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A Special Audio Interview FeaturingDonnie Yance

Here, Dr. Mercola interviews Donald (“Donnie”) Yance, an internationally known herbalist and nutritionist who founded the Centre for Natural Healing in 1992, and the Mederi Foundation in 2006.

Mr. Yance has developed and taught a proprietary diagnostic and therapeutic approach to energetics and nutrition called the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System (ETMS). Here, Mr. Yance will introduce you to his holistic approach and share some of his vast botanical knowledge, including how you can use herbs to restore your health.

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A Special Interview with Donnie Yance By Dr. Mercola

DY: Donnie Yance DM: Dr. Joseph Mercola, DO INTRODUCTION DM: Hello everyone! This is Dr. Mercola and we’re here for another Inner Circle expert interview. Today, we are privileged to connect with Donnie Yance, who is out in the West Coast of the U.S., in Oregon, specifically. I met Donnie earlier this year when I was lecturing in Scottsdale, Arizona. Donnie happened to be not at that conference but at a different one, and we got connected through a mutual friend, Dr. Robert Sieve. We had dinner one night and I found out that Donnie has an extraordinary background. His passion is similar to mine with respect to using nutrition as a primary tool to treat illness, but on top of that, he specializes in and studies herbal medicine and how to use it. But he has become more of an eclectic practitioner and has learned the use of pharmaceuticals and where they fit in, and a whole variety of other therapies that he’ll be sharing with us very shortly. We’re really excited to have him today. Donnie, welcome aboard, and why don’t you expand on that introduction so that our listeners can know exactly what your training is and what your focus is on? DY: Sure, thank you very much for having me. My background on paper does not really express who I am, who I’ve become and who I’m growing into.

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But my love of herbal medicine started, I would say, in 1977 when my cousins had sent me an herb book called Back to Eden, which was written by a man named Jethro Kloss. It was actually written in the 1930s but yet it was based on what’s called “Thomsonianism,” which was the primitive system of American medicine practiced for some 300 years. That book sparked my interest because, just from that title saying Back to Eden, that meant all these wonderful plants have been used by all civilizations since the beginning of time for every aspect of their well being: from food, to making clothing, to dyes - and of course for medicine. I’m also a Franciscan; I’m a secular Franciscan and I spent three years in a monastery. I made this connection that plants represent our Creator in a very beautiful way. So that was my introduction to herbal medicine. From that point, I went and managed many natural food stores and eventually then said, “Well, I want to go and get more formal training.” At that time, I did the most formal training you can do. Both in nutritional medicine and botanical medicine, which isn’t what could be done today, but I have studied it with Dr. Christopher and did the herbal studies at Sequoia College of Herbology - studies that are very primitive when we go back and look at it now, but that’s all that was available at that time. The 1930s up to recently were what I call the “herbal dark ages.” Up until about the 1930s, herbal medicine was very strong as a medicine in this country. and I went back then and learned those medical systems, which were called the eclectic medicine tradition and then the physiomedical tradition. And then there was, of course, homeopathy as well. But I fell more and more in love with these systems of medicine because they were much deeper, much more elegant, much more elaborate, and much more specific, so you could really learn the little nuances of plants both from an energetic perspective as well as from understanding how plants should be used in people’s condition. Then, I went and studied European phytomedicine, brought in a lot of what we call the usage of adaptogens, which came out of the Russian research from Dr. Lazarus, then later Dr. Breckman – that whole vitalistic concept, then in looking at Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine – I went and studied that.

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This constant theme, which we call the vitalistic theme, is prevalent amongst all medical models, and that’s kind of the motto of how we work. My study of nutritional medicine started with people like Carl Pfeiffer, and looking at Orthomolecular Nutrition, using nutrition in a more grounded way and a foundational way with lots of what we would call ‘”tonic foods,” but also bringing in nutrition more in a medical way. You can use nutrition to better people’s health or you can use nutrition to actually target conditions and diseases. We can go into that a little bit later. Then I went on to study allopathic medicine, because all of a sudden people with cancer started coming to me, and I just have this inner drive and this passion to get people well. I had to learn everything I could about what’s offered in the array of conventional medicine. And now, I consider myself an expert in that field as well. DM: Excellent. So what year would you say is the beginning of this interest - I guess the current interest in herbal medicine? Was that after 2000 or before 2000? DY: Twenty years ago. DM: Twenty years ago. DY: I had cancer patients now. I just talked to one yesterday, a metastatic prostate cancer patient of mine. We just went to over the 20-year mark working together, of which he was the oldest of three brothers, had metastatic disease when I started with him, did nothing conventional. Both of his brothers were diagnosed with cancer after him, both went conventional, both have since passed on. So, I’ve been working with cancer patients 20 years now. My book called Herbal Medicine, Healing and Cancer came out in 1999. HERBS AS MEDICINE FOR THE “ESSENCE” OF THE PERSON DM: Excellent. Before we start and go into the specifics, I want to take the position of a skeptic for some of our listeners out there. I actually was a skeptic somewhat of herbal medicine.

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Let me just define that more clearly. It was my clinical experience in the late 80s and 90s when many people were using herbal medicine as an alternative to drugs, not under a guided expert like yourself, and people are using this and making the substitution, but not really addressing the foundational causes of the disease. Now clearly, the herbs in many cases were far less expensive and certainly less toxic, virtually almost without side effects for most people; but my objection to that approach was that it really didn’t treat the cause. And another one that I experienced is that I was taking care of many environmentally ill patients, sort of the chemical canaries who would react to many things, and it seems these sensitive people were particularly prone to developing reactions to herbs, maybe not initially but over time. So I’m wondering if you can comment on those and kind of address some of those concerns that I had, and I think some of our listeners might have also. DY: There are different ways to think of the role of herbs in people’s health. From my perspective, working from that vitalistic tradition, herbs are what are called trophorestorative, so they actually do work on the deepest level. What’s very interesting now, with the explosion of science and to the field of herbal medicine, is that we’re learning that plants transfer information genetically to our genes that do nothing but add benefit to our health in a genetic level. Anywhere from environmental toxins, and we can go and do very fancy genetic studying to see what polymorphisms or single nucleotide polymorphisms a person might have that then can give us clues into understanding why certain environmental toxins may be more difficult for them to eliminate, therefore their bodies start to react to it. And the ways that we can repair those are through botanical medicine, nutritional medicine, and dietary medicine. Where plants and food share similarities is that they’re pleiotropic, and I think we’re in a world where everything is so reduced and everything is so snapshot, we’re all looking for, “Oh this herb is for this part of the body.” For example, everyone knows Serenoa repens, which is saw palmetto, and one assumes saw palmetto is for the prostate. Well, read the eclectic data on saw palmetto; they used it more for female problems than male problems. So an herb isn’t for a male or a female, more so, saw palmetto is one of the most nutritive plants in the world. It’s for underactive reproductive organs – it could be mammary

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glands, it could be prostate, but it has an ability to nourish those glands, so it is a nourishing herb really. DM: So it has a benefit other than the one that it’s primarily used for, at least in my understanding, which is as a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor. DY: Yeah, and that’s again, reductionistic. That’s taking the way conventional medicine views drugs and applying that concept. Now, here is a good way of seeing it. Pharmaceutical medicine sees the body as broken and needs to do one of two things: replace something, but most of the time, it’s blocking something. You just said, “a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor,” so it’s blocking, you know, Avodart and Proscar but more so Avodart, which works on both enzyme pathways of the 5-alpha-reductase enzyme, basically eliminates it. It blocks it. Now, plants aren’t going to block or eliminate or replace anything unless you abuse them, unless you either manipulate them, by taking everything away from them but maybe one compound, and then using it inappropriately, like the wrong dosage. So you can manipulate a plant to be used pharmacologically. But if you look at it from my perspective which is providing plant medicines like you do food, like what I say is a gourmet meal – I put plants together like you would put a great gourmet healthy meal together for someone – and that’s more a traditional way. I’m just looking to find ways to lend a helping hand to the body so that the body is as much responsible for the healing as the plants, so there is a cooperative effort. I’m not looking at the body as some broken mechanistic machine; everything relates to everything. A big focus of my treatment plan is to lend a helping hand and save the, what I call the “essence of the person.” The essence is a way of depicting the endocrine system, for example, and seeing the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal access as the hub, seeing the reproductive organs, seeing pineal glands, seeing regulation of insulin, seeing the way the body views information coming in as well as information being fed in. So, I’m always looking to nourish. Now, if that doesn’t quite get it, as I layer a protocol in, I will get more and more specific but I’m always starting with a foundation, if it’s possible. If you get someone with stage 4 disease coming to you, you can’t be that patient. You’ve got to pull everything out

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together. You got to layer everything in right away if you’re going to swing that person around to a state of health. DM: That certainly sounds like an enlightened perspective that anyone who is really interested in health and has an understanding of the basis couldn’t disagree with then. I heartily applaud that approach. But it doesn’t seem – that’s been my experience – the way that most lay people use herbal medicine. Would you agree with that or are there… DY: I completely agree. Not just lay people but practitioners as well. I don’t think they have a depth of understanding. THE ECLECTIC TRIPHASIC MEDICAL SYSTEM (ETMS) AND ITS SIX THEMATIC ELEMENTS For example, in my system, I’ve developed an integrative medical model, which I call the Eclectic Triphasic (three branches) Medical System. In that system are six thematic elements, so how you figure out how to treat a person is based on six different things. Element One: Traditional-Classical One is a traditional classical element. In other words, I’ve taken in everything I can learn from traditional medical models like traditional Chinese medicine, which has been around for thousands of years. It’s a medical system. But I see where its weaknesses are and where its strengths are, and then I try to see what the eclectics brought to the table, and we kind of bring this together to form the basis of the wisdom because traditional medicine has wisdom. Contemporary medicine may have knowledge but no wisdom. It’s like the old grandmother; it’s got all these wisdom, may not know how to run a computer but can answer the issues of life. You have some life issues you can go talk to her.

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So there is this wisdom in medicine that we must never ever eliminate. It’s like we have this philosophy “out with the old, in with the new.” My feeling is like, “Why get rid of something that has been used for thousands of years to get people well because something new has come along?” Anything new that comes along should be evaluated and complement what has already been done for thousands of years to get someone well. So I’m not saying that we eliminate the usage of drugs completely, but we fit those in when appropriate – that’s the thing. They don’t replace dietary medicine, nutritional medicine, but even more importantly, prayer. All traditional people prayed when people were sick. They laid hands on people. They would do music… You would sing… There would be healing music. There would be healing scents because scent is powerfully for healing. And there would always be the administration of herbs. And so that’s in our genes and it’s not just about how we see the black and white of disease and health but it’s even greater than that. It’s a real expression of healing, of the love that can be poured out in every level. Element Two: Modern-Scientific Let’s go into the second thematic element: Modern Scientific. I spend about two hours a day on research. I know you’re a great researcher and you do a lot of work - I am the same. I’m primarily a practitioner. I’m 32-plus hours in the clinic with patients. I run a round table Thursday night that the physician’s phone in and participate in. I do on Fridays, right after this (the interview), I’m doing what’s called IHCP (Integrative Healthcare Consulting Program) where I’m talking to doctors who have difficult patients and helping them with those patients. And those are the things that my life is about. DM: How many physicians are you consulting with? How big is your group? DY: The Thursday roundtable is anywhere between 10 and 15 people phoning in and usually live, there is anywhere from four to seven people at a table. That’s just that one roundtable that we have. Then I do a weeklong clinical training, a Level 1, Level 2 for physicians.

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For example, next month in September (2009), we have 25 coming for Level 2, but you can’t do Level 2 until you do Level 1. Level 2 is an in-depth, six-day intensive in cancer. Level 1 is about 50 percent cancer and 50 percent general health and other diseases as well. But then the second thematic element is the Modern Scientific. So I study everything I can in medicine, understanding drugs, pathways and even plants, to know what I can learn, and then write monographs on plants. For example, my monograph on turmeric is now up to about 300 citations and it’s about 80 pages long. So every plant practically I give somebody, I have accumulated all the data on that plant and I can give it to people at a snap of a finger, pretty much. So science is very important. Element Three: Analytical-Technical The third is an analytical technical element. When you’re looking at people’s blood work, when you’re looking at pathology, there is an analyzing effect to that that energetically you can pick up on. There are great things that you can do in an interview with somebody. You can see but you cannot tell someone has a methylation defect, no matter how much time you spend with them. There are just certain things that we can pick up. You can’t tell someone has a P10 mutation and maybe they’re HER-2/neu positive with breast cancer. If the P10s mutated, her septum will not work. There are things that we need to gather and analyze that are very important. Element Four: Intellectual-Logical The fourth is very important: it’s a logical intellectual approach. Logic is not practiced in medicine, in oncology especially. There is no logic. People do things just because they do things. Surgery, we talked of people who always say, “Well, natural medicine doesn’t work,” know nothing to validate it. I said, “Who has ever validated that surgery, in many cases, extends people’s lives or makes it better?” There is no data that supports that. Very often, same with radiation. The data on what is done with conventional medicine is not very strong when you look at the data. And drugs are misappropriately used, and good drugs aren’t given to the right people, and the wrong drugs are given to people constantly.

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DM: I’m reminded of the relatively unusual or rare occurrences where surgery was attempted to be validated of a trial that was published about five or six years ago now in a New England journal. It was a multicenter trial, placebo-controlled, blinded, and randomized. They looked at the intervention retroscopy for knee damage. It showed that the placebo worked as well as the intervention, which is a very powerful statement to confirm what you were just saying. It just defies logic sometimes. I’m wondering, I admire the fact that you have focused your energies on oncology and treating people with cancer. I have never had that passion for a number reasons. One is the relative risk one undergoes by essentially bucking the establishment. So as you escape from under the radar, you’re really a target for conventional medical physicians because there are so many dollars and economic interest in there that they really guard that territory well. And then, even more importantly, if that wasn’t an issue, for me, it seems like in many cases, certainly not all but in many, it’s sort of a last stage process of illness. In my experience, it’s somewhat frustrating to treat because if one intervened much earlier, you could have obviously prevented it. So, I’m just wondering what drew you to that and what keeps you drawn and passionate? And I’m grateful because we need people like you to do that who are really passionate about it. DY: Well, it’s the opposite; it drew me, I didn’t draw it - I just responded to the call, let’s put it that way. That’s how I see it. I feel this is truly a calling, a mission, a vision, and I get people well. I get better and better at it. I’m not afraid. I mean, fear is the great obstacle to healing and when people have cancer, all of a sudden they’re filled with fear. The whole medical system set-up is based in fear. Many physicians, even good people, really good people that would actually take a different approach to their patient care, are afraid because they are in a system that locks them down. And then if they deviate from that system, they expose themselves in every possible way and very few people are willing to take that risk. I am always willing to take that risk because the only thing I’m not willing to do is go against what I think is in the best interest of the people I work with. And that’s why I will, sometimes, someone comes and say, “I don’t want to take any drugs. I’m not going to take any chemotherapy in my case.”

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Sometimes I say, “In your case, we need a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” In another person, I’m steering them away from that. I said, “In your case, we’re better off treating you without that at, least at the time being. And if we need to go to something, we will figure what it is in a logical and sensible way. Not just giving you standard therapy.” For example, for the last 10 to 15 years, Adriamycin became the stand alone, the top-tier drug to treat breast cancer. A year and a half ago, data was released that said, “Less than 4 percent of women benefit from Adriamycin, a very toxic drug that has long term cardiac damage.” And so you’ve induced all this damage in all these women, that to some degree, can be prevented and protected with nutritional medicine, but they’re never going to suggest that. So you have all these women that never needed a drug that gave them no benefit, not even a little benefit, against their cancer and now they have heart disease as a result. They have a weakened heart because that’s what it does – it causes a myopic condition of the heart because it damages mitochondria. That’s how it works. And still to this day, even though two years ago or a year and a half ago that data was all released, still I would say more than 50 percent of the institutions will use Adriamycin as an upfront chemotherapeutic protocol. DM: It takes a while to turn the ship. I remember very similarly in the turn of the century when estrogen replacement therapy and the big studies came out and absolutely disproved it in every way, shape and form, and put black box warnings on the PDR inserts. Even today, some people still use it but it took many years before the bulk of the physicians really understood that. DY: Very true, yeah, exactly, it takes a long time to steer things. For me, that’s a little bit frustrating for someone that’s on top of the medical data. I could just go on and give examples and examples, like drugs that target EGFR (Epidermal Growth Factor), and there are three approved drugs: Tarceva, Iressa and Erbitux. Now, if you have lung cancer that has reoccurred after your first line of treatment, whether it be chemotherapy, which is usually a Taxane combined with a platinum – that’s usually the first line – then you may be eligible to get Tarceva as part of your second line treatment. Now, you can test the pathology to see if someone is EGFR positive and they can have a three plus then you can test a mutation called KRAS, and if they have a mutated KRAS they don’t respond well to that drug. If they a wild type KRAS, they do. And there is another mutation called the brat mutation; that also is a clue whether someone would do good on this drug or bad.

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Now, if you test COX-2 too as well, and you target COX-2 and WOX5, which can be targeted predominantly with botanical medicine with but a little bit of drug like Celebrex if you really wanted to. And all of a sudden, you’re taking away the downstream effectors to that growth factor. You’ve identified a person that’s maybe going to benefit from it. They just randomly throw people on drugs without any clues or any insights. The “Sherlock Holmes Approach” One of my big mentors in how I approach things is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock was great because you have to accumulate all your clues before you have an understanding of what to do. And Sherlock said it’s a – and this is a great one on nutrition, this is a great one for you even to use – “capital mistake to theorize before one has data and sensibly, one begins to twist facts to build theories rather than to build theories upon fact finding.” A great example, as you would know, is in nutrition. You are a big proponent of raw dairy, whole food dairy, eggs, things like that. And 30 years ago, cholesterol was blamed for the cause of heart disease, therefore they assumed that eggs contain cholesterol; therefore, eggs are bad for you. There wasn’t one stitch of data, no animal research, no epidemiological research, yet everybody was told to stop eating eggs and butter and start eating margarine and whatever and lots of sugar. That seemed to be all right. DM: Classic example. DY: Yeah, and if you follow Sherlock’s message, that will never happen. DM: Yeah, it’s a good strategy. I just want to go back to a point where you mentioned that fear is driving many physicians’ choices. I think part of that may be the fact that they actually have a license that is regulated by their local medical societies and that they can actually have disciplinary action taken, and even actually have their license taken away. I’m wondering if you could tell our listeners… so that’s a fear that they have, a real fear, it’s just keeping their livelihood. Do you have a license to practice? You’re not a physician, right? DY: No.

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DM: So, that risk is kind of gone. The only risk you have is getting accused of practicing medicine without a license I guess which is… DY: Well, that’s probably worse because then I could easily be thrown in jail for that. I have what I could have. I’m a registered herbalist, a member of the American Herbalist Guild, the society of practicing herbalists. I’m a certified nutritionist, so I have as much in the field as I can, short of being a naturopathic doctor, which would maybe be the next thing that would actually give me a license. But when I look at the plus, I need to continue working the work that I work because nobody teaches what I’ve learned and what I’m going to and so I can’t… when I look to the benefits of going in and getting that license versus… DM: I’m not suggesting that you need a license. I’m just pointing that out as maybe one of the reasons that physicians don’t do that. But I’m also curious because many of our listeners are like you, they’ve gotten this… sought to get the truth and could care less about a specific license and yet they’re helping people enormously, far more than the bulk of the traditionally trained physicians. Are there any guidance or recommendations you would give to clinicians in that setting that don’t have a formal license but yet are treating patients? What are the cautions and the concerns or strategies that you found to be useful? DY: Be as honest as you can, execute these thematic elements, like I said. I gave you four. Element Five: Intuitive-Musical, and Element Six: Contemplative-Spiritual The last two are intuition and music, and the last one is spiritual. If you use your intellect and your spirit, the place where God resides in you, you cannot be wrong then. If you use your emotions, then that can get you into trouble. So I try to eliminate the emotional response and use my brain to the utmost and have my brain convey and communicate with my spirit. I have been gifted in two ways. To a degree, I have a photographic memory, number one. Number two, I have a great multitasking brain. I can just do many things all at once.

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And then I have great intuition. I can feel things that need to be done, need to be shifted. I have insight very often into what I believe someone needs to do to get well, even diagnostically. There are so many examples that I can give, or maybe I just figure things out so quickly – what was wrong with someone and what was really needed to get them well. Those are kind of my gifts, and I need to just be true to those and use them. And I can’t necessarily speak for what someone else should or shouldn’t do. I think that if you’re true to your heart and you’re using your intellect, that’s all I can say that you need to do, and don’t overstep what you shouldn’t do. DM: Great. That’s a good strategy because we need knowledgeable, wise individuals to help mentor those people who are not interested in relying completely on allopathic medicine. Your focus is on cancer and I’m wondering if you would like to, sort of broadly, be kind enough to review some of the strategies that you use or advise for some of the top cancers like breast cancer, I would imagine, and prostate being another one, and some of the others that you found, particularly useful approaches. If you can go over that, that would be great. A UNIQUELY INSIGHTFUL GAME PLAN FOR CANCER - WITH BOTANICAL WEAPONS DY: Prostate and breast cancer very often share a lot of similarities. So, we’re looking at what we call hormonal related cancers. Now, interestingly, breast and prostate cancer are not the only cancers that have hormonal elements to them or hormone receptors as we say. Believe it or not, almost any cancer in any part of the body can have characteristics that emulate breast cancer. So you can actually have a lung cancer, for example, that has estrogen receptors. Prostate cancer can have estrogen receptors. So this concept of even seeing cancer - how it’s identified - is wrong. Current Ways of Identifying and Understanding Cancer are Wrong So what I do is, for cancer, when someone has cancer, I do an in-depth look at the pathology. Brain tumors can have estrogen receptors. Pancreatic cancer can be 70 percent HER-2/neu positive. Breast cancer only 30 percent HER-2/neu positive. So we need to shift away from the idea that identifying cancer solely based on the location as fact.

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Prostate cancer, 80 percent of prostate cancer, even though it’s called cancer, is very benign-like. So in other words, it’s not in an energetic position to be life threatening at least for many years. Ten to 20 percent of prostate cancer can have characteristics that potentially make it aggressive. And the fact is that removing the prostate, for example, or radiating the prostate doesn’t address those abnormalities. So if there are a number of gene abnormalities that have contributed to that cancer and some of those characteristics in that cancer enable it to proliferate and to metastasize and to invade the body, when you remove the prostate, you’ve done nothing to change that. And most likely, within six months, a couple of years, you’re going to have metastatic prostate cancer. If you don’t, and you do nothing at all and you don’t have those aggressive characteristics, you can live a very long time with local disease advancing at a very slow pace. And then if we actually intervened with botanical medicine, nutritional medicine, you can very often stabilize or reverse that cancer - but you have to identify it. The idea that breast cancer is just the same cancer is wrong; there are hundreds of different kinds of breast cancer. So I don’t want to make people think that that’s what you do. Now, let’s say the most common type of breast cancer is going to be estrogen receptor positive, often progesterone receptor positive. So we can go there, then we look at it – is it HER-2/neu positive? For example, HER-2/neu positive cancer, just by altering fatty acid intake, looking at a high intake of omega-3 fatty acids with GLA (gamma-linolenic acid), rich fatty acids and olive oil – olive oil, both the oleic acid in olive oil as well as the phenolic compounds oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol – all suppress HER-2/neu, down regulate it. And that’s just changing the diet to be resistant to that gene. Diet is really interesting; we can use diet to target abnormalities in the genes that we need to, like for example, HER-2/neu. We can use diet energetically so we can build the essence of the person with diet. Things like black beans and eggs and sweet potatoes all build the essence of that person. We can look at, say they have excess liver heat, then we can use a lot of bitter foods, a lot of bitter green vegetables that cool the liver, detoxify the liver. Then we can look at what I call the exogenous environment and look at what is around the person that is conducive.

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So if someone has a job or a lifestyle that puts additional stress on a certain organ system or then that environmental exposure predisposes them to cancer, we can do one of two things or both things. We can either get them away from that toxin. Say they are a hairdresser – now hairdressers have an increased risk of breast cancer – they can change the chemicals that they use to be less harsh. They can change their career or they can implement dietary strategies and botanical medicine that improve their body’s ability to protect itself from the toxicity of those chemicals that are inducing genetic abnormalities. Asbestos, for example, is the most identified cause of a very serious cancer called mesothelioma. For some of us, I’m sure you and myself grew up and we can’t even remember if we have asbestos exposure - it was everywhere growing up as kids. DM: Oh yes. It was in the bottom of the stairwells. DY: Exactly, and so why do some people get mesothelioma from asbestos exposure and others don’t? Well, we learned that asbestos mutates the p53 suppressor gene. This p53 is called the tumor suppressor gene. If your protected gene, your main protected gene is going awry now, it’s like out to lunch, all this damage can start taking place and there is no checkpoint anymore. We learned that many plants and phenolic compounds – curcuminoids and catechins and other lesser-known agents, andrographolides – these plant compounds not only prevent mutated p53 but can actually repair a mutated p53. We can go and test people for mutated p53. That’s just a great example. And your diet can repair p53. The BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes associated with breast cancer, by the way, associated with prostate, pancreatic; you’ll find down the road, any cancer can have an increased risk if someone has a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene abnormality. What is the BRCA1 and BRCA2? They’re also suppressor genes that suppress cancer. Now we found out that a person that eats a diet rich in sugar and refined food, can induce mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2. A person that eats a very healthy diet can inhibit a BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene from becoming abnormal. So diet, as we go into the future, is not only going to be a strategy for prevention, for making people healthier, it is going to play a role as a contributing factor, not a solo factor to treatment strategies as well.

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DM: I’m sure you’re familiar with Bruce Lipton and he is really well known for… DY: Yes, great guy. DM: It’s not so much the genetics that we’ve inherited but the expression of the genetics and epigenetic expression, the regulation of the expression of those genes – that’s really the key. You’ve referenced many gene tests. I’ve stopped seeing patients about five years ago and that was actually before they finished the genome analysis. So genetic analysis wasn’t common back then but I’m wondering, are there regular assays that you use or that are typically done in cancer, or you just have to know about these polymorphisms and then order them specifically? Abnormalities of Cancer Expression Dictate Plan of Attack DY: That’s a really good question. It’s a pretty complex question. It’s very interesting because we can look not only at polymorphisms in the person but we can look at polymorphisms in the cancer as well. Isn’t that interesting? We can see the abnormalities in the cancer that are being expressed, and then the abnormalities in the person. For example, you take one of the most common drugs given for breast cancer, a drug called 5-FU. Used in colon cancer, it’s a primary drug in colon cancer with oxaliplatinum and then CPT-11. It’s pretty much three and then Gemcitabine. So there are just a few drugs for colon cancer. Typically, breast cancer will have that but now it has been replaced by an oral version that converts it in the body, and that drug is called XELODA. Now, if someone is even considering that drug, before even going on that drug, we would test in that person methyl defects, particularly the NTHFR677T. I’m just getting that off the top of my brain. That polymorphism in particular means that a person has a defect in methylation and the toxicity of that drug can be tenfold, based on that mutation. That’s not a good thing just for you to know before you go and take the drug. There is a test called the UDG test, that you would always test before you consider taking CPT-11, which is Irinotecan. DM: That’s if you were an enlightened clinician. I guess that’s the intention of the question.

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Do most treating physicians know this, or is this really a very small eclectic piece of knowledge that hardly anyone is aware of and really accessing these available tools? DY: Very small number of people. DM: Hardly anyone is doing it. DY: They are more worried about people taking herbs with chemotherapy than testing these things that really are relevant, because if someone has that mutation and they take a standard dosage of Irinotecan as a second line treatment for colon cancer, there is a 17-fold risk of that person dying from that drug. It will induce life-threatening diarrhea in that person. They cannot eliminate that drug. They don’t have the means to get rid of it. The enzyme that breaks the drug down is defective. And therefore, they’re just going to keep pumping the drug into the person until they say, if they happen to be taking a couple of vitamins, they blame it on the vitamins. And that’s the way it is. DM: I totally understand it. This is a great classic example of one of the… and you’ve mentioned others previously of the importance of understanding the genetics, not only your own genetics but genetics of the cancer that you’re treating. DY: Exactly. DM: And the drugs that you’re choosing to use. THE MEDERI FOUNDATION: AN INTEGRATIVE MEDICAL MODEL DM: So, I think the more important question – because there is just no way in our limited time we’re going have a complete exhaustive revelation of what these tests are and what their implications are, and even if we did, it’s going to be outdated in six months – the key in my perception is to really plug people into clinicians who understand this, because there are going to be many people listening to this interview who are going to want to know this.

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So, how do they find someone like you or who has been trained by you or other clinicians, because I mentioned there are other enlightened clinicians who understand this, which is a small group. How would the average person access this knowledge - how do they do that? DY: Part of the mission of my foundation, The Mederi Foundation, is to do just that. DM: Can you spell that so people will know? DY: M-E-D-E-R-I, mederi, which is the Latin, word where medicine comes from. Actually, the word literally means ‘to heal and be whole.’ So the whole term of holistic healing comes from mederi, and that’s where the birth of medicine has come from. That is the name of the foundation. The focus of the foundation is education and research. So what I’m trying to do is, we’re brainstorming about clinical trials and taking on very difficult cases and showing that this system, even in advanced cancer, is so far superior to standard care that people cannot turn away from it, because I know that’s the case. Now, I’m going to validate it. One of our big causes is to validate that. And it’s not about an herb; it’s not about an herb formula. It’s not about this - it’s about implementing an integrative medical model. DM: That’s well. That’s good, but people – that should be done, but cancer as you are well familiar with, is an urgent situation – people are going to want to know this information now and not wait for the result of some clinical trial. DY: Right. And education, so you brought the standpoint, there are now probably 50 plus practitioners around the country that have studied with me and have learned the system. I would say, out of that 50, they have done Level 1, Level 2, and probably a third of them are actually very good in it now. People can go to our website and learn or they can call our foundation and tell us what area they’re in, and we can help point them to somebody that they can work with.

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DM: Let’s not hold them in suspense any longer. What is that information? DY: The website is www.MederiFoundation.org. That is the website for Mederi and then the clinic website is www.CentreHealing.com, which is C-E-N-T-R-E. It is my vision, in two to three years, to build a medical center that is practicing that system in this town. I am in the process of aligning our foundation with the Institute of Functional Medicine, for example, because they are the closest of medical doctors that see health in a similar way. DM: One of my previous interviews was with Dr. Will LaValley, and he is out at, I think in Austin, Texas, I believe. He is similar to you; he was a trained family practice physician, but he just became passionate about treating cancer, and he actually took two or three years off and just studied the molecular biochemistry of these drugs and these pathways, and he’s just really well trained in the use of these. And I think that there would be a great synergy between the two of you. So when we get off (after the interview), I’ll connect you with him. He was actually our previous Inner Circle interview person and he was a phenomenal physician. Enlightened educators like you are really going to bring the science forward. DY: I’d love to meet him. DM: Yeah, I think there is a great synergy between you two. Thank you for getting the burning question off my chest because we can go on and on about these specific genes and certainly, if there are any other major examples that you want to share that would have great value for a large number of the listeners, that’s going to be great. TWO BASIC, LOW-TECH WAYS TO APPROACH WELLNESS DY: Now you can see another opposite way that we could look at people, which is more of a basic way and isn’t all about the hi-tech gene testing. In my system, like I said, there are three branches. The third branch is all the molecular profiling and looking at excision repair enzymes and all of that. That’s the more modern, kind of technical way, of

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viewing the body. But the other two branches are not. Looking at the Essence of a Person: A Way of Seeing Your Endocrine System Branch number one is the energetic model – it’s looking at the person’s essence, their vital force, and what we call their vital spirit, and making sure those are all in harmony with each other and strengthened to the utmost to promote health and healing. And essence, as I said, is a way of seeing the endocrine system. We see an epidemic of problems in endocrinology these days – everything from autoimmune diseases, to hormone imbalances, to hypothyroid conditions, hyperthyroid conditions; all kind of issues related around hyperinsulinemia. So you can see the whole hormonal system of the person is very much a contributing factor not just to heart disease and neurological disease, but cancer. Sometimes, we don’t even need to go to Branch 3 to see the work that we need to do with people as a preventive measure. For example, you said breast cancer, prostate cancer. Well, if someone has hyperinsulinemia, their risk for both those cancers and other cancers is far greater. And, their chances of surviving that cancer (if they have that cancer) is greatly diminished just because of that terrain, that environmental terrain. We could look at it specifically and reductionistically and say, “Well, here’s your testosterone level. Here’s your estrogen level.” But the whole endocrine system is a harmonious system and we have to see it as a commune of ever changing responsive systems; we have to then also see the work from the center of that system out. For example, if we strengthen with adaptogenic remedies, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, very often other issues that are peripheral improve. And we could say someone could have borderline hypothyroidism, borderline hyperinsulinemia, they can have imbalances of leptin, imbalances of cortisol; nothing is overtly wrong but there are many things that are subtly wrong. There is no drug; there is no way to make that person healthier. This is a great example of where plants are not going to specifically change anything. They’re going to lend a helping hand in a system to get better and healthier. So, this is a beautiful way of understanding how plants, in a foundational way, not in a way of targeting gene receptors, because all of that we can do as well, but in a foundational way, are going to build the life force of that person with an emphasis on their essence or their endocrine health.

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Looking at Your Vital Force: Digestive Health Then we can look at what I call the vital force, which is a way of seeing mitochondrial energy, cellular energy and also depicts the digestive health of the person. A person with or without cancer who has a weak digestive system and a poor ability to metabolize their nutrients is going to be compromised. They could be anemic because their bone marrow is not getting the nutrition it needs from the food it needs and all kind of things like that. If you have anybody that has blood deficiency, they’re not going to do as well with any disease. They’re going to be prone to many problems if they have blood excess. An extreme example like hemochromatosis, that’s not good either. So there are things that we have look at. High iron, for example, predisposes people to cancer and heart disease and also proliferates cancer. Iron, copper, and sugar all proliferate cancer. So these are things that we can identify beforehand and help to change the terrain or the environment to be the least conducive to disease, the most conducive to health. That’s kind of what we do. Cancer and Copper DM: I wasn’t familiar with the copper. I’m certainly familiar with the iron and the sugar, or the insulin levels, but copper is… DY: The three main growth factors in cancer – vascular endothelial growth factor, basic fibroblast growth factor and transforming growth factor-beta – are all copper dependent. Copper activates the switch to the angiogenesis in those cancers. You brought up prostate cancer; I’d say three out of four men with prostate cancer have a very poor ratio of copper to zinc. In other words, their copper is excessive, their zinc is deficient and then their ceruloplasmin, which is a great marker for cancer, is elevated, and if that is continuing to elevate, that is problematic because that reflects a copper storage very often. DM: So for many, it’s not so much just reducing the copper intake but it’s also increasing the zinc intake, to get that zinc-to-copper ratio up? DY: Yes, it is.

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Very often that’s one of the ways that we do it. A lot of the sulfur-downing amino acids with phenolic compounds and molybdenum are also useful. Molybdenum is a chelator of copper as well. Even the drug that they use for Wilson’s disease, TM (tetrathiomolybdate) is a molybdenum-based chemical agent that is used not only to treat Wilson’s but is actually in clinical trials, used to treat numerous cancers including kidney cancer, brain cancer and lymphomas, so it is really something. But the trouble is, one of the great problems is that almost everybody in the field of oncology has visors on. In other words, they do their thing, they do their research but they’re not looking at what the person down the road is doing and looking at. And everybody is still looking for magic bullet solutions that will never ever be. The answer is too smart. DM: I couldn’t agree more. And that’s actually really one of the motivations for me developing the site and that I realized early on, as clearly as you do, that the knowledge… there is this tremendous lag between the time something is found out by these brilliant researchers who spend most of their lives in a lab, identifying these piece of truth and information then applying it clinically – it can take decades sometimes. So the purpose of my site was to decrease that lag time, and clearly that’s one of the missions that you are doing too - to have that applied clinically and not being wasted in some lab paper somewhere. DY: Exactly. For example, I’ve written a paper on copper and cancer. and eventually it will get edited and then will go up on our website. Just like you, I’m trying to educate people about that. I’ve got a paper on questioning the timing of surgery on cancer, all with hundreds of citations all the way back from a hundred years ago questioning it. More than a hundred years ago. Eli Jones, the great eclectic physician in cancer, and probably the most brilliant person that ever lived on the face of the planet - I rarely talk without mentioning his name - but he wrote a book in 1908 called Cancer - Its Causes, Symptoms and Treatment. There isn’t one inaccuracy I can find in that book, written more than a hundred years ago. DM: That’s just startling.

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USING HERBS TO BATTLE SWINE FLU DY: Let’s just start with his four main causes of cancer in 1908. Number 1: stress. Number 2: vaccinations. Number 3… More Evidence Vaccines Wreak Havoc on Your Immune System DM: How many vaccines? It was just the smallpox back in 1908, wasn’t it? I don’t think there were any others. DY: Vaccines was the second cause of cancer. DM: But that was just one vaccine. I don’t think there was anything other than smallpox in 1908. DY: It might have been. I’m not… DM: I think that was it. It was just pretty extraordinary. Now we have at least a 50-fold increase in the number of vaccines. DY: Well, I have three kids and none have been vaccinated. Just so you know. DM: Congratulations. DY: That’s my feeling on vaccinations. People don’t even know the depth of it, you know, you’ve exposed some of the other chemicals that have been in vaccines and some of the reactions, but again from the vitalistic perspective, a vaccine is intended to set off an antibody response without bypassing the cell mediated immune response. That is not how the immune system works. So you’re tricking the immune system, and you’re doing it with all these childhood diseases so people have broken immune systems. They don’t know how to work. So it’s a function of the concept of vaccines, and you can look at the cost-to-benefit ratio, I tell everybody, look at the cost-to-benefit ratio but on a systemic vitalistic level, every vaccine is weakening that part of the body. They’re weakening how their body is meant to work.

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And when we look from a perspective of cancer, the cell-mediated immune response is everything - natural killer cells, cytotoxic T-cells. We heard all about the importance of these and cancer, they don’t work because they’ve been exercised. And the immune system, like the body, needs to be exercised. DM: Interesting. Herbs and Swine Flu Now, as we’re recording this interview, it’s late summer. The processing time is usually two to three months, sometimes longer before gets into distribution. I’m sure it will be out later this year. So at that point, what’s going to be in everyone’s mind is the swine flu vaccine. So obviously we’re both in strong agreement not to get it. That is just sort of, as obvious as can be, but the more important question is, from your perspective and understanding of nutrition and herbs, do you have any recommendations as to what you feel might be a useful approach to enhance your immune system and protect against it? DY: Completely, and I have no fear of the swine flu. I’m an herbalist and herbs are incredibly effective against any flu. And we don’t see the pathogen as the problem, we’re not trying to eradicate it; we’re trying to improve the body’s response to do what’s it’s supposed to do. I’ve developed a formula actually through my product line and to our health products, it’s called Flew Away. The main compound in that formula lists some of the herbs which I all think are wonderful against that, and this is more of an acute formula. It’s not about building, using adaptogens that keep the body much stronger and healthier, and tonic herbs like astragalus. Those are great preventive strategies. But this is more of a direct remedy for the flu – propolis. The bee resin propolis is one of the most broad-spectrum antimicrobial compounds in the world, if not the broadest spectrum. Propolis is also the richest source of caffeic acid and apigenin, two very important phenolic compounds that aid in immune response, that also are very protective against cancer, actually. So propolis is my favorite thing.

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If I was stuck on an island, deserted, and I can only have one medicine with me, it would be propolis. That’s how much I love propolis. Elderberry has strong anti-influenza properties and elderberry is also high and rich in phenolic compounds. It’s very nourishing. But more importantly than the elderberry, which is more trendy now, is the elderflower. The elderflowers were traditionally used to treat the flu. For hundreds of years that’s what we used. It’s a diaphoretic, and other diaphoretics that are mixed with that in the formula. A Simple Herbal Tea Remedy for the Flu People can even make a tea, a very simple tea that everybody should have at home is a mixture of elderflowers, boneset (eupatorium), yarrow, linden, peppermint, and ginger. So those are six herbs that can be blended together for probably a dollar, and you can keep them at home. That is the basic herb tea remedy for influenza. And the key is to drink it very hot, drink it very frequently. I also use another herb in my formula, Flew Away, called honeysuckle and chrysanthemum, and then a couple of essential oils as well. That rounds out the capsule formula that I have. It’s a liquid gel capsule. Actually the herbs have not been dried or anything - they’ve been concentrated in gel. But you can make that simple tea, drink it hot, drink several cups a day and take a warm bath, hot bath at night with a little Epsom salts in it and get right into bed and induce perspiration. Sweating Out the Virus The biggest key if you have the flu, any flu, is to induce perspiration. DM: Interesting. DY: Other key things to do, diet wise is, I’m a big believer in soups at that point. So I have a couple of soup recipes that I give people. One is a soup that we put herbs in, so you have both the food and the herbs mixed together, and it becomes a medicinal soup for example, and another one is just a hot and sour soup and I have a recipe for that that I give people too, and you drink that and that also induces perspiration. But the real key is to start sweating. That’s the key. Nutritionally, I like zinc. I like zinc both chronically for health. A little bit of zinc sometimes in people but acutely, taking a little bit of zinc really helps the immune

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system exercise more efficiently. I think in many people, flues and other diseases like even malaria, it’s been proven that malaria, if you could correct the zinc deficiency in Africa for example, you’d reduce the death to malaria by 50 percent easily. DM: I think that only kills a million people a year. Maybe it’s more. DY: Directly linked to zinc deficiency. The immune system cannot respond. DM: That is just shocking. Actually, that’s one of the diseases that the Gates Foundation is targeting. Of course they’re using it with a different approach. But they actually are using Artemisia too, which is an herb you’re familiar with. DY: Well, they don’t use Artemisia - they use artemisinin. DM: The extract from Artemisia? DY: They isolate a compound that is very active against malaria, but they don’t do what I do. I have a formula called Artemis Plus, which is artemisinin combined with Artemisia whole plant extract, with a couple of other things. The whole plant, just the sesquiterpene lactone artemisinin, has nine active sesquiterpene lactones that all work together, and then there are also a number of flavinoids that synergize with that. So, what’s going to happen if you only use artemisinin is you will get malaria resistance to artemisinin. DM: Makes perfect sense. DY: If they would only combine the whole plant with the artemisinin, you’d get all the benefits of the pure artemisinin and you would not develop resistance. The reason why plants have multiple compounds, you know, plants have been around here a lot longer than we have. As a matter fact, the oldest plant in the world, the oldest tree in the world is the yew tree, where we now get three chemotherapeutic drugs. Basically, you have Taxol, Taxotere, and now the new nanoparticle Abraxane. They’re all based on one compound from the tree – one taxane called Taxol. The tree produces 27 taxanes, all active against cancer and other diseases. If the tree only had Taxol, there would have been bugs that learned to manipulate themselves around that and drug resistance would occur, and the tree would have died a long time ago, but it’s the longest living tree that we have.

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By the way, the Taxol is present in many nuts, on the skin of nuts – the Filbert or the hazelnut. The skin of the Filbert is the second richest source of taxanes in the world, short of the yew tree. DM: That’s a very important principle, and I want to come back to that, but I wanted to address one last question on the swine flu. When Your Healthy Immune System Betrays You It’s significantly different than the regular flu, and the concern that many clinicians have is that those with a healthy immune response, some of the healthiest people, will actually generate a cytokine storm and have tremendous swelling, inflammation, and flu build up in their lungs, which actually can contribute to the death... DY: That’s true. DM: So it really needs to be a bit more specific, and I’m wondering, you mentioned address the cytokine storm - or is there something else that you address that with? DY: They do. That’s the beautiful thing about plants is that the cytokine storm is the overresponse to the flu. DM: Right. DY: The body is over responding. So now what is happening there is a tremendous amount of inflammation. So most of these plants, you look at plants like yarrow, they are immune modulating. So they do buffer that response and even an herb like Echinacea – which everyone says, “Oh, immune stimulant.” Don’t take it. Echinacea is anti-inflammatory; so it will buffer that storm. Echinacea is not a major flu remedy or cold remedy like people think it is, especially alone, and it wasn’t traditionally ever combined with Golden Seal. These are all fallacies that have come out and the concept that Echinacea, take it a week and then you’ve got to stop taking it - all unfounded. No basis whatsoever. Traditionally, it was used more for chronic conditions like rust toxicity, more diseases that have now taken on a chronic nature with tremendous blood impurities and things like boils and things like that. Not so much acute disease.

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Now, the other things that we can use are botanicals that are designed specifically for inflammation, and with acute benefits like anti-influenza benefits - Andrographis for example. Andrographis has these compounds called andrographolides. The nickname of Andrographis is this “king of the bitters.” Bitter plants cool the body and reduce inflammation. So, Andrographis is going to continually help against the flu, but yes, it will buffer the inflammatory response that’s going on. And there are many examples of plants that can actually aid in that modulatory effect. Glyceride is a licorice. A little bit of licorice will be beneficial because you want to help the body’s second response, which is the mineral corticoid output to then reduce the inflammation. That part doesn’t respond. That second part to calm the system down isn’t working as well. So a plant like licorice is going to be very good. Licorice is going to increase the steroidal output by the adrenal glands to then buffer that highly inflammatory response. TIPS FOR FINDING QUALITY HERBAL PREPARATIONS DM: That’s terrific. Thank you for expanding on it because that really was an important issue, and I’m glad your approach addresses that. Now I want to go back to another important principle that you were discussing, which I think is central to the optimal administration of herbal preparations because, ultimately, herbs are plants. They’re grown and they need to be harvested and there are a number of different variables that go into that. And of course harvesting, some type of preparation needs to be made. There are just so many different ways that you can go about it. I’m wondering if you can address the principles that one might use to identify a higher quality superior herbal remedy or therapy that’s going to provide the benefits that you’re mentioning. DY: Well, that could be a whole two-hour talk in it of itself. DM: Well, at least some of the principles.

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DY: I think the safest way for people to have an insight to that is to know who is responsible for the herbs that you’re buying, where are they coming from and who’s taking responsibility for that, and if that’s a person you can trust. And so, the herbs, when you go to buy the herb on a shelf, what company is providing that herb for you and who is behind that company, and do you believe that is somebody you can trust. That’s probably the easiest and best way, because everything else is going to be difficult. Now, if you’re buying crude herbs of the shelf, you can learn to identify at least aesthetically what looks like a good herb, which is useful. The smell of an herb, the way it looks. Orange peel for example - you look at the orange peel we keep in bulk. It’s so beautiful. It’s so aromatic. It’s just like you can just like chew into it and you look at the red clover blossoms and the rich chlorophyll and the nettles, I mean you just want to stick your face in it. So you can in a crude herb, but if you go on buying tinctures and capsules, you have no idea. And then there is so much garbage. I would say more than 90 percent is of lesser quality. DM: So, less than 10 percent of the products, the herbal preparations that a consumer can purchase, is of questionable value? DY: Yeah. DM: That’s a very important statement. DY: The reason why, though, is that their motives, especially this is being driven by places like Whole Foods, big industries that are kind of monopolizing the natural food industry because they then go to the company and they say, “Look, we’re not going to buy your product at this price, we’re either going to buy at someone else’s or you got to chop your price down to us and give it to us at this price.” There was like this negotiation, and there is a loss of delivering quality in lieu of meeting price demands. And so the company owner has got to do something to address that and normally they’ve got to use an inferior product that’s going to cost them less to get or make it smaller, bring the milligram content down, or do something so that they can still maintain a profit margin.

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Unfortunately, for the good people, that’s one of the things. The other thing is that the people that don’t even care, they’re just shopping herbs and buying whatever is cheapest and throwing in a capsule because they don’t believe the consumer knows the difference - and they don’t. DM: Which is true. DY: Which is true. But when you can go, like me, and I do nothing but seek the highest of quality and the best concentration, exactly what I’m looking for, but I don’t provide my products in a natural food store just because of that reason. I’m selling to really good practitioners that understand that. And then they’re results-driven; people take things and they are going to get the benefits that they’re supposed to get from it. We can look at looking for active constituents and plant extracts and identifying key components and being sure that those herbs meet those components. There are obviously toxicity assays that need to be run, so not only do I buy things from very reliable manufacturers but then, in turn, I do third-party testing as well to be sure that I’m getting what I want. Then the preservation of the herb is – is the herb preserved well in the capsule? Are the contents going to, down the road, dissipate? And so what was a high quality now, six months later, isn’t anymore. So there is a lot to go into maintaining. There are good quality lines out there and people with good integrity, and people can learn who those are, and there are educated people behind the counters that know a little bit more. For example, you look at a bromelain. People buy the enzyme bromelain. You want to always check the GDU rating because you can say a capsule, it says “bromelain 500 mg or calcium 500 mg” on the label. It doesn’t mean there is 500 mg of bromelain in there; there is just 500 mg in the capsule. And you don’t know there could be 50 mg of compounds and calcium, you can have an Albion Lab high quality, mineral chelator. You can have something that calls itself a chelate when it’s not. So you’ve got to really know.

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And you can have a 500 mg bromelain that has a 500 GDU or you can have one that’s 2400, which means it’s uncut, which means it hasn’t been cut with anything else. And people are just going to see 500 mg of bromelain and buy the cheaper one, probably. TINCTURES VS CAPSULES VS WHOLE HERBS… WHAT’S BEST? DM: Sure. Now, with respect to general principles again, do you prefer tinctures versus capsules? And the second part of that is, how do you apply the general principle you were discussing earlier, which just used a whole herb, which I absolutely wholeheartedly endorse. I think anything beyond that is really foolish. So how do you get it - because there are so many approaches? Like St. John’s wort. It’s an extract that they’re using and not the whole thing. So how can you address those, the tincture versus the capsules and then the extracts versus the whole herb? DY: Well, I use it all in my practice, and it’s indicated in both by what the herb has taught us to be the best way to deliver the herb, and what I’m really looking for out of the herbs. So, we can start in some cases with crude herbs, and crude herbs can be made into infusions, which are making a tea, or they can be made – there are two basic ways – into a decoction, which is where you cook the herbs. Generally, barks and roots are cooked longer than leaves and flowers. It’s a very general rule. But save for the usage of a demulcent. Say you want to give somebody herbs for stomach ulcers. The best way to deliver those herbs is in a demulcent tea form. Tinctures aren’t good. No other way will work as good as a tea. When you’re flushing kidney stones out, you want to use a combination. In that case, a tincture formula combined with a tea. You want to use both forms. Fluid Extracts Now we go to the fluid extract, which is the next form. One of the reasons why you have an extract is that the water-soluble compounds aren’t what you’re looking for. So, a tea will not get you the medicine that you need.

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Therefore, a tincture is going to use some alcohol. Anywhere from 20 percent all the way up to like 90 percent. Like in the case of propolis, you can’t make a tea from propolis, so you have to tincture it. And I use a 65 percent, so it’s more like a serous fluid extract. So, a tincture is a strength of anywhere from 1 to 3 up to 1 to 5. In homeopathy, they use 1 to 10. That means that there is 3 parts solvent to 1 part herb, if it’s 1 to 3. A fluid extract is now when you go to a 1:2 or a 1:1, or say a 2:1, all the way up to a 5:1, 6:1, or 7:1. That means, where the original starting material was, if it was say a 1:5, you have 5 parts of raw herb and you’re left with 1 part solvent. So it’s now 5 times stronger but it’s not been manipulated in any way. It’s still a whole herb - just concentrated. In the case of something like Crataegus and Hawthorn, Hawthorn for the heart, you need a good amount of that herb. It’s a nutritive herb. So we use the berry, but we use the leaf and flower as well. And a tea for repairing heart damage just isn’t going to do it - it’s not strong enough. So we would want to go to something much stronger, in that case. So if someone has an inflammatory condition and you want to use licorice, the tea isn’t going to be strong enough. If you want a demulcent for the stomach, it will probably be adequate. But if you need that mineral corticoid output, you need to use a concentrated form of that herb. Now when you look at adaptogens like Eleutherococcus, Rhodiola, Panax ginseng, Panax quinquefolius, American ginseng - all these classic adaptogens - all of the research is based on predominantly 1:1 fluid extracts. So when you look at Eleutherococcus, which was formally called Siberian ginseng, probably the most researched plant in the world – over 3000 papers have been written on it – that one plant and it’s benefits to human health, 80 to 90 percent of the data is based on the 1:1 fluid extract, not on a tea, not a super concentrate but on a 1:1 fluid extract. People consuming anywhere between 4 ml a day, all the way up to the high dosage is 10 ml. So that’s there. Now, the next level of herb we get into is a more manipulative way of doing things.

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Advanced Herbal Therapies You talked about artemisinin. To make artemisinin takes 400 lbs of Artemisia. So now you’re talking of a 400:1 extract, which I use. I use artemisinin in a formula of mine but I don’t use it alone. I want to respect the whole herb and combine it. But if we have a situation, a cancer, that has a sensitivity to artemisinin, and you give them Artemisia tea, you’re not going to get that patient well. So we do need to go and see in each circumstance what we want to do. Always starting with using herbs in a more food-like, simple way as a foundation, but layering those herbal formulas all the way up to a more pharmacological way if it’s needed. Because if you take a 30:1 extract of turmeric or a 30:1 extract of green tea that gives you 90 percent phenol compounds and 60 percent catechin with about 40 percent Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), that is what most of the new data is based on now. From a cancer perspective, the dosage of that compound is usually 2 to 4 grams a day. Again, drinking green tea for a treatment strategy, not prevention, is not going to be enough to be suppressing the cancer. So in that case, we need to use a higher dosage, but I think it’s all appropriate. The best way is to start just like you do, with your diet. You start with good, wholesome herb medicine, and then you layer the other things in. DM: I don’t recall your mentioning the capsules. Are there indications that you would use capsules? DY: The only capsules I use are powdered extracts in capsule forms. I don’t use crude herbs in capsule form. I just don’t see that, because you’re dealing with all these fibrous material. DM: Okay. DY: So a capsule to me is reserved for powdered extracts. DM: How do you get a powdered extract? Wouldn’t they use a solvent to do that? DY: Yeah, and then they evaporate the solvent. DM: Okay.

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DY: You evaporate it, and then you’re left with a powder, and then the powder is then thrown in a capsule. Good examples are like what I use in the formula InflamAway. I’m using all powdered extracts, but the main one is frankincense. And we look at frankincense from a standpoint of reducing lipoxygenase, topoisomerase II. Generally, it’s a great anti-inflammatory, but we’re using a concentration that is about 30 percent of a certain compound called AKBA (alpha-keto-boswellic acid) as well as 80 percent boswellic acids, which are the terpenoid compounds that give frankincense that resinous smell, that beautiful smell that it has. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard and fibrous. So you’re not going to absorb a whole lot if you don’t take an extract. Some of these hard bark materials, if they throw it in a capsule, even a healthy person isn’t going to break that down very well - not to mention an unhealthy person. But if you use the powdered extract and you combine it with a little pepper, believe it or not, pepper - which people use on food to enhance the taste - we’re learning that pepper makes your food, as well as your herbs, more bioavailable. And your nutrients – even ubiquinol and ubiquinone – and have increased bioavailability just by using pepper. There are other tricks to make compounds more bioavailable because that’s the real key. It’s not just what you start with but what you are actually going to absorb in the body. DM: That’s true. Is Drinking Hot Tea Safe? I have a question on tea. There was a study, and you might have seen it - it came out earlier this year - that suggested that drinking hot tea would increase your risk of esophageal cancer. I didn’t look at the study details, but it’s certainly a source of concern. I know you mentioned drinking hot tea. DY: That’s not hot tea though, that’s like scalding tea, which is commonly done in some countries. What happens is – it’s very common sense – it has nothing to do with the tea. It has to do when you constantly are burning the throat lining, you’re causing inflammation and inflammation causes cancer. It was just a simple case of the heat inflaming the tissue constantly. That inflamed tissue, like H. pylori causes gastric cancer, gastric lymphoma.

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How does H. pylorus do it? If the bacteria cause an inflammatory state to take place, a chronic inflammatory state, it is the inflammatory state that then creates the terrain for cancer to develop. DM: That makes sense. Just continuing with the tea, I tend to have Tulsi tea, which is holy basil out of India and I’m sure you’re familiar with that. And what I do is, after I brew the tea, I just swallow the tea leaves as a sort of a supplement. The logic there would be to incorporate any of the non-water soluble benefits that are in the tea. Is that a good strategy, or something that’s unnecessary, or do you think there is any wisdom to that? DY: I’m not positive. I think in some cases like in nettles, I’m sure swallowing a little nettle on top, the holy basil, same thing. It’s kind of a nutritive, I call it a secondary adaptogen, but it could even be a primary adaptogen, almost. I can’t quite say that because there needs to be enough science to validate it as that and the science is getting close, but to me its not quite there. I think that doing that certainly can cause absolutely no harm, and maybe you do get a little bit more benefit from it. I would say, if you enjoy doing it, then continue. A Toast to Turmeric DM: Great. Then one of my favorite herbs is turmeric, and there are curcuminoids in it. It seems like it has great enormous potential for treating many cancers and I suspect you would agree with that. I’m wondering what way you would advise using turmeric? DY: I’ve developed a formula called Botanical Treasure. The featured compound is curcumin 3C, which is not just a curcumin concentrate turmeric extract but a curcuminoid, because curcumin is only one of four active curcuminoids, and so that one is also the one where all the cancer research is being done. Like at M.D. Anderson (cancer treatment and research center), that’s the extract that is being used for that. So that’s curcumin 3C that has done that.

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And again, pepper makes curcumin much more active, and so does some other things like bromelain - the proteolytic enzymes also further increase the bioavailability of curcuminoids. But I personally take that formula, which is the 30:1 extract, and so that’s what you use but I have no problem with that. Traditionally, people have used just regular old turmeric powder. I think it’s great and so a lot of the good epidemiological data is just based on people eating curry everyday and that seems to offer benefit. So I think it’s all good. Now if you’re treating disease, I don’t think taking powdered turmeric is probably going to work, but if you get the 30:1 concentrate and you start taking anywhere from 3 up to 8 grams a day, you’re going to get some medicinal value. As a matter of fact, at M.D. Anderson, they did a study on 21 eligible people with pancreatic cancer. Not to say that the turmeric did anything unbelievable, for one person it was miraculous, one person completely got reversal of their cancer, about half got a beneficial response and you might say, “Well, that’s not so great,” but there was one agent that’s still far superior to standard care with pancreatic cancer – Gemcitabine, which is the gold standard for pancreatic cancer and is not very effective. We’re not even sure. It doesn’t increase survival. If it does, it is by weeks. And it’s borderline whether it increases quality of life, and so here we have turmeric. It’s just the regular old spice outperforming the main chemotherapeutic drug used to prevent pancreatic cancer. DM: Big surprise - but if you’re a knowledgeable herbologist, it’s exactly what you would expect. With your extract, that 30:1 extract, do you have the other components of the turmeric in there? DY: Yes. DM: Okay. DY: It’s about 90 to 95 percent curcuminoids, 75 percent even, though the breakdown is curcumin and then you still have some of the other compounds as well, like milk thistle, the silymarin complex. You’ll see a lot of new data coming out on silibinin and people think they should just get silibinin because all the new data, which is milk thistle has shown great anticancer activity, at least seven different pathways.

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They show that it significantly has effects in suppressing cancer. The silymarin, 80 percent extract, which is the common extract of silymarin, 75 percent of silibinin. So you’re pretty much covered with a good milk thistle extract to get a high amount of silibinin. You don’t have to go look for just silibinin. WRAPPING IT UP DM: Well, it has just been fantastic. I think we’re getting close to the end of our time together. We spent some time together, as I’ve mentioned early, at the beginning having dinner and it was a large group of people and we didn’t get to talk, certainly not anywhere near in depth as this. But I’m just beyond impressed with your knowledge and your understanding of this field, and it’s very easy to understand how you’re going to require two weeks to train someone to share with them a portion of your information. It’s interesting, my presentation today sometimes alluded to the fact that even if you knew everything there was to know about the discipline, which is very difficult to do, it’s going to change. Next week is going to be a different story. So, it’s not just knowing what’s out there; it’s having the discipline to keep tied into the research and to apply your own clinical knowledge, as obviously you are doing as a leader in the field. I think you have phenomenal information, and I’m just so glad you were here to share a portion of it with us. There are two types of individuals I would think listening to this that would want further information: one is the clinician, who would like to get training in your approach, and then second would be the patients who are interested in finding a clinician who has your training. I think you mentioned it earlier, but if we could just repeat those again for those who are interested. DY: Sure. The foundation website is www.MederiFoundation.org and the clinic website is www.CentreHealing.com. And you’ve got to spell ‘center’ the English way, and you will get there.

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Natura, the product line, is www.NaturaHealthProducts.com. And that is if you want to look at any formulas that have been developed by me, but they are sold through practitioners, not in stores. You would need to find a practitioner anyway that would be familiar with them. DM: And Naturo is N-A-T-U-R-O Health Products dot com. DY: N-A-T-U-R-A. DM: Good. DY: And, just a quick mention of that, the name ‘Natura’ was a beautiful little story for me. It means nature in Latin. About 100 years ago, all the natural physicians in the country held a meeting together with the eclectics, the physiomedicalist, the Thomsonians, and they developed… they knew that the AMA was getting powerful and was going to squash them, which they ended doing pretty much, and you’re talking about a lively system of medicine. There were schools all over the country teaching botanical medicine, but by the 1930s, there were no schools left, all shutdown, books burned, everything. It was just unbelievable. But they held a meeting in 1910, kind of foreseeing that coming, and they said, “We are much better banding together than picking out our differences; let’s join together and form an alliance instead.” And they called that alliance “Natura,”and part of their code of ethics was that the practitioner had to be spiritual in nature. That was the first part of their creed, the first sentence of their creed. And so I’ve gone on to be an ETMS (Eclectic Triphasic Medical System) practitioner. You also need to first and foremost, be of a religious character, and I think the words “religion” and “religious” are misunderstood. And so I have gone on to define that word, which is religion, and truth is not a matter of dogmas, beliefs, or rituals or superstitions nor is it the cultivation of personal salvation, which is a self-centered activity. Religion is the total way of life, the pursuit of pure love, which is God through the understanding of truth where all that we do is exemplified as religion. So that’s what I’ll end on. DM: Well, that’s great.

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Again, I thank you for sharing with us a fraction of your knowledge and just more or less giving us a glimpse of what is possible with this type of approach. Thank you for being a resource and pushing forward the envelope of what is known and how we can apply this, because as we both know, cancer is really an epidemic - and about one in two to one in three people in the country, or half, will get it at some point. So this knowledge is really helpful and useful and is going to benefit many individuals. DY: Well, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity, and also thank you so much for the wonderful work that you do. DM: Thanks. [End of audio] REFERENCES www.mederifoundation.org www.centrehealing.com http://www.naturahealthproducts.com