239: Robyn Openshaw on How Biological Medicine Is Changing Health

The Wellness Mama Podcast

00:00 / 00:59:14

Robyn Openshaw is an incredible human being and dear friend of mine, as you all probably remember from our previous podcast interview. I met Robyn a few years ago at a biological medicine clinic in Switzerland and we really hit it off. She’s amazing since she is not only a dedicated single mom of four kids (who are all now flying the coop), she’s also managed to travel to a huge number of clinics across the globe, interviewing the world’s top experts and inspecting clinics that deal with biological medicine and alternative therapies.

Because of her intense personal research and firsthand knowledge, Robyn is now considered one of the top experts in the world herself on all kinds of health topics. She’s lectured in over 450 cities in the last six years after launching her popular site, GreenSmoothieGirl.com, and has authored fifteen books including the bestsellers The Green Smoothies Diet and 12 Steps to Whole Food. Her latest book is called Vibe.

Not to mention (but I will) that Robyn is a former psychotherapist and university professor to boot. Her advice is definitely worth taking, so don’t miss this or our previous podcast episode!

Episode Highlights With Robyn Openshaw

The personal family crisis that got Robyn started on her quest to find the best health clinics
The number of cancer cells the human body makes every day
How biological medicine views cancer (that most U.S. docs wouldn’t agree with)
Where Robyn found the most impressive health treatments that really made a difference
What’s on the menu at a biological health clinic
Why I (Katie) did a liver detox there (and how often we should do one)
Health benefits of a coffee enema and why you might want to do one!
Dr. Petra’s background and training
What to expect at the clinic
And more!

Resources We Mention

GreenSmoothieGirl.com
Come to Switzerland with me in 2019!
Webinar on Switzerland clinic
Robyn’s books
My last podcast with Robyn: 110: How Vibrational Frequencies Affect Our Daily Lives

More From Wellness Mama

If you went to a biological health clinic, what would you want help with? Do you have questions I can pass on to Robyn? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I’m here today with my friend Robyn Openshaw, who is the author of 15 books including bestsellers, the “Green Smoothies Diet” and “12 Steps to Whole Food.” Her latest book is called “Vibe” and she and I have talked about that on the podcast before. I’ll make sure to link to that episode in the show notes. But Robyn is a former psychotherapist, former university professor, and she’s lectured in over 450 cities in the last six years after launching her popular site, greensmoothiegirl.com. She’s a single mom to four children who are now all flying the coop, as well as she skis and plays competitive tennis. She’s an incredible human being, and on this podcast, we’re gonna go deep on something that she is one of the top experts in the world on, which is biological medicine and alternative therapies. So, Robyn, welcome and thanks for being here.

Robyn: Thank you. Thanks for having me again, Katie.

Katie: I’m excited to chat. It’s always so fun to talk to you and to learn from you. And I think to start, we have to get some background on all of your world travels and all of the clinics that you’ve been to worldwide, and interviewed dozens of people on many continents studying all kinds of different things. So, talk us through that. What sparked that? And then, what happened on this journey?

Robyn: Yeah, it started with cancer. There was lot of cancer in the family, and when I was in high school, I watched my uncle and my grandmother get cancer at the same time. He was 31. She was at her 50s, and they went very different routes. He went straight standard of care medical route, which would be your surgery, chemo and radiation, that’s really all that standard of care oncology has to offer. And she went on what everybody thought was crazy off doing the Gerson Therapy and drinking all this carrot juice, and she turned orange, and she didn’t any chemo or any radiation. She was the one who had the serious cancer. He had the, the lightweight cancer Stage 1 Hodgkin’s, very, very, very curable, 95% curable in the stage they caught it. Anyways, he died and she lived.

And I’ve been researching cancer ever since, and I went on this clinic tour for three and a half years. Every chance I got I would get on an airplane. I went to several different continents, and I went to 20 different clinics who were treating cancer specifically, although I learned a lot about other disease treatment. When these practitioners, or functional medicine practitioners is what we would call them in North America, in Europe they call it biological medicine and it’s really the predecessor of functional medicine. And I really feel like they go deeper and they go broader and probably just because it’s been more acceptable for a longer period of time. There wasn’t traction for it here in the United States because medical schools don’t want it. And so, I was jumping on planes and going and putting a microphone in front of a lot of functional and biological doctors, and I was learning what they do to treat cancer holistically.

What they do to treat cancer when the patient doesn’t want the, what my grandmother called when she opted out of it, the cut, cutting, burning, poisoning method, methods of treating cancer. And, you know, this research I’ve done, I’m really glad I did it. I was planning to write a book about cancer, did not do it, that’s a whole side story, that’s another question. But I did feel like I had done something that no one else has ever done. I’m unaware of anyone who has gone all over the world and interviewed all these clinics to find out what it is they do, what do they offer, and, sort of, evaluate them. I’m reticent to…I tell people one-on-one when they ask me, “Hey, what do you think of this clinic? I know you went to all these clinics.” And people constantly ask me, I’ll tell them that one-on-one. But I’m not gonna go out there on the internet and say, “Hey, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to this clinic, and here’s why. And this one is pretty subpar, and this is why.”

But I did learn a lot, and I can tell you what these clinics have in common, the good ones, and what I was really looking for if you want.

Katie: Yes. Absolutely.

Robyn: Yeah, so, I didn’t realize this as I headed into my travels, but it became very clear to me that if a sick person is going to travel somewhere to stay for three or more weeks to get well, let’s say they have neurodegenerative disease, let’s say they have ALS, or Parkinson’s, or dementia, or multiple sclerosis, or let’s say they have cancer. If they’re gonna go to one of these holistic clinics, then a lot of them cannot afford to build a facility where you can stay on site, but it makes a massive difference in the kind of experience that the patient has.

And it also really helps if they’re going to feed them a therapeutic diet. If you’re really sick, there are some specifics that should be there in any of the dietary recommendations, but also for some people, especially, they really should provide the food, three meals a day and it should be a very healing diet based on the evidence of what would be a detoxifying diet.

And I found that in very few places, 2 of the 20. And I was really going to the places that were being recommended to me, and the places where I felt like they were doing good work from the evidence that I could gather from home and on the computer. And so, I really found two clinics that met those criteria. Then, there’s the price issue, and a lot of people are spending $30,000 or more for three weeks of care. The reason I say three weeks is that most of these clinicians I met with, I would say, you know, if you’re gonna help somebody turn cancer around, how long do you want them to be inpatient? And your, and my mutual friend, Katie, Dr. Tom O’ Brien has a book to the effect of, I’m paraphrasing the title of it, “In Three Weeks I Can Work a Miracle.” And the best clinic of the 20 clinics I researched at, which you’ve been to as well now, and some mutual friends of ours have been to, the best clinic I found worldwide, the medical doctor who is the clinical director there says the same thing. She says, if people are sick, if you want me to turn around some neurodegenerative disease or cancer, I need a minimum of three weeks to get their body alkaline, to oxygenate it.

And what I found that the good, of these 20 clinics and lots of them, I don’t consider them to be doing good work. I don’t know if there, you know, it’s because they don’t know they’re burned out, they don’t have the funds to invest in equipment or what. But of the good ones, the two really common themes that I found are that they are, number one, identifying the cause of the failure of the immune system. They don’t see disease the same way a standard of care doctor would.

So, your standard oncologist who came out of American medical training, sees cancer, for instance, as a growth, an invader, something to be fought. And so, they’re gonna declare war on it, and they’re gonna do chemicals, and they’re gonna do radioactive waves to nuke the invader. Well, a biological medicine doctor in Europe, or a functional medicine doctor here in the U.S., sees cancer as a completely different thing. And I side with them, I side with them. I think that the, the evidence is very strong that they’re right when they say cancer is a catastrophic failure of the immune system.

And one other ways I can explain why that is really accurate is that, we all are producing about 50,000 cancer cells a day. Our healthy cells mutate…and then our body is metabolizing about 50,000 cancer cells a day all the way until it isn’t. And so what one of the common, the two across the board common themes in these clinics was is they’re looking for what caused the failure of the immune system, and then they’re going to rebuild the immune system, which they can’t really do if they don’t know what part of it failed, and why it failed. What were the toxic exposures?

And so, that’s another thing that I see all of them doing is that, across the board, they are working on detoxifying the body through lots of technologies, through a diet that optimizes throughput, through the various organs of elimination. So, those were the two things that you’re looking for. If you’re looking at functional medicine and you’re looking, or you’re looking at biological medicine in Europe, and you wanna start asking questions of a practitioner, you’re gonna wanna ask what treatments do you have? What are you doing to rebuild my immune system and detoxify my body? Those seem to be the two major strategies that they all employ to varying degrees. And some of the treatments that are at these clinics are, what I consider, spa treatments. And it’s like if I’m going to send somebody across the world to what I think is what best likes in the world, I wanna see them having invested heavily in things that are gonna move the needle, and things that are actually going to be highly effective in those two things. I don’t want everything they do there to be a spa treatment. Like the ion bath or whatever. It might work. I’m not sure. It’s certainly controversial, but that’s not a needle mover treatment. That’s a, to me, that’s pretty lightweight. I wanna see the heavy duty treatments there.

Katie: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And, like you said, I have been there as well. And I think the place that we’ve both been in Switzerland, they do a great job of that you feel very calm and relaxed like you would in a spa, but, like you said, all of the treatments are very backed by evidence. And they are extremely knowledgeable. So, can you, kind of, talk through…I know that that people come there for all kinds of different reasons, but talk through some of the people that you’ve met there and why they were there. And then, also, walk us a little bit through what some of these treatments are that are actually needle movers.

Robyn: Yeah. And, you know, just so you have the back story, Wellness Mama listeners, what we did there, what Katie and I did there is a little detox, and we should definitely talk about that, because Katie’s open to leading one this October. And if you wanna go with her, or Heather, who’s the mommypotamus founder and she and Katie worked together now, if you wanna go with them in October then you can, we’ll give you a link to that in the show notes, I think is how Katie will do it. But, yeah, the Dr. Petra is a medical doctor who was trained in Germany. Germany’s really the birthplace of homeopathy, which is just one small part of what biological medicine does. But in Europe, doctors of biological medicine aren’t pariahs, like, they are here in the United States. They aren’t laughed at, scorned, sometimes kicked out of their professional institutions. Their insurance isn’t likely to cover functional medicine just like it isn’t in the U.S. although more so, more so…But bottom line is, it’s a medical specialty. And so, Dr. Petra has a medical degree, which I really, you know, if there was a perfect clinic, I’d want it to be run by a medical doctor who has all that background in physiology, and all the background a medical doctor gets, plus goes on to do the additional training in biological medicine.

So, Dr. Petra is trained in that. She didn’t speak any English until she was in her 20s, because she grew up behind the Berlin Wall. And so, until the Berlin Wall fell, that, you know, Germans weren’t allowed to speak any English. So, she loves to treat neurodegenerative disease. She feels very competent in neurological disease. So, you will see a lot of people with Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, the page that Katie’s gonna give you to invite you to come to liver detox week, or two weeks. I really like when people stay a second week, because of they can do, they do deeper treatments in the second week, but I’ve been running them for about eight years because when I discovered this clinic, I was just so blown away by it. I know you asked what kind of people you meet there. If you’re there during our liver detox week, you’re mostly just there with Americans and people who follow us, people who follow Wellness Mama. If Katie is gonna run these retreats October 6th to the 13th, or October 13th to the 20th, you can go check out the page all about it. You can see photos of the place.

But I do want to tell you a little bit of the background of this place because it’s, I just think it’s like one of the wonders of the world, but, sort of, undiscovered. When I found it, there wasn’t a single word in English, in the clinic or on the Internet about it. And when I found it, I was like, “Oh, my goodness. This place blows away all the others. The breadth and the depth of the treatments they have there, and the diagnostics that are available, and the sophistication of the medical staff, you know. And they’re not prescribing drugs and they’re not doing surgeries. And so, this is way outside of standard of care. And so, if you’re hearing this and you want to come for one or two week liver detox, and we can get in, in a minute, we can get into why we all need a liver detox, then, check the page out that Katie will link you to for that.

But if you are ill, or, if you listen to this and later you find out your mom or dad is diagnosed with, you know, a terrible disease, and you’re thinking, “I really would like to get them some help.” This place is the least expensive and the most competent with the deepest investment in really good biological medicine that I found worldwide. But if you are sending a sick person there, they should not come on a liver detox retreats. If they have ALS or Parkinson’s, or MS, and they’re gonna need a longer stay, they should go there soon and they should go there for three weeks. And on this page, that’s about the retreats, there is a section of that page that lets you apply to go there for three weeks stay. And it gives you, I’m really, kind of, proud of this because there’s not a lot of clinics that will give you this, but it gives you a Skype call with one of the medical doctors. Petra is one of the medical doctor of another hired one who works there. And also, Dr. Petra’s daughter, Frederica, is a medical doctor. She’s a doctor of internal medicine, and has trained for years under her mother in biological medicine.

So, just a quick little note about this amazing building. What happened is many, many years ago in the ’80s, one of Switzerland’s wealthiest women became very ill. She was fairly old. She was ’70s or ’80s, and she got very sick, and she hired a holistic doctor to take very good care of her. And the guy turned her health issue around, and she got well again. And she was so grateful and she said to him, “What can I do for you?” And it sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? “What can I do for you?” And he said, “Build me a clinic.” And so, she gave him what in the 1980s was $23 million, this facility was built, and all the rooms are onsite. There is this gorgeous lunchroom that we take all three of our meals in, or you can go have a chic cafe, which is like a chicory coffee and they’ll steam sheep’s milk in it for you. The food they eat in Europe is surprisingly different, if you haven’t been there.

There are surprisingly a number of food items that you’re like, “Gosh, I’ve never seen this before.” Like chestnuts, chestnuts are everywhere outside, but they’re also on the lunch buffet. So, this facility was built for $23 million, and it has changed hands multiple times, because that’s a lot of money, and nobody could afford to buy it for $23 million. And so, if you went to build a facility like this, let’s say in North America, you wouldn’t be under so much bondage of debt that you would have to charge a fortune and only the very wealthy would be able to go there. But what’s crazy is, I don’t know what a $23 million building in the 1980s would be when it’s been appreciating for whatever that is, 30, 40 years. It’s been appreciating it. It’s gotta be worth $50 million by now. It was sold to Dr. Petra and her husband who’s the MBA, business brains behind it. It was sold to them for $3 million. And half of that money was gifted to them.

So, they acquired this world class facility that would just bury most doctors financially to even own a spectacular building overlooking the Kalonka Valley in the Southern Swiss Alps. They acquired it for only $1.5 million in debt. That is pennies on the dollar, what it would cost to build it. And so, even though Switzerland is the most expensive country in the entire world, it was the cheapest care and the most quality care I found worldwide. It was just really remarkable considering that several of the clinics I researched at were in Tijuana, Mexico with chain link fences around them, with locks on them, and that it was like staying in a hospital room in a twin bed with other people in the room. They charge more than this Swiss clinic does.

So, I really wanted to get the word out so that sick people who are looking for a more holistic care, can find a better option. And maybe it’s far away. You have to fly into Milan, and if you come with us in October, is when Katie and Heather are talking about doing it, and if you sign up, then they’ll go. I’m running three weeks in June. Last I heard it was sold out, but now I hear we have two more rooms available in least one of my weeks. You will see, it’s is just…I’m so excited that Americans are finally starting to go there, because America is looking for options, and there are people who can afford to get good care, but they didn’t know this place existed.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, I went, like you said, just for the liver side, which I think can’t be understated. I think we need to talk more about that in just a second. But it was amazing to see people there recovering from Lyme disease, or recovering from neurodegenerative diseases, or seizures, truly people across the board, and they were all getting help in this very calming, relaxing environment. You’ve mentioned…we’ll put the link in the show notes, but also for anybody listening who wants to just check it out now, I’ll create a short link which will be wellnessmama.com/go/clinic. So, you guys can find it just through this right now. But again, more information will be in the show notes as well. But, Robyn, you started talking about liver detox, and my listeners are pretty savvy, so they, I think, understand how important the liver is to overall health. But can you walk us through like what a liver detox looks like and why that’s such an important step even for those of us who are not really, you know, have really serious illnesses.

Robyn: Yes. You know, your liver serves you in, some estimate over 500 ways. And I’ve heard other estimates by a clinician saying that there are at least 2,000 chemical functions of the liver. And so, if your liver is doing somewhere between 500 and 2,000 things for you every single day, every single second of your life, including while you sleep, and we all are participating in some version of the American diet, right? We all need to clean out our liver. There are thousands of ducts in our liver, and when they get sludgy, and when bile gets stacked up, or the bile gets thick, or we’re not producing enough bile, which we would if we were eating more of a native diet like we used to before we lived in this industrial age and all of our food is this like processed package stuff now. And I’m sure lots of people who listen to your show, Katie are making their own food and they’re eating whole foods that you teach.

But I don’t think there’s anybody listening who will be able to say, “I’m completely opting out of it.” Here’s the thing, there’s also tons and tons of ducts in the gallbladder, and there’s an epidemic going on right now. A colleague of ours, Katie, said to me recently because she’s in horrible pain and having serious issues and thinks her gallbladder is involved, that they told her they were three months out from even being able to schedule her gallbladder removal because they don’t know what’s going on, but gallbladder removals have tripled in the last few years. Now, last I read, which is quite a few years ago, we were removing over a million gallbladders a year in the United States alone. So, our diet has everything to do with that, our lifestyle, and we have got to prevent that by doing a flush. And so, for a couple of days before you go to Switzerland, and we’re picked up, we just get the royal treatment. We were picked up at Milan airport and taken to the clinic, which is about 90 minutes away.

We’re eating specific, only plant diet, because what we’re doing is we’re increasing alkalinity. We’re increasing the pH of our body. We are oxygenating, we are getting a lot of throughput going on, eating a high fiber diet. So, all of us are eating an exclusively plant-based diet for eight or nine days. We’re also dilating those ducts, and we’re increasing bile flow, and we’re increasing the thinness and the viscosity of that bile, because that bile is out there sopping up all these chemical toxins that we all unfortunately are bombarded with in this weird plastic world we live in now. We’re just bombarded with chemicals.

Gosh, I do so much to keep the chemicals out of my life. And then, I walk into my tennis club this morning and I’m bombarded with the cleaning stuff, you know, and I’m smelling the Lysol and the whatever. I mean, there’s just no getting away from it. So, we go through a liver detox that at the end of it, at the very end, we all do the flush together. And I, here at home, like in a home program, I take people through a 26-day detox, and we do a gallbladder and liver flush like that. And people will always say, “Well, if I don’t have a gallbladder, should I do the flush?” Yes, you should. Because guess what? If you lost your gallbladder, you needed your gallbladder, and now your liver is backup, and your liver has to do a lot, and the liver has lots of duct work in it as well. So, you’re actually flushing out. Some people see dozens of the precursor stones. They’re actually not gallstones, but they have the potential to become such, and they’re definitely clogging up the ducts.

And so, some people see hundreds or even thousands, a little green brown stones, sometimes they are not all that little. And so, we all do the flush together. It’s really fun because, and less scary because we’re doing this thing we’ve never done before, and we’re doing it with a group. We all do it at the same time. We’re all eating three meals a day together. We have a marvelous time and it’s just time together that we just would never otherwise spend in such a beautiful place. The energy of the place is preserved. There’s no EMF allowed there. And partly that’s because there’s a lot of Lyme disease patients treated there. I just took my daughter there who was diagnosed with Lyme disease several years ago. And guess what? Probably because of Dr. Petra’s treatments, she’s now negative. Her tests are all coming back negative for Lyme. So, probably I knew enough to get right on it.

But back to the liver flush, here’s the thing, we all should be doing something like this at least once a year, just as a really good preventative. Dr. Petra may treat a lot of neurological disease and a lot of cancer, but what she would love to do is get people upstream of that, get people to do the liver flush and really commit to it. We’re doing treatments every day to optimize that. For instance, they use a sonogram. They have a practitioner, heat your liver with sonogram technology, and it’s a liver hyperthermia treatment. You get a professional colonic okay. See how it’s just increasing throughput. It’s dilating ducts. You get a coffee enema if you’ve never heard of something like that. Virtually all of these clinics, I went to worldwide do this. And so if that sounds crazy to you that you’re gonna put a cup of Joe in your booty, then let me just say this is very time tested.

It’s an interesting therapy. But what it does is it dilates the liver and gallbladder ducts because when you put an implant of organic coffee, then the bottom of your rectum and you hold it for 10 or 12 minutes, the caffeine and the palmitic acid is taken up by the hemorrhoidal vein and that causes those ducts to open up wide and dump. And so, all this toxicity instead of circulating throughout the body, because the liver circulates the entire blood supply of your body every four minutes. Isn’t that amazing and miraculous? So it’s going to allow, the coffee enema allows, it’s not going through your digestive tract. Okay? There’s good things about coffee, there’s bad things about coffee. You know, we always say if you’re going to drink coffee, drink organic, tried to get it low acid, but this is not going through the GI tract, where it’s creating that acidity. It is, however, like, aiding your glutathione production.

So, you actually feel like a million bucks, and people think that they’re just flying high, and they feel very creative, and they feel just ecstatic about life. They think it’s the caffeine, but it’s actually a double whammy because you’re just being flooded with glutathione, which massively helps your detoxification pathways. So, lots of good things that are happening allowing you to dump from the liver, and the gallbladder directly into the lower colon, which means you can expel it and lots of garbage leaves your body without, you know, recirculating and recirculating, which often happens when people try to do a detox program.

So, I haven’t gone through everything. That’s the 20 different diagnostics and treatments that you get when you do the liver detox week. But, the page shows you a recorded webinar that we did. I did it with Heather. Katie was out of town. I did it with Heather, and so, you can learn more about what all the treatments are you can see on the slides, lots of photos of this beautiful place built into the Alps through… something like 320 days a year of sunshine. So, you can learn more about the different treatments that you get, and then, if you can stay a second week, they give you $500 off that week. And they give you a free OligoScan.

And I like the OligoScan technology. I was skeptical of it because I know that you’re in challenge testing is, sort of, the gold standard for heavy metals testing, and we should all get our heavy metals tested because we have so many exposures. Okay. Like, your amalgam fillings, if you ever had metal fillings in your mouth, if you had them or still have them. Sushi and cheese have really high levels of some heavy metals. You have lots of exposures, air quality. Everybody here in Utah has really high cadmium levels because we breathe so much exhaust during the winter and the invert terrible inversions we have here. So, we all have lots of exposure to heavy metals. And they’re about the most toxic substances known to man, and this OligoScan is noninvasive.

And I’m skeptical of it at first, and they press on points on your hand, and a reading comes out. It doesn’t just tell you the levels of all your heavy metals and whether you’re in the green, yellow or red zone, danger zone for each of those heavy metals, also tells you the level of every single one of your minerals. I see a lot of people deficient in zinc, and then the clinic can deal with that. They’re gonna give you a nutrient IVs while you’re there and send you out the door with some supplements, some of which we can’t even get in the United States.

But these are some of the things you get, live blood analysis. They take one drop of your blood from your finger or from your ear lobe, whichever one you want, doesn’t really hurt, and they look under a high-powered microscope, and what they can tell you about the state of your overall health from one drop of living blood is amazing. Believe it or not, you could sit there for one hour exploring that one drop of blood under a high-powered microscope. You can tell if you’re a really acidic. They can tell you if it looks like you have parasites or other pathogens, viruses. They can tell you if your red blood cells are floating free with really healthy membranes, or if they’re clumping together showing that your blood is tired.

And when I stay there for three weeks, you have to stay there for three weeks for them to do one at the beginning and one at the end, the difference in my live blood analysis, and you can’t fake this. You can’t fake this. You can’t make this up because I sit there and watch them take the blood out of my, you know, poke my ear lobe and watch them put the drop of blood under a piece of glass, and under this microscope. I am seeing my own blood is literally one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen, because they don’t have HIPAA laws there. As a researcher, they actually let me into their client folders, and I mean, they were there just showing me different people’s blood and how much improvement they saw with people who stayed for three weeks.

So, if someone you love is sick and is looking for a place to stay, there are places in the United States that have full body hyperthermia, like they have there at the clinic, which I am very impressed with the efficacy of that treatment. It’s basically inducing an artificial fever. Yes, I love saunas, but they cannot do this. My daughter was, did two of them. I actually bribed her that if she would get to 104 degrees before telling them to stop, that I would give her $100. Second time she just did it. She did it. She beat her previous fever. A fever is how you, and I’m sure Katie has talked about this on this show. I bet she’s talked about this in many different places. A fever isn’t a thing to fight. It’s very, very rare that the fever gets high enough to cause problem in your brain. You know, 99.999% of fevers are the body’s immune system burning out bacteria and viruses. Guess what else a fever will do. Cancer cells don’t like being at 104 degrees. You know, you know that your body is optimized at 98.6, I think it is. I always forget it’s 98.4 or 98.6, but what you don’t probably know is that your immune cells are optimized at 102 to 104 degrees.

And so, when you heat the body, or you heat the liver, you know, because during the liver detox we do, like I said, a little liver hyperthermia, but full body hyperthermia, guess what? Imagine your white blood cells going five times the speed they normally do, and just running around gobbling up the bad junk. Imagine your killer T-cells just hyper mobilized. That’s what beaver does for you. I’m always so sad when somebody’s child gets a little tiny fever and they give the child Ibuprofen or Tylenol, which can be toxic to their liver and doesn’t let the child’s body do what it’s trying to do, which is kill bacteria with fever.

So, I mean, those are some of the things that we do. Liver detox talks is remarkable. People just leave feeling like a million bucks. And frankly, we should all do it every year anyway, and we have an amazing time. You know, eat together. We sit out on the patio, we hike together. Olf tricked me and Katie into doing a five and a half hour hike. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah, he called it a, “Let’s go on a little hike.” And we were like, “Yeah, sure, little hike sounds great.” It was over an Alp. It was not so little, but it was a great time.

Katie: And I love what you said about fevers. I think that is so important on so many levels. And you’re right. I’ve written about this, and I’ve talked about it on the podcast. I’ve taken a lot of heat actually from parents who were like, “I can’t believe that’s like, that’s child abuse to not bring your child’s fever down.” And I’ve had many doctors back me up on this, including when we both know Dr. Eliza Song who said, “No.” it was one of some very rare cases. Children absolutely should be allowed to run fevers, and there’s all these beneficial long-term outcomes when their body maintains that ability. And a lot of adults actually have, kind of, this impaired ability. We don’t run fevers as well as we should. Kids are much better at it. And so, I think the whole body hypothermia is an amazing tool, and I can’t accomplish that at home. But I will do that if I notice I’m starting to get sick. I will really push it in my portable sauna, which lets my head stay out, so I can get hotter for a lot longer, and I can’t get to 104, but I can raise my body temperature a couple of degrees and couple of hours there, and almost inevitably don’t get sick. And that goes back to the white blood cells and the immune response that you talked about. So, I love that you brought that up.

And when it comes to the liver, I also wanted to say, you know, like I didn’t have any serious health issues that were my reason for going to Switzerland other than I, you know, I’ve always had Hashimoto’s and I’m always trying to improve that in any way that I can. But I realized after all these years of pregnancy and nursing, those are both things that are pretty tough on your liver. Stress is also tough on your liver. And I just looked back at the last couple of decades of my life and realized I had been working my liver pretty hard. And so I was curious to see how it would respond. And a couple of things that we know are related to liver health are things like sleep and skin health. And those were the two things I noticed, really dramatic improvements in even just in one week in Switzerland. And I know, you know, people who stay longer see incredible results.

I have a personal friend, a really dear friend who had cancer about 10 years ago, and ever since, he has had seizures and headaches and horrible heartburn and all of these problems that went back to the chemo, which he wouldn’t have done if he knew what he knows now, but he did. And so, he’s had these horrible effects for a decade, and he’s gone to the clinic that we’re talking about a couple of times. And after the last time he stayed for three weeks, did really intensive treatments, and it’s the first time in 10 years he hasn’t had a headache. For multiple weeks in a row, he has not had a headache, he’s not had a seizure. So, I think that’s just important to highlight, is it can definitely help someone like me who just want to feel better, to be a better mom, and to recover from all those years of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And I get, as moms, it’s so hard to do that. But for me, I felt it was really important, but it also was helpful for him and he was facing much more challenging circumstances. So, I think they really do have that, like, you said, the spectrum for people all across that.

Robyn: They do. And another one of the treatments I should mention, there’s a photo of me in the slide show. If you go to the page that Katie’s linking you to, and I’m sure she’ll tell you the link again if you didn’t pick it up, and it’ll be in the show notes. But there’s a photo of me, a little selfie I took doing hyperbaric ozone. And this is the kind of treatment I wanna see. I wanna see really sophisticated knowledge of how to use nutrient IVs. And they have it, you name it, they have it that they can give you. If they see a deficiency and they think it’s going to be useful therapeutically. But the hyperbaric ozone, I saw versions of this all over the world in my studies, all the way down to as rudimentary as one clinic in Arizona had me, because I participated in these treatments. If they were safe for a healthy person, then I participated in them, because I wanted to be able to report on what the whole experience was, how it would be for a cancer patient. They had me bend over, took some blood out of my hip, shook some Ozone into it right there in the syringe, and then injected it back into my hip. So, that is like the lame version of what they have in Switzerland.

The best one I’ve seen worldwide is the one they’ve invested in a couple of years ago in Switzerland. And you could see a photo of me with a needle in my arm, you know, so there’s a little needle prick. That’s the only pain I experienced though. And then, I squeeze on a little ball squeezy ball thing in my hand, and the blood leaves my arm, goes into container where they shake ozone into my blood. Now, you may know ozone as, you know, it’s oxygen molecule, extra oxygen atom. So, it’s O3 instead of O2. And it’s what lightning creates in the atmosphere that cleans the atmosphere. And, it’s used in hundreds of industrial applications. It cleans. And what it does in the body is that cancer cells, and bacteria, and viruses, and parasites cannot live when in contact with ozone. And so, they shake it in the blood, and it breaks down into totally non-toxic metabolites.

But when it goes back into the arm, then they reverse the flow and it goes back in the arm. Then I started squeezing and they reverse the flow in my blood, leaves my arm again, and they shake ozone into it. They do that 10 times. So, you’re just really getting a really high, more therapeutic dose of the same thing that the guy injected into my hip. When he did that, I was just like, “Yeah, I don’t really think that’s gonna make a difference. That two tablespoons of blood that you just pulled out of my hip. So, these are just some examples of the kinds of things they do. Dr. Petra is also really good at iridology. It’s a very old science of how the different parts of the iris of the eye correspond to different parts of the body. The body is so integrated, it’s such a circle. It’s so simple and complex at the same time, just like how reflexologists will work on certain parts of your foot because they correspond to meridians that connect to specific organ systems in the body.

Oh, and by the way, they do, they have a massage therapists trained in reflexology as well. But, so, Dr. Petra is amazing at assessing your live blood and seeing what to do for you, where to guide treatment based on what your live blood tells her. She is good at this iridology. It’s not part of our liver detox package, but I think three week patients do get this. It’s a great tool for guiding treatment. It’s not the only thing, you know. When you do the liver detox, you’re going to get a test of your autonomic nervous system. And so, you’ll know the health of your parasympathetic, and your sympathetic nervous system and how they do. How do they balance out? And they give you recommendations based on that. That’s one of the diagnostics that we get there. So, it’s an amazing experience. And you know what? We don’t allow any EMF in the treatment rooms or the common areas, or even the lunch room. You can’t go in there with your cell phone.

We were there, honestly, I think it was the summer you were there, Katie, but it wasn’t right when you were there, because after you had left, there were some long-term EMF refugees, is what they call them in Europe, and these are people who are so deeply impacted by the chaotic frequencies from all these electronics in our environment. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Kirlian photography of the Earth and what it looks like, Kirlian photography with this cloud of electro smog is what they call it in Europe. We here, tend to call it like EMR, electromagnetic radiation, or EMF, electromagnetic frequencies. In Europe they call it Electro Smog. It’s way more mainstream. A lot more people know about it. Their governments are actually doing something to protect them about it. But there were two people staying there long term who were EMF refugees who could not be around these chaotic radiations that bothers some people here in the U.S., but most people don’t even know it’s a thing. Most people don’t even know that their phone with Wifi on is constantly transmitting, sort of, some mild radiation, and lots and lots and lots of other exposures.

When you go through the TSA security check, your Wifi, the smart meter the electric company may have on the outside of your home. Lots of different exposures. Point is, we had a girl there. There was a 19-year-old girl who came with us that summer for my Liberty Talks weeks who would not follow the rules, and she would walk into the room with her phone in her pocket. Because, you know, it’s really hard to separate teenagers from their phones. Katie’s gonna work with you all. I’m sure she already is on how to set limits with kids and not give you too much exposure. I know she’s done this topic a lot and it’s important, and I wish I had gotten on it sooner. My kids are all 18 to 25, but this 19-year-old girl walked in with her emitting device, and one of the EMF refugees who was in a wheelchair, 30-year-old woman with Lyme disease, which is probably why she got so sensitive to EMF, her immune system was very, very taxed with Lyme disease, and the woman in the wheelchair wasn’t even facing this girl when she would walk in with her phone, and she would start seizing. It’s happened twice. And one of the times, I had to help catch her as she seized and grand mal seizure, and fell out of her wheelchair.

So, I’m just mentioning that because that’s an example of what a healing climate they preserve at this place. That they literally won’t even allow a cell phone that isn’t on airplane mode in the lunch room. There’s a room where you can go and get Wifi. People work in there. They take their laptops in there. It’s one of the only rooms in the clinic that doesn’t have a gorgeous view. The room you stay in is there right on site. You come with us on a liver detox, you can walk out of your room and press a button, you’ll be taken a nap, or you can be sitting out on your little deck. Every room has a little deck, you can be sitting out there drinking tea, walk out of your room, press a button for the elevator, and 30 seconds later you’re there on another floor for your massage, or you’re there, you’re walking into lunch. It just makes things so very convenient. It makes such a healing climate for our liver detoxes, but also for the sick patients who go there.

I’ll tell you what? Most of these places I went worldwide. You have to find some tiny, little hotel somewhere, and the other one in Switzerland, I went to, super expensive, probably the most expensive place I went worldwide. And you had to stay at a hotel two miles away, and the room was the smallest room I’ve ever stayed in, and it was $250 a night. And then, I had to fend for myself for food. And I was like, “Gosh, if I had cancer, I would not be wanting to fight this fight.” Here’s the thing. If you’re going to go to one of these clinics, you’ve got to realize the medicine isn’t just the treatments. That’s not just the needle in your vein with the high dose vitamin C, and whatever it is you’re getting. It’s also the whole healing experience. It’s also the diet they’re feeding you. And I wanted to see, in my worldwide tours, I wanted to see great attention to those details.

And a lot of these clinics, I mean, every single one I went to in Germany, it was so weird. They had salt shakers on the table of regular refined salt and sugar bowls around the table, and they were serving fried food, and, like, pie and ice cream. And when I would ask the doctors who ran this place, because I was like, “Wow, I thought this was like a…gosh, I traveled all the way here and I thought it was a holistic clinic. And they certainly do things that are, you know, rebuilding for the immune system. But I would say, what’s your deal with the diet you’re serving here? You don’t seem to, you know, be doing gluten-free, whole foods, juicing. I’d love to see some very nutrient-dense organic greens and vegetables being juiced.” And some of these clinics on dinner, I’d ask them and they’d be like, “Oh, you know, they just…we just want them to just have a peaceful experience and not have to worry about food. We don’t want them to think about that.” Or, “Yeah, not everybody wants that.” And so, they had their excuses, but I’m telling you, this place in Switzerland had all of those things that I really wanted to see.

I mean, it was kind of over time that I developed, sort of, this checklist of what I wanted to see. And I intended to go out and rate them online. But I actually think that will hurt some businesses of some struggling clinics who do have some good things about them. Most of them are doing some good work, but I didn’t want to, and I also don’t want anybody suing me for saying that their clinic isn’t very good, and that I wouldn’t send people I care about to it. But I am willing to say the ones I think are really good.

Katie: Yeah, for sure. And I was actually there when the EMF refugees were there. I wasn’t there the same week as the girl when they were having the quite the extreme seizures, although I did see a couple of their seizures. But, yeah, it was really…I’ve talked about it a couple of times on the podcast. It really hit home for me, just how we really need to pay attention to how those are impacting us. And on the food note as well. We’ve touched on it, but we should also mention when you’re there, there is a five-star chef, like, an amazing chef who cooks all the meals. And even though I’m not normally plant-based, I was there and the food was incredible, some of the best food I’ve ever had, and I didn’t miss meat at all. The chef does amazing things with fennel and artichokes and just all of these vegetables. It was incredible. I just wanted to make sure we mentioned that.

And, like you’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’ll say the link again, it’s wellnessmama.com/go/clinic. If you guys wanna check it out. And like you said, I blocked a week in October the 6th through the 13th. If anyone wants to come with me to Switzerland, if there’s a group, I’d love to go and host you guys and spend some time in person, and Heather will be there the 13th through the 20th if there’s interest in a week there. So, if you guys think this sounds really interesting and wanna check it out more, the links will be in the show notes, or you can go to that wellnessmama.com/go/clinic to find out more and see if it’s a good fit for you. I know it is a big commitment to, especially those of us with families to leave our families and our kids for a week. But I would say, if it’s something that you feel like you should do, definitely research it and see if it’s possible because it made a big difference for me. It was an incredible week, and I’m excited to be able to invite you guys to join. Any other details you wanna mention, Robyn?

Robyn: I just wanna mention that each of you will have the opportunity to be part of a healing process for someone older than you. I’m much older than Katie. My kids are raised, and I’m in my 50s now, but, you know, all my peers are taking care of their very ill parents, and I see it coming with my parents. I’m one of eight children, so, I don’t think I’m the one they’re going to choose to take care of them, but it’s coming, and I want more people to know about this clinic who are looking for a place to be treated. You can’t go there for three weeks and expect a miracle and go back to your eating out of the McDonald’s drive through. That’s not gonna work. However, you’re gonna learn a lot there that you could take home and implement.

They’ll leave with supplement therapy’s super dialed in with detailed instructions, how to do it, but this is where I would send my own mom. So, I wanna say that, that on the page, that Katie just gave you about the retreat, there is a part of that page that is for sick people. We started out doing that because people would want to come to our retreat who are like stage four cancer patients and we’d say, “You should go now. You should go now and you should go for a longer time.” A liver detox is for everyone. Everyone needs to detoxify their liver. It’s a great prevention and it’s a great thing for sick people to do. However, you know, we usually, kind of, fill the place with liver detoxers. And so, it’s not concierge care. It’s not bring all your medical records, and that’s what I want for sick people.

So, that’s the additional thing I just wanted to mention is that, point people to the page who are ill and looking for something like this, because they’re gonna save a lot of money, they’re gonna get much better care than anywhere I found worldwide, and now, they’ve made lots and lots and lots of changes so they can accommodate native English speakers. And so, I’m really pleased about that. They’ve worked so very hard. It’s just a magnificent facility run by some of the most caring and knowledgeable doctors I’ve ever been exposed to. And I know a lot of them, and I know a lot of good ones. But make sure that if someone in your life is sick, you know, you can always come to Wellness Mama and say, “Hey, what was that link?” And I know Katie has someone on staff who can point you to this link, but it’s a good thing to keep bookmarked, because it really is remarkable and nobody else has flown to 20 clinics and done the depth of research that I have here. So, I just wanna make sure everybody understands that this is where I would send my own kid.

Katie: Yeah, that link will absolutely be in the show notes as well so people can learn more. And I agree with that. If I found out that my parents had any of these things that we’ve talked about, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, that’s exactly where I would send them as well. But my hope is also to send them their pre, like you said, up line of that, hopefully, they don’t face those things. And I probably will be the one in my family who one day takes care of my parents. So, this is something important to me and all of the details, again, will be in the show notes. You can go read more, learn more, find out if you can come join me for a week, which I would love, and just learn more. So, Robyn, thank you so much for being here. I love that you’ve done all of this work to explore biological medicine and to connect people with solutions when so many people feel like they’re out of answers in the conventional treatments here. And I hope that eventually we’ll start seeing more of this available closer to home for us. But for now I’m glad that we have a place to go and to get a reboot and spend a week improving health. And I appreciate the work you’ve done in the invite for us to join.

Robyn: Well, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Katie.

Katie: And thanks to all of you as always for sharing your most valuable resource, your time with us. We don’t take that lightly and we appreciate it, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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239: Robyn Openshaw on How Biological Medicine Is Changing Health

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