“THIS Might Be The Real Cancer Cure” - WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW! | Dr. William Li

0:00 If you implanted a tumor and you prevented blood vessels from ever getting to the cancer, the tumor would stay there for weeks and never get larger than about the size of a grain of rice. But then if you stimulated blood vessels to touch the cancer cells, then the cancer getting oxygen and nutrients would explode and grow 16,000 times in size in just 2 weeks. Those people who had their colon cancer successfully treated [music] if they were on a GLP-1 drug, it prevented the recurrence of cancer between 30 and 50%. Didn't come back. People on GLP-1s getting chemotherapy had fewer side effects of chemotherapy. The health care you do at home between visits to the doctor's office. That is where we are sticking

0:45 the landing today. Even medical schools are teaching people that now. If you want to live long, no matter how you get to do it, the the bottom line is you want to. [music] So there was a study presented at ASCO, this major cancer conference uh just recently that looked at um people with colon cancer who had been successfully treated. They had the surgery, they had the chemotherapy, they had the radiation, they had a targeted therapy or the imunotherapy. Now the cancer's gone. So what happens uh in in medicine at that point is that we say congratulations, we got you got we are

1:30 all clear and now the clock starts ticking. So you hit the stopwatch and the timer goes off for 5 years and that's really when you look for that fiveyear allclear mark and there's a second all clear mark. After the second five years, you feel much better, right? And anybody who's known or dealt with cancer, you know that that's what the oncologists tell you. Once you cross once you get out of the jungle, you saw another 5 years to be sure you're out of the jungle. It turns out other research study found that those people who had their colon cancer successfully treated, if they were on a GLP-1 drug, it prevented the recurrence of cancer between 30 and 50%. It didn't come back. All right? And that's really important because that's the secondary prevention part right and again we're talking about

2:18 you know uh just within recently these eyes on the community the 30 million people taking GLP1s at scale and trying to look at patterns that we wouldn't have expected less metastases of cancer metastases if you're a cancer patient already prevent preventing cancer itself possibly associated with a mechanism with the bullseye being painted by the tumor on itself possibly. Now you're talking about preventing secondary cancers, the cancer recurring. We don't actually have drugs that can do that effectively at this level. And so this is really having us one more thing about about that was presented at ASCO. You know, they also presented studies to show that people in GLP-1s getting

3:04 chemotherapy had fewer side effects of chemotherapy. >> Wow. Now you're preventing the side effects. Less neutropenia. That's like knocking out your white cells and making you vulnerable for infection. You know, boy in a bubble syndrome. Some people actually wind up like losing their immune system because the chemo knocks out their bone marrow and their their white blood cells immune system. And then less uh neuropathy that can cause very distressing tingling or pain in some cancer patients. In fact, a lot of times people stop a cancer treatment altogether because their neuropathy is intolerable. The observation that GLP-1 drugs, people taking them actually had a sub significantly lower risk of having these side effects is very much eyeopening. Right? So, we don't have the

3:50 answer. This is not ready for prime time. Everybody jump on GLP1s. But I'm telling you, this is a series of back-to-back breakthrough observations leading to new discoveries, tying to genetics, looking at targets, thinking about a brand new role for GLP-1. This is what we're learning. We're learning more about how cancer forms. But I want to tell you one thing, it's important. one of the main ways that as we learn more about the biology of cancer, it does uh open the doors and open our minds for more ways of treating the cancer for sure. But I will tell you that there's been a kind of a a wholesale shift in thinking away from the wartime analogy of the war against cancer, killing the cancer, burning the

4:36 cancer out, poisoning the cancer, and switching towards healing the person, healing the patient. And that frame shift is really important because we now realize that boosting your immune system, helping better gut health is really uh absolutely and improving your circulation so you don't have the those runaway hijacked blood vessels. Those are even better ways uh to be able to prevent cancer and to help restore success uh of what your body already tries to do. When the shields go down, then our body is less able to defend against cancer. And so the ways that diet and lifestyle that are in the hands of everyone can help out. Um we talked about lowering stress uh stress hormones

5:21 the fight or flight hormone catakola beans epinephrine actually it's healthy to have a little shot of that every now and then but chronic stress which is you know what a lot of us are dealing with honestly we got to actually be kinder to ourselves. Self-compassion is listen your worst fear diseases will come true if you actually cultivate your stress. I mean, I think that's something we need to unlearn. How to actually just keep winding ourselves up. Number one. Number two, you want good sleep. Sleep is something that no, by the way, nobody teaches us how to sleep, right? I mean, we come out of our mom, we get the first suckle of breast milk. You just had a baby. You know about this. And then what does a baby do? It conchks out right away, right? It's something that just happens naturally. And yet, as we get

6:07 older, things do disturb our sleep. whether it's the blue light from a device that we're staring at until we fall asleep. But the point is stay away from blue light, put your devices away, don't check your email or anything for a couple hours before, you know, be in a quiet space if you can. You know, some people live in noisy urban environments say they they're surrounded by noise. Get the earplugs. you know, the same earplugs that you'd wear to a a loud concert or the same earplugs that you if you worked in an airport and you were out there waving the planes in, you know, you're going to be wearing earphones that actually can help you sleep as well. Noise cancelling uh headphones or earbuds, those are really helpful as well. Good sleep does a lot for you because that's when the body repairs, right? The bo you're we're physically not very active from the

6:54 surface inside our body. We are more active in our body during the night when we're sleeping than during the day. It's like the inside stuff that's going. Your brain is opening up the sewers that drain toxins that have accumulated during the day. And everybody knows this cuz if you pulled an all nighter, you know, been out late partying and, you know, stay up until the sun comes up, you got brain fog. You know why? Because you weren't sleeping and your brain didn't clear the toxins from the night before. You're going to feel foggy in your head. And like, so that's one thing. But guess what? Your immune system gets rebuilt. Your gut microbiome gets rebooted when we're sleeping. Our metabolism gets uh gets optimized actually while we're sleeping. We're not eating, but our metabolism actually is kind of right sizing itself and and

7:39 grooming itself to do the right thing. We're burning we're actually burning fat, visceral fat when we're sleeping because when we're sleeping, um you know, we need to draw energy. We're not eating. And so the uh uh body draws down on the harmful excess fat just to get energy to run our cells. And so good sleep, 78 hours, good REM sleep, super important. If you go take yoga or Pilates um to try try to stay or you go to the gym, you know, it's worthwhile uh making it a little carving a little time to go and figure out how to actually get good sleep. What I would say is that if you want to live long, no matter how you get to do it, the the bottom line is you want to live healthy to whatever many years you can, which means you got to dodge those chronic

8:25 diseases. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, like you want to you want to dodge all those. And you can dodge all those with mindful intentional diet and lifestyle. That is something that is the health care you do at home between visits to the doctor's office. That is where we are sticking the landing today. Even medical schools are teaching people that now like we do sick care when people come to us in the clinic. You know, we try to keep people going in the right direction when we see them in the primary care clinic, medicine clinic. And you know, and if somebody gets really sick, we got to bail them out. That's what earlier I was using analogy of the Coast Guard. Medical doctors as we've been trained, we're the Coast Guard. You know, we get into the boats and we go out there into the rough surf to fish people out of the water if we can before they drown. But

9:12 you know what? Now we're beginning to realize in modern medicine, hey, we want to keep people happy on the beach, you know, and you don't want to go into the riptide. So, what can you do to be mindful to enjoy the environment, enjoy the beach, enjoy the health, uh, without waiting to just get into trouble. So, you got to get fished out. That is the modern message of health care. That is what even medical doctors are being trained on. I think the current generation of young doctors coming in medical school, they're going to have a completely different approach towards their patient because they're going to be thinking about themselves as well. Do unto others as you first do unto yourself and that is health and wellness. Yeah. So, Grail test is actually um an example uh a growing popular example of a direct to consumer

9:59 test where you get a little bit of blood drawn about 20 millimeters. is two tubes worth of blood. And what does the test do is it takes advantage of the fact that we can detect DNA today. 10 years ago wasn't that easy. 20 years ago is impossible, okay, to do it at scale in an affordable way. Now we can actually do it pretty quickly. And so what the the Grail test does is it looks for DNA signatures of cancers that uh have an unusual DNA signature. They call it methylation. uh it's epigenetics and let me just say it's it's basically detecting uh a fingerprint from floating DNA in our blood that cancer cells can shed. So if you got a little microscopic

10:44 cancer or a big honking cancer, it's going to be releasing flakes of DNA that are just floating. Okay? Um, think about um, you know that plastic bag that's floating down the river when you're going canoeing or something or you're paddle boarding and you're like, "The heck is that plastic bag floating down? That shouldn't be there, right?" Or maybe an empty soda soda can that's crump crumpled up like we've all seen that. That's what uh tumor cancer cell DNA that's methylated. you look for that that test looks for that those floating pieces of plastic around and actually it's quite good at nailing down the organ of origin if they see some tumor DNA floating around. So for something of breath they probably nail it pretty well. Okay. Uh the false positive rate is very very low meaning that if you

11:31 find it it's probably real. Okay. It doesn't catch everything though and it doesn't always catch early cancers which is what you want to do. But I mean, you know, I think for people that are scientifically minded, who uh really want to advocate hard and because it's consumer available, if you can afford it, if you think it's something that you want to build into your monitoring system, it's kind of a it's a little bit of a biohack, but you know, a life and death biohack if you can find cancer cells. Um, I think particularly in somebody who's had cancer, if you're if you're already of the mind and I like to monitor everything I can, that's a pretty decent test to do. It's about a it's about a grand, a little bit under a grand to actually do. Then the qu and then the question is like insurance

12:17 doesn't most insurance doesn't cover it. So then the question is how often should you do it? You do it every year? Do we do it every month? Do we do it every week? you know, like and and that's where the slippery slope is because when do you catch this thing, you know? I mean, colon cancer screening, you wait until you're 50 or 40 or whatever and then you look at your risk factors. And so, I think that what about an full body MRI? Like that that'll catch things too. This is the modern debate, an intelligent debate. I think a really good conversation to be had and like um how much should we be looking for trouble? uh in whom should we be looking for it and what technology do we apply and then is it something that everyone

13:03 should get or just the people who can afford it and if it's only for the wealthy or the people who have the resources what about all the people who don't have it you know how do we actually make it fair so I think there's multiple layers it's it's also a sociological not just a medical conversation but if you're asking me point blank again I'm not giving medical advice here for somebody who has had a history of cancer if they want to tap into a technology that's very very good at detecting floating plastic bags of cancer DNA in their bloodstream for you know to see if anything is sticking around. It's a pretty good test we need to do more of in this day and age especially of of just distressed society is self-compassion. We need to be kinder to ourselves, not

13:50 so hard on ourselves. It's so easy to be self-critical. I'm not doing this well enough. I should be doing this more. And we talked about a lot of things that you can do. But I think that if we are just kinder to ourselves, it actually will make it easier for us to be kinder to other people. And that's what we need. >> Hey, if you like that video, then you're going to love this one. Check it out.