In this episode, Dr. Nasha Winters shares her powerful journey with cancer and the urgent need for a paradigm shift in oncology. She explores the limitations of the current cancer care model, the critical role of mitochondria in chronic illness, and why asking different questions is essential for improving patient outcomes. Dr. Winters also introduces MTOmics, a cutting-edge data platform designed to revolutionize cancer treatment by integrating personalized, data-driven insights.
Listen to the full episode to learn more:
- The standard cancer care model has seen little progress in outcomes since 1971.
- Cancer is affecting younger populations, signaling the need for new approaches.
- Mitochondrial health is a cornerstone of cancer and chronic disease management.
- Integrative medicine offers evidence-based strategies to enhance patient care.
- Community and collaboration are essential for driving meaningful change.
- Data-driven, decentralized healthcare models can empower both patients and practitioners.
- And much more!
Tune in to discover how integrative oncology, cutting-edge research, and patient empowerment are reshaping the future of cancer care.
James Maskell:
To a very special episode of the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We are here at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, live with Dr. Nasia Winters. We are going to be talking about the transformation of cancer care, and I’m really glad to be doing this in person. I know it’s incredible to be here doing this together. We almost did this on Zoom, but it is better in person for sure. Always, always. Alright, well let’s just jump into it. The theme of our year here at the Evolution of Medicine is transformation. And I believe you are in the process of transforming cancer care. So why don’t we just start there. If people aren’t familiar with your work, tell us a little bit about what led you to this moment and why the transformation of cancer care is important to you and what you think the transformation that needs to happen is.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Alright, well, we probably should start a little bit of his context because I think people think that the way we do cancer care now is how it’s always been done, but really this is sort of a modern or more modern experience. And we only waged war on cancer in 1971, which is also the year of my birth. So, 53 years in the making. And we haven’t really moved the needle on the dial very far with regards to changing outcomes. And we now are one in two people are going to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Those aren’t my statistics. Those are World Health Organization statistics. And we’re even expecting to see a doubling in cancer rates globally by 2040. So, we’re clearly not doing something right, which is in my personal experience of coming into this place, didn’t wake up one day thinking, I want to work with cancer.
That’s not how it works. But 33 years ago, I had my own diagnosis. Unfortunately, I was very gung-ho, pre-med, really excited to go into medicine, really excited to help people. But my own healthcare journey or lack thereof, led me down a different path. Unfortunately, I was too far gone by the time they figured out what was going on with me. You speak to functional clinicians all the time that work with patients with dozens of disease processes, which is what I had going on for many years. So they just thought it was more of the same. But by the time they figured out what was going on, I was in the end stage of cancer. So, kind of sent home to die really is I guess the way, not even kind of, I was sent home to die, and I didn’t expect to fight it or fix it. That wasn’t my expectation. At 19 years old, my expectation was I wanted to understand it. I wanted to understand why. And I think that is what has propelled into this three-plus decades, which is when you say about transforming healthcare, this is part of the transformation is asking different questions.
And so, what I’ve learned along the way is that we don’t ask questions. No one says, well, why do I get cancer? We’ve tried to pin it on the genetic theory of cancer, but we’ve not really been able, that is a theory and it’s not one that’s held up very well. And I wouldn’t describe why it’s growing so rapidly, exactly why we’re now one and two, and why we’re seeing doubled rates and why we’re now seeing cancer, which used to be considered a disease of the aged.
Now and younger and younger explosions in cancers in people under the age of 40 that we’ve never seen in medical history. And yet we’re not asking the right questions. So, part of the transformation of healthcare is asking different questions and my work over the last 30 years of trying to save my own life and then working with tens of thousands of people directly, hundreds of thousands of people indirectly creating training programs to apply different methodology, different thinking, different questions, is where we are in this moment. But what I’m feeling hopeful about in this year of transformation is an opportunity to have conversations more publicly than ever before. So just so your listeners know, as someone who works with patients with cancer, we’ve always had to be very, very careful of how we even talk about it.
You legally cannot say you treat cancer unless you are a board-certified oncologist or a dental surgeon. Those are the only two people who can actually legally say they treat and work with cancer, which is fine because that’s not what I do or the people I train do. We work with people that happen to have cancer, we work with people and the terrains, the environments in those people that allowed cancer to really take root and express. And so, we are looking at it from a different lens. That’s another part of the transformation. And the other piece of this somewhat perceives what I do as alternative, and yet I would like to really put it on the table that it’s not alternative whatsoever. It’s very data-driven and of one, it’s very thoughtfully applied. It’s very evidence-informed as well as evidence-based. But the two things that I’ve been told in my career was, number one, there’s no evidence or number two, this is just people trying to take your money. It’s just charlatans. So, in some of the things we’ve created over the years, we’ve created access by access. We’ve trained hundreds of clinicians and allied health providers and advocates into understanding and asking different questions in the cancer space. We’ve also then created grants, patient grants to get access to care above and beyond standard of care loan because it’s an out-of-pocket expense.
And we’re also working on building out a hospital eventually, which we can talk about later, which will be an integrative residential oncology hospital and research institute where not only will standard of care be offered and offered in a unique way, but also well vetted therapies and all of that against a backdrop of regenerative farming. This hospital will be built on a 1200-acre regenerative farm, which brings in other components, which I’m very passionate about as part of the transformation of this year. And then the data piece, the, there’s no evidence, there’s lots of evidence. I’ve spent 30 years traveling all over the world, meeting with even going to for my own health, various hospitals, clinicians, researchers, healers, all over the world to see what people are up to because there was a long time, I mean, back in 1991 when I was diagnosed, there was no James Maskell out there connecting communities of like-minded clinicians. There was no Dr. Google, there were no influencers. I had to go it and just get out into the world and experience it for myself and find things that made sense. So, the data is out there, the anecdotes, the information is out there, but now the funding is what needs to come to help do further studies. But what we’ve also created, and you’ve created it as well, is a data platform collecting the millions and metrics and points to gather information about each and every person to understand what led to their diagnosis, to help them understand where they are in that moment to help find the best path forward,
Whatever the right tool may be based on that test and assess methodology. And so, this next year is about transforming the narrative, about asking different questions, about showing actionable data and about publishing more of these studies, more of these end of one clinical experiences, as well as educating and transforming from the patient to the practitioner and everything in between.
James Maskell:
Obviously at the beginning of a journey like this, there are certain moments where you sort of see something and you realize, okay, you’ve got some momentum here and you want to follow that. Maybe you could just share some of those key moments along the way that made you think, okay, we’re on the right path here.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Yeah, yeah. Well, when I first had my own diagnosis back in 1991, no one wanted to talk to me because they just thought I was gone for. So, there was nothing they could offer. And it was very painful for those clinicians to talk to a 19-year-old that they had nothing they could offer. So, I was sort of abandoned in that place because it was painful. As a clinician, I know what it’s like to lose patients. It’s very painful. But for somebody at that time having ovarian cancer in 1991, that young was very rare. Unfortunately, not so rare today, but nobody knew what to do with that. And then when I managed to live sort of accidentally, not by anyone’s benefit, but just things I learned along the way, no one wanted to talk to me about what I was doing, which was really interesting. And then I was at a time in my life, in a peer group in my life that none of my peers wanted to hear about what I was doing. Either cancer was very heavy for 20 something,
So I kind of just had to put that on a shelf. I managed to be alive, and I managed to kind of put it in a box and put it away for a long time. When I ended up in medicine, I swore I would never work with cancer. And so one of those pivotal moments was coming into my first week of private practice and a man coming in a wheelchair, his skull bulging out. He was coming in for pain management. I was also trained as an acupuncturist, and the neurology center in my town referred him to me because hospice wasn’t helping his pain. So opiates weren’t helping. None of the other pharmaceuticals they could do touched it. And this man was coming in in the last days of his life with glioblastoma. That moment shifted because of some things I learned. He was having seizures that wouldn’t stop.
He was under unbelievable pain. And so I was able to get him on therapeutic ketogenic diet, which stopped his seizures within days. He had tried medications for weeks and nothing touched it. We did acupuncture for his pain because the opiates weren’t touching it. Then weirdly, I didn’t expect him to live, but he stabilized. That was a pivotal moment. And he managed to live with his ventricles of his brain on imaging closed completely shut down, which means there was no pumping of a cerebral spinal fluid. And every neurologist and myself included scratching our head saying, how is this man alive? And he managed to live another 18 months like that
With a quality of life out of his wheelchair, out of his diaper, able to talk out of pain and seizure-free. He still died of that disease. But 18 full months after the moment, he rolled into my office. And at that point, he was already nine months into a terminal diagnosis and told he’d be dead in weeks. So that was one pivotal moment and suddenly where I didn’t think I was going to be treating cancer in small Durango, Colorado in early 2000, my practice started filling up pretty quickly of people saying she gave him better quality of life.
Suddenly patients were caring about quality as well as quantity. That was a pivot. The next pivot came in 2012 when I had another woman come in a wheelchair and of life and wanting pain management and end of life support for her end stage ovarian cancer. And it was in that moment that I decided to share a little bit about my history.
I recognized myself in that woman. And I’d been very, very private about my history. People knew I had cancer, but they didn’t know the details. I think they probably thought I had a little melanoma or something, a little skin scare. But I ended up sharing something with her, and she was on a small forum, so this is where community comes in. She was on an online group called Inspire, and it was like an ovarian cancer group. And thinking about this now when there’s, at that time there were about 24,000 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer a year, and over 17,000 of them died every year. Those statistics, no one in standard of care was doing anything about it, but this group of women in this online group were scrappy and resourceful and listening to things that maybe could help this woman, not only lives, she’s still alive today. She’s got her own book that she’s been working on to come out today. But she started talking about her experience with me in this room. We were doing things.
Yeah, she did. She was like, so there was that pivotal moment, and suddenly in 2012, I Maddie, Colorado Ovarian Cancer Symposium, that three medical doctors got up and walked out. They boycotted the event because they had a naturopathic doctor there presenting. And I had to do the talk three different times because there were three sessions happening simultaneously, and nobody wanted to go to the other sessions. They wanted to come listen to me. So they had me speak at all three times, which I had never done before, and their system crashed. That’s that moment for me that I realized that, and it makes me emotion to think about it, that people were demanding something different.
Yeah, it was a hunger, isn’t that? It was a hunger. And then the next one, I think came in just the last, I mean, gosh, it’s just exploded beyond that. When my book came out in 2017, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, I wrote that book thinking that my mom and a couple patients would read it. My mom still hasn’t read it. And now it’s like, well over a hundred thousand copies and nine languages and another more languages to come. And it just became this little grassroots phenomenon. It was a very small publisher, no marketing whatsoever, just word of mouth. And then the now over 850 clinicians in 46 countries that we’ve trained and growing by leaps and bounds every year, many of them conventional oncologists coming forward, the table has totally turned. In fact, 70% of the people taking my course are conventionally trained clinicians, not naturopath, not alternative. So something has shifted and it’s all been patient driven.
James Maskell:
Love it. Well, I would say just as a feedback to you having been in the industry for a long time, I would say the people that care about you or follow you care very much for what you’ve taken them through and the journey that you’ve taken them through. Lemme ask you this. So your book was called The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. That’s what I know you for, right? But I actually saw you last time here at this conference, and now I see you again here. Why do you come to an environmental medicine conference if it’s metabolic?
Nasha Winters, ND:
Well, it’s funny, first of all that any doctor questions why we’d ever come to an environmental medicine conference in general is interesting to me.
All should be coming because we’re all impacted. I mean, my teacher the late Dr. Walter Ian said that it’s not a matter if you have toxicity, it’s how bad is and how does it impact you. But one of the biggest drivers of endocrine disruption is our food and the environment around us and what that impacts directly and specifically is the mitochondria. And what that turns into is a metabolic discourse and what we now understand cancer to be and growing in the understanding of that is cancer is a metabolic mitochondrial disease. And so if we’re not looking at the triggers to where it suddenly goes rogue in our system, we’re missing out. And so if you are not taking out the garbage with your patients dealing with a cancer diagnosis, you won’t change their metabolic mitochondrial health. Having them understand what, so think about it this way, your mitochondria, we all were taught in sixth grade biology. It was just about making ATP. It’s like the teeniest tip of the iceberg. What we now understand our mitochondria to be are these amazing receivers. They’re taking in information of every single thing we’re putting in on and around us, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, from everything from our soil, our air, our water, our body care products, our food sources, our thoughts, the people we’re around go into the mitochondria, they translate that information, and then they send out signaling agents.
James Maskell:
Can I ask you this? We did a whole thing on the mitochondria a couple years ago with Andy Heyman, and he said a couple of things, and I want to run them by you to see whether you agree. Cool. He said, we’ve always been told that the nucleus is the brain of the cell. And he said, it’s not. The nucleus is the library. The mitochondria is the brain.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Oh, I just got chills.
James Maskell:
Do you like that?
Nasha Winters, ND:
I love that.
James Maskell:
I like that.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Oh my gosh. And—
James Maskell:
He also feels that the energetic connection between mitochondria in different cells is the vital force.
Nasha Winters, ND:
I got chills again. We’ve called it chi. We’ve called it piana. We’ve called it energy.
James Maskell:
When we said that in the Functional Forum, a bunch of naturopathic doctors on the thing were like, that’s definitely not that you don’t know. And I was like, well, I don’t know. Tell me when you got a better answer.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Well, exactly. Well, when you think about it, let’s just a moment you guys have done, go back and listen to the mitochondria talk, but think of it 170,000 years ago, there were these bacteria that basically we became part of us, our mitochondria makeup, upwards of 20% of our body mass. Our mitochondria evolved from bacteria. We have been pouring antibiotics on our soil for at least since World War II, which were all lovely leftover remnants from the wars where we’re like all this leftover ammo. Let’s turn it into Big Pharma or Big Ag, which is where part of the transformation of this year is changing. And so we immediately started poisoning in a way that we’ve never poisoned these guys that have evolved with us for 170,000 years. Then number two, our mitochondria are our inner light source. So when I think about life force, vital force as naturopathic, as a naturopathic doctor, I do think about the mitochondria because the complexes in the mitochondria are what interface with light. They’re like our photovoltaic cells like photovoltaic system. So the exposure, another environmental toxin, blue light in the wrong times in places and screen time and EMFs, these are things that impact directly in the chain of our energy production cells, which is just wild.
There it is again, the signaling pathways that come out of those mitochondria, those signaling pathways are jammed up with misinformation from all kinds of chemical invaders and toxic invasions, which is pretty wild to me. And then when you think about it, at the end of the day, every clinician will tell you that the number one common symptom when a patient comes into their office is fatigue. And fatigue is the first sign of mitochondrial destruction, and we can’t take out the garbage apoptosis. So program cell death, which is when cells are damaged or not optimal, our mitochondria are in charge of apoptosis to take out the garbage. So think about it on those levels. So why would anyone not be in an environmental conference? We’re here because our mitochondria are demanding us to be here.
James Maskell:
Yeah, I like that. That’s a good way of thinking about it. I wanted to ask you about cancer because I guess what would you think of the idea that part of the reason why we don’t understand cancer is that we use the same word for a range of different diseases?
Nasha Winters, ND:
Oh man, I love it. And what is his name? The man who runs the New York, he’s known as the billionaire doctor. He came up with a saying, Dr. Shiong, am I saying that, he’s also owns the LA Times? LA Times?
Yeah, so he did. I remember in 2014, probably October, November 2014, I started getting calls from all kinds of patients and emails and texts of them saying, I just saw this guy on 60 Minutes, and I swear to God, he sounds just like you. And when I went and watched it, it’s because he said, we should stop it with calling it cancer or calling it breast cancer or pancreatic cancer. We should look at it as a disruption in the system. The ecosystem that we should stop classifying it as a single disease when it’s a collection of diseases or patterns are going to manifest uniquely in each and every one of us. So even 10 women with the same breast cancer diagnosis and even similar demographic, they’re going to have very different expressions and reasons for why they’re expressing. He questioned that. Back then they all thought he was nuts.
He’s still talking about that. Right? And I think that if we took that away, it would change because you even just say the word cancer and people just go into shock and trauma.
James Maskell:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you say that because I feel like it’s actually kind of emerging at this moment that all major chronic illnesses are actually like that. So if you look at Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline, it’s like, well, by grouping them in the way that we’ve grouped them, we’ve decided that it’s this. But if you look at the sophisticated ways that this has been reversed in some people, yes, it is largely metabolic. In some people it’s largely toxic in some people, it’s largely biotoxin. And you need to be able to separate those things out. And ultimately, I feel like we’re on a parallel path to go and work all that out. Let’s talk about the transformation that you are facilitating because the easiest place to start, which you’ve done, is to educate patients and educate doctors and so forth. The harder thing I think is then to think about how do we really solve the problem at the scale that it exists?
And I think that one of the reasons why friends of mine have always been trying to put us in a room together is because I think we think in those terms, and I know that you do, the hospital is obviously on that path, but I know you have some exciting stuff coming up and I’d love to help our practitioners know about it so that if there is some resistance, I think in the functional medicine community to treat cancer, I think there’s not a lot of cancer stuff at conferences. And I think part of the reason is that with most other complex chronic illness, there’s a predictable pattern by which it occurs and then goes back. So if you do too much of one thing or not enough of another, you’ll get this disease. And if you do the opposite, it’ll sort of come back in the other direction. Autoimmune disease, metabolic, all those kind of things. But with cancer, there’s just this level of unpredictability, and I think that scares people. And also the fact that I think in the early days, and maybe still now, it was an easy way to lose your license.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Exactly.
James Maskell:
So tell us a little bit about what is the transformation and how do you see that we can actually solve this problem at the level that it exists with your vision?
Nasha Winters, ND:
I love it. Well, I mean, first of all, I really appreciate you talked about the major conditions that affect us today. So cardiovascular, neurological, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular, mental illness, cancer, to me, they’re all the same disease. They’re all mitochondrial at their source of where things go wrong because the information being taken in translated and signaled out. It might signal out and manifest as Parkinson’s or mental bipolar or diabetes because of that. And so if you come back and you clean up the environment of the ecosystem of us in relation to the environment of the ecosystem outside of us, you can have a pretty big impact on any of these chronic illnesses we just listed off. There might be some nuances, of course, with either any one of those diseases. What I want people to understand is what we tend to do in the functional medicine and the naturopathic medicine, really conventional medicine too, is we default immediately. I like how one of our colleagues spoke this morning about we default to treatment right away. That’s what I always say is we jump right into protocol and we do that without understanding the why. We do that. We need to gather data. And so functional medicine, I think, does a really good job of gathering data, but sometimes they don’t know exactly how to translate it and then apply it, make it actionable.
So what I’ve done is trained a methodology so that it still maintains people’s autonomy, still maintains their level of expertise and interest and their own curiosity, especially if they’re a seasoned practitioner or somebody who’s been kind of scared of the big C, and suddenly they realize, well, if I just follow this methodology, I can apply this to cancer, but I can apply this to neurological, I can apply this to mental health, I can apply this to cardiovascular. They start to realize it’s sort of a sure path forward, which is different. We don’t have a common language. And I think when you’re drawn to doing alternative integrative functional medicine, you’re already kind of a little bit of a rebel and you kind of already want to do your own thing. So I like that there’s more of this methodology, like a framework that still says, you be you, but let’s follow a consistent methodology that gets us the results, whatever tools we choose to use, as long as we’re choosing them based on the information we have that’re gather. So
James Maskell:
You set out the methodology. People can choose their own adventure within it—
Nasha Winters, ND:
But ultimately—
James Maskell:
The adventure—
Nasha Winters, ND:
Exactly. Yeah.
James Maskell:
Helps. That’s huge. I mean, in this sort of parallel universe that we’re both participating in brain health, it’s like we’ve got doctors using true Neuro who are mental health, wanting to do cognitive decline and just looking at complex chronic illness, and ultimately, they’re choosing their own adventure in there. If you want to reverse cognitive decline, that’s it. But ultimately, people use it in different ways and ultimately you have to do a few things the same. You have to empower the patient, participate. You have to understand what’s driving the dysfunction. You have to make sure this person’s not going to die. And I think that there’s some commonality in the way that we see what needs to happen for this to really shift and then collecting that data in a meaningful way
Nasha Winters, ND:
Because sometimes there is just so much. And our conventional medical system, as you well know and speak to, is very much like you look for the single target and you find the single treatment and that just is going to fail us over and over again because we’re complex humans with complex experiences, with complex interactions. And so a methodology allows for some of that complexity to take root and then the meaningful way of collecting the data and looking at the data. That translation starts to allow for more the in of one model to really be birthed, which is where I think part of the transformation is. I think you and I are both on that page of you need this communal model to help it. So we train both. We empower the patient because then empower patients are hard to kill a patient. We then empower an advocate, which might be an allied health professional or someone who themselves has come through a journey themselves who have a lot of wisdom in what they’ve learned.
And then we empower the clinician and then we empower a relational aspect there. Also this in your communal teaching, in our litigious society, people don’t want to harm their tribe. They want to trust and lean in. So when you’re working in that communal model as well, there’s more trust and more ease. Like you saying, a lot of doctors are afraid to work with cancer, but when suddenly they have 800 others from around the globe who are supporting people on the cancer journey, they feel a little more confident and they feel like they’ve got resources to lean into and then they don’t have to go it alone and that they’re not going to be completely attacked on their own. They’ve got other people to resource with. That’s huge, huge in that—
James Maskell:
Arena. Yeah. So tell us what’s happening April 1st.
Nasha Winters, ND:
So April 1st, we are launching our first iteration of our data platform, which is MTOmics, which is very much specific to the oncology community where it will go in the future. We don’t know, but that’s where it’s starting. It’s basically a tool, a clinical decision-making tool for clinicians
That is also a data repository of a lot of, when they tell you there’s no data for the love of God, there’s so much data. So we’re bringing it all together and then translating it and using things like AI to help people understand certain patterns, pattern recognition, but also what treatments seem to be best fit with certain patterns. Like for instance, off-label drugs are a hot topic in oncology today and everyone and their dog is going it alone and reading books and then ordering things online and applying it to themselves with no methodology. Some do okay, more don’t. And it’s like, well, if we can actually get their data, we can now know what’s going to work, why, what dose duration in combination. We’re going to know how it interacts with their pharmacogenomics. We’re going to know what is the best timing of this, when should it be brought on board? Does it need to be brought on board? Have they run the course of whatever therapy they’re on and need to change direction? It’s going to be an incredible tool to help give the confidence, but also to scale this approach. A lot of data we have to go through with patients in this model to give them the right outcomes.
And doctors don’t have that kind of time. So to have an environment and a tool that is doing it automatically for them and scaling it is pretty exciting. And then there’s the front facing part that the patient can engage with it in almost like a gamified way and that similar thing. And to be like you showing which pillars are your strengths right now, what are your priorities, what are your weaknesses? Then there’s also the place of the tendency of some people want to do everything all at once. Some people are petrified to even take one step. This will give them some ability to prioritize and choose, like you said, choose their own adventure.
James Maskell:
Can I have a stab at how I think it goes from one to the other? Yeah, I would love it. My feeling is you start with the platform, you track the outcomes at a certain point, you then can compare the outcomes that you are getting to what’s happening in the hospital.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Banging.
James Maskell:
Banging. At a certain point it becomes clear that this is better outcomes at lower cost, and there are people who want to purchase that, right? Those outcomes. And then at that point there needs to be a central center of excellence in order to execute it in the sort of manner that it’s designed to be done. And there’s a hospital with the regenerative fund. Boom, boom.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Exactly. And you actually just spoke a little bit to the 23 and Me model, which a lot of people, they’ve got a bad rap now because they kind of sold out to the devil in my opinion in some ways. But they were starting in that place of citizen science. We’re going to gather this. We’re cheap for 99 bucks. You can have your epigenetics, your single nucleotide polymorphisms run. And when we hit a million participants, we now have meaningful data that can change the industry, which it did, but it unfortunately landed in the wrong hands when in 2017 I believe they got in the hands of GlaxoSmithKline. Now, all the data that I wanted as a clinician got scraped or censored, which was a lot of it around pharmacogenomics because the pharmaceutical companies do not want you to know if a patient’s going to respond well to their drug or not. And suddenly it went the wrong way. It was like, yay, and then fell away. So folks like you and I are very much trying to use this to change the current system versus sell out to the—
James Maskell:
Old. Well, I dunno if we should talk about this, but I think we should. Why not? Why not? I have a dream about how we avoid—
Nasha Winters, ND:
That. I love—
James Maskell:
And my dream for that is that the nodes of the network should own the network.
Nasha Winters, ND:
The decentralization. That is a hundred percent. This is why is our friends all want us here.
James Maskell:
Yeah.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Yeah, yeah.
James Maskell:
No, I really believe the question that you have to ask yourself is would you send your parents to an organization where that organization was owned by private equity? And the answer is clearly no. Because everyone with heart left 10 years ago. And ultimately what I see in the practitioner network that exists out there, you who I’m talking to right now, the heart is still very much present. The heart is the reason why they’re there at all. And you need that. I mean, that’s the heart that you showed with the lady who had the cancer that you connected with. There’s so much of that healing therapeutic relationship. There’s an attunement that’s happening between the patient and the practitioner that is not calculable, but is definitely happening. And everyone who’s involved in medicine fucking knows it. Absolutely. And ultimately, we just have to acknowledge that that’s happening.
And medicine can’t just be data. There is something that’s powerful there. Absolutely. And so my feeling is that what I see and what I think is about to happen is tools like we’re working on actually allow the scaling beyond the first practitioner because the people who’ve been taking your courses for this long, they’re this good at it. The next person who brings this good at it, and you can’t really deliver a standard of care. Whereas if everyone’s using the software, at least you’re like 80%. There’s still some intuition and there’s some pieces there that are going to be, but you lift it up. So I’m really grateful that we’re on this sort of parallel path. And when you told me about the vision of the hospital years ago, I haven’t been short of people in my world that have told me massive things that they want to do, but I haven’t really been able to see a pathway there. And obviously early on when I was in the industry, I remember very clearly a naturopathic doctor who was awesome and I loved him from Connecticut. He was like, I’ve got this huge vision of this and we’re going to bring everyone in together. But it was like you were walking before you could run. And to build a practice where 20 practitioners work together in harmony is a very difficult ask. It’s almost—
Nasha Winters, ND:
Impossible. Very—
James Maskell:
Few people have done it. And so, in sense, if that’s, you have to go from zero to one if you’ve never done any sort of personnel management or HR or whatever, never mind. Thought about the business model that gets you there and the incentive structure and all that stuff. So what I see now having witnessed your journey is this sort of crawl, walk, run journey. And I’m excited to see, I know that it’ll happen because I think you’re thinking about it in the right way. And I know you’ve got a lot of juice left in the tank. We couldn’t leave this interview without having a little bit of a discussion about the fact that just yesterday Bobby Kennedy was confirmed. You and I saw each other last month at the MAHA Ball. I know both of us have probably lost subscribers and friends and other things for being this, but ultimately there’s some sort of internal conviction in us that this is the way to go. Where does it come from you for you?
Nasha Winters, ND:
Well, it’s wild. I mean, my entire life, even before my cancer diagnosis and since I’ve always had everything sort of stacked against me, everyone always told me in every step of my life, it can’t be done. It can’t be done. And so I’ve always had this mantra of, well then please get out of the way of me and the people that are doing it. Part of that is the mantra I’ve had for all of these decades of my work is I spent the first 10 years of my career trying to fix the broken system. And I learned early on that is never going to happen. About 23 years ago I said, screw that. I’m just going to build a new one. And at that time, 23 years ago, it was being a lone wolf. It was being completely isolated from anyone and everyone thought it was necking butts like this woman’s crazy. She’s just, you are trying to boil the ocean.
But that conviction has always been there. I have always questioned, we aren’t asking the right questions, we aren’t approaching this the right way. There are more things that can be done. And that has always been the way the work I’ve done in the regenerative farming community, the regenerative health community, the environmental community, these have all been the pieces. Knowing that if we don’t get Big Ag and Big Pharma out of the way and we don’t link arms with health and regenerative farming, we’ll never move this forward. The last seven, eight years, the relationships I’ve built and bridges I’ve built in those communities have given me this hope. So when I started having conversations with my friends and family, a couple, 2023, when I saw RFK coming, I said, I’m really interested in what this guy has to say. And everyone was like, he’s crazy. I’m like, but you guys have all told me I’m crazy all these years.
Right? Kind of crazy. And there is, there’s crazy and there’s the right kind of crazy, but it’s going to take enough people willing to go against the grain, which I’ve done my whole life, to come together all at once. That’s what we’re seeing.
James Maskell:
Let me tell you something. I love that you said that. There’s a great quote, Jeff Bezos actually said this quote. He says, if the anecdote doesn’t match the data, then you’re measuring things wrong. And that’s huge for me at the beginning of my career, I’m literally sitting with kids that have an environmental injury and I’m seeing them over a period of time reverse it and come back. So whenever you think about the data, that’s a thing that I saw with my own eyes. And if you see the numbers going up like this, then you realize actually you guys dunno what you’re doing and we’re going to bring this forward until well done. Thank you. Thank you. This has been amazing. I’m really grateful to have this conversation. I’m really grateful to record this conversation this time. I’ve been thinking about how the last 12 years is really a journey to capture and catalog what all these pioneers have been doing. There’s so many people that I caught 10 years ago that have done amazing things in the meantime and this revolution hasn’t even happened yet.
Nasha Winters, ND:
Exactly.
James Maskell:
It’s—
Nasha Winters, ND:
There’s been so much you guys, this is what I’m excited. There’s so much happening. We’ve been grassroot it for so long and it’s the first time we actually have the potential to have a top down meet the grassroot up in my lifetime. Well said. And I’m super stoked.
James Maskell:
That’s exactly it. Well, we have been live on location at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. This energy exists here. I came a year and a half ago, I was at a different conference across town. I came, I saw Peter McCullough, everyone under standing ovation. I saw you very briefly and I was like, this is cool. I see Derek Guillory and Jeff Morrison and other people that are stepping in Kelly McCann who are like, hey, we think about environmental person like this and we’re going to go after it. This is an organization worth being part of. And I hope if you’re listening to this and you felt frustrated that your favorite organizations don’t think about things the way you think about them, it’s okay. Everyone can choose their own adventure, but ultimately part of, there’s an energy here that is different because of the people that are showing up. So I will continue to be part of supporting this organization and I love it. Great to be here with you. This has been the Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’ve been live at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine with Dr. Nasha Winters. We’ll have all the details in the show notes. We’ll be talking about the upcoming launch of the program and I hope that you start from cancer. We’ll start from brain disease and we’ll meet in the middle.
Nasha Winters, ND:
We’re on it. Alright.
James Maskell:
Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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