Recently I interviewed Dr. Carol Lourie, as she discussed an integrative approach to breast cancer. If you would prefer to listen the interview you can access it by Clicking Here [1].
Dr. Eric Osansky: With me, I have Dr. Carol Lourie, who is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a naturopath, acupuncturist, and homeopath. She has helped thousands of women recover their health and restore their life through her holistic protocols involving focused nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and a centered mindset. According to Dr Carol, the key to wellness is to understand that treating the symptoms of a disease is not going to help you recover your health. You need to get to the bottom of the cause to begin your health journey. I definitely agree with that, and I’d like to thank you for joining us.
Dr. Carol Lourie: I’m really honored and excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Eric: Why don’t we start out with your background, Dr. Carol? How did you start helping people with breast cancer?
Dr. Carol: I didn’t start out by focusing on breast cancer. I started out by wanting to go to medical school many years ago. Then I was living in a spiritual community in New York, and my roommate had cancer. I went with her to Memorial Sloan-Kettering where the doctors told her, “There’s nothing more we can do. You’ve had a ton of radiation. You can go home and probably die in a few years.” She was in her 20s, and she looked at me and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
She investigated and discovered this doctor in Long Island who was doing detoxifying diets using iridology. You need to understand this was in the mid-70s when the word “detox” was not a household name. I started working in his home office. I saw people come to him, all different types of people with all different types of medical conditions. I was extremely naïve in the power and beauty of natural healing.
A young woman came in with acne, and I thought to myself, “She has acne. What’s the big deal? Why is she here? You go on antibiotics.” Then she came back a month later. Her skin was clearer, she had lost weight, and her whole energy was different. I saw that with a lot of the people who came to see him. That was my introduction to another way in working with illness and disease.
One day, I was going through this very large pile of paperwork. Out popped the catalog to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should go here instead of regular medical school.” That was the beginning of my journey of becoming a naturopath, acupuncturist, and homeopath. I have been on that path ever since, and that was a long time ago.
The beauty of natural medicine is it is science-based, and it takes the best of both worlds. It’s not one or the other. You don’t want to pit natural medicine against regular medicine. It’s a bad idea to make it “us versus them.” You want to use the best of both worlds no matter what your illness or disease is.
Dr. Eric: When discussing an integrative approach to cancer, what is your definition of that?
Dr. Carol: That’s a good question. Ideally, it’s everyone’s definition. You want to take the best of both worlds. Integrative or complementary is using what regular medical oncology has to offer and adding in the other side of treatment, which is to reduce the side effects, prepare for chemotherapy, protect your healthy cells. When you are done with active treatment, to recover from radiation/chemotherapy, restore your health in your gut, reduce the oxidative stress caused by radiation. The third phase is to reduce the risk of recurrence.
Dr. Eric: Do you know what the rate of recurrence is?
Dr. Carol: It can still happen even 20 years after you have been initially diagnosed. The risk is greatest in the first 2-5 years. There can be up to 15% recurrence rate. You don’t want to be in that statistic. There is a lot you can do to make sure that is not you.
Dr. Eric: There are people who are listening to this, and it’s easy to put yourself in this situation when you’re not in this situation, meaning some people might be thinking, “If I had breast cancer, I wouldn’t want to get chemo or radiation.” An integrative approach is you are thinking about people might go through those procedures, but you want to address underlying imbalances and prevent a recurrence. Do you have any thoughts on those who want to completely go natural and don’t want to receive any chemo or radiation?
Dr. Carol: A lot of that decision needs to be based on the parameters of the tumor and what comes back from the pathology report. Sitting down with both your oncologist and an experienced integrative doctor, making that decision from the standpoint of what is going to ensure my longevity for the long term? I want to note that men also get breast cancer, but that is not the community I work with, so I am going to use the word “women” because that is who I work with. There are women who adamantly refuse to do medical oncology work. That is their choice, of course. There are clinics I know of in Europe which use non-medical methods to address the tumor and cancer. I can refer someone there. My area of expertise is the woman is under the care of an oncologist, and I am offering supportive supplements and clinical advice regarding reducing side effects through nutrition and homeopathy. I am not the primary doctor treating this illness.
Dr. Eric: Can you talk about the diet? Is there a specific diet you recommend for breast cancer?
Dr. Carol: There is a lot of varying options out there. I have women come into my practice who are keto; vegan; doing the Budwig protocol, which is cottage cheese and a certain type of oil, which I think is absurd; vegetarian; the standard American diet. They are overwhelmed and don’t know what to do.
There is a lot of research on the ketogenic diet. If there is a case of brain cancer or epilepsy, keto has been beneficial for brain disease. There are people who feel that even with breast cancer, you should be on the ketogenic diet. I have more of a modified Mediterranean approach. It’s gluten-free, very low carbohydrate, and almost all sugar-free. It verges between ketogenic and modified Mediterranean. We need to reduce the amount of sugar available to the cancer cells.
In 1918, there was this German scientist named Otto Warburg who won the Nobel Medical Peace Prize. His discovery was that cancer, given a choice between glucose and oxygen for what I call the cancer gas tank, chooses glucose, even though it has to work much harder and go through a much more difficult pathway to get there.
The ketogenic diet is very low sugar, and that’s what happens when you don’t eat carbs. People have to live, and they have families. It can be very difficult to live in a family unit if you are eating only keto. You don’t want to have to cook one way for yourself and another way for your family. The modified Mediterranean takes the best of both worlds. The research which has gone into the modified Mediterranean diet over 25 years with thousands of women has shown that eating this way has resulted in a reduced risk of breast cancer.
Dr. Eric: From what I understand, if someone absolutely wanted to follow a strict ketogenic diet, there is no problem with that. It is just restrictive. It might be difficult if you live with other family members since you might have to prepare multiple meals. The modified Mediterranean diet is not easy to follow, but it’s not as difficult as keto. It sounds like it’s effective, or else you wouldn’t be recommending it.
Dr. Carol: I think it is easy to follow. First of all, this brings in an important concept for the way I work and how I want to encourage women to view what they are doing with their life. It is easy because you are choosing to do it.
The way the standard American diet proposes that you eat does not support health. There is a lot of research which shows that the standard American diet quadruples the cancer rate. That is a really clear indication how you were potentially eating and how you should, want to, or choose to eat, now that you have a cancer diagnosis, there needs to be a change.
Modified Mediterranean is filled with luscious food. There is a lot of healthy fats in it. It is easy to prepare. It is wonderful for not just you but the entire family. You can go out to eat and order appropriate food. You can go to someone’s house and hopefully enjoy what they are having. It encourages health all around. I think it is easy. But it is definitely not cereal from a box with milk for breakfast, which nobody should be eating no matter what.
Dr. Eric: Definitely. That is how I ate growing up.
Dr. Carol: We all ate that way growing up.
Dr. Eric: How about stress and emotional trauma? Can you discuss the connection between those and breast cancer?
Dr. Carol: It’s almost impossible to be an older person and not have had something upsetting or traumatic happen in your life outside of being diagnosed with cancer. Many times, when I first start working with a woman, I ask them, “Have you had any trauma or upsetting experiences in your life?” She will say, “There was this incident that happened 25-30 years ago, but it couldn’t be that.” The reality of it is it absolutely can be.
We have a protective mechanism in our body. When something upsetting or traumatic happens, we take a breath in, and the energy of that event goes into our cells. It hangs out there. We process it at the level we are able to handle emotionally at the time. The rest of it is stored in our psyche and our cells. Over periods of years, with added stress and busyness and elevated cortisol and the chaos of life, all of a sudden, the overload of all of that emotional work and restraining can pop up. You can have a lot of unexplained depression and anxiety and the creation of illness. It doesn’t just have to be breast cancer. It can be an autoimmune problem, insomnia, gut problems, or some other form of cancer. Incorporating and acknowledging the trauma of the past into the healing you choose and want to do in the present is very important and helpful.
Dr. Eric: Do you recommend any techniques—mind/body medicine techniques, working with a counselor, etc.—or does it depend on the person?
Dr. Carol: I am a big proponent of therapy. I think therapy is really wonderful. There are different forms of therapy. I think it’s important to interview the therapist. I think women should be working with women therapists. You need to interview the person you are choosing to see to make sure you feel comfortable and safe with them, and the type of therapy they do is a match for what you’re looking for.
You go into therapy not just one time. Ideally, you go in and do a bit of work, settle, and then go back because other stuff comes up. Being in therapy off and on throughout your life is a healthy way of looking at your mental health.
Dr. Eric: How about the impact of environmental toxins, such as xenoestrogens? How have those impacted cancer rates?
Dr. Carol: I will give an example of a 35-year-old woman who came to see me. She walked into the office, and I have a scent-free office. She had on enough perfume that you thought you were on the ground floor of Macy’s. For those of you who can’t relate to that statement, it’s the makeup area, and it smells unbelievable. She walked in, and I said to her, “Tell me about scents.” She said, “I love scents. I have those plugins in the wall. I have those sticks in the oil.” This was the cincher for me. “I spray my sofa with Febreze.”
There are, as you mentioned, xenoestrogens. They are estrogen blockers. These are certain chemicals which look like estrogen. Estrogen in your body needs to be metabolized to be excreted in the healthy form. In order to do that, it needs to go int the parking garage and park, and the nit’s bound to a receptor and excreted. Xenoestrogen or estrogen-looking chemicals take up the parking spot in the garage. When the healthy estrogen goes to park and be excreted, there is no space for it, and it turns into an unhealthy version of itself. That is what is known as estrogen dominance. That can create infertility, PCOS, lots of menstrual irregularities, endometriosis, and breast/vaginal/ovarian cancers. Detoxifying your home is a very important aspect of recovering your health.
I said to this young woman who came to see me with a diagnosis of unexplained fertility, “Could you go home and put every single item that you use to clean your house on the counter and take a picture?” There were 29 items on that countertop. I said to her, “You don’t have unexplained fertility. We have an explanation. There are too many chemicals.” We had to throw out her sofa because she couldn’t detoxify it. She spent a week cleaning everything, getting eco laundry detergent, and throwing out all of her shampoos and soaps. Within three months, she was pregnant.
I should explain that when you wash your clothes and maybe use a dryer sheet, when you get in the shower or sleep, your pores are open. You wrap your body in a towel, and the chemicals from the detergent and the dryer sheets are absorbed into your skin. Your skin is a porous organ. All those chemicals you use in your laundry, shampoo, body wash all have chemicals that block healthy estrogen from being excreted. Detoxifying your home is the first step of reclaiming your health.
Dr. Eric: I assume you recommend things to support detoxification rather than just minimizing exposure.
Dr. Carol: Yes. Now we are getting into supplements. I am a big proponent of supplements. I think they are really important. Women say to me, “Can’t I get everything from the food I’m eating?” Even if you are eating 100% organic, if you have breast cancer, you need to support the pathways that block the cancer and increase the pathways that promote health at a level that eating a regular diet, even organic and lots of phytonutrients from vegetables, you need more than what you can get from your food.
Dr. Eric: In addition to supplements, do you recommend other methods of detoxification, such as infrared sauna? Gerson recommends coffee enemas.
Dr. Carol: I’m not a big coffee enema person. I’d rather do Epsom salt enemas. What happens when you use Epsom salts is you take two tablespoons, boil the water, add the Epsom salts, dissolve them in a glass jar, and add them to your enema bag. It’s a little bit of water with Epsom salts with the rest of the bag. What the salts do, and this is from the doctor I studied with originally, is it pulls toxins from your gut and your lymph.
It’s not about being constipated. You don’t want to use an enema to help you eliminate your daily evacuation. You want to use your enema very targeted, not all the time. You need to prepare when you do that. You want to change your diet the day before. Eat very lightly. Do the enema. The day after, eat very lightly before you go back to your regular diet.
Dr. Eric: You are not recommending daily enemas then.
Dr. Carol: Absolutely not. If you have constipation to the point where you are not eliminating daily, we need to do some work as to why you are not able to evacuate on a daily basis. There are a lot of Americans in the U.S. who are constipated. People come in and say, “I go to the bathroom maybe every other day. I’m not sure. Maybe every couple days.” As we get your health better, we need to have one evacuation in the morning and then another smaller one 1-2x a day. That is a healthy elimination of toxins.
Dr. Eric: Getting back to supplements. There are a number that could help with detoxification. There is milk thistle, n-acetyl cysteine, alpha lipoic acid.
Dr. Carol: You mentioned all the ones I was thinking of, yes.
Dr. Eric: Do you also use supplements like DIM to help with estrogen metabolism and calcium D-glucarate?
Dr. Carol: I use calcium D-glucarate, but I don’t use DIM. Well, it depends. If a woman is on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor, I think DIM is contraindicated, or you don’t need it. We have to stack the supplements because they are on a lot. We have to be specific about what we take.
Sometimes people say to me, “Can’t I just take DIM instead of an aromatase inhibitor or tamoxifen?” You can’t really take enough DIM to block the estrogen. If you have estrogen-positive, hormonal-positive breast cancer, you want to block the uptake of that hormone. The problem with tamoxifen is it isn’t without its side effects, just like aromatase inhibitors. Tamoxifen is anti-estrogenic in how it blocks the hormone from your breast. It’s pro-estrogenic with what happens with your uterus. There is a 15% risk of getting uterine cancer.
Before a woman, ideally, is prescribed tamoxifen, I encourage her to speak with her oncologist to get what is known as a CYP2D6 enzyme test. That enzyme is the enzyme that breaks down the tamoxifen. If you have a deficiency in that enzyme, you will get an increase in the tamoxifen byproduct, which can contribute to lots of oxidative stress and an increased risk in uterine cancer. You need to be prepared to speak to your oncologist about this. There are certain supplements and methods we use to reduce the toxicity and side effects of tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors.
Dr. Eric: I wasn’t going to get into the genetics, but since you brought it up, would you recommend other genetic testing? Like for the COMT enzyme or MTHFR.
Dr. Carol: Those are fine to know about. If you’re MTHFR-deficient, we want to make sure you are getting the right form of folate. If you’re COMT-deficient, we know that your pathways to metabolize are a little deficient, so we have to make sure you are taking enough calcium D-glucarate and berberine, and maybe doing a castor oil pack on your liver once or twice a week. Those are not the major driving factors of what has contributed to your breast cancer.
There is no one thing, I should say, that makes or creates breast cancer. It takes awhile for this tumor to develop. When you’re initially diagnosed, most of the time, it’s not a surgical emergency. You can take a week or two to get a second opinion.
If you have children at home that need to be taken care of, develop a care tree. The kids are being dropped off at school and being taken to their extracurriculars. You need to involve friends and family to take care of your children and bring food. Women multitask so often that when a woman of the household is not feeling well, a lot of things are too much for her spouse to take on. It does take a village ideally to get through breast cancer.
Dr. Eric: How about testing? Do you recommend testing the hormones through the blood or dried urine testing?
Dr. Carol: If a woman wants to check her hormones through a Dutch hormonal panel before she either starts treatment or after treatment is over for a while before she goes on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor, I think that’s a valid thing, especially if it’s a young woman.
There are women getting breast cancer earlier, at the age of 32. I have several young women. If you get breast cancer at that age, and there isn’t a family history of either breast cancer or colon cancer, we want to understand what is happening with your estrogen and hormone metabolism. The Dutch hormonal panel tells us how your hormones are being broken down, and at what level there is a problem, so we can target that in addition to whatever medical treatment you are doing.
For older women who are on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor, that test is not valid. It’s not going to give us any valid information. There are other tests we can do.
Dr. Eric: If someone is taking tamoxifen, they wouldn’t want to do the Dutch test for looking at estrogen metabolites.
Dr. Carol: No, it’s being disrupted by the drug. Aromatase inhibitors block aromatase enzyme. The aromatase enzyme is the enzyme that is responsible for taking the androgen, which is then broken down into estrogen and progesterone. That is blocking the conversion from the androgen. It is not a valid test if you are either on one of those types of drugs.
Dr. Eric: Is there anything people shouldn’t do with regards to supplements or foods they shouldn’t take or eat? There is some controversy with phytoestrogens like soy or flax. If you don’t mind, can you talk about the phytoestrogens?
Dr. Carol: In answer to the question of to soy or not to soy, because I wrote an article about that, where we need to start is looking at the Japanese culture before it became Westernized, i.e. fast food and American-style processed food. When it was pure Japanese culture, they had almost no breast cancer. That right there is research for the answer of soy or not to soy. Their soy was non-GMO. If you’re getting organic, non-GMO soy, and it hasn’t been fried in a toxic saturated fat oil and turned into a soy snack, soy and gluten-free tamari are fine.
Are we eating eight ounces of tofu seven days a week? That’s a problem. How can someone really do that? If you are eating four ounces of steamed tofu, like I made a kale and tofu dish last night for dinner, and I had two thirds of a block of organic tofu in it, and I will have some for lunch today, there is nothing the matter with that. That is not going to increase the estrogen in your body.
Neither is soy milk. I am not a big proponent of soy milk. Even though people do their best to make sure the soybeans are non-GMO, it is very difficult to control all of that. If you are drinking eight ounces every day, that’s a lot. At this point, there are so many nut milks you can drink that you don’t need to be drinking soy milk if you want a non-water product to drink.
I don’t think there is a problem with soy. The caveat is it needs to be organic and non-GMO, and you shouldn’t eat it every day of the week.
Dr. Eric: I assume flax is okay, too?
Dr. Carol: There are two different types of flax. There is a lighter seed and a darker seed. You want to buy the darker seed. You want to make sure it’s organic. You want to smell it before you bring it home if it’s in one of those bulk things. Flax as an oil is sensitive to heat. If it smells fine, you want to bring it home, put it in a glass jar, and keep it in the freezer or refrigerator.
What I recommend is you use a mortar and pestle before you put it in your smoothie to break up some of those seeds, or you get yourself a $10 coffee grinder you just use for the flax and pulse it two or three times. You don’t need to make apowder of it. You want to break up some of those seeds. If you don’t want to do any of that, fine. People put it into their smoothie whole and drink it every day. You get more of the lignans available.
What are we doing, eating a pound? We are eating a tablespoon or two in our smoothie. Sometimes this verbiage gets out there, and people go, “I can’t eat flax.” Flax is a healthy oil. It’s a powerful antioxidant. It has positive anti-inflammatory lignans in it. I think flax is a wonderful thing to eat every day.
Dr. Eric: What I do is buy organic whole flax seeds and do what you mentioned. I put a tablespoon in a coffee grinder and add them to my smoothie.
Dr. Carol: It’s an easy way to get a lot of positive lignans. I should say that Dr. Eric’s area of expertise is the thyroid. Often, the stress of going through cancer can bring out a latent thyroid problem. There is fatigue that is associated post-chemotherapy/radiation/surgery. With the addition of hormone-blocking drugs, there is a lot of fatigue that shows up. One thing we need to look at is have you developed a thyroid problem?
If you are having unexplained fatigue, when you go to the doctor, too often they will say, and this is an upsetting phrase for me, “Let’s just put you on some antidepressants for a while and see if that helps.” I am not opposed to antidepressants, but I don’t think it should be the first line of therapy.
If you’re having unexplained fatigue, first of all, it’s not unexplained. You have been through an arduous 18 months or longer of treatment. It can bring up a thyroid problem. There is a lot of emotional trauma that women tend to put on the backburner when they are getting through treatment. When you finish, it comes rushing up, and you are emotionally overwhelmed.
Before you go on antidepressants, which might be your choice, let’s see if it’s a thyroid problem. Let’s see if detoxifying works. Let’s see if working with an integrative person for a month or six weeks works, if you have that time frame. If you are severely depressed and can’t get out of bed, that’s more like an urgent care moment. But if it is low-level depression, let’s do a differential diagnosis and see if it’s your thyroid. Do you need to detox? Do you need to do some therapy to appreciate and understand all the trauma you have been through because it is very disruptive of your life? It does create a ripple effect not just for you, but for your spouse and household.
The other component of this is when you are done with active treatment, your workplace and your family think, “She’s done now. She is going to be back to her normal self.” That is not necessarily the case. You may not be feeling well. You may have fatigue. You may have emotional trauma. You may have developed anxiety. All of these are real and appropriate. You are not back to yourself.
You may have had body changes. If you had surgery, you had one or two breasts removed. That is a big deal, even with reconstruction. It is not such an easy moment. Fatigue and depression are very common and normal. That is part of the emotional recovery work we need to do and help you with when you have been through cancer of any kind, especially breast cancer.
Dr. Eric: It sounds like it’s common for women who go through this to have fatigue and depression, which is not a surprise. You will recommend for them to do a full thyroid panel?
Dr. Carol: Absolutely. I love testing. I’m a big testing person. Testing provides us information about what’s going on in your body metabolically. Cancer is a metabolic disease. The more information we have, the easier it is to address that with nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle.
Just doing TSH is inept. We need to know if you are having inflammatory antibodies show up in your thyroid. Are you developing hypothyroidism/Hashimoto’s? Very rarely does a doctor do a complete thyroid panel the first time. If a woman knows to say to a doctor, “I want more than TSH. I want this, this, and this,” then they can hopefully have a doctor who works with them to get those additional tests done.
Dr. Eric: Agreed. Unfortunately, a lot of medical doctors will still only look at the TSH. Endocrinologists might go a step further and do a T4. Maybe free T4 and free T3. The antibodies, it depends. I deal with a lot of hyperthyroid patients. Usually, they will test for antibodies. With Hashimoto’s, the treatment is pretty much the same. If they don’t have antibodies, they will be given thyroid hormone replacement. Either way, I agree. Regardless of the symptoms, more hyper or hypo, do a full thyroid panel with antibodies.
The reason I wanted to interview you is because I have had some patients with breast cancer. Interestingly, I have had more patients with Graves’ who have breast cancer than Hashimoto’s patients. It could also be because I see more patients with hyperthyroidism/Graves’ than Hashimoto’s because that’s what I dealt with. Maybe there is a higher prevalence in Hashimoto’s, I’m not sure. Either way, there is that risk. I don’t even know if there is an association. I think the research is unclear.
Dr. Carol: Between thyroid disease and breast cancer?
Dr. Eric: Yes.
Dr. Carol: I don’t know of any. I’m not saying there is or isn’t. I haven’t researched that component of that illness and breast cancer. In my clinical practice, it’s not uncommon for a woman to develop a thyroid disorder after the physiological and emotional stress of treatment. I don’t think of hypothyroidism contributing to breast cancer.
Dr. Eric: From what I have seen, I don’t think so either. It’s a little bit iffy with hyperthyroidism. There are some studies, but it seems to be unclear as far as there being a connection. We will see what future research shows.
If someone was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, what are some action steps that she could take for those looking to take an integrative approach?
Dr. Carol: Understand the oncologist at the medical center has a certain area of expertise. Integrative care is not their skillset. They follow a protocol that has been researched: With this type of cancer, you get a mammogram, then an MRI and an ultrasound, and then a biopsy. That generates a pathology report. From there, it’s decided if you need neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which means the tumor is a certain size, it’s hormonal-positive, and they feel if they give you chemotherapy beforehand, the tumor will shrink. Hopefully you will be able to have a lumpectomy and not a mastectomy. There is a lot of decisions to make in that initial chapter.
Bringing in an integrative practitioner right away to help you, first of all, make sure you are getting the right tests. For example, if you have DCIS, the next moment, the oncologist should order an oncotype breast cancer recurrent index test. What that does is it gives you a number, which will tell you your risk score if you do chemotherapy and/or radiation. Doing that will reduce your risk of recurrence by XYZ%. That is important information. You want to know that.
Unfortunately, sometimes women have DCIS. I will ask them if they have an oncotype, and they go, “No, the doctor didn’t order it.” If you know that, you can say to the doctor, “My understanding is this is a really valid test that should happen with my type of breast cancer. I am wondering if you can order it.” It should be ordered.
There is other more advanced diagnostic genomics SNPs testing. According to the methods the oncologist use, they may not be used at the first stage level. For example, there is the Caris Molecular Intelligence test. There is the NeoGenomics test. Those go further into the genomic SNPs that created your breast cancer. They will give you chemo sensitivity. What types of chemodoes your tumor respond to? It will also say these are the clinical trials you might be eligible for.
The way medical oncology works is that test is not usually run as part of first line treatment. If you have the funds, you can talk to the doctor about it, and you will have to pay out of pocket because first line treatment will not cover those tests. If you fail chemotherapy, then your insurance can be billed, and it should be covered because it is part of second line treatment. There is a lot of information you need to know about that that is not normally discussed with your medical oncologist.
Dr. Eric: Is there anything I didn’t ask that I should have asked? Anything else you’d like to discuss?
Dr. Carol:I want to discuss reducing risk of recurrence because so often, women finish active treatment, ring the bell, and all of a sudden, the oncologist disappears, you are told to take a pill, and that’s it. That really isn’t it. Cancer is a metabolic disease. That gives you a lot of empowerment to reduce the risk of recurrence because you have the ability to make your body less hospitable to cancer recurrence. It doesn’t have to be random.
That is how I developed my Empowered Against Recurrence program, which is an online, live, group coaching program with me. You also get the other part of my program, which is science-based, educational, and you have 24/7 access to it. I am bringing this information to the world beyond the ability of who I can see in my clinical practice.
Dr. Eric: Where can they find out more about this program? I assume your website.
Dr. Carol: I have a website for this called EmpoweredAgainstRecurrence.com. You can go to my practice website, which is my name, CarolLourie.com. Use the Contact Me page at the top. Send me an email. I will send you the information I think is appropriate. I answer all my emails personally.
Dr. Eric: Thank you so much, Dr. Carol. I appreciate you sharing with everybody your experience and thoughts on an integrative approach to breast cancer. Anything else as far as resources? Or is everything on your website?
Dr. Carol: I have a lot of free downloads on my website, CarolLourie.com.
Dr. Eric: Wonderful. Thanks, again. I learned a lot today.
Dr. Carol: My honor and pleasure. Thank you for having me.