Timothy Zercher 0:00

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Beth. We really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule.

Dr Beth DuPree 0:04

Thanks, Tim, for having me and thanks for reaching out. I appreciate the opportunity to share what I know about mental well-being.

Timothy Zercher 0:11

Absolutely. So you've had such a wide-ranging career in medicine. What first pulled you into this work and what has kind of shifted in terms of your definition of healing over time?

Dr Beth DuPree 0:23

My undergraduate degree was in the behavioral neuroscience and the history and philosophy of science, which they were just interesting undergrad degrees. And since I was pre-med, I wanted to expand my horizons. As my career progressed from being a general surgeon for the first decade to becoming a specialist in breast cancer surgery, it became absolutely apparent to me from my interactions with my patients that their mental well-being was not being addressed by our traditional Western medical care. I was seeing patients, as I would say, falling off the cliff. They'd get to a point in their cancer care and they'd be stuck on the cliff. And without guidance, they're going to freefall. And we know how that's going to end up. So it started out as a need to help my patients reach a safe place, which began with integrative medicine, Reiki, guided imagery, meditation, and has now progressed to the point where I'm involved with bioelectric or electroceutical interventions, as well as psychedelic therapy, because healing is something that happens deep inside. And I cannot cut out the fear when I cut out my patient's cancer when I use a scalpel. And so it's been a natural progression. And although I just turned 65, I feel like my career is just beginning because I really believe that this is what God put me on this planet to do. This is my life's calling. This is my passion, my purpose. And we're just getting started.

Timothy Zercher 2:04

I love that. I love that. And that's really cool. And I think that holistic approach would help a lot of people do a lot better if they took that.

Dr Beth DuPree 2:12

It's unfortunate, but our Western medical model is to treat the physical disease in the individual and not treat the entire person. And without a holistic approach, without recognizing that the body, mind, and spirit are deeply interconnected, we can get patients who don't have any more physical disease but are deeply broken inside. And others who their cancer leads to a transition into spirit. So we weren't able to physically remove the cancer from their body, but we're able to help their soul to reach a place where they're at peace in their heart. So that's the big disconnect in Western medicine. And that's what I'm hoping to try to become a bridge to give practitioners all the tools that I've learned over the years to bring peace to the heart of our patients and to anyone who is surviving in this world. Because if we can actually get to that place where we've got deep inner healing, our body doesn't need to keep score anymore by showing us a disease process to drive us to heal. So this is something that expands far beyond cancer care. But I feel really grateful for my years as a cancer surgeon and integrative physician to understand what it took me to help my patients to get there so that we can prevent cancer in the future and other diseases.

Timothy Zercher 3:40

Absolutely. So a lot of healthcare leaders are talking about innovation in general, innovating and improving outcomes. Your work, obviously, like you said, goes a lot deeper than that into kind of the whole person healing. What is, if you can point to one or two specific areas where like traditional healthcare falls short when it comes to truly supporting patients and their whole person?

Dr Beth DuPree 4:03

I learned through my training in psychedelic therapy about adverse childhood experiences and understanding how the autonomic nervous system is dysregulated by the disease process. Just this past week, my partners and I presented a poster at the American Society of Breast Surgeons on our preliminary data using a novel bioelectric technology called MindVibe. It uses low-level energy to stimulate the vagus nerve and acupressure stimulation on the ears. And I just posted all my stuff on social media yesterday because I don't have a person to do that sound a little bit slower. But what we found was across the board improvements in sleep, decrease in fatigue, improved well-being, decreased distress. And what was interesting is we actually measured heart rate variability. And in the two separate groups, the group, everybody had great outcomes across the board, but we were not able to shift the HRV in our group who came in with the highest levels of anxiety. And many of those patients are already on SSRIs and anxiolytics. And we know from research in cancer care and in chronic disease that antidepressants and anxiolytics are not as effective. They actually work about the same as placebo in cancer patients. So I believe that bioelectric interventions are actually the key to the future. I believe that instead of we did our trial at the end of treatment, like when they were already completed their Western medical treatment. But I think this is something that we need to bring into the very, very beginning of cancer care.

Timothy Zercher 5:50

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because you can help them fight only one battle at a time. Exactly.

Dr Beth DuPree 5:58

I also did a recent keynote at the Oncologic Naturopathic Association on the vagus nerve. And not only does the vagus nerve help with anxiety, depression, sleep, it also boosts the immune system. So I believe that we have an opportunity to unlock our body's own natural healing ability by stimulating the vagus nerve. And you don't have to be on an electroceutical technology or bioelectric technology. You can learn that through deep breathing, through meditation. And we have other modalities to do that. But when you've got someone with a high level of anxiety, to get them to commit to eight weeks of breath work twice a day to get to that place is very hard. But if we can use the bioelectric interventions to let them know what it feels like to be relaxed, then we can take the time to teach them how to breathe, how to relax and meditate. And it was really my training in psychedelic therapy. And now I actually facilitate retreats for breast cancer survivors with psychedelic therapy. That takes it to the whole next level of what are the experiences that your default mode network or your subconscious is holding on to that may be driving the anxiety or the depression. So I'm really excited about the work that I'm doing because we're able to help individuals in addiction to treat their underlying disease, as I call it, so that they don't need to medicate it with alcohol or drugs. We're able to help individuals who've already been on antidepressants or anxiolytics come off those medications and to actually feel again because you're probably quite aware of from some of the podcasts that I've watched of yours that a lot of our Western medical interventions don't touch the root cause. They're actually just vactumus surface and kind of downplaying the symptoms and making patients not as aware of their true feelings and allowing them to live.

Timothy Zercher 8:05

Absolutely. I wonder how your research plays, or maybe it hasn't yet, with TMS therapy. I have a number of clients that provide TMS services, and it can do wonders as well for fighting anxiety, depression, those kind of things. I wonder how that how those two play together if they do.

Dr Beth DuPree 8:25

Well, TMS is transmagnetic stimulation. We have two separate technologies in our company Interstill. One is MindVibe, which stimulates the vagus nerve and acupressure stimulation. The other actually stimulates deep brain structures, which is more similar to TMS, but it's highly effective. Our first generation device called Trentsa was highly statistically significant in our clinical studies, but it's very hard to get these bioelectric technologies across the finish line through the FDA. MindVIBE is a wellness device. Our other devices are more medical, and we're in the process of doing research with them. So I believe that we will be parallel or maybe even surpass TMS based on the original data that we have. And I'm really excited to be part of this because this isn't just something for cancer patients. These are technologies that will basically be available to all individuals who have the need to have stimulation to actually activate their own bodies' inner healing mechanisms. And it's really about bringing someone back into homeostasis. Our bodies know how to heal. We have certainly shut down that knowledge, and I'm trying to reawaken that knowledge in the bodies of the patients that I treat and of the other individuals who are going to be blessed by using these technologies.

Timothy Zercher 9:51

I love that. You guys are doing incredible work, and I definitely appreciate that. I thank you so much for taking time today. I know you you're a busy woman with four or five roles. So I appreciate it, and I appreciate the work you're doing to help some of the most vulnerable people in the world right now.

Dr Beth DuPree 10:05

And I appreciate you taking the time to have podcasts to get the message out because so many individuals have recognized that what they call alternative media, which podcasts are certainly to me the best alternative to listening to the chatter boxes all day long and being able to get the message out in a concise way is a beautiful thing. So thank you, Tim, for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Timothy Zercher 10:28

Thank you. Bye bye.