Innovations, Breakthroughs and Insights

I mean, admittedly, you tell yourself, I'm just going to do this for three seconds and I'm going to hold my breath and I'm going to run. But I'm exposed, and I'm like, I probably should be better about my own, honestly, my own exposure. I'm Dr. Tina Kazer, and as Leah likes to say, I'm the science-y one. And I'm Dr. Leah Sherman, and I'm the Cancer Insider. and we're two naturopathic doctors who practice integrative cancer care but we're not your doctors

This is for education, entertainment and informational purposes only. Do not apply any of this information without first speaking to your doctor. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast by the hosts and their guests are solely their own. Welcome to the Cancer Pod. Well, hello, Tina. Hello, Leah. How you doing? I'm doing well. Long time no see. I know. I was just going to say that. It has been a long time.

Welcome back to the Cancer Pod. Well, I appreciate you holding down the fort while I've been gone. And yes, I've enjoyed your interviews. Oh, I'm glad. Me too. It's actually been a lot of fun. You know I was really afraid of all of that stuff. I was really nervous about doing interviews, but, you know, I'm figuring it out. Now I'm a pro. You're a pro. It's easy, right? I am a pro. Yeah. You're a natural. I'm a natural. So for this last episode of the year. Oh, yeah.

Right. This is going to be our this is our December episode. We're going to do something slightly different for our Decembers. We're going to talk about advances in in medicine related to cancer. Right. Yeah, I just wanted to prize people of some findings that have been in the last few months, certainly everything in 2025. Some of it just came out this month. Crazy. And so, yeah, so this is late breaking things. Some early diagnosis stuff.

as well as some things people can do just to improve their overall health and hopefully prevent recurrence of their cancer if they've had it. Nice. So what do you got?

AI is going to change the world, as we all know. Yeah, well, only in certain areas. It's going to change it for good and for bad. And unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of the bad right now. Not in medicine, though. I'm just saying, across the board, it's not that great. I want AI out of my Google. I want it out of my social media. I want to choose. I want to choose when I have AI. I don't want it forced on me. Apparently now in Microsoft Word, I can't figure out how to turn off Copilot.

Oh, yeah. You know, I got to say, I'm not a huge fan of the co-pilot. I have it. I've been doing PowerPoints and I'm like, no, no, no. Like, go away. I want you. I will find you. But just go away. Just bring the paperclip back. I'll just click on the paperclip if I want. Give me Clippy. I want Clippy. Give me Clippy. Yeah. So anyway, so yes, so I see AI as an evil, not even a necessary evil, but you are bringing...

To the table, the good part of AI. I use AI a lot right now because I mine a lot of information and it can read stuff faster than I can. So I'm actually using some dedicated... literature research AI, and it's really helpful. Do you go back and check to make sure that it's correct?

Well, it's just pulling the papers for me. And then I could see like this paper cited 32 other papers. And it goes right down to the phrase in those 32 papers where that paper was cited. So then I can, you know what I mean? Like I can just keep hop, skipping and jumping and down.

and finding more information a lot faster than reading all 32 papers to see where this paper was cited and how it was cited. And it even brings up like agreements and disagreements with that current paper that I'm looking at. And the one I'm thinking of right now is called Cite.

S-C-I-T-E. I use a paid version. And maybe some of these other AIs that are free can do this kind of stuff, but I just trust when it's a dedicated literature type that it has a little more rigor to it. It's not going to hallucinate. Hallucinate. That's absolutely what I want out of my computer hallucinations. I don't need more hallucinations. Don't need any more hallucinations in my life. Okay, so tell me the stuff that you've been learning.

Well, some of it, like you sent this one from Medscape a little while back. I thought this was interesting. What is happening in something called pancreasure, which can differentiate benign from cancer tumors. in the pancreas. So it's a test? It's a test. Yeah, it's a blood test. Okay. So without having to have surgery, or even a biopsy for that matter, you see something at the head of the pancreas, it's sitting there at the duct, I'll tell you now, they usually go in and take it because...

You can't risk, right? Or at least they biopsy at the very least. So they did a study looking at people who did have biopsy proven stages one and two. primary, let me make sure I get the verbiage right, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma stages one and two, and they look to see, can we differentiate these folks from people who have a benign lesion in their pancreas? I'm just going to go.

cut short of it, they used a biomarker signature that combines a bunch of genes, and they saw that if they look for these genes that are specific to pancreatic cancer... If they see this panel of genes, then yes, it was pancreatic cancer. If they don't see those genes, then it wasn't. It's called pancreasure. And this is great because the surgery for pancreatic cancer, as you well know, is intense.

Yeah. So anything that can spare people over treatment is a good thing. So this was this was exciting and it's very nerve wracking. Pancreatic cancer is one of those that we don't want to catch later. So this. affords people an earlier diagnosis so that they can identify it. And if it is pancreatic cancer, get it out stage one or two, hopefully. What's happening with a lot of these blood tests, slowly but surely, they're going to make it to...

screening, high-risk screening. So for example, if somebody has a parent who had pancreatic cancer, or they know they have genetic predisposition towards pancreatic cancer, and this will happen for ovarian cancer too, these tests that are now using DNA in the blood, it's called free DNA or tumor DNA or cell-free DNA, it depends what paper you're reading, they will be able to just draw the blood and check.

And it's much different than looking for just the tumor marker. So in pancreatic cancer, you've got a tumor marker called CA19-9, and it usually is high if people have pancreatic cancer, but it's not always high. So it's not as definitive as running a whole DNA screen like this. So this is much, much more reliable. So that was exciting. I think that's anything that prevents overtreatment. I think everyone agrees. And I think this is kind of a.

The easiest use of some of the technology out there is to say, okay, let's spare people overtreatment. And I think anything that contributes to early detection, before we turn on the record button. I had talked to you about there were some teenagers who did a project for like a science competition in Richmond, Virginia, who came up with an app for actually using AI.

So AI for good. And it's an app that detects melanoma. So I guess it looks at moles. They put in a whole bunch of images of moles for the AI. to study but is that what i don't know the ai i sound like an old person but um so ai studies all of these images and then

I guess you scan in your own mole or something or take a picture and upload it and it's able to tell you whether or not it's concerning for melanoma. So that's, you know, anything that you can do to... detect things early and catch it before it becomes um you know harder to treat is yeah second best thing preventing it completely right i mean and then you can't always prevent things completely i mean especially like

pancreatic cancer, there are things you could do to reduce your risk, but how do you prevent it? I mean, even melanoma, there are melanomas that you can get that aren't related to the sun. So even though you avoid the sun, you know. Yes. And so they probably, the A, B, C, D, and E of melanomas, which I'm going to remind our listeners for their own knowledge, asymmetry of a mole, you look at the border for irregularities.

cauliflower-y looking and that kind of stuff. The color, if it's more than one color. And then D is diameter or darkness. Not all melanomas have pigment. That's really important to realize. And then evolving. growing quickly is it changing or changing over time right it's like oh this was always like one color and flat and all of a sudden it's like raised in several colors so yeah

Yeah, so that's kind of a cool. And we'll put links in our show notes to all of the things that we're talking about today. And there's been a few apps out there that like Scanomo was one of the first ones that you could hold your phone up to any mall and it would tell you the percentage of it. likely being a certain skin cancer. Scanoma's been around for many years, but I bet the AI upped the accuracy. That's my guess. Interesting. Yeah. Because, you know, AI does some things better than us.

So we have to hallucinate better than I do for now. Hard to compare, but yeah. All right. So what else, what else you got?

I wanted to touch on some information that's come out this year that is very specific to environmental toxicants that we inevitably expose to, but we can avoid. So I don't want to be a downer and say... The world is a toxic soup, so we're all screwed. That's not where I'm going. I want to say we should all make an effort and nothing is perfect because our food sometimes comes wrapped in plastic. I'm thinking of cheese, for example, or, you know, sometimes you go to the deli.

the meats, the whatever, you know. It's plastic wrapping. Plastic is hard to avoid. But microplastics is one of the things that has gotten a lot of attention the last few years. And we have a whole episode about it. And we do have a whole episode on microplastics. And a recent study showed that when they looked at people who died of various causes, this doesn't have to do with cancer specifically in this case, various causes, they showed over time...

like 2016 versus 2020 versus 2024, they looked at the brain tissue, the liver tissue, and the kidney tissue. All of them have increasing amounts of microplastics over those years. In other words, if you died in 2016, you died with less plastic in your body than if you died in 2024. And of those tissues, the brain tissue had the highest concentrations of microplastics. Now, the good news is, as long as you stay hydrated and you sleep well, you should be washing them out.

pretty regularly. You shouldn't end up with too much in your system, but really exposure is where we should, you know, really cut it off at the pass, right? So ideally store things in glass. use silicone instead of zippy Ziploc bags use resealable silicone bags or just you know Pyrex glass is probably but it's hard you know it's hard because when you buy cheese

I agree. Even if you buy it in the deli and you're getting it sliced and it's coming to you on butcher paper, it's wrapped in, I mean, so, I mean, what do you do? You buy your own cow? You do your best. I mean, even locally, like locally people are going to like wrap.

Yeah. Wrap the cheese. I mean, that's why I say it's impossible to be perfect, but you can do a few things. You can say Saran wrap doesn't exist in my kitchen, for example, or, you know, try not to put especially things that are fatty and. against plastic. So don't store in the GLAAD, you know, reusables or something. Yeah. And, you know, taking care not to microwave. Yeah.

And, you know, we don't know how much comes in our water. These are nanoparticles. Some of them are probably making it through our municipal filters. And the air. Oh, and I want to clarify what I said. Making sure you don't microwave in plastic, I think, is important. Huge. Yeah. So, I mean, yes, you can't control it everywhere, but you can say, okay, I'll do what I can. And then if you sleep well and you hydrate, you should be.

detoxing really well in the night, and even your brain has glymphatics that are washing your brain of particles. And they did show that in mice, you know, when they actually intentionally... gave nanoparticles to mice. Of course, they do a lot of things to mice that, you know, they exposed them to a bunch of it, and then they watched over time how long it took to get out of their brain tissue, and it took mice 72 hours.

to release the nanoparticles that they were exposed to. So that's good. That means that there are efficient systems to get them out. And mice metabolism is different than human metabolism. I mean, mice don't live that long. No, they don't.

quick little metabolism, you know, the speedy little heart rate and all of that stuff. But their glymphatics in their brain are very similar to ours. So they do wash their brain with a glymphatic system that looks a whole lot like ours. Well, I think just being hydrated and getting good sleep is, you know.

That's foundational anyways. Yes. So here's one more reason to make sure that you are hydrating and getting good sleep. Yeah, just add that to the list. So another thing that came out that was kind of an environmental thing that got my attention was...

You know how dry cleaners, we've always known that they've been kind of nasty chemicals in dry cleaning. Sure. Tetrachloroethylene, which is abbreviated PCE. There was a study that came out showing that exposure to that, which is not just dry cleaning, it just happens to be concentrated in dry cleaning, but it's in adhesives and glues, it's in paint removers, metal degreasers, spot removers, water repellents.

I don't know what water repellents, but water repellents was on a list. Anyways, what it led to was liver damage. So the liver actually can be damaged and lead to fibrosis of the liver, which then can lead to liver cancer. So I think the rate was...

triple the person's risk for liver fibrosis when they were exposed to these chemicals, dry cleaning chemicals. So are you talking like you get your clothes dry cleaned and you're wearing them or you're working in that industry or you're... it's mostly contaminants okay so or contaminants because i know uh when i lived in new york uh there was a dry cleaner on the corner and now it's like a cafe i mean i lived there over 20 years ago but yeah now it's like

a cafe and i was always like i don't know well that's what they're known for like they're known for contaminating kind of the surrounding water right and stuff so yeah that is it's It's a concern. So, I mean, basically, just take precautions when you're using chemicals, whether you're using a silicone lubricant. Like, you know, we do a lot of DIY fixes. I'm thinking of, like, you might not spray breakthrough. You do.

You do a lot of DIY fixes. I do. It's true. Which is cool. But yeah, you have to be really careful and practice safety measures and stuff. It's true. I mean, admittedly, you tell yourself, I'm just going to do this for three seconds. I'm going to hold my breath. I'm going to run, you know, like, but I'm exposed. And I was like, I probably should be better about my own. Honestly, my own.

exposure. Sometimes I'm a little lax. So just seeing this makes me go, yeah, right. This is really serious stuff. The other thing that I want to say with exposures, and this has to do with cancer, this one, is ultra-processed foods are back on the map. connected to early colorectal cancer, early meaning young people, less than 50 years old. Ultra-processed foods, there was a recent article in JAMA. I don't think that's news to our listeners.

But the JAMA, Ultra Process Food Consumption and Risk of Early-Onset Colorectal Cancer Precursors Among Women, was the title, and it just came out November 13th. So that is more fodder for our proof. that we really shouldn't be eating that stuff. Right. And I mean, ultra processed food would not be something like a processed food, which would be like canned beans or frozen vegetables or, you know, things like that or, you know.

pasta even as you know dried pasta it would be something like I don't want to say brands but all I could think of is like ho-hos and ding-dongs yeah yeah Cracker Jacks. These are things from my childhood that I was never allowed to eat because my mom was not into buying that stuff. But yeah, all the stuff that I wanted to eat when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. They're non-foods.

They're incredibly shelf-stable. They're not like shelf-stable like white rice is shelf-stable. They're like, you know, you can get a Twinkie that's been in a bomb shelter since the 1950s and it's still intact. Yeah, so they're ultra-processed, meaning they have additives, they have preservatives, and they also have probably undergone a process to make them very different than where they started if they're from any natural food. So I think of like even a Pringle.

like versus a potato chip. Like a potato chip could be called a processed food. But a Pringles is an ultra-processed food because I don't even know what that is. They mash the potatoes. They add things in because Pringles are not gluten-free. So I know they add some sort of meat product in there. They make it look like a chip. Well, they make it look like...

something cool that fits in a tall can so that it's not crushable. Yeah. And you can drum with it after, so. You can? Yeah. Pringles cans? Oh, I never did that. Oh. Well, because, you know. You missed out. Well, Lucy was not a big fan of, I think she bought Pringles for a while and then was like, no, I'm not going to buy Pringles. Well, because she would eat them. That's the whole thing with my mom, right? Like no junk in the house because she would eat it.

Let's talk about exposures in general. Like, I grew up kind of that way, too. We really didn't have a lot of processed food at all. I do remember potato chips and ranch dressing in the fridge, but I don't. I had to go to friends' houses to get Doritos or even Fritos for that matter, which isn't.

So I kind of grew up with similar, like not a lot of processed food. There was a study, and I didn't put this on the sheet that I was going to talk about today, but this reminds me that some of our exposures now and some of the... colorectal cancer, and certainly leukemias and other cancers are linked to exposures in utero. And so what they just did in this study was in mice, yes, but...

I think it was informative. They exposed, I think it was rats in this particular study, to glyphosate, basically Roundup, and saw that the offspring... were more likely to have various types of cancers, mostly leukemia, but other cancers as well. And they were a lot of rare cancers. Sarcoma was on the list. Would they get it? Well, I mean, it's hard with a mouse, right? A mouse is always at a young age.

Until, you know, it's not. But for them, it was before 52 days. Okay, so it was like baby mice. Yes. Yes. Juvenile and baby. Okay. But it's an interesting, and what they did, what was interesting about the study, was that they exposed them to levels that are found in the EU. So the study was done in Europe, and they showed that real-world exposure caused.

cancer in the offspring. They were directly exposing them. So it would be like somebody who worked in... No, no. It would be eating food willy-nilly, not paying attention to glyphosate. Did they... So they didn't... Like load the food up with extra glyphosate? No, this was regular amounts. This was like amounts that the EU, not the U.S., but the EU has determined as safe. I didn't compare it to the U.S.

But my guess is it's either the same or less because they generally are tighter regulated over there. I thought that was interesting because when you start using real world amounts of chemicals, like an average amount that someone who's not paying any attention to it would be exposed to. The reason this caught my attention, too, is the rate of colorectal cancers in people under the age of 50 has been growing since the 1990s. So glyphosate hit the market here in the U.S. about the same time.

I should say glyphosate hit the market earlier, but GMO crops that allowed you to drench the fields with glyphosate, Roundup, Roundup-ready soy, Roundup-ready crops, really hit the market in the mid-1990s. They got approved. The first approval was 1996. So it does correlate. Doesn't mean it's causative, but it correlates to our rising incidence of young people with colorectal cancer and other cancers, actually, around the rise in young people. Coincidence? We don't know. I don't know, but we...

If possible, avoiding anything that has glyphosate on it is ideal. So that means the really laid crops like soy and corn, those are the big ones. There's going to be residual glyphosate if it's not organic. And then, but isn't the thing with sweet corn, like that's before they spray it or something? That's like young corn that's not sprayed? I honestly don't know. I don't either. I thought I learned that in Indiana. I'm not sure. I'm sure we'll have people comment if we leave this in.

But yeah, for some reason, I thought that sweet corn. I don't know. I don't either. I don't know. But I don't know if people realize the reason for the rates being so high is because they made crops that don't die. These are herbicides. The glyphosate or Roundup is an herbicide, and they made corn that won't die with that particular toxicant. So now you can use as much as you want on the crop, and our usage went way up. So that's why we have so much exposure now. It didn't grow.

Like, as a normal chemical usage would grow. I mean, it was an exponential growth in the mid-1990s, and we jumped in our usage. I mean, I had those numbers, but I don't remember now how many tons of glyphosate are used on our crops. A lot.

This is why I wanted to mention is because it's not just what we do in our lifetime. It's what happened in utero. It's what our grandparents did. And we're not in control of all of that, right? So you do what you can and then you let go. And that's true of all of risk reduction. in all of healthcare, I think. You know, you don't stress out. You try to do what you can and then let go. All right, so what do you got next? Well...

Something just came out about using hypnosis just before surgery for breast cancer. A 15-minute live hypnosis session before breast cancer surgery reduced postoperative fatigue, emotional distress. and fentanyl use compared with a recorded mindfulness session. So it was 203 women, and it was prospective, randomized clinical trial. It was in Norway, and they were undergoing either lumpectomy or mastectomy.

And they two hours preoperatively underwent either live hypnosis, which involved relaxation, imagery, and symptom reduction suggestions. or 15 minutes of mindfulness, which was breathing relaxation via headphones. So they assessed him afterwards, and yeah, outcomes.

Pain, fatigue, nausea, discomfort, and emotional distress were all checked out and analgesic use as well. And like I said, they had less fatigue, emotional distress, and used less fentanyl. Than the mindfulness. Than the mindfulness group. Interesting. Live hypnosis, recorded mindfulness. I mean, those are not apples to apples. Maybe if they did a live mindfulness, it would be a better control.

It was a single center. It was just one place in Norway, and it was 203 women. So it wasn't a large population. But it was just kind of a cool thing that something as simple as 15 minutes of hypnosis a couple hours before surgery could really... statistically significantly affect the outcomes. Yeah, no, that's really cool. I wonder if they've checked it out with other surgeries as well. I know, I think that's the...

probably the next thing they're going to do. And there was no control control group, right? They checked again. Yeah, the people who like got nothing. Right. There should have been a third arm. They were just wheeled on in. Yeah. But you know what happens in all of these studies is the ideal study gets displaced by the study you can afford to do.

Because it takes money. The more people you recruit, the more data you collect. It all comes down to dollars because most studies could be better. And even the people who design them admit that usually. But, you know, they only have so many dollars on their...

grant or their whatever their gift is so yeah i thought that was pretty cool and then maybe the last thing to talk about that what you had mentioned was that bar of soap oh right it was another young kid who entered some sort of science competition. And, yeah, he came up with a skin cancer-reducing bar of soap. Yeah, I looked that up quickly, and you were right. It was a couple years ago.

And imitkomad, if I'm saying it correctly, imitkomad is something that is used, I know, for other skin cancers as a drug, like it's prescribed. Topically. It's topically. Topically. Yes. It's actually an immune directed treatment. But the cool thing is a bar of soap. I mean, a lot of these things, what is interesting is like if you can bring that to maybe cultures in the world that can't afford.

right to have surgery early on like using the soap early and there's i guess very little downside risk um of using it i mean that'd be kind of cool anything that we could use in places that don't have affordable care or even access to any medical care in some places. Or even just you've been diagnosed with an early stage

skin cancer, squamous or basal cell, and then you're, you know, prescribed or given the soap and like, okay, let's reduce your risk of others. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I actually, you know, There are some people who have a very high risk of repeat skin cancers. I mean, anyone who's had a skin cancer has higher risk of more skin cancers. But some people have immune...

glitches, we'll call them, that doesn't recognize squamous cell carcinoma, for example. So they'll end up with a lot of them. So this kind of thing could be really useful for people who have repeat skin cancers that you have to keep going back and having them taken off, actinic keratosis and basal cell.

There is something, I looked at it just before we started talking, and Skin Cancer Soap website is out there. So you can look at it. You can find this by just putting in skincancersoap.org online. and just see where they're at with it. I think it's in clinical trials now or something. What I found especially cool is, I think, isn't that the young man who I told you went to my high school? Was that the study? Yeah.

Yeah, so he's a graduate of the same high school that I went to in Fairfax, Virginia. So go Cavaliers. There you go. Like I ever would have said that when I was in high school, but no, I think that's kind of cool. It's the same with the, you know, the... young students um who did the melanoma app you know i think yeah um you know i just i think it's really cool when you have just younger people doing these for their you know their

school research projects or, you know, local science competitions. There was something else where there were some students who were coming up with an oral cancer detection app. I mean, it's just, it's such a... I don't know, it's kind of amazing to see like just young people, you know, it's probably from their own family experience. Maybe they had a relative, you know, who had this cancer. And then I think that was the case with the melanoma app is that one of the students had.

A relative who had had melanoma. And so just creating these apps or programs or whatever it is, you know, soaps. I don't know. Just, you know, if you've got kids, encourage them to go into science.

Yeah. Did you know most scientists make their massive discoveries before the age of 25? Like the vast majority of science discoveries are made in people who are young because that's the way the brain works when you're young. You just... more creative and even scientifically most discoveries are made by young scientists breakthrough discoveries so it's kind of cool yeah and hopefully they're getting the credit for it depends who writes the history i know

I'm going to stay on that one. There's a lot of mud. That's a whole other episode. Yeah, a whole different topic. There are podcasts based on that, though. So let's just do a little recap of the stuff that we've covered. Sure. So we have differentiation now through blood of a tumor in the pancreas so that you can differentiate between benign and...

cancerous more easily through a blood test. That's a new discovery. We have unfortunately microplastics growing in our society and our exposure in our bodies. So doing whatever you can to limit your exposure to micro... plastics is a good idea just for your overall health. And just in general, just because I've seen it, like if you have a campfire or something and you've got a plastic bottle, don't be throwing that in there. Yes. A lot of it has to do with just being mindful.

Yeah. And that's true of the dry cleaning chemical, too, of the tetrachloroethylene. You know, be mindful of your chemical exposures and know that your skin, your largest organ. is very good at absorbing a lot of nasty chemicals. So protect your skin, protect your lungs. And then also dispose of those properly. So I know that in different cities or towns, there are specific...

places to dispose of more hazardous chemicals. And so just make sure you make use of that and just don't chuck it in your trash. Absolutely. And then the other like... limit your exposure to ultra-processed foods, not just because they're ultra-processed and not all that nutritious, but because they add crap to it that your body really doesn't need. Probably going to mess with your biome, you know, the whole ultra-processed food thing, and glyphosates as well.

I think we're going to find out that glyphosates have really, really changed our entire way of being on the planet until we get them out. And the last couple things were just some inventions from... younger people. It was the skin cancer reducing soap and the melanoma app. That's right.

I got to check out that Melanoma app. I looked at one before. There's a few that were competing, but I bet this one's better than what was out there already. I'll check it. Yeah. I mean, they're using AI for good, like I mentioned. That's it. See? You know I always say that. It's Wonder Woman's line. Seems to me you can put your powers to good use somehow. Linda Carter. On that note, I'm Dr. Leah Sherman. And I'm Dr. Tina Kaeser. And this is The Cancer Pod. Until next time.

Until next year. Until next year. Thanks for listening to The Cancer Pod. Remember to subscribe, review, and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates. And as always, this is not medical advice. These are our opinions. Talk to your doctor before changing anything related to your treatment plan. The Cancer Pod is hosted by me, Dr. Leah Sherman, and by Dr. Tina Kazer. Music is by Kevin MacLeod. See you next time. Free audio post-production