Health & Fitness

In this interview, Dr. Nasha Winters, coauthor of “Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology,” reviews some of the benefits of this ancient herb in the modern world of oncology. Winters is herself a cancer survivor, so this topic is close to her heart.

“I'm coming on 30 years out of a death sentence, a terminal cancer diagnosis,” she says, “and still to this day get met with so much resistance to what I've learned for myself, and for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of other patients directly, as well as way more than that, indirectly, through the training of their physicians ...

My crazy controversy is that I focus more on the human organism and the health of that terrain versus the condition, the disease or the label that overlays that person.”

Mistletoe Has a 100-Year Oncological History

Mistletoe, a semi-parasitic plant that grows in the branches of trees all over the world, has been used as a herbal medicine for thousands of years for conditions such as epilepsy, spleen disorders, pain and rheumatic conditions.

Just over 100 years ago, in 1917, Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher with incredibly keen observation skills, noticed the mistletoe looks a lot like a tumor, and proposed it might have anticancer properties. Many vitalistic medical practices, such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy, for example, use the doctrine of signatures, which is what Steiner was suggesting.

“For instance, you look at a walnut and it kind of looks like a brain and we think, I wonder if that's any good for the brain? And sure enough, we find some significance in how it impacts the brain. Or things like lungwort. When you look at it, it looks like a lung and we've learned that this herbal medicine is very helpful for lung conditions,” Winters says.

A Swiss doctor named Ita Wegman applied Steiner’s observation of mistletoe to see how it would impact a patient with cancer, and the plant has since enjoyed over 100 years of consistent application in oncology, both standalone and as adjuvant support.

“Interestingly enough ... Steiner understood that you needed to harvest different components of the plant — berries that bloom in the winter, which is very abnormal, and the leaves that grow in the summer ... and grow inward.

It has a very interesting behavior compared to other plants, and that was an observation of how cancer works as well. It goes against the rhythm. It grows out of sync with the organism. That is very much what he recognized.

And as such, he harvested the plant and aspects of the plant at different times, blended it, and then took a particular extract from it. He also noted that it needed to be injected, because you need to remember, 100 years ago we didn't know about lectins, we didn't know about viscotoxins, yet somehow, he understood that you needed to inject it to get the anticancer benefit.

You could take the full tincture. You could take it in other ways, and it has a lot of other medicinal impacts, but then it doesn't have the anticancer impacts, the reason being, we've learned — or at least we suspect, because we're still learning — is that those lectins and things get broken down in our GI tract and they don't get into the bloodstream; they don't access the immune system in the way they need to ...”

Mistletoe Can Be Used as an Adjunct for All Cancers

According to Winters, mistletoe is likely to be useful as an adjunct therapy for all cancers, and she, along with several other doctors, has been training physicians on how to use mistletoe for several years now.

“One of our physicians has been using mistletoe for 45 years in his practice, and what we've seen clinically, and what the research suggests, is that this therapy, it has always been about using it with others. It plays very well with others.

It was never really developed to be a standalone therapy, though believe me, we've seen impact with that as well. And it has virtually no contraindications with any of our standard of care therapies. So, we can literally inject this into a patient the morning before they go into a surgery, or they can start on this therapy the very day they're going to start a round of chemotherapy or radiation.

It bypasses first phase detox pathways of the liver, so it doesn't interact, intervene, speed up or slow down detox processes that could otherwise cause some adverse events, or change the desired effect of a certain medication, herbal intervention or dietary intervention.”

Mistletoe Is a Key Cancer Treatment Adjunct

In fact, mistletoe has been shown to enhance other interventions. Even the most toxic treatments seemingly work better and with fewer adverse effects when combined with mistletoe.

“This should be utilized, in my personal opinion, with every patient going through a standard of care approach to just enhance their experience with treatment,” she says.

“There are a lot of things that we kind of have to be careful with ... but mistletoe, in my experience, and that of my colleagues, is that this is probably the least harmful and least contraindicated substance and therapy I've ever had the privilege of working with. It’s pretty extraordinary and rare to find something that is this applicable to the masses ...

As I said, it has over 100 years of continuous use, and has over 250 very good randomized studies ... It just completed a Phase 1 clinical trial at John's Hopkins in the United States as an IV application for solid tumors, and is getting ready to be moved into a Phase 2 clinical trial.

It is the most studied integrative oncology therapy in the world, and it is utilized in upwards of 60% to 80% of all cancer patients in Europe. In parts of South and Central America, all over Southeast Asia and India, in different parts of Europe, this is just part of their medical system ... It's just in the United States where we have a little bit of resistance to embracing it into our conventional medical system ...

As a naturopathic physician who's been practicing integrative oncology for some time and who has teachers, mentors, colleagues from all over the world, some of the most powerful anticancer therapies I've seen that are beneficial even to the standard of care model of treatment — things like artesunate, curcumin, quercetin, green tea extract, all of those in intravenous forms — have been taken out of our ability to use here in the United States.

Do my colleagues still find workarounds to get access to these very important medicines? Absolutely they do, but they have to tread very carefully and very lightly. But again, you go north of the border or south of the border and you have no problem accessing these therapies. Or go to Europe — and this is what I've been doing for the last two years.

These treatments that we've had great success with have been plucked out of our ability to access easily, readily, legally, so we're now having to send our patients abroad for them to actually get good cancer care.

That's what's really devastating to me. So, another part of my purpose and mission is to build an in-house residential research institute and integrative cancer hospital right here on our soil so we don't lose access and patients don't lose access [to helpful remedies].”

Arizona Research Facility

Winters is currently building that research institute in Arizona, which will be funded entirely by private donations and research grants. Thousands of patients are anxiously waiting for the doors to open. When asked if she isn’t worried our pro-pharma agencies might shut them down, she replies:

“We will be doing all of our due diligence to let people know that these are not FDA approved therapies, that people are coming into a research environment. They're either paying cash or they're getting grants based on their financial ability to help them cover this care.

We're doing it in a pretty open-minded medical state; Arizona has one of the broadest scopes of practice in the country. And we're also very close to our southern border with Mexico, so that if we do come up against someone shutting down one of our therapies for a bit, we are able to take our patients across the border to a little sister clinic to keep the continuity of care.

We don't anticipate that happening because people are coming as a buyer beware. They're coming being well-informed about who we are and what we're about. And frankly, we get thousands of inquiries a month from all over the world looking for this approach. The patients will drive this home.

It’s a mighty David versus Goliath story, especially now, but I also think the time is now because we have these acts, like the Right to Try Act, and because we do have more and more patients facing this diagnosis with grim outcomes.

And, a study that came out in the last year that looked at 17 years’ worth of conventional cancer treatments found that, overall, of the 96 different drugs they looked at, the average survival rate was 2.4 months. That is the reality and this is what's driving the clinical oncologists from around the world to sign up and take my course ...

So, there is this massive kind of underground movement that's starting to sprout and come above ground. That's happening. And frankly, mistletoe is one of the vehicles for that to happen ... Instead of trying to fix the model, we're just creating a new one.”

Another potential “back door” is to convince insurance companies that this is in their best interest. Mistletoe is a natural remedy and therefore cannot be patented, so there’s no incentive for the drug companies to pursue it. But insurance companies may support its use once they realize how much money they can save on hospitalizations, drug coverage and everything else.

Mistletoe Modulates Immune Function

Your immune system and metabolic function are both integral parts of addressing cancer, and mistletoe works on both. It’s important to recognize, however, that it’s not a magic bullet. If you’re eating a standard American diet and are metabolically dysfunctional, mistletoe is not going to be as effective as for someone who is also eating a healthy whole food diet and supporting their health in other ways.

That said, mistletoe is an immunomodulator. Immune therapies are all the rage right now, with a majority of research dollars being funneled into them. Yet the effectiveness rate for these therapies is less than 20%. In other words, they’re hardly a cure.

“A lot of folks have heard of Jimmy Carter's melanoma story that had metastasized to his brain. He took this immune drug, Keytruda. That's a checkpoint inhibitor. The most common drugs you'll hear about are things like Opdivo, Keytruda, PD-1, PDL1 inhibitors, those are checkpoint inhibitors, or CTLA-4 inhibitors, also a type of checkpoint inhibitor.

These are drugs that kind of pull the breaks off your immune system to go hog wild in treating the cancer. Now that seems like a great idea — unless you have underlying metabolic dysfunction, right? Hello! And then, if you have an underlying autoimmune condition, you are also someone who's likely going to have a not so positive response to these medications.

What I love about mistletoe is it comes in and it modulates that teeter-totter. It doesn't take the breaks off and make it go hog wild, and it doesn't suppress. It’s ... kind of adaptogenic in some ways. So, it behaves a little bit like a smart drug, in that it can sort of match itself to the individual.

It is not a protocol, it's a patient-driven process in that we look at the person's gender, we look at the tumor type, the tumor stage, the general condition of the patient, and then we consider the most appropriate host tree. The most common are the pine, the fir, and the apple tree hosts. Mistletoe [from these trees] tends to have the highest lectin content that have the highest anti-cancer content.

Then we look at the dosing frequency, and if we're going to do it subcutaneous, intravenous, intratumoral, intraperitoneal, et cetera, depending on where you live in the world and how we're going to pair it with other therapies, if at all. So, it is based totally on the individual and the individual's response.

We want the patient to have a little local reaction if they're injecting it. We want it to get a little redness, irritation and itchiness and maybe tenderness. We want it to raise the body's temperature a little bit ... The point is, we want to create this cytokine release at a very low-grade level. Whereas when we bring on an immune drug like Keytruda, it creates a cytokine release at an explosive level that can sometimes be fatal for patients.”

Other Mechanisms of Action and Synergies

Similar to drugs, mistletoe also has a systemic effect. It doesn’t target a specific receptor site. Instead, it’s a systemic terrain-centric approach. In its mechanisms of action, it's engaging with B-cells, T-cells, natural killer (NK) cells.

It will basically calm those that are acting overzealous, to prevent an excessive immune reaction, and activate those that are dormant or underperforming. Mistletoe also reduces inflammation, lowering your levels of C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, homocysteine, liver enzymes and more.

It also lowers vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which can be important for certain cancers, and it lowers blood sugar and insulin. Winters also suspects mistletoe may be upregulating both the endorphin and the endocannabinoid system, so you’re getting stress modulation as well.

“So, it’s hitting all of what we call ‘The Terrain 10,’ from my previous book, ‘The Metabolic Approach to Cancer.’ I find that mistletoe tends to hit every one of those ... including epigenetic expression ... clean up of DNA.

We use it for people who've gone through radiation. We'll use it as a DNA stabilizer. We'll use it if people have taken a course of Cipro [and other fluoroquinolones] to help clean up the metabolic mayhem, the DNA damage that they cause. We know that it has some impact on insulin and IGF-1.

In our book, we have hundreds of references to all of the different mechanisms of action. My colleague, Dr. Paul Faust, [has written] a beautiful chapter on its direct impact on the immune system and all the nuances of that.

That chapter alone will illuminate for so many people why this therapeutic support and this therapeutic intervention is so helpful for the cancer patient, for prevention of cancer, for cleanup after cancer treatment ...

And the synergy, when you pair mistletoe with hyperthermia, like so many of my colleagues in Europe have been doing for the past 50 years, talk about the biggest bang for your buck. We see some pretty extraordinary outcomes.

I've had patients go to Europe with Stage 4 [cancer], metastatic disease everywhere, getting IV mistletoe along with local, regional and whole body high-heat hyperthermia that have put their cancer into complete remission in many cases, but at the very least, turning it back into a manageable disease process, and even more interesting, increasing the responsivity to other therapies again.”

More Information

The good news is the number of doctors trained in this therapy is growing, and the treatment itself is only between $200 and $300 a month, so it’s highly affordable while also being highly effective. I think it would be beyond irrational not to integrate this into any cancer therapy you're considering.

Again, for cancer, oral supplementation is ineffective, as the lectins responsible for the anticancer effects are broken down in your GI tract and therefore can’t enter your bloodstream.

The Physicians' Association for Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM) sponsors Winters’ mistletoe trainings. While most are held in person, there’s now also a course available online for licensed physicians. There are plans to take a group of physicians to Europe for immersive in-hospital training in the fall of 2023. Here’s a list of resources where you can find more information:

Last but certainly not least, you’ll want to pick up a copy of “Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology.” It’s an excellent book.

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This article was previously published October 6, 2019, and has been updated with new information.

Travis Christofferson — who has a premedical undergraduate degree and a master's degree in materials engineering and science — has written two excellent books about health. The first one, "Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms," helped me understand the profound influence of diet in cancer.

Here, we discuss his latest book, "Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform Our Health Care System," which addresses questions such as: "What has happened to American health care?" and "What are the foundational disruptions or corruptions in the system?"

His book, in some ways, is based on the theory promoted in the book and subsequent film, "Moneyball." It describes how you can use statistics to massively improve a flawed system. Christofferson explains:

"I'd been invited to speak at a small charity event in London. The speaker who went right after me was Dr. Ndabezinhle Mazibuko. He was at this startup clinic called Care Oncology in the U.K.

The idea behind this clinic was that there are drugs that have gone off patent that have [other uses], but they're unrealized. They're undervalued in the system. One of these drugs is metformin in the use for cancer.

There's this vast body of data to suggest it can improve cancer outcomes, but there's no good mechanism to get this on the prescription pads of doctors. It just doesn't happen. There's a flaw in the system.

To address this flaw or this underappreciated argument, they opened this clinic and then prescribed a combination of four drugs that showed they had synergy, very few side effects and the best chance to [improve] outcomes. The cost of the drugs is about $60 per month …

I agreed to open a clinic in the U.S. to help them start in the U.S. I opened it up in my small town, Rapid City. We started doing telemedicine as well to address the rest of the country. I arranged the time to speak at our local cancer center, to present what we were doing to the local oncologists.

My hope was that they would see the value in it and refer patients to us, especially patients with dire cancers, like glioblastoma, where there are few good treatment options. This is such a low-risk intervention that it had a good potential to help …

Immediately when I was done … one of the oncologists just lit into me. He accused us of taking advantage of desperate patients. Then he brought up, ‘Why would you prescribe a medication for Type 2 diabetes for cancer?' Another oncologist in the room in the corner said, ‘Well, I do that.'

What struck me in that moment is you can have these medical doctors in the same room that have a profound disagreement on data that we have just gone through. If this is the case, what are the inefficiencies in the health care system? That was the original spark for the book."

Identifying the Inefficiencies Within the System

Michael Lewis' book, "Moneyball," showed how, within a simple game of baseball, you can have massive inefficiencies. By taking away the human biases and just applying statistics to find what is undervalued in that market, you can massively boost the performance of a team (in the book, it was the Oakland A's, which had a tiny budget).

"In health care, we have a massive disparity in valuation — how we value treatments," Christofferson says.

"As I said, metformin has got massive repositories of data to suggest you can ward off not only cancer but a plethora of chronic disease, but it's the price of a nickel a pill and very rarely gets prescribed for these other indications … [‘Curable'] is an examination of these huge disparities in health care and why it's gotten so out of control in the U.S."

The health care system is the largest industry in the United States. It has an annual revenue of $3 trillion. So, there's a financial motivation to capitalize on expensive treatments, even if they don't work well, and that's a significant part of the problem. Price gouging is another related problem. Overtreatment and plain fraud are yet others.

Christofferson suspects these issues may account for half of all health care costs. One answer is to focus more on undervalued treatments and low-cost prevention — both of which could help prevent cost escalation. In his book, Christofferson recounts a number of stories demonstrating this.

Drug-Free Treatments Save Money

One such example is Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania. For Type 2 diabetes, they introduced the Fresh Food Farmacy. In a nutshell, patients with prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes are given a prescription for fresh, whole foods. Patients are allowed two free meals a day and recipes, along with intensive care and educational support.

As a result of this program, Gelsinger Health was able to reduce its per-year outlays and cost for Type 2 diabetics by a whopping 80%. "It only cost them $2,600 a year," Christofferson says.

"What interests me about that is they didn't leave out the human component. They made sure that the patients' families [were] engaged. They gave free food to the families so they can all cook together. Pretty soon, when people have this level of engagement and feel like they're part of a system, they start asking questions.

‘What else can I do? Can I exercise? How do I stop smoking?' Not only is it changing their health status, but it's changing the way their families view health and what they do about it. To me, there are these wonderful examples of places, these pockets that are doing extraordinarily good work.

The other one I focused on is Intermountain Health Care which, shockingly, if you … extrapolated their system to the rest of the U.S., we would see a 40% reduction in health care costs immediately."

The Overwhelming Power of Incentives

Another fundamental issue that really needs to be addressed is the physicians. Most medical students pursue medicine for the right reasons. But then they get brainwashed into a single-minded focus on drugs and surgical intervention, and aren't given the education and tools to address the actual roots of disease.

What's more, once they're done with their schooling, they're a few hundred thousand dollars in debt, which they need to pay off. And then they go into a health care system where they're given just 10 to 15 minutes with each patient. It's a system that is designed to fail right out of the gate.

"As I wrote this book, what I kept coming back to was the overwhelming power of incentives," Christofferson says. "Our system is so flawed with regard to incentives. The biggest offender of that, by far, is the fee-for-service system, where we demand our doctors get paid for every test and procedure that they do.

This creates a terrible incentive for them so that they have to think like businessmen … If there's a marginal procedure and you have a financial incentive to do it, perhaps you're going to do it. This leads to overtreatment.

There's a brilliant example of that in the book. This was actually done by Atul Gawande. He wrote about this in The New Yorker. McAllen, Texas, had two times the Medicare utilization compared to the national averages — $15,000 per person.

And it wasn't specific to that demographic region, because if you went to El Paso, up the border, it's the same demographics, but it was half the cost there. He flew down there to ask why. What had happened was the doctors had just developed this entrepreneurial culture where they almost competed with each other financially …

Really, their focus was money. Just putting a pen to paper and writing that article had a sterilizing effect. Suddenly, the regulators came in. They looked at all the fraud that was going on. There was, I think, $20 million fines levied. The overutilization started to drop …

When you look at the high-quality providers, like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, they put their physicians on a salary. The marketplace will reward that behavior because now you can see the data … [At] the Mayo Clinic … if they don't need surgery, they won't get one. The doctor has no financial incentive to operate.

So, the incentive structure is entirely backwards. That's the underlying theme of this book. We really have to take a look at human incentives and what drives human beings; how they make mistakes. We can design systems around that to do better."

The Success of Intermountain Health

Intermountain Health, for example, places their doctors on salary, and gives them bonuses based on health outcomes. They also assess the differences between treatments to see which works best.

For example, they discovered that inducing delivery in pregnant women led to more babies being born with respiratory problems. Guidelines for inducing labor were entered into the electronic medical record, which led to a drop in early inductions from 30% to less than 2%. This resulted in babies born with fewer respiratory problems.

Another example: Patients are always given antibiotics before surgery, but it's never been established when the optimal time to administer the drugs is. Intermountain compared medical records, finding the optimal time was two hours before surgery, which cut their surgical infection rate by over half.

The History of Medicine

Christofferson's book also addresses some of the history of medicine, and the advent of controlled clinical trials. Historically, the practice of medicine was largely dependent on the doctor's experience and personal ideas.

"Hippocrates said that a physician's judgment matters more than any external measurement. This really guided medicine in the beginning, in the 1700 or 1800s," Christofferson says.

"I was shocked to learn that the first well-conducted trial was in the ‘40s … That's how far [medical science] lagged behind. And then all of a sudden, it kind of exploded because they shifted the patent structure to where over-the-counter drugs were separated from patented drugs.

This launched pharmaceutical companies into a for-profit venture. They took over the randomized control trials … That was the gold standard to determine if a therapy was good, if it was going to be approved by the regulatory bodies in the world.

Today … the pendulum has almost swung too far to where you have to have this randomized control trial and Food and Drug Administration approval for a therapy to be good."

Novel Science That Might Extend Life Span

In the interview, we also discuss a few side tangents, such as cellular reprogramming therapies under investigation. David Sinclair, Ph.D., refers to the use of what's known as Yamanaka transcription factors, which can be used to reedit your genome to reset the epigenetic clock and the DNA methylation. As explained by Christofferson, who has looked into this research:

"I'm completely fascinated by it. I think it's not known as widely as it could be. Longevity science is focused on caloric restriction. That's the reliable way to extend mammalian lifespans … Epigenetic rejuvenation is outside of that …

When you think about humans, about all life for that matter, we are essentially immortal in the fact that we take our aged germ line cells and we recombine them through the process of fertilization to create a new life. That life is biological age zero when it comes into being.

How does that happen? The way that happens is it takes 23 chromosomes from the mom, 23 from the dad. There's a process in the egg that wipes off the processing of the software. The software in the genome is the epigenome. There's molecular tags on our DNA that are wiped clean and new ones are put on. This kicks off the process of embryogenesis.

In the process, it resets the aging clock. Now we're starting to learn that you can do this, you can take a cell … and put it in a Petri dish, add these factors — there are four factors involved in this process — and you will reset the epigenome back to age zero … Potentially, now it's a therapy. You can inject this back into them."

The Influence of Lifestyle and Social Connection

Christofferson also points out science showing that inherited genetics account for a rather small portion of our health and longevity potential — about 20%. The remaining 80% is predicated on environmental variables, factors such as toxic exposures, certainly, but also love and interpersonal relationships.

"All of these things we experience day to day have an impact … Our epigenome changes the way genes are expressed. This has a massive impact on our health.

We know this because of identical twin studies … When you track them over time, their destinies are very different. They very rarely die of the same diseases. This nurture aspect, this 80%, that's the part we have control over …

I looked at that in the book. What misconceptions do we have under these kinds of medical biases? What are our misconceptions as individuals about our own health? … What are the most important factors to stay healthy and live a long life?

We always think of diet, exercise and genetics … [but] the biggest factor is your social life and how engaged you are in the world — the number of close friends you have, social integration. How many people have you talked to throughout the day? Did you say hi to the mailman? Did you talk or chat with people at the gym? That's got a massive influence on your immune system.

When you're lonely, you have this sort of corrosive inflammatory response. But when you're not lonely, your immune system has a more targeted response. Inflammation, as we know, is the root cause of so many cardiovascular disease, cancer and so many chronic diseases.

That's kind of why these blue zones get so much attention. That's the constant variable … People are connected and they're surrounded by each other all the time. [The blue zones] is where you have … 10 times the number of centenarians than you do in North America."

Indeed, epigenetic programming, which is dependent on environmental factors, far outweigh the influence of your genetics, and it does this in a very specific way. It's usually through transcription factors that either methylate the DNA (put small one-carbon molecules on the DNA), which essentially silences that specific genome, or they acetylate it, which activates those genes.

Depending on the combination of shutting off and turning on of genes, you get the expression of the genome. So, it's not what you've inherited, but your expression of the genome that's so important, and this is really how these lifestyle factors influence your genes.

"The good news about the epigenome is it's able to be manipulated," Christofferson says. "We can change it, from lifestyle factors all the way to these Yamanaka factors that kind of reset it back to a younger age."

More Information

In short, the fact that epigenetic factors control so much of your health and longevity potential is powerful motivation to make simple, inexpensive lifestyle changes. Basics include sleeping well, choosing the right foods, choosing when not to eat (time-restriction eating), exercising, getting plenty of sunshine, and addressing loneliness and stress.

These are simple basics that pretty much everyone could apply to radically improve their health and avoid the medical care system, which is fraught with hazards. While medical mistakes are a leading cause of death in the U.S., the greatest hazard is the fact that so many doctors fail to understand what the foundational cause of disease is.

By failing to address the root of disease, they are causing premature death and needless pain and suffering in a majority of the population. As noted by Christofferson:

"The numbers are scary. I think it's 200,000 die every year from medical error. I learned that 7,000 people die from sloppy physician handwriting. If you're in the hospital for four weeks, you have about a coin-flip chance of developing C. diff, which is a horrible, horrible intestinal infection.

Anytime you can stay out of that system, [you avoid] not just the financial but the very real health risks. We didn't even touch on the overtreatment and cancer that is so rampant …

We've had such a focus on early detection for cancer. We've gotten much better at it. However, that hasn't changed the death rates at all. But it's led to an incredible amount of overtreatment, unnecessary treatment, because most of these tumors are not dangerous at that point.

If you are diagnosed with prostate cancer from a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, you're 47 times more likely to receive damaging treatment — chemotherapy, surgery or radiation — than you are to have your life extended …

My editor said something to me while I was writing the book that I thought was beautiful. You can be your own culture of one when it comes to health. Just do these very simple things … and just being with other people. That, in and of itself, is health care."

To learn more, I highly recommend picking up a copy of "Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform Our Health Care System." I really enjoy the way he tells the story and makes it a very readable book.

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He always knew he'd be a world champion, achieving that goal during a history-making bout in the US last year. Now the fighter has returned to home soil for another epic match. Today, a week out from his first world title defence, Kambosos speaks with Body+Soul about his journey and the lessons he’s learnt along the way.

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