Dale Atkinson on Self-Advocacy, Integrative Oncology, and Going from Terminal Cancer to No Visible Disease

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr. Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions or to access some of our resources at resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:32] Hello all and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled and welcome to my guest, Dale Atkinson, who's beaming in front of me. Hi Russell, thank you very much for having me. That's it. Where in the world are you? Because you sound as if you're from this fair isle. I am. I'm from just outside of Reading, so about 45 minutes, half an hour from London. Yeah, I know Reading well. Whereabouts near Reading are you? So I'm in a little village called Burfield, so quite literally just on the outskirts. But why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself, first of all?

[00:01:02] Yeah, so my name's Dale Atkinson. I spent most of my life working in finance as a very sad individual doing compliance, looking at laws, regulations, etc. Until 2024, when all of this wonderful stuff started happening. So, you better tell us before you get into that, what it is that you do now? So, these days I do several things. First of all is I'm a patient advocate. Second of all, I have a business that helps to audit companies for patient trust leaks.

[00:01:32] And third of all, I also have a company that sells what is essentially adjunct modalities. So looking at infrared saunas, ice baths, pulse DMF, red light therapies, etc. Very good. Luckily, there's not a fourth of all. That's a very Americanism. Oh, there is. I'm also a writer and various other things as well, but I thought I'd try and keep it shorter for you. It's a big Americanism that seems to have spread into our language, isn't it? First of all, second of all, I think is quite interesting. Come on then, tell us the story.

[00:02:00] So you teased this nicely, 2024 something happened. So take us from there. So, first of all, the summer of 2024. Actually, let's step back from that. So after a lovely career in finance, I'd sat on board of lots of companies, etc. I'd just started out on my own, started my own consultancy. Things were going brilliantly. I'd gone off investigating presidents on behalf of commissions and all sorts of things. And then the summer of 2024, my partner had a funny turn.

[00:02:25] They thought it was a heart attack. They took her into hospital and they found just purely by luck, a small cell lung cancer. So, roll forward a little couple of months. On October 2024, on the 3rd of October, she went into St Thomas' Big Hospital in London and had a lobectomy. So the entire upper right lobe of her lung removed. She came home on the 5th. 10 days later, on our youngest little boy's first birthday, I then went in to have an endoscopy.

[00:02:54] And sadly, during which they found a whacking great tumor. So not only was there one cancer diagnosis, there were two cancer diagnoses. And later that week, I was due to sign a £36 million contract with a high street bank in the UK to run a remediation project with 100 plus staff. So, funny enough, cancelled that very quickly. And then a few days after that, on our eldest little boy's third birthday, we then found out my mum, who very ironically was a palliative care nurse for her entire career, had died the night before.

[00:03:24] Oh my God. And then, on that Thursday, so that was the Monday morning we found that out. And on that Thursday, I was then told that not only did I have cancer, but it was terminal. That it was a do-not-pass-go, that I had 11 and a half months to live, palliative care only, and that it was extremely advanced and metastatic. It was one of those diagnoses that they give you what's called a TNM score. So, the tumour size, the node to metastases and all these kind of things. Mine was the worst tumour you can get.

[00:03:53] It was a T4BN3M1, meaning it metastasised heavily. It was in multiple structures and the tumour was about as large as it could get. So, really not a particularly nice place to be. And all in the space of three and a half weeks. And there was a complete surprise to you, was it? It wasn't a complete surprise. So, I'd been going to my GP on and off for about six or seven years, all the way back into my sort of mid to late 20s.

[00:04:19] I'd been going in with heartburn, with digestive problems, with gastrointestinal problems. But I just kept being met with the same thing. It was, it's probably your lifestyle. You're obviously not eating very well. You're eating too much junk food. And I wasn't. I was a 6'3", 115, 120 kilo, former semi-professional rugby player. I was super fit. I was really healthy. I ate a vegetarian diet pretty much my entire life. I was mainly on salads and decent levels of protein. I wasn't eating processed foods.

[00:04:49] Yeah. But it's one of those. They just kept giving me omiprazole, a protein pump inhibitor, to lower stomach acid and sending me home and telling me it was my fault, essentially. So... Just a lot. Yeah. I went into well into the double figures of times across six or seven years until eventually my GP, we moved out of London, moved to a little village near Reading, as we've already said. And my local GP, he finally took me seriously. I'd started by that point having these really shooting pains going up through my shoulder and my neck.

[00:05:17] And he's twigged and went, oh, okay, there's something not right here. But even then, he didn't take it seriously enough that he put me on an urgent pathway. He thought I was young. I was fit. I was healthy. I was everything you could want to be at that point in time. Obviously, I've just picked my kids up wrong or something. So let's just send him through for a routine endoscopy. Nothing too urgent. That was February 2024. And it took until October to get the endoscopy in. It was that non-urgent. Absolutely terrible. Turned out. Do you not have a private medicine?

[00:05:46] No, because I just started out on my own company. I would have had weeks and weeks beforehand. But I'd quite literally, three or four months beforehand, just started my own company. So at that point, I wasn't privately covered. I'd just moved to this new GP as well. Yeah. And they probably wouldn't have treated, paid a claim because you'd had symptoms for a long time. Because you know they do their best not to pay you any money. So you get this news and it's been not the greatest period of time. So first of all, let's just deal first things first. I'm sorry to hear about your mum. That's very sad. Thank you.

[00:06:16] How is your wife doing? So she's fully recovered. She was surgically cured, was three months or so, four months or so of pain and issues. She still gets occasionally out of breath, but otherwise no symptoms, no nothing at all. We do have her on a preventative protocol just to make sure nothing comes back as well. That's a whole other story. And cancers in different parts of bodies are all treated in different sorts of ways. Actually, we're all familiar with that. All right. And so I'm guessing that you said it was sometime in 2024 and now we're in 2026.

[00:06:44] And you had 11 months that some things happened. So tell me about this. What's been going on? Yeah. So essentially, with everything that happened in that month, I ended up taking the grief, taking the frustration, taking the anger. And instead of letting it defeat me and beat me, I may have turned it into fuel. I think accidentally more as a rebellious thing to upset my oncologist who told me I was going to die. I decided I had to prove her wrong.

[00:07:11] So I decided to take that news and bury myself into research. And I read probably around four and a half to probably up towards about 6,000 research papers in the space of about two or three months. Came across books like How to Starve Your Cancer and Radical Remission by Kelly Turner and all these sorts of things. And very quickly realized that the standard of care is a beautiful, amazing thing.

[00:07:36] But there are lots of things you could do atop that and aside it in order to basically put your body into a really good place to heal. So I started doing those things. I did next generation sequencing to map the genetics of my tumor. I found off-label medications that then worked for the pathways I'd identified. I worked with a naturopath and nutritionist in order to increase the health of my general overall body.

[00:08:01] I found and discovered and looked at lots of other adjunct modalities such as everything from infrared saunas to red light therapy through to pulse DMF through to you name it. Lots and lots of weird and wonderful things. And I worked out exactly which would work for my genetics, my tumor, my specific circumstances. Took those all to an integrative oncologist and the naturopath and the nutritionist and

[00:08:28] a researcher who I came across along my journey at the University of Westminster in London. Got them all to basically help me create a protocol out of it. And as I sit here now, I have no visible signs of disease. Much to the dismay and disbelief of my oncologist. So the tumor itself has gone, is it? Everything's gone. So I had a primary tumor that was nearly 10 centimeters. I had a secondary of 4.6 centimeters attached to my aorta.

[00:08:55] Lots of lymph nodes involved and another secondary on my pancreas and all sorts. So I think it's important to put a medical caveat at the beginning of this, isn't it? The fact that this happened to you doesn't mean it's going to happen to everybody else. And you've obviously researched this, gone into this in a bit of depth. And you're not a doctor. It's a bit of treatment. So let's know. I don't give protocols. It's not for me to give advice. It is very much, that's the reason I do not give my protocol out in full, is very much, this is an individual circumstance thing.

[00:09:22] And it is down to the individual to take control of their journey, to understand their cancer and to find what works for them. And what worked for me will not ever work for another individual in exactly the same way, because we are all completely different. And I just have to get lucky. Yes, I'm guessing your medical history and your six foot three playing rugby and all that sort of stuff is a different physiological starting point from someone who's in the 70s who's smoked and being a deep sea diver. I don't know what I got deep sea diver from. So, okay.

[00:09:51] So we've done all the sort of, we've done all that stuff. So we've got that out of the way now. So, okay. So you started doing the research and you started building your own protocol. You must have had, you must have been looking at some of these things and thinking, that sounds bizarre. And then thinking, and he must have tried a lot of things which didn't work. So do you want to give us a couple of examples? Huge amounts. Yeah. Give us a few examples of the stuff that was red herrings or stuff that seems the most bizarre. There are some really fun and interesting ones out there.

[00:10:20] I'm going to have to tell you this one. It's not one I ever did, funnily enough, but it's something that was actually suggested to me more than once, was to strip off into my birthday suit, to go into my garden when it was nice and sunny, and to do naked yoga. Because apparently showing your bottom to the sun is one of the best ways to increase vitamin D levels and vitamin levels throughout your entire body to rid yourself of cancer. Wow. There were lots of these things suggested. There were also then lots of things like, so on a more serious note,

[00:10:50] I looked into things like methylene blue. I looked into the horse meds, the dog meds, all these sorts of bits and pieces. And some of them there was credible evidence for, and I did end up using a few of them. But human versions, only where it was actually evidence-backed, trial-approved. I okayed it and ran it all through my oncologist and naturopath, etc. Worked out exactly what would work for me and what wouldn't. But there were many things along this journey that were just snake oil.

[00:11:18] There's things like there's teas, special teas from different places. There was a thing called black bat flower oil that I had imported at hundreds of pounds for a little tincture of this sort of stuff. And the idea of the mechanism works fantastically well, but on paper. But in reality, it did absolutely nothing. Or you're looking at the sour sops and the graviola teas and the bitter melon teas and these sorts of things. And you can go crazy with them. And they are hundreds of pounds.

[00:11:47] And most of them are just snake oil. There is no evidence for half of them. They are just madness. And I'll be honest, I wasted way more money than I put to good effect on this journey. I spent probably somewhere towards half a million pounds in total. And I would say only about a hundred grand of that went to good use. A lot of it was just frivolously wasted because I was desperate. And I guess there's two things going on here. One, which is that at least even if it's wasted, it's that thing about being control being so important.

[00:12:17] And I'm guessing because it was stage four when you started this journey that they didn't advocate a treatment pathway like chemo or radiation. So in a sense, you weren't dealing with that as well. So you're- They did. So I took chemotherapy and a form of immunotherapy, but it was always only palliative. I was very much told, and I've got it all obviously documented, that at most they felt it would buy me a month to two months. I had very initially started out looking to deny chemotherapy partly on the basis that I was told

[00:12:45] it wasn't going to do very much for me, that at most it would extend my life by around a month, maybe six weeks, two months, if I was really lucky, but that it would decrease my quality of life and take me away from spending time with my kids. So I had initially said no until I went forward and did my next generation sequencing. At that point, the chemosensitivity part of that sequencing noted that the chemotherapy that I ended up taking, K-POX, was actually going to be more effective than what my oncologist

[00:13:14] had basically put across to me. And that by them protecting myself, which was the initial aim I'd set out with, I never set out to cure myself in any way, shape or form. I initially set out just to limit side effects in order to give me better quality of time with my children and with my partner and to stop them from seeing me suffer as much. And to essentially just ease my own way out of this world at that point in time, to be honest with you, as dark as that sounds. That was the initial aim. It wasn't until later when things started to vanish and disappear

[00:13:43] that we realized that this was working far better than we ever expected. And you said next generation sequencing, two or three times now. Can you, because obviously I'm guessing this must be part of what started to work for you. Yeah, so the quickest version I can think of, next generation sequencing is genetic profiling. So they took a liquid biopsy, so blood. They also took the copy of the biopsy that the NHS had done, the piece of my tumor itself. They essentially go off and grow that artificially in a lab

[00:14:12] and test things against it. Next generation sequencing at the moment is seen as cutting edge. It is actually on the NHS's 10 year cancer plan. It is going to become mainstream. It is already used within the NHS in certain instances. It's just not widely used at this moment in time. But this is the future. This is the way we're going. And this is the way it should be. Yeah. And you mentioned the treatment with immunotherapy. And it's a new thing, isn't it? It's really start to take off. It's this idea of stimulating the body

[00:14:43] to fight, to just raise its own defenses and fight on your behalf. So you were using that as well. And again, was that just palliative or did that seem to have an effect? Yeah, so that was palliative. I had a very low PD-L1 score. So PD-L1 is a protein marker that they look at to essentially measure whether you're going to have a response. I was down at a 9.8. Technically, the threshold was 10, but my oncologist squeezed me in to get it. And it was with the idea of it could give me a little bit longer in life. I then realized quite early on,

[00:15:12] very thankfully for me, that there were various other ways to stimulate my immune system. Things like mistletoe therapy, which is signed off and used across much of Europe. It's used in much of the Germanic sort of old school world in Switzerland, in Germany, etc. And by stimulating my immune system with mistletoe therapy, it then gave me much more of an immune system for the immunotherapy to work on. And therefore, obviously it could be more effective. So it has been a huge part of my journey. Both chemo and immuno

[00:15:41] were a huge part of my journey and have worked, absolutely worked. I'm never against them in any way, shape or form. But the other things I did alongside it were what made them work in the way they did, if you understand, if you see what I mean. Yeah, that's interesting. And I wonder how much you hit on a sort of a cocktail of something. And actually, it'd be hard to replicate that cocktail because A, it's really unique to you and B, it quite randomly got towards a cocktail. So it's randomly got towards, but a lot of these things are easily, they're very easy

[00:16:10] to piece together. And I was quite thankful that the next generation sequencing company I used had actually also designed an AI overlay that looked at the pathways, looked at my genetics, and was then able to suggest a bunch of off-label medications to use as part of my treatment. And it came up with, it did both the standard side and the off-label side, and it looked at supplements as well, and things like mistletoe therapies, et cetera, came up with a full list of them. And then my integrative oncologist

[00:16:40] happened to be very well versed in how to put all of those pieces together to create it into one overall protocol without, first of all, overloading my body and destroying me further. And second of all, in terms of actually creating the best possible outcome for me. Yes, but at the same time, it is replicatable in terms of other people's physiology and overall direction, but for them, based on the information that you get out of things like a next generation sequencing and using someone like Dr. Harry Kuhn,

[00:17:09] who's just an incredible oncologist. And, Dr. something struck me as you're talking about this because actually most NHS oncologists are part of the pathway, aren't they? And they put you on the pathway and then you're on a conveyor belt and you go, and it's that, whatever, you know, whatever the answer is, or whatever this problem is, it's that solution, isn't it? So, you must have struggled with this oncologist because I would have thought that's quite rare because not all of them are that accepting about patients getting knowledge and coming back and having discussions. He wasn't my NHS oncologist.

[00:17:39] My NHS oncologist when I came to them and said, look, I want to go the integrative route. I want to do this and this. First of all, I said, I want to go the integrative route and she went, fantastic. And I said, and I want to do this and this and she went, I thought you meant yoga. She then unfortunately threatened to pull my care at multiple points. They brought in a nutritionist and told me that I should be eating massive amounts of sugar, ignoring the real science that says that. Yeah, but it's a normal thing in the NHS. They actually tell cancer patients going into chemotherapy, you should be eating

[00:18:09] as much sugar as possible to put on weight. They ignore the science that says the inflammation caused by that sugar is horrendously bad during chemo and can make the effects far worse. They ignore that completely and they blindly told me that I was wrong, despite the fact that I could provide them with 30 odd papers that said the opposite, including two from the NHS that outright stated that this was the case. But there we go. That's a whole other conversation. But no, sadly my NHS oncologist was not on board at all at that point.

[00:18:38] She has since realised due to the sort of outcome that I've gotten and the fact that she cannot explain it for love nor money and the fact that I am probably the biggest response she's ever seen to treatment and in the shortest timeline as well, 18 months. In fact, it took me six and a half months to go from nearly 10 centimetres to nothing. She's coming on board. And I'm guessing this has created a massive lifestyle. It's a statement that's being obvious, isn't it? But what is the massive lifestyle change you've gone through there?

[00:19:08] So we realised as part of the next generation sequencing that stress was a major, cortisol was a major thing in my cancer journey, that my cancer actually fed quite heavily off of it. It fed off of that, glucose and glutamine, those three main feeders that we found. So first of all, I am never able to go back to my career again because it was extremely stressful. May have paid well, but unfortunately didn't do me good. Excuse me. So no more finance. I have gone off and set up companies and doing other things instead.

[00:19:37] Second of all is my health comes first now. I spend three to four day, three to four hours every single day in various therapies. Be that the hyperbaric oxygen chamber that I have in the other room, be that in my infrared sauna or doing exercise or various other things, I allocate three to four hours every single day to doing that. Second of all is my family and my love for my kids comes second above my health. It comes first technically, you know what I mean? But it comes second on that list. I fit that around after my health

[00:20:06] into everything I do. And then you very quickly realize that money and work and these other things don't matter anywhere near as much as we think. Although I have a huge passion for what I do and therefore work heavily for it, I am not going to exhaust myself and break myself to work for anybody else and do something for anybody else that doesn't suit where my life is now. And that's the three big things that came out of it. So let's say you find someone who's like you,

[00:20:36] who gets a diagnosis and the traditional thing would be to go and do chemotherapy. Where did you start looking? Where did you start looking that was the most useful rather than where did you start looking and you disappear down thousands of rabbit holes? I'm assuming you've got a website that actually has the time-saving type stuff here. Or do you actually just advocate that everyone does looks at 30,000 articles? What's your advice? I wouldn't recommend most people do what I do. I was lucky to have the right skill set given my background in compliance and in finance.

[00:21:05] I was a researcher essentially for a living. So for me, it was just natural to do that. Most people, it's a nightmare. Instead of telling somebody the right place to start because there are so many different right places, I would probably actually prefer to tell you the wrong place to start, which is social media. Do not start on social media. Do not go to social media groups. Do not listen to somebody online who does not have credible credentials. There are a lot of people out there selling snake oil. There are a lot of people,

[00:21:35] unfortunately, like Chris Walk, who is crispy cancer, who is out there telling people to juice instead of taking chemotherapy when in reality he actually got surgically cured. He had a colon cancer, had it cut out, chose not to have the chemo afterwards. He was already cured. He was just lucky that it hasn't come back. Don't listen to people like that. Don't go and do these things unless you really understand what you're doing and you have run it through a credible professional who you trust.

[00:22:05] And that's where I would say it's probably the best start is to go to a credible professional, find somebody who does what you're looking for, who actually has the credentials to do it, who actually knows what they're talking about and is an expert in their field. And I use Dr. Harry Kewin as the example in terms of the doctor and oncology side. There's also Amanda King who's a brilliant naturopath. There's Jane McClelland. There's Naysha Winters. There's lots and lots of them out there. Go and find one that suits you and your journey

[00:22:34] and speak to them. Don't do it for yourself. It's too dangerous. Dr. Harry Kewin, did you say? How do you spell that? So he's Harry Haren Kewin. So his first name is H-A-R-I, H-A-R-A-N, Harry Haren. And then Kewin is K-U-H-A-N. So he was involved in researching immunotherapies. Frantic Googling. Oh yeah, here we go. He was involved in creating some of the original immunotherapies many years ago. He was a researcher.

[00:23:04] He's a truly, genuinely brilliant doctor. He's not a, technically, he's not an oncologist. He's not on the specialist register for oncology. But he did train at the Royal Marsden. He has trained in oncology. He knows a lot about oncology. But he is a doctor rather than oncologist because there is a difference. But he specializes in integrative oncology but not as an oncologist as a doctor. It's very confusing. And I think this is part of the challenge, isn't it, when you start looking into things like this? It is a challenge to find someone.

[00:23:34] It's so easy to find someone that's, as you say, a snake or a cell someone. That's quite challenging. Yeah. There is a great resource, by the way, on. So Jane McClelland, the author of How to Starve Your Cancer, has a website called How to Starve Your Cancer. On there, she has a resource, book basically, a glossary of doctors who do integrative oncology in the UK. They're all registered professionals. They are actual practitioners. They have GMC registrations, et cetera. That's a really good place to start for anybody

[00:24:03] looking at this world. And it has to be said, there are people in the world who don't agree with some of these approaches. There's no doubt about that, aren't there? Yeah, of course. I'm just looking at, as we're chatting, there's a lot of people who think that Jim Clelland's ideas are very terrible. Some of them are. Yeah. I know Jane well. Some of them, as with anybody, everybody has their take on things. Everybody has their spin. You need to take it as an individual listening to this, watching this. You need to take everything with a pinch of salt.

[00:24:32] You need to find a team that you trust and believe in, people who you trust and who are credible and who do things the way you want to know and give you the evidence that you need to feel happy and comfortable. Don't blindly follow anybody. There are so many different ways to do these things. The old saying goes, there are many different ways to skin a cat and it is true. Yeah. As long as you get a cat end of skin. Sorry, I'll definitely pillow it. Ideally not in the real world. But if you're going to eat it. So one thing, because actually I noticed the word biohacking on your side now,

[00:25:02] almost slightly nervous when people talk about that thing. Actually, I think you just call it life hacking and not biohacking. I tried to call it life hacking. Yeah. And because you do meet tons of people in that world who are just selling supplements and they talk absolute garbage to sell a supplement. I think of my own personal experience of Dave Asprey and people like that who have had all these diseases they've single-handedly defeated through pasture-fed beef and dancing naked

[00:25:31] in the moonlight or whatever it is. That's not Dave Asprey. But what you'll find is a lot of supplements people have been encouraged to take, which actually you're just weeing out every single day. And really the only people that are benefiting from that are the people who are selling to you. So it's again, how do you find these credible sources of evidence? Because even the person you recommended when you read it, it's on the edge of woo-woo. Oh, a lot of it can be. Absolutely. It's all about finding things that you as an individual trust.

[00:26:01] So for me, in terms of supplementation side, I went directly to a naturopath and nutritionist called Dr. Amanda King. She is genuinely brilliant and we did it via my bloods. So every single month we ran a full blood panel. We looked at and updated everything off the back of those bloods. And then we tweaked and tweaked and she helped me find good versions of drugs, etc. She never took an affiliate cut. She never gave me affiliate links. She said, look, this is what you're looking for. This is why you're looking for it. Let's take this for a few days

[00:26:31] or a month or whatever. And then let's go back to the bloods and see how that affected it. So we actually tracked, traced, managed to monitor essentially absolutely everything so that we could prove what worked and what didn't. And what then had knock-on effects to put my body in the best overall position. So yeah, I completely agree. There are so many people out there selling snake oil. And unless you have the evidence, the actual proof, the monitoring for it, unless you are tracking and looking at the evidence properly, both in your own body and the actual evidence,

[00:27:00] then don't do it. And I noticed that you talk a lot about ketosis, which is the opposite of sugar, isn't it? It really is this idea of starving carbohydrates and putting your body into this ketosis state, which is actually little Dr. Atkins who used to bang on about this or back in the day, as I think we used to talk about, we used to eat meat. But it's interesting because I'm guessing you're not going back to this eat meat only diet because especially bacon. Well, I'm vegetarian. Yeah, well, that's what threw me because the whole thing is I used to remember going on

[00:27:28] with groups of often blokes who were just stuffing bits of bacon down the throat. And I was thinking, I'm sure that's really not the point to eat the most carcinogenic substance around. But ketosis, you found work for you, did you? I did. So I've used bursts of various different diets. Essentially, I tried to pulse different things in order to put different pressure onto my cancer at different points depending on what off-label medications I was using, what supplements I was using and what phase I was in at that exact point in time. And ketosis was one tool as part of that.

[00:27:57] Prolonged fasting was another tool as part of that, which also kicks into ketosis and autophagy as part of that process. And I used them dispersingly depending on what I was trying to do. Ketosis as a vegetarian was not easy to do and I couldn't maintain it. I couldn't do it for 18 months non-stop. But I have done two, three, four months at a time and then I stopped for a month or two, pulse back in sort of high-quality carbohydrates, very slowly bring them back in and juice them and then I'll go back into ketosis again depending on what I'm

[00:28:27] then trying to do and how I'm trying to put pressure onto the tumour. It's a specific environment. Yeah, because ketosis is a challenge when it comes to things like fibres and you have to have fibres to keep your body moving because you need to get rid of those toxins I'm guessing which are coming from the process of attempting to And for me I took artificial fibres. I took modified citrus pectin, I took psyllium husk and various other things in order to artificially add those fibres in for exactly that reason. Yes. And I noticed the medical cancer, medical cancer,

[00:28:57] medical cannabis and I used to work in the CBD field so I'm intrigued that you're using that. Was that for pain really for something else? So initially that was actually for pain relief. It was pain relief appetite as well so I went through a period of having cachexia so I actually dropped from 120 kilos at the start of this all the way down to what was I, 64 kilos at one point. I dropped a lot of weight mainly because 10 centimetre tumour in your esophagus you can't eat very well. Yeah. Dropped into cachexia started to have malnutrition issues

[00:29:27] and I was trying to find a way to essentially kick my body out of that and actually want to eat so medicinal marijuana came in first of all for that. It gave me that you hear it called the munchies it gave me that want to eat it spurred that thing in my brain that sort of forced me to eat. Second of all is I use two different versions so I have a daytime one which is high CBD and the cannabinoids and cannabinoid oil is very good at being anti-tumour and has lots of other different sort of neuroprotective and all sorts of other effects so I've used that one

[00:29:57] during the day and then a high THC one both of these from a UK registered cannabis dispensary yeah from Cureleaf you actually see it on television now they do adverts and it was a high THC one that I used during the evenings and it really helped me sleep and where I was on huge amounts of opioids at various points I was on the pre-gabalins I was on the oxycodone they put me on morphine high dose morphine for quite a while as well it helped me to come off of all those it helped me to kick that I was only on them for four and a half months in total

[00:30:27] and it helped me to then stop them completely and it helped me to sleep through the night despite the pain and I'm sure you would say sleep's so good for you but also those drugs the opioids and the things that you talked about are ruinous for your body and I'm guessing are horrendous because the side effects that come the trouble is the side effects that come from the traditional way of treating cancer are horrendous aren't they almost as bad not as bad obviously but they're pretty horrific in their own right aren't they they're really not very fun

[00:30:57] though to be honest worse than the opioids for me was the steroids I found the steroids and the mental effect of the steroids were really difficult so I managed to cut down my steroid use as well by using the cannabinoids by using CBD and I'm a big fan of CBD we used to sell it and it's interesting to hear that the high THC stuff is now approved medically which is about time really because it's has been for a while yeah yes but it's it is still about time

[00:31:26] because it took far too long didn't it and I don't think it's necessarily that well known IGP these clinically is it they're not allowed to prescribe it so you have to refer to a special specialist medical cannabis dispensary in order to be able to get assessed and actually dispense it and they then have specialist pharmacists as it were who are then able to approve or deny people on that basis but it takes a special license and my GP wasn't able to get me medical cannabis wasn't able to talk about it or recommend it at all he told me it was one

[00:31:56] of those weird things that he can say it exists but that's about it yeah that's bizarre I remember that the what's interesting here is and please don't turn this wrong way because I don't mean it the wrong way but it's you're demonstrating that thing again for those that have money that they can actually fund their own treatment and for those that don't you're thrown into a system that from what you're saying is not necessarily effective at all there are lots of people who go through cancer pathways in the NHS and they're absolutely fantastic different experiences in different parts

[00:32:25] of the world and I know that but it is that thing isn't it that it is actually quite useful money here unfortunately hugely but that's something so I've set up a charity I've got several charities at this point but I've set up a charity to try and push for change at the UK government level it's called Beyond the Standard we have the former CEO of the Red Arrows we've got the former cancer chief of the World Health I can't say it now the World Health Organisation the WHO he's come on board as well we've got various doctors

[00:32:55] various other people involved and we are trying to push for this change at a government institutional level for the NHS to actually start providing a lot of these things because it has the ability to we're still waiting for charities commission sign off at this point so watch this space but I was off a couple of weeks ago over in Copenhagen at HIMSS the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society it's one of the biggest healthcare gatherings in Europe actually presenting on exactly this as well how the healthcare system needs to change

[00:33:25] needs to update and needs to help people who are doing things like adjunct therapies because at this point in time over 90% of people diagnosed with cancer research alternatives and over 50% end up undertaking adjunct therapy under their own volition without telling a professional at all Is this beyondcharity.org? It's not up and running at the moment there is a Beyond Charity International so be careful if you're looking because that's a very different charity Yeah the charity hasn't got a

[00:33:55] launch website at the moment we do have the URL for it it's just unfortunate because we haven't got charities commission sign off and we're not launching anything at the moment Yeah makes sense although you can start a charity that doesn't have to have charities commission sign off you can have an unincorporated group let's not get diverted There's lots of other ways to do it We're trying to receive some donations and a few other things at the moment in order to push for what we need to Yeah medical charities have their own levels of complexity as well So the prognosis is

[00:34:24] what for you? I'm now waiting for a PET scan to confirm whether I'm no evidence of disease which is the closest the NHS will give me to remission And if you get that what does that mean for you? Does that mean you have to continuous risk regime you have or I guess part of your thinking is you wouldn't dare stop would you? So I'll be on my protocol for a little while longer probably about another two or three years hopefully by that point any circulating tumour cells and circulating stem cells etc will have disappeared and I will be back to

[00:34:54] having the same chances of cancer as most other people after that I will consider you on a very slim down protocol probably one of my own design rather than anything else and hopefully that will keep me cancer free for the rest of my life Amazing And talk to me a little bit more depth about the hyperbaric chamber we've had whole episodes on that before but it's interesting to see how you use it but also the red light stuff because that's all the rage these days at the moment isn't it? So tell me through hyperbaric stuff first for people and how is that what are you using that for? So I use it for two different things

[00:35:24] so I use it for reduction of inflammation first of all as a separate modality on its own as a segregated modality and then I use it in twin with high dose vitamin C and artuzan or artemisinin depending on what you want to call it as well so essentially you can use high dose vitamin C above very roughly 70 grams via an infusion in order to inspire a hydrogen peroxide reaction within solid state tumours so using that plus artemisinin which helps to inspire part of that reaction as well and then putting in oxygen so you have the

[00:35:53] other side of the hydrogen peroxide oxide obviously being oxygen helps to essentially create a degradation inside of the tumour itself and helps to break the tumour down and then that hydrogen peroxide also helps the immune system to identify where the tumour is and actually kicks the immune system into gear to try and identify and start hunting down the tumour cells so that's the main thing I do use it for is for that essentially what we call a kill phase is pumping in the high dose vitamin C and then straight into the hyperbaric chamber in order to try and cause that exact

[00:36:23] reaction and the red lights so the red light's a bit of a 50-50 when it comes to oncology so red light and near infrared light depending on the bandwidth so if you're looking around a 650 nanometers and an 820 840-ish nanometers for near infrared it can have effects where it essentially helps cancer to grow it can be supportive of certain cells it can inspire growth hormones and all sorts of other things and near infrared light

[00:36:53] as a cancer patient but for me because I am actively healing because we know my cancer has disappeared because there is still some scar tissue there because there is still some things to sort out we're hoping and we're trying to use it in a way that it doesn't necessarily inspire cancer growth that it actually inspires the healing process in my esophagus fantastic wow what you said to me at the very beginning was that you wanted to give people hope and I think it's interesting I can't speak for anybody else but it is fascinating I should be boot marking your contact

[00:37:22] details in the case that it happens to me so if people would like to find out more about your work you'd mentioned a number of different web domain names what are the ones that you'd like to let us know about so the main one for me is thelifeorganic.com is my blog I put up information there unfortunately not all that regularly once a month twice a month three times a month depends on how much time I have free you can also contact me by there as well and then I mainly live on LinkedIn so it's Dale J Atkinson or LinkedIn whatever it is slash Dale J Atkinson are the two best

[00:37:52] places to find me very good and if you want to leave people with one last thought what might it be so I think the biggest thing that's helped me on my journey is self-advocacy I think the ability to stand up for oneself the confidence to stand up for oneself and to say either this feels right or this doesn't feel right and to also tell especially oncologists and doctors within the system itself who quite often will push for answers because they themselves are extremely stretched for time to have the self-advocacy

[00:38:22] and self-confidence to stand up and say hang on a minute I need five minutes to think about this before I make a decision is one of the absolute best things that any patient can do in virtually any setting you take the time process it yourself and come back with a fully measured fully thought out confident answer because you will feel ten times better about it you will feel confident in the route that's been taken rather than just saying yes because the doctor has told you to so yeah

[00:38:51] last piece of advice that is a good piece of advice Dale has been fascinating thank you so much for your time it's been absolutely amazing LinkedIn as you say the site as you said thelifeorganic.com I'm not going to wish you luck because I don't think this has been a process about luck I want to wish you continued good research self-king as much luck as anything else yeah never harms does it thanks for spending time with us today it's been a joy cheers I hope you found

[00:39:21] that episode useful and entertaining if you want to support our work please go to resilienceunravel.com and you can become a member there as well you can also send us a question there and even apply to do a podcast you can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any of the other podcast hosts of your choice as well as getting hold of some useful resources about resilience and a whole lot more join us next time on the next edition of Resilience Unraveled