Dr. Donese Warden on Metabolic Cancer Therapy, Spontaneous Remission & The Truth in Medicine

Dr. Donese (00:00)
you

Zane Myers (00:01)
So I'm here with Dr. Donice Warden, ⁓ naturopathic physician. correct me if I get anything wrong. And you have your own clinic there, or two clinics you operate now in Arizona. And then you have another organization called, let me see if I got this right, based out of Florida, ⁓ Prove It Research.

which you're doing ⁓ clinical trials. And I actually want to ask you more about that too as we get going here. So did I get everything right so far?

Dr. Donese (00:39)
Well,

almost. So let's start with Donnese. My father's name's Don, so it's Donnese, not Denise. So you're close, you're close. ⁓ And I see a lot of virtual patients now, almost all of my practice, they're clients because I'm metabolically treating cancer patients all over the world. So I still do have a clinic in Gilbert, Arizona, where I see patients, but ⁓ I'm really trying to just narrow down on doing.

Zane Myers (00:46)
Okay.

Dr. Donese (01:09)
So then Prove It is, ⁓ yes, we incorporated in Florida and I'll tell you more about that research company, which is quite exciting. Yeah.

Zane Myers (01:18)
Yeah, so tell me about ⁓ how, Warden, how you ended up, I kind like to go back and look at how you got started in ⁓ naturopathic medicine. I did pick up a little bit about you were in college at the same time as your son, but you had a background in media ⁓ and had a talk show on one of the networks.

Dr. Donese (01:31)
you

Zane Myers (01:45)
And tell me about that and just give me kind of a sketch of even

Dr. Donese (01:49)
Yeah,

yeah, long ride. was in the television business. I was a broadcaster. I was a media newscaster. And I also had a couple of television talk shows that was with NBC, ABC and CBS in the day, but mostly NBC and ⁓ then got moved and went into other things. ⁓ And ⁓ my son was in college at five years old getting college credit. I'm taking driving him and I'm thinking.

Okay, I love education. had my master's degree. I had a lot of background. I'd always been interested in medicine. was ⁓ working in nutrition and sports training and always been athletic and competitively working in athletics. And I thought, well, you know what? ⁓ I'm interested in science and in medicine. As far as allopathic medicine, the only thing that I considered would be literally brain surgery or neurosurgery or...

cardiology because those are mechanical things. The rest of the parts of medicine and traditional I wasn't that drawn to. But when I found out that as a naturopathic medical doctor that I would be licensed in both, I would be able to prescribe meds, do minor surgery and understand and know the traditional side of medicine, but also be licensed in the alternative medicines that made sense. And went back and went to medical school and got that completed. And while I was doing it, I was training a lot.

with European doctors because in some areas of medicine, they're still ahead of us in my opinion.

Zane Myers (03:17)
Mm-hmm. So it seems like when we think of traditional medicine ⁓ as ⁓ my journey, it seems like that actually traditional medicine is ⁓ really alternative medicine and what we think of as traditional medicine now, allopathic medicine, is really not traditional.

Dr. Donese (03:35)
Yeah, those are terms,

right? We've got to settle that at one point. You're right. Traditional medicine traditionally would be Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine and the traditional and ⁓ indigenous ⁓ medicines. That is traditional medicine. But somehow along the line, traditional became allopathic, regular, conventional medicine is really a term that we're starting to use more conventional medicine. And instead of alternative medicine, there's integrative medicine.

where we're using both and I sit in the middle because I'm licensing both and I'll do and think about whatever is best for the patient in that moment. But I lean toward the side of trying to do natural first.

Zane Myers (04:16)
So when you're talking to, so you say you do a lot of cancer patients now. So run me through a typical situation that you're dealing with. And I have a whole bunch of questions I wrote down here too,

Dr. Donese (04:28)
Okay, well I work

with all stages of cancer, but I get a lot of stage four cancers that are terminal stage four. They've either completed out the conventional medicine and they don't have anything else to do and they're saying I'm still in the fight, I still want to do this. They're looking for something else or whatever stage they're in they say I want to do integrative, I want to do metabolic therapies and so that's what I specialize in. I'm a published researcher in it with a group that we were published recently in the British Journal of Medicine.

And what we do is we highlight the fact that the majority of cancers, in fact, probably over 90% % of cancers are not genetic. But our entire conventional medicine system is based on that. All the medications, the chemo, everything that we're doing is based on DNA. Cancer's not a genetic, the genes get disrupted, but that's not the root of the problem. We consider it that it's a metabolic, inside the cell mitochondrial problem.

So we treated at that level because a lot of conventional medicine doesn't get to stem cells Even if it's if it's successful at slowing down or regressing a tumor a lot of people have recurrences Because they lift these stem cells there so the therapies that we do either in conjunction with conventional medicine or You know instead of or at the end is a hyperbaric oxygen ketogenic diet repurpose drugs

I add on some of my training in ⁓ nutraceuticals because I'm licensed in that. Sometimes that makes sense that supplements can be supportive. But we have ⁓ unique ways of testing outside of conventional medicine to look at the number of cancer cells for that particular patient that can be killed by certain agents, anything that has science behind it. So it might be metformin, it could be resveratrol, it could be a supplement, it could be a statin actually.

fights the cancer really well. So I dig in as a researcher, I'm not just a clinician, I am a researcher, is that I'm looking at what is there, what can we look at, and then very much ⁓ utilize precision medicine or personalized medicine. What does this patient need and where's their mindset? What do they believe in? Because I know the bodies, the best pharmacy in the world is the bodies. When we take out what it doesn't need, put in what it does, it's

highly effective and no side effects, right dosage, better than any medicine we're going to come up with. So the belief system of the patient is very big in what I do as well. I want to educate them, both sides, all of their options, really let them understand what we know and don't know on both sides of medicine and then help them believe in their intuition to be able to make good choices.

Zane Myers (07:15)
Well, we have somebody in my direct family right now who has ⁓ stage four cancer and is doing all this outpatient and doing some surgery and chemo baths and removing organs and down to the final, let's figure this out. So you talked about a number of different ways of addressing the cancer and talking about

working with people that are stage four who have exhausted all their regular allopathic medical ⁓ oncological ⁓ approaches and now have said, I'm in the fight, like you said, and I need to do something ⁓ different. How do you get to the point, okay, because you suggested a number of different things, ⁓ a number of different ways, how do you make the decisions on ⁓

you know, which direction you're going to take this patient in because you.

Dr. Donese (08:12)
By science, by science, yeah. By science,

by research, by the clinical evidence, and by looking at the patient. So I look at their labs, I look at their imaging, I look at their type of cancer, what the histology is, how aggressive it is, where they are. Is the body strong enough to even do more therapies? Or are therapies just going to exhaust them and they have no quality of life at the end?

Where is their mindset? It sounds like your family member is like, I still want to continue to do all the way to the end. Some patients do, others go, no, I'd rather go on a cruise with my family. What can I do to feel better in that time period? So it depends on what the goal is. ⁓ We'd like to say the goal is always the remission of cancer, that it's gone. in medicine, we're taught not to give false hope. I think we need to give more hope.

Zane Myers (08:51)
Yes.

Dr. Donese (09:07)
especially to these stage four cancers, because they can have good quality of life. And here's something everyone needs to hear. And it's not false hope, it's reality is for every type of cancer at every stage, there is a survivor, a documented survivor of someone who they had a spontaneous remission. You can't explain it in modern medicine. So I tell patients, well, why not you? So if they're still in the fight, they still believe they're feeling good, they have a quality of life.

Why not them? And it's not about spending a bunch of money, taking their money and doing all these different things that they're reading about. It's got to be in my mind for me, it's got to have science behind it. We've got to have studies. We got to know at least clinically that we see that this is helping people and that it's not going to be a huge financial strain on them and that they are choosing to want to be in this fight to the end or

to still believe that they have a chance to not just survive, but thrive. And those of us working in the metabolic therapies, we extend life, we have better quality of life, and we have people that have had terminal diagnosis that are still alive and doing well.

Zane Myers (10:17)
So tell me about spontaneous remission. it seems like, and I've heard of this before, but what is this? You say there is no science behind it.

Dr. Donese (10:30)
means the cancer is gone.

Tumor is gone, the cancer is gone, and it's not coming back. There's no sign of cancer in the body. That's what that means. Can't see it. ⁓ Markers, the blood markers don't show it. There's no tumors. We can't see it. Can't find it. It's gone.

Zane Myers (10:45)
and you don't have any explanation for it.

Dr. Donese (10:47)
Well, ⁓ it depends. If they're doing other therapies, we could say, did we have a part in that, right? But even before we started doing the metabolic type therapies, ⁓ there were documented cases of this. And this is, you'll find this interesting, is ⁓ Kelly Turner's a PhD. She wrote a book, a spontaneous remission, a radical remission, radical remission, same of her book. And she was a researcher. was

To my understanding, she was donating her time in a cancer ward while she was in school. And she would see people that would be given, you you need to go home and put your affairs in order. This is last time we'll see you. We've done everything we can do. Goodbye. You know, it was nice working with you, but we don't have anything else. We won't see you again. And then she would see them back in months later and say, well, I'm confused. I didn't think we'd see you again. go, no, I'm here. I'm just.

doing a checkup, my cancer is completely gone. So she said, well, what is that? So she started asking oncologists, what is this? Do you see these spontaneous remissions? And they all go, yes, yeah, we see them. And she said, well, what do they have in common? And it was like, we don't know, we can't explain it. She went around the world with all the documented cases and she put together several things and I'll condense it for you, but really,

⁓ Most of them had done some kind of radical change in your diet. Now ketogenic diet is something that we use as treatment and that is a radical change for most people. It's high fat, low protein, know, very little carbs.

Zane Myers (12:21)
And I know that there's a lot

of treatments that are treated well with ketone. You know, I think of epilepsy and there's just a whole litany of things that.

Dr. Donese (12:27)
⁓ yes, neurological

Parkinson's, MS, you name it, anything brain disease, cancer, ketogenic is very, very good. It's a core principle of what we do. So she found a radical change in diet. She found a radical change in their exercise. If they were marathon runners, they were creating too much oxidative damage. They needed to slow down and not do as much. Those couch potatoes needed to get up and move. They had a radical change in their movement.

And the other three things had to do with kind of a spiritual connection, finding something outside of themselves, something where they felt a sense of peace and gratitude and they were not afraid of cancer and not afraid to die. And I can tell you in my practice, that's who I see that thrive, not just surviving, but thriving. They don't, they're living in the moment, they're living in gratitude and loving every moment and they're not afraid of the cancer and they're not afraid to die.

That is strong medicine right there.

Zane Myers (13:30)
Yeah. So ⁓ you mentioned metformin, and that's kind of a controversial thing because I've read some recently. I have a little bit of a medical background too. ⁓ I've read some information recently that was, you know, I've read a bunch that was very positive and then recently some very negative kinds of things about ⁓ metformin. So can you ⁓ address those? I'm kind of going off topic, but now I'm just satisfying my own curiosity.

Dr. Donese (13:54)
Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Right.

That's fine. So, you know, I really, it's not, I don't think it's a cure. It's a one-off for everybody. I don't think there are panaceas. I think everything should be ⁓ personalized. Some people metformin could be extremely helpful for, especially when we're trying to get them into ketosis. They're doing the ketogenic diet. They're not getting sugar, but they're still having trouble producing these ketones that we need. And so we know it's coming from the stress side. There's a glutamate.

pathway and then there's a glucose pathway and if they're stressing and they've got all this going on, we know it's too hard to do it with just the diet and doing metformin helps us get there. There's also longevity studies that it shows that diabetics, you know, they don't live as long as regular people except, except when they're in metformin. When they do, studies are showing they're outliving the normal person, the regular person not on metformin. And so,

You know, I don't know that we know exactly who that avatar is, that patient that perfectly fits it. I don't put everybody on metformin, but some of the tests that I do for these cancer patients or neurological patients, but especially the cancer patients is looking for with their cancer cells. We draw the blood, it's a liquid biopsy. Their blood, their cancer cells, how many of those cancer cells died when they were exposed to a certain therapy?

Metformin shows up pretty well in most people. Maybe it only kills 30%. Maybe in some people it kills 80%. Sometimes it beats the chemotherapies. Sometimes it doesn't. And that's just one example. There are hundreds of agents that get tested by these kinds of ⁓ tests to know which ones are going to kill the most cancer cells. Then you also have to look at the individual, the patient in front of me. Can their liver tolerate it?

Can they, what are their, what's going on with their gastrointestinal? You have to look at the whole patient. So there's not a, here's the protocol. Everybody do this. You won't get cancer. If you have cancer, it's gonna cure it. Or you're gonna live forever if you do this. We're not there yet. We're not there yet. And we've got a lot of misinformation out there about certain things that if you do this or take this off-label medicine, it'll cure your cancer.

Zane Myers (16:14)
That's

what I hear a lot from Metformin is there's all these places online that have popped up and you get kind of a doc in the box. And don't mean to be completely pejorative, but they're really just there to legitimize that we're going to give you, you called in, you made an appointment, we're going to give you Metformin and here's this doctor you can talk to and it's going to say it's all okay.

Dr. Donese (16:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I will tell you most cases though metformin for cancer patients specifically is pretty helpful and neurological because you're lowering the glucose and the glucose is the bad guy. It's the main bad guy. So for most it could be helpful, but not everybody. somebody's hypoglycemic low blood sugar, we shouldn't be doing that, right? So, and then we choose.

Zane Myers (16:48)
Great.

Right.

Dr. Donese (17:01)
There may be other agents that work better than metformin for that particular person. If they're getting into ketosis with their diet, and it doesn't show up on the labs to show me it's gonna help kill cancer cells, why would we do it?

Zane Myers (17:16)
So my wife, I'm going to just go from my personal experience. So I was ⁓ very ketogenic for a number of years. And I generally carried around probably about 30 extra pounds for a long time. I've had three hip replacements, ⁓ pretty much died in the hospital on the last one, ⁓ and was fortunate to come out of it. Now I still play tennis, although not quite so fast anymore.

Dr. Donese (17:39)
Good. Well, that might

be the hip. It might be a few more ears, but that's okay. least you're playing.

Zane Myers (17:45)
Yeah, it's

a combination of both. So she just can't tolerate a ⁓ ketogenic diet. So I mean, I can get on it and stay on it and it worked for years, but then we're kind of on these two different pathways. This is kind of a, it's a personal thing, but I think that anybody's on a ketogenic diet can kind of relate to this. Sometimes the spouse is resistant or doesn't want it. And just the managing that is

Dr. Donese (18:10)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's hard. It's coo to completely different diets. It is. And so, you know, part of what I do is kind of coaching the whole family, especially when we have a critical disease that everybody needs to be on board. And most people could shed a few pounds. And even if they don't, you won't lose muscle with ketogenic. In fact, it helps save muscle. So even if you're losing weight, if you're

truly in ketosis and that's the first step. A lot of people say I did ketogenic and I say, how'd you test it? You were doing the urine strips, not accurate. If you were doing it, calculating what we call a GKI and we know what your ketone levels were, then I'll say that would be very, very beneficial. But a lot of people just did it what they did was cut out vegetables and fruits and all, they cut out good things and they weren't in ketosis so they lost weight but it wasn't healthy.

You have to do it right if you're gonna do it. You have to look at your macro and micronutrients. You have to know that you're in it, you're doing it right, and it will do amazing things. But if you're just limiting your diet and losing weight, it's just another diet. Yo-yo diet. Which is worse than being a few pounds overweight.

Zane Myers (19:19)
Right. Yeah, another diet.

So tell me about ⁓ Proovit research and how you got started in that and why is that different? So I just read there's not a lot of information on your website, but you see...

Dr. Donese (19:34)
No, we're just,

we're too busy to make the website. Actually, we literally this weekend are gonna try to get the real website up and going just for these purposes, but we don't need it for business. The reason why we did it for 25 years, I have formulated for the nutritional industry. And I know how bad some of the quality is. We might talk about that in a minute, but I've been in the formulation. I'm part of the team that brought pea protein to the market. Didn't exist before us. We changed the,

whole market because everybody had these healthy greens drinks that were spiking people's blood sugars, right? So I found it, I did a study and boy, I got my head chopped off about it, but changed the industry. Now everybody's ⁓ protein drinks, green drinks have protein in it and resveratrol and everything else. So I would help companies when they had an FTC or FDA complaint to be able to comply and know what they were doing wrong. So I didn't set out, ⁓

Zane Myers (20:10)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Donese (20:33)
to do this company, I've got other companies, but yours is the holistic entrepreneur show. So everybody watching yours will understand that, you know, here's another thing. this was, I got approached by an epidemiologist that was working for a large contract research organization. These are the groups that do the studies, safety and efficacy studies, that do the clinical trials for pharmaceuticals.

Zane Myers (20:42)
Yeah.

Dr. Donese (21:00)
And pharmaceuticals can pay several million dollars for these studies because they're going to make billions, right? There's an ROI in it. The nutraceutical, the supplement companies and some of the smaller wearables, the health and wellness industry, they can't afford that kind of money, nor should they, because they don't have to go through the same steps that pharmaceutical does. So we said, OK, we're both doing this and helping.

Zane Myers (21:00)
Mm-hmm.

All right.

Dr. Donese (21:27)
these kinds of companies, let's form a company. So we made it affordable, yet still very strict and rigorous research. So we design and conduct the clinical research. Sometimes it's taking data they already have, and we are the third party, non-biased, that can give them what they need to make the claims they need to do and the safety and efficacy. And if they want to do clinical trials to see what is it all working on.

We do all of it and we've made it affordable and specific to the health and wellness industry.

Zane Myers (22:00)
How do you market that?

Dr. Donese (22:01)
We're not right now. Well, we don't need to because of my connections, our connections. I have a co-founder and I, but it was just word of mouth. It was just told one company, they told another. Now we're like, okay, we're scaling quickly, scaling quickly. Yeah, we'll get a website up. know, right now, you know, for the last, it's been a year, not quite a year. We've just been really ⁓ just taking the ones that we knew that we could handle and do well.

Zane Myers (22:06)
Yep.

So now you're busy.

Dr. Donese (22:29)
⁓ and others are waiting on us and that's okay, but we are ready at this point to, ⁓ we've got our nuts and bolts put together and we're ready to rock and roll with it and we're excited about it because we're really helping a lot of companies. Good companies that want to do the research, not the ones that are wanting to sell you something they shouldn't be. They know it's contaminated, they know it's got bacteria and viruses, it's got heavy metals in it. These are the good companies that want to know what is their...

their product doing and it's interesting. Sometimes they come in and say, well, we think it's really helping on sleep because we're getting feedback and we'll do the clinical trial and we'll put all the feelers out in the way you design it. We come back and say, yeah, it does work on sleep, but it works better on pain management or on energy or whatever it is. Sometimes what we find is not what they thought it was going to do. So then they can change their marketing around it and have better results.

Zane Myers (23:26)
So tell me how do you, so as a consumer, when I'm out there and I'm, know, everybody will go online to Amazon or they'll go to their local GNC, which by the way is owned by a Chinese company now. I don't know if you knew that or not, but it's interesting. And well, I don't want to end up in any political, they bought them because they were going into receivership and there's GNCs all over our military institutes.

Dr. Donese (23:41)
Yeah, I do.

You

Zane Myers (23:56)
Installations all over the country and now it's owned by Chinese just kind of an interesting ⁓ Interesting dynamic But anyway when I go out and I say okay I want to ⁓ have a rest for Verital supplement or I want vitamin D or I want fish oil I want you know different things because I feel like these are important in my diet and ⁓ and then I'm looking online for a particular brand or ⁓

Dr. Donese (24:01)
Yeah, dynamic there, right? Yeah, I hear you. ⁓

Zane Myers (24:23)
I'm always looking for someone who's got ⁓ some sort of USP or they've had some kind of testing. See, and I don't really know. I'm not an expert in that area. And so as consumers, they don't know either. how do you, if you go onto Amazon, you pick out something, this is a good deal. This is vitamin D or this is whatever, some sort of multiple vitamin that's got all this stuff in it that's great for my bones or my joints or whatever.

Dr. Donese (24:50)
Yeah.

Zane Myers (24:52)
then, but it may be made in China where there's absolutely no regulation and there's, how do you know?

Dr. Donese (24:58)
You don't. And that's honest truth. So you don't. And here's the problem. It's not just China. It's here. Supplements are regulated as food, not as pharmaceuticals. So there's no real oversight regulatory, only if people start having problems like with curcumin and turmeric recently with liver issues. It's not that the substance is bad. It's the way it was being processed. So you don't. And there's a lot.

of bad players in the nutraceutical industry, a lot. And so I have a full-time person, and this cuts out my profit, but I'm not gonna do it without, because I use it as my medicine, and I'm not loyal to one company. I have multiple companies, I have some in my label, here's why I have a full-time person. We require...

that every batch, not just once a year showed me you looked at some ingredients that came in one time into the, and you dumped it into the corner in the manufacturing facility. No, on this bottle, on this batch, show me you did all of this testing for heavy metals, arsenic, lead, mercury, all the things that shouldn't be there, bacteria, viruses, mold, fungal. They have to prove to me that they, on that batch,

do it and I only work with the best companies but even the best companies can get a bad batch and if you're just looking at it at the beginning when that raw material got dumped into a manufacturing facility and it sits there and it grows stuff then they put it into a capsule and you don't know what happened I make them show me in batch run I mean it is a full-time job so unless here's what consumers can do a baby version of that but when you can I say if you

Zane Myers (26:31)
you

Dr. Donese (26:42)
If you love a product and you're taking it and you can feel it, you believe it's working for you, you can look on the bottle, call that manufacturer and ask at least for a C of A, it's called a certificate of analysis. Now they should be doing that testing. It's inexpensive, they should all be doing it. If they won't, if they tell you it's proprietary, that's not right. It's not proprietary. The testing is not right. They should be wanting to give it to you.

Zane Myers (27:04)
I knew what the word you were going to use right there.

Dr. Donese (27:10)
I tell people I'd rather you be on nothing than on something you don't know that it's first not doing any harm. Yes, I like resveratrol too, but not resveratrol with heavy metals in it. Now it's causing more harm than good. So at least ask for a CFA or work with, and you could say, well, my doctor has their name on it. It's got their, the doctors, if they're not asking these questions, which 99.9 % aren't, they don't know that it's okay. It's a good formula.

and they've got a reputable manufacturer, but they don't know. and you know, it's hard. It takes out the profit when you are as rigorous as I am to make them do, I mean, there's a lot I make them do on the testing because I know I've been on the backend, most doctors haven't. I've been there for the formulation and the manufacturing of these things to know that we better. I'd rather you take nothing unless you know that it's good.

Zane Myers (28:06)
Wow. So.

Dr. Donese (28:07)
And

just so you know, Consumer Reports just did the test of the top brands in protein powders. 75 % were contaminated. think, was it lead or arsenic? It was one of them. I think it was lead. 75%. Everybody was shocked. I wasn't. I know that. I already know that. That's why I only have my protein powders. I know they don't have that in it. And here's the other thing too, at Amazon.

Third parties are taking brand names. They're storing them, selling them in hot manufacturing places. So now they got hot. All the active ingredients are destroyed and it's grown out bacteria and stuff. They relabel it. They put in other stuff or it's bad things in it. They put on a copy of the original label and sometimes that's what you're getting from Amazon. Now I will say this, Amazon is starting to make

companies show third party testing, which is great. They're not enforcing it yet, but I'm glad you're starting to go down there. But even if it got tested, I don't know where it was stored. know, all I know is mine comes direct from the manufacturer. I know it was shipped. I know the temperature and I know we protected it. Everything else, you don't know what you're getting. You just don't know.

Zane Myers (29:13)
Mm-hmm.

Well, that's a dilemma. So tell me about ⁓ what, so are you pretty much now ⁓ specializing in cancer patients?

Dr. Donese (29:35)
Metabolic therapies, I have Parkinson's and MS. I work with neurological because it's the same therapies. It's the same, you know, our protocols are very a little bit, but it's the same basic therapies. They're all mitochondrial diseases. So is diabetes, so is heart disease. They're all mitochondrial damaged diseases. So I could say I specialize in all of them. However, there's very few of us that are really up, really to the...

to the speed where we can really work with these cancer patients and work with oncologists. I don't work against oncologists, I work with them. They say, we're done and say, let me take over. Or they say, we're struggling with this and I say, I can help. I can help with the side effects. And by the way, these therapies, you can use lower doses of chemo, better effect, better effect and less side effects. Why wouldn't they?

want to do that. We're allowing it and hyperbaric oxygen, allowing them to continue on some of these therapies that can be helpful. I will say most of the conventional are not getting to the stem cells. That's why we have high rates of reoccurrence. But the metabolic therapies, we believe we see in our research ⁓ so far it's called research signal that we're getting to those stem cells.

Zane Myers (30:50)
So tell me about that now. I don't know if we're gonna go too scientific and we're gonna lose people, but that's okay, just because I'm curious. ⁓ As far as getting to the stem cells and you're talking about regular prescriptive medicines versus using metformin or...

Dr. Donese (31:08)
Metabolic therapies,

yeah, the metabolic therapies, yeah. So that means when you do chemotherapy or radiation, it's not killing the cancer stem cells. So the ones that survive are stronger and smarter than the ones that got killed off. So when that reoccurrence comes back, it's far greater, it's far worse. It's far worse. You get a reoccurrence, we know that's.

Zane Myers (31:12)
So tell me about that, the mechanism.

Right. Yes.

Dr. Donese (31:34)
It's worse than the first time. And that's because the ones that grew out are the ones that are already resistant to the therapies. They're the strongholds, right? Well, they're just resistant from day one, right? So the therapies that we're using, we believe we're getting to those stem cells. So, you know, a lot of my patients, they're coming at all stages. You know, when I get to stage one, stage two, I'm going, okay, easy, got it. Do these things.

Zane Myers (31:41)
It's kind of like antibodies, antibiotic treatments.

Dr. Donese (32:02)
Enjoy life, don't worry about it. I'm usually in favor of surgery to take out, if there's tumors, take out the bulk of those. Usually not a great fan of radiation. I have to have a real reason to say that makes sense. But in some patients, chemotherapy is warranted. It makes sense. There's four types of cancers that it can actually cure. So it's not either or. It's about what's best for the patient in that moment. But in all instances, in my practice, metabolic therapies are always a...

piece that should be being done.

Zane Myers (32:34)
So tell me about ⁓ your talk you did recently at the UN.

Dr. Donese (32:38)
Yeah. So a couple of things about that. ⁓ It was supposed to be women and AI. And so I tweaked, you know, I had to go in with my expertise. And first it was that AI right now, a lot of doctors are using it and it's good. I use it for a quick, fast find, but then I want to fact find it. There's different AIs that actually give me the studies behind it was the only ones I use. But here's the problem is that

The majority of studies, in fact, some studies, only 30 % of the people studied were women. Women are very different than men. So AI is being trained on a model for 150 kilogram white male. That doesn't cover the rest of the population. And women, we ⁓ metabolize drugs differently.

At different speeds, we have different side effects. We present differently with diseases like a heart attack. Looks very different like the flu in a woman. That's why a lot of women still get ignored in the ERs with a heart attack. It's not the down the arm and the chin thing. We're very different. Our brains, our hormones and all that. We also have different side effects and we know in cancer, certain cancer drugs,

don't work as well in women as they do in men and vice versa. So right now, if we 100 % are relying on AI, we're missing out on some good information. And I believe that intention should always be there. A physician's experience, like I have 25 years of experience, and I can look at a patient. I can see a lot of things by looking at a patient. AI is not doing that.

And in Chinese medicine, it's called this shin. There's ⁓ a doctor's intuition and experience. Right now, AI cannot take over for that. It's helping us. Eventually, it's gonna do a lot of things. Do I think it'll ever take over the intuition part? No. I think we should use it as a collaborator and use both. That's good medicine. The other part of the talk was ⁓ these countries that are trying to help women entrepreneurs.

They don't have money. They don't have, you know, they haven't had education. How can we help them have businesses and survive? I said, they are the, the, the women are the ones that have passed along these plant medicines, these indigenous medicines we were talking about at the beginning of this. They're still using them. And guess what? We go, that's third world stuff. Well, guess what? We in America have the worst chronic degenerative diseases and the worst stats than anybody. So they're better off in many instances without Western medicine.

Zane Myers (35:17)
We do.

Dr. Donese (35:21)
You know, you get hit by a car, you want to be here. You get, you know, but for chronic diseases, we're a miserable failure, but they have these old medicines that they've used for centuries that we could be helping them know how to monetize product, make products out of it and help their tribes, help their communities, help them become entrepreneurs. And so that was a piece of it. And, you know,

People go, well, why would we do that? said, well, 80 % of medicines have come from plants. Aspirin is white willow bark. 80 % of the medicines have come from plants. then they turn them into something, they manipulate them so they can make a patent out of them. But they got their idea and they got the information from plants. And here's the big piece. Less than 15 % of the planet's biomass of plants has been stud.

There's a lot of medicines out there. So that's a nutshell of what I talked about at the United Nations.

Zane Myers (36:26)
Well, that's an interesting topic. So tell me about regenerative injection therapies. I noticed that that was something you had on your site. Is that something that you're actively doing or something that you have done?

Dr. Donese (36:36)
Yeah, I maybe you're-

Yeah, no, I

taught it for years, did it for years. I was one of the first doing prolo therapy, platelet therapies, all these things, because I studied in Europe, brought a lot of this mesotherapy over from France. So I taught for many years and did it. There's plenty of docs doing that now. And that's fine. I am spending my time advising and giving the advice of what needs to be done, not doing those therapies anymore. I don't do those therapies anymore. But there are some great

Zane Myers (37:03)
Okay.

Dr. Donese (37:07)
Types of therapies, think that we've got to be careful with stem cells and peptides. Everybody's talking about it. I think they have great potential, great potential, because I was working with a clinic in South America with peptides 15 years ago before anybody was talking about it. The great potential, but we don't know enough now. And for everybody to go, I want to live forever there. I'm going to go get some stem cells. Those same stem cells could be helping cancer cells to grow.

Zane Myers (37:12)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Donese (37:35)
and lengthening, we know certain ones that do. So until we know more, I don't think everybody should be doing it until we know more. Great potential, but I'm not a fan right now of everybody doing peptides and stem cells till we know more. Because I work on the oncology side.

Zane Myers (37:48)
So,

right, right. ⁓ And so you have to be somewhat conservative in your approach there. Amen. So truth in medicine. I saw something on your site too that you're looking for HIPAA compliant digital tools, someone who specializes in putting together digital tools. So tell me, do you have up your sleeve? ⁓

Dr. Donese (37:56)
First do no harm. First do no harm.

So, so, yes.

Yeah, what I have

up my sleeve is people every to every entrepreneur group I belong to, every group I go to, they go, we want to pick your brain, pick your brain. I can't get a break. You know, it's like and it's fine. I like educating, but and I can't just see everybody as patients. Right. I mean, I see a lot and it still will. I everybody wants. I just want to ask you this. What about this? And they've learned to trust me. That's why it's called the truth in medicine. The know I'm going to give them to them straight. I'll say I don't know yet, but I'll find out.

Zane Myers (38:32)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Donese (38:46)
It's rare, but I will, I can say that. If I say, hang on, give me a second. But ⁓ most of the time, ⁓ you know, I'm not necessarily going with the biggest fad, the newest thing. I'm gonna say, here's what we don't know, and here's what we do know. And they've learned to trust me. So what I'm doing is I'm putting together, and somebody helped me to do it, my team do it. We're putting together a monthly, we're calling it the Truth in Medicine Movement.

and it will be a monthly, probably an hour and a half where I'll pick a topic, I'll talk for a minute, a little bit, and then I open it up to Q &A and it's pick my brain, ask me questions. So everybody can learn all these things about environmental medicine, what products that you, all the things that everybody has questions about that I'll be able to answer it. So that's why we're doing that.

Zane Myers (39:35)
Sounds like a huge, huge project.

Dr. Donese (39:37)
Well,

you gotta build funnels and all that. I know what needs to be done. I've done workshops and things for cancer in the past. It's a lot of work. So that's why I need somebody to build it, let my team run it. So we'll get it done. I know the pieces. The problem is I have to be HIPAA compliant for people watching. That means every software integration, anything that touches any of mine, it has to be locked down and encrypted so that patient information is protected. And that means just your name. You don't even know you're my patient.

a name, a phone number, it's all called electronic protected. And it's hard to put these marketing things together because most of the great tools are not IMPACOMPLICANT.

Zane Myers (40:17)
So I see you, when I did my little bit of research on you, it was like I was drinking from a fire hose.

Dr. Donese (40:24)
That's why I'm doing the Truth in Medicine Movement. It is. Let's

pick a topic. Let's talk about it. How do you want to clean up your home? You know what should be in there, not be in there, all that stuff. Right. ⁓

Zane Myers (40:31)
So.

Yeah, you had ⁓ really a tremendous amount of information on toxic liver ⁓ press pulse for cancer therapy. Maybe we should talk about that too. You talked about Alzheimer's, seasonal affective disorder in the summer, respiratory ailments from wildfires, ⁓ intuitive eating, PTSD, allergies, microbiomes. I mean, you really kind of had ⁓

Dr. Donese (40:52)
you

Yeah.

Zane Myers (41:04)
a lot of different topics that you ⁓ addressed in various platforms.

Dr. Donese (41:10)
Yeah, I've been called a kind of walking encyclopedia. And the reason why is I'm a researcher. I'm up at 4 a.m. and reading the latest and greatest, but I'm also an educator and I can speak and I can bring it down to a level where people can understand it. And I know it can help more people by doing more of that. Bring back my media background and training now with all the wealth of information I do have. And I do have a lot. I've studied with the best in the world and now I'm considered one of the

the top tiers of information. So no matter what the disease is, there's a root cause or causes. You find that out, then you talk about what are the different ways that we can treat it and work with it. There's a reason for the body having a problem. And that's the first thing and that takes time to root that out. But a lot of it is our lifestyles and all the things that we could be doing if we knew about it.

And that's what the truth in medicine movement will be about. From a credible source because, my goodness, I don't watch all these influencers on all this. I was just on one a minute ago. She's got a million followers. She's great. She's all over the world looking at things and she's working with me clinically, personally. But there's a lot of influencers out there touting all kinds of stuff and I watch it for a second and just cringe. They have no medical background, no clinical experience. They're just jumping on the bandwagon and I think.

It's, ⁓ don't know, there's a lot of words I could use for that, but I don't think it's in the benefit for patients listening, because it sounds good. I'm gonna go buy that, or I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna go cold plunge, but they didn't know they had an aortic aneurysm and could kill them. I mean, there's things that may be good, but it's not for everybody. And you're not showing both sides of it. And that's...

Zane Myers (42:47)
Right.

Dr. Donese (43:02)
where, ⁓ you know, Zayn, I have a television show. signed with PBS before our big shutdown. And ⁓ then, Kassel Warner of the Warner Brothers was taking it to Discovery, and we lost her to an accident. And ⁓ so now this show, it's gonna be somewhere where it can be, where we can hear both sides without somebody being influenced by, you know, ⁓ somebody ⁓ paying for the ads for Network, which is where we thought it was gonna be.

Zane Myers (43:28)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Donese (43:30)
But it's a debate show. I sit in the middle like I do every day and I have an alternative medicine practitioner in conventional medicine. We talk about a topic and we hear both at once. We've done it in politics. We hear both sides. We hear the debates. We haven't done that in medicine. We have not heard both together. And I said, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Zane Myers (43:47)
So I talked to both, I'm sorry, because

I talked to both ⁓ MDs and ⁓ NaturePaths and really acupuncturists and ⁓ Reiki practitioners and just really kind of the full gamut. It's interesting to figure, to understand how these things all work together. But I was talking with an integrative medicine ⁓ physician who was very knowledgeable a couple weeks ago and he was frustrated by,

Dr. Donese (43:55)
Yep. Yep. Yeah, sure.

Zane Myers (44:16)
the lack of acceptance of, in general, from the allopathic community for his approach, even though he had clinically just success story after success story after success story ⁓ documented. And yet it was very difficult for him to get ⁓ regular recurring ⁓ referrals from that community with some exceptions.

Dr. Donese (44:43)
Yeah.

Well, a few things. There's liability. If I refer to somebody and they do a poor job, I referred, I'm liable. That's one thing. Second is they are, most of them are tied underneath an insurance model. An insurance only pays for certain treatments for certain diseases. It's cookbook. You have A, you get B and they must stay within that guideline, especially in oncology.

They're not allowed. They may believe in it. They may like it. They may have read about it. Or they may be that somebody says, I don't have time, don't care, don't want to do it. I do what I do. And I think that's all a bunch of bunk. And you say, here's a stack of research. They don't have time to read it. Well, which one is it? Read it and deny it or don't or say, I don't know anything. So it depends on who you're dealing with. But in their defense, if they're working with a big organization, big hospitals and all, they can't.

Zane Myers (45:22)
Yep.

Dr. Donese (45:37)
refer. They can't say sure go do that and something happens it's outside of their care. Now they're liable. So in the defense of traditional medicine the system is broken. They know it. They're in a hard place. It's horrible. The doctors are not bad people. They went into it to heal people and they are helping people but they are stuck in a system that doesn't allow them.

to say let's cross over the fence. It will come from the public. That's why I want my show. That's why we're doing these things is that it comes from the public. But what the public is caught in, they go see this alternative person and they tell them to do this. And then they don't want to tell their traditional doctor because they don't want to upset them. They don't want to tell them because they know what they're going to say. So and then they don't tell the alternative practitioner that they're doing the medicines from the traditional. Now they've just put their life at risk.

Zane Myers (46:20)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Dr. Donese (46:33)
and

their health at risk, they should be open to say, these are the things that I'm doing, these are the things I wanna do, and this is why, but how are they choosing that? Who are they listening to? Who can they trust? And so, I've been called the female face of medicine, that's a big, big title. I'd rather, I like the truth in medicine, at least my truth to what I know it as, right? ⁓ Is that people need to understand

the failings and what we don't know on both sides of medicine. They need to hear it.

Zane Myers (47:07)
So how do

you address the insurance part of it? Because it sounds to me like some of what you did, what you do would be covered by insurance and some of what you do is not covered. So none of it.

Dr. Donese (47:15)
No, no, no, I'm 100

% cash pay, always have been. I cannot do what I do and have for 25 years to dig to the root of the problem, to spend the time with the patient to find what's causing that symptom in a five to seven minute insurance based visit. I'm not willing to do that kind of medicine, never have been. So it's unfortunate because some people can't afford to come see me, right? It's cash pay. That's why we wanna do more of these educational things so they can hear it.

for free in different ways, right? To get the information out there where they can hear it. But no, I am cash bae, always have been. I have no interest in insurance. Now, I will say this. I will tell patients, these are the labs that I think you should do. This is the imaging. Go back to your primary care and see if they will run this for you. Many times they will. When they tell them, I'm working with an integrative doctor, not alternative, not complementary, not those guys that they're worried about.

And when they say that Dr. Worden works with, know, City of Hope and MD Anderson and all the big boys, when they see my accolades published, researchers and all, then they feel a little more comfortable and then they'll run the labs and the imaging. Now they're responsible to address what they find, but they also know that that's coming back to me for my take on it. And most like it. They want the patients to do as much with diet and lifestyle, emotional.

things that they need to work on. They want them to do these therapies. They just don't know anything about it. They haven't been trained in it at all, if any. You know, have a tiny little bit. They don't know, but they know the importance. Once in a while, I'll get a hard-headed, I haven't run into one in a while, but once in a while and I say, you know what, I don't, I'm not going to spend my wills or spend my time. You obviously don't want to learn. You don't want to see the research. You're stuck in your box. You're not willing to get out of it. God bless you, go on.

I'm not going to spend time with you. There's plenty who want to hear and want to learn, even if they can't do it with their patients because.

Zane Myers (49:22)
So let me ask

you from a business perspective, because I haven't even got there and usually I am way there in a big way, by now. ⁓ When you started and you weren't taking insurance from the very start, wasn't that difficult and how did you get people to start coming to you when you said, you're going to have to come out of pocket, sorry?

Dr. Donese (49:44)
Yeah,

so it's called communication. When I was a student, I had more people that I brought into the medical school to the, you know, that where we were learning than anybody else combined. And it's because I talk to people.

You stand in line at the bank. You open up, you say the right questions, you open yourself up, start a conversation. People go, I like this person, I trust them. When I left as a student, I had a full practice already there. After I left, they said, no more could you take patients afterwards. They can't stop it, but a set of precedents. But there was some jealousy there from an entrepreneurial standpoint of my classmates. They actually went and complained, but then they came back and said, we wouldn't have any

patients for you to be seeing and learning on if Dr. Worden wasn't bringing them in. So it wasn't Dr. Worden at that time, right? It wasn't a doctor yet. So it was that I had run businesses. I was older when I went back to medical school. I knew how to run a business. I knew how to be an entrepreneur. I knew how to connect with people. And medicine is the same way. It's no different than any other business. People, I still.

you know, for years, know, and they still come and say, how did you have the number one naturopathic practice in the United States? At one point it was the largest. Now I want the most comfy minds narrowed down. Is how did you have that? And I said, I got people better. And they said, well, what marketing did you use? Did you do ads? you do, I said, no, I got people better. You get one person better, they bring their family, they tell their friends. I grew a practice. And like I said, a story to practice with.

student, but I grew practice very quickly where I was turning people away and hiring residents to work for me became the largest. And then I had from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I was doing a repower your practice of seminars for doctors to come. said, we want to know what you're doing. How are you doing this? What labs do you use? Why are you using them? What do you charge? They didn't know anything about the business side. And so I did those for years and taught and I made the vendors pay for it. You know,

and I got paid to teach what I knew, how to make a business out of medicine, a cash pay practice. And we want to use insurance if there's something simple, send them back to their primary care. I don't like it when I see integrative ⁓ doing all these thousands of dollars of testing, the functional medicine, all these groups doing all this testing. If they just listened to their patient, they just listened, they would have heard, not had to do all of it and

A lot of it could have been paid for insurance. That doesn't sit well with me. I always said either we do it through the insurance. I don't accept insurance, but I give them the codes, let them try or send them back to their primary care and try to use insurance as much as we possibly can. They're paying for it, let's use that. Some tests are not covered by insurance. Now those, they've got to do cash pay. And those tend to be the best ones.

Zane Myers (52:39)
So what would you?

Right. So what

would you say to somebody like a naturopath or a chiropractor who's specialized in integrative medicine or ⁓ what would you say to them if they're struggling to get in?

Maybe they're not as dynamic of a speaker as you can speak really well. I always saw you on TV and you're obviously very relaxed and have a good, you know, can have a conversation. ⁓ But what would you say to somebody? How would you, what would your advice be to them on how to grow their business?

Dr. Donese (53:24)
Yeah, you

know, I know shy, quiet ⁓ doctors that do very well. They carry themselves with strength, they have a knowing within them. They have a confidence. And sometimes as physicians, a patient can...

fish out, can smell it. They can smell the, I'm not quite as confident or maybe I don't know everything I need to know. So just being truthful and honest with the patients, they learn to love you. Even if you make would make a mistake, if they make a mistake or they don't know everything, you've got to be as confident as you can. And you've got to be as truthful as you can. And patients love it when you say, you know what? I'm not sure about that. Hold on a minute. If you could do it right then, or I'll get back to you. They love.

that because they're part of a community, feel that you care, you spend time that you're not BSing them with I'm the doctor, I'm the God, do what I say, don't question anything I say, just do this plan. Many alternative practitioners try to run their businesses like allopaths, like the allopathic doctors. They still have the, here's the A equals B, I'm gonna write this script, do what I say, come back in whatever day's.

very cookbook, that's the way they were trained and the way they're practicing and insurance pays for it and they get paid. When you're cash pay, you can't do it that way. You can't do it that way. You've got to create a community. You've got to create a feeling of truth and honesty and really confidence. And if they don't have the confidence at the beginning, that's okay. Say, I will work hard for you.

And like I said, how do you build a practice? One patient at a time. You get them better. They are your marketing tool. Marketing nowadays doesn't really work. I magazines quit working a long time ago. You've got social media. You might get a few off of something off of that. I mean, those trying to build their practice that way, everybody's doing it. The websites look good and all this stuff, but they're still struggling, right? It's literally internal marketing is your best. Work with who you got.

Zane Myers (55:24)
All right.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Donese (55:35)
and say, I need some more patients. Do you know anyone I can help that you could refer? Ask them. And that I used to teach that to the docs that were struggling. Your best marketing is your, is your internal. Now you need to be seen online and all that. I haven't updated my website and I don't know when because I don't need to. don't want to. I don't have the majority of the things I'm doing now on my website. It's word of mouth. Always has been.

Zane Myers (55:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

So you have a full calendar. You really don't have to worry about marketing at this point. You just have to worry about how much taking time off. But it sounds like you, I don't know how to say this, you're your own worst enemy because you have all these people lined up that you're going to talk to.

Dr. Donese (56:19)
Well, yeah, well, no, I've always been that way. And I see it as I'm in gratitude and all that. I've learned to say no. And I've learned to, you know, we in entrepreneurs, you learn it's either a, and I don't like to cuss, but you know, hell yes or a hell no. It's not an, this might work. It's got to be easy, lucrative and fun. got to enjoy it. If you're getting a new project, you got to really enjoy it. It's got to pay you something. And it's got to, you know, it's, you got to.

Zane Myers (56:33)
Yeah.

Dr. Donese (56:46)
Otherwise you say no, it might have potential. You might do this. I I've formulated some of the top formulas in the country. I don't do much of it anymore. It's fine, it's okay, I can do it. And you know, the Prove It research, we're going to scale that. It won't need me in time. I wanna scale it and sell it, right? And being, I tell you what I love doing right now is being on stage with Les Brown. You know, he is the master.

Zane Myers (57:04)
Mm-hmm.

Well, who wouldn't love

that? He's pretty incredible.

Dr. Donese (57:13)
Oh, well, he's he I'm under his wing.

He and I may do some podcasts together. He's my patient. He tells people she's my patient. She's keeping me alive. He has prostate cancer. I can only say that because he's out there saying it. I would never tell anybody who I'm working with. Right. And I work. He he's amazing. And so you brand up. But what I'm trying to do is more of that. I want larger audiences to hear the things that my experience of the things I have to say so I can go back to my

Zane Myers (57:25)
Right, okay. He's a pretty incredible individual.

Dr. Donese (57:43)
my, what's been on my website forever. Educate, empower, and enlighten. That's what I do with my patients. I want to do it with larger groups. Educate them, where's the truth? You know, and empower them. You can do this. This is not that hard. Take these easy steps. We can do this. And then enlighten them because when they have a spiritual connection, anything, I don't care what your belief system is, when they have that, that's when we see

that miracles that aren't supposed to happen in medicine happen. And it's not a religious thing. It is about feeling connected and safe and in gratitude. what I do every day, I can do on a larger scale with more people. So I will eventually keep narrowing down my practice with a specialty few that I'm working with, but right now it's still robust. I'm at a tipping point that I'm being very selective in who I do accept as a patient.

I don't do everybody that comes in. They've to be a really good fit. And I know that I'm the best for them. And then I'll refer them to somebody else if I think it's an easy case. I take the complicated, hard ones. That keeps me, I like that. That keeps me where my finger's on the pulse of medicine still as well. I want the tough cases. So.

Zane Myers (58:56)
Engaged. Yeah.

So

I think I'm about ready to wind this up. I really enjoyed it. I'm going to produce this. I have somebody who does it for me. And then I have about seven more in front. ⁓ But I'm going to start releasing them probably a couple of weeks. So it may be a week or two before I get them back. But I'm going to produce some shorts out of this. And then I'll just give those to you. And then I can tell you.

Dr. Donese (59:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, great.

appreciate it.

Zane Myers (59:34)
Let me turn off my...

Dr. Donese (59:36)
You know how you

give that media package, I've got a person that does it, give them the assets and we'll post it on my stuff. I'm just now trying to get into all this. You know, like I said, I haven't had to do it, but I'm starting it. I have to. So we will get it. I've got an Instagram following. was on somebody, the person today, she had a million followers. I think there's, I don't know. And that, that was just live. She hasn't even posted it yet. You know, we got lots. So it will build, give me what you've got. Let me help you promote it the best that I can on my end.

Zane Myers (1:00:03)
So.