Preventing Breast Cancer with Dr. Jenn Simmons | 027

Dr. Jenn Simmons: That whole narrative of estrogen causes breast cancer is simply not true. And in fact, breast cancer, when we look at it closely, is not a disease of hormone excess, it's a disease of hormone deficiency.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Hi, this is Dr Fab Mancini, and I'm super excited that you decided to join us, because today we have an amazing guest, and somebody that's really taught me so much about women's health and especially integrative breast cancer and how to manage that properly, and that is the world renowned integrative oncologist, Dr Jen Simmons, Hi, Jen. It's so great to see you once again. Fab.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: It's so nice to see you. Well, you know, I spoiled I get to see you so much lately, I know, and

Dr. Fab Mancini: I'm so excited because, you know, I admire so much anytime that you have individuals like you that have been trained traditionally in the healthcare system as a medical doctor, and you were one of the first Philadelphia's fellowship training breast surgeon, and then I heard you walked away from that to build real health MD, especially after your own crisis. So tell me a little bit about how does somebody like you, which is the elite in the medical profession, has an experience and all of the sudden realizes, you know what, this is a defining moment in my life, and practicing the same way that I've been trained just doesn't make any sense anymore. Tell me a little bit about what happened.

enough for my mother to be diagnosed. And then at 46 it's my turn, and I'm sitting there in the office of my friend and colleague and physician, and he tells me that I need surgery and chemo and radiation and things that I say all day without hesitation or reservation, and yet, when these words are coming at you, it has different meaning. And I'm now asking all the questions that everyone was asking me, but suddenly the answers aren't working right, hearing that it's multifactorial, or there's nothing that you could do, or there's nothing that you can do, and you have to just hand over your health and your trust to the system. And I didn't want to that. That was really the first time in my life where I ever said, Wait, I need to understand why this is happening. Right, and I need to have a role in it. I can't just go under the knife, take the drug, have the radiation. I can't I can't do that. I need to actively participate in this. I need to understand it. And so I go on a journey to heal myself. This wasn't about like pulling back the curtain and exposing what's wrong with our medical system. I didn't learn that till later. I didn't learn that till I started to walk this path and walk this journey. And one of the first lectures I found myself in this tall, lanky guy walks on stage, and he has a big, toothy grin. He introduces himself as a functional medicine physician. Now, at this point, I'm a doctor. For 20 years, I never heard of a functional medicine physician. All I can think of is like, what is this quack talking about? Right? Because, despite the fact that I'm sick, I'm still cynical. And then I remembered that I was there for a reason, right? And that the only thing that I could hear in that time and space when I was given my diagnosis, when I was told that this is what I need, the only thing that I could hear in that time and space is there's something more. Go find it. And this is a voice that I couldn't quiet, and it didn't quiet until

I arrived in that room on that day, because what I would learn on that day from Dr Mark Hyman is that in all chronic disease, but cancer in particular, since that's what I was most concerned about, we're doing it wrong. We're getting it wrong. We're focused on the wrong thing. We're focused on the tumor, but the tumor is not the problem. The tumor is the symptom of the problem. And unless you back up 10 or 20 steps and figure out why the symptom is there, why the tumor is there, you're missing the forest for the trees. And so as a surgeon, me removing tumors and saying to these people like, That's it, go back to doing what you were doing. Go Go back to your normal. Well, your normal is what got you there, and we are so highly trained as conventional physicians to not ask the questions, and that's very intentional, but I didn't learn that until it was about me. It was only when it was about me that I could take off those blinders and start asking the questions. Is, is how we're treating cancer? Correct? And the answer is no, and why are we treating it that way? Well, we're treating it that way because we want to get people into the system and keep them in the system. And the whole goal of our system is to get sick and stay sick. Now they don't want you to die, but they also don't want you to be well, right? It is this system that is built on getting people sick and keeping them sick, and it took me getting sick to learn that.

Dr. Fab Mancini: You know, it's interesting, because when I hear you talk like that, it makes me realize that you, for so many years, were just repeating what you were trained to do. You were doing the surgeries that you were trained to do, and that's all we know. And it's not until you open yourself to say, is there something more out there, that little voice that spoke to you and it allowed you to all of a sudden begin to ask new questions and get different answers than the ones that you have been feeding yourself and being trained all those years as a traditional physician.

are overweight, and they desperately need not to be, because they're so metabolically shifted in the bad direction, right? And it all comes back to what we have is a sick care system, and all we do is rinse and repeat. We're training the same people to think the same way, to get people into our sick care system and not have them be healthy, because our system doesn't work with people healthy. The only way doctors get paid, the only way hospitals get paid is if you're sick, they're not getting paid if you're well.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Well, you know, being in this space for 38 years and watching the evolution of wellness, complementary medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, regenerative medicine, all of this evolution. For me, the blessing in disguise is that it opens up the opportunity to see a more holistic approach as an initial support and then never discarding the fact that, thank God that we have the more aggressive conventional approach if needed, but we have found over the years that even if you choose the conventional approach and say, in this case, chemotherapy or radiation, there are ways to prepare like you mentioned, or there are ways to actually reduce the symptoms By feeding the body the right things, not the sugars and the carbohydrates and all you see a lot of times, unfortunately, as people are doing chemo. But let's talk a little bit about mammograms, because you've been very outspoken about the limitations and potential points. You know, well, I think it's important, because this has been traditionally the main tool.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yes, yes. For more than 50 years

Dr. Fab Mancini: You've been in this space, you have been able to see also its own limitations, especially as you've gotten more into the functional aspect of the body, being able to heal. And what are some of the new sciences that you discover in this journey with those that are skeptics out there and may not be hearing what we're about to discuss. And why is it that you may want to reconsider a different technology, instead of your traditional mammography, which is what everybody recommends.

population, which is the normal, healthy population. I don't think that we should be exposing them to radiation. I especially can't stand the argument that it's just a little bit of radiation. Well, how do you feel about taking a little bit of poison? Right? Do you want a little bit of poison or no poison? Or the other argument that is made, even by radiologists, that well, it's the same amount of radiation as you would get in a cross country flight, and you wouldn't tell someone to not fly across country, right? Well, that may be true if you're talking about absolutes, but you're not talking about the scattered radiation that you get on a flight. You're talking about focused cone down radiation to the tissues of the breast. Now. Not the same, all right? My knucklehead of a 16 year old knows not the same. It's different, right? And we need to start acknowledging that. We need to start we need to stop treating patients like dummies, they know. And 35% of women are opting out of getting screening mammogram because they know so even if, even if the radiologists want to continue on and continue to hitch their wagon to this very, very broken technology, we are still not serving 35% of the screening population, if that's all we're offering them. So I'm very excited about QT. I opened a center featuring QT. It's called perfection imaging, but perfection is spelled with Qt in the middle. And I'm opening 50 of these because I want to make sure that every single woman who wants access to this technology gets access to this technology,

Dr. Fab Mancini: Well, from a preventative basis for those that are listening right now, what is the ideal scenario now that we have a radiation Free, compression free 3d acoustic ultrasound, much safer technology. What would you say from a preventative mesa? Because, remember, we in the functional space, we go after the root causes, so the earlier sometimes that we find out, the better. What is a typical recommendation in your in your life as a physician for those individuals out there that maybe they may have a history, maybe they don't have a history in their family of breast cancer, but they want to ensure that they are keeping themselves aware of how healthy they may be. What's your typical organization?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Excellent question, and I do want to stress that imaging is always going to be early diagnosis. It's not going to be preventative, and prevention, as you mentioned, and rightly so, is far more important, right? We always want to prevent more than we want to treat or reverse. Right? Early detection is good, but by the time you've developed the disease, and by the time we can detect it on imaging, we're talking about hundreds of millions to billions of cells, right? Like the is it the horse is out of the barn? Or, yeah, the horse is out of the proverbial warrant. So I always want to talk about prevention, and for for me, there is a brilliant new test that's out there that is considered an at home breast cancer screening tool. It's called the ARIA test, or the tears test, and it is actually looking at the fluid in your eye. You don't have to make yourself cry or poke yourself in the eye or anything like that. It's a little tiny litmus paper that goes right beneath your lid, and it's measuring for these two proteins, the s1 100 a eight and s1 100 a nine protein. Now these are inflammatory proteins that are very commonly seen, but when they're both elevated together, they are highly predictive of the early stages of breast cancer, way before you can see it on imaging. So for someone that has a clinically positive ARIA test, what they have is opportunity. They have the opportunity to actually prevent a diagnosis, because those people know that they have inflammation. Now, inflammation is our buzzword, right? We want to know that we are not inflamed, because inflammation is the precursor to all of these chronic diseases that we we are all helping to fight every single day, and breast cancer is no different. So I encourage people to do the ARIA test twice a year so that you know, and if you have a clinically positive ARIA test, then you're looking at, I have developed something called the breast cancer burden score, or the breast

burden score, where you're looking at all of these factors and saying, where's my inflammation coming from? Am I eating processed foods? Am I not sleeping well? Do I have chronic constipation? Am I drinking alcohol? Do I have too much EMF exposure? How much antibiotics are you taking? How much antibiotics are you exposed to? What about pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, what about plastics? What kind of water are you drinking? Are you getting enough rest? Are you exercising too much? Are you exercising too little? I could go on and on. There's a lot of things on that list, but I'm helping people with a positive ARIA to think through. This, and they become part of my prevention program, where I have a breast cancer prevention program, because we know you're at risk, and this is different than having relatives with breast cancer or even having a genetic mutation. This is a real biological risk right now, and we can help prevent a diagnosis with that, and we just work with people to find where their inflammation is coming from, and help them to create an anti inflammatory environment in on and around them.

Dr. Fab Mancini: You know, you recently had your 100th episode of your very famous podcast where you talked a little bit about the role of many of the survivors that you've interviewed, and also where bioidentical hormones may play a role. What would you say to those individuals, what has been your founding, your findings, but also, what message will you give those oncologists out there that are still stuck with the old way of thinking you want them to rethink, perhaps based on your experience?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, so that whole narrative that estrogen causes breast cancer is it's logical and it's convenient, and it actually leads to a plethora of solutions that can be provided by the pharmaceutical industry. It just doesn't happen to be true, right? God would never give us hormones that cause breast cancer. That's just not how it works. We are perfect beings and living in a very imperfect world, and that whole narrative of estrogen causes breast cancer is simply not true. And in fact, breast cancer, when we look at it closely, is not a disease of hormone excess, it's a disease of hormone deficiency, and you think about what happens to the female body as opposed to what happens to the male body, because men do go through what we call andropause, but they go through andropause in a very kind of steady, slow decline, whereas women, Especially those treated for breast cancer fall off a cliff. They go from having a body that works to nothing's working. And historically, because we've had this whole narrative of hormones cause breast cancer, which was only reinforced by a very, very flawed NIH study. So now we have decades of providers who have come up in a system believing that hormones are a problem and not a solution. They're not educated on hormones, and it's become a taboo saying for anyone with a history of breast cancer, they're told that they can't have hormones, and it's the wrong message, and the wrong answer, Ruth is that it's very much a part of health and a necessary part of health. Yeah.

Dr. Fab Mancini: I mean, we've been trained to understand the role of the hormones, but unfortunately, most people, they they're not, so they're just listening to whoever they're going to. And I've always said say to them, Look, it's okay to receive an opinion for whoever provider you may be seeing today, but if for some reason, that opinion does not make sense, or it doesn't resonate with you, or it just flat out doesn't make any sense. Go seek out a different opinion, because we have now individuals like you that have been trained traditionally, but have also advanced their studies into the functional space to give people maybe a deeper insight. But let's talk about your new book, this smart Woman's Guide to breast cancer, promises to free you from your diagnosis. Now, in this book, what I love about it is the fact that you made it very practical for people to follow a roadmap and to understand and ask the right questions. But what would you say are maybe two myths that you see out there in social media that are keeping a lot of these women stuck to the old beliefs.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, well, I think the biggest thing is the fear, right? And so they capitalize on the fear to get people into treatment ASAP, right? They make it like it's an emergency. And I understand that breast cancer feels like an emotional emergency, and maybe it is right, but what you need if you're having an emotional emergency. See is a hug. What you don't need is a surgery, right? And so one of the biggest myths is that you have to take care of this right away. Most people have time. Most people have an excessive amount of time. You have months to decide, right? But the system really doesn't want you to the system doesn't want you to look too deeply into these things, right? And so we we tend to ask the same person the same question, and so we get the same answer and we think that we got a second opinion. You talk about this all the time. If you think you're getting a second opinion from another person that does the exact same thing that you asked the first person that's not a second opinion, right? They're all going to give you the same answer. That's what they're trained to do. So the first thing that I tell people is that you have time, time to learn about your diagnosis, time to understand it, time to understand all the treatments, the conventional ones, and what would call the holistic treatments, right? And the second thing is that you are an individual. You got to that place for your own individual reasons. Breast cancer is not one disease. It's not and it also doesn't define you. It's not who you are. So many people come to me and they're so focused on their pathology report, like it's who they are. That's not who you are. It may be something that you're dealing with right now, but it's not who you are, right? And so really looking at the why, what got you here? Because something has to change, we can't expect a different outcome if all we're doing is the same thing that we were doing before. So I don't want people going

back to normal, right? They they're going to have to find a new normal if they want their life to be better after their diagnosis than it was before. And the people that I work with, you may think of them as exceptional in that they have very different outcomes than most people going through a breast cancer journey, but the truth is that they have very different outcomes because they live very different lives after their diagnosis than they did before. And this is an opportunity for people who choose to take on this responsibility. This is an opportunity to really be better afterwards. And my people are healthier after their diagnosis than they ever were before. And it's not that it's so hard to do it's just that they didn't know to do it. We are not taught how to be healthy. We're only taught how to be sick.

Dr. Fab Mancini: And the thing is that because most people follow the same healthcare system, not only here in this country, even though we keep hearing we're one of the sickest nations in the world. But it's all over the world, and one of the things I love about this book is not necessarily when you've been diagnosed. I believe this book is about somebody that wants to prevent a diagnosis, because Absolutely, you said a smart woman, a smart woman is somebody that is proactive, not reactive. It's that simple to me. And then the guide is the fact that you go through what are the right questions to be asked and how to understand what this really is, instead of this urgency that you feel that sometimes is overwhelming. And then, if you talk to your friends, they don't know what to tell you, so they, most of them, just want to give you pity and you know and feel bad for you and and try to

Dr. Jenn Simmons: They'll push you into treatment because that they know and understand, yeah,

Dr. Fab Mancini: And it may be because they care about you and they think that that is maybe the right thing to do. But in closing, I wanted to ask you this because you you're very much a leader in this space, and you have been a pioneer, in my opinion, in awakening society towards this issue and being more proactive than ever. But let's say, all of the sudden, you have the opportunity to make a recommendation for future guidelines, potentially or even policies that are made in order for women in the healthcare system to be given an opportunity to learn early, but more importantly, educate them properly towards how to manage this disease if it ever. Shows up, or how to prevent it from ever showing up. Do you have any ideas of what contributions or what recommendations you will make? You know, the administration to consider in this process?

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, so I would absolutely love to take over breast cancer screening. I'll tell you that right now where in my system, I would have everyone doing self breast examination, because I think that no one is ever going to know you better than you know yourself.

Dr. Fab Mancini: And how early would you start that? I mean,

Dr. Jenn Simmons: I think that women, when they start to menstruate, they should start to learn what their breasts feel like and what their body feels like. The patient is absolutely the doctor of the future, right? No one is ever going to know you better than you know yourself. And we, we all have to take responsibility for our own health, because no one is going to do it for us, and even if they do, they're not going to do it as well as we can now. That is not to say that everyone has to take responsibility, in total, for their own health. No, of course not, but you should know your body and know what it feels like when it's normal, so you can know what it feels like when it's not and not allow the medical profession to normalize things, right? Oh, you're just getting older. Oh, you're just tired because of this or that, like no we can feel good forever, right? But you have to understand your own body and recognize when there's been a shift, so that you can go get help to get that shift to come back. So I believe in self breast examination. I also believe that that tests like the ARIA test are going to be the determining factor in who does and who does not need imaging. Because unless you have a positive ARIA test, the likelihood that you have breast cancer is is almost you know nothing. So it has a 93% sensitivity for breast cancer, which is better than any of the other tests that are out there, with the exception of MRI, which is too sensitive and leads to a lot of false positives. So I believe that the ARIA test is going to be the determining factor for who does and who does not get breast imaging. And then beyond there, I think we need to stop lying to people about our food pyramid, about what is food, what is what? What is proper lifestyle? You know, we're we are literally killing our people with the diet, with with, you know, our work life, with our stress, with the EMF, with the toxins, with what's in our water, like we are literally killing our

influence out influencers out there, even providers out there saying, you know, this supplement will do it, and that this diet will do it. It's simply not true, and it is necessary and it is safe when done correctly and thoughtfully. And if we decided tomorrow that hormone replacement is is good for everyone, we simply do not have the providers who are literate and trained in this area. And that needs to change. We need to educate our providers about hormones, about hormone safety, about safe delivery systems, and we need to support our women well.

Dr. Fab Mancini: And to me, as all of that is happening, and I see the good news is that I have seen with my own eyes, over the last few years, how more and more medical doctors are getting additional training, additional masters or certifications that are teaching them some of these processes that have been around and also the science behind it. And for those of you that are listening, the main thing that I also want to impress upon you is the fact that, just like Dr Jen mentioned earlier, you are your best doctor, and you should actually take the opportunity to ask the questions. Now, in my opinion, you have probably one of the best books written on this subject matter right here that you can just easily go to Amazon and get it, or you can go to Dr Jen's website, and I'm going to put all of this information right here so you just click and be able to get it yourself. But also, I would encourage you to listening to her podcast. Her podcast has amazing guests. But also the informations are very real. There's no whole bars, there's no pretensions, there's a lot of takeaways every week. And I love that, because I've seen that that's really how people learn today. You have to be authentic, and you can't just keep repeating the same things that everybody already knows. You have to really bring in some new insights into the conversation to allow you to have a different outcome. So make sure that you follow her her podcast, and I'm going to put her link here, please. If you have not given yourself the opportunity to experience the technology with the Qt imaging, please do so you can go to her office in Philadelphia, do it there, and she can guide you as to if there's any other facilities that are available. I was so excited when you told me the other day that you were expanding these concepts. People can actually have it in their own backyard, and hopefully they'll take advantage of that. But don't wait. Just take a quick flight be able to get a comprehensive

evaluation, and, most importantly, be proactive. Be Proactive by beginning to shift your thinking and start asking different questions, but also learn about the subject matter, go beyond your typical opinions that you're getting out there and understand that is not anyone's fault. It's just the way the system is, because that's the way it's been for a while. But it doesn't have to be your system. I stepped away from that system 38 years ago because of an insight that I realized that I'd rather live my life preventing disease than managing symptoms. It was that simple for me, and it made me have a radical decision not to go to medical school and become a neurosurgeon, but also become a chiropractor, acupuncturist and nutritionist and energy medicine expert, all the things that I became only because I'm hungry. I'm hungry for answers that have not been given to the masses of people. And I'm also hungry for better outcomes. We live in a system that our outcomes are terrible, terrible now solving our problems, and this is one that now you have an opportunity to, in my opinion, have a better chance to manage it better, and more importantly, to be proactive and never have to deal with it. Because better way of doing that than to really be preventive, any last minute words, anything that you would like to leave our audience with.

Dr. Jenn Simmons: Well, first of all, it was such a pleasure to be with you here today, and I love what you're doing and your whole perspective, and I do. See a future for all of us where we are biohacking and we are all about preventative medicine, and it will happen. The thing that you said about being curious, I think that that's what sets that whole functional medicine mindset apart is that we are approaching everything with curiosity and wondering every day. How can we do this better? And unfortunately, conventional medicine is kind of stuck in, oh, this is how we do it. And so you know, for any of you out there who are in that world, if you're just a little bit curious, there is so much training out there for you, and it is tremendously rewarding. So and for the person who's looking for more help, and your doctor says no or that's impossible, go ask someone else, go ask someone else with different training that question and see if you can get a better answer, because I think health is possible for everyone at any age and any stage. And there are really, really trusted guides out there, you just need to find one. Well.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Thank you so much for your time from your very, very busy schedule, and for those of you that are listening, thank you for taking the time to be with us. Please share this with your loved ones. Somebody out there that may be praying or hoping for this type of information right for them, you may not even be aware that they're struggling with something. So share it with as many people as you can, and continue to join us as we continue to bring to you all this innovative information that will hopefully allow you to make a better choice when it comes to your health today than you did yesterday. God bless you, and I'll see you soon. Thank you. Bye.