273: The Anti-Cancer Revolution
with Ryan Sternagel
Ryan Sternagel's son Ryder was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma – a childhood cancer of the nervous system – just days before his first birthday. Ryan and his wife consulted countless doctors and health experts of all disciplines to employ an integrative approach that cut the amount of conventional treatment Ryder received in half through an integrative mix of super nutrition, complementary therapies and energy medicine along with a whole lot of prayer and healthy lifestyle changes. Ryan is here to share his story today.
More about Ryan Sternagel:
Ryan Sternagel is the founder along with his wife Teddy of The Stern Method, a platform informing and inspiring families going through cancer to succeed on all fronts.
Ryan hosts the Integrative Answers to Cancer podcast to share these strategies with those that need them. To further their goal of preventing future cases of childhood cancer, in 2018 Ryan hosted The Toxic Home Transformation – an online event that showed over 100,000 families how to rid their homes of all physical and energetic environmental toxicity.
Ryan will also be hosting The Anti-Cancer Revolution, a free online conference in June of 2019, and is the creator of Going Integrative, a step by step course for cancer parents and patients.
Ryan and Teddy continue to ensure that Ryder and his little sister Channing thrive for the rest of their lives, sharing how they do it along the way through their social media posts, videos and articles on The Stern Method website.
Additional Information:
Show notes:
The Anti-Cancer Revolution – online and FREE! June 17-23, 2019
Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
On this episode of Cell TV, I taped this right after a conference here in Nashville, a Live It to Lead It conference, one of my seminars where we had the top scientists and doctors in cancer, alternative cancer. We learned a ton. One of the things that really just grabbed me was the increase, almost a 70% increase in childhood cancer since the 1950s. We learned a lot about the causative factors and why.
In this episode, I interview Ryan Sternagel. The seminar interviewed him and his wife and I wanted to bring you this story. Ryan talks about what they went through, their battle. It’s very emotional, but what they learned from it. Right now, it’s a pain to purpose story in their life. They’ve started a website. They are doing a series, a summit where they’re bringing this information to families where cancer is obviously a part of their story somehow, but also other childhood illnesses.
We talk about that all in this episode. You’re going to want to stay tuned and hear this story. You’re going to want to share this with as many people as you can because believe me, there’s families around you with kids that are sick, have cancer. It’s going to impact them greatly. They need these resources that we talk about in the show. I’ll see you in the episode.
I’m here on location with Ryan. I’m on location again at one of my seminars actually here in Nashville. We had you on stage last night, you and Teddy talking about your son. I was heartfelt, so was the audience. We had a lot of tears. The topic in this seminar was cancer.
I really wanted you to tell your story because what we’re seeing is a massive increase in childhood cancers. You all lived a healthy lifestyle. My family, we lived a healthy lifestyle, and my kids received lead inherited from my wife, and it created gut issues. We had children who were not well. It became inherited toxins.
You ended up with a child that here under a year old, and all of a sudden, you’re seeing these health things start rising up. Tell the story. I want you to hear this story because this is where we are as a nation right now that we see. Since 1950s, we’ve seen a 67% increase in childhood cancers. That’s concerning.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and you go back 100 years, and it was basically nonexistent at that point. The doctors had to travel from all around if they wanted to actually study a case of childhood cancer. Now, you go to the mall and you’ll see some kid with a wig or whatever.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, with its hair out.
Ryan Sternagel:
Like you said, my wife and I lived a very—obviously, we’re not as—we weren’t as tuned up with everything then.
Dr. Pompa:
As you are now.
Ryan Sternagel:
For the couple years even before Ryder was born, we were getting rid of using chemical cleaning products and personal care products. We were even pretty far ahead in realizing that EMFs were a concern and doing everything we could with that. I was getting into triathlons, and marathons, and that sort of thing. Teddy, my wife, was getting into Crossfit. We were lessoning to Ben Greenfield.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good friend of ours.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, for sure. That’s actually I think how I found about you originally was hearing him on his—or hearing you on his show. Yeah, we were getting into all of it. Ryder was born in a birth center with a midwife. Everyone’s first question when they talk to us always is was he vaccinated; wasn’t.
Dr. Pompa:
You were like us; we did a lot of right things.
Ryan Sternagel:
That said, we were living the normal—he was our first kid, so living the normal new parent life for about a year. Like you said, things started—we didn’t really put them all together until eventually about a month before he turned one year old, my wife found a lump in his back when she was nursing him. It wasn’t sticking out huge, long, but if you bent over the right way like when she was nursing him, you could fill it.
To back up a little bit, it’s—when we found the lump, we started thinking about all these things. He was born in the 90th percentile. By that time, he’d pretty much stopped growing at about six months and then just plummeted on the growth chart. He wasn’t crawling and this was about almost a year old.
It’s just all the—he wasn’t handling solid foods which actually turned out to be an entirely different issue. Once we did get the diagnosis, it turned out that he also had a double aorta in his—coming off of his heart that was compressing his trachea and his esophagus. That was actually a whole other ordeal. After we got the cancer until control, then we had to fly him out to Pennsylvania to get a heart surgery.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh my gosh.
Ryan Sternagel:
Who knows; probably somewhere deep down those two things are related.
Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, there was part of the story where okay, they didn’t know what was wrong. Someone said this neuroblastoma, this type of cancer that really there’s no way that your child should have this. You brought him for a second opinion. They’re thinking there’s no way. Then what happens?
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, no, it was interesting because we took Ryder to—back to our pediatrician who was a naturopathic doctor. They basically brushed it off which was really strange looking back on it that he had a lump sticking out of his back and all of these other things that were adding up. They tried to send us to physical therapy for the crawling thing and occupational therapy to teach him how to eat. They even started making Teddy feel bad that she was breastfeeding him and maybe that was the reason he had fallen off the growth chart.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s unbelievable.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, I don’t know; it was really strange, really strange looking back on it.
Dr. Pompa:
I can’t believe in modern day—this modern day and age, they actually were thinking breastfeeding was why he wasn’t doing well.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, or maybe they just—
Dr. Pompa:
They wanted to give him the sugar, corn syrup, soy, GMO product in of course baby food.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and then Teddy comes home with all the organic baby food or whatever because they freaked her out. I don’t know. Anyway, we—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but that was Teddy, okay. Yeah, if she was going to move to food, she would have done that, but they weren’t going to put him on that. They were going to put him on the standard crap, whatever it is.
Ryan Sternagel:
It didn’t feel right. We never went to one physical therapy session. It was just something was—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you knew it was something else. As it turned, the tumor sticking out was just the tip of the iceberg.
Ryan Sternagel:
That’s what they said, yeah. Teddy was the one that diagnosed neuroblastoma just from clicking around on the internet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they thought she was nuts.
Ryan Sternagel:
We ended up seeing a—well, we got admitted to the hospital, but then it turned out to be an orthopedic physician’s assistant that we saw. He took an x-ray and then sent us back home and said nothing looked wrong. We kept pressing after that. Then finally they did an ultrasound just to placate us more or less. That’s when they did see a mass.
Then all of a sudden, it became okay, well now we need to get him back into an MRI to rule out neuroblastoma is the way they put it. Yeah, then the MRI, like Teddy was saying last night, it was supposed to be a half hour; then an hour goes by; then an hour and a half. When the doctor and her nurse did come back in, they both—they had tears in their eyes. It was their words. They said, “The lump you feel is just the tip of the iceberg.” Yeah, it was Stage Four cancer. He had a tumor inside of and growing out of his spine that was larger than his kidneys.
Dr. Pompa:
Because it’s in the spine—you heard it from stage. We had some of the top cancer experts in the world here speaking. They said sometimes there’s a time for radiation or chemo when it’s choking something like that like the spine. You have to decrease the tumor.
The problem is that long-term after that, you better do something else. Let’s tell the rest of this story. Alright, you get this diagnosis. I can’t even imagine how you and Teddy felt. What was going through your mind at that point?
Ryan Sternagel:
I look back on it and it’s hard to really—it’s almost like you remember it—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you lived through it, man.
Ryan Sternagel:
It’s almost like remembering it—
Dr. Pompa:
Survived through it is what I meant to say.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, it’s almost like remembering a dream.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s like when I think about when I was sick. It’s almost like a dream looking back.
Ryan Sternagel:
The one thing that I did just have a deep confidence on was that we were going to find a way to get this under control and reverse it. Along with the just getting healthy stuff, I’d seen a few documentaries on alternative approaches to cancer and that sort of thing. Yeah, I did just—your son gets diagnosed with cancer and especially looking at those scans; it was spine, spine, spine, tumor. You couldn’t even see the spine anymore. There was secondary tumors. They had metastasized into the bone.
Dr. Pompa:
Did you think for a moment, we might lose our son? My brain would go there. It would because I’m one those things, okay, the worst-case scenario. I almost want to visualize that; I would. Then I would be, okay, I’m going to fix this. It’s not going to happen. Did you guys do that?
Ryan Sternagel:
Of course, you know that is the worst-case scenario. I really just didn’t let myself dwell too much in that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t know how I would have reacted. I guess that’s why I’m asking that question.
Ryan Sternagel:
I did a pretty good job of just keeping it together because I knew that’s what was needed for the family. For the first few weeks, I put Ryder to bed every night and by myself for whatever reason. I’d bawl my eyes out, to be honest with you. Then I’d pull it back together and just—
Dr. Pompa:
I’m sure you and your wife were strong at different times and lifted each up at different times. She’d break down; you’d be strong. You’d break down; she’d be strong.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, but that being said, it was a weird—looking back on it, a weird sense of calm almost in just knowing that we were going to find a way.
Dr. Pompa:
Look, you and Teddy are action takers. Meaning you go through a short period of time like that, but then you take action. The action is what you need to stay focused and not get too emotional right, so you took action. Here you were.
Let me back up. They came in now and say, okay, here it is. It’s chemo; it’s this, it’s that. Finish that part of the story.
Ryan Sternagel:
It took weeks and weeks and weeks to get a diagnosis. Then once we finally get the diagnosis, its, okay, you need to get admitted to the hospital immediately and begin chemotherapy. They didn’t even know—they hadn’t done a biopsy. The still weren’t 100% sure it was neuroblastoma. There’s different types of neuroblastoma that do have their own—there are different types of standard of care chemotherapy/radiation protocols that they put kids through.
Without even wanting to know all those details, they wanted him to get started immediately just on their best guess, I guess you could say. Like you said, there are times that shrinking a tumor is the right thing to do. We were certainly open to that, but we also wanted to get a second opinion.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would have.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and make sure that this was the right thing for him.
Dr. Pompa:
They didn’t like that.
Ryan Sternagel:
They didn’t like it, no. We did agree to get a port placed right away because we had already been hearing about IV vitamin C.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it would be easier to do that.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, then just poking a one-year-old every time. We got the port placed. We said, okay, thank you for the diagnosis or what you’ve done so far. We’re going to go home and get a second opinion. From there, it was a stream of probably a dozen different doctors, and nurses, and social workers all telling us not to do it.
Dr. Pompa:
The CYS called?
Ryan Sternagel:
The CPS, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
CPS, was it? Is it?
Ryan Sternagel:
Child Protective Services.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I was thinking CYS. Why was I thinking CYS? Child and Youth Services. It’s probably called a different thing.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and the different states call it different things. Yeah, it was weird how it worked out. We did take him home. We didn’t know about the CPS call.
Then I think two days after that, we were sleeping in bed with him, and he woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy high fever. All of a sudden, he was puking all over the place. We didn’t know what was going on. It was the hospital that we had just worked so hard to get out of, all of a sudden, it was 90 miles an hour back to the hospital. It turned out that he had got a bloodstream staph infection.
Dr. Pompa:
From the port.
Ryan Sternagel:
As a result of getting the port put in. At that point, we were just basically for lack of a better term, trapped in the hospital. For those couple of days, I had been calling around all sorts of different Mexican and German clinics and trying to figure out what we’re going to do. All those travel plans went out the window because now we got—
Dr. Pompa:
The infection, yeah.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, now we got the infection.
Dr. Pompa:
Then, okay, there you are in the hospital. Okay, so they do the chemo. At least they shrink it.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, at that point, we considered a round of chemotherapy because it’s like okay, we do have to do something about this tumor.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it could choke off his spinal cord.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, so we went through a round of chemo and that was tough. Like I was starting to say last night is we demanded a feeding tube right away. At least, I think I mentioned this last night.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you did.
Ryan Sternagel:
They wait for a lot of these kids to get super emaciated and just looking like a typical cancer patient. Then they’ll put a feeding tube in and try to but the GMO crap into them.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but because you wanted to put all the good nutrients in, put it in right away. That was smart.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, so we demanded that. That was actually weird enough; that was a fight in and of itself.
Dr. Pompa:
Of course.
Ryan Sternagel:
Just getting that feeding tube in him because he doesn’t understand.
Dr. Pompa:
You guys ended up bringing your juicers, your blenders. You set up. You had all the nutrients. You weren’t the average family. They were probably laughing at you like oh, look at these people; meanwhile.
Ryan Sternagel:
I know; some of the nurses thought it was cool. They’re like, oh, you’re making your own feeds because they call the stuff the feeds. Yeah, you can call it that. It was quite the operation in there and had water filtering.
Dr. Pompa:
At this point, you’re doing a combination of standard care and natural care, which was really smart.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and then finally, we cleared the infection. The infection actually ended up coming back because they didn’t realize it was living in the line. We got out of the hospital and then ended up going back to the hospital. Then he had to get the line taken because it wasn’t a port he got put in; it was actually a Hickman line. We had tubes taken out of his chest.
Dr. Pompa:
It was in the line.
Ryan Sternagel:
Then we had to get the line taken out and get the port put in. Between those two occurrences, we were actually on I think our way back to the hospital just for a regular appointment type of deal. My uncle calls me because he was looking over the house just helping out with everything. He said, “I just go a knock here on the door from CPS, Child Protective Services. It sounds like somebody is not agreeing with the way you’re doing things sort of thing.” Of course, when we get to the hospital, they’re like, “Oh no, we didn’t call.” I don’t know who else would have done it.
Dr. Pompa:
That makes me mad, I’m going to be honest with you, for different reasons of our freedoms. It’s your child. That’s a whole another show. I don’t even want to go down that road right now.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, it was quite interesting, to say the least. We get a child in cancer diagnosis, but then we’re also in a CPS office answering questions about, were you molested as a child? How do you discipline your son? It’s like, my son is one-year-old. I’ve never needed to discipline him before. Anyway, it’s an unfortunate part of the story.
At that point it was like, well, we did talk to the hospital. It sounds like you guys are complying now. As long as you keep complying, we won’t have a problem. Successive trips to the hospital and more appointments, it became very clear that we would need to keep doing the chemotherapy or there would be a new problem.
Dr. Pompa:
Because initially, you said one shot. Is that right, or two, or three?
Ryan Sternagel:
They had said that the protocol would be four rounds of chemotherapy. Then I asked, “Well, what are you looking for in those four rounds?” They gave me a couple of different metrics of reduction in tumor size and that sort of thing. By that point, we were already going off to see a naturopathic oncologist on the side, and then getting IV vitamin infusions, and then like we talked about, just shoving all these different supplements into his feeding tube. I think I can get there in two rounds. If we can hit these markers in two rounds—
Dr. Pompa:
You were smart. You asked, okay, what’s the goal? Because if we can hit the goal sooner, can we stop the poison?
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah; and so, that will never happen, but okay. We’ll give him a—because usually, they don’t give him another scan until after four rounds. They said, well, we’ll give you scan after two rounds. Of course, we blew those metrics out of the water.
Dr. Pompa:
Did they stop? No, they wanted to keep going.
Ryan Sternagel:
No, we actually said this, this, and this. No, you didn’t. Then we got to four rounds. We’re like, okay, now we’re done, right? No, I don’t know where you got four rounds; it’s going to be eight. The story kept on just getting crazier from there.
Dr. Pompa:
What did you do? Did you have to comply to the eight?
Ryan Sternagel:
That’s when we moved.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s when you bailed.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
You went to Utah, which you’re my neighbor technically. You ended up going to Utah and a little different pressure.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and it’s not like we just called them and said, would you not let us do chemotherapy.
Dr. Pompa:
No, but you realized you had to get out of there.
Ryan Sternagel:
Utah, it's very natural health friendly, which Washington state was too, but it’s also a little bit higher on the personal liberty scale I guess you could say as far as—
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, a little bit more freedom I would say here.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah; and that was enough for us to say let’s give it a try. Like I said, it’s not like Utah is some bastion of parental rights where you can do anything.
Dr. Pompa:
No, but you ended up here. A different hospital, a different philosophy, what happened?
Ryan Sternagel:
The team we landed on ended up—it was nice that we were starting over with this team. By that point, Ryder, the secondary tumors were pretty much gone. The metastases was pretty much gone. The primary tumor was so much or so substantially reduced at that point that they were okay with what they called a wait and see approach, which makes a lot of sense. They knew we were doing all the natural stuff and maybe they put some credence into that, but really more than anything, they were just willing to see Ryder as an individual, our son, and think maybe four rounds of chemo is enough for this kid.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll see what happens. That seems a more sensible approach to me. Okay, so they did that. What happened?
Ryan Sternagel:
He said if things start going the wrong way, we can turn on a dime. Yeah, that sounds good.
Dr. Pompa:
It didn’t; it started going the right way without treatment, without chemo. It started going in a very positive direction rapidly.
Ryan Sternagel:
It was crazy. Once we had the choice and they were actually willing to work with us, it was—that actually was like a whole new, oh crap, do we really want to stop? Yeah, but we ended up stopping at that point. Yeah, things kept going in the right direction.
Dr. Pompa:
Today, it’s the size of a walnut. It looks like it may just be scar tissue.
Ryan Sternagel:
You could call it a residual mass at this point. On one scan over the course of a year, it ticked up just slightly. Of course, that was pretty disheartening, but I—there’s something called ganglioneuroma which is cells that are—it’s basically benign cells that aren’t cancerous but maybe just smoldering in there, that sort of thing. That being said, we doubled down on just everything we were doing holistically. Then on the next scan a few months later, it stopped in its tracks. Then this last scan we got, it actually looks like—that mass has been there for a long time. We would like it to go away. On this last scan, it actually looks like it is starting to break up a little bit, which is pretty cool.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. How many years later are we now, five or six?
Ryan Sternagel:
We’re just about five years later.
Dr. Pompa:
Pretty amazing.
Ryan Sternagel:
He was diagnosed in May and it’s—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and how long has it been since the last chemo, four years?
Ryan Sternagel:
Four plus years.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m sure that I asked you this question last night, what did they say? Here you stop the chemo. Obviously, and their comment was?
Ryan Sternagel:
Just good luck.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, good luck to you. It’s like, oh, you got lucky. That’s good.
Ryan Sternagel:
This team is pretty cool.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I’m liking this team. There’s no bad things about this team.
Ryan Sternagel:
Our primary oncologist at one point made the crack that these aren’t vitamins that we’re giving these kids here, which he’s actually acknowledging the toxicity of the treatment. They’re always trying to minimize it which is—that’s the only person I’ve ever really like—oncologist that I’ve heard really actually acknowledge that. Yeah, it’s powerful.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to share your website here, but you all have done a lot from a nutrition standpoint, from a detox standpoint, which is where something you and I resonate here on which is part of the success that you’ve had obviously. From pain to purpose is my story. You have a great purpose now helping families with these situations. One of the things that you and Teddy were amazing at is working through it: how to get these healthy foods in a child, how to get these types of things in an infant all the way through. That’s a hard situation. On your website, you have all these little tips and things that you—the only way you could learn is going through it. I have no idea how to get that into your child. You guys help these families.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and there wasn’t any—there was alternative or integrative cancer websites obviously.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but nothing with all the things here’s what to do, how to do it.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, and especially for kids, that sort of thing. Along the way, we started posting everything we were doing originally just to Facebook for fundraising purposes and to just show other families what we were doing because we saw a lot of these families just up close and personal in the hospital that it was an exact opposite of a juicer.
Dr. Pompa:
You guys are doers, man. Yeah, I want to know. Okay, give the website and share this because how many other families are going through childhood cancers. They need this resource. Give the resource.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, the website is thesternmethod.com. Our last name is Sternagel; that’s a little hard to remember, so we shortened it up.
Dr. Pompa:
Smart.
Ryan Sternagel:
It’s the Stern Method.
Dr. Pompa:
Sternagel, that’s a dyslexic. Who knows what I’m calling it.
Ryan Sternagel:
Fun fact, it was actually originally called my kid cures cancer, but that got politically unfeasible to be running around with cures cancer in your name.
Dr. Pompa:
That stinks though. I’m like, well, okay, your son cured cancer? No, his body cured cancer. Anyways, yes, obviously, this must have been—it must have decimated your finances. What does it do to a family?
Ryan Sternagel:
Teddy and I were just getting started, a young couple. Ryder was our first kid, that sort of thing. We get asked this question a lot, or people assume, and they make comments about, you’re so lucky that you were so well off to be able to afford all this. Because they see us posting all the different energy medicine gadgets we’re getting and just hundreds of dollars’ worth of supplements. Like I said, the IV vitamin C in and of itself adds pretty quick. Like I said, fundraising was a really big thing for us.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you talk about that on your website at all?
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, good.
Ryan Sternagel:
We have a course coming out in just a few months here that’s going to be—take people through not only how we think about supplementation, and nutrition, and detox, and a lot of the stuff you think about when you think about cancer, but a lot of the mechanics of how we’ve made all this stuff work for us between because we’ve raised tens of thousands of dollars to be able to afford all this stuff, and even just how do you fit all this stuff into a day. Having a healing schedule more or less was really big for us. It just started out with supplements because we’re on 50 different supplements at any one time. Some are with food; some are without food; some are right before bed.
Dr. Pompa:
Navigating that, it’s like how were you working? This is a full-time job. I’m sure Teddy really raised up for most of it.
Ryan Sternagel:
We were fortunate in that I was an outside sales guy without an office to report to, so I was already working out of the house. That being said, it was still—I will never forget the first few months that Ryder was diagnosed. I wasn’t really selling anything, but the checks kept coming in. I’ll always be grateful to my old day job for that. I’ll never forget that.
Outside of that, at some point, I had read that book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It was all about how to get out of your day job and only work four hours. Fast forward, the second part came true, I don’t have the day job anymore, but now I work way more than 40 hours, but it’s for a good cause obviously. One of the things in his book was outsourcing as much of your day job as you could using freelance services like upwork.com and things like that.
I said, well, I could—we’re raising money fundraising. What if I found somebody to do all the parts of my day job that it didn’t necessarily need to be me doing? I outsourced a lot of the data entry and proposal writing and stuff like that to a guy that still works for us in the Philippines. That gave me more time to just be on PubMed doing research and implementing everything we were doing for Ryder.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve done shows on you—with you I should say, interviews, how to make your home safe. I’m sure you have a lot of that on your website too, which is really important because obviously this weekend we heard a lot about the causative factors of cancer. So many chemicals in the environment that we have no idea. Even in utero, as I pointed out in my story that my wife giving my kids the lead, so many other chemicals. They all talked about you have to get upstream to cause, the detox, all of it is critical.
Ryan Sternagel:
That’s a really big component of what we’ve done for ourselves and what we try to get out there to other people is you can throw all of these therapies at the problem as you want, but if you’re still living in an environment that potentially had a big percentage causative factor in the first place be it chemicals, or mold, or EMFs, or most likely a soup of all of those things, then you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you just said something. A lot of us focused on chemicals in our environment, moldy homes, there’s a lot of environmental things that you have to consider; really very important. Obviously, you guys, you were doing a lot of the right things, but yet, we live in today’s day and age. There’s a lot of stress on the DNA.
Ryan Sternagel:
It’s got to be taken up to the next level, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ryan Sternagel:
That being, it’s stress.
Dr. Pompa:
You wife is going through a lot of stress.
Ryan Sternagel:
When she was pregnant actually, she had a day job situation where it was one of those trying to make things so miserable on her that she would quit and they wouldn’t have to pay the maternity leave. At least that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why they were treating her the way they were. It got to her. It really got to her. I could see it on her face when she came home every day. We ended up pulling her out way early than we had planned on. I still think about that to this day; that may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. I don’t know.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, when you look at physical, chemical, and emotional stressors, they come together and create a perfect storm. It can trigger certain conditions no doubt about it and genes for that matter. I hate the cliché thing that you would say, okay, there’s one thing, one piece of advice you would tell a parent that’s going through this, but for this situation, I think it’s worth saying that. Because I just put myself in this situation, I think gosh; it’s like I can’t even imagine. What one piece of advice would you give them?
Ryan Sternagel:
I’d say as hard as it is to look at it like this, I still think it is the best way to look at it is it’s really caused us to take ten steps back. Look at everything from the biggest picture possible and basically just do our best to remove all badness for lack of a better term from our life be it physical, toxins, the home environment, or just the energy my wife and I are putting off, and then trying to project the best energy we can onto him, or getting him outside. Just really living the best life possible. Just trying to replace all of any negative factor with something positive.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re helping people do that. I started this piece by saying a 67% increase since the 1950s in childhood cancers. By the way, most experts if not all experts feel that it is environmentally induced. Meaning that’s the biggest component of this increase that we’re seeing. Why else is it happening? Physical, chemical, and emotional stress. The chemicals, we’ve done many shows on that we’re exposed to today, hidden things: flame-retardants. I could go down the list of things.
If it doesn’t show up as a child, it may show up later. Autism right now is sailing. One in two kids predicted by 2032 if the statistics stay the same; it looks like it is. This is where we are right now as a nation.
Ryan Sternagel:
That’s a good point you made about maybe something’s not showing up right now, but it might later. I think a lot—we have a lot of families following us that are just—that aren’t going through cancer but are inspired to live healthier lives for their families.
Dr. Pompa:
There you go, yeah.
Ryan Sternagel:
For the folks that don’t really subscribe to that and just look at us like, well, that’s unfortunate for you that you have to be so paranoid about this stuff, but our kid’s healthy.
Dr. Pompa:
For now.
Ryan Sternagel:
We don’t need to—but it’s like even if they don’t—even if they never come down with childhood cancer or something like that, with adult cancers rates being pretty much one in two or one in three these days, you want your kid getting diagnosed with cancer when his 40?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but it’s even beyond that. Look, my kids are here at this particular seminar. I had a conversation with all the youngsters. They’re like, look, our whole generation, everybody is sick. All of their friends are sick. They’re already developing degenerative conditions. They’re on meds. They’re doing things just to focus.
Like you said, how many are taking Adderall? It’s a sick generation. I probably know that more than you because my kids are there. You see what I’m saying? They’re telling me what’s going on. It’s scary. When your kids’ age get to there, I don’t know what we’re going to see. We’re going to see an explosion of autoimmune, cancer, and other terrible basically degenerative conditions.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, no, I’m started getting invited to birthday parties and stuff like that now and just seeing all the kids; it’s crazy.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, and it’s beyond that. It’s the food. It’s the chemicals. It’s the stress of life. It’s the EMFs. We’ve done shows on all these things. Ryan, thank you. I appreciate you coming on sharing. Share the show because this is important.
Ryan Sternagel:
Yeah, we should mention the event you’re going to be on that we’re putting on.
Dr. Pompa:
Put it out.
Ryan Sternagel:
It’s called the Anti-Cancer Revolution. It’s an online conference or summit if you want to call it that with 40 plus speakers. You’re on it, Dr. Pompa. I’m informally referring to it as the truth about cancer meets what you might hear at an integrative physicians’ conference, a naturopathic oncologist conference.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll give you a link for that, so you can share it and be a part of that as well. You need to hear the information. Yeah, thanks for doing that. Alright, see you on the next one. Remember, fix the cell, get well.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
