order to help you navigate these treacherous waters during this difficult and uncertain time. We'll help you avoid wasting time and making mistakes. Lee and I will discuss family, marriage, diet, doctors, supplements, research, and more. Stick around. You're not going to want to miss it. We are The Rugged Authentic Study and you're in the right place. Live free. Pursue health. Powerful living starts in 3, 2, 1. Come on in, everybody. Welcome to episode 14 of the Toe Talks Podcast, Diagnosed Cancer Centauri, part 2. I'm your host, Dr. Toe, and with me, my husband, Lee. We pick up where we left off in our last episode. Let's get started. Let's move into the next portion. This is probably very important but very difficult to do, I would say, and I think we would agree. You need to find, this is number four, you need to find a primary care and an oncologist who has an evidence-based practice. Now, what does that mean? That means that your primary care and your oncologist are actually reading research and they're applying that research to their practice. They're practicing medicine that is evidence-based research. And if you're fortunate to find such a healthcare worker or physician, this physician is more likely to listen to you when you want to try something that is off-label, like having a certain drug be prescribed to you that's not typically used for that reason but used to treat cancer because there's research surrounding it, that they are allowed to do that and that they will be more willing to actually prescribe it to you and try it. They'll be more likely to actually just listen to you in general. Now, I'm going to describe to you exactly what happened when we did that very thing with Lee's primary care and oncologist. This is back in 2021. It was after he had been hospitalized for 18 days because of COVID. But I would tell you that he was probably, when he left that hospital, he was worse than when he went in, and it was because of the hospital protocols. And had they treated him properly with ivermectin, steroids, heparin, budesonide, antibiotics, he probably would have been out of that hospital in two or three days. But he wasn't. And he came out with worse health than when he went in. That episode you can listen to in the past if you go look. It's called the hospital ovens. But I digress. We visited his primary care and his oncologist probably within the same week of each other following this hospitalization because I had learned how important it was for Lee to be taking ivermectin in order to keep him healthy. We wanted him to be able to take it prophylactically, meaning he would take it as he was healthy, not sick, in order to prevent getting sick. And yes, there is so much research surrounding and supporting this idea. It's unbelievable to me that physicians are still resistant to this because the research is now even more of a tsunami than it was back in 2021. This is November of 2021. And it now states that if you take it prophylactically, you're less likely to get sick, less likely to get hospitalized, and yes, less likely to die from a virus, specifically COVID. So yes, there was a cure to COVID, and it was called ivermectin. But because it was so vilified, because in order to get EUA for the death jabs, that is the COVID vaccines, which are not vaccines, there could not be any other drug that was already FDA approved that could be tried. So they had to vilify ivermectin in order to say, no, no, no, that's not, we can't use that, the FDA to push it through and give it its EUA status. Because of that, doctors' hands began to be tied, and their livelihoods began to be threatened. Their medical license could be taken away from them. There are big stakes, I will admit, 100%. But again, you are to treat the person in front of you, and it is your job as a physician or healthcare worker, wherever you are, to do no harm. So with that being said, Lee and I will now tell you about our first visit to his primary care, where we began to ask him to prescribe ivermectin prophylactically to Lee to protect his health because of what we had just been through in the hospital. Lee, do you remember that day? I think it was just a normal checkup. You know, we just went in to kind of check my health and blood work and that kind of thing. Yeah, I think it was a follow-up from being in the hospital. Right, and towards the end of that, he said, hey, can we talk to you about a medication that we have researched? And I think when we said the word, he immediately started getting red. He did. He did. He did. I think he immediately started getting you could see the tenseness in his makeup of when he heard that word. And he completely rejected it, said, no, I won't do that. And, you know, the more we questioned him about research and what he knew about it or had he done any research, he said, no, he trusts the FDA and he trusts the drug companies for what they say is the most helpful. Even to the point of, and as we pushed him on research and said that we would, you know, send it to him so that he could read it himself, he said, yeah, you can send it to me. But he got more and more stressed. And really I thought he was going to have a panic attack. No, he did have a panic attack. He did. Because by the mid part of that conversation, he got up and left the room. Okay. This is a physician. He got up and left the room in the middle of this conversation. And I was looking at Lee going, what is going on? Then he came back, okay, but he stood in the doorway, the door wide open, okay, which, you know, I won't talk about how that is medical privacy issue. But he could not come back and he did not come back into the room from then on in. But he had a panic attack absolutely 100%. I want to read to you the exact conversation that ensued because I really think it's important that people hear this. So this doctor whose primary care said to me, I trust the CDC, FDA, and NIH. It seems you don't. If they say a drug is safe, it's safe. Okay, this is my response. So if they said here's a drug, take it, it's good for you, and you don't know anything about it, you would take it. He answered yes. Me, I'm flabbergasted at this point in time. He said, so you wouldn't do any research on it to be sure this was the case. He answered no. He later went on to say, I'm a rule follower, to which I said in my mind, well, that's obvious. Then he said, they may find that ivermectin is a detriment, to which I said, it's the safest drug in the world, not likely. The doctor said, I said, quote, may be a detriment, to which I said, the data strongly points to the opposite. Meanwhile, it could be protecting somebody like my husband who's immune compromised by taking it prophylactically. Basically, he said since these organizations were saying that the research is not valid or reliable on the use of ivermectin, that this must be the case. He blindly accepts their conclusions without researching it himself. Even though the research I sent him, so I sent him research following this appointment, was peer-reviewed, randomized clinical control trial, metadata analysis. Folks, you can't get any better than that for research. So what he is practicing is basically lazy medicine and, I might add, dangerous medicine. It's not really practicing medicine. It's practicing medicine blindly. He might as well be seeing his patients with a blindfold on his eyes. This isn't medicine. This is not evidence-based practice driven by science. It's practice driven by those who own him because he, I can guarantee you, this doctor was afraid of losing his license and losing his job. They were telling him how to treat patients. This is where it went really sideways with COVID. There was no, you treat the patient in front of you anymore. It is now, do as you're told. He did ask me, why would the CDC not give this drug to people if it would help them? To which I said, because it's inexpensive. Where Remdesivir is thousands of dollars, it's all about the money. To which he said, but that's your opinion. And here's the most flabbergasting thing that he said. The pharmaceutical companies have nothing to do with the FDA. Insert crickets here. It's kind of like herding cats, folks. You got to find a doctor that's going to actually read the research. And when you send them the research, if they haven't seen it, is actually going to read it and get back to you. All right, let's talk about our visit with the oncologist, Lee. So we go to Lee's oncologist and we run the same route. We want you to prescribe ivermectin to Lee prophylactically in order to help keep him healthy. Do you remember what she said, Lee? I don't remember clearly. I mean, I remember what she pushed was to get the vaccine. She pushed to do all the things that the government was saying. She was doing exactly what our primary care said to do. Get the shot, get tested, do those things. I know she didn't give me a prescription, so I know that was a no, but I can't remember her response. Yeah, so she also didn't have a panic attack, but she definitely – you could tell people become very rigid all of a sudden. They start to put on a defense. And her answer was, oh, but people are overdosing on that in India. They're drinking it like it's water. That's right. I remember that, yeah. To which I said, well, hence the reason why we're coming to you. You could prescribe it so that we don't get in trouble with it. Honestly, people, Advil and Tylenol have a worse safety index than ivermectin, and it is so difficult for anybody to overdose on this drug. Anyway, so that was the first thing. And then she said to us, well, you could also think about entering into a clinical trial for the use of ivermectin. I'm like, oh, my gosh, are you serious? And then her last thing, which was the piece de resistance, was when she said to Lee, oh, well, you know, you could get vaccinated and boosted. Because at this time, they were doing boosters. And I was like, oh, my goodness. Because I remember we walked out of there, and Lee had said to me, you noticed that our early solution was getting jabbed. And I was like, yeah, niggas. But she also said, and boosted. And I was like, oh, I totally missed that. I just heard her say get jabbed. But for her to say get jabbed twice and then boosted, I don't know. It's just mind-blowing. And to know what we know now, what we knew then about it, coming from an oncologist, is just mind-blowing to me, that you totally are in the dark about the detriment that you are causing to patients, especially those who are immune-compromised and your patients who are fighting cancer. Number five. What's number five, Lee? In general, I would say a lot of people that will be listening to this do not have cancer, and so that's a great thing. So I would say just changing your diet, and we threw out exercise really fast there, I would say this is for everybody. We should all be eating better. We should all be looking at labels. We should all be walking, running, lifting. Whatever your form of exercise is, I would encourage you to do it. If you're healthy now, if you're not healthy now, everybody should have a nice routine of rest and exercise and diet. It's easy to hear that and let it just go right out of your head, but it's important for a good life, a good, healthy life. I had a friend tell me you can be in pain in the future for not working out, or you can work out and be in pain now. Which would you want to choose? Right. Yeah, and I think those two things are different pains. Workout is a burn, right? A workout burn. A good pain. Yeah, a good pain. It's your muscles getting stronger. It's your joints being lubricated. We need to put our heels into the ground when it comes to progressively getting older because we have to fight it. This is something that we don't take gracefully. Eating right, changing your diet, exercising, yeah, it's not convenient. Your family is going to buck up against it. You know, change is like that. All change is uncomfortable. Hey, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing, right? Same thing with this scenario. We are not meant to be sitting and looking at screens all the time. And that's the other thing I would tell you to stress. This would probably be number six is try to cut out as much stress as possible in your life. If there are people in your life that are causing you stress that is not healthy for you, unhealthy relationships, people who are not encouraging you, people who are not like-minded, these are people that you need to not necessarily cut out but maybe replace with some other healthy relationships. But certainly jobs, your job is incredibly stressful. I understand sometimes people go through seasons with jobs being stressful. But if it's stressful all the time, you need to find a new job. And I know that's easier said than done. But it is so important. Your health is more important. Number seven, so this is one that I just added to the list because I think it's really important to mention. And that is this is actually for the future. If you happen to have to do oral chemotherapy or any kind of chemotherapy in general, I need you to research that drug inside and out. You need to go look at clinical trials. You need to know exactly who is included and excluded in those trials and what the criteria was while they were undergoing the use of this drug because it will affect you and all chemotherapies increase the risk of cancer, every single one of them. Chemotherapy does not kill stem cells, which means if you kill the cancer and you didn't get the stem cells, they're still in your body and eventually they're going to come back. But there are drugs out there that do isolate, kill stem cells, cancerous stem cells, but leave the healthy cells alone. And those are drugs like ivermectin and fenbendazole. Again, that's in our guide. You can go look at that information. But what I'm telling you is you need to know how it's going to affect you and you need to know how it's going to affect your spouse. Yes, I did say spouse. If you look at the research, a lot of them will say you need to use birth control, which tells you whatever drug you have is transferable and it could disrupt the genetic process of creating a life or it could influence your spouse because the drug is transferring from you to them. So that's just a side note of caution to anybody who is possibly going to be undergoing chemotherapy in the future. You need to be asking your oncologist what those options are and start researching them now. Hopefully, you'll never have to use them. But if you do, you're going to be ready and you're going to be ready to know what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do. Number eight, sleep. Getting good sleep is so important for your body. I can't even count the ways. I know that there are seasons of stress, difficulty. You can't shut your mind off at night. But practicing meditation, prayer, and on occasion the use of melatonin, those things are so important for us to strive to get a good night's sleep as best as we can. Exercise, diet, and coming out as much medication that is not necessary will help your body to heal itself. Again, it's not underrated. If you need to work on getting a good night's sleep, go to bed at a decent hour. Make sure that you're sleeping well throughout the night as much as possible. Stop drinking at a certain time in the evening so that you're not having to be going to the bathroom because you're being woken up because you drank too much, which is me typically. I think those things are helpful. I hope that you find them helpful, Leigh, and I hope that they bless you and that you're able to put those things to good use and that you find that your health improves because of these things that you can be doing and that you find some support where you don't feel as alone or lost. Because a lot of times I see people on Facebook support groups for people who either have cancer or their spouses have cancer or their loved ones have cancer or their friends have cancer and they just got diagnosed and they are just grasping at straws because they just don't know what to do. They have no idea how to navigate. So I hope that these things help you to figure out how to navigate and give you some resources to cling on to so that you can find your footing, find your grounding. The other thing that I would tell you that as a spouse that was helpful for me when Leigh got diagnosed was prayer. Prayer was key because I realized that things were so out of my control and always in God's control. And the other thing was to have at least two people in your life that you can say anything to and they would listen and understand and love you unconditionally as you're going through this process of navigating your way through what are we going to do now and what does it mean for our future. Because you're going to find that there are some people that just don't understand. You're going to find that people, and they may not mean it, but they are so unaware of the struggle that is underneath between you and your spouse that is constantly there in the background. They are so unaware that sometimes their lack of self-awareness is painful. They make comments that are not encouraging. I totally understand that. And you need somebody to go to and bounce off these difficult times in your life that's going to support you, that's going to listen to you, that's going to encourage you, and that's going to pray for you. You may even find a friend that has some sort of medical mind or even the gumption to look for things that might be beneficial to help your spouse heal or you heal if you've been diagnosed with cancer and I've been fortunate to have friends like that that I call my sisters of Christ. They're actually family to me. So I hope you find your tribe, find those people that are going to be that for you. And it may not be your family members. I hope it is, but it may not be, and that's okay if it's not. Well, I think that's it. Lee and I are very grateful for you coming along this conversation with us, and we hope that if you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below. We're just grateful for you coming alongside us in our journey too. Thanks for listening, and God bless you. Bye, everybody. So what, Dr. Ko? So what? Well, the so what is this? We are not meant to fight life's battles alone. When you find yourself surrounded by people but feeling utterly alone, turn to the God of the universe who stopped the sun and the moon for Joshua, made David a very unlikely king and a fierce warrior and conqueror over all his foes, split the Red Sea for Moses, slays giants, heals the blind, forgives sin, and provides living water for all who will drink. He is with you. He sees you. He loves you and knows your pain. He is ready for help, strength, peace, wisdom, and encouragement. And if you haven't given your heart to Jesus, do it right now. Say this prayer with me. I am a sinner. I believe Jesus is king who died for all my sins. I accept his forgiveness. I surrender my life to you and ask you to come into my heart right now to stay forever. Amen. Hey, don't forget to get your free gift. It's called I Have Cancer, Now What? Go to DrToe.com and download it for free. It's our gift from us to you in hopes that it might bless you. Well, that's a wrap. If you like what you heard, please share. Want to hear more, please subscribe. And if you are a faithful listener, thank you for all your love and support. Because without you, I would not be here. I'm glad you're alone on this journey with me. We have each other, so you are not alone. Pursue health, live free, and breathe deep. Until next time everyone, this is Dr. Toe signing off. Important disclaimer. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I am not a medical doctor and I do not diagnose, advise, or treat. This podcast is not intended for the substitute of advice from a personal physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. It is not intended to be used or relied upon for any diagnostic or treatment purposes or to be used as a substitute for professional diagnosis, treatment, or conventional medical therapy. None of the statements made in this podcast have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. 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