Dr. Josh Axe on the Power of the Body to Self Heal (video)

Video Transcript: Dr. Josh Axe’s Personal Story & The Power of the Body to Self Heal

Dr. Josh Axe: So, I’m going to kick it off. I’m going to talk about beating cancer using ancient Chinese medicine and biblical medicine, sort of marrying those two together. And these are things that radically transformed my life and my mom’s life and actually saved my mom’s life from cancer. So we’ll dive in.

So for me growing up my family lived in the medical model. And I’ll tell you, when I opened my practice eventually—that’s why I opened the practice, and I had a family functional medicine practice early on, because I looked at where my family was and I said I want to help families like that.

My family was very into fitness and so my mom was my gym teacher in elementary school, my dad was a semi-pro water skier and weightlifter. So we were really active growing up, but we knew nothing about nutrition. We knew nothing about health.

So at 40 years old my mom came home and just sobbing and I was in eighth grade at the time and shared the heartbreaking news that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and our family, not knowing any better, went through the conventional medical system. My mom went and had a mastectomy.

She went through rounds and rounds and rounds of chemotherapy. I can tell you I remember at one point my grandma came in and said “you need to say goodbye to your mom because we don’t know if she’s going to make it” and I remember seeing her lose her hair. I remember her throwing up in a bucket. I remember going with her to her treatments in Columbus, Ohio.

And the thing I remember thinking is, two things: I never want to see anyone have to go though this again and the other thing was, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.

So my mom went through all these treatments and at the end, praise God, she was diagnosed as being cancer free and healthy, but here is the shocking thing. After my mom got her cancer free diagnosis, she seemed sicker than ever. My mom spent half of her time in bed. My mom was then diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, hypothyroidism, had leaky gut.

She got put on antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. And one of the things I remembered with my mom growing up is she was sick and tired all the time, overwhelmed. And for a mom who is trying to work and raise kids and a family and do all that, I just saw her—it was just taking its toll on her.

So growing up, I was always in this frame of mind thinking there’s got to be a better way. So I remember at 14 years old, as a 14 year old, just got into high school, I knew nothing about nutrition but I read or saw somewhere on a TV commercial that soda was bad. So literally at 14 years old I stopped drinking soda. And probably had it a handful of times ’til today, 38 years old.

So I just started changing myself. I started getting into fitness. I started eating healthier, learning about nutrition, and then 10 years later, I was inspired to go to school to train to become a doctor.

I was a year away from graduating and I get a call from my mom and she said, “I’ve got bad news. I’ve been diagnosed with cancer again. This time it’s on my lungs, and the oncologists are recommending they go in and do surgery and radiation in three days.”

I said, “Mom, I’ll be home.”

I flew home from Florida back to Ohio where I grew up. We sat down. And we prayed together. And we felt really led to take care of her all naturally.

So with my mom, we just changed everything. We changed her diet. She started juicing vegetables every single day. She started using ancient remedies like reishi mushroom and turmeric. We started using essential oils like frankincense. We started doing lymphatic drainage massage with essential oils. We also worked on her emotional health. She had a lot of fear and worry in her life.

And my mom, when she was a kid, had a horse and so she started horseback riding again. We started doing everything we could to help her heal. She did these headphones and meditations where she would say bible verses every single day, morning and night, for 10 minutes and we followed this program for four months.

And after four months we went back to the oncologist. She got a CT scan and they called us the next day and their exact words were: “This is highly unusual. We don’t typically see this, but your largest tumor has shrunk form 2.5 cm down to 1.2.”

They said, “We want to see you again though in nine months.”

We went back nine months later in complete remission, and so today my mom is 67. I just saw her in Florida here this past week. Yup.

And so this is my mom last Christmas. I took a picture of her water skiing. There in Florida so you can ski over Christmas. Yeah, and she’s ran several 5ks with us. And she says she feels better now at 67 than she did in her 30s. And so the thing I want to express to all of you is no matter where you’re at in your health or if you have a loved one is there’s hope. Your body has an amazing capacity to heal, if you do the right things. And that’s the big thing I’m going to talk about today. It’s all about changing your environment.

Today too often we’ve been trained to think I need to attack something and I need to sort of—like a food heals you. Just so you know, foods don’t heal you. Herbs don’t heal you. Supplements don’t heal you. Your body heals itself. If you change your body’s internal environment, your body will heal itself.