Den Stacey
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Hi, Drew. I hope this email finds you well. My name is Dan Stacey, and I have an incredible and inspiring story to share with you. In October, 2022, I was diagnosed with stage four pulmonary artery intimal sarcoma with a metastatic growth in my right lung. Despite the grim prognosis, I chose not to undergo chemotherapy or radiation and instead delved into the science of Dr. Thomas Seyfried.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
With the guidance of an amazing team of mentors turned friends, I constructed a human scale press pulse protocol inspired by Dr. Seyfried's groundbreaking research, which initially was conducted on mice. Remarkably, what seemed like an insurmountable battle against cancer has taken an extraordinary turn. In my recent PET CT scan, they found no traces of cancer in my body. Yes, you read that right.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
I'm currently cancer free. During many previous podcasts, Dr. Seyfried has mentioned the value of people hearing from someone who has put his science into action. Well, that person is me. I have comprehensive PET CT scans and other records documenting my entire journey, undeniable proof of the effectiveness of this approach. You are more than welcome to review them all.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Until now, I've chosen to keep the specific details of my day-to-day quasi-private, hesitating to share my protocol or its success publicly before achieving this momentous milestone. But now I believe it's time to spread the word. Drew, I would be honored to have a conversation with you and share my experience with Dr. Seyfried Science and the HRF team.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Let's discuss how it works, the challenges I faced, and the incredible difference it made in my life.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, I think that the easiest way without getting into the weeds at all, which these guys are much more qualified to do in a much more articulate way, is just to understand that what we now understand is that cancer has two fundamental fuel sources. Cancer ferments glucose and glutamine.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And so just about anybody of any age, if you tell them this fact and say, well, what do you think we should do about it? Most of them will immediately say, well, why don't we take away those fuel sources? Everything that a cancer cell has to do makes cell membranes divide, spread. Everything that happens is entirely dependent on access to its fuel source.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Energy metabolism drives every other part of that. And so number one, you have to inhibit these two fuel sources. What are they? Well, they're glucose and they're glutamine.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So the first part of the protocol is figuring out exactly how far you've got to lower glucose and exactly how often and how far you've got to limit glutamine to take away the two fuels that drive cancer, growth, spread, metastasis, and everything that it wants to do every day.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah. And to add to that, as Daniel's pointing out, by very carefully and meticulously measuring fat grams, protein grams, and carb grams, you can use food as a drug to manipulate metabolism such that your blood glucose drops into a therapeutic range, which is 55 to 65 MGDL. But with glutamine, as you're pointing out, it's this very important thing. It's used in 121 processes in the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Your immune system relies on it, which is a very important part of healing from cancer. Your gut biome and your GI tract rely on it. So it's not something that you can day after day, hour after hour inhibit. This is where the name Press Pulse comes from. We press on cancer by limiting access to glucose, and we do that in a sustained way, creating metabolic stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And then we pulse in instances where at specific times and in specific ways and in combination with other parts of the protocol, like HPOD and the use of other substrates, we inhibit glutamine just for a few hours using whatever method we do. In my case, it was a drug called Dawn, and that allows you to safely remove glutamine from the equation for just long enough to create a problem for cancer.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
For as long as it takes.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
That's right. And I mean, when you're really getting into it and you're really trying to find your stride, I mean, sometimes you're going through eight test strips a day. You're trying everything you can to really get a handle on how your body is responding and what you're doing and whether this type of food is having an impact on blood glucose.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So eventually near the end, yeah, you can get away with one or two. But I was testing quite a bit. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, it's a funny story. It's a micro stressor. Your blood glucose goes up. Well, you know, Seyfried's protocol very specifically in that 2017 paper, it very specifically says, you know, stress reduction, mindfulness, meditation. These are things that you... You know, we know, Seyfried, this isn't just an afterthought add-in. It's critical.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
It turns out that stress causes your body to produce cortisol, the stress hormone. And cortisol drives something called gluconeogenesis, which is the manufacturing of new sugar, new glucose in your liver.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And so if you're not managing your stressors, that can be job stress or child stress or any manner of stressor, if you get even a little bug or a little cold, you'll notice, especially when you're in these very rarefied ranges of blood glucose in the therapeutic range, you'll notice these sudden changes.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And so Dr. Howard's actually referring to this very funny story where a friend of mine knew I was sort of at home, holed up, trying to heal, wasn't able to see people. And he thought he would be very helpful. Thank you very much, Jay. And went out and bought a PS5 so that we could play PS5 golf together. But it was a roo.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
He really wanted to play this game called Warzone, which is this very aggressive, high speed, high octane game. And so I agreed that I would play around with him. And at the end of a few hours of this game, I went from my blood glucose at 62 to blood glucose at 120, where it stayed for almost an entire day.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And this is just illustrative of the fact that external stresses drove blood glucose production in the liver just from a game. At these ranges where you're trying to maintain blood glucose, stress management is critical. So dealing with family stress, dealing with work colleague stress, dealing with child stress, dealing with anything that's going to upset that apple cart is critical.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Which is, I mean, it's phenomenally interesting. Not enough is said about HPOT in many different disease models, but in cancer, it's extraordinarily interesting.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Daniel was mentioning a scientist earlier, Dom D'Agostino, who did some phenomenal work on this and was able to show with a probing electron microscope inside a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, glioblastoma cells tearing themselves apart because of reactive oxygen species at I think 2.5 to 2.8 atmospheres absolute. When you get into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber... A hard chamber.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, the soft chambers are, you know, they're great for all kinds of things. You know, they have their own benefit and their own use. But for cancer, when we're telling people to get HBOT therapy in conjunction with a press pulse, we need the hard chambers because they can go to these depths. And...
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
While you're in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at depths above 2.2 to 2.8 atmospheres, what happens is reactive oxygen species act very much like radiation therapy does to tear up cancer cells. Radiation therapy is effectively knocking an electron off an oxygen molecule, and it's causing a dysregulated spin that flies around and tears up the cancer cell.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Well, you're doing the same thing with oxygen, but radiation isn't preferentially targeting a cancer cell. It's doing that to every cell in the immediate vicinity. What we found is that hyperbaric oxygen largely because the rest of the body has protection from the ketone bodies that are being burned in the cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
You get the same effect as radiation from reactive oxygen species generated in hyperbaric oxygen at those depths and pressures.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, Seafreed calls for going five days a week. It can be a little bit cost prohibitive. For me, I couldn't afford the time or the treasure to go five times a week, but we were able to figure out three times a week. And so for the entire duration of all the protocols, which we break up, we probably did four protocols in total over six months.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
For the entire time, we'd be going three days a week, making sure that... one of those days you've got your substrates on board, your blood glucose low, your dawn on board, and you're in hyperbarics. And that's a very powerful cancer killing moment.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
I guess one of the things I'd like to say is the whole team at Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, from the nurses, the physicians, everybody there was incredible. We developed a great bond with the whole team. They all worked tirelessly to try and do whatever they could to help me. BC Cancer has a huge facility right across the street from Jubilee Hospital and that team works collaboratively.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So I had an oncologist from there and an internist and a whole team of surgeons and everyone there was phenomenal. I can't say enough about them. I owe them literally my life and have developed some really great relationships with a lot of them. When it comes to the oncology side,
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
great oncologist, nice fellow, but like many oncologists, his hands were completely tied in that he's bound by law to recommend and administer standard of care. And so in the exploration of this as an alternative, he had to sort of bow out. But we were able to maintain a relationship. We were able to continue to communicate.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
They continue to provide scans even to this day to follow the progress of what I'm doing. More recently, they've actually taken the protocol, my data, the HRF case study, they've added it to the file. And we've begun to have very interesting conversations around what's possible. But it's very difficult.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And I think a lot of people watching who are in a similar situation that I was are going to have to figure out how to navigate their oncologist and the medical community, because this is not part of the standard of care. It's something that they can lose their license if they recommend.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Your team becomes people that are brave enough to put themselves out like HRF and Dr. Howard and Dr. Howard and Daniel. Of course, if you're as lucky as I am to have a wife like I do, who's incredibly gifted at the pragmatic organization of the things that it takes, that you have to do every day, the things you have to eat, the drugs you need to take, where you need to be.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And of course, all the family and friends that are going to be there to support you financially and emotionally. And it takes a whole village.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
This is the opposite.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
That's right.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Exactly, yeah. Yeah, we organized very quickly the first protocol. And when I say I did four protocols, I really mean there's the constant press of glucose inhibition, but we pulse these 21-day cycles of Dawn and hyperbarics very aggressively. And so each one of those we sort of count as a protocol.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So after the first 21 day protocol that was performed that December, December 2022, I went about three weeks later after I'd finished that to get a CT scan just to sort of follow up because we'd been kicking the can of chemotherapy and radiation down the road, not telling the oncology team, we're not going to do it, just saying maybe we'll do it later because
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
you can also get fired by your oncology team for making certain types of decisions. And that allowed us to continue to get the CT scans and the follow-ups and any help we might need.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And so we did one of those first follow-on scans and the result was that there was no reperfusion in the heart and the stage four metastasis that they saw in the lung and the metastasis that they were seeing in the lymph nodes had been reduced by 50%. And that's in four and a half or five weeks of glucose inhibition and DON administration with HBOT. That's pretty quick.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Oh, well, what's interesting about that, and it goes back to why you stack all of these things around HBOT, it does happen very quickly. We're talking about impugning energy viability in a cell. If you were to hold my head underwater, how many minutes would it take for me to die?
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
literally three or four, maybe depending on how long I can hold my breath, but very quickly because you've taken my cells ability to use oxygen as energy away. Well, this is how quickly your cancer will die when you're taking those fermentable fuel sources away in minutes.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And so two and a half hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber where you've turned off glutamine analysis and you've turned off access to glucose and you're further stressing this with Mabendazole or any of the other substrates you may be using is killing those cancers. And in the same way, when you pull my head out of the water, I'm not rescued suddenly by exposure to oxygen. So very quickly you can
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
devastate cancer, even in just the few hours that you're in hyperbaric oxygen. And so it was surprising then. Absolutely. I think we probably broke into tears in the car after the oncology. We were on our way to hyperbaric oxygen when the oncologist called us. But now we understand it can happen very quickly. You have to do it at an extraordinarily Olympic level.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
You have to be extremely consistent. You have to change everything. But when you do, it works like a hot damn.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
1921?