When the Healer Becomes the Patient

In this episode, Dr. Mary Louder and Brandon LaGreca discuss patient agency, what true holistic, integrative care really means, and how calling, cancer, and personal transformation reshape the work of healing. 

Brandon LaGreca, LAc, MAcOM, grew up on the East Coast of the U.S. and attended Montclair State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in science with a minor in religion, summa cum laude. He was accepted to the prestigious Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, where he earned a master’s degree in acupuncture and Oriental medicine. His postgraduate work included studying and working at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in China. 

After 10 years of private practice, Brandon experienced firsthand the journey of the wounded healer when a series of small bowel obstructions led to hospitalization and diagnosis of stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

He achieved remission eight months later following an integrative oncology protocol that included immunotherapy without surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. He now lectures and writes on the epigenetics of cancer and has dedicated his career to empowering patients through and beyond chronic illnesses such as cancer. 

His interests include studying indigenous forms of healing and eco-spirituality. 

Listen now for the full conversation, full of gems of wisdom, ethical questions, and inspiration to find your true purpose instead of simply going through the motions. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome to the Doctor Mary Louder podcast show. I'm your host, Doctor Mary Louder. Today's episode is going to be quite special. Uh, it's entitled When the Healer Becomes the Patient. How calling cancer and personal transformation reshape the work of healing. My guest today is Brandon La Greca. He is an acupuncturist and a Chinese medicine specialist, and he received his training at the prestigious Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, where he earned a master's degree. And then his post-graduate work included studying and working in Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in China. 

And it was after ten years of practice of private practice that Brandon experienced firsthand this journey of being a patient and the wounded healer. When there was a series of small bowel obstructions that led to hospitalization, and then the diagnosis of stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Brandon achieved remission eight months later following an integrative oncology protocol that included immunotherapy without surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. He now lectures and writes on the epigenetics of cancer, and has dedicated his career to empowering patients through and beyond chronic illnesses such as cancer. So welcome, Brandon, to our podcast.

Mary Louder, DO: Great. Well, Brandon, welcome to our podcast. It's great to have you.

Brandon LaGreca: Well, thanks for having me on, Mary. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Mary Louder, DO: So your story holds several journeys. Fascinating. Yeah. Within within it, there's a childhood calling towards Chinese medicine. Mhm. The discipline path of becoming a Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist. Then that profound disruption with your diagnosis of lymphoma and then the transformation of your work. So starting if we were to go back and start before you had the credentials, before you practiced, before you'd written your books. Go back to that twelve year old boy who somehow knew that Chinese medicine was a calling for him.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, I guess I've always been interested in Asian culture. And that was really. That came to a certain interesting twist and turn. When I was twelve and I'd seen Bill Moyers was doing a PBS special called healing in the mind. It was. That was in. At that time, I had never seen anything like that. He's walking through China, you know, interviewing people, doing qigong on the in the parks in Beijing. But there was one thing that really stood out to me. And there was a patient getting brain surgery and for certain kinds of brain surgery, as I know you're aware, you have to be awake for it because as they're prodding around, they got to know what they're doing and hitting. 

And so through a translator, here's Bill Moyers speaking with this patient who the only anesthesia they were receiving was through Electroacupuncture, which is essentially acupuncture points that are hooked up to a current. So it's constantly being stimulated. And the patient had a mild sedative, probably something like a Valium, but was able to communicate to Bill Moyers that they were not in any pain, that the entire pain relief was coming from the electroacupuncture. Now that was wild for a twelve year old to see, right? Absolutely amazing. And you know, what we understand about it now is certain acupuncture points can release endorphins, our body's own pain relieving chemical. And so by using acupuncture with that constant stimulation, it was providing enough of an effect for that patient in that moment. 

So seeing that, you know, seeing these these masters doing qigong in the parks, which to me looked like the force in Star Wars, right? I mean, it was just amazing stuff. So it just lit a fire under me. And then sometime in the following year, because I knew I was thirteen at the time, I started studying qigong and tai chi in the back of a Chinese restaurant in new Jersey, suburban new Jersey. Right. So it was just already at that age, I'm like, I want to know what they're doing and how they're doing it. Um, and so yeah, and that just stuck with me ever since I went through high school to college, college to graduate school with my medical training and went right into private practice.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. And your undergraduate degree, you had science and religion?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, I have a bachelor's in science. So pre-med, essentially. Yeah. Knowing that I was going to go to Chinese medical school. But then I got a minor in world religions, which with a focus on East Asian religion.

Mary Louder, DO: Okay. So really just a lot of prep work for where you were going.

Brandon LaGreca: Exactly. Yeah. I kind of designed my, my college experience to, to set me up for that.

Mary Louder, DO: That's very nice. Yeah. So you're in practice, you're doing your private practice. What about that in your early stages? Did you really enjoy.

Brandon LaGreca: You know, I think the thing I was going into Chinese medicine school having the greatest love for was herbal medicine. Mhm. And I still do. I mean, I practice herbal medicine, and I appreciate it so greatly. I came out of Chinese medical school having such a profound love for acupuncture as a modality and working with the energy body as almost like a grid. You know, what are these points? How are they connected? How are they even working? How is energy being translated throughout the body through these these discrete areas? So that was still a mystery that twenty years later, I'm still unpacking because I do certain protocols for a certain condition. And having seen the effects sometimes almost immediately, in some cases that it's just like, how is that working, you know? So it amazes me to this day seeing it in action.

Mary Louder, DO: Mhm. It's interesting when you talk about the energy body, people, uh, call it woo woo often, you know, because they can't see it. And it's certainly not something we look at in the traditional Western world very well. But I mean, with Chinese medicine, this is centuries old.

Brandon LaGreca: Absolutely. So three thousand years, best we can tell.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. So I mean, kind of the woo and the woo is over, isn't it? I mean it's pretty, pretty well, pretty well accepted I would say. And, you know, taken as a relative matter of fact.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah. You know, and we have a lot of really fascinating lines of evidence that I think when you put them together, they really do showcase what the energy body is. I mean, for instance, I mean, we've known this for, you know, decades, that there are certain spots in the body that have a higher conductance and lower resistance. You know, if you were to take an ohmmeter and basically, you know, move that along the edge of the of the body along the skin, there's going to be areas that are higher. You know, there's electrical nature to some of these points, electromagnetic even. Um, we know that and we know from studying the effects of acupuncture, you know, we can, we can insert a needle into this one discrete spot. And every time reliably we'll see an increase of white blood cell count, or we'll see a change in the MRI of someone's brain in a very specific region from a certain point. So we can measure all these downstream effects. 

I have my own, you know, opinions about this. I mean, I do genuinely believe that the energy body, as we think of it, falls along the fascia that we mechanically, you know, through this kind of effect with mechanically manipulating the needles, we are altering how that fascia is conducting. There's almost like a piezoelectric effect. Um, so, you know, we've got enough, I think lines of evidence that suggest that, yeah, there's, there's absolutely something going on here. And then of course the proof's in the pudding, right. You know, we have, like you just said, you know, thousands of years of this being applied both in a veterinary world and also in the human world. You know, some of the old maps were with horses, you know, being treated in ancient China. Right, right.

Mary Louder, DO: So and people include in the energy body the chakras.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: And those areas, we would see an increase of energetic activity almost like a hub or a center. And we see those, you know, um, some of the main ones we see is that the crown of the head, the forehead, throat, heart, solar plexus, around the navel in the pelvic area and below our feet. So when you or do you with your acupuncture, bring into your awareness how the chakras are actually functioning or measuring? Or do you use that information at all when you evaluate folks?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, I mean, to a lesser extent, the chakra concept comes largely from the yogic and Ayurvedic world of India. Again, a very old traditional form of medicine. Three of them have prominence within traditional Chinese medicine. They're called dantian, like kind of like you say, like a center of energy. Yeah. And I think of them as transformers of energy. There's some way that they are modulating energy as it runs through the body. Um, you know, they happen to be over nerve plexuses some of them. So there's, there's a correlate to that as well. 

But the three that we think about in Chinese medicine, there's the lower dantian, which is below the belly button, um, which in, in Japanese culture and medicine, they also call the hara. There's a lot going on in that kind of lower belly button area. Um, the middle dantian is kind of right over center chest over the heart area. And then the, the upper dantian is within the center of the brain. Um, and so these are the three that we work with. And yes, there are acupuncture points on the surface of the body that can sort of tap into them a little bit. But I think for what you're asking, the tradition of more of the contemplative or meditative aspects of, um, you know, Chinese medicine, Asian culture, like qigong and tai chi. Um, definitely target that quite a bit more. That's where if you were to do a practice of focusing your awareness, for instance, in the lower dantian, Can you give rise to a deeper embodiment type experience? And the answer to that is absolutely yes. I mean, and that's that tradition is just as old as acupuncture, of course, too. Um, so they kind of play off each other that way. Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. Okay. That that's helpful because I think sometimes we don't always know the traditions of where the energetic body comes from or how we define it. So knowing the, um ayurvedic versus the Chinese medicine, then the overlap and then with the neural plexus, what we learn as osteopaths, we call that neural therapy. And we work, you know, and often do craniosacral work or visceral release or somatovisceral release, things like that, that allow, um, or the somatovisceral reflex. And so what we see is different points in history describing the same thing.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: Absolutely. Yeah. Slightly different nomenclature, but essentially applying healing from lots of different paradigms.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. So okay, so let's go into the ten years into your practice. You're minding your own business, right? Doing your thing as we say. And something quite, uh, disrupting occurred. Walk us through that. What was that?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah. So I would have told you at that point in my career that I was at least trying to live a pretty healthy life and be a good model for my patients. And, you know, I was eating pretty healthy and trying to stay active and doing my meditation and my inner work and such. Um, but then, so this was twenty fifteen, um, the winter of twenty fourteen into fifteen. I started having episodes of very severe abdominal pain. It would be, you know, nausea, vomiting. I'd be on the bathroom floor for a couple hours with just severe pain. And this happened a couple times. And finally I said, honey, we just need to talk, to my wife, we just need to go to urgent care and figure out what's going on. So I went to urgent care, um, that they sent me home with a prescription for Zofran and said I had IBS, like, all right. 

So then it happens again. This one was even worse. And I was again laid out on the bathroom floor. Um, and just miserable pain. And I said, we need to go to the ER, I mean, and here I'm thinking I don't know what's going on, but my mind is like maybe it's some kind of atypical presentation of, you know, some kind of like gall attack, right? My gallbladder is ready to explode. So let's get to the E.R.. Um, and there they were able to put me under a CT scan. I told them the story. I've already been rejected once. Um, and then, you know, not too long into that evening, um, the ER physician came in, you know, he already had a wet read on the CT scan and my abdominal cavity was filled with lymph tumors. One of them was four inches and it was causing a bowel obstruction. So that was the cause of the pain. 

So I had a small bowel obstruction and that started my cancer journey. Right. Because at that point, not only was I trying to heal from this acute episode of bowel obstruction, but now I have the long view in mind of, okay, what do we do now? Um, obviously I have a pretty severe cancer diagnosis to be causing symptoms like this. Um, fast forward a little bit, a few weeks of testing biopsies and um, PET scan later. Um, and then a bone marrow biopsy, which was positive. That bumped me up to a stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosis, the subtype being follicular lymphoma. 

So yeah, that started the whole thing. Um, and then from there, we can go wherever you like, but, um, it definitely changed the trajectory of many things, one being my career. And now of course, I think a lot and work with cancer patients. Um, it changed me spiritually in terms of how I show up differently and the different strategies that I've used along those lines. It really gave me a newfound appreciation for environmental medicine and understanding carcinogens. So a lot of things came out of that. It was a very rich time for it was a difficult time as it was.

Mary Louder, DO: So before we go to where you ended up, let's go.

Brandon LaGreca: Back.

Mary Louder, DO: To where you were.

Brandon LaGreca: Sure.

Mary Louder, DO: Like all good healers, you like to jump to the the better parts. Yeah. I'm going to take you through the parts that are a little more vulnerable for a minute.

Brandon LaGreca: That's fine. Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: Because, you know, the thing is, as providers, practitioners, physicians, acupuncturists, Chinese medicine specialists, we become patients to at some point in our life.

Brandon LaGreca: So true. Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: You know, and I, I often say, you know, my patients say, what's your success rate? And I said one hundred percent. And they go, what? I go, yeah, one hundred percent of my patients die. Yeah. Eventually, but not hopefully from something I've done or caused and eventually way down the road. Right? So I use that humor to say, you know, common humanity. We're all going to be faced with something.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: But in sometimes in the what we would see in our culture as the alternative world, the world where or the, the career that we choose that promotes health or promotes things that are supposed to be maybe contrary to some of Western medicine that's stamping out disease and punching down symptoms. Sometimes we think we shouldn't get ill. Or if we do, what didn't we do to keep ourselves from getting ill?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: And to ask that question, there's no blame. There's no shame in that. But that is not often what people who practice a more mindful approach to health care experience, is it?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, absolutely.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon LaGreca: Go ahead.

Mary Louder, DO: No, I was going to say so. Share a little bit. If you you know, that's a vulnerable spot to go to. And the shoulda, coulda, woulda is, are pretty, you know, pointed. But, you know, did you, when you were faced with that and especially coming to a stage four so if you're a stage and you had symptoms before you went and you were evaluated. Not sure I would have agreed with that diagnosis of irritable bowel, you know, based upon your presentation. And if literally tumors were so abundant, the abdominal exam would have been different. Mhm. You know, and I say that as a physician who, uh, you know, when in doubt listens to the patient and when in doubt goes back and re-examines the patient.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah. And to that briefly, I mean, I think that day that I was at the urgent care, I'd only seen a PA, they never put their hands on me. And it was the morning after when the symptoms were gone. You know, so it's, you know, from their perspective, maybe it was all too easy just to just, you know, brush it off and say that, well, we ate some bad food or whatever. And that was that. So, um, yeah, that's where, you know, that's where I think intuition comes in as a, as a provider, right? You know, listen to your patients. What are you hearing? And does something not feel right? You know, what's the pattern recognition that's coming to the surface? Have I seen this before? You know, does this and then and then act upon it. 

Um, but more to your, your question, um, you know, yeah, I have no problem being a little more vulnerable and kind of telling you about my specific experience. But before I do, I'm going to kind of, I'm going to zoom out for a second and give you more of a big picture of how I think about disease in general Chinese medicine lens and how I think specifically about cancer. And then I'll answer the question from my own, um, you know, personal life experience. 

So in Chinese medicine, we say there's really only one cause of all disease. And that's an imbalance with nature and natural rhythms. So everything kind of stems from that. You know, you can't go eating ultra processed foods day in and day out and sleeping three, four hours a night without expecting something to break in your body. That's just the way it is. And so, you know, if we take that, that overarching idea and then zoom in into, you know, what we call the Tai Chi symbol, the representative of yin and yang in Chinese medicine, then we can drill down and say that the flavor of imbalance with nature can have internal and external causes, the yin being the internal, the yang being external. And so as that applies to cancer, um, when people ask me, you know, what is the cause of cancer? I don't think that question really gets us the answer we're looking for. And instead I hear two different questions. 

So someone says, what's the cause of cancer? I really make it very patient focused. And I say, well, then the better questions are how do we get cancer and why we get cancer? Right? And the how is the external? That's the yang. And for that, my answer is very simple. It's carcinogens. Right. And now that's a little bit of a cop out answer because I'm just telling you things that cause cancer. But but essentially that's the whole world of environmental medicine. And by saying things that we are exposed to in our environment that on an epigenetic level are causing gene mutation and then tumor growth. Okay. That's one thing. However, a lot of us are exposed to stuff, right? Why do some people develop cancer when others do not? And there's a second story here. And that's the yin, the internal. And that is why people get cancer. Not just how. 

And for that, here again, Chinese medicine, um, has a, you know, a very definitive answer. They say the, the why we get sick comes down to an imbalance of the seven emotions. Okay. Now I, I simplify that for a Western audience by saying stress and trauma. Now I delve into what those seven emotions are in my writing and how they interplay with the different organs and such. But essentially what it comes down to is the suppression or the repression and or improper expression of emotions from the things that we are chronically being stressed about, or the acute things that traumatically affect us are what cause the seeds of illness within the body. Okay. So with that primer in place, basically that's the lens with which I look at all patients and where those two things interact. 

The yin and yang for me is the art of medicine. And so if I were to answer your question now from my own perspective, um, I dug deep into some childhood trauma and I grew up in a, you know, a pretty easygoing household. Um, I didn't have trauma in the home, but growing up in suburban New Jersey and, you know, at times somewhat rough school experience, I definitely encountered a lot of physical, verbal abuse that happened at a very young age and juxtaposed that with me growing up not too far from a Superfund site and, um, really doing some research and realizing that there were chemicals sprayed in my neighborhood, uh, specifically a pesticide during a certain era when I was growing up in the suburbs, which I was likely exposed to. Um, so, you know, that's kind of where I think differently about things. I think that there's these childhood exposures, which probably set the stage decades later to really be the, you know, the soup that both emotionally and chemically, which, um, you know, caused my cancer formerly. 

Now, having said that, there are definitely other factors. Who knows? Karmically, what did I come with this lifetime with? I mean, what am I here to do? Um, I can even tell you that at the time of my diagnosis, my daughter was two years old. And, you know, I had a really different mindset about being a provider and working really hard. And I was pushing it and burning myself out, you know. So there's a lot of elements that kind of come together, but that's, that's the nature of holistic medicine, right? We don't think of it just in terms of, you know, one cause for that disease or, you know, take one pill for every ill, right. It's really about getting into the weeds, right? So how do we, you know, have this kind of nuanced look at these different factors? So I mean, that's my story. Um, yeah, it all comes together.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. It does. Well, I think the neat thing about that is, you know, turning that concept of we should have known better on its ear into we have lots of ways that we can look, inquire and be curious as to why this is here. Yeah. And you know, what we often encounter in the from the Western perspective is, well, it just happens. We don't know why it happens. Here's your treatment. Here's your hat. What's your hurry? Wow. Right. And, you know, even saying to this day that nutrition has no component in cancer, stress has, you know, stress or stress causes everything. Well, does it or does it just impede the body's ability to heal properly?

Brandon LaGreca: And that's enough. Yes. Right.

Mary Louder, DO: I mean, yeah, but to say it's a cause of or is it a cause or is it an impedance? Yeah. And so stopping and really understanding that the resilience we have as humans, the inherent capacity to heal, how the body is designed that way, and it leans towards healing until it's has enough impedance where it can't.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: Right. Yeah. So then, um, and the other thing is, do you think that, you know, you said you healed some things, some childhood traumas. Do you think that there was pause to say, or the audacity to say when you had stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, you learned some lessons?

Brandon LaGreca: Oh, absolutely. One hundred percent, yes. I mean, and to this day, I still think of cancer as being my greatest teacher. Um, and even as I, you know, delve into different spiritual practices, to me, I think the greatest initiation that I've ever had was getting that diagnosis in terms of the path that it put me on. Um, so now not everyone is willing to go there. There's absolutely the mindset of I'm broken. I just need to go to someone to fix me because there's something wrong. And even the oncologists were frankly, that was a line that I was given. You know, I went to get a second opinion from a lymphoma specialist. And, you know, the the standard line was just bad genes. The cat's out of the bag now. We just need it to hit it hard. Hit it fast. 

So, of course, the recommendation was, you know, high dose induction chemotherapy, which I did not do. You know, I chose a different path. Um, but the idea there again, is it kind of, um, dovetailed with that idea that, you know, you're just broken. Um, and there's nothing you can really do. It's just bad genes and those genes have been turned on and that's that. There was really no deeper questioning around the things that we've been discussing around terrain, like what you so eloquently just brought up. Um, yeah. So that's the world we live in though.

Mary Louder, DO: When you, you know, so they offer you this high induction chemotherapy surgery, radiation. Yeah. Did was they were they bringing up like, um, stem cell transplants or things like that and this at all?

Brandon LaGreca: Or you think that might have come down the line if I didn't respond? Um, for the kind of tumors that were that I had lymph tumors are in the abdomen around the small intestine specifically there was no real good surgery or radiation treatment. So for me, the only thing that they offered was chemotherapy plus an immunotherapy drug. Um, what I ultimately decided on was to only do the immunotherapy drug because I know I knew doing some research that the side effects were not absent, but minimal. I mean compared to the chemotherapy for sure. Mhm. Um, and I thought to myself, well I have to at least try. I want to just try to get by with the least amount of conventional. That's going to cause the least amount of total harm to my body and then build an integrative protocol around that. So the drug that I use, it's an old drug. It's called rituximab or rituxan. Um, because I had a Cd20 marker. So it was positive for that. So it was applicable. 

And you know, I ended up getting an infusion once a week for four weeks. And I think I had about a thirty percent tumor reduction. So pretty good. I mean, I was responding, um, but it wasn't necessarily, you know, the end all, be all. So right around that mark, you know, four sessions in when my oncologist said, well, now we're going to space it out to every two months for the next few and see how you respond. We'll do a scan later in the year because I started in April of twenty fifteen, that's when I really kicked into high gear, and that's when I really rolled out the integrative protocol that I had been researching since, you know, beginning of March. Um, and I was doing a lot of things that frankly, um, were supportive or, um, worked well with immunotherapy, immune modulating type therapies. Um, in addition to really dialing in my nutrition, you know, working on some of the stress and trauma pieces. 

Um, yeah. And so three infusions later then that would have brought me out to, you know, kind of end of October, uh, end up repeating a PET scan and happy to report that I had a clean PET scan. And I've remained so ever since, um, you know, going on eleven years later. So I responded beautifully to what I was told would never work, frankly. I mean, the lymphoma specialists looked at my wife and I and said, you know, I don't think you'll ever get into remission without chemotherapy. She didn't think it was possible, given my tumor burden.

Mary Louder, DO: So okay, so let's pause on that one for a minute. Because those are pretty big words to say. You're never going to.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: To make a declaration to a patient you're stepping on their agency.

Brandon LaGreca: Yes.

Mary Louder, DO: You're stepping on their sovereignty as an individual. You're stepping on their informed consent.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: You're stepping on the sacredness of the doctor patient relationship.

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: And I wholeheartedly disagree with that approach in communicating with patients.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: And I think that it is not the physician's duty to make a judgment about what will work and what won't work. We, you know, we're paid. And the thing that's hard in our training is we're paid for outcomes. Were scored on outcomes. So we're under the gun to provide outcomes. I mean clearly you don't want to go to an orthopedic surgeon who's got a thirty percent success rate with hip replacements, because you're going to probably end up with two left feet, right? I mean, there's certain things, right that are that are very important to understand. But then in other situations in communication, because chemotherapy, trust me, is all about throwing as much as you can at the patient based upon statistics.

Brandon LaGreca: Yes, yes. I love that you're bringing this up. And this is this is so this dovetails so perfectly with my work and what I got out of this on a mindset and a deep spiritual level. And, you know, and maybe in retrospect, if I was to cut this oncologist a little bit of slack, I was she was probably just thinking in her own heart and mind, you know, again, based on the statistics, I know this guy is not going to get into remission. So I have to do my job to convince him to do this course. You know that that's probably what she was thinking. But you were also one hundred percent right that my agency was being challenged in that moment. Now, most people, based upon their past experience with Western medicine, Western medical practitioners and maybe their own fears and lack of knowledge would have definitely just gone along for that ride. Okay.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah.

Brandon LaGreca: But when I heard her say those words to me, I got angry instead. I said, let's see, I bet I can do this. I, I thought of that as a challenge. And I said, well, I'm going to do things my way and I'm going to see. So I actually use it as a force to to bolster my agency. Mhm. Most people that would have potentially crushed. And why that's important is because for me now, when I interface with patients, where the rubber hits the road for me is exactly that. The thing I'm most looking for is a return to agency in them. That matters more to me than anything. And I'll give you an example. If a patient comes and let's say they've recently been diagnosed with cancer. 

Now, mind you, I'm just a licensed acupuncturist, right? I'm not an oncologist. I consider oncologist to be the disease experts. They monitor the disease. I'm a health expert. I'm interested in the health and the vitality of the person. So I have my own role to play and I stay in my lane. Having said that, if a person comes to me and they just want to go for the conventional therapy that's being recommended to them, and I'm going to be relegated to just maybe side effects, maybe just treating neuropathy from chemotherapy. And that's what they're asking me to do. I'm not there to talk them out of that. I don't have a dog in a race that way. I will one hundred percent support them in that decision, and I will be there for them to the fullest extent that I am able to. And the opposite could be true. 

I can have someone who they've been given the course conventionally, and they don't want to do it. Their heart's not in it, and they want to just build an integrated protocol. That's their autonomy and that's what they want to do. I will support them with whatever knowledge base I have. I don't say one way or the other to me, what I don't want is I don't want someone waffling back and forth. I don't know, should I do this? Should I do that? That's not what I'm looking for, is someone who gets their whole head and heart behind whatever they're doing. And that to me means more than anything. 

Now what I love someone to really take the middle road and take a holistic approach or an integrative approach, right? And try to balance both worlds and what makes sense for them. Absolutely. I mean, that's what I would love. And I can maybe, you know, provide some information along those lines. But at the end of the day, I mean, to me, it really comes down to what is the thing that's going to make that patient most empowered in the situation? And how do we reinforce that? Because that's what I'm looking for. To me, that means more than anything.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. And I think that empowerment then reaches into the immune system where you really get the alignment and the function of healing moving along. I mean, when and if we think, you know, there's more and more information coming out, how cancer is a chronic metabolic condition.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: That really started years before we see the, the, um, the, the full symptoms come out, the full changes or tumor growth. There's small tumors, there's tumors that are not detected. And even we know in breast cancer up to like nine years before there's a diagnosis, there's actually metabolic changes in the breast tissue. Yeah. Um, and so, and it's, and so looking at that, you don't want to. Block that in the body. You want to understand it and support it towards its natural process and natural healing process.

Brandon LaGreca: Absolutely.

Mary Louder, DO: So if you were doing so, then when the oncologist, you told the oncologist that or did you tell the oncologist, hey, I'm going.

Brandon LaGreca: No, I did not. I went in my own way.

Mary Louder, DO: You kept it to yourself. And they probably just thought you were going along, minding your own business, just doing. I mean, did they give you any guidance on nutrition, vitamins, lifestyle, stress? Um, you know, um, you know, environmental things, anything.

Brandon LaGreca: None of the above. So it's a good thing I knew a lot of that stuff.

Mary Louder, DO: Okay.

Brandon LaGreca: And, and of course, you know, consulting with colleagues of mine to dial it in, but yes. So none of the above.

Mary Louder, DO: So let's think about the statistics of chemotherapy for a minute, then. if you've got the specialists not informing the patient regarding the implications of proper nutrition, micronutrients, macronutrients, inflammation, environmental components, stress, trauma and anxiety. Does that have a play in how good the statistics actually are, how accurate they are for treatment?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah. Um, yeah. No. Absolutely not. I can say that with all certainty. I mean, even to, to double down on something you just said. Um, to me, the tumor is not the disease. The tumor is the symptom. And it's really easy for me to say that as someone versed in Chinese medicine, because that's our world, you know, it's like, what is the imbalance that gives rise to what at the root gives rise to the branch that you see as a symptom. And to me it is, um, it's absolutely without a question in my mind that when you see a tumor, that is a disruption of the terrain that's been going on for years, if not decades of many different levels, right? 

Um, to, to get to that point, there's, there's got to be some inflammatory process that's unchecked. There's almost always some disruption of the gut microbiome. There almost always is some immune, you know, compromise. Um, there is the overload of the body burden in terms of toxicity. There is the overload of the body in terms of emotional toxicity. There almost always is some, you know, like you say, nutritional deficiency. So all those things come to bear again within this larger lens of holistic medicine that can really, um, tell us what all those imbalances are that collectively give rise to the imbalance that was represented by the symptom of a tumor.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. And it's interesting because I gave a lecture recently on the microbiome. And really, when you look at holism and holistic medicine, it has to do with our microbiome meeting the microbiome of the world, of the universe, of the dirt, of all of the environment around us. And so you've got the, you know, trillions of microbials, the genomics of that interfacing with our genomics, interfacing with the environment, interfacing with absolutely everything around us where we're literally part of the collective that is actually holistic medicine and holistic medicine is not, let's go to the anti aging conference and get the most, uh, you know, the highest level of peptides we can get. 

So we can, you know, look like we're going to live forever. That's not holistic medicine that is taking a particular lane, using a particular therapy to do a particular outcome. It's Western medicine fancied up with a bow. Yeah. So and I and trust me, you know, I mean, I've been in this world for three over three decades, so I'm not like, you know, trying to be crabby about it at all. But to be very clear in a holistic approach, you have to deal with your emotions. You've got to deal with your diet, you've got to deal with your home front. You've got to deal with your job. You've got to deal with what is your place in this world?

Brandon LaGreca: Absolutely.

Mary Louder, DO: What are you meant to be doing? And so it sounds like in some ways, the wake up call that you had, because you had, uh, many things in place that you liked, adored, enjoyed, and then many things and many lessons that you learned that even when we're going along doing the very best we can, the apple cart can get upset. Can't it?

Brandon LaGreca: Mhm.

Mary Louder, DO: And so the resiliency there is to dig in, learn be open to the. The experience changing us in whatever way it can. And then just understanding what our choices are, what we want our choices to be, and then having the strength to make those choices.

Brandon LaGreca: Absolutely. Yeah. And in my case, you know, the, the question that I posed to cancer patients now, which I did for myself when I was in that position, is, you know, how can I use this moment in time to become a stronger and more empowered person? And there I kind of saw a little glimpse into my future and saying, I can get through this, I can heal from this, and I will be able to help others because I have all the pieces. I mean, not only am I a provider, um, but I, you know, I'm a wordsmith. I'm good with words end up becoming books that I've written on the subject. My blog, of course, being able to share that to me, it was my life mission. Kind of changed to how do I specifically, now that I understand this right, I know the dark place that a cancer patient will go to when they hear about a diagnosis. How can I speak specifically to that person? From heart to heart and say, I know where you're at and here's how you can think a little bit differently about them. And so I kind of took that as my calling. That changed in that moment to being able to relate to people with, for sure, chronic illness, but certainly who have received a cancer diagnosis and to walk them through that process.

Mary Louder, DO: Mhm. Yeah. So do you think that you. Were you faced with fear and you conquered your fear? Were you faced with fear and you accepted it? What? I mean, how did you come through that part of this?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the fear has lessened over time. It's certainly at the five year mark, it did and it definitely did in the ten year mark. But it's still always kind of there a little bit in the background. And so my funny story to to explain this is if people have gone and seen the old, the old original Avengers movie from, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you know, there's the character of Bruce Banner who becomes the Hulk when he gets angry. And then there's the character of Iron Man, who keeps goading him in the first movie to try to get him to turn into the Hulk when he's not supposed to. And at the very end of the movie, of course, he says, you know what my secret is? I'm always angry. And and that's what I joke with cancer patients. And I say, like, the fear doesn't actually really go away. You're always a little bit afraid. You just kind of learn to change your new to change the norm. Your new norm is where you're going to rise above it to some degree. And the two things, mindset wise, that really help with that. Um, the first one is cancer results in a death no matter what. Either it will kill you bodily, or it will kill you to the life that you were living and you choose to to walk a different path. And so my, my one piece of advice.

Mary Louder, DO: That can you say that again?

Brandon LaGreca: Yes, absolutely. Cancer results in a death in everybody, no matter what. It's just a question whether it's bodily. Um, if they succumb to the disease, which by the way, is not, is not a failure. I mean, that absolutely can be an outcome and people can even heal on their deathbed. You know, healing is different than curing, right? Mhm. Um, but if it doesn't kill you bodily, it shouldn't, it will most certainly kill you to the life that you were living up until that point. And that you will have to, to really think differently about who you're going to be going forward. 

And so my one response to the fear is let it kill you. Find a way to become born again, um, born anew. Um, given the situation that you've been put into. Um, and the second one, which is kind of now the flip side of that, right. The other side of the coin is what truly, genuinely makes you feel alive. I feel like people who have been given a cancer diagnosis, they have to fall in love with the world again. They have to find their love again of just being here and and how they express themselves. And so there's an invitation for all sorts of creative outlets or, you know, really what makes you jazz you up? What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? And I think those are the two things that I would would give as advice to people who are in that situation, dealing with that fear.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah, I think that's really, uh, you know, words, beautiful words to live by, um, finding, you know, dying to that which, you know, no longer need to live to, right? And, um, and really then, uh, falling in love with the life that you've got and you want to live.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah.

Mary Louder, DO: Because I have seen cancer patients that just get through it. Right? They just grin or grit and bear it and get through it, and then they go back to whatever they were doing.

Brandon LaGreca: That's right. And that brings up something that you said at the beginning. You know, now we're talking more about this whole life purpose thing. And you mentioned earlier, you know, on a long enough timeline, the mortality, we go to one hundred percent, right? Everyone dies. So to me, it's this and this goes back to this, this concept of, you know, how do I empower my patients, restore agency? How do I pull that out of them? Right. We're all going to die of something. And so what I don't want is someone, um, you know, like there's this old saying, um, when death finds you, let it find you alive. 

Like that's, that's what I'm after, right? I don't want, I don't want is the walking zombie. I don't want someone to die before their time walking around like a zombie for decades because they have, they have lost their true sole purpose. So for me, that's that's to me, like that is the beauty of what? And you know, who else is doing that now? Maybe someone is who's spiritually inclined, and maybe they have clergy that they go to, and maybe they're talking a little bit about that, but maybe not. I mean, maybe it's maybe it's really now our job as holistic providers to be able to say, you know, what is your idealized life? What if you if you had no fear, what would you be doing right now? You know, and, and really, you know, helping people to give them permission to maybe live that life, to look into it in the very least. Right? Yeah. So yeah, absolutely.

Mary Louder, DO: That's good. That's really, really good. So this impacted your patient care. Did the focus of your practice change then as a result? Are you doing only oncology care for patients now or have you have you just incorporated that in or how does that look now.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, I still do everything. I mean, you know, I live and work in rural Wisconsin, so I kind of see a little bit of everything, you know, so at any given time, I always have a small handful of cancer patients, but I still treat, you know, whatever comes in the door. Um, yeah. So a lot of that kind of goes into my writing and my online communities and such. But, um, yeah, it, it definitely added a, a significant, again, ability to relate to and speak to people who are in that situation. And so yeah, you know, I definitely have added that into, um, how I can interact with patients that way.

Mary Louder, DO: Wonderful. How can we find you online? What do we need to know? You've written, I think three books. Am I correct there?

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and so yeah. Thank you. Um, so my name Brandon lagreca dot com is basically my author website and that'll get you to, you know, my books, my blog. Um, I also have a Patreon community, um, where I post once a week and you can access that through, um, my, my website or if you just want to jump right to my blog and just kind of read whatever I'm thinking about, I post once a month. That's just empowered patient blog dot com. I'm not very active on social media, but I do have a curated newsletter that I do once a month, and I'm on Patreon at least once a week, which there's even a free membership there so people can hear more about what I'm doing there.

Mary Louder, DO: Nice. Okay. We will have all of that in the program notes too, so people can find you and get support and just learn more about, you know, how they can feel very empowered as they go through their journey. Well, Brandon, thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for your vulnerability. When we went to some of those little harder places, it was very kind of you to be so forthright. And, um, I learned a lot. And I think that, um, the most important thing to know is no matter what we do in life or who we are in life, our agency is really important. How we approach our health care is really important. Our ability to make our choices is very important. And, um, that, that type of, um, ability to have that freedom of choice and the ability to, um, really put our heart and soul into healing is super important. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Brandon LaGreca: Yeah, it's your journey. Make the best of it. Thank you. Mary, I appreciate you.

Mary Louder, DO: Yeah. Thank you. 

So I'd like to thank our guest, Brandon LaGreca, today for sharing with us that a journey like this reminds us that the knowledge does not exempt us from being human. Understanding and being a provider does not exempt us. Illness is not a moral verdict, and that healing may include far more than simply the disappearance of disease. Sometimes it's also the slow restoration of trust. Trust in our body, in our life, in our choices in our relationship, and sometimes even into the mystery that carries us when certainty cannot. So thanks for joining us today on our podcast. I look forward to you being here next time. Please rate and review the podcast. We appreciate that. That helps us get more views and let us drop us a line. If there's something you'd like to hear about or see us record and discuss, and we'll go from there. Thanks again and have a great day.