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May 17, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:20
4 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Cancer Risk: Dr. Paul Marik
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If you do an experiment, it should be reproducible.
And I think that's the most important qualifier of good science is because then it's likely to be true.
Dr. Paul Merrick is a pulmonary and critical care specialist and a founding member of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the FLCCC.
Intermittent fasting, which is the way the body was designed to eat for a while.
And then to starve for a while.
It's not a difficult concept.
The human body wasn't designed to snack and eat all the time.
And that has serious metabolic consequences with high insulin levels and insulin resistance.
He is the second most published critical care physician in the world and known for his revolutionary protocol for sepsis.
Dr. Merrick is also the author of Cancer Care, the role of repurposed drugs and metabolic interventions in treating cancer.
Vitamin D is effective in preventing cancer, but it's also very effective in the treatment of cancer.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Paul Merrick, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you, Jan.
It's always a pleasure.
Since we spoke last on camera, I've implemented intermittent fasting in my diet, and it's made huge, huge changes to, frankly, a whole lot of things along the vein of what you told me about.
One thing that I didn't fully realize was how valuable something like intermittent fasting can be in preventing cancer.
So why don't we start there?
This is what's been on your mind, cancer treatment in general and cancer prevention.
Yeah, so it's a good question.
We think obviously cancer is likely...
caused by multiple factors and we don't really understand all of it, but it seems like obesity insulin resistance plays a really important role in generating cancer, particularly insulin resistance.
Insulin is a stimulates cell growth and so part of the metabolic syndrome and diabetes is this problem of insulin resistance.
And the most effective way of dealing with insulin resistance, the metabolic syndrome, is really twofold.
First is intermittent fasting, which is the way the body was designed, to eat for a while and then to starve for a while.
It's not a difficult concept.
The human body wasn't designed to snack and eat all the time, which is what people seem to do.
And that has serious metabolic consequences with high insulin levels and insulin resistance.
The second is to eat real food, not highly processed food.
So Americans are addicted to highly processed foods, which really causes the blood sugar to spike.
These are foods that have very little nutrition.
They're not nutrient dense.
And then they are contaminated with all kinds of additives, preservatives and chemicals.
So I think it's getting back to more basics is the way our body was designed in our forefathers is that, you know, there wasn't a 7-Eleven up the road from the cave that we lived in.
So you ate when there was food, and when there was no food, you didn't eat.
And you ate natural food substances, not processed food.
And I think that goes a long way to dealing with insulin resistance.
So I think the key point here is that obesity, it's a spectrum.
Obesity, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance.
It creates this metabolic milieu which allows cells to replicate, you know, uncontrolled.
So I think it's one of the more important causes of cancer and then on top of that you add, you know, environmental toxins on top of that.
It creates the conditions, you know, likely conducive to develop cancer.
Well, in some cases, I guess, genetic predispositions.
Yes, so about five to eight percent of cancers, there's a genetic predisposition.
So sometimes it's a very clear-cut genetic.
Predisposition people with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene, people with familial polyposis, coli, or Lynch syndrome, these are specific genetic mutations.
But often it's more polygenic that there's a strong family history of cancer, but no specific gene or gene mutation.
But clearly genetics play an important role.
You said today on stage that half the people in the room Are likely to get cancer sometime in their lives?
Yes.
It's a frightening thought.
And so we know the incidence of cancer is going up.
The data from the American Cancer Association shows the last 10 years, the incidence has gone up 17%.
The mortality has gone up 5%.
And so a recent-ish paper showed which is most disturbing is Pre-COVID that there were about 18 different tumors in which the incidence was increasing predominantly in younger people.
So this is the scary part, you know, young people, people in their 30s and 40s developing very aggressive cancers.
This is pre-COVID.
Essentially, cancer is a disease of the elderly above 60 years old, just because of the cumulative effect of risk factors.
But it seems, you know, pre-COVID, there was a tendency towards younger people getting cancer.
Obviously, post-COVID, and particularly post the COVID jabs, there's been a further spike in the incidence of cancers, particularly turbo cancers.
And turbo cancer is the, you know, quickly manifesting...
So yeah, basically, turbo cancer refers to cancers that are aggressive, cancers that happen in young people, cancers that happen unexpectedly, cancers that present at a late stage.
And it seems that this concept of turbo cancer is strongly linked to the use of The COVID vaccines, particularly after the second shot, after the primary series.
Recently, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Soon-Shong has been talking about this type of question, describing it, I believe, as a kind of, there's an oncogenic virus at play.
Can you explain that to me?
What do you make of that?
Yeah, so I watched the interview, and he's a very intelligent man.
He knows a lot about the topic, particularly natural killer cells killing cancer.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus link with cancer, I think he got it a little bit wrong, to be honest.
So clearly there is a link between...
SARS-CoV-2 and cancer, but it's mainly the vaccination.
He was basically, as far as I understand, was postulating that patients get chronic infection with the virus and then the virus becomes an oncogenic virus.
The data that patients have long-term viable COVID replicative virus is not that strong.
What they do have And which is shocking is they have persistent spike protein after vaccination.
And so that's the problem.
So, you know, the recent Yale study looked at this.
They looked at a number of factors.
In the study, the longest person in the study that was reported was over 700 days after the vaccine.
The patient still had circulating spike protein, not the virus, in the monocytes.
But there was a patient who was in that study and they excluded for a number of reasons, which is obvious.
This patient had circulating spike for 1400 days.
We were told you get shot in the arm.
The vaccine stays in the arm and goes away in two days and obviously both of those were lies because it distributes out the whole body and it seems that in a certain segment of the population may stay forever.
So this poor patient who's severely vaccine injured 1,400 days of circulating spike protein and it's not clear how to get rid of the spike protein.
So it's important to emphasize that it's not circulating replicative virus, it's spike protein.
And Dr. Merrick, one quick sec, we're going to take a break right now and folks will be right back.
And we're back with Dr. Paul Merrick, co-founder of the Independent Medical Alliance.
You offered a very simple Intervention that people that are concerned about getting cancer sometime in the future, and frankly, at some level, all of us should be if the number really is 50%.
I've summarized it for myself as sun, salmon, and steppes.
Can you tell me about that again, that study?
And have you found any other interventions of this nature that could have such a profound impact on reducing the incidence of cancer?
Sun, salmon, and steps is a really good start.
So what I'm working on now, I'm working with Dr. Justice Hope.
That's his pen name.
He's written a book on cancer.
He got the idea of using AI to answer some of these questions.
And so we've been using AI to figure out the best prophylactic protocols to prevent cancer, both in people of low risk.
moderate and high risk and so we're putting this together as a document so that if you look at breast cancer you can decide I'll take this protocol which has a 40% reduction or this protocol which has a 90% reduction.
So the higher the risk reduction the more nutraceuticals and drugs you need to take.
Which would also depend upon your risk.
So if you're particularly low risk, maybe you'll take three or four.
We call it the root three, root four, root five.
But if you have a BRCA gene, you take the root nine, which has more extensive medications and nutraceuticals.
So we're busy working on this.
It should be available on our website soon.
And so, you know, we've used AI to help us stratify which are the most effective drugs, and AI can calculate the risk reduction, you know, for different cancers.
And so surprisingly, the most effective nutraceuticals, the first most effective is green tea.
EGCG is very effective in preventing cancer.
Primarily because of its effect on cancer cells, but also the tumor microenvironment.
So it's very effective.
And then we have curcumin, which acts on multiple biological pathways.
We then have vitamin D, which as we spoke this morning, is a very strong association between vitamin D deficiency and cancer.
And then number four is omega-3 fatty acids.
Which was in that original study.
So our basic protocol, we call it Route 4, are these four drugs, which I think, you know, they're reasonably cheap, they're safe, there are no side effects, and so that I think people over the age of 60, even if you're healthy, should consider taking these drugs, because it will significantly reduce...
Your risk of developing cancer.
Obviously, it won't completely eliminate it.
But think how cost-effective this is, because we know the cost of treating a patient with cancer with conventional chemotherapy and checkpoint inhibitors runs into the millions of dollars, let alone the lost time of...
You know, work-related activities and lack of productivity.
So it's a highly cost-effective approach.
And you would imagine that it would be an approach that public health would be interested in because it's public health.
We should be preventing diabetes, obesity, and cancer.
These are very simple interventions that need to be aggressively pursued.
If I recall correctly, right?
It was vitamin D plus omega-3s plus exercise.
In that study, it was a 60% reduction in your likelihood of getting cancer.
That's correct.
And so now you're saying if you add turmeric and green tea or matcha, I hope it fits well in that because it's one of my favorite things to drink.
That could reduce it even further.
What kind of number are we looking at here?
Yeah, so it depends upon the particular...
So what's really interesting AI can stratify it because some cancers like pancreatic are really bad cancers.
So what this table does or what this protocol does is it will stratify it according to each cancer.
So you can decide, you know...
What your risk tolerance is and how many drugs you want to take to reduce your risk.
So, you know, it varies anywhere between 40% to 70% depending on the particular tumor.
And surprisingly, you know, I was a little bit skeptic about AI doing this, but it seems to be scientifically very sound.
And it's very difficult to integrate.
This without the use of artificial intelligence.
So, and how is it that you're deciding which studies to include?
Because, you know, AI is only as good as the material that it has to work with, right, in the first place.
So, AI does it on its own.
I don't know how it selects.
I mean, there are obviously algorithms.
I mean, it goes through the entire world literature of over 38 million papers in, you know.
Two or three minutes and it comes up with the answer.
And what's interesting is, you know, we repeat the question with different AI machines and we get similar answers.
So we want to make sure it's reproducible.
So when we do this over and over again, and we've done it over and over again with the same AI.
Database as well as with others, we get the same thing, green tea, curcumin, vitamin D, omega.
So it seems to be reproducible and it's supported by the basic papers because they give you the references.
So I was at the beginning a little bit scary that Big Pharma and other nasty people may be trying to influence the outcome because they certainly would be in their benefit.
But it seems at this point it's good science.
Fascinating.
So you took the outcome, you took the references, and you thought, okay, this is a very reasonable conclusion based on the references that I saw.
Yes.
There's this crisis in reproducibility, right?
And so many of the papers right now aren't easy to reproduce, aren't reproducible.
And so isn't that something that would figure into this kind of analysis?
Absolutely.
So one has to be really careful about single studies making outrageous claims.
And I've always said if an observation is valid, it will be valid in New York, in San Francisco, in Bangkok, in Tel Aviv.
So if you do an experiment, it should be reproducible.
And I think that's the most important The qualifier of good science is it's reproducible.
The results are reproducible because then it's likely to be true.
And so we find that these results and these studies are reproducible.
So, you know, one study one has to be very careful about.
I mean, you look at green tea, you look at vitamin D, there are multiple studies.
Showing the benefit.
You're absolutely right.
One study, one has to be very careful about.
And presumably, you know, with AI, it's all about prompting.
So you're, I guess, somehow in your prompts, probably you'll share those with us when you share the outcome.
We'll be able to...
Try it ourselves and also realize that this reproducibility does figure in to what you ask the AI to do.
Yes, you have to ask the right question in the right way using the right language.
I was surprised at how reproducible it was.
And then it does give you the references so you can go cross-check it and make sure that the references are correct.
It's quite a phenomenal tool.
What do you make of Dr. Soon-Shang's BioShield approach to cancer?
His general approach is that you basically need your immune system and your natural killer cells and your T cells to get rid of the cancer.
Absolutely fundamental concept is that you have this balance between the immune system and the cancer and immune suppression.
So he's absolutely correct that you need to have active T cells and natural killer cells and which Kill the tumor.
So you have this, which is really kind of interesting.
The tumor is in a microenvironment.
It's called the tumor microenvironment, in which you have myeloid depressor cells, you have T regulatory cells, you have macrophages.
These are all different types of cells within the microenvironment of the tumor.
So the tumor's not alone.
It's got a lot of company.
And so you want the company to be hostile to the tumor and kill them rather than be friendly and allow the tumor to proliferate.
And so what's interesting is chemotherapy knocks out your natural killer cells and knocks out your T8 cells, your T4 cells.
So it doesn't make any sense if you think of it that Chemotherapy immune suppresses, allowing the tumor to proliferate.
In addition, as we'll probably get to, chemotherapy preserves the cancer stem cell, and the cancer stem cell is the root which drives the tumor.
So the tumor proliferates from the stem cell and divides indefinitely and reproduces indefinitely and mutates and divides.
So you can't cure the patient unless you get rid of the cancer stem cell.
Interestingly, chemotherapy doesn't kill the stem cell.
In fact, there's some chemotherapeutic drugs which stimulate the stem cell.
So it really doesn't make sense.
You have to have a more...
Holistic approach rather than this burn and cut approach which traditional oncology uses.
They use this high dose or usually high dose chemotherapy which kills the rapidly dividing cells.
It kills the immune system but then it allows the stem cells to grow back and it really weakens the immune system.
I mean, clearly it does work.
Like, I mean, this is a therapy that's used by, you know, so many doctors.
I mean, I know a number of people have recovered using, you know, chemotherapy and so forth from cancer.
So, yes.
So, it does work to some extent.
What chemotherapy does is it knocks off the rapidly dividing cells.
The stem cells grow back into...
Cancer can take seven, eight, ten years.
So once you have cancer, you're never cured.
You're in remission or you have no current disease, no detectable disease.
People don't like to use the word cure because I'm not sure if you're ever cured.
Now, you are correct.
It depends upon the type of tumor.
If it has rapidly dividing cells with a low percentage of cancer stem cells, then you're more likely to be cured or go into long-term remission with chemotherapy.
But some cancers, you can appear to be in remission.
Ten years later, the cancer comes back again just because you haven't dealt with the stem cells.
Cure is always a relative term.
Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Well, thank you.
It's always a pleasure.
I think these are interesting times.
I think we are at a fork in the road and hopefully we'll go in the right direction.
So this may work out for everyone's best interest because our health care system is completely and utterly broken.
Top to the bottom, it's a broken, dysfunctional system that does not provide health care.
So hopefully we can develop a system that actually promotes health and promotes care, and we can rehabilitate this completely broken system.
Well, Dr. Palmerik, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
Thank you, Jan.
Thank you all for joining Dr. Palmerik and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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