Integrative Oncology and the Unique Power of Mistletoe Therapy with Dr. Nasha Winters

Featuring Dr. Nasha Winters, the global healthcare consultant and enthusiastic specialist in exploring integrative cancer, guiding the clinicians to become masters of metabolic approach. Having the experience of being a cancer diagnosed patient, Dr. Nasha put forward to supporting patients with integrative cancer by suggesting constructive and practical treatment to achieve sophisticated health results.

Dr. Nasha Winters has educated hundreds of professionals on the clinical application of mistletoe. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the overwhelming topic of oncology in tandem with this alternative therapy. Dr. Winters shares her insights and experience bridging the gap between conventional oncology and the development of Integrative Medicine as an effective path in the treatment of cancer.

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Michael Roesslein:

All right. We’re live and I’m really excited. And this is one of the few guests that is coming back from season one to join us on season two. In season one, we learned about your incredible healing journey yourself with cancer and how that led to doing everything that you’re doing now. And this time we’re going to learn stuff about treating cancer and integrative approaches to cancer, where we didn’t really talk about the how before we just talked about the what and the why, and everything else. I’m here with Dr. Nasha Winters. Thank you so much for coming back.

Michael Roesslein:

That was one of the more fun podcast episodes I’ve ever recorded, so I’m excited to do this one. We just chatted. I’ve really got to start recording the pre-recording conversations, because they would make an awesome addendum to the podcasts.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

The outtakes.

Michael Roesslein:

But we just planned a visit in Italy and possibly one in Mexico because I live in Italy and she lives in Mexico, so we’ll see how that goes. But for those who don’t know about Dr. Winter’s work, she’s a global healthcare authority and bestselling author in integrative cancer care and research consulting with physicians around the world. She’s educated hundreds of professionals in the clinical use of mistletoe, which we’re going to learn about today and it’s not just for making out at Christmas, I think. And, has created robust educational programs for both healthcare institutions and the public on incorporating vetted integrative therapies in cancer care to enhance outcomes. We’re also going to learn about what integrative cancer therapy means. Dr. Winters is currently focused on opening, which is open-ish soon, the Metabolic Terrain Institute.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Working on it, working on it.

Michael Roesslein:

Always working on it, a comprehensive nonprofit metabolic oncology hospital and research institute in the US where the best standard of care has to offer and the most advanced integrative therapies will be offered. And this facility will be in a residential setting on a gorgeous campus against a backdrop of regenerative farming, green building, and restorative amenities, EMF mitigation and retreat, as well as state-of-the-art medical technology and individualized data assessment to employ the right therapies at the right time to improve patient outcomes. And can we just make every single cancer treatment place in the world that?

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Yes, that is the plan for sure.

Michael Roesslein:

Well, I mean, if you guys do it and then you can put data behind your outcomes, they will come. And it’s a no brainer, there’s absolutely no way that such a place would not improve patient outcomes for any disease, especially cancer with some of the things you’re doing there. And I’m excited. I hope I never have to visit it as a patient, but I’m glad that it exists or existing soon and thank you for creating that. I think that’s every integrative practitioner’s dream is to have a place like that to be able to work.

So let’s start learning things. I used the word integrative several times in your bio right there and a lot of things that you do the word integrative is used. And we talked before we went on air and I said, and I kind of visualize, I don’t know if people saw the Batman movie with the Joker, the one that was really popular, Dark Knight, I said, “When people hear the word cancer, everybody loses their minds,” and I visualized that scene in the movie where he was like, “Loses their minds!” Because it’s scary as hell, one, especially in our culture it’s like, “Oh my God.” And then you don’t want to say even the word, it’s like that kind of taboo around it. There’s this massive fear and everybody loses their minds around that, which the fear is understandable.

And there seems to be this belief, I’ve seen this debate, internal debate, with people and people in my networks who have been diagnosed with cancer, do I go the conventional route or do I go the holistic route? And I have to pick one or the other. And if I go this way, I’m putting poison in my body, and I’m working with the conventional system, and da, da, da, da, and all these things. But if I go this way, I could just die and maybe the chemotherapy would work, but maybe the surgery. And there seems to be this belief that you have to choose I’m doing this or I’m doing that. Can you speak to that? Explain what integrative cancer treatment and therapy means and then speak to that whole loss of mind around the situation.

Dr. Nasha Winters:

Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that is a great sort of narrative picture that you just painted because I think that’s very realistic of what most people feel or experience when they’re diagnosed with this condition. We’re sort of taught to believe that it is a death sentence and yet studies and research has shown over the last few decades that we’ve actually turned this into a manageable disease process, much more like dealing with diabetes or cardiovascular disease and it’s not a death sentence. So I want to kind of displace that concern.

Often the biggest, most dangerous part of a cancer diagnosis is the reaction to the diagnosis itself, which is what you were alluding to here a moment ago in that the medical emergency is not so much the cancer because very rarely does it show up as a medical emergency, it’s often just found of sort of these obnoxious little symptoms that are brewing for some time that over time collect enough momentum or enough volume to get the attention to let us know what’s going on. On average it takes seven to 10 years for cancer to become big enough, loud enough for us to be aware of its existence. And very rarely, less than 1% of the time, will it present as an emergency, such as an occlusion of something vascular, or pushing up against colon, or something that’s causing an obstruction or something maybe causing a stroke, because oftentimes cancers can change your coagulation pathways. And sometimes the first sign and symptom of cancer is a blood clot kind of out of nowhere.

So that emergency is way less of an occurrence and yet we treat it like an emergency and the whole system tells people, “Oh my God,” [inaudible 00:06:26]. And so what is the most dangerous thing is the reaction. And I know the work you do, Michael, is so much about sort of commanding the mind and dealing with the traumas in our world around us. The diagnosis is very traumatic and how we are meeting that trauma, meeting that diagnosis, meeting that label can make or break our outcome pretty intensely. So that’s sort of one piece and we will come back to that here in a moment.

But cancer itself, unless you are a conventional oncologist board certified oncologist or a conventional board certified oral surgeon, then and only then are you allowed to say that you treat cancer. That is a legal requisite. So you can’t be someone like me to ever say I treat cancer. And first of all, I don’t, I happen to treat people that have cancer. And my focus is on their terrain, the environment in which the cancer took root, which that’s a very big differentiator right there as to the difference between perhaps integrative and standard of care.

The other side of this is when I had my first diagnosis in 1991 for my terminal diagnosis, there was no Dr. Google, there was no information out there. When you would go to a library and read up about anything about alternative cancer, it was these sort of obscure faraway places in Mexico that you could go to and they pretty much were about raw food juicing and praying away your cancer, which believe you me, there is power in some of those interventions, right? It’s not to say that those aren’t effective, but it was very limited in what we knew we had access to.