307. Dr. Josh Axe, Dr. Will Cole & Taylor Dukes: Toxoplasma Gondii Is Linked to Brain Tumors

0:00Gary Brecka:Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka. Do you know that one in five Americans will develop cancer? The vast majority of autoimmune disease has no known cause. And millions of people with brain fog, joint pain, crushing fatigue, and mystery symptoms are told every year that their labs are just fine. They're not fine. What's happening to them is invisible to conventional labs. Mold toxins in the tissue, parasites suppressing the immune system. Stealth infections that retreat and hide until the immune system is just too exhausted to keep them contained.

0:31Gary Brecka:And an immune system so overloaded that the circulating tumor cells it would normally catch every single day are slipping through. Today, I have three people who found what was hiding. A functional medicine nurse practitioner who shrunk a plum-sized brain tumor in half before surgery using metabolic ketosis, methylene blue, and red light therapy. A functional medicine physician who has spent 15 years treating the patients conventional medicine just couldn't explain and knows exactly how to find what the standard labs miss. And one of the most respected holistic physicians in the entire world will lay out the complete protocol for tackling stealth infections, Lyme disease, and parasites that are quietly destroying the immune function while your blood work looks perfect.

1:12Gary Brecka:So let's get into it. Yeah, so life was good. I've met the man of my dreams. He was an Air Force pilot. We have two children. I have a thriving functional medicine practice of my own at this point. I founded a wellness center with a partner. And I don't know if you're familiar with the Pernuvo full body MRI company. Very familiar. Yeah. So I'm trying to put, I'm trying to actually bring them to the Middle East right now because I love it. I'm a huge fan. Yeah. So they reached out and they said, Hey, you know, we're getting a location in Texas near you and we would love to give you a full body preventative scan.

1:42And I'm like, all right, cool. I'm healthy. You know, this is 2020. This is 2022.

1:46Gary Brecka:2022. Yeah. So two and a half years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So not too long ago. And I got the curve ball of my life. And so I did the scan, you know, took the picture, put on the scrubs. And I was called and told that they found a massive brain tumor in my right frontal lobe. And I'm like, what? You've got to be kidding. This is the wrong person because I have no symptoms. So it was a shock to say the least. But I did, in fact, have a huge brain tumor. Wow. You said it was the size of a plum. It was the size of a plum. how did it displace that much gray matter and you were having no symptoms truly i can't even explain it because from a medical perspective i mean the brain is so symptoms like one millimeter shift you can have symptoms in your brain so literally it's a god thing i don't have no explanation because it's truly beyond my comprehending you see this image yourself i mean did your heart just drop it did i'll never forget we were headed to the museum with my children.

2:40And I remember opening the app and I actually didn't get a phone call. I actually have to back it up. I opened up the app because I'm the practitioner. I'm the one who saw it first. No one had told me. So it said abnormal finding. And I look and it said nervous system. And I'm like, that's weird. So I went to go look at it and it was a huge picture and it does not take a radiologist or a trained medical professional. I'll show you after.

3:00Gary Brecka:Okay. I mean, it is huge. It's this huge white mass. So when I first got diagnosed, you know, I had a 10 month old at the time and a three-year-old. And so it was scary as all get out, you know, and as much as I know about integrative and functional medicine at this point, I know nothing about cancer. And now I feel like I have my PhD. Right, right, right. I do too, just because of all the people I've worked with. Yes. And it's only increasing. That's the hard thing. And so, um, I slowed down and I prayed and I said, okay, God, like, this isn't a surprise to you. You know this, you know, the number of my days, but like, what do I do?

3:29And I didn't freak out. I didn't make decisions and fear. I wasn't reactive. And I knew that I probably needed to get it out. But I was also like, okay, this has been growing for years. Same thing with functional medicine. Symptoms, a disease doesn't just happen overnight. It's drops in the bucket over time that lead to the full blown manifestation of a disease and symptoms. And so I knew enough about the body that I wasn't just going to like jump to surgery and fear. And I just felt led to take an integrative approach. And so I started doing research and reading books and contacting integrative cancer clinics.

4:02And, you know, it was also hard. We had to execute a living will. I had to make a lot of decisions as a mom and a wife and a business owner. Like I had to get my husband access to all my business stuff because I'm like, what if something happens?

4:13Gary Brecka:Right. So there was the life part of me that was trying to figure things out. And I also am so blessed because most people that have a brain tumor, they have a seizure, they wake up in the emergency room, they get the next on-call neurosurgeon. You don't have time to research, pray. I mean, it's like, you don't pack bags. You don't send an out-office email. It's go time. And so for me, I'm like, okay, God, thank you for giving me this information. I just want to like walk this journey well. Yeah. So I ended up going to Hope for Cancer. It's a holistic cancer center in Mexico. I went to the Cancer Center for Healing in California and Irvine.

4:44And I did everything from hyperbaric oxygen, red light beds, methylene blue, curcumin IVs, high dose vitamin C. I mean, you name it, I've done it. And so I spent five months prior to surgery, I did end up getting brain surgery, doing research, getting second opinion. And I was like, I knew a lot about nutrition. And that's the hard thing for me. I was already really healthy. So to feel like I had to take it up a notch was like, whoa, what does this look like? But I treated healing like a job for a period of time, especially during those five months before brain surgery. And I was like, you know what, it'd be so cool if we could shrink this brain tumor.

5:16But if anything, I'm just preparing my body to be strong going into a brain surgery.

5:20Gary Brecka:Right. And so for me, I did high dose vitamin C. I had to work my way up to like 75 grams. Yeah. Yeah. You started like 25 grams. And then worked our way up. I did methylene blue infusions. I did methylene blue before doing a red light helmet, like 30 minutes before it activated. Yeah, I did oral. So I do like my methylene blue drops 30 minutes later. I'd put on my red light helmet. Great. I did molecular. Was that a neurotic helmet? Do you remember that? it's Weaver. It's from Germany. Okay, great. So I did that. So we, you and I were offline talking about therapy stacking because you got to, to be efficient.

5:52You know, you can't just all day do everything. So I would sit at my desk. I'd check emails. I do my methylene blue. I'd put on my red light helmet. I do my molecular hydrogen oxygen. I have a hyperbaric chamber, you know, sauna. I do. I have a soft chamber. I've gotten so claustrophobic though. So I haven't used it as much, but I had to use it. Seriously. I sat in there earlier and I could do that.

6:13Gary Brecka:Yeah. But yeah, I did everything that you can imagine. Got into ketosis. I was checking not just ketones, but GKI, glucose ketone index, pricking my finger. I mean, it was I did everything. I was taking so many supplements. the CGMs. I did CGMs. Yeah. And for me, you know, I was living abroad, so it made a lot of sense. And another thing, and I will say drops in the bucket, it was the perfect storm for me. You know, the parasites was a huge contributing factor. I tested positive for parasites and stool. I actually, this is crazy. And for anyone listening that think parasites are woo woo, and they're like, yeah, but we don't live in a third world country.

6:46No, no, we do worm our pets. Like you can have exposure. And so one thing that I have to say specifically about parasites is, so when I got diagnosed, I did all the lab testing you can ever imagine on myself, you know, Because I had practitioners, but I'm like, I'm going to cast the net. What are we missing here? And I actually found I was blood positive, serum positive for a parasite called Toxoplasma Gandhi that the International Journal of Cancer and the American Cancer Society link to brain tumors and middle aged people.

7:13Gary Brecka:No way. Yes. And so. Is this because of the outcasting of these? Or do you know why? It suppresses the immune system. So parasites, we want to talk parasites, they suppress the immune system. And so again, with cancer, we want to do anything to boost our immune system and decrease inflammation, boost immunity. And so parasites suppress the immune system because they're a foreign invader. Yes. You know, and so for me, I did ivermectin. I did all sorts of mabindazole, fabindazole. I even did Alinea. I did all sorts of actually did pharmaceuticals. I think there are times and places for it. Were you doing anything to, I mean, obviously you're conscious of your diet.

7:45Gary Brecka:And before your surgery, did the tumor actually shrink? It did. Yes. It was a miracle. That's so amazing. Which is insane. Yes. Because when I got the radiology reports. That is incredible. I mean, first of all, was your like neurologist? Like what in the? So I actually have the coolest neurosurgeon. He's actually in, I flew to Arizona for my brain surgery. He's at Barrows Neurological, Chris Smith, if anyone needs a recommendation. And he believes in ketosis. In Scottsdale? Uh-huh. I was literally just there. Yeah. So he operates in Scottsdale and in Phoenix. And we stayed in Scottsdale for me to recover, but he believes in metabolic ketosis.

8:16You know, he doesn't have the time to talk about all these things that stress the immune system because he's saving lives and doing brain surgery. But yeah, I mean, he's all in. And he's like, he's the one that told me, I don't want you doing it. because mine was stage three. So it was stage four is the most aggressive. So it wasn't like this, you know, little tiny growing thing. It was a beast that we needed to get out of there. So I'm grateful. And that's what I also want people to hear me say. I think it's easy to hear all the stuff that we talk about and think that it's all holistic. And I always say, I like saying integrative because you take the best of the conventional, the best of the holistic, and you integrate the two for the best possible outcome.

8:47Gary Brecka:Yeah, I agree. I mean, just changing your diet alone is not going to save your life. Right. And there are times and places for acute care. You Let's get someone out of the acute flare of ulcerative colitis. And you sometimes have to get the steroids and get the iron infusion. But then you have to figure out what caused the inflammation and caused the immune system to go rogue. Not just with cancer, with anything, autoimmune disease. And so everyone was shocked. And it was truly a miracle. But I'm so glad I still did surgery to get the remainder out. And so I have a huge hole in my brain. I'm still normal.

9:14You wouldn't know, right?

9:15Gary Brecka:I didn't even. When I first saw you, I'm like, dude, this chick's got a hole in her brain for sure. No, I'm just kidding. No, not at all. Well, and even people that knew me, you know, they're like, you're still the same Taylor, even 24 hours. I mean, the whole thing is a miracle. And I didn't have any deficits. And I was walking six hours after brain surgery. I was like giving them orders. I'm like, get this catheter out. I'm ready to get up and get ambulating. You are. Wow. And then I was, I went home straight from ICU 24 hours after surgery. And so I really think everything I did to prepare my body.

9:44Gary Brecka:So they went in through the temporal side? Right here. I have a huge scar right here. Well, yeah. So nobody sees it. Yeah. And so he's the one that said, you know, traditional oncology. And that's something else, you know, when people are like, oh, my gosh, but you did integrative stuff with cancer. Isn't cancer scary? And for me, I'm like, well, no, because traditional only offers chemo, surgery and radiation. And the integrative side offers all these other therapies and diet. And as a mom that wants to see her kids live a long life, like, why wouldn't I do anything and everything? And so for me, I didn't just do what traditional offered me.

10:15I did all the other things, too. but instead of doing chemo and radiation, that's where I'm still doing things to prevent recurrence. And my neurosurgeon said, like, I want you to get into ketosis. I want you to keep focusing on everything you're doing with your immune system. So no chemo, no radiation.

10:28Gary Brecka:And now post-surgery images are good. Yeah. Taylor's story raises questions that I think about constantly. She's a functional medicine practitioner. She was already eating clean. She was already doing all the things and she still had a plum-sized brain tumor growing right in her frontal lobe for years without a single symptom. How does that happen? What was building in the background that her immune system couldn't keep up with? The parasite she tested positive for. The toxic load she had been carrying since her time abroad. The drops in the bucket because that's how disease works. It's not overnight, not a single catastrophic event.

11:01Gary Brecka:Drops in a bucket, slowly accumulating until the immune system cannot hold everything at bay simultaneously and something slips through. Dr. Will Cole has spent 15 years treating the patients who are exactly where Taylor was in those early years before the diagnosis. People with brain fog, joint pain, crushing fatigue, mystery inflammatory markers that conventional labs do not catch. People who have been to every specialist and been told their labs are just fine. He knows what to look for and he's gonna tell you exactly how to find it. This phenomenon that you're explaining is something that I see on a daily basis.

11:35People that have things like brain fog, fatigue, digestive problems, anxiety. Joint pain, like global pain. Yeah, joint pain. what the world may call mystery illnesses, they're falling through the cracks. They'll be told from conventional doctors, well, it looks autoimmune, but they're not like checking all the boxes. There's somewhere on that autoimmune inflammation spectrum. And exactly what you're saying, where it's like, yeah, metabolic labs are pretty much okay. C-reactive protein, high sensitivity C-reactive protein looks normal. Homocysteine's sometimes suboptimal, but nothing crazy. These inflammation markers.

12:13That's what I mean. Conventional inflammation. But you're right. When you look at things like TGF beta one, C3A, C4A, MSH, these sort of other immunological labs that are conventional labs that aren't typically ran in the conventional setting, you will typically find for that subset of people, those labs will be off. And then when you start looking at biotoxins, it confirms those conventional labs in my mind. It confirms things like mold and bacteria and viruses. And almost 100%, I don't know if you found this, but almost 100 % of these people that check all these boxes, what the world would call mystery illnesses, have these HLA gene variants.

12:52Yes. Like they're all, which for people that don't know, that's human leukocyte antigens. It makes your body more sensitive, if you will, to these biotoxins like bacteria, viruses, and mold. So whereas mold is everywhere, bacteria and viruses humans have been with symbiotically for a long time but these people their immune system doesn't know how to calm down when they're exposed to these pathogens and then we could talk I think in my mind there's an environmental toxin component to it when you talk about glyphosate or forever chemicals I think there's something man made that is exacerbating these biotoxin sensitivity normally it's leaky gut syndrome Normally when you look, and I would say most of the research is being done, is there's some sort of breach of the intestinal lining.

13:42So undigested food proteins and bacterial endotoxins called lipopolysaccharides, these bacterial toxins in gram-negative bacteria, are passing through the gut lining because there's these proteins that govern gut lining permeability called a cludin and zonulin. Think of the Z in zonulin, this protein that protects the gut lining, the tight junctions of the gut, as a zipper. So if there's increased zonulin antibody activity, increased zonulin activity, you're going to have things breached, getting from the gut into the bloodstream. And that is at least part of it that researchers have looked at for the past 15 or 20 years or so as this event of what's happening as to why this molecular mimicry is happening.

14:24Because the immune system sees undigested food proteins, sees bacterial toxins, and says, what the heck? It's not actually saying what the heck, but I'm speaking for your immune system right now. And it is tagging the undigested food proteins with that flag for destruction, that antibody, and then cross-reacts because it's similar enough in structure. The thyroid is similar enough in structure that it's attacking the thyroid, but then it could be the joints, the gut, the brain, and for anything. So we have to look at what's destroying that gut lining. And these environmental toxins like glyphosate, when you talk about herbicides and pesticides, what it's doing to decimate this gut garden.

15:02Gary Brecka:Yeah. The gut microbiome, big part, microplastics. When they're finding it 90 % of human tissue. Yeah. And there's not a healthy amount of microplastics in the human body. Right. And we should not be like microdosing microplastics, but we are doing more than microdosing these plastics. Yeah, I heard on average, was it Dr. Gundry that I saw on the podcast? I heard on average, you know, about a credit card a week. Yeah. So remember mold, the context around this is mold is everywhere. right so we're joking about Miami it really can be any state I have patients in very dry arid place and it's not you know in Arizona for example it's not the desert that's necessarily moldy but it's they're piping they're plumbing within their home it's leaking behind the walls so the more humid a climate is the more obviously it's going to be you know conducive to growing more but don't count yourself out if you live in a dry arid place and they go I don't live in Florida I'm fine It really can be anywhere.

15:56It's just more likely to be in more humid areas. So how, and the other context is not all mold is toxic. So we have to understand what type of mold are we talking about? How much and how long have you been exposed to the mold? And then what's your bio-individual tolerance to that mold? That genetic epigenetic puzzle, right? So all these variables matter. Because I think one accusation that we can get in functional medicine is like fear mongering around something like mold. but it's people lose the context and the nuance. Like when I do a social media post, it's not a two hour consultation. So forgive me if I give you statistics about mold and realizing, yeah, I don't want everybody to be freaking out.

16:38But the reality is it is a piece of the puzzle. And when you talk to people for a living, it's something that's missed very often. So I wouldn't want to shut up. I just want to bring the awareness. Exactly, exactly. So to answer your question pointedly, just it's a blood test or a year and or a urine test. and I would say both are important because I want to look at the immune system's response to the pathogen, whether it's a mold, bacteria, or virus. And I want to look at if you can measure it, and a lot of these things you can, actually quantify the mycotoxins in the body. So looking at the immunological and the toxic burden of mold, and then these other man-made toxins that can be exacerbating it, and a lot of these like Epstein-Barr virus and other things that can be reactivated are because of these other toxins.

17:22because like the statistic is like somewhere like 90 some percent of people have epstein-barr virus antibodies right 90 of people don't have reactivated ebb so just because you have antibodies doesn't mean it's a reactivated yeah yeah there's igm and igg too so exactly i can see the difference

17:38Gary Brecka:between dormancy and but i see a lot of people they'll see like antibodies and then they'll automatically think it's a reactivated not necessarily but it can be and mold and man-made toxins can be something that's perpetuating these viral reactivations so that's where you would start and then I would look at the genetic component because you almost always, it's going to be this big aha moment. I'm like, oh, that's why I don't, I'm sensitive to mold, but my spouse isn't. Because there's a lot of like marital relationship gaslighting going on where it's like, they think they're a hypochondriac. Like the husband, not to generalize, but the husband typically is like, yeah, she's hypochondriac.

18:14She's just making it up. But you measure, you run his genetics, he doesn't have the same methylation and HLA gene variants. So you could be in the home and she's reacting very hypervigilant. Her immune system is very sensitive to it, but he's not, it's not healthy for the family. Our telehealth patients are typically that canary in the coal mine for our family because these things are carcinogenic. It's not healthy for anybody. So maybe the guy, it's just going to be this slow burner for decades and it's going to be fueling cancer over 15 years. But she's having problems right now and she's going to save his life by getting that mold remediated.

18:51So good. So, I mean, look, yeah, I mean, what we do, if they have access to these biohacks and tech devices and therapies, yes, let's give it to them. But it starts with some basic stuff, right? It starts with, let's clean up the gut. Let's lower inflammation levels in the body. Let's see how resilient you can be by just allowing your body to do what it was created for.

19:15Gary Brecka:Oh my gosh, amen. So it's like you, most people, yeah, like if we need to jump to hyperbaric, we will do that when we need to. But most Americans are not there. Like let's just see how much of a needle moving capacity with the free and low cost and accessible stuff. I totally agree with that. And then from there, then we live in such a blessed time where we do have access to technology that our grandparents, great grandparents, all the generations before us never had access to. So, but yeah, so I would start with really, if we're saying 75, 7 % of the immune systems in the gut, really focusing on gut health.

19:51So we do a lot of souping and stewing, like things that are really gentle, calming to the gut instead of lots of raw foods, being on very like a proverbial siesta for the gut. this sort of break, this reprieve, this Sabbath, where you can allow, when you're brothing and souping, like just think having hearty soups for meals. And they could be bone broth based with lots of good meats in them and pureed vegetables or some soft cooked vegetables. And then when they have fruit, I even cook the fruit down, have people cook the fruit down as sort of a compote, like inside of a pie, because these people, their immune system is stressed.