How To Be WellnStrong

69: The Truth About Mammograms | Dr. Jenn Simmons, MD

• Jacqueline Genova • Episode 69

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Breast cancer is never a blessing, but it can be a blessing if you seize the opportunity to take back control of your health. I’m very excited to welcome Dr. Jenn Simmons, MD, an integrative oncologist, breast surgeon, author, podcast host, and the founder of perfeQTion imaging, to the show today.  Dr. Simmons began her career as Philadelphia’s first fellowship-trained breast surgeon and spent 17 years as Philadelphia’s top breast surgeon. Her own illness led her to discover functional medicine. Captivated by the concept of promoting her own good health rather than suppressing symptoms, Dr. Simmons rejected traditional medicine treatment methods in 2019 and founded Real Health MD to support all women on their breast cancer journey. In this episode, Dr. Jenn and I discuss the flaws with breast cancer screening methods like mammography, the future of breast cancer imaging, and the benefits of considering a holistic approach when it comes to battling cancer.

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*Unedited Transcript*
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Jacqueline: [00:00:00] First of all, Dr Simmons, thank you so much for reaching out. I was very excited to, to kind of dive into the work that you were doing. And I think it's very much needed. And I'm really excited for our conversation. I had a bit of a hard time because I was like, there's so much I want to talk to her about.

But, I'd love to start by asking how you found yourself in this space. And you have a pretty incredible journey from what I briefly read from traditional medicine to functional health. I understand a significant part of your journey, um, you know, played a role in that as well.

So I'd love for you to share a bit more about that.

Dr. Simmons: I definitely didn't find it. It definitely found me. Um, I was born into a breast cancer family and I, I really truly do not remember a time in my life where I didn't know about breast cancer. It has without question been a part of the fabric, the tapestry of my life. my [00:01:00] entire life. So when I was little, I had a first cousin.

Her name was Linda Creed. She was a singer songwriter in the 1970s, 1980s. I'm totally dating myself and you're not going to know anything about this era because bless your heart, you're very young. But, but she wrote 54 hits. So she wrote all the music for the spinners and the stylistics. She wrote, um, her most famous.

Song was the greatest love of all. So she wrote that in 1977 as the title track to the movie, the greatest starring Muhammad Ali. I'm sure you've heard of

him, but it really received its acclaim when Whitney Houston released that song to the world in March of 1986. And at that time it would spend 14 weeks at the top of the charts.

Only my cousin Linda would never know because she died of metastatic breast [00:02:00] cancer one month after Whitney released that song. I was 16 years old and my hero died. Her life and ultimately her death gave birth to my life's purpose. And I did the only thing I know how to do. I never wanted another woman, another family, another community to have to suffer the way that mine suffered.

And so I became a doctor. I became the first doctor in my family. I became a surgeon. I became the first fellowship trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia. The first, um, sorry, uh, oncoplastic surgeon in Pennsylvania. And I did that really well and for a really long time and I was about 15 years into my career and I was arguably at the [00:03:00] top of my career and thinking that I'm invincible, burning my proverbial candle at both ends.

I am running my own business. Surgery practice. I'm running the cancer program for the hospital. I'm a wife and a mother and a philanthropist and an athlete and, and, and, and, and, and I literally go from being probably one of the most high performing people you've ever met to, I can't walk across the room because I don't have the breath in my body.

And I go under this intensive workup. And three days later, I find myself sitting in the office of my friend and colleague and physician. And he tells me that I need surgery and chemo radiation, and I'm going to be on lifelong medication. And despite the fact [00:04:00] that these are things that I said all day, every day, To other people when those words are coming to you.

It has an entirely different meaning and It's not that I didn't believe what he was saying or that I Thought that you know, he was not giving me the correct advice I knew that what he was telling me that I needed was The gold standard was the standard of care and despite the fact that I myself am running a cancer program And that I'm telling people to do this all day, every day, something inside of me, a voice, you can call it God, you can call it universe, you can call it whatever you want to call it.

Something was telling me there's more, go find it. And I left that office that day. I declined treatment. [00:05:00] My doctor told me I would die. And despite how, well, I was really numb at that time. I couldn't feel, I couldn't process, I couldn't anything. I All that I could do was hear that voice inside of me saying, there's something more, go find it.

So I was very fortunate very early on in my process to be sitting in a lecture hall and this man walks on stage and he introduced himself as a functional medicine physician. 20 years. I'm still completely cynical because, you know, I have no idea what it is that I'm looking for. I'm just like, you know, throwing a bunch of things out there hoping that something comes back to me.

And all that I'm saying in my head is like, there's no such thing as functional medicine. What is this quack talking [00:06:00] about? And then I remember that I'm sick and I'm there for a reason. So I checked my ego at the door. And I tune in and thank God we did, because as it turns out, the quack is Dr. Mark Hyman. And what he was going to talk about over the next three hours would not only be the cornerstone to how I was going to recover my health, but he was also telescoping how I was going to The rest of my life helping others, because what I learned in that space and time is that We think about physicians as people who heal, but actually that's not what physicians are doing.

Physicians are managing symptoms and nowhere is that more obvious than in the cancer [00:07:00] world. So in the cancer world, All we're focused on is the tumor, but the tumor is not the problem. The tumor is never the problem. The problem, the tumor is the symptom of the problem, right? And so the problem is 10 steps behind that.

The problem is what that made that tumor appear in the first place. The problem is the environment. The problem is that environmental shift. Because cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. And when you have that environmental shift, those cells, those breast cells, they go into survival mode.

All they're thinking is, I need to survive this toxic place. And so they go into survival mode, reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. So, if you can create that toxic [00:08:00] environment, so too can you create a healing environment. And that is what I learned in that day. That is what I learned in that space and time.

That what I needed to do for me is to reverse that environment that was promoting disease. And what I needed to do for my future was To help people who wanted to recover their health and there are a lot of people that don't right There are a lot of people that are saying just give me the pill. Just give me the procedure like I don't want I I don't want to take responsibility and that's okay, right?

Like they're not gonna live as long and they're not gonna live as well, but that's everyone's choice Right my body my choice I knew that I wanted to work with people who wanted to partner with me [00:09:00] on building their health. So I immediately enrolled in the Institute for Functional Medicine.

Jacqueline: It's a great program.

Dr. Simmons: I spent the next three years just immersed in the study of functional medicine.

It was three years of a lot of trial and error trying to heal myself. It was not easy. My healing journey was not linear. It definitely got a lot worse before it got better. And I think, you know, I use myself as a cautionary tale in that. It didn't matter how much I knew, because I knew a lot about medicine and I knew a lot about physiology and biology.

But I didn't, I never learned how to heal 

in medicine. Never, never. So it took me a while for me to recover my health. [00:10:00] But once I finished my training and once I got to be back to me, I knew that that was a bell that I could never unring. And I knew if I stayed as a surgeon and continued in that system, that very, very broken system, I knew that I was not changing the trajectory of the rest of these people's lives.

And so I decided to leave surgery in 2019. I founded Real Health MD, which is a functional medicine oasis for women with breast cancer who want to recover their health and have the best health of their lives after their breast cancer diagnosis. And it has just grown from there. And it's been an amazing, amazing, amazing journey.

God has blessed me with incredible privilege from being a surgeon [00:11:00] and having people put their inarguable trust in you in that these people go to sleep and literally put their lives in your hands. So my surgical, my surgical career. It was such an honor, such a privilege, so amazing. And it also gave me a tremendous education and perspective that no one else has in the cancer space.

So though I no longer operate, I am one of maybe two or three people in the world. that have my kind of experience from the conventional medical, I'm sorry, it's my

dog 

Jacqueline: worries.

Dr. Simmons: making a lot of noise, from the conventional medical world to the world of integrative medicine. And that perspective has allowed me to help [00:12:00] a lot of people to recover their health.

Because I speak both languages, because I see things in a way that other people don't. 

Jacqueline: I'm 

sure. 

Dr. Simmons: and so it's, it's been amazing. It's really been amazing.

Jacqueline: That's wonderful. What a journey. And I am curious too, Dr. Simmons, what were some of those interventions that you yourself used through your healing process?

Dr. Simmons: Yeah, so I want to be clear that, you know, everyone's why is different.

So, my why and everyone's why is multifactorial, right? It's not one thing. We all have kind of, an ability to tolerate a toxic load. And we all have a finite amount of resources in which to deal with toxins. So when you, when you fill a water, a bucket up with water, you'll notice that like, it can get [00:13:00] really, really full.

and you would think that it would overflow, but it's not overflowing yet. And then you put one drop in and the whole thing pours out, right? It's not like you put one drop in and one drop comes out. Once you put that one drop in, that is, that is overwhelming the bucket, everything just pours out all over the place.

So for me, I had years and years and years of low level inflammation because I did not know. That I had severe gluten intolerance, severe, and like I thought if you ate pizza and you had brain fog the next day, it was because you like had too much salt or something. And I just didn't, I just didn't put it together. And, you know, also [00:14:00] when I was going through medical school, we didn't even talk about this. It wasn't even part of the conversation.

Jacqueline: I've heard most medical students today receive like two weeks of nutrition education if that.

Dr. Simmons: Well, we only had, wait, did we have two? No, we had one. We had three hours a day for five days in the first year of medical school and then never again, never again. And I went to a, an excellent medical school. So there is so little. information given about how to be healthy, about how to heal. Medical school education is a recognition of symptoms, putting them in a neat little package, if this and that, right, giving them a diagnosis.

And then prescribing a pill, a [00:15:00] procedure, something along those lines, but it's all geared at symptom management. So it's not, it's not like people are having a heart attack and we're saying what's causing the cardiovascular disease. People are having a heart attack and they're getting a stent or they're getting a, um, a bypass.

And then they're like, Left to the same devices that they were on before or they're put on a statin even though Cholesterol isn't the problem and we know that you have to treat like 73 people or 82 people I forget what that exact number is in order for one person to benefit from going on a statin and yet we do it

Right.

So the whole system is just it's so inappropriately designed and And nowhere are you rewarded for making people healthy, right? And if you make [00:16:00] people healthy, actually causes a lot of problems in the system because the only way that doctors get paid is if you're sick. The only way that hospitals get paid is if you're sick.

And so there's no incentive to the doctors learning how to make people healthy because why would they want to do that?

Right? And I don't want to pick on doctors. Right? Right. I want to be very clear that I think everyone goes to medical school with the same intention. They are altruistic. They truly want to help.

But the problem is the system is broken. So really good doctors are people that memorize all the stuff really well, right? They're able to remember all of those things, they're able to make a diagnosis, they prescribe what is supposed to be prescribed. That's a really good doctor. And someone like me is considered a quack or annoying or, you know, what, [00:17:00] whatever people called me for when they called me when I left.

surgery. You know, I kind of went from being the smartest person in the room to like the craziest person in the room. And you know, it is what it is,

Jacqueline: Yeah,

Dr. Simmons: but I think the doctors are inherently good. I think the system is inherently broken.

Jacqueline: yeah, 100%. I mean, quite honestly, I think it's because pharma has infiltrated medical schools to the point where, like, it's ingrained in

the 

Dr. Simmons: in charge of the curriculum, 

right? So my, um, my attending when I was in a surgical residency used to say to me, is my middle name. And he used to say to me, You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit, right? Like if you're starting with something that's not good, you're not going to make something great out of it.

It's just not going to happen. So, you know, we start [00:18:00] off with this educational system, which is so broken and designed to teach you like every single pharmaceutical there is and find the diseases that match up with it. And T, you know, from a surgical perspective, we're taught all of these surgical techniques and go find the diseases that match up with it.

And nowhere are we taught how to eat. how to move, how to sleep, how to think, how to avoid toxins, how to detoxify. Like it's just not part of our education. And that's because if you're well, you don't need the system. And the system also wants to survive.

Jacqueline: Right. 

Dr. Simmons: Now, I'm not saying that all of medicine is bad. I want to be very careful.

I'm not throwing the baby out of the bath water. If you break a hip, if you have an appendicitis, if you have some acute [00:19:00] thing, our system is fantastic, but our system is very, very bad for chronic disease. It's very bad for asthma and hypertension and, um, And, uh, depression, anxiety, cancer, autoimmune disease, arthropathy, it's like, it's very bad for those disease states because you can't treat a chronic disease like it's an acute syndrome.

It's not. It's just not.

Jacqueline: Yeah, no, couldn't agree more. I dedicated, um, a whole chapter. So I don't know how much you've been able to read on my background, Dr. Simmons, but, um, graduated from a business college called Babson right outside Boston, concentrated in economics and finance. My mom was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in 2008.

So I was 13 or so years old. That really ignited a passion of mine to again, see what else was out there. And that was kind of when I was [00:20:00] first exposed to the whole concept of integrative medicine. So that interest persisted. And then in college, I was part of an honors program where we could essentially write a thesis on any topic under the sun.

And obviously, I was really passionate about integrative medicine. So I wrote a thesis on incorporating a more integrative approach, um, when it came to addressing cancer in this country. And I had a whole chapter just dedicated to the amount of spending, um, with pharmaceutical drugs and cancer and the corruption behind it.

And again, I knew a little bit at that point, but after writing that, um, that really also lit a fire in myself too. And then about a year later in 2018, um, we found out my mom's cancer returned. Um, so she's been dealing with stage four since 2018.

Dr. Simmons: Oh,

Jacqueline: But, um, I mean, again, over the past six or so years, you know, she's the reason why I started Well and Strong in the sense of I've been able to share a lot of the research that I was doing for her when it came to complementary therapies.

so we've been incorporating Just [00:21:00] that and integrative approach, right? And her care regimen. So there's certainly a lot out there, but everything you said definitely resonates with me. Um, but I am very excited to talk with you, particularly about this new screening technology that you are behind now.

Am I pronouncing it correctly? Is it called perfection? And

Dr. Simmons: hmm. Yep. Um, but perfection has a cutie in the middle. So I should first start off by saying that our screening program is very broken. Our screening program, which started off in the 1970s, It's built on mammogram, right? That is almost the entirety with the, with a very small exception of people who are considered high risk and qualified as screen with MRI.

And I could argue, I don't know which one's worse. It's like a [00:22:00] race to the bottom between mammogram and MRI. 

Jacqueline: really? yeah,

Dr. Simmons: absolutely. I'll talk to you about that. So first we'll talk about mammogram.

Jacqueline: hmm. Mm

Dr. Simmons: The mammographic screening program was built on this foundational belief that breast cancer growth was both linear and predictable.

So what that means is that breast cancer starts very small. grows to some critical size, at which point it is more likely to metastasize. So you could find it before it reached the critical size. You could save lives, save breasts, and have women undergo less treatment. And it's a lovely, lovely theory, just doesn't happen to be true. Breast cancer is what it is from the very beginning. And the key to breast cancer is biology. So the small [00:23:00] tumor, the big tumor, it doesn't mean anything. If it has aggressive biology, it almost doesn't matter what you do. Those people are going to have a tough time of it. And if it doesn't have aggressive biology, same thing.

Almost doesn't matter what you do. These ladies are going to be fine. And then there's things in the middle. But screening with mammogram doesn't change any of that. It doesn't affect any of that. So what happened when we started to screen with mammogram? So what Well, we didn't save lives. No matter how many mammograms we do every year, the same exact number of women die of breast cancer. No matter how many mammograms we do every year, the same exact number of women present with aggressive disease. [00:24:00] So this means that mammogram is not impacting survival. from breast cancer.

Jacqueline: I was just going to say, I wanted to call out too, I mean, the Canadian National Breast Screening Study was done for folks who are like, where's the research behind that statement? I mean, I'm sure there's been some done in this country, but that particular study showed that women, it was between 40 to 59, right?

That 

Dr. Simmons: women, right? This is the population that everyone's most concerned about, right? Like how do we prevent young women from dying from breast cancer and mammogram isn't it? So as you mentioned, the Canadian breast cancer screening study, 90, 000 women, 45, 000 undergo screening mammogram and are getting a yearly breast exam.

45, 000 women are left to their own devices. The exact same number of women die of breast cancer in each group. Here's the difference. In the group that screens, we're [00:25:00] finding 20 to 30 percent more breast cancers, which means that these women are getting treated for breast cancer. Now if treatment for breast cancer were benign, it would be one thing, but treatment for breast cancer changes everything.

Treatment for breast cancer takes into question you being a woman. Your sexuality, you undergo deforming surgery. Maybe it's a little deforming and you have a lumpectomy. Maybe it's a lot deforming and you have a mastectomy. You undergo medical treatment. Some women undergo chemotherapy. Some women undergo antihormonal treatment.

Well, what happens when we block hormones in women? They get brain fog, depression, anxiety, Palpitations, cardiovascular disease, cardiomyopathies, arthralgias, joint pain, muscle pain, they gain weight, they, [00:26:00] it's very pro inflammatory, they have problems with continence, they have no libido, they're struggling in their relationship, sex is painful.

This is not exactly a joyride. So when we treat a woman for breast cancer, first of all, A woman treated for breast cancer is two to three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than a woman who was not treated for breast cancer. So now we might have cured them of breast cancer, but we gave them cardiovascular disease.

So how did that help them? It didn't. And we are affecting both the quality and the duration of their life. And the biggest problem that I have with this 20 to 30 percent is that if that woman goes on to die of cardiovascular disease because of the treatment she got from her breast cancer, that death gets attributed 

to cardiovascular [00:27:00] disease. 

Jacqueline: interesting.

Dr. Simmons: So we don't really know the real numbers. of who's dying of breast cancer, because in my opinion, if the cardiovascular disease came from the breast cancer treatment, that's a breast cancer death, not a cardiovascular disease death. And we have to be very mindful of this, because if we take a screening study that ultimately doesn't save lives, And quite frankly, even though we called it a nice name, even though we called it a mammogram picture of the breast, what it is is a breast x ray.

We are literally causing some of those cancers. When you x ray a woman year after year with this low energy x ray, a lot of that radiation is going to be retained within the tissues of the breast. We are causing some of these breast cancers. So when [00:28:00] we look at. Let's say I take a 40-year-old woman and we, and we give her a mammogram every 10 year, every year for 10 years.

When you look at 2000 women who you do that to, you may potentially save one life and you will call us somewhere between 10 to 20 of those women to be unnecessarily treated for breast cancer. These numbers do not make sense. It is unethical. to screen young women for breast cancer. It's unethical with mammograms. 

Jacqueline: Right. When yoU say unnecessarily treated, so, I mean, at, at least to my, my understanding is that they have the mammogram, they'll get the result, if there's something questionable, they'll do a biopsy, which then would identify the quote unquote stage. So, what are your thoughts on treating one stage versus another?

Let's say a biopsy shows stage 3 [00:29:00] versus a stage 1.

Dr. Simmons: So stage three, without question, needs to be

treated. Without question. 

Jacqueline: about stage 2? 

Dr. Simmons: they've already proven to you that they have aggressive biology. Right? So they have nodal disease because there's no one with stage 3 disease that doesn't have nodal disease. So we already know that that tumor has a proclivity to spread beyond the breast.

Jacqueline: about a 2?

Dr. Simmons: Stage 2, you know, I, I would err on the side of treating them. What I am mostly talking about are these screen cancers. They're totally asymptomatic. No one feels a lump. All it it's based on is these are these findings on mammogram and we know that mammogram is gonna find 20 to 30% more cancers than if you would just screen with physical examination.

And we don't know anything about the biology of these small tumors, and [00:30:00] we're treating them all the same. We're treating them all like they're aggressive disease. And so we are over diagnosing and over treating because some of these cancers would have reversed on their own. We know that because we know what, what it looks like to compare the screening population to the population that doesn't screen.

We know that from the Canadian breast cancer trials. We know that from the Cochrane report. We know that from the Nordic trials. That was 600, 000 women. It's not like we have these small size studies. We have 90, 000 in the Canadian breast cancer study and, and 600, 000 from the Nordic

Jacqueline: Right. Yeah, completely hear you. You mentioned MRI before. So, obviously, you've heard of the full body MRI pre, prenuvo, prenovo, prenovo. So, with that, I mean, why, what are your thoughts on that and what is

Dr. Simmons: So I'm, I'm [00:31:00] actually fine with the PRONOVO scan, just understanding that they have a threshold of one centimeter because that's a non contrast study. For what I'm talking about in terms of screening are there is a high risk population, women who have a history of breast cancer, women who are, uh, BRCA mutation carriers or other high risk gene carriers.

Women who have extremely dense breasts, women who, um, have a strong family history of breast cancer, women who have breast implants. These women are all, um, they all have the opportunity to screen with MRI. because they are at high

risk. The implants don't make you at high risk. The implants make the mammogram very difficult to read.

So we are recommending that these women get MRI every year. And that means that they're also getting gadolinium every year. [00:32:00] Gadolinium is a heavy metal.

Jacqueline: Do you have to do contrast, though, with breast MRIs? Like, I'm, I mean, it makes that much of a difference?

Dr. Simmons: it does. 

It does, but that's not the only problem with MR. I mean, the contrast is definitely a problem without the MR also has a tremendous amount of false positives and Calling things that are of little or no significance and these undergoing biopsies Some of them are undergoing extensive surgeries and I can't tell you how many mastectomies that I've done Based on An MRI report that says that there's extensive disease and then pathology back.

And there's nothing there.

Jacqueline: Wow. That's crazy. 

Dr. Simmons: very scary. 

It's very scary.

Jacqueline: about thermography?

Dr. Simmons: Thermography is an amazing, amazing tool for what it is. It is [00:33:00] designed to find inflammation. It's not a screening tool for breast cancer and I don't use it as a screening tool for breast cancer, but I use it regularly. My patients are getting thermography every year because I want to know if there's inflammation anywhere that I need to address.

Jacqueline: Right.

Dr. Simmons: I want to know what's happening in their mouth. I want to know what's happening in their thyroid. I want to know what's happening in their chest and their abdomen. And we, and this is how we get this information. And sometimes we do get a heat signal on the breast and we can follow that up with an ultrasound.

But um, but I am not using it as a screening tool for breast cancer. And up until last year, my recommendations for screening included, I really believe in self breast examination. It's a. Everyone needs to know their body and no one is going to know you better than you know yourself. So doing self breast examination every month, I think is really important.

And then [00:34:00] I, I also recommend the ARIA test, A U R I A. Uh, this is the TEARS test. I don't know if you've heard of this test

yet. 

Jacqueline: I'm intrigued.

Dr. Simmons: It looks for two proteins in the TEARS, the S100A8 and S100A9 proteins. These are proteins that are secreted in the early development of breast cancer. They're inflammatory proteins that are associated with the early development of breast cancer.

And so I'm having my patients do that. Once a year every year so that I have a level of suspicion of who does and who doesn't have breast cancer

Jacqueline: what age would you recommend a woman start doing that? To 

establish a baseline. 30? 

Dr. Simmons: yeah, and then it's just every year

Jacqueline: Interesting.

Dr. Simmons: and And because it's totally non invasive. I mean it's It [00:35:00] has this little piece of paper that you literally put in the corner of your eye, close your eye for five minutes, take it out and, and send it off. It's really amazing. It's an amazing, amazing test. If your listeners are interested in doing that test, if you go to aria.

care, A U R I A dot care, and you put in the code, Dr. Jen 20, you'll get 20 percent off of that test. D R J N. J E N N 20 capital letters. And we can put that in the show notes. But so that that is something that I'm doing for screening every year. And then the third thing that I'm doing is I'm having women get a perfection scan.

So this is new technology. FDA cleared, 100 percent safe. So you could literally do this on a [00:36:00] child. There's no age. So like little girls who get breast lumps and I think it's a fibroadenoma, we just do this scan. There's no reason, there's no contraindication to doing it. And because there's no radiation, there's no compression.

It's completely safe. Completely painless. It's actually like a lovely experience. Most women take a nap during their scan. So what it is, it's, it's sound waves transmitted through a water bath. So we just submerge the breast in a warm water bath and they lie there for 20 minutes while the ultrasound waves surround their breast.

And then it creates a three dimensional reconstruction of the breast with 40 times the resolution of MRI. So, this is the first testing that we have that's functional. This is what makes it so different than everything else. So, if we see something in the breast on a baseline examination, we can have someone come back in a short [00:37:00] interval, 60 days, 90 days, something like that.

We can re measure and measure a doubling time. We know that cancers have a doubling time of less than 100 days and things that aren't important or aren't cancer have a greater doubling time. So, if that person comes back and they have a doubling time of 150 days, we know. We can just say, see you in a year and we just need to follow it.

So this is going to save women from unnecessary besides pain, compression, radiation. It's also saving women from unnecessary biopsies, over diagnosis and over treatment because we're not looking to call everything in the breast. We don't want to call everything in the breast. We want to give women the opportunity to get healthy.

And we can follow you and make sure, and listen, I'm still going to, we still find cancers. We still recommend that people get treated for cancer, [00:38:00] but we recommend the people that need to get treated. For cancer, get treated. 

We're not sending the, the women with DCIS off for surgery and radiation. We're not, we're not biopsying every little thing that we see.

We're biopsying the things that we think are meaningful and important and could potentially be life threatening.

Jacqueline: Wow. That's incredible. At some point in the future, I mean, would we be able to apply this technology to the full body?

Dr. Simmons: So the full body scanner should be out in 2026

Jacqueline: Very 

exciting. 

Wow. Sound waves? Yeah, there is. That's one thing I am very excited about is all this technology coming out and I'm sure you're familiar with histotripsy. That was recently FDA approved. I was within the past year or so, but yeah, for listeners, histotripsy essentially uses sound waves to target tumor cells.

And I think they're looking specifically at patients with [00:39:00] liver mets, which is my mom's case. So we're actually going to see if she's a candidate for that, um, next month or so, but it's, it is so fascinating. And the safety profile is, it's, yeah. It's, it's really solid. Um, but Wow, that's incredible. And with perfection.

Dr. Simmons, would you like, do you still recommend women starting at age? 

Yeah. 

Dr. Simmons: 100 percent safe. You can start whenever you want. 

Like if you're looking for that peace of mind, it was designed for women with dense breasts. So if you're looking for peace of mind, you can start at whatever age you want. What I again, generally recommend is that you're doing your self breast examination. You're doing the ARIA test every year. And you are doing, you're doing a perfection scan when you're, when you feel like you want more.

Jacqueline: Yeah.[00:40:00] 

Yeah.

That's incredible. That is very, very exciting. 

Dr. Simmons: It's very exciting. I mean, this is literally forever changing the way that we screen for breast cancer And really that is my mission. My mission is to change how we diagnose, treat, reverse, and screen for breast cancer. And this is one really big element of that because I want to make sure that I leave this world a better place than I found it and I want to The woman who knows inherently, I mean, listen, 40 percent of the eligible screening population is not screening because they know mammogram is wrong.

And even some of the screening population. Um, knows that mammogram is wrong, but they're scared not to do it because they've been so, um, indoctrinated by this system because of the slogans like, if you're not getting your mammogram, you need more than your breast examined, right? Like [00:41:00] they're making women feel like they're crazy to not get a mammogram.

I think you're crazy to get a mammogram. I don't think anyone should ever have another screening mammogram again, but I want to be clear. I'm talking about screening. I'm talking about the normal population. I'm talking about the healthy population. I'm talking about the group of women who have no reason to believe.

That they have breast cancer. I am not talking about the diagnostic population. If you have a lump in your breast, please go have a mammogram, go have an, an ultrasound, go see a breast surgeon, go get a diagnosis, right? I, there is no question that that is the right thing to do in that population. If you are asymptomatic, if you have no reason to believe that you have breast cancer, you should never have a mammogram for screening.

Never. [00:42:00] Never. It can, there is no benefit, there is only harm.

Jacqueline: Yeah. Here's a question for you, Dr. Simmons. Again, technology is accelerating at such a fast pace, but do you see, or can you predict, like, at some point in the future, will these tests be actually, like, Able to tell if something is malignant so that we can just. surpass the biopsy stage. Let's say like perfection picks something up.

I'm assuming like a biopsy in some cases would be necessary, but is there any other way we can circumvent having a biopsy?

Dr. Simmons: So, uh, The question is, will we ever be able to get tumor biology from these? I don't think so. Now, will we be able to get tumor biology from circulating tumor cell tests? I mean, yeah, we're getting that 

now. 

Jacqueline: signataria and all that.

Dr. Simmons: Uh, not so much Signatara, but like the RGCC and [00:43:00] the Jatara

tests. 

Jacqueline: are you a fan of RGCC and 

Datara? I've I've heard mixed thoughts on that.

Dr. Simmons: So there are lots of people who say that RGCC results are not reproducible. And, you know, that might be true in that there is tumor heterogeneity. So I guess it does depend on your sample. but I think it's a whole lot better than nothing. And I have seen great responses in people who have done the RGCC and done the Onconomics Plus, which is like, The test that, that looks at natural substances and chemotherapeutic substances for, uh, tumor responsiveness.

And I've seen a lot of progress being made in people who utilize those protocols. So I I am using the [00:44:00] test, uh, the JITAR is another one that people, um, think is a little more predictive than the RGCC. It's also very, very expensive. So it's much more than the RGCC. I mean, it's hard for me to say, um, but you know, all we can do is kind of look anecdotally at our patient responses. And they've been good.

Jacqueline: Yeah.

Dr. Simmons: Good.

Jacqueline: All right. Well, that's encouraging. Dr. Simmons, this is all very exciting. If someone wants to go get a perfection scan, like how does that process work? Is that something they could just go to their doctor and ask for or not at this point in

Dr. Simmons: That part, you do not need a referral, all self referred, so all you need to do is go to perfectionimaging. com and perfection is spelled with a QT in the middle. Just sign [00:45:00] up for a scan.

Jacqueline: Wow. And are those done like nationwide right now?

Dr. Simmons: Right now there, uh, there are, uh, Scanners in California, Scottsdale, Arizona, and, uh, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but I'm opening 10 more this year and 

I'm going to open 15 in five years. So they're, they're coming, they're coming to a town near you.

People are flying from all over to come see our center in Philadelphia

Jacqueline: I'm sure. 

Dr. Simmons: magnificent.

Jacqueline: I'm sure. I can imagine. Well, thank you for all of the incredible work that you're doing in this space. I do want to be conscious of your time. I'm going to have to have you back on again at some point because there's too much to discuss. But this is definitely 

a 

Dr. Simmons: love to. I would love to. Um, but yeah, I mean, with that, I will be linking, uh, Perfection in the show notes.

Jacqueline: Are there any other resources you would like to share with listeners?

Dr. Simmons: Yeah. So for anyone who's had a breast cancer diagnosis, I wrote this book this year. It's called the smart [00:46:00] woman's guide to breast cancer. It's available on Amazon. I would tell you, even if you haven't had a breast cancer diagnosis, this is an owner's manual for your breasts. This is how to create that healthy environment that, um, Not only helps to reverse breast cancer, but helps to prevent breast cancer and prevent breast cancer recurrences.

If you've had a diagnosis, this is going to be your Bible. It literally is filled with all of the information you need to understand your diagnosis, to navigate the conventional medical system, and how to build your team that can help you to build your health. Because we know that when we build health, disease goes away.

And at the end of the day, Breast health is health. So the same things that you're going to do to build healthy breasts are going to build a healthy body, healthy brain, healthy heart, healthy [00:47:00] gut, healthy skin, healthy bones, healthy joints, all of it. And so this, this book is going to be a really important piece of work for anyone who is conscious and wants breast health.

Jacqueline: Wonderful.

Dr. Simmons: I have a podcast called keeping abreast with Dr. Jen. We release a new episode every Monday, so definitely check us out there. I have a YouTube channel, I'm on all the social media channels, um, and I'm at Dr. Jen Simmons and my Jen has two N's. My medical practice is RealHealthMD. You can find us at RealHealthMD.

com. And so if you're looking for information, interested in working with me, interested in joining my group, the Breast Health Blueprint, all the information is there. And again, if you're looking for a scan, PerfectionImaging. com and [00:48:00] Perfectionist. com. spelled with a QT in the middle. And lastly, if you're interested in taking that ARIA test, use the code D R J E N N 20 to get 20 percent off and it's aria.

care.

Jacqueline: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Simmons. I will be including the links to all of those in the show notes. And my last question for you is what does being well and strong mean to you?

Dr. Simmons: Yeah, so that means that you get up every day. You get out of bed with energy and optimism and you are able to accomplish all the things that you want to accomplish during your day with energy and enthusiasm. And you go to bed at night and you're able to sleep through the night and have dreams and start the next day in the same way.

Jacqueline: Love that.

Dr. Simmons: You know, if you can do all of that and have a smile on your face and have [00:49:00] your beautiful relationships and serve your beautiful purpose, that is what life is about.

Jacqueline: I love that. Couldn't agree more. Well, Dr. Simmons, it was a pleasure. Um, it was so great to finally connect with you again. I look forward to having you back on at some point, but we certainly will be in touch 

and yeah, excited to share this with listeners.

Dr. Simmons: Thanks so much. It's great to see you today.


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Jacqueline Genova

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