Tag: chronic health issues

Misty Williams  00:01

Hey Sister, this is Misty Williams, founder of healing rosie.com And I’m so excited to welcome you to Rosie radio. Tune in to find clarity, direction and hope for your healing. New episodes drop every Tuesday. We created this show to empower you to regain control of your life and feel like yourself again. Yes, sister. It is possible. 

Misty Williams  00:20

All right, you guys. I’m super excited about this interview that I’m about to have with Dr. Al Dannenberg. Many of you have heard me interview Dr. Al for different masterclasses and summits that I’ve done. He’s a periodontist retired, knows a lot about oral health, the gut mouth connection. One of the things that we have talked extensively about in the Healing Rosie Community and in the recent masterclass radical healing detox your stress and stressors was how important it is that you clean up your mouth. Right? 

Misty Williams  00:52

I had mercury fillings improperly drilled for my teeth, triggered a 45 pound weight gain, also triggered my body not being able to handle toxicity at all, and probably started picking up mold from the house I was in during that time. So all this stuff with the mouth, it’s really, really important to healing. But we’re gonna go a different direction with this conversation today. And I’ve had chills just thinking about it right now because many of you know the doctor was diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer several years ago, and he was given just a few months to live. And he decided that he wasn’t going to accept the prognosis. 

Misty Williams  01:26

He had a lot of life left to live and a wonderful partner and family and he still had a lot in him. He wanted to contribute to the world. And I have been really fortunate to be a witness to this journey unfolding. And the way that he is choosing to give back and it’s been several years now he’s had lots of ups and downs, he shares really freely about those on his blog, drdanenberg.com And he has done what I feel really inspired by, which is why I founded Healing Rosie is I wanted to teach people how to advocate for themselves. 

Misty Williams  01:56

He’s been a fierce advocate for his journey for how he wanted to approach treatment. He is committed to extending his life as much as possible and maintaining his quality of life. And he’s doing it on his terms. And I wanted him to just share about his journey with us today. Because many of us find ourselves in situations like me where we, like in my situation, I had chronic issues going on that I was scared may one day kill me, right? 

Misty Williams  02:21

There’s other people in our community who are watching people that they love go through things like cancer, like what Dr. Al is going through where they might get killed quickly, right. And then there’s others of us that are at the crossroads where we’re getting a really serious diagnosis. It’s scary to think about. what this could mean for us. 

Misty Williams  02:40

It forces all of us, whether this could happen to me in the future, or this is going to happen to me soon, right? We all have to stare our mortality in the face and it helps us in some ways to get a lot clearer on what’s important to us and the life we want to live. So I’m going to peel back these layers today with Dr. Al. He is a periodontist.  

Misty Williams  03:00

He was in private practice for 44 years. He incorporated ancestral nutrition and lifestyle with his leading edge laser protocol to treat periodontal disease. And he currently consults with patients all over the world virtually regarding animal based nutrition, lifestyle, oral and overall health and the importance of a healthy gut and immune system. 

Misty Williams  03:15

He also includes his 11 unconventional cancer protocols since he was diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer in September of 2018. And he was given only three to six months to live through, rejected all chemotherapy and is thriving today. And on July 15, Elsevier will publish a textbook titled Microbiome and Unity, Digestive Health and Nutrition with Dr. Al authoring the chapter entitled The Ideology of Gut Dysbiosis. And its role in chronic disease. 

Misty Williams  03:37

Welcome, Dr. Al.

Dr. Al Danenberg  03:38

Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be on again. I love it. Yes, well, this is always fun.

Misty Williams  03:43

I’m excited. I have, as I said, just felt so inspired by the way that you’re going about this. It’s the part of me that wants to feel empowered in this journey. I don’t want to feel like a victim of what’s happening, right? I want to find a lane where I can do something about it. I’ve been really inspired by you basically embodying that. 

Misty Williams  03:43

So I think maybe we should just start out with the beginning. I’ve been blessed to hear this story. Maybe most people that are in my community have not heard the story of what happened in 2018. And maybe you could just start walking us through what you chose to do and how you’ve continued to chart your own course as you’re navigating all of this.

Dr. Al Danenberg  04:22

Well, I can bring you from that point all the way to literally what’s going on today, which is another challenge. But in 2018 I thought I was a really healthy guy. I would have considered myself the senior poster boy for a healthy lifestyle. I was writing. I was lecturing. I was treating patients. I can’t help. I was on top of my game. And I was asked to speak at the Paleo f(x)™ meeting in Austin, Texas. I think it was April 2018. And I travel. I live in Charleston, South Carolina, to get to Austin, Texas. I have to connect in Atlanta and to do that there are at large, or concourses that, you have to go from ABCD depending on where your flights are. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  05:06

Generally when I have time, I like to walk from concourse to concourse rather than take the train. So I usually take a bag on my shoulder, and I walk the Concourse, and I did that. And as I was doing that, my right shoulder where the bag was starting to get sore. Now, I am a whisk for pain. I do not like discomfort. So I couldn’t figure out why my shoulder was getting sore. I thought I pulled a muscle or ligament or something crazy like that. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  05:32

I went to Austin did my speech came back to Charleston, and the soreness never really went away. And then it started to go to my back. And then it came to my chest. And now it’s about August or so of 2018. Kind of a hard head. And I figured maybe I need to call my doc. So my doctor, I’ve been buddies with him for 30 plus years, he knows me well. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  05:54

I call him and I tell him what’s going on. He’s scheduled an appointment. And he does some normal bloodwork, bloodwork chemistry is but you know, CBC, and things like that, and he also says a C-reactive protein, looking for systemic inflammation. When the blood work and everything comes back, he says everything is fine, but the C-reactive protein is out of whack, indicating that you have some kind of inflammatory process going on in your body. And we don’t know where it is. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  06:21

So we need to do an MRI. So we get an MRI done, which I never had done before. By the way, an MRI is an interesting contraption in and of itself, because of the noise it makes. So I got this MRI. And he calls me up and he says Al do you want to come into the office? Or do you want to talk about it over the phone? I said, Bobby, come on. What’s the big deal? Tell me what’s going on? I thought I pulled a muscle or tore a rotator cuff. He starts to get funny and he says, Did you fall down some steps or did somebody beat you up? So that of course not. And he tells me what he sees on the MRI, several vertebral compression fractures, several broken ribs, and a hairline fracture in my pelvis. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  06:22

My pain was coming from the fractured ribs that was causing me difficulty in breathing. And then he gets very serious. And he says, I think you’ll have lymphoma, leukemia, or multiple myeloma, three cancers. How can a guy, at 71 years old, Who is the healthiest guy around, have cancer? I mean, it’s not possible, right? I’ve been on a paleo type diet and lifestyle for six or seven years prior to that. How could I be sick like this? Well, I can tell you later on. Why note the way that I got sick, but this was pretty serious. And it was devastating. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  07:41

So he says, my friend who’s an oncologist, unbelievable guy, let me connect you with him. And let’s see what’s going on. So I have a bunch of other tests. And I meet this oncologist that I’ve never met before, George, and he is now my oncologist today. And he looks at me and he looks at all the tests. And he tells me with my wife and two adult children in the office, that I have IgA kappa light chain, multiple myeloma, with what’s called innumerable Lytic Lesions throughout my skeleton, meaning that my body’s bones are so porous. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  08:16

Now, it’s almost like a person with severe osteoporosis, that my bones break very easily. And that’s because the disease has probably been going on for a very long time, but not diagnosable until what happened to me. And then he tells me that this is incurable. And I have three to six months to live if I do nothing. And he says, let’s start chemo tomorrow. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  08:39

I said, Well wait a minute. Why would I start chemo? If I have three to six months to live in chemo would it be rather destructive? And he said, Well, it is destructive. But you’ll go into remission. And you’ll live longer than three to six months. And I said, Well, you said it’s incurable. And he said, Well, it’s not going to last, you’ll come out of remission. And you’ll need more chemo, but you’ll need it in a more caustic fashion, cocktail after cocktail, and I wasn’t a good candidate for stem cell therapy, which may or may not be a good form of treatment for what I have. And then eventually, I’m going to die from multiple myeloma. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  09:18

Now, I’m very geeky, and I need to know all these facts. And I found Well, what does that mean? How am I going to die? Well, he says that multiple myeloma generally patients die from multiple myeloma will die from either an infection that we can’t get under control, because multiple myeloma destroys your immune system, or kidney failure because it also destroys your kidneys. Or because of the way the blood cells are pushing out healthy. The malignant blood cells push out healthy blood cells, you may bleed to death with anemia or some type of condition like that. None of those are pleasant, but this is what I needed to know. So I’m looking at my wife and I said,

Dr. Al Danenberg  10:00

I am not going to start chemotherapy, because it is so caustic, it’s going to destroy my immune system, which is already compromised. Modern medicine ain’t so smart to figure it out to rebuild my immune system, no matter what anybody tells you. And I just didn’t want to do that. So I needed to do what I could consider to be healthy to improve my immune system. And I needed to do a lot of research. So I said, George, you know, I will do what needed to be done to take care of the pain in my chest, which was actually radiation treatment, to kill some localized malignant cells so that the pain from the broken ribs wouldn’t be pushing into my lungs. And that worked fine. But it doesn’t cure the disease. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  10:43

I researched a bunch of stuff and I came up with it now, I tweak it all the time. But now it’s 11 unconventional cancer protocols. It is not a treatment for cancer, it is a method to improve the immune system, you could do it, I could do it, anybody could do it, a kid could do it, an 85 year old could do it. This is what you need to do to improve your immune system. And then I’d have to let the chips fall as they may, because I am going to die from this cancer. So I did quite well. This is September 2018. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  11:17

And then fast forward to August of 2019. I’m alive, everything is great. I have some little setbacks here and there. But everything is great. And I’m aware that my bones are very fragile. You know, when somebody tells you, your bones are fragile, you may think that you know what you’re talking about. But I didn’t really know what that meant. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  11:36

So I’m standing in my bathroom in August of 2019. One year later, brushing and flossing my teeth. And I think I know a little bit how to brush and floss my teeth, and I’m taking the dental floss. And when I’ve used it up, I’m going to throw it in my trashcan, while the trashcan is to my left. So I’m twisting my body 90 degrees to the left, like anybody would do to throw something away in the trash can, while my right femur snaps in half, and I crashed to the floor, I break several more ribs, and my right humerus snaps in half. Now I’m lying on the floor. Of course, I don’t know all this yet. But I’m lying on the floor in extreme pain, screaming for my wife who’s in the other room. And I know that things are bad, because my arm and leg are in positions that could never be bent. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  12:28

So she obviously comes in, there’s a lot of emotion, she gets in touch with the ambulance and they take me to the hospital. Now this is now a year after my diagnosis, and I was given three to six months to live. I’m thinking in my head. Sometimes that’s a dangerous place to be thinking in my head, look at patients that I know that just have a hip fracture in my age group die shortly after that. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  12:56

And I have all these major bones on the right side of my body fractured. How could I even survive, I really wanted to die. And I was ready to die, I was not in denial, and I was ready to die. So I went to the hospital. They fixed my right femur, because if I didn’t get it fixed, my right femoral artery would have ruptured from the fracture. They don’t fix my right arm and the ribs. They don’t do anything about anyhow. And I’m put into a hospice hospital to die. And this is the first week of September 2019, literally in hospice to die. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  13:31

Interestingly, and this is fate, I guess. Interestingly, our hurricane is coming through Charleston. It’s called hurricane Dorian. And it’s moving at three miles an hour. And it has 187 mile an hour winds. And it’s going to target the hospice Hospital where I am. So the hospice hospital is ordered to evacuate all their patients. They had no idea where to send me, my wife is a registered nurse, She arranged to get a hospital bed in our house. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  14:02

I’m still under hospice, but they shipped me to my house instead. So I’m now at my home, in a hospital bed, this hurricane comes and goes. And my wife, who is amazing, gives me a bunch of tough love. And she basically says, Look, you have done so well for a year with these unconventional cancer protocols. Let’s get you back on those. Let me get a physical therapist in and see where we go with this. So I’m on a catheter for 30 days, if you’ve never been on a catheter, it’s the greatest fun in the world.

Dr. Al Danenberg  14:36

I’m on a catheter. So I’m in a hospital bed, and I really am not moving at all. So the physical therapist actually gets me to get out of bed, gets the catheter out of my body. And I start walking on a walker, and I’m starting to get better. So I revoke hospice, get back on these unconventional cancer protocols. And see my oncologists the next month in October, who is amazed I’m still alive. So my oncologist and I have a long talk. And he recommends an immunotherapy drug, which is not chemo. 

Misty Williams  14:36

Right 

Dr. Al Danenberg  15:12

But it’s a drug that’s relatively new that the FDA has approved to kill malignant plasma cells. That’s the cancer I have. And it would help to rebuild my body if it’s possible. It made sense to me. And I got started on that. And that was a weekly injection and then a monthly injection. And I was doing that for almost a year or so. And I did quite well. Again, going back on my unconventional cancer protocols, by May of 2020. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  15:40

My PET scan, which is a X-ray that shows cancer cells from head to toe, was negative. Now, it didn’t mean that I didn’t have cancer anymore, because a PET scan only looks for moderate to large amounts of cancer cells. But it was a good side and I was feeling fantastic. And I was doing everything I wanted to do. So this was May of 2020. So life always takes another turn, right. So I’m continuing on and everything is going great. And then come I think June of 2021. I take another of this immunotherapy drug, which is called Darzalex. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  16:17

Very effective for multiple myeloma, theoretically, but I get numerous side effects from it all of a sudden, now the injection was given incorrectly, the nurse screwed up, it was given incorrectly, and it damaged some of the tissue that should never have been damaged was supposed to be subcutaneous, meaning that going into a blood vessel, but she punctured a blood vessel. And I had a big team tournament like a five centimeter hematoma bruise that lasted five or six weeks, that’s pretty big. And that caused my body to really aching, and it was just terrible side effects. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  16:53

Well weaken my body. And when it weakened my body, I got COVID. So I got COVID At that time, and it really took me under but because I had improved my immune system, so Well, from what I’ve done already, I never had to go to the hospital, I never had to take medication. And I recovered probably, I continued with long haulers for a while, but I recovered. And then in 2022, this year, in January, my oncologist said, Well, let’s try the Darzalex. Again, maybe it wasn’t the Darzalex, maybe it was just the COVID. Well, we tried it in January, it was great. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  17:30

And we did it in February, and I had all the symptoms again, and it was coming back with a vengeance. And it really caused a lot of pain, a lot of muscular pain, joint pain, out of breath, it was terrible. So we do a new pet scan. And it turns out that my multiple myeloma was reactivated with the COVID. And maybe, again, the side effects from the Darzalex. Obviously, I stopped Darzalex, for sure, at this point forever. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  18:01

And unfortunately, the multiple myeloma started to work into my back and to my leg, and it had some effects on my sciatic nerve, which was treated with radiation once again, and my back. Now, once again, my bones are fragile. So we started radiation just last week, in my back, and it as a series of 10 appointments, just to kill the masses of malignant plasma cells that are aggravating and creating pain.

Dr. Al Danenberg  18:36

And here’s where you’d really have to understand advocating for yourself as if I didn’t do it already. So I go into the clinic, the radiation clinic, and I have to be put on a machine on a metal table that goes into a machine to have this very targeted radiation just hit the cells. But the platform is a steel platform that’s very hard, very uncomfortable. And I have all this pain in my back. So I have to be laid down very carefully. And then I have to be raised very carefully. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  19:11

So the technicians after each treatment for five consecutive treatments, literally pull me up too fast. And I have excruciating pain with difficulty breathing. And this past Thursday, I was supposed to have the last or the sixth session. And I had so much pain. Before that session, I had to go to the ER because it was hard to breathe. Turned out that the technicians broke several ribs when they tried to pull me up. So I had to now try to recover from that.

Dr. Al Danenberg  19:46

I had to tell them, This is so annoying. I had to tell them how to transfer me from a gurney to the platform of the machine and then slide me back into a gurney so the gurney could all medically lift my back without them pulling me and damaging my ribs. They were very defensive. And they said we could have broken your ribs. And I said, Well, let me just tell you that if you go to the ER and as the ER is attached to this cancer clinic, the record is there, the CT and scan shows new fractures from the beginning of the radiation treatment. So yeah, you did. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  20:23

So the annoying thing is I had to tell them how to do their work. And they had an attitude because they were very defensive, which unfortunately, modern medicine gets these attitudes, they make no mistakes, and everything they do is correct. And if you don’t follow their guidelines, they’ll just fire you as a patient, which is crazy. Now my oncologist is still my oncologist from day one. And I right now I’m in the middle of these radiation treatments to take care of this pain.

Misty Williams  20:54

Did your oncologist, was he on board with the things that you wanted to do when you said, obviously, he gave me the diagnosis that day in his office, you wanted to go home and do more research? How did he respond?

Dr. Al Danenberg  21:04

Actually, he said, I understand. And I agree with you, because we cannot cure your cancer. Now, if you had a different cancer, I would disagree. And I would say we need to do this chemo because it’s 85% effective. And I would probably have thought about that, if that were the case, and the statistics were accurate. But there are no statistics that are accurate for multiple myeloma other than it’s incurable. I’m not seeing anything that says it’s curable. Now, some people have remission, spontaneous remission, for a variety of reasons, but it’s not because of treatment. So that’s interesting. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  21:38

The other thing is, and I will tell you this, for anybody that is interested in radiation treatment, radiation treatment has its benefits on course its side effects. Now, my radiation was in the thoracic area of my body. So the radiation is targeting the cancer cells. But there is collateral damage, it does damage some healthy cells around the sides. And that would be in my esophagus, my GI tract area. And so the oncology, the radiology, the radiation oncologists, never explained in detail to me, and I’m sure no patients get a good explanation of what the side effects could be. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  22:14

Interestingly, the side effects, because of the radiation in the area, could be creating gut dysbiosis and diarrhea. I’m not sure that any of those physicians even know the word gut dysbiosis, by the way, in addition, it causes an irritation in the entire mucosal layer of the GI tract, causing mucositis. And many people with radiation treatment, get what’s called oral mucositis, which are severe painful raw sores in the mouth, that makes it difficult to swallow, to talk, to chew food. I mean, that’s more painful than cancer. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  22:51

So those are some of the problems. But there are ways to prevent that. For example, there is well documented research that raw honey, if you eat raw honey, before the radiation treatments, it may prevent the mucositis from ever getting started. It’s amazing. Three studies published in 2019, show that raw honey can prophylactically prevent mucositis. Or if you have mucositis already helped to treat it. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  23:22

There’s another thing that can help to neutralize the excess radiation that can damage the cells adjacent to the cancer cells. And that’s molecular hydrogen. well documented studies that show molecular hydrogen neutralizes the very damaging free radicals that are created for a variety of reasons, but specifically from radiation. So those are things that are important, and then you can improve your gut. If you just do some very isolated specific probiotics, spore based probiotics to rebuild the gut microbiome before all the damage occurs, so that you have a stronger diverse microbiome to prevent the damage from the radiation. None of the oncologist will tell you that. But that’s true. And if you had that, if you were to do that proactively, you may not have the side effects from radiation treatment.

Misty Williams  24:15

So one of the things that your journey has confronted you with is your mortality. You talk about it on your blog, you talk a lot about the experiences that you’ve had, processing things with your wife and your family. Obviously in 2019, you thought you’re looking at Heaven’s gates. Here we are 2022, Coming up on the three year anniversary of that work. Four year rather of that stint and you’re here with us still so why don’t you talk to us just a little bit about what that’s been like for you. How did you process emotionally and spiritually what was going to happen? 

Dr. Al Danenberg  24:50

Well, this is going to either resonate with some of your listeners, or just turn them off. So I believe in life after death, so I believe we’re here for purpose. I believe we have a soul. I believe we have a soul that comes into a human body to learn the lessons, and then that soul leaves when the body dies. and has other lessons to learn maybe at other times, and that soul reincarnates. And I believe my lesson this time around, is to deal with this cancer, but not so much deal with it, learn from it and share from it. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  25:30

I think if anybody knows me, they know that I am amazingly transparent with what I’ve gone through. I have not ever seen any articles written by any cancer patients that are as clear as I have been, and what I’ve done positively and negatively. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  25:47

I think that’s very important for cancer patients, or anybody that has a serious terminal disease to know that there are other ways to treat or deal with your medical challenges, rather than just give in and give up. Even if the disease is going to kill you. You can do different things to make you feel better to make memories with your family. I mean, these are things that are intangible, but are the only important things in life anyhow.

Misty Williams  26:18

Yeah. How did your family respond to everything that’s happening?

Dr. Al Danenberg  26:21

Well, of course, some of my family members totally Disagree. Disagree with me. My wife is always on board with me. We don’t have the same belief system in everything. But she has always been an amazing support individual, she is just phenomenally strong. She has her own medical issues. So I right now I have a lot that I put on her because physically, right now, with the pain in my back, it’s very difficult for me to do a lot of the things that I want to do and that I used to do. Right now the radiation going to take care of my problem. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  26:53

After the problem is gone, I will be as obnoxious as I’ve been in the past, I will do all the things that I’ve used to do, until the disease finally gets me but right now I’m a little weakened because of the pain from what’s going on in my back. But my wife is there to take care of all the loose ends, which is fantastic. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  27:12

You have to have a supporting partner of some type. It doesn’t have to be a spouse, but you have to have some individual that you can bounce things off of that can give you tough love when it’s necessary. And believe me, it’s an important process, because it’s easy to get down and depressed. And sometimes you just need to be made aware of, you’re not a victim, just stop it and change your way of thinking about things. And other things can happen in a very positive way.

Misty Williams  27:44

So you kind of teased us earlier with knowing how you got this cancer you want to share with Oh yeah.

Dr. Al Danenberg  27:51

So again, I’m very geeky. So I tried to do a lot of research. So I’m trying to dive into the medical literature that I can find that talks about the prevalence of cancer in guys my age, I found a paper that was published with a Brazilian researcher, I think it was in 2010, or something like that. And he actually studied dentists in the age group of my cohort 65 to 75 compared to the male population, so he studied and looked at the male dental population 65 to 75, compared to the male population in general 65 to 75. And in that male population of dentists, there was a significant prevalence of cancer, specifically, multiple myeloma. Now, it was observational, 

Dr. Al Danenberg  28:45

It never gave an example of why these dentists got cancer. But now that I’m a dentist, and I know what dental school and dental life was, I’m thinking what happened in dental school that actually could have created the situation that I dealt with 45 years later. And there are two things that stand out, at least in my mind. One, I’m exposed to low dose ionizing radiation on a daily basis, that’s dental X rays. Now in my dental clinic, there were about 120 kids. In each class, four years of dental school, a lot of dental students, and in the clinic for dental students shared 1 X-Ray machine, there were a lot of X-ray machines all over the clinic. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  29:32

And those X-ray machines go on and off all the time, and you don’t hear them or smell them or feel them you just see a little red light or a green light button on. But other than that you don’t know that the machine is ON. Now, in those days. This is the late 1960s, early 70s. Very few people wore radiation badges to make sure you didn’t get exposed to too much radiation. I don’t even remember if I were a badge, but I’m sure that I was exposed to ionizing radiation On a regular basis, and in fact, plasma cells are very susceptible to ionizing radiation, and they become malignant. And that’s the cancer that I have. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  30:10

The other thing that I am aware of in dental school is that we played with free mercury in our hands, like kids used to play with Play Doh, we played with this wonderful, watery metallic substance that, it’s shiny, it’s savory, and we could throw it on the floor and a little beads would eventually evaporate and disappear. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  30:30

The environment in the dental school was probably the most toxic environment in any public building, probably in United States. And so free mercury, as you know, is used to make dental amalgam dental fillings free Mercury is highly toxic. So either and or the free mercury and or the ionizing radiation caused one plasma cell in my body to become cancerous, and not shut itself off, where the immune system didn’t kill it off. And that cancer cell went on to reproduce and became malignant. And it took four decades before it manifested into what I’m dealing with today.

Misty Williams  31:15

Are you angry when you know?

Dr. Al Danenberg  31:17

 I wasn’t angry.

Misty Williams  31:19

How do you feel about it?

Dr. Al Danenberg  31:20

There’s a relief when you know what’s causing a problem, even though you can’t change the problem. I wasn’t even angry when I had a cancer diagnosis. I was devastated in the fact that I thought, irrationally, I thought my life was coming to an end. I didn’t know how to live other than the way I lived as a periodontist, husband, a father, and doing the things I did. Obviously, all that would change, literally, immediately. And it did. And, that was a very scary scenario. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  31:53

But I was never in denial. I never thought, oh, I don’t have this disease, or, well, I’ll get over it. Or, I mean, I wasn’t in denial and I wasn’t angry. But it was somewhat devastating that I knew my life was changing. But I took that and change that completely around too.

Misty Williams  32:13

Yeah. So I’m really intrigued by your cancer protocols. Because I love the reframe that you gave. This is not just for cancer, this is all about boosting your immune system. I would imagine it’s tied a lot into creating more resiliency in the body, as well. So I would love most people are listening, not watching us, right, I would do a screen share and just scroll through the blog. And I’m not sure that’s super useful to people. 

Misty Williams  32:37

But I would love for you just to kind of walk us through not getting too deep here, you guys, We will put the link in the show notes to this blog post that Dr. Al has on his website. So you guys could go check it out. There’s a ton of links throughout the document so that you could go a little deeper, right, and really wrap your head around what he’s teaching but it’s a roadmap for building resiliency and strengthening the immune system which all of us need. 

Misty Williams  33:00

There’s a lot in our community that are dealing with autoimmunity, autoimmune disease, we’ve got lots of people dealing with diabetes, women struggling with symptoms. Some of them are just mystery symptoms, meaning there’s no accompanying diagnosis, we have hypothyroid and hormone issues and all sorts of things that we’re each one confronting recurring Epstein Barr Virus, Lyme disease, mold and metal toxicity. 

Misty Williams  33:22

And the common thread through all of these things is when your immune system is compromised, allows these disease states to present it. Allows things like Lyme disease and Epstein Barr and whatever else to proliferate, right? Because your body isn’t able to keep it in check. So why don’t you just kind of give us the rundown 11 Cancer Protocols,

Dr. Al Danenberg  33:41

I’ll give you a view, probably one of the most important would be nutrition, the food that we take in, and probably even more important the food that we avoid taking in that inherently damages our gut microbiome, and therefore it can damage the rest of the body. So unfortunately, we are a society of again, I’m going to step on a lot of toes. We are a society of plant eaters. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  34:08

We are a plant based society, meaning that meat is vilified, animal fat is vilified and anything that’s green, and grows out of the ground is the best thing that could ever be unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s not true. As a matter of fact, Dr. Mickey van door and two other colleagues, they’re PhD anthropologist, published a paper in 2021 that clearly showed in a variety of discipline areas that the human species evolving over two and a half million years,” two and a half million years”, as basically leaned toward an animal based diet with very, very few plants. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  34:54

As a matter of fact, if they were not eating an animal based diet, the brain tissue and a variety of other tissues could never have evolved the way they have. And this is identified from a physiological standpoint, based on the way our digestive system is designed, our stomach has a very, very low acid level, so that it destroys microbes that are eating away of animal products that we eat from the ground in those days, and so on and so forth. 

How to have nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory diet

Dr. Al Danenberg  35:23

Plants very frequently have a lot of nutrients that we theoretically could use, but they have other chemicals, called anti nutrients that offset these nutrient benefits and actually damaged our gut microbiome. So there are certain plants that are okay, most of them are not okay, because of these anti nutrients. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  35:44

But in an animal based diet, we’re eating animal foods, like beef and lamb, that have four stomachs that can digest these anti nutrients, destroy them, recreate them, and all of the nutrients a human requires, for the most part, are in animal based foods. But it’s not steak and eggs, it’s all the organs, it’s the bone marrow, it’s the cartilage, all of these things are critical to eat in one way or another. Now, we’re not used to eating them today. But this is the style of eating that I proposed. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  36:15

As a matter of fact, I wrote a book called The Better Belly Blueprint, which is my way of a 70% animal based diet and 30% or less, certain plants that are low in these anti nutrients. And I’m also having another book, I think it’s going to get published next month, called Eat as If Your Life Depends On It basically talks about the history and the combination or blend of keto, paleo and carnivore as probably the ideal way of eating, not necessarily just animal based, but at least the plants that are not damaging to the body. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  36:48

So the first goal in my unconventional cancer protocols is to have this nutrient dense anti inflammatory diet that doesn’t damage any of the pathways of the body. Another unconventional cancer protocol is to have a healthy gut microbiome, which most of us don’t have. There was a study that was published two years ago that showed 88% of the US adult population is metabolically unhealthy. Wow. That’s amazing. That is amazing. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  37:21

These are people that eat an unhealthy diet, they have all kinds of damage to different metabolic pathways in their body. They’re getting sick. They’re not dying yet, but they’re just sick, and they’re getting sicker. And like you mentioned before, people have symptoms, but they don’t know what their diseases are. Generally, it’s because of this poor diet, and a poor gut microbiome. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  37:43

So the gut microbiome is hugely important. You have to have a huge diversity of bacteria in the gut called Alpha diversity. And there are ways to improve that. diet helps, and a variety of other things out. Many things affect the gut microbiome, stress, exercise, sleeping patterns, emotional stress is a critical factor that is very frequently overlooked by all the medical profession, that is a cause to gut dysbiosis.

Dr. Al Danenberg  38:11

You could be the healthiest young lady around. And if you were under constant emotional stress, your gut microbiome can be shut down and you can be prone to all kinds of chronic diseases. Even if you’re eating a healthy animal based diet, even if you think you’re trying to get your gut microbiome healthy, because the emotional stress is extremely destructive to that gut. And then I just mentioned exercise is important, not over exercising, not under exercise, you have to sleep well. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  38:39

Circadian rhythm is a critical factor for overall health. I get involved with almost electromagnetic field therapy, because we are electrical beings, and all of our cells communicate chemically, but also with frequencies, they speak to one another. And these frequencies are electrical frequencies and they sometimes frequently get out of whack, or they get very weakened. And pulsed electromagnetic field therapy has the ability to re energize your battery. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  39:12

You know, if you had a flashlight, and he put batteries in that flashlight, and you turned on the light, it would glow bright for a while and then it would start to dim these flashlight. These batteries are what’s called mitochondria in every cell of our body except red blood cells. Well, these mitochondria are electrical beings and when their energy is not correct, they weaken. As a matter of fact, every chronic disease is a disease of mitochondrial dysfunction, the battery is breaking down. And cancer is a disease of mitochondrial dysfunction. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  39:46

If you can re energize that battery, like you type a battery that you can actually put into a re create the energy of the battery. You’re going to do that with your mitochondria. So if you have a method like pulse electromagnetic field therapy to help your mitochondria, it’s just one of the other elements to improving the immune system. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  40:10

So all of these kind of combine to get to a point where you are enhancing your ability to fight infection externally and internally. And that is your immune system. And everybody has the ability to improve that immune system as best as it can. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  40:29

Now, I will never be able to make my immune system as healthy as yours, because I have other preconditions right now. But I know that I can improve it to an extent that improves my body’s healing potential. And that’s what I’m trying to do. So those 11 Unconventional Cancer Protocols are appropriate for any of everybody. Actually, only 10 of them or one of them would be more delegated to my cancer, which is an immunotherapy type of treatment. But everyone other than that one, anybody and everybody could delve into to improve their own body. And it’s not difficult to do. It’s not exotic stuff.

Misty Williams  41:06

Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. I’m delighted to have you walk us through, I’ve been fortunate to get a front row seat to see you sharing as this thing has unfolded. But it’s really inspiring to hear what you’ve put together not only for yourself, and for what’s happening in your body, but the way that you’re sharing it with others. And I’m sure you get lots of people reaching out to you that are implementing this protocol. And it’s making a difference in their lives, too. 

Misty Williams  41:30

And it’s also inspiring to see how throughout this journey, you’ve been really committed to finding ways to give back, putting out another book. I mean, just think of what you’ve done in the last few years to make sure that the things that you’ve learned are helping as many people as possible. 

Misty Williams  41:44

So thank you so much for sharing with us today. I’ve loved it. Thank you everyone, for tuning in. We are going to have lots of good links in the show notes. I’ll make sure we’re linking to Dr. Al’s website, to this specific post. We’ve also talked about things like hydrogen water and you know, several other things that he has talked about being helpful to him. We’ll make sure that you can get those links in the show notes as well. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Al. 

Dr. Al Danenberg  42:10

Thanks for the opportunity. 

Misty Williams  42:12

All right, we’ll see y’all soon. That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you for listening. I hope you’re feeling more empowered to overcome your flabby foggy and fatigued and to reclaim your life. If you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button right now so you don’t miss any of our episodes. We have some awesome shows coming right up. I love reading your reviews and comments too. They inspire me and encourage other Rosie’s to hang out with us and learn all these amazing strategies for healing and living our best lives. Till next time sister. Bye