Episode 12 - Envision The Future Of Natural Health In Cancer Care with Dr. Rob Verkerk, BSc, MSc, DIC, PhD, FACN

1:05 – Honoring Dr. Verkerk’s Contributions
3:03 – The Fight for Natural Health Freedom
6:03 – European Commission’s Directive on Vitamins and Minerals
11:00 –  Censorship and Free Speech in Natural Health
14:53 – Recap of The 2023 Beljanski Integrative Cancer Conference in Jacksonville, Florida
15:39 – The Role of Alliance for Natural Health (ANH)
16:35 – Follow the science
18:18 – The Corporatization of Science
21:02 – Integrative Cancer Care
26:23 – Call to Action: Supporting Natural Health and Integrative Medicine
29:00 – The importance of supporting organizations like Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) in the fight for natural health freedom

Introduction and Welcome

Sylvie Beljanski: Dr. Verkerk, hello and lovely having you today. I want first to thank you and I would like to tell you how much, how happy I am to have you on this podcast because I, for the past 20 years, I have looked up to every, to you and to everything that you are, have been doing.

Honoring Dr. Vervek’s Contributions

Sylvie Beljanski: I was extremely honored that you agreed to come to Florida a few months ago to receive an award from The Beljanski Foundation. I cannot tell you how I feel that your work is important. And I am delighted that our audience is going to have the opportunity to hear from you about the fight that you have been conducted, conducting over the past 20 years.

As a, because I’m French, maybe I have heard before most Americans about ANH and the importance of what you have been doing and taking, fighting the European Commission, but American people have no, no idea. So, I would like you to tell, to tell us what you have been doing since 2022, I believe, and why you jumped into this fight of a lifetime.

Dr. Rob Verkerk: Sylvie the honor, by the way coming to Florida and receiving the award from The Beljanski Foundation was entirely ours. We were very honored. It’s an extraordinary privilege. I have the deepest respect for what you’ve done, what your father did.

And, obviously, quintessentially right in all of that is the battle we face at so many levels.

The Fight for Natural Health Freedom

Dr. Rob Verkerk: That when you have products, particularly products that cannot easily be patented, that come from nature, that compete with pharmaceutical drugs, you’re in for a fight. And one of the things that Europeans really understand is that every freedom that we enjoy, whether it’s the freedom to choose the kind of medications or healthcare regime that you want, or the freedom to even speak openly, every one of these freedoms has been the result of a fight and I think we now face a really interesting predicament where there are large portions of Western populations that have never experienced a war, never experienced occupation.

And I just did an interview last week with the Health Freedom Alliance in Greece. And it was interesting, the orthopedic surgeon and the other co-founder of the group, both of their parents lived through the occupation in Greece. And one of the reasons that they recognize that that freedom need to be fought for.

And as we were discussing, I said, “Look, my, my parents, both Dutch by origin, my father, went through the occupation of the Netherlands during the war and lost, we lost a lot of family in the resistance. My mother, although Dutch by origin, grew up in Greece. Similarly, all, both families were deeply involved in the resistance movement.”

I think from my point of view I’ve got it in the genes. I’ve got it in the epigenes, epigenetically, I’ve grown up with a deep understanding that these freedoms don’t get given to us lightly and we need to fight for them. Yes, I left my academic career at Imperial College London back in 2002 because I was convinced that we knew enough about nature and the critical importance of our connection to nature, which includes the products that we take, the medications that we use, to understand that, that we don’t just need to do new research all the time.

We need to defend our right to be able to use products of nature, and it was when I was presented, while I was still in my laboratory at Imperial College, I was presented with a list of all the only allowed vitamins and minerals that were to be permitted in the food supplements directive. And I looked at them, I said these straight outta a, yeah.

Sylvie Beljanski: So in 2000, in 2002, there was this European directive that came out and limited to a positive list, the number of vitamins and minerals that people are allowed to take, right?

Dr. Rob Verkerk: And that was a list of synthetic vitamins and minerals that exist on the Merck and Sigma-Aldrich catalogs that were used in infant formulae.

They were not the products that you find in fruits and vegetables and animal foods. And that’s really where…

Sylvie Beljanski: The plan of the European Commission was to ban every natural mineral and vitamins, right?

Dr. Rob Verkerk: The plan of the European Commission was to use a Napoleonic law system to say, if you cannot prove that your substance is safe, it will be banned.

And I now head up ANH in USA as well, ANH USA. And what we’re seeing is that this principle of pre-market authorization drifting from Europe across the Atlantic into the USA and that’s what we need to stop happening. So, it’s basically the premise that says Napoleonic law basically says you are guilty until proven innocent whereas in Westminster law, if you like, the law that was the English law that was, preceded it, really, it basically said you are innocent until proven guilty.

And if you look at the graph there.

Sylvie Beljanski: As a French lawyer, as a French lawyer by trade, I would not say that, says that the French law, Napoleonic law is guilty until proven innocence. It’s not framed that way, but indeed you are right. It comes down to that very often, unfortunately, yeah.

Dr. Rob Verkerk: It does, and the danger when it comes to natural products is that you’re faced with having to put together, one of the first tasks we did back in 2002 was to say, “Okay, if we’re going to take one natural source of vitamins, let’s see what it would cost to produce the dossier, the data requirements that were being asked of the European Commission.”

And I still remember the figure. It was around 80, 800,000 Euros for one ingredient. And one of the U. S. companies was saying, “Hold on, we’ve got something like 60 natural sources of vitamins and minerals.” What, is that 800,000 times 60? And of course they said, on that basis, can we do anything about it?

And it was, that’s when we decided to lobby like hell. And then, when we created even a 2000 percent shift in the voting, didn’t actually stop the directive, we, we then took a legal action and it was in 2007, we got confirmation. It was a complex ruling as you know, Sylvie, it was a complex ruling.

The courts had the opportunity to invalidate the directive. And even though that was the target, we were hoping that we’d go for a compromise because it’s better to have a directive that at least recognizes food supplements as a subcategory of food, rather than turning them all into drugs.

So, that was the long road. And we’re now deep, in the fight on all sorts of issues from the, the use of biotechnology and healthcare, the restriction of freedom of speech around natural health, the collusion and coercion by government, particularly the Biden administration, if you look at the the Murphy versus Missouri case that’s currently being heard in the Supreme Court in the US, the oral hearings occurred on the 18th of March, but it’s staggering the evidence that has been accrued by two of the key originators of the Great Barrington Declaration to see the extent to which pulpit bullying by the Biden administration was forcing the big social companies like Facebook and Google to say, eliminate any information that suggests that any natural product might be useful in for cases of CoViD-19.

We’re now, obviously, in a post pandemic era, but that kind of restriction of freedom of speech has not gone away at all, and that’s why we’ve launched recently a big petition on free speech.

Sylvie Beljanski: It is certain that with the pandemics has been an increase of the censorship, but the limitation of what can be said about dietary supplements is, has always been extremely, the free speech has always been limited.

Those dietary supplements are not supposed to treat, prevent, diagnose anything. So, even when you know that something is doing, compound is doing something, even when you have the mechanism of action, even when you have some studies, you just cannot advertise that because that would transform the dietary supplement into an approved drug.

And as a result of its proven efficacy, it would be taken out of the market and many people do not understand and that’s the situation not only in Europe, but also here, also in the States.

Dr. Rob Verkerk: Yes. The difference in the post-pandemic environment is that if you were to say, right, taking high dose vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc and quercetin are beneficial for natural immunity.

If you do that, while there is a pandemic, that’s, we effectively got three strikes. One was because of vitamin C. One was because of vitamin D. We were not making direct medicinal claims about CoViD. We were not selling any products. We were providing information through an NGO on all of the available science.

Our third strike that caused us to lose to have, to be de platformed was actually attending a demonstration in London on the extent of lockdowns and everything else. And, in one of the pictures that we had photographed, I think I photographed it, there happened to be one person with a banner with the word Ivermectin on it.

And that, that, that was the fact that there was an image with the word Ivermectin on it. And it’s interestingly, the FDA have had to row back on what they were saying about Ivermectin and agree that they went too far. So, again public pressure is required to allow free speech. I think everyone realizes you cannot because of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in the US because of medicinal law in Europe, you cannot make a direct claim for a product, but surely we should be able to speak openly about the science that supports the use of products for all kinds of conditions on the basis that we’re not advertising a product specifically.

Sylvie Beljanski: Absolutely. And even that, I mean, is, not always a given. Even though, indeed, it’s not pushing any specific product. As you mentioned, the FDA has been, timidly made some steps back with regard to either maintain. As of now, as of today, in our post-pandemic world, what do you think are the biggest challenges that we are facing and what is ANH doing to, to fight them and why should people support the ANH?

Dr. Rob Verkerk: You know, the struggle continues on a whole range of levels. Interestingly if you look at the prescriber, the doctor, the health practitioner, in essence, what is typically allowed in most jurisdictions is a system that allows a certain amount of control by the doctor to make specific decisions based on the unique doctor-practitioner-patient relationship and that relationship in which, which is the, ideal environment under which informed consent is made is now threatened and it’s mainly threatened because the medical boards have jumped so heavily into a given narrative that they are told is about following the science. If you go to Google Scholar or any peer review search environment and put in, follow the science, you’ll see there’s a whole discussion around the use of this term following the science and most of it points to the fact that actually the science that’s being followed isn’t really science.

Science is a very open process in which a hypothesis is proposed. It is then evaluated through various forms of experimentation or observation when the results are available, they are published.

They are, then go through a peer review process. They then are published in such a way that the methodology can be copied by others so that they can also test it over the passage of time. The stuff that kind of lasts, that sticks, is this, ends up being this thing that we refer to as scientific truth or objective science or objective truth.

Now that whole process of the scientific method is gravely under threat, is gravely under threat because almost every part of it is being challenged. The availability to be able to do open science. When governments used to fund what we used to call blue sky research, areas of interest that were for the public good or the environmental good.

That’s pretty much game over now. What we’re seeing is the corporatization of science. There is a massive amount of money going, for example, into biotechnology. And there’s incredibly small amounts of research money going into the natural sciences. To the point, incidentally, that I’ve been in discussion with some of my colleagues from Imperial College recently, and they said, “Rob, we’re really concerned about the fact that courses on the natural sciences, degree courses are almost all being closed down. There isn’t sufficient funding anymore.”

So, we’ve got this massive bias towards biotechnology, which immediately skews our ability to look objectively at the world around us. We then look at what’s happened through the publication of science. I mean, important papers are being retracted, are not being published simply because they don’t comply with a given narrative, which is about a very specific view around specific issues.

Then, if we look at what’s happening in terms of discourse. Discourse is one of the most important principles in science that we are able to openly discuss, you know, conflicting science, contradictory science. I remember at Imperial College back in, in the day in the 1990s, we used to, once a month, sit with our research postdoc colleagues. And, a few of us would have to speak on a given day to a whole auditorium of, you know, of postdocs and professors whose job it was to tear us apart.

And that was an amazing environment because what it did is refine the quality of the science so that when we went to put our ideas together and publish them, we had already been through a pretty tough kind of peer review internal peer review process before we went to external review.

That whole process has been diminished massively in the last few years. I’m astounded to see the quality of science that’s being published in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, even the BMJ, but many of the major medical journals, the quality of that science is now in dispute. Many of us would feel that way.

Sylvie Beljanski: Yeah, the fact that people are not able to listen to each other and to discuss and hear some kind of opposition is not limited to the science, unfortunately, it looks like a global trend, but specifically in about the science and more, even more specifically to the cancer care, what are the interesting developments you would like to share and speak about that you think are not spoken enough and do not receive enough attention because of this general censorship?

Integrative Cancer Care

Dr. Rob Verkerk: Yeah, look, I’ve been, as the Scientific Advisor to a UK integrative oncology charity, Yes to Life, for 15 years now. So, we’ve been in the front lines of seeing what, for example, in the UK context, what the National Health Service will deliver. And it’s not to say that all of the cancer services are worthless, far from that.

But it’s the closed-mindedness to the principles that are actually enshrined in even the, in the National Health Service constitution, which is about what patients determine all their own needs and, their own wants, if you like, as cancer patients, and I think as we continue to unravel the complexity of this disease that we give a single name, but it’s actually a complex of different diseases that manifests in terms of this, these malignancies in particular.

We are increasingly recognizing, as with most complex diseases, they require complex solutions. The difficulty is that we are, that the public understands very much the need to move away from a kind of magic bullet approach, some kind of chemotherapeutic agent that will be all that you need to, eliminate that cancer permanently and put you back into good health.

They realize that there is a complex condition that has inflammation at its heart that involves dysregulation that goes beyond just the dominant somatic mutation theory. This, the somatic mutation theory has taken such an important place in terms of the prioritization of research.

And like we see with a bundle of other diseases, whether you look at heart disease, cardiovascular diseases, or you look at Alzheimer’s disease yes, there may be some genetic linkages, but to argue that, every woman that is BRCA positive is destined to have breast cancer, I think is well understood to not be the case and epigenetics, our ability to manipulate the micro environment and macro environment in ways that change gene expression, yhat’s where it’s all at.

So, the public is desperate to see these integrative solutions where a whole array of different measures are provided. They also are delivered into something that could possibly be to be described as the wild west because, there is a lot of inconsistency in terms of what different organizations and groups and NGOs are offering, or even different doctors are offering. And I think that’s something that is a problem in terms of trying to deal with the epidemic of cancer.

And then, of course, on top of that, we have new problems all the time because of the increasing sort of authoritarian nature of big healthcare. One of the most recent problems that we’re all dealing with is the fact that there appears to be an association between CoViD 19 genetic vaccines and the acceleration or the promotion of cancers that are sometimes referred to as turbo cancers.

It is the complete denial of this by the authorities that massively complicates things for patients. You know, we’re encountering families all the time who are, have their oncologist tell them they’ve never seen anything like this in their lives. And when they say, well, we think maybe the vaccines are associated immediately, they are shut down and then to some degree, they are marginalized.

These are the kind of complex problems that we need to solve, but we have a long way to go to making integrative cancer care, the standard of care. And that’s, I think, the direction we need to go in.

Call to Action and Conclusion

Victor Dwyer: You did a great job explaining like why and what needs to be changed. For the audience, for the individual person, what can they do to help make that change?
You talked about having that battle, to fight for the good of the public. What can the individual person do to help contribute to this integrative medicine approach and help with that battle?

Dr. Rob Verkerk: I think one of the, one of the big issues we face is a change in the locus of trust. We’ve historically, actually, for thousands of years, the public has been able to put their trust in the family physician. This is something that Hippocrates talks about a lot. And, and in fact, if you follow this trend through to even 25 years ago, that was still the case for most people.

And then the family physician would then recommend, a specific consultant, a specialist in oncology that was known to that person. Now, that system is breaking down. And part of that is because the level of trust that there is for governments and for health authorities is not there and, why, because there have been a succession of errors.

We can look in terms of the areas in public health. We can look at the issue of, for example, low fat has created the obesity crisis and the metabolic disease crisis. The metabolic disease crisis is also at the heart of the cancer crisis, and the heart disease crisis. It’s all inter, interrelated.

The public is desperately keen to find new authority. It, cancer is so complex that the individual, if you like, operating as a lone ranger, does not stand a great chance in the face of such a complex disease. And, to be frank, this is one of the reasons we are such supporters of organizations like The Beljanski Foundation because, within your foundation, the same applies to Yes2Life, there is a collection of specialists who’ve come together, who share the same values around this idea of moving towards an integrative path.

Sylvie Beljanski: Okay, so it looks like we have lost Dr. Verkerk but I would like to say that ANH is an non-for-profit organization, which is available in the UK but also in here in the US.

They are based in in Washington. They have been doing a great job at lobbying for continuation and preservation of our rights. The rights that we have to choose our treatments to choose our, to speak freely to have access to information. Of course, there is still a lot to be done.

Maybe more and more every day as we see an erosion of our rights, which is similar in Europe and here in the States. However, some organizations like ANH are at the forefront of fighting and for those freedoms, and they have been doing always on the right side of history for the past 20 years.

And as that means a lot to to me and I do believe towards the people who are listening to this podcast. If you are looking for a charity to support, ANH would be one of those I would heartfully endorse.

Victor Dwyer: That’s all we have time for today. This is The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show, and we’ll catch you guys next time. Thanks guys.

Dr. Rob Verkerk PhD is a multi-disciplinary scientist, researcher, educator, regulatory expert and campaigner with nearly 40 years of experience in the non-profit sector, academia and as a consultant. He has a MSc and PhD from Imperial College London in the field of sustainable agriculture where he continued as a postdoctoral research fellow for a further 7 years, working on projects in Eastern and Southern Africa, as well as Central and South-East Asia.

In 2002, Dr. Verkerk founded the non-profit Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) International (anhinternational.org) and has acted as its executive and scientific director since. ANH has been at the forefront of protecting and promoting natural and regenerative health approaches internationally. As of April 2023, after being ANH-USA’s scientific director for 15 years, Dr Verkerk also took on the role as the organisation’s executive and scientific director.

Dr. Verkerk has authored more than 60 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings, is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition, and is scientific advisor to the UK-based integrative cancer charity, Yes to Life.