Recently, I interviewed Dr. Jenn Simmons, and we discuss her personal experiences with breast cancer, the complexities of its detection and treatment, the root causes of breast cancer, how environmental toxins and lifestyle factors affect cancer development, innovative imaging technology for safer breast cancer screening, why you shouldn’t be afraid of estrogen, and more. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am very excited to chat with today’s guest, Dr. Jenn Simmons. We are going to be discussing breast cancer. It’s going to be a fascinating topic. Let me dive into Dr. Jenn’s impressive bio here:
Dr. Jenn Simmons started her professional career as Philadelphia’s first fellowship-trained breast surgeon and spent 17 years as Philadelphia’s top breast surgeon. Her own illness led her to discover functional medicine. So enamored with the concept of creating health rather than killing disease, she left traditional medicine in 2019 and founded Real Health MD to help women along their breast cancer journey truly heal.
Dr. Jenni is on a mission to help change the impact of breast cancer by empowering millions of women take control of their health and create the life they want. She hosts her weekly podcast Keeping Abreast with Dr. Jenn. She hosted the Breast Cancer Breakthrough Summit and is the author of The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer and Recipes for Real Health.
Dr. Jenni is currently opening Perfection Imaging Centers across the country, featuring QT imaging, an innovative technology that uses sound waves to create a 3D reconstruction of the breast without pain, compression, or radiation. This fast, affordable FDA-approved technology has 40x the resolution of MRI and will forever change the way that we screen for breast cancer. Definitely need to talk about that while we chat. Welcome, Dr. Jenn.
Dr. Jenn Simmons:
I actually think I can go home now. I think we’ve covered it.
Dr. Eric:
Got most of your background, so we don’t need to have you talk too much about it. One thing while reading the bio, you said you switched to functional medicine in 2019. What led to that transition to where you are today?
Dr. Jenn:
Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’ve been really looking forward to this discussion.
Like everyone else, I have a pain to purpose story. It was a very unpredicted pain to purpose story. When I was growing up, I really don’t remember a time where I didn’t know about breast cancer. It was truly the thread, the fabric, the tapestry of my family.
When I was a young child, I had a first cousin. Her name was Linda Creed. She was a singer/songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s. She was the songwriter for The Spinners and The Stylistics. I’m really going to age myself now. She was beautiful, brilliant, larger than life. She was the queen of Motown sound in Philadelphia. She was my hero. She wrote 54 hits in all. Her most famous song was “The Greatest Love of All.” She wrote that song in 1977 as the title track to the movie The Greatest, starring Muhammad Ali. It really received its acclaim in March 1986 when Whitney Houston released that song to the world. At that time, it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts. Only my cousin Linda would never know.
Linda died of metastatic breast cancer just one month after Whitney released that song. I was 16 years old when my hero died. Her life and ultimately her death gave birth to my life’s purpose. I really thought what I took from that was going to be my destiny.
Because breast cancer was so prevalent in my family, literally all the women in my family got breast cancer, I went into this field because I never wanted another woman, another family, another community to have to suffer the way that mine suffered. I also went in, thinking that this was inevitable for me, and I wanted to try to figure it out.
I became a doctor, a surgeon, the first fellowship-trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia. I did that really well and for a really long time. I did it long enough for my aunt to be diagnosed and my mother to be diagnosed. About 10 years before my aunt was diagnosed, she developed Graves’. I was far enough into my career at that point that when she subsequently developed breast cancer, to at least say, “I wonder if there’s something there.”
I’m about 15 years into my career. Arguably, at the top of my game. I’m running the breast program for my hospital. I’m running the cancer program for my hospital. I’m a wife, a mother, a stepmother, an athlete, a philanthropist. I have all these balls in the air. I fancy myself an expert juggler, until the day where it all came crashing down for me.
I went from probably being one of the most high-functioning people you’ve ever met to I couldn’t walk across the room because I didn’t have the breath in my body. I spent three days with a really intensive workup because when your prize pony is hurt, you figure out what’s wrong fast. I find myself sitting three days later in the office of my friend and colleague and physician. He tells me I have Graves’, and I need surgery and chemo radiation. I’m going to be on lifelong hormone replacement.
Though I knew that this was the standard of care, and though I knew that what he was telling me was what he knew to be true, and it’s what I knew to be true, something inside me said, “No, there’s more. There’s something more. Go find it.”
I walked out of his office that day. He told me I was going to die. It’s not that I didn’t believe him, but there was this very loud voice compelling me to look further, to search for options, to investigate, to look beyond what we are so trained in conventional medicine to see.
The truth is that people think of doctors as critical thinkers. I’m not exactly saying that they’re not, but even if you were, before you went to medical school, once you get there, critical thought is not rewarded. The critical thinkers, once you’re inside of the system, they’re the quacks, they’re dangerous, they’re all the names, the titles, the labels that people put on things that we don’t know or don’t understand and thus we fear.
I very much had blinders on. Even when I walked out of the office that day, I had no idea what I was walking into.
I was very fortunate to land very early in a space where I’m sitting in a lecture hall, and a man walks on the stage, smiles his big toothy grin, and introduces himself as a functional medicine physician. At this point, I’m a doctor for 20 years, conventionally trained at one of the best medical schools in the country. All I could think of was, “There’s no such thing as a functional medicine doctor, so what is this quack talking about?” I’m still in that place. I’m still in that mindset. Then I remember I am sick, and I’m there for a reason. I check my ego at the door, and I tune in. Thank god I did.
The man was Mark Hyman. Though he is very famous, in 2017, maybe not so much. I had no idea who he was. What he had to say over the next two hours would move me more than anything had before and maybe since. He would actually foretell not only what was going to happen to me, but what was going to happen to the rest of my career, what my goals were, what my aspirations were. Granted, I’m an early adopter.
I left that day and enrolled in the Institute for Functional Medicine because I, too, wanted to practice root cause medicine. I, too, wanted to understand where disease was coming from, rather than managing symptoms. I wanted to heal for sure. A large part of the initial part of this journey was about me.
Once I engrossed myself in the study of functional medicine, there is really no looking back. That’s a bell you can’t unring. I knew that I couldn’t stay and practice within the confines of conventional medicine because when I was there, I was part of the problem. I wasn’t part of the solution.
When you are helping anyone through any chronic disease- I happen to be talking about cancer. We could almost talk about any chronic disease this way. If all you do is manage the symptom, and as a surgeon, all I was doing was managing the tumor. I was not in any way affecting the rest of their lives. I was maybe delaying a recurrence, or I was delaying the next manifestation. But I wasn’t doing anything to remove that inflammatory nidus that led to their disease. I wasn’t in any way intervening in the process that got them there in the first place.
I decided where my place was in this world was to help millions of people recover from their disease, restore them to health, and maybe, just maybe, even lead them to the health that they never had their whole life. That became my goal.
I’m still in clinical medicine. When I left surgery, of course my colleagues thought I was crazy, or I lost my skills or my mind or maybe all of it, I don’t know.
It’s funny because it’s about five years since I left, and I went from the quack to, “I know you’re doing this, but if I were you, I would also go see Jenn Simmons.” I know I have arrived when the people at Penn are now telling their people to come see me, too.
It’s been a journey. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture in that my healing journey was not linear, and it was not easy. I got a lot worse before I got better. I am delighted to say that I did get better, and I am healthier now than I ever was my entire life. It really wasn’t until I got sick that I actually knew what it was to be well.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you so much for sharing that. It’s great that you’re able to save your thyroid, avoid the radioactive iodine, avoid the surgery, and keep that open mind. I try to encourage people listening to this who have hyperthyroidism/Graves’ as well as Hashimoto’s because as you know, with Hashimoto’s, it’s different than Graves’. Most endocrinologists will recommend thyroid hormone replacement, and that’s it. They won’t do anything for the underlying cause. Like you said, you could apply a lot of what you will be discussing today to other chronic health conditions.
Let’s dive more into breast cancer. Can you talk more about the physiology of breast cancer? There are different types of breast cancer. Not all breast cancers are estrogen dependent.
Dr. Jenn:
I don’t even like that “estrogen dependent” word. First, it is a very heterogeneous disease. What makes it so heterogeneous is think about what brings people to that diagnosis.
For everyone, it’s going to be different. Though we can look at the cells under the microscope and say, “This is breast cancer,” maybe this one has estrogen receptors on it, and this one has progesterone receptors on it, and this one has HER2 receptors on it, and some have all of them, and some have none of them. We can say all of that with uniformity.
The thing that is not uniform is what got you in that place in the first place. Breast cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. It’s what is creating that environmental shift for people that leads to the disease state. We know If we sample the environment, the micro-environment around a tumor, it chemically looks different.
What happens is that as we are exposed to any number of things in our environment, and these can be tangible things, they can be intangible things. They can be visible things; they can be invisible things. Stress, overexercise, underexercise, sleep deprivation, poor diet, chemicals, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, plastics, xenoestrogens, you name it. We are exposed to thousands and thousands of chemicals every single day in one way or another that have this effect on our cells.
We all have an allopathic load that we’re going to be able to tolerate, a toxic load that we’re going to be able to tolerate. Once we all exceed our ability to tolerate that, whether it’s stress that put us over the edge, whether it’s a viral illness that put us over the edge, parasites, chronic metals, dental infections, it doesn’t matter what it is. When you reach your threshold, your body can no longer maintain that healthy environment. Our cells perceive that. Things like the thyroid, things like the breast, they are our canaries in the coal mine. Even minute environmental shifts, these are recognized as threatening to our cells.
What do our cells do? They go into survival mode. Just turn it out. Just reproduce. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. All we have to do is survive. That’s what’s happening. That alone won’t lead to cancer. We do have an immune system that is supposed to recognize these rogue cells, these cancer cells, these cells that have gone into this survival mode in their infancy and destroy them before they can get mass, before they can form a tumor, before they can create a blood supply.
The problem is that our immune systems are working overtime and have been working overtime for way too long. You can’t fight it at all fronts. If you have a war going on, you can maybe be a really good soldier for a little while. After a while, your army is just going to get exhausted, and that’s what happens where you have exceeded your toxic load. You’re having this environmental shift from the chemistry of what I call joy to the chemistry of stress. You’re getting DNA damage, and your immune system has been working overtime for so long that it just doesn’t recognize it. It goes unrecognized. Then it just grows from there.
Whether that is an invasive ductal carcinoma, an invasive lobular carcinoma, hormone positive, hormone negative, HER2 positive, these are all silos that were created for the purposes of prescribing the thing, the pill, the chemo, the whatever.
Cancer is not a chemotherapy deficiency. It’s not a radiation deficiency. It’s not a surgery deficiency. Cancer is this normal response to this abnormal environment. The key to all of it is figuring out where is that environmental shift coming from and helping to alleviate it. What do you have that you don’t need? What do you need that you don’t have? How can we shift you back from the chemistry of stress to the chemistry of joy?
I don’t disparage people who want to undergo conventional therapy. I get it. You’re scared. This is what everyone is telling you to do. We all make the best decisions we can with the information that we have at the time.
However, what I write about in my book and what I talk about all the time is that the very best thing that you can do if you get a diagnosis of any kind, unless it is actually an emergency, not it just feeling like an emergency but actually an emergency, is take a pause. Think about, “Is there a message here? What is my body trying to tell me? Can you work on that for a little bit?”
For most women, breast cancer has been in the making for three, four, five, 10 years. Your taking a month, two months, six months to figure out where this is coming from, what is driving this, and can I turn this around, that’s some really valuable information.
I’m not saying you won’t need the conventional therapies. If you have a lot of tumor burden, and your proverbial sink is overflowing, you need to mop up the floor. That’s what surgery is. That’s what chemotherapy is. That’s what radiation is. There are times when I use those things. If someone has a bone metastasis that is causing a fracture, I send them for radiation. We have a situation that needs to be dealt with right now. I’m not going to solve the issue of what got you to cancer fast enough to relieve you of the pain. It’s very hard to heal when you’re in pain.
That’s one of the major questions that I ask people: “Where is your pain coming from? Where is your emotional pain coming from?” We need to heal that. That’s a lot of where breast cancer comes from. It comes from prolonged suffering. Your heart’s hurting. Your brain is hurting. Your body is hurting.
For me, the functional medicine part of it, the why is this happening, the root cause part of it, that is the end. That is the always. These are the questions that we need to be asking every single person whose body isn’t functioning optimally. Unlike conventional medicine, where inside of conventional medicine, we think of health as the absence of disease. You don’t need to go to the doctor because you’re not broken.
Instead, what we need to think about is that health is optimal function. If you’re not functioning optimally, you ought to be working on doing that. This should be all of our pursuits: to function optimally and live as long as possible.
Dr. Eric:
Definitely agree with that. As you mentioned, the overlap between thyroid autoimmunity. You mentioned the thyroid and breast being the canaries in the coal mine. I look at Graves’ and Hashimoto’s as more of immune system conditions. Not to say there is not a time and place for conventional medicine, whether it’s antithyroid medication to lower the thyroid hormones. In some cases, thyroid surgery. Either way, you want to do things to address the cause of the problem, the stressors, the traumas, the toxins, the infections.
Dr. Jenn:
It’s an “and,” right? There is nothing wrong with taking thyroid hormone replacement. I don’t want to say for a moment that there is anything shameful about doing that if you need it. But at the same time, you should be asking yourself, “Where are my thyroid antibodies? What’s driving that? What do I need to do? How do I need to change? What do I need that I’m not getting that my body continues to be in this state?”
As you well know, most doctors aren’t even checking those antibodies. They’re not following those antibodies. They’re not thinking, “What is actively happening with my patient?”
Most doctors that I see aren’t even measuring full thyroid panels. They’re getting a TSH and treating that. You can have a TSH in the normal range although right now, we have a range that 95% of people will fall into that we call normal. We know that 95% of us are not metabolically healthy. The thyroid gland and thyroid hormone is the center of metabolic health. When we use something like TSH to guide our therapy and determine who is and who is not, we are doing people a great disservice.
The most important factor in all of thyroid disease, as far as I’m concerned, is look at the person in front of you and ask them how they’re feeling. They’ll tell you. You can put a lot of people on Synthroid, and they don’t feel any better. If they don’t feel any better, and all you’re doing is treating that TSH, you’re not helping that person in front of you at all.
We need a lot more thyroid-literate physicians, providers. I don’t mean to say physicians because I think there’s lots of providers out there who are doing really good work, and they don’t necessarily have an MD or DO behind their name. We need a lot more thyroid-literate practitioners. We really do.
I think the last statistic that I saw was one in four people have thyroid disease. It’s an epidemic. We need to start to address it properly. Otherwise, we are really suffering as a society. We’re suffering unnecessarily.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. Speaking of statistics, do you know what the statistics are with regard to breast cancer? What percentage of women? Some men also develop breast cancer.
Dr. Jenn:
One in a thousand breast cancer cases are men. The statistics for breast cancer for the vast majority of my career were that somewhere between one in seven and one in eight women over their lifetime would get breast cancer. Those numbers are changing. Now, we have a one in three lifetime risk of cancer. It’s only going to get worse because of a little epidemic that the world experienced a few years ago. We’re starting to see the data come out of that.
I’ll tell you that before 2021, it was an absolute rarity to see breast cancer in someone in her 20s. Not so much anymore. I don’t want to say too much on that because I don’t want to take away from the focus of this discussion, and I don’t want to get it flagged and thrown out anywhere. We will be seeing a lot more information about how we’re going to have worsening cancer statistics, younger, more prevalent unfortunately.
Dr. Eric:
That’s interesting. I would think also, just our toxic environments, the xenoestrogens. Not to blame everything on estrogen, but there is a difference between- We could talk about this conversation now. I understand why you don’t like the term “estrogen dependent” because of everything else that’s setting the stage. The xenoestrogens, don’t they play a big role?
Dr. Jenn:
Absolutely. What we have to remember is that estrogen is the hormone of life. It’s actually when we lose our estrogen that we start to die. When you look at what happens with cardiovascular health after menopause, what happens with brain health, skin health, bone health, joint health, gut health, vaginal health, bladder health, literally everything we lose after menopause. That’s because estrogen is the hormone of life.
Estrogen does not cause breast cancer. If you believe that estrogen causes breast cancer, you have to believe that women were put on this earth for the purposes of getting breast cancer. It’s ridiculous.
If you believe that estrogen causes breast cancer, how do you explain the fact that the vast majority of breast cancers happen in post-menopausal women, not in pre-menopausal women? If you believe that estrogen causes breast cancer, how do you explain the fact that women who are pregnant have 10x the amount of circulating estrogen, and breast cancer during pregnancy is relatively rare? Estrogen does not cause breast cancer.
That said, there are a number of compounds in our environment that mimic estrogen, that sit on the estrogen receptor and abnormally stimulate it. They have to be detoxified down the pathways that estrogen uses. The metabolites, the byproducts of that breakdown are very toxic.
There is no question that these xenoestrogens are leading to an increase in breast cancer because they’re leading to an increase in DNA damage. They’re leading to an increase in gynecologic cancers. It’s not only breast cancer that is suffering as a result of this toxic soup that we’re all swimming in. We’re talking about plastics, antibiotics, antibacterials, antifungals, metallo-estrogens. The things that we used for metallic fillings for years and years are 50% mercury. Some even more.
All of these things that we barely think about in the course of our day. We get up in the morning, and you make your cup of coffee with your Keurig. You’re basically pouring hot water through a plastic cup and drinking it. If you’re doing that and drinking out of plastic bottles and cooking in nonstick pans, and you eat a fair amount of seafood, you’re basically eating a credit card every week. Would you voluntarily eat a credit card every week?
Dr. Eric:
Definitely not.
Dr. Jenn:
Definitely not, right? These are the invisible toxins that we don’t think about because we don’t see them. They’re having profoundly negative effects on our health.
Now, the place where the hormone-driven cancer came from is there are narratives created for many purposes. A lot of times, we create narratives to sell pharmaceuticals, make the story easier to understand, make it seem logical and acceptable. This is one of those instances.
Do the majority of breast cancers have estrogen and progesterone receptors on them? Yes, they do. Do normal breast cancer cells have estrogen and progesterone receptors on them? Yes, they do. That’s how they listen to cell signaling. That’s how they do what they’re supposed to do. When you have a breast cancer that has estrogen and progesterone receptors on it, it means that it’s not too far a departure from normal. It’s trying to maintain those normal signaling methods.
We do have an upregulation, meaning that we make more. Usually, we make more because there is not enough estrogen or progesterone out there. Your cell is just looking to survive. It’s just trying to figure out how can I get back? How can I keep up? It’s the tumor cells that don’t have estrogen and progesterone receptors on them that have really mutated from normal. They are no longer following these hormonal signals, these normal pathways. They have really gone rogue.
To me, I don’t think that we should be thinking about hormone positivity like that. After all, in pre-menopausal women with a hormone positive cancer, what is being recommended? Tamoxifen. It’s a form of estrogen. We don’t talk about that, but that’s what it is. It’s a form of estrogen sitting on the estrogen receptor. Like estrogen, it’s protective in the breast. Not so much in the uterus. In the uterus, we have a problem with tamoxifen. That’s why women on tamoxifen have an increased risk in uterine cancer because it’s not protective in the uterus. It’s stimulatory in the uterus.
I don’t think that the whole story is being told to people. They’re not given the ability to understand the whole truth in a way that they can truly make informed decisions. That’s another reason why I wrote my book, The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer. I wanted people to be able to understand what is breast cancer? What do all of these things mean? How do I read my pathology report? How does this make sense to me? Then what are these treatments that you’re proposing? What do they actually do? Do they actually benefit me? What is that benefit going to be for me? What else can I do? What can I do to actually take control of my health? What can I do to reverse this or make it better? When people know the real numbers and have the real information, they make very different decisions.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. I want to switch gears and talk about screening. I know you’re not a big fan of mammograms; I’m not either. I want you to talk about mammograms, thermography, whatever you’re willing to talk about.
Dr. Jenn:
Yeah. I don’t know if there are a lot of people left other than the manufacturers who continue to be big fans of mammograms. It’s a miserable procedure. Anyone who’s had one will attest to it.
Women in general do what they’re told as long as it’s for the good. We will sustain a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, a lot of anguish, if we know it’s for the good. If we didn’t, the population would be over because no one would voluntarily go through childbirth.
Mammograms, we have been told for 50 years, save lives. Women dutifully go and get their mammogram every single year. It’s a lovely theory. It just doesn’t happen to be true. We’ve known this for a very long time.
The mammographic screening program started out in the early 1970s. It started out built on this premise, this understanding, this belief that breast cancer growth is both linear and predictable if you found breast cancer small before it reached this critical size at which time it would be more likely to metastasize. We could save lives and save breasts. It’s a lovely theory.
Breast cancer growth is neither linear nor predictable. A cancer is what it is. A breast cancer is what it is from the very beginning. If it’s going to be an aggressive breast cancer, it’s an aggressive breast cancer from the very start. It doesn’t matter how early you find it. This person is going to have a difficult battle with this disease. There are breast cancers that are very unaggressive, and it almost doesn’t matter what you do. These people do fine. And everything in between.
By 1978, we knew that there was no survival advantage to screening with mammogram. We knew that. Yet we continued to do it. We continue to do it today. As a result, we cause thousands of breast cancers every year from the radiation. Thousands. And we treat thousands of women for breast cancer that never needed to be treated.
No matter how many mammograms we do every year, the same exact number of women die of breast cancer every year. The same exact number. We are not impacting the bottom line. No matter how many mammograms we do every year, we have the same exact number of women who present with aggressive disease.
We know from the Swedish studies where they looked at two populations of women. They looked at women who screened for breast cancer and women who didn’t. The thing is, both of these populations had equal access to care and access to equal care, in that they both had access to good care. When we look at the two groups, there is no difference in survival from breast cancer. The difference is incidence because they treated a lot more women for breast cancer in the screening group than the group that didn’t screen.
We have known for decades that screening with mammogram doesn’t save lives. How about if it doesn’t save lives? How about if it saves breasts? That’s important, right? If it saves breasts, that may be reason enough to do it.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, if you give a woman a diagnosis of breast cancer, that’s all she hears. Many women will opt for mastectomy not because they need it, but because they’re afraid. We know statistically speaking, there is no survival advantage to doing mastectomy over lumpectomy. None. Yet we’re not saving breasts. Women are so terrified of dying that they somehow think that if they remove their breast, they will have a lower chance of dying. The statistics do not support that at all.
We’re not saving lives, and we’re not saving breasts. Like Switzerland, it is time to abandon our mammographic screening program. We are not helping women. We are hurting women. We’re hurting them to the tune of hundreds of thousands. It’s not insignificant.
The women that are getting overdiagnosed and overtreated are shortening their lives and diminishing the quality of their lives. If you are treated for a breast cancer that didn’t need to be treated, the 40,000 women a year with DCIS, non-invasive disease, I hesitate to even call it breast cancer. DCIS stands for doctor carcinoma in situ. These women would never have died of their disease. Never. Then we treat them like they have breast cancer. The treatments for breast cancers are not benign. The scars from mastectomy run deep. Lots of women with DCIS end up with mastectomy.
The antihormonal treatments that are given to address DCIS for prevention, these lead to the acceleration of heart disease. They decrease mental capacity. They decrease cognition, interfere with sleep. These are all really important things. They accelerate bone loss. They cause pain, discomfort, depression, anxiety. These are really serious things that lead to premature death.
A woman treated for breast cancer is 2-3x more likely to die of cardiac disease than someone who isn’t. We are not helping these women. We are hurting them. Hurting them to the tune of hundreds of thousands every single year. It’s unacceptable. It’s really unacceptable.
Now, I never like to present a problem without offering a solution. I’m going to say that women in general don’t want to sit by idle. They want to do something.
I’m a huge believer in self-breast examination. Everyone should know what their breasts feel like, what their breasts look like, so if there is a change, you’re able to recognize that change and intervene. If you’re going to have a breast cancer that is clinically relevant, you’re going to be able to detect that lesion before it is meaningful, unless it is an aggressive cancer. If it’s an aggressive cancer, screening with mammogram wouldn’t have helped you anyway. I fully believe in self-breast examination. However, there are a lot of people that want to do more.
You mentioned thermography. I love thermography as a tool to find inflammation, to screen for inflammation because that’s what it is. It gives off a heat signal and shows us areas of the body that are inflamed. What it is not is a screening tool for breast cancer. That’s where thermography got a bad rap.
I use thermography very frequently in my practice to look for inflammation. But I do not use it as a screening tool for cancer.
If you’re going to use it as a screening tool for cancer, it has to be paired with another modality like ultrasound. It should be done by someone who does both so that they can interpret these images and correlate these images in real time. That’s one way to go.
Is ultrasound a sensitive modality? No. It’s sensitive enough, but will it miss a lot? Yes. Is it operator dependent? Yes. Is it the perfect screening tool? Not by a mile. But it is one screening tool.
MRI for a while was thought to be the great hope for screening, especially in dense breasted women or high-risk women or that kind of thing.
The problems with MRI are many. First of all, it’s time-consuming. It’s expensive. It’s uncomfortable.
The biggest problem with MRI from my perspective is that it uses gadolinium. Gadolinium is a heavy metal. Whenever you put a heavy metal in the body, it’s going to be stored. It’s going to be stored at the expense of something else, something you need. It’s going to cause organ damage to the kidneys, brain, bones, the places where it’s stored. Gadolinium is a real problem. We cannot expose healthy women because that’s what the screening population is, right?
That’s my biggest objection to mammogram. We’re taking healthy women and radiating them. For MR, if you’re using MR for screening, you’re taking healthy women and exposing them to gadolinium every year, heavy metal. It’s not the right thing to do. MR is not the solution.
I’m very excited about technology that is coming out of the United States. It’s called QT imaging. It uses sound waves transmitted through a water bath that creates a 3D image of the breast with 40x the resolution of MRI, all without pain, compression, or radiation.
There are only a few centers offering it right now. I will be opening up a center in the suburbs of Philadelphia in July or August 2024. I hope to open them all across the United States. God willing, someone will take on this charge in other areas of the world. I’m only one person; I can only do so much although I do dream very big, and I aspire to open somewhere between 50-100 of these. This is without question going to be the focus of the next 10 years of my life. I know everyone wants it tomorrow, and I’m doing the very best I can.
This will forever change how we screen for breast cancer. The reason is not because of the high-resolution images, because although that alone would be enough, this is the only functional imaging available in that you can bring someone in and screen them, find a lesion, and bring them back in 60 days, reimage them, and measure doubling time. We know cancers have a doubling time of less than 100 days. Things that are not meaningful have a greater doubling time. This allows us to say, “You do not have a lesion that needs intervention. Come back in a year.”
This avoids the unnecessary biopsies of which of all of the breast biopsies we do every year, 75% are benign disease. 75% of biopsies are done unnecessarily. Yet once you ring that bell for a woman, it never gets unrung. She thinks she’s high-risk. She goes into a different category. She has to wear this sign. I’m trying to avoid that, so we can avoid so many unnecessary biopsies and we avoid overdiagnosis and overtreatment. We are going to save hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives this way.
Will it eliminate breast cancer? No, of course not. Do we need to work really hard to make sure that people are practicing all the things that we know prevent breast cancer? We still need to be loud voices out there. We still need to be out there as shining lights, helping to guide people. But we can change this very broken system. We can change it now.
Dr. Eric:
That’s wonderful. The QT imaging will prevent unnecessary biopsies, so there will still be biopsies done. As you mentioned, 75% are benign. Hopefully-
Dr. Jenn:
We are going to biopsy the things that need biopsy rather than biopsying everything.
Dr. Eric:
Makes sense. Before we wrap up, we have to talk about healing. What are some of the things you recommend when it comes to healing? Obviously, addressing the cause of the problem that we discussed earlier.
Dr. Jenn:
There are pillars you want everyone to put in place. How everyone got here is going to be different, and everyone is going to need to address their own stuff. If it’s trauma, if you have a history of root canals and have chronic infections in your mouth or receding gums or metal amalgams or maybe parasite infections or food sensitivities. Whatever got you to this space is going to be your story.
However, we all need to eat and weigh that nourishes us. For everyone, that will be different. The diet that is right is not going to be the diet that’s right for you.
What all of us can agree in this wellness space is that processed foods are not good for anyone. I don’t care if you have disease, if you don’t have disease, if you’re healthy or not, processed foods are not good for anyone, and they are having a negative, detrimental effect on your health. If it has one ingredient, came from nature, and a three-year-old can tell you where it came from, it’s probably safe to eat. Otherwise, leave it.
I also believe that we should all be eating low glycemic diet. What that means is minimal to no grains. Grains are the seeds of grass. They are meant to be consumed by ruminators. Ruminators have a very long, redundant gastrointestinal tract. In comparison, we have a relatively short gastrointestinal tract. If we never ate another grain again, we would suffer no nutritional deficiency. I really don’t believe in putting things in your diet without benefit.
Now, I get a lot of pushback about my no grain diet. You can take it for what it’s worth. You can think I’m a quack. You can think I’m crazy. You can think whatever you think. “Where am I getting my fiber?” I’m just telling you what I believe.
I think that if you’re actively cancering, you should be on a whole food, plant-based, grain-free, low glycemic diet. If you’re not actively cancering, it shouldn’t look much different than that. We should spend most of our time in a place that really nourishes us. A whole food place that nourishes us.
At the same time, I think there is a time to eat and a time to fast. I think that there is a fasting practice for everyone. I think there is very good reason why fasting is built into almost every religion there is. I think that it changes. There are times of the year that you will fast in one way and times of the year you will fast in another way. We are all tied to circadian rhythm. That is another element that should be incorporated because fasting is truly the quickest way to healing.
We need to move our bodies, or we’re going to lose our bodies. What movement looks like changes. Lots of people do really well on pure cardiovascular exercise when they’re in their teens and 20s and maybe even 30s. As you approach your 40s and 50s, you really need to start thinking about muscle mass and maintaining muscle mass. That means they have to lift heavy things. As you get into your 50s and 60s, you also need to maintain flexibility and balance because that’s what connects the mind and the body.
How you exercise matters, and it changes. Making sure that you’re moving your body every single day in a way that benefits you. Overexercise is bad. Underexercise is bad. We have to get this right, Goldilocks. We have to get this right.
We have to figure out a way to manage stress healthfully. Stress is always going to be there. We are not getting rid of it. It’s going to be ever-present. It’s not the stress that matters. It’s the effect that we all allow the stress to have on us. The impact that we allow the stress to have on us.
Everyone is capable of developing a toolbox to be able to deal with the stressors in their lives. For some people, it’s going to be meditation. Some people, it’s journaling. I have a very good friend, Marcel Pitt. She is a dancer. That is how she manages the stress in her life.
Having more than one or two things in your toolbox is important. Building your toolbox to be resilient, to allow yourself to be in control of what comes in and what has an effect on you.
Is that going to eliminate the stressors of life? No, of course not. There will still be deaths. There will still be sick people. There will still be divorces and new jobs and moves and all the things that we know can have profound effects on our health. The better we are at dealing with them, the better our health will be as a result of them.
We have to prioritize sleep. Sleep is where the healing happens. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not healing. Making sure that you’re doing the things during the day that set you up for healthy sleep. Making sleep a priority and protecting that.
We talked about the toxins and eliminating as many toxins as you can, especially those xenoestrogens. They really profoundly negatively affect your health.
Also, having detoxification practices. Making sure that you’re sweating, that you’re peeing, that you’re pooping, that you’re consuming filtered, clean water to help to flush toxins out of your system. Getting plenty of fiber in your diet. Bowel regularity is really important.
Lastly, living a connected, heart-centered, purpose-driven life. I think it’s important to say that god put us all here with a unique purpose. My purpose is not yours, and your purpose is not mine. I am never going to be the best version of you, and you are never going to be the best version of me. We’re not supposed to be. We are only ever supposed to be the best version of ourselves.
You don’t have to be saving the world. You don’t have to be changing the world. That may be my purpose, and that’s okay, but it’s not yours. Whatever your purpose is, as long as you’re living it, that’s okay. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing. That is where you get that internal joy, that internal reward that leads to health.
Putting that picture together for yourself, that’s what you can do. That’s where the power lies. We have to remember to stop giving away our power because health happens at home. It doesn’t happen in a doctor’s office or a chemotherapy suite. It doesn’t come out of a pharmaceutical container. It doesn’t happen in a radiation suite. Health happens at home with all the things that you do to drive your health.
Dr. Eric:
That was amazing. So much good information. Thank you so much for sharing.
Dr. Jenn:
My pleasure.
Dr. Eric:
Before I ask you where people can find more about you, for those who are tuning in, what’s your new book?
Dr. Jenn:
This is The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer. It’s available on Amazon. It really is for any woman because this is information that you want, information that you need, and information that you’re going to want to share with your mother or your daughter or your best friend or your neighbor. Definitely pick up that book.
If you are looking to work with me, my website is RealHealthMD.com. All of our programs are there.
If you want to hear more from me, I have a podcast called Keeping Abreast with Dr. Jenn. We put out new content every week.
I have a weekly blog on my website. You can follow me on all the social channels @DrJennSimmons.
Lastly, please come visit us at Perfeqtion Imaging. It is just in the suburbs of Philadelphia. If you want to schedule your QT scan, go to PerfeqtionImaging.com. We will see you there real soon.
Dr. Eric:
Wonderful. Thanks again, Dr. Jenn. This was an amazing conversation. I even learned a lot.
Dr. Jenn:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
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