Innovative Approaches to Breast Cancer Recovery with Dr. Jenn Simmons

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi, and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, doctor Jessica Drummond, founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. Hi there. Today I have a very special guest for you, Doctor Jen Simmons. She was trained as a conventional oncologist and breast cancer surgeon, and she worked for nearly 20 years in that capacity before being diagnosed with cancer herself.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:34 Now she is innovating in technology, which is a very exciting breast cancer screening technology for people like me, with dense breasts and cute technology is a screening tool that combines the resolution power of MRI, ultrasound and mammography. So keep your eye out for this new technology coming to your part of the country or the world. In this episode, Doctor Simmons and I go deep into a conversation about how to help people who are either at risk for cancer, diagnosed with cancer, or had cancer, and have been through conventional recovery, but still don’t feel well to fully recover. This is such an important conversation because cancer doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a sign. It’s a symptom of immune dysregulation of metabolic dysregulation. And while we don’t want to completely throw conventional treatment out, and Doctor Simmons will point out some key situations where emergency aggressive treatment is important, But for the most part, using a holistic, integrative and client centered approach is a much better in many ways, strategy for helping women prevent, treat, and recover from breast cancer.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:13 And we talk specifically about the very important role of health coaches in integrative oncology. So tune in, listen to our conversation and I’ll see you on the other side. Hi and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, doctor Jessica Drummond, founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. And I’m here with doctor Jen Simmons. She is a breast cancer specialist. And today we’re going to talk about all things integrative oncology, specifically around breast cancer. So welcome, Doctor Simmons. Thank you, thank you.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:04:01 I’m so delighted to be here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:02 So tell us a bit about your story when it comes to your transition from more traditional, conventional oncology and why you shifted to a more integrative approach?

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:04:18 Yeah, absolutely. So I really don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t know about breast cancer. Breast cancer is really part of the thread, the tapestry of my family’s history. And when I was growing up, I had a first cousin. She was a singer songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:04:40 Her name was Linda Creed. She was beautiful, brilliant, larger than life. She was my hero. She wrote 54 hits and all, and her most famous song was The Greatest Love of All. So she wrote that song in 1977 as the title track to the movie The Greatest, starring Muhammad Ali, but it really received its acclaim in March of 1986, when Whitney Houston would release that song to the world, and at that time it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts. Only my cousin Linda would never know because she died of metastatic breast cancer just one month after Whitney released that song, and Linda was one of the many women in my family who died of breast cancer. And Linda’s life, and ultimately her death, gave birth to my life’s purpose because I really never wanted another woman, another family, another community to have to suffer the way that mine suffered. And so I did the only thing I knew how to do it became a doctor, the first doctor in my family.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:05:43 I became a surgeon and became the first fellowship trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia. And I really thought that I was making a difference in an impact in the world of breast cancer. And while at the top of my game, I went from arguably being one of the most energetic, high performing people that you could ever know to. I couldn’t walk across the room because I didn’t have the breath in my body, so it felt like I went from all to nothing in the matter of days. And I had this really intensive workup. And three days later, I found myself seated in the office of my friend and colleague and physician, and he told me that I needed surgery and chemo and radiation and that I would be on lifelong medication. And these were things that I said all day, every day, without hesitation or reservation to other people. But believe me, when those words are coming at you, they take on a whole new meaning. And the question that every single person asks when they get a diagnosis like this is why did it happen? And I had been asked this question thousands and thousands of times because at this point, we’re talking about 2016, like I had been in clinical practice a long time at that point.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:07:12 And the answer that I always gave, the answer that I was trained to give is that it was multifactorial. And there’s nothing that you could have done to change it, and there’s nothing that you can do to improve it. So like, rest your pretty little head and we’ll take it from here. Right? I mean, that is conventional medicine. You don’t have any power. There’s nothing you can do and you just need to follow this paradigm. But that answer wasn’t good enough for me. And so I don’t know why you can call it God. You can call it universe, you can call it whatever you want to call it. There was a voice inside of my head saying there’s something more. Go find it. And I walked out of the office. Against the advice of my friend and colleague, who told me the same thing that I had told other women, every time they ask this. They would ask, you know what will happen to me if I don’t treat my disease? And I would tell them that they were going to die of their disease.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:08:11 And that’s what my friend said to me. You’re going to die of your disease. And yet I couldn’t ignore the voice. I couldn’t ignore that instruction that I was getting, that I was downloading, saying, go find something else. So I was very, very fortunate that in the very beginning of this kind of journey towards enlightenment, I was sitting in the room, a lecture hall, because I was enrolled in a course and a man walks on the stage, this tall, lanky guy with this big toothy grin, and he introduces himself Self as a functional medicine physician. Now, at this point, I’m a doctor for about 20 years because between medical school and residency and fellowship and practice, like, you know, I’ve had those initials, those MD initials behind my name for a long time at this point. And all I can think of is there’s no such thing as a functional medicine physician. So what is this quack talking about? Right? And then I remember that I’m sick, and then I’m there for a reason.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:09:14 And I check my ego at the door, and I listen and tune in and thank God I did, because as it turns out, this quack is Mark Hyman.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:09:23 yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:09:24 And while he is more or less a household name, and certainly in our universe he’s a household name, but in 2016, like, not so much.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:09:34 Yeah for sure.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:09:35 And what he had to say would not only completely enlighten me, but it would also forecast not only how I was going to get well, but what I was going to do with the rest of my life, because what I realized on that day was that in conventional medicine, we are completely focused on the wrong thing in the area of cancer. We’re focused on the tumor, but the tumor is not the problem. The tumor is the symptom of the problem. And never once in all of my years of medicine did I actually think about why this was happening. But that’s the question that we have to ask. That’s the question that everyone needs to ask.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:10:21 Because symptom management is not healing, right? Symptom management is just taking people from one pain point to the next. Right. And most of the things that we do to manage the symptoms, and certainly in the area of breast cancer, that symptom management only brings up the next symptoms and the next symptoms are oftentimes worse.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:46 Interesting. Yeah, the side effects of the chemo and all of that. Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:10:51 Exactly. Like we’re trading in one disease state for many more. And in the instance of breast cancer, we’re often trading in it for heart disease, despite the fact that women die exponentially more of heart disease in every generation of their lives past the age of 30 than they do of breast cancer. So, quite frankly, for most women, including those women with breast cancer, the number one threat to them, number one threat to their life is heart disease. And we ought to be doing everything we can to protect and promote heart health. And yet all we’re focused on is that five year window, which is despicable in and of itself.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:11:39 But all we’re focused on is that five year window, like, get these women through five years we can say that we cured them of breast cancer. But the truth is that if we cure them of breast cancer. And I’m going to use air quotes because we’re not doing anything of the sort. But if we cure them of breast cancer and give them heart disease, did we help them at all?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:59 Right.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:12:00 Because I can make a big argument that, no, we did not. Yeah. You know, this ultimately should be about allowing women to live a normal life span, not to make them die from another bodily dysfunction.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:12:16 Yeah. So if I’m a woman who’s listening to this conversation and I’ve had breast cancer, had traditional breast cancer treatment, have maybe even made it through the five years, at this point, we’ll circle back and talk about what you have done. But now they’ve gone through treatment. What can they do now to optimize the health of their heart, their cardiovascular system, their cardiopulmonary system, Knowing that this is a very common side effect of the therapy for cancer.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:12:49 Their gut, their skin, their brains, their bones, their joints. Yeah. So I spent the last 18 months of my life telling the story of what these women should do. Because unfortunately, when you get a breast cancer diagnosis, the most abundant thing that’s happening right there is fear. Women are so afraid, they’re so scared. And so they’re kind of catapulted into treatment, like this conventional conveyer belt of surgery and chemo and radiation. And, you know, by the time they look up, they’ve already completed this and they’re like, okay, now what? Like nowhere along this cycle is anyone talking to them about their agency, about what they can do to promote their own health. And that is really the most important thing. And that should start on day one. My biggest objection to conventional medicine isn’t their approach. It’s that everyone gets a treatment plan and no one gets a health plan. But that’s the thing that everyone needs most, right? They need to learn how to eat in a way that’s nourishing for them.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:14:03 Because we’re all bio individual. They need to learn how to move their body, and that needs to happen every single day. They need to prioritize sleep. They need to avoid toxins. They need to detoxify even as they’re going through treatment.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:18 Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:14:19 And they need to live in a meaningful, purpose driven way because that is a huge predictor of how people do. And there are lots of nuances along the way. For instance, you know I’m not completely against chemotherapy in that I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I understand that there are some people in crisis, right? They have so much disease burden that they need a leg up. They need something to kind of facilitate. They need to get rid of some of their tumor burden. So it’s okay. But if you’re going to get chemotherapy, do it in a way that we know is the most beneficial in the least harmful. So every single chemotherapy center in the country, in the world should be talking about doing chemotherapy along with fasting.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:15:14 The fasting mimicking diet, which was made famous by Valter Longo, and the studies that happened at USC. This should be universal. And you interview Doctor Longo and he’s like, oh yeah, it’s happening everywhere. I’m telling you, it’s not happening everywhere that most of my patients and my patients are pretty well read on breast cancer. They don’t know about fasting. They don’t know about it because they’re not talking about it in the conventional medical circles. So I understand it’s not their job, right? And it’s not part of their training. But at this point, it’s like almost malpractice that it’s not part of their job and not part of their training. But this is what’s happening. So my main reason for writing the book was to help people who are just diagnosed, right? Because they need to be able to make informed decisions. And you cannot make informed decisions unless you have all the information which they’re not getting inside of the conventional medical system. They’re just not getting it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:16:19 Absolutely. So quickly, tell us the name of the book for those listening just on audio.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:16:24 It’s called The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer, and it’s available on Amazon. And then I wrote this book for the woman who has completed treatment, and I call it The Quiet After the storm. Right? When you’re diagnosed and in treatment, you’re here, you’re there, you’re busy, you have appointments, you’re doing this. It’s a very active time. It feels like a very active time. And then they have you ring that bell and they’re like, okay, you’re done, bye bye. And you’re like, wait, what just happened here? And what’s calling? I don’t have any appointments. I feel so helpless. Plus they’re left with all the side effects of treatment. So I wrote this book for them so that they could regain their health. I wrote this book for the woman who was treated five years ago, and she’s told that she should be so happy that she’s alive. Only she has brain fog. She’s anxious. She has. She has depression. She can’t sleep. She’s gained weight.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:17:23 She doesn’t know what this new tire is around her body. Her joints hurt. Her muscles hurt like everything hurts. Her bones hurt. She has dry skin, dry hair, brittle Fingernails and she has no libido. She’s struggling in her relationship. Right? All of these things are happening. She has bloating and food intolerance. All these things are happening. And she’s told that she’s happy to be alive. But it feels hard to feel happy and grateful about being alive when you feel like s***.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:17:57 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:17:58 And so I wrote this for them. And while we’re on that topic, I do feel like I should put out there that I am a firm believer that women who have been treated for breast cancer should have access to bioidentical hormone replacement, just like women who have not been treated for breast cancer have access because these people are people too, and they don’t deserve to suffer, certainly not unnecessarily, and not because most providers don’t understand or feel uncomfortable.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:36 Yeah, absolutely. So your personal story, you’ve been through medical school, you trained as an oncologist, you trained as a breast surgeon.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:45 You then were diagnosed with breast cancer yourself. And thyroid. Oh, thyroid cancer not breast cancer. Okay. So are a lot of these strategies very similar across cancers.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:18:59 Some of them are in that, you know when we talk about diet right. There’s no one diet that’s right for everyone. There’s no breast cancer diet. There’s no colon cancer diet. But I think all of us who work in this space agree that everyone should be on a whole food diet. No one should be consuming highly processed diet and should not regularly be consuming any processed food at all. But there are certainly Nuances like, we know, for colon cancer. A plant based diet is highly, highly preferred because they are so fiber dependent and they really need to be on a high fiber diet universally. Everyone needs to be on a low glycemic diet because sugar just is not good for anyone. And the things that spike blood sugar spike, insulin spike, insulin like growth factor and that is growth hormone, right. So we don’t want additional extra growth hormone in someone who has cancer.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:20:06 Now for some people like me, it’s forever because I know that if I don’t walk the line, I’m going to relax. And I shortened my story. I got a lot worse before I got better, but I did when I met Mark Hyman and like, all those bells went off for me. And I knew that functional medicine was absolutely the approach that I needed to take, and I needed to, you know, learn and study. And I immerse myself in the study of functional medicine. And I got my functional medicine certification and then knew that that was a bell that I couldn’t unring. And I walked away from surgery in 2019, which was a really, really, really major thing to do. I mean, you know, I kind of walked away at the height of my career and everyone thought I was crazy, or I lost my skills or I lost my mind or, you know, maybe all of those things. Yes. But the truth is that I didn’t want to be part of the problem anymore.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:21:11 I didn’t want to take people from one pain point to the next, like just trading it in. Right. So while I do still think that there’s a place for surgery, again, I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I know that there are people that can do that, right. There’s plenty of technicians out there, but people like me who are really knowledgeable in the cancer space and also really knowledgeable in the integrative space, those are few and far between. And I knew that if I was really going to make an impact, I needed to be in that space and teach as many people as I could and empower as many people as I could to have their own agency to take control of their health. Because as you and I know, health doesn’t happen in a medical oncology suite and a radiation oncology suite in an operating room and a hospital and a doctor’s office, health happens at home, and it happens with the things that you do every single day, the decisions that you make every single day.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:22:16 And I wanted to give people the power to make those decisions and to really take back control of their health. And I’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of times Over and over again since I made this shift. People who are remaking their lives in an amazing, beautiful way. And I mean, it’s probably more than that. It’s thousands and thousands of people because not just the people that I see one on one or in my groups, but the people that are listening to my podcast every week, the people that are reading my book, the people that are following me on social media. I know that I’ve had this tremendous footprint. And that’s really my goal, is to help people, to take control of their health and get to a better space.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:07 So if someone finds themselves in the shoes that you were in, you know, back almost ten years ago now they’re newly diagnosed with cancer and they have fortunately heard this podcast or your podcast or seen that integrative oncology exists. How does the process then look different? You know, what is the experience? Because as you said, there’s a little bit of a conveyor belt feeling to the standardized protocols of cancer care.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:44 And while some of those tools might still be valuable in any given person’s situation, how do you help people navigate that healing journey over time, which we know is going to take months to years because there’s a lot to unwind.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:24:02 Often there is, there is. So it first takes the right person because there’s a lot of people that still want what they perceive as the quick fix, right? Like, I want the pill, I want the procedure, I just want to get it done and over with. So it does take some patience. It takes the right person. It takes a lot of courage because there’s a lot of pressure to just do what the system wants you to do and do what the system tells you to do. So it does take a lot of courage, and oftentimes people have to go against what their family wants for them or what what their friends want for them. And so it definitely takes the right person. And the thing that I think is the most important is if you get a diagnosis, the first thing you should be doing is taking a pause.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:25:01 There is no urgency to breast cancer, with very rare exception. I’ll tell you the exceptions and I write about this. This is the opening of my book. If you have inflammatory breast cancer and if you have inflammatory breast cancer, you know, you have inflammatory breast cancer because you go from having essentially a normal breast to address that’s red, swollen, hot and filled with cancer in a month. Like it comes out of nowhere. So if you have inflammatory breast cancer, if you have metastatic breast cancer to your brain in that you have brain lesions. Yes. So if that’s the case, the brain is a fixed space. And when you have metastasis to the brain you do have swelling you know tissue swelling. And if it gets too swollen you cut off the blood supply to the brain. So that is not something that’s compatible with life. So that is an emergency if you have metastasis to your bones. So if you’ve breast cancer that spread to your bones and it’s caused a fracture not just metastasis to the bones, but it’s caused a fracture and you’re in pain and you’re suffering, it’s nearly impossible to heal while you’re in pain.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:26:17 So these are the three areas of emergency in breast cancer. So if you meet any of those three criteria, go straight into the conventional medical system because you need those quick fixes. You need chemotherapy, you need radiation to your brain. You need radiation to your bone. That is absolutely true. However, they are also an end in that do this and that. Right. So all of these people need these foundational pieces that functional medicine doctors put in place that integrative oncologists put in place. Right. Because at the same time, we’re trying to figure out your why. We’re trying to figure out what’s driving the disease. And this is the most important part, right? So if you have a breast cancer diagnosis, your proverbial sink is overflowing. So you can use a mop to mop up the floor. Right. You can use surgery, you can use chemotherapy, you can use hormonal therapy, you can use radiation, but you can’t mop up the floor for the rest of your life, right? If your sink is overflowing, you need to turn off the faucet.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:27:28 And that’s what functional medicine looks to do. That’s what integrative oncology looks to do. I don’t like the word integrative oncology so much because they think it’s like, go have chemotherapy and get acupuncture. That to me is not what it’s about. To me. It’s about if you need chemotherapy okay, I’m going to support you. But I’m also at the same time going to be asking, why do you have breast cancer, right. Did you have some horrible trauma in your past and that you couldn’t deal with that you couldn’t process that you are reliving that trauma again and again and again, and a part of you wants to die to escape the pain of that trauma. Are you in chronic pain? Because chronic pain, a lot of people, if you are suffering all the time, breast cancer is a way out. It’s true for people stuck in awful Full marriages and awful relationships. Breast cancer is a way out for them.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:28:25 Well, and we now know that pain is a trauma response as well. So, you know, as part of the underlying, say, contributors, if you will, pain could be a signal even more than a cause.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:28:43 Yeah, that’s absolutely true. So what happens with that is that we are always going to have some physical manifestation. Like if you don’t deal with whatever that emotional pain is, whatever the source of that emotional pain is, if you don’t deal with it, it will deal with you. Right? Like it will absolutely present itself in some way that can’t be ignored. So I’m looking for signs of that. I’m looking for sources of pain for people, but I’m also looking for things like micro infections and subclinical infections, you know, do you have a mold exposure? Do you have chronic viral illness? Do you have something? Do you have candida? Do you have something that is causing a constant state of inflammation in your body? And has it been there long enough that your immune system is so exhausted that it couldn’t deal with the cancer? Because the truth is that we all make cancer cells from the very young to the very old. Everyone in between. But an intact immune system should be able to recognize those cancer cells in their infancy and stop it from becoming a mass.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:29:59 But if your immune system is distracted by the fact that you have chronic viral illness or mold exposure, or you have, you know, significant mycotoxins or whatever it is, parasites, whatever it is, if that is hindering your immune system, it’s not going to be able to protect you. I think another thing that is so underappreciated that we’re not talking about enough is the effect of the environment on our breast health, that we are literally surrounded by thousands and thousands and thousands of chemicals that our bodies never knew before. So we’re living in this new world of toxicity that we’re not living on our grandmothers earth. We’re not even living on our mothers earth, like there is just a whole new level of toxicity out there that some people are really good at detoxifying, even these horrible environmental toxins. But some of us are not. And, you know, I’m one of those people that is not I’m just not good at detoxifying. And so the thyroid, the breast, these are the canaries in the coal mine because these are the organs that are very highly affected by environmental toxins, which is why we see so much disease and dysfunction in these organs, because they are literally like reservoirs for these toxins.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:28 Yeah. And this will probably continue to get worse as we have more climate change related infections, things like dengue fever now in the US, like things that we didn’t have to deal with in certain locations are increasing that. And as you say, the multitude of chemicals and the combinations of chemicals, even things, you know, that we don’t think about wearing microplastics and plastic Flip-Flops and our cosmetics and skincare and all of this kind of thing.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:31:57 That’s exactly right. Personal care products. Absolutely. But, you know, it’s so amazing to me that with all that’s out there and with all the people, no, I still see people walking around all the time drinking out of plastic bags. Yes. And like it amazes me that I go to health conferences. Yeah. And I see people drinking out of plastic bottles and it’s like bizarre to me. But it’s happening.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:22 Yeah. And I think the challenge with all of these things is that it’s so ubiquitous. Right? I mean, I’m completely agree with you.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:29 You go to a health conference, you see people, first of all in large indoor spaces, which is a crazy thing to do in this moment in time, but also like holding a cup that has a plastic top that has like a hot drink in it, drinking right out of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:32:47 Yeah. I mean, people think I’m crazy, but I bring my coffee mug with me everywhere. I bring my water bottles with me everywhere, like my metal water bottles. There was only one time in the recent past that I drank out of plastic water bottles, because I was literally in the desert, and there was literally not another choice. But you know, unless I’m absolutely, positively desperate, I can’t believe that it’s happening, but it’s happening all the time.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:17 Well, and I think what people are probably feeling at some level, because toxins are everywhere, you know, the world does feel a bit more overwhelming. And when you speak with, you know, I’ve been practicing in functional medicine since about 2006, and my colleagues in naturopathic medicine a decade before have always said, you know, our ability to help people heal has gotten more and more difficult because of the complexity of the environment over time.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:51 But I also think that part of it people check out a bit because it can feel so overwhelming to think about everything you wear, everything you eat, everything you, you know, put on your skin when it just exists as part of the norm. So if you’re helping your clients navigate this in a truly life or death situation in a lot of cases, or at least very severe debilitation and morbidity. How do you help them really kind of lean into making all of these changes without that actually adding more stress?

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:34:28 Yeah, it’s not that easy. But remember, most of my people are highly, highly motivated because there’s nothing like the fear around breast cancer to really motivate people to make significant changes. But that said, you know, I’ve also had a number of people who wouldn’t work with me because part of what I ask is that if you’re actively canceling, I don’t want you drinking alcohol, right? I mean, the American Cancer Society says that there is no safe amount of alcohol for women. Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:35:03 No. Absolutely not. So, you know, if you have someone who’s drinking a bottle of wine every night, which I have had plenty of those, and it’s probably. If not, I mean, of course, breast cancer is multifactorial and it’s not one thing, but a bottle of wine every night is certainly contributing to the disease day. And I’ve had people say to me like, I’m not giving up drinking, and I won’t work with them because I’m not giving up my reputation. Right. Like, I want to work with people who want to get better and who want my help, but they have to at least meet me halfway. Yeah, right. I try to meet them where they are, but they have to meet me where I am to for sure.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:46 And I think this is where health coaching is so valuable, because making these behavior changes when they are probably, you know, people don’t use alcohol to that level unless they’re soothing something, right? Like for sure, which could be even the stress of having breast cancer, all the traumas that contributed to the breast cancer, You know, everything we were talking about? Absolutely.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:11 So, you know, I think that’s why health coaches that specialize in integrative oncology, you know, collaboration. Yeah, I think can be really valuable members of the team.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:36:23 But I think the important part is that we continue to make positive changes, and we’re not making all of these changes overnight. So I generally work with people over a minimum of six months. Most of the people that I work with, I initially agree to work with them for a year minimum. And we’re not changing everything overnight. We’re changing one or maybe two things at a time, knowing that these things will build upon each other, and every good thing that you do will create more health in your life. So, for instance, if you have someone who’s not exercising at all and you say to them, can you walk for five minutes every day? Not like. Yeah. So they walk for five minutes every day. But what happens after they walk for five minutes? They’re like, I’m good. I’ll walk for ten.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:37:21 I’m good. I’ll walk for 20. And before you know it, these people are walking an hour every day. Right? So you go from someone who was doing nothing to now they’re walking for an hour every day. Well, that translates into a lot of health benefits, right? They’re lowering their blood sugar. They’re lowering their blood pressure. They’re lowering their insulin, their lowing, their hemoglobin, a onesie. All of these things are going to have a very positive impact on their health. And we know that breast cancer is a metabolic disease. It’s an environmental disease. And so if we’re helping these people to change their environment a little bit at a time, if we’re helping them to improve their metabolic health a little bit at a time. This makes a huge difference and I really believe that the body is capable of healing, but we need to put it in a position to do so. And that means helping people to get rid of the things that are interfering with their ability to heal, and making sure they have what they need to heal.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:38:27 And it’s somewhere in there that the magic happens.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:31 Absolutely. So to wrap up, if you were to sort of go back in time to a couple of years before you were diagnosed with cancer and you were to say like, okay, what do I wish that every oncologist would learn in school? What would that program look like?

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:38:53 Yeah, I think for me, probably the most important thing that I wish oncologists knew because most of our contact with the outside world is through what we eat and what we drink. And probably the biggest pet peeve for me is when my patient says to me, my medical oncologist said that what I eat doesn’t matter, and no matter what, don’t lose weight. And so they told me that I could eat pizza and ice cream. And in fact, they told me that I should drink boost or ensure because I shouldn’t lose weight during chemotherapy. And this drives me bananas.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:39:39 I can see why. I can see why. Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:39:42 So I wish that medical oncologist understood that cancer for the most part, there are some environmental cancers, right? Leukemias, lymphomas.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:39:55 These are environmental cancers, probably sarcomas or environmental cancers as well. But the endothelial cancers, the breast cancers, the colon cancers, the prostate cancers, the ovarian cancers, the uterine cancers. These are metabolic diseases, and we need to teach people how to be metabolically healthy. And if it hasn’t started before, they wound up in the medical oncologist office. It needs to start when they get there, because you have people at an amazing teachable moment. And I wish that most people, instead of seeing their cancer as a punishment, instead, if they were able to see it as an opportunity, an opportunity to reclaim health, to restore health, to restore wellness, we would be so much better off. And it should be happening in the OBGYN offices. It should be happening in the pediatrician’s offices, but if it’s not, it has to be happening in the medical oncology offices. Just has to.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:12 Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Doctor Simmons. Remind us again the name of your book.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:19 And where can people find you if they want to learn more about your programs or working with you?

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:41:24 Yeah, absolutely. So my book is called The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer. And you can find that anywhere that you find your books Amazon. And then my practice is called Real Health MD. So you can find us at Real Health md.com and learn about all of our programs and working with me. I am opening the first freestanding imaging center featuring QRT. It’s called Perfection Imaging. It’s in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and this imaging will screen for breast cancer without pain, compression or radiation. So this is a revolutionary new technique with 40 times the resolution of MRI. So it is actually in place to replace mammogram ultrasound and MRI for screening. So it’s really, really exciting technology. And you can find that at Perfection imaging.com. And this perfection has a cut in the middle. And then you can see me on all the social media outlets. I’m Doctor Jen Simmons. And my Jen has two ends.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:42:32 And if you like hearing my voice I have my own podcast. It’s called Keeping Abreast with Doctor Jan, and we put out a new episode every week to people who are looking to optimize their health.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:42:45 Excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, for sharing some really actionable tools and strategies that people can use if they find themselves in this position, or to prevent being in this position, and for Were the clinicians and coaches that listen to our podcast. Really new, insightful perspectives on building that multidisciplinary team for your clients with cancer. Thank you. Yeah.

Dr. Jenn Simmons 00:43:13 Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:23 If you’re a women’s health or wellness professional or a woman at risk for dealing with right now, cancer, any kind of cancer, but especially breast cancer, I hope you got a few key things out of this episode that are, I think, really important for us to think about as we expand access to good health care for all women. One I think the role of health coaching in integrative oncology cannot be overstated.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:53 So many things in our regular environment contribute to cancer and many other chronic diseases, and yet eliminating them all from our lives or changing all of our habits, can feel so overwhelming to people that it can stop them from actually getting the best possible care that they can. So there’s such an important role for health coaching, health coaching, communication skills in cancer care. And if you’re working in any other women’s health care perspective or professional perspective, such as if you’re a physical therapist, if you are a nutritionist, if you are an acupuncturist, use this conversation as a jumping off point to think about how can you make your practice even more integrative, even more innovative, and think in terms of new models of delivering care? Doctor Simmons shows us how she could go from that really traditional care delivery in her day to day practice to now building personalized programs. Longer term therapeutic relationships with her clients, either one on one or in groups, which sometimes is even more beneficial over time. Healing of these complex chronic illnesses doesn’t happen quickly, doesn’t happen overnight, doesn’t happen in three months.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:45:20 It happens over the course of collaborative and integrative therapeutic relationships. So how could you offer a bit more of that to your clients? And one other thing to think about, how can you simply help your clients start lightly lowering their toxic load? Switch out the water bottles. Switch out the plastic athleisure. Change some of their personal care products or cleaning products. Use air cleaners in their homes. There are so much that we can do to help people lower their risk of cancer that. I think everyone in women’s health need to be thinking about how they can support their clients to lower that toxic load and lower their cancer risk and improve recovery outcomes should their clients be diagnosed with cancer. Thanks so much for being here with me and my guest this week, and I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:46:47 Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.