Beating Cancer Wholistically - Peg Harvey

The Power of Holistic Healing: Peg Harvey's Journey

In this episode of Open Forum in The Villages Podcast, host Mike Roth interviews Peg Harvey, former Director of Education at the San Diego Zoo and survivor of stage four cancer. Peg shares her incredible journey from a terminal diagnosis to complete healing through holistic methods at the Optimum Health Institute. She discusses the role of mind, body, and spirit in health, the importance of diet changes, and the power of positive emotions and social support. The episode also provides insights into holistic medicine, radical remission, and practical advice for those facing serious health diagnoses.

00:00 Introduction to Open Forum in The Villages
00:56 Meet Peg Harvey: A Journey of Survival
01:58 Peg's Battle with Cancer
04:42 Discovering Holistic Healing
06:34 The Power of Holistic Medicine
08:36 Radical Remission: A Deeper Dive
15:46 Life After Cancer: Peg's New Lifestyle
19:20 Final Thoughts and Farewell
19:59 Support and Upcoming Episodes
21:22 Artificial Intelligence Course Announcement

 Over the next several weeks, while I'm out of town, I've decided to release some reedited and improved versions of the  most popular shows in the series,  as well as some totally new episodes.  I hope you enjoy them.  I'll be back in mid-November with some new episodes

Have you heard about mature adults with Donna Hoover and Mike Roth? Yes. This is my second podcast and Donna and I are going to be addressing subjects which are significant for seniors, especially seniors living here in the villages.

The easiest way to hear the show is to look it up on Apple Podcasts. Look for mature adults with Donna and Mike. We'll be looking for you there. 

You can also find us on mature adults with Donna and Mike. All spelled out. Dot buzz sprout.com

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Transcript

Healing Cancer Holistically with Peg Harvey - Season 7, re-edit

[00:00:05] Nancy: Welcome to Season seven of Open Forum in The Villages of Florida. In this show, we talk to leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live in and around The Villages. We also talk to people who have information vital to seniors. You will get perspectives of what is happening in The Villages, Florida area.

We are a listener supported podcast. There will be shout outs for supporters.

[00:00:36] Mike Roth: This is Mike Roth. Welcome to the Open Forum in The Villages Podcast. In this show, we're going to talk to leaders in the community. Leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in The Villages to give perspective of what's happening here in The Villages and information that I think all villagers should have.

 I'm here today with Peg Harvey. Thanks for joining me Peg.

[00:00:59] Peggy Harvey: Pleasure. 

[00:00:59] Mike Roth: Peg was the director of education at the San Diego Zoo and taught thousands of people about wildlife. And conservation for almost 30 years. In 2010, 

She was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She learned she only had a few months to live, determined to heal. Despite the odds, she discovered a nearby holistic health institute. There peg learned how we can use the power of the mind, body, and spirit to heal. In five months, her cancer went from stage. Four to no more.

She spent the next 10 years as the program director of the Optimum Health Institute, teaching others to live their healthiest and happiest lives. Gratitude for a second chance at life underlies her life motto, buyer, encourage, and power. I really wanna thank you for being with us today. Peggy. 

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: Thank. 

[00:01:46] Mike Roth: Hey. I always thought the show with a little bit of a joke from my grandson, Evan here.

See if you can answer this one. why did the cookie. Go to the hospital. 

[00:01:54] Speaker 2: No, 

[00:01:54] Mike Roth: cause it was feeling a little crummy. I thought that was a good joke for today's show. In your own words, tell us your story, how you went from stage four cancer, which is usually a terminal situation to no more cancer in only 19 weeks.

[00:02:07] Peggy Harvey: Started in 2008 when I was diagnosed with stage two uterine cancer. My Oncologist recommended a radical hysterectomy followed by 35 rounds of pelvic radiation. when I finished the treatments, my oncologist said, just go back to what you were doing. Eat what you were eating and drink what you were drinking About two years later my husband and I had been accepted. For summer jobs with Prince's cruises, working at Copper River Lodge in Alaska. I needed a chest x-ray as part of a pre-employment physical, and in that chest X-ray they discovered the uterine cancer had metastasized.

To both of my lungs. There was a lemon sized tumor in my right lung that was inoperable, a walnut sized tumor at the back of my left lung. An innumerable tiny tumor scattered like a shotgun went off in both lungs. That's when new oncologist said, nine to 18 months to live. Nothing we can do. Nothing you can do.

Get your affairs in order and live joyfully. So I went home and, I'm married to an Irishman and I said, bring me the largest bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey you can find. 

I self-medicated for a week, didn't eat any food, just drank that good old Jameson's. 

on the sixth day I emerged, it was a Sunday, and I said, I'm gonna do two things today.

I'm gonna go to church and out myself to my church community and get some prayers coming in. Then I wanna walk across the street to the farmer's market and get some good food. 'cause I was literally starving. 

[00:03:39] Mike Roth: And you were living in San Diego at this time, living in San 

[00:03:41] Peggy Harvey: Diego at the time. So I went to church.

A lovely friend named Phyllis, held my hand when I used the words terminal cancer for the very first time. Walked across the street to a farmer's market, had large bags of lovely produce, and my husband said we gotta go down this last row of vendors. And then I said, oh no, our car is the other direction and I'm getting a little tired here.

he said no, it's just a short little jaunt down this row of vendors. So we did, we headed that way and we encountered a man selling wheatgrass. Do you know anything about wheatgrass 

[00:04:13] Mike Roth: A little bit? 

[00:04:13] Peggy Harvey: It's one of my uncles 

[00:04:15] Mike Roth: was very in favor of. Eating wheatgrass. 

[00:04:18] Peggy Harvey: Okay, so you actually drink it?

Yeah, you juice it and you drink it. And it's considered to be a health tonic I looked at this vendor and he had these flats about 18 by 18 inches of wheatgrass growing. It looked to me like something you would buy if you had a cat and lived in an apartment. I didn't know anything about this health tonic, and all of a sudden without my saying anything about the cancer, this vendor looked at me and he said, if I had a serious.

Health condition, I'd get myself to the Optimum Health Institute in Lemon Grove. Lemon Grove is a suburb of San Diego, so that struck me as maybe a message from the universe or something. I went home and I did a internet search and found out that. There is indeed a place, 12 miles from my home.

They don't do any marketing or advertising. They don't make any claims about healing cancer, but they teach people how the mind, body, and spirit are connected and help people detoxify at all those levels. 

So since I'd gotten kicked to the curb by my.

Oncologist, I signed up, checked in, did the program, which is, as I said, a mind, body, and spirit program. 

[00:05:25] Mike Roth: So were you a live-in patient there? 

[00:05:26] Peggy Harvey: Yeah. How, 

[00:05:27] Mike Roth: How long were you a patient? 

[00:05:28] Peggy Harvey: I was there for almost six months, but results came very quickly with the radical diet, change, relaxation, meditation, having people pray for you.

Learning more about healthy food, healthy water, healthy habits, getting rid of emotional, mental blocks that might be impeding your healing. And in eight weeks after being on this program, I had a chest x-ray, that large lemon sized tumor had completely dissolved. The walnut sized tumor at the back of my other lung was about a third of its original size.

No, there wasn't any chemo, any radiation, This was all non-medical. 

[00:06:08] Mike Roth: This was after you stopped taking chemo? 

[00:06:10] Peggy Harvey: I didn't ever take chemo. They said that for the metastatic cancer, it wouldn't be effective. 

The doctors had given me nine to 18 months to live and instead I beat the odds 

So 19 weeks it was all gone. 

[00:06:23] Mike Roth: What year was that? 

[00:06:24] Peggy Harvey: That was 2010. So we are in 2023 

[00:06:29] Mike Roth: Years 

[00:06:29] Peggy Harvey: Celebrating my 13 year cancerversary free from cancer 

[00:06:34] Mike Roth: Could you tell us more about what holistic medicine is all about? 

[00:06:38] Peggy Harvey: Holistic. The concept of holism recognizes that we are.

Integrated beings, mind, body, and spirit are connected. conventional medicine deals almost exclusively with the physical body. Holism, on the other hand, recognizes that our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our beliefs, our spiritual connections. Belief in prayer. Lots of studies have been done, in fact, at Oxford and Stanford universities about the power of remote prayer.

they've had test groups and control groups where patients hospitalized, patients who have undergone surgeries are prayed for. Their outcomes are far superior to people who don't receive those prayers. 

When I first checked into the Health Institute, I met with the woman who was the program director at that time, and she wrote on a oversized yellow sticky note, something that I kept in my daily planner And what she wrote was this, what the mind can conceive and believe the body can achieve. And so that I think is the essence of holistic, healing, mind, body, and spirit connected. 

[00:07:52] Mike Roth: Are there any scientific studies that prove holistic medicine is a legitimate path to take for the treatment of cancer?

[00:08:01] Peggy Harvey: We'll be back 

[00:08:02] Mike Roth: Have you heard about mature adults with Donna Hoover and Mike Roth? Yes. This is my second podcast and Donna and I are going to be addressing subjects which are significant. For seniors, especially seniors living here in The Villages. The easiest way to hear the show is to look it up on Apple Podcasts.

Look for mature adults with Donna and Mike You can also find us on mature adults with Donna and Mike all spelled out at Buzzsprout.

[00:08:36] Peggy Harvey: There's a book. published in 2014 called Radical Remission, written by Dr. Kelly Turner. She started out her PhD thesis interviewing oncologist to try to find out the latest and greatest in conventional. Treatments for cancer. One of the questions she asked was have you ever seen a patient diagnosed with advanced cancer who you told had 6, 9, 12 months to live?

But despite your prognosis, that patient went on to heal completely and live a long and normal life. 

Every oncologist that she interviewed said, yeah, we have patients like that. Her follow-up question was have you ever done any case studies to find out why? What did they do differently that changed the outcome?

Each oncologist said, no, we don't really do case studies like that. We have a lot of patients. We are on a schedule seeing them every 15 or 20 minutes. 

We have to read all the package inserts on new drugs. We have to go to continuing education and deal with insurance companies. 

So she Tore up her original thesis, and decided that instead she was going to find a statistically valid sample of patients who had healed holistically. 

She found a thousand such patients. Wow. Who had been told you have a few months to live, and yet they survived. 

She interviewed them to find out what methods and treatments they used, and there was a wide range.

Think about a bell curve. There was a guy who went down to Brazil and he was healed by someone named John of God, a spiritual healer. There was another man who took a bottle of shark cartilage every day. Some of the patients had chemotherapy, some had radiation, some had surgery, some had none of that. But all thousand of these people that she interviewed did have nine things in common.

[00:10:25] Mike Roth: What were the nine things? 

[00:10:26] Peggy Harvey: I'll share a little bit from the book. They radically changed their diet. That was clearly something I did at the Health Institute. It's a raw vegan program. They took control of their health. That was true for me as well. 

[00:10:40] Mike Roth: What does that mean? 

[00:10:41] Peggy Harvey: You don't accept the prognosis.

You accept the diagnosis. I believed the diagnosis that I had stage four cancer, but I wasn't willing to accept the prognosis, nine to 18 months to live. I had an intuition that I could. Change that outcome. 

[00:10:57] Mike Roth: Okay. 

[00:10:57] Peggy Harvey: These thousand people followed their intuition. 

They used herbs and supplements. On the Optimum Health Institute diet, there were a lot of cilantro, parsley, these are detoxifying herbs. Some of the spices like. Curcumin have been known to affect cancer cells in a positive way. 

A lot of studies have been coming out in the past five years about vitamin D, supplementation, people who have high levels of circulating vitamin D in their bloodstream seem to be.

More immune to cancer taking hold. 

[00:11:35] Mike Roth: Did you take vitamin D? 

[00:11:36] Peggy Harvey: Are you still 

[00:11:37] Mike Roth: I do. 

[00:11:37] Peggy Harvey: They released suppressed emotions, so this might be anything from a grudge, anger or feelings of why me? It's not fair. I'm such a good person, and yet I've been diagnosed with cancer. 

They increased positive emotions that might be gratitude, for example.

Being grateful looking around at all. We do have, focusing on that rather than what we've lost. Embracing social support. When I went to the health institute, I had A basket of get well cards from friends and family members. And I would describe the love and the caring and the affection of my friends as a tsunami of love.

Just remarkable how, 

[00:12:21] Mike Roth: and that helped. 

[00:12:21] Peggy Harvey: Oh, absolutely. Deepening spiritual connections. I mentioned before, studies at Stanford and Oxford demonstrate that. The power of prayer, even remote prayer can be an effective healing strategy. finally, having strong reasons for living. At the time of diagnosis for me, I had a 1-year-old granddaughter.

I lived in San Diego. She lived in Portland, Oregon. She's 13 years old now. And as part of my strategic healing master plan, I made a written plan for myself. I decided that I could go no longer. Than intervals of about eight weeks between visits with her. She was at that peak of baby perfection, and when I would play with her or hold her or cuddle her, it was almost as if someone was putting a PICC line in my arm and infusing me.

With oxytocin and all those helpful hormones and chemicals that are good for healing. cuddling babies is one of my all time favorite things. 

[00:13:23] Mike Roth: What are the most effective things that you use to heal? 

[00:13:26] Peggy Harvey: Some of those nine factors from the book, radical Remission.

Radically changing your diet is something that's obtainable for most people 

[00:13:35] Mike Roth: For you, that meant going vegan, 

[00:13:37] Peggy Harvey: Going raw vegan. So the theory behind raw food is brought to the United States by a woman named. Anne Wigmore, who was a pioneer of a raw food movement, her theory is that when you heat food above a temperature of about 105, 115 degrees, you destroy the enzymes in the food, and those enzymes are catalysts that help the nutrition be assimilated.

There's some religious traditions that eat all organic vegan food. Seventh Day Adventist would be an example of those, and they're known as a group to live longer and healthier lives than the general population. 

[00:14:16] Mike Roth: What will you have for dinner? 

[00:14:18] Peggy Harvey: So dinner on the raw food diet might be zucchini noodles raw, and a raw marinara sauce made of herbs and tomatoes.

Maybe a side salad with, loads of vegetables and a few sprinkles of hemp seed for protein, broccoli sprouts. All the sprouts in fact are high in nutrition polyphenols, these phytonutrients that we tend to overlook. 

[00:14:43] Mike Roth: What can listeners do if they're diagnosed with cancer or another health issue?

[00:14:48] Peggy Harvey: I would say use your God-given. gifts of intuition, body wisdom, and common sense. So when a doctor gives a patient a diagnosis and says to the patient, as my doctor, said to me, nine to 18 months to live, nothing you can do and nothing we can do. I would step back and question that, that may be statistically correct.

But you are not a statistic. You're an individual and there are many things you can do immediately to take control of your health. 

[00:15:21] Mike Roth: Where was the doctor that gave you the pit bull doctor? 

[00:15:25] Peggy Harvey: Dr. Pit Bull was the leading oncologist at a large HMO.

It was Kaiser. She was a Kaiser oncologist. 

[00:15:33] Mike Roth: So you didn't go to a place like Sloan Kettering 

[00:15:36] Peggy Harvey: No, I accepted the diagnosis, but I rejected the prognosis. 

[00:15:41] Mike Roth: Good. And in your current remission status for the 13?

Things that you do on a holistic basis that most people or that you didn't do before your cancer diagnosis? 

[00:15:54] Peggy Harvey: Radical change in diet, my husband and I are, primarily plant-based eaters. The term vegan in its truest sense means that you don't wear leather shoes, you don't eat honey because it's a byproduct of bees.

We're not that extreme, but we eat primarily plants. We get most of our protein from beans. Seeds, nuts, healthy fats like avocado. We do occasionally eat wild caught fish. There are some omega threes that are healthy for our bodies found in fish, but for the last 13 years we haven't eaten any red meat chicken or poultry 

[00:16:32] Mike Roth: If our listeners wanna contact you to learn more about holistic healing, how do they do that? 

[00:16:37] Peggy Harvey: About 10 days ago, I resurrected my Facebook account. I had been off Facebook since 2016. They could find me, send me through Messenger on Facebook. 

[00:16:48] Mike Roth: And your name on Facebook is 

[00:16:50] Peggy Harvey: PEG. Harvey, 

[00:16:51] Mike Roth: And so leaving Facebook helped you heal 

[00:16:54] Peggy Harvey: I went on back in 2010, 2011, the health institute that I stayed at is very determined to have people disconnect from media. 

Adult media even cell phone. most of us nowadays, I think our cell phone is like.

Attached to us with a imaginary umbilical cord. 

[00:17:12] Mike Roth: They have a dependency on cell phones. when you were in the institute as an inpatient for six months, did you keep your cell phone? 

[00:17:21] Peggy Harvey: I didn't have a cell phone at that time. I sold my car because I didn't want to be tempted with.

Going off program. 

I only had one, I'll call it a modification, not a cheat from the raw vegan diet. I needed some smaller clothes because I lost a significant amount of weight and my pants were literally falling off my hips. But I walked into Target and the first thing I saw was this enormous display of Lays. Classic potato chips. 

And like an addict, I forgot all about buying smaller pants and I went over and I grabbed a family sized bag of these chips and I ate the whole bag. 

[00:18:02] Mike Roth: That was it. That's right. that was okay because it was a pure vegetable product. 

[00:18:07] Peggy Harvey: My body didn't react too favorably to that, but I think it proves a point.

It's not what we do once in a while. With our health. It's what we do every day. And if you have 95% healthy living practices, eating clean food, drinking clean water, exercising, meditating, getting rid of stress, you can make a modification once in a while.

[00:18:27] Mike Roth AI4: Let's take a short break and listen to an Alzheimer's Tip from Dr. Craig Curtis

[00:18:32] Dr. Craig Curtis: We now know that Alzheimer's disease starts about 20 years before the symptoms with the buildup of a toxic protein called amyloid. And so scientists have been on a quest to remove amyloid to see how it affects the disease. The medicine that was recently FDA approved to slow down symptoms in people with Alzheimer's disease memory problems.

Works by removing this substance called amyloid out of the brain. And now we're attempting to use those medicines to actually remove amyloid before someone develops symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, such as memory loss and forgetfulness. So that's in that 20 year period before the disease is obvious.

That's right. Scientists now call it Alzheimer's Pathologic change versus Alzheimer's disease. We're saving the term Alzheimer's disease for when someone is actually experiencing symptoms due to Alzheimer's 

[00:19:32] Warren: disease. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life.

To learn more, visit his website, craig curtis md.com, or call 3 5 2 5 0 0 5 2 5 2 to attend a free seminar.

[00:19:50] Mike Roth: Peg, Let me ask you this one last question.

What made you move to The Villages being a West Coaster? 

[00:19:55] Peggy Harvey: We lived in San Diego for 45 years and for. 40 of those years, it was a paradise. But in the last five years or so, things have changed. It butts right up against Tijuana, Mexico. You've probably been reading about the border crises. 

Because of San Diego's, ideal climate, It's a magnet for a lot of homeless people. Very little law enforcement. So we lived in a pretty nice neighborhood and one of the turning points was about five 30 in the morning. A woman knocked on our door.

She was obviously on drugs, wearing a wet white T-shirt and no underwear. 

And we said maybe this is a sign that's time to move to a little bit safer, cleaner, more reasonable place like The Villages. 

[00:20:43] Mike Roth: Thanks for joining us peg. Is there anything you want to tell our listeners before we go?

[00:20:47] Peggy Harvey: Just use that intuition if you're ever given a serious health diagnosis, and take a breath to do some due diligence about what all of your options are. 

[00:20:59] Mike Roth: Thanks again, peg and listeners, you might wanna read that book that Peg has with a Radical Remission. Who was the author again?

[00:21:05] Peggy Harvey: Dr. Kelly Turner. 

[00:21:07] Mike Roth: Say the name again. 

[00:21:08] Peggy Harvey: Dr. Kelly Turner. has a website called the radical remission project.com, in which you'll find inspiring stories about people who have healed from cancer naturally. 

[00:21:21] Mike Roth: Great. Thanks again. 

 How can you support our podcast? This podcast brings you knowledge, inspiration, and a lot of things that people need to know about The Villages and the people that are living here and what's actually going on.

Creating this podcast is a labor of love, even though it demands more time than I can easily spare, Here's where you come in, the unsung heroes and heroines. You can help us keep the podcast alive and thriving. How by becoming a supporter is a small monthly donation.

Visit our podcast website, open forum in The Villages florida.com and click on the supporter box. Even a small three to $10 a month donation makes a difference. And guess what? You can cancel anytime, no strings attached, and your support means the world to us. Stay curious, stay inspired .

[00:22:11] Nancy: Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9:00 AM.

Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike@rothvoice.com. This is a shout out for supporters TWE Coleman, ed Williams, and major supporter Dr. Craig Curtis at K 2 in The Villages. We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week.

If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike@rothvoice.com. We thank everyone for listening The content of the show is copyrighted by Roth Voice 2024, all rights reserved.

[00:22:45] Jack: Are you ready to dive into the world of artificial intelligence? Join us at the Village's Enrichment Academy for artificial intelligence for beginners. This is a hands-on course. Over two weeks, you'll explore what AI is. How it's created and get your hands on five to eight exciting AI products using your laptop, tablet, or phone.

Limited to 25 students per class. Classes are scheduled for April 10th and 17th and September 11th and 18th. The cost is just $60 for village residents. And 66 for non-residents. Plus a $15 cash supplies fee paid to the instructor on the first day. Unlock the power of ai. Sign up today@theenrichmentacademy.org.