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Rane Bowen: Hello, my name is Rane and this is the Flow Artists Podcast. Every episode, we interview inspiring movers, thinkers and teachers about how they find the flow, and much, much more. We speak with some of the best yoga movement and meditation teachers from Australia and all over the world. I hope you're having an absolutely wonderful day today. I am not too bad myself, I just got back from New Zealand yesterday, I was visiting family back in my hometown of New Plymouth, and it was a great little break. And I did some great yoga there in The Wellness Project in New Plymouth, it's a great little spot, really beautiful. And flew in yesterday and so tired. We have an excellent episode lined up for you today. This week's episode is a recorded conversation between myself, co-host Jo Stewart, and Timothy McCall.

Rane Bowen: Dr. Timothy McCall is a board-certified physician specializing in internal medicine, a yoga therapist and the author of three books, Examining Your Doctor: A Patient's Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care, Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing, and his latest, Saving My Neck: A Doctor's East/West Journey Through Cancer. Timothy's book, Yoga as Medicine, is a book I referenced a lot during my yoga teacher training, and it sits on my bookshelf. So, I was really excited to get the chance to speak with him. And having been through my own journey with stomach cancer, I was really interested to hear his perspectives in how he drew on his medical knowledge as well as his extensive yoga background to find his way to recovery. And he talks about that in his latest book. It's a fascinating story and I'm so glad that we get to share it with you today.

Rane Bowen: And as I mentioned, his story is covered in full in his latest book, so, I really urge you to go out and buy yourself a copy right now. Maybe pause the podcast first. All right, that is more than enough for me, let's get on to the conversation.

Rane Bowen: All right. Oh, Tim, thank you so much for joining-

Jo Stewart: Oh, is it Tim or Timothy?

Rane Bowen: Oh, Timothy, Sorry.

Timothy McCall: I do prefer Timothy. Now, it's funny, I've heard that in Australia that everyone always abbreviates every name. So, I do actually go by Timothy, I have since I was 16 years old. But, my family is still figuring it out, 40 years later, so, I can't take it personally. But, yeah, whatever.

Rane Bowen: Okay. Well, my apologies, Timothy. It's so good to have you here today, would you like to tell us a little bit about your background and where you grew up?

Timothy McCall: Sure, you can probably tell I'm from the States, and I was born in Chicago, I grew up in the city of Milwaukee. But my father was a university professor, and we spent all our summers in Vermont. Vermont is a state in the northeast of the country, and we were just about 30 miles from Canada. And I've now in the past couple of years, moved back and now live full-time in Vermont.

Rane Bowen: So, what brought you to yoga?

Timothy McCall: Well, that has more than one answer. I thought I started yoga in 1995, when I happened to get talking with a woman at a party, who told me that she was taking classes at this local yoga studio, and she recommended it highly, and I decided to check it out. Unbeknownst to me, it was a studio of one of the most famous yoga teachers in the United States, a teacher by the name of Patricia Walden. And then, also, as it turned out, Patricia, about once every eight years, starts out a new group of beginners, and then brings them forward for all those years, and I happened to be there right at the right time for that as well. So, it was one of those kind of magical things that happened, and she's a wonderful teacher. But then, there's another story, which was 20 years earlier, when I was 18 years old. I was, at that time, a tournament tennis player, and I had just won a tournament in Milwaukee.

Timothy McCall: You know, Joe, that this is in my new book. And this guy, who at one time was the top tennis player in the State, approached me and he said, "Would you be willing to feed me some balls, so I can practice on my strokes, in exchange for free lessons?" Well, he had just had his own teaching transformed by reading a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which has also been called the Zen Tennis. And it was only about five years or six years ago, that I went back and reread that book. Because, that book didn't just revolutionize my tennis game, which it did, it revolutionized my whole life. And I went back and I reread it, and I was like, "Holy..." I'm not going to say what I said.

Timothy McCall: I said, "Holy something, this is a yoga book. And it's all about studying your body and studying your mind, and looking at your ego and separating your ego from your felt sense, and using your breath to modulate the nervous system, and tuning into awareness, and creating habit patterns, and notice whether the habits that you're doing with fine detail to what you're actually doing are corresponding to the habit patterns that you want." And as I'm reading the book, I'm thinking, "This is the same stuff I teach in my Yoga as Medicine workshops to this day, it's the same technology." He never used the word yoga once in the book, and I didn't know anything about yoga, and it never occurred to me. When I went back and reread it, I did notice the book is dedicated to Guru Maharaji, didn't really register that the first time I read. So, in fact, in terms of philosophy, in terms of self-study, in terms of psychological inquiry, my yoga practice started when I was 18 years old.

Timothy McCall: And for the first 20 years, tennis strokes were my asana, but it was the same process. And I had all this stuff like my head got in the way of winning matches, if we can go into psychology of that if you want, but basically, I'd be way up in a match, and I'd get tight, what tennis players call Iron Elbow. And I just, I couldn't make the shots that normally I could make. And I had a habit of, we sometimes call it wrestling defeat from the jaws of victory. But, through self-study and through re-patterning, I learned to overcome that as well. So, anyway, the process has been going on for a long time on every one account.

Jo Stewart: You mentioned your book, Yoga as Medicine, and it's just struck me that your latest book, Saving My Neck, is also a book about yoga and medicine.

Timothy McCall: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So, of course, I practiced medicine for a little more than a dozen years. After college, I took a year and traveled, and then I went to medical school for four years and did a residency for three years. And then, for about another 10 years after residency, I practiced in the Boston area. But then, gave it up and pursued yoga and yoga therapy, and really kind of made the science of yoga and the therapeutic applications of yoga, my kind of intellectual and professional interest for all those years. And then, I get diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, two and a half years ago. And suddenly, I'm going to be re-entering the world of medicine, this time as a patient.

Timothy McCall: And I went through my cancer treatment with no conception that I was going to be writing about it. And I didn't take notes on it, the way a writer would. I just felt like, "I'm just trying to get through this," and I know you know about this. And then when I got to the end of the process and then I finished, it's almost exactly two years ago, I finished my treatments, so that we're in March 2017. And by that summer, I was like, "I need to write about this." Because, I learned so much along the way, that I felt like, "I have to write about this." And so, then, I got into the process. And of course, it's fascinating, because, in writing my own story, I learned more about the story than I did the first time through it. And so, it was actually quite instructive and helpful in helping me process it and move on from it.

Timothy McCall: It's funny because I have another whole skill set I brought to this game, which was, not only had I practiced medicine, not only did I study holistic healing and do yoga therapy for 20 years, but I used to be a consumer health care activist. My first book was called Examining Your Doctor, okay? And I basically taught people how to deconstruct ideological biases and the influencing insurance companies, the influence of the pharmaceutical companies, which are big problems in the U.S., I think less so here. But I helped readers see through that process to get healthcare that actually serve them better than what they might have got just off the shelf. So, I'm kind of a feisty patient, I mean, I'm polite, but I don't take any crap from anybody, and I don't just go along with stuff.

Timothy McCall: So, for example, I was recommended to have pretty extensive surgery on my neck. So, I had a cancer on my tonsil, it's related to the HPV virus infection. And I had lymph nodes on the opposite side of my neck, three lymph nodes that were metastatic. So, they wanted to do robotic surgery to take out the tonsil, and then, they wanted to fillet open both sides of my neck, and take out all the lymph nodes on both sides to the front of my neck. And so, I started calling this, in a kind of an allusion to the breast cancer treatment, I started calling it a bilateral modified radical neckectomy. And I turned it down, I was like, "No." Because, even though they pushed it hard, I was like, "There is no scientific evidence, this is going to increase my chance of surviving, and this is definitely going to increase my chance of side effects." And of course, those guys are clueless about Ayurveda, and the notion that there are Marma points in the neck, and one of the teachings of yoga.

Timothy McCall: So, our Marma points, for people who don't know are probably the historical precursor of acupuncture points. And the teaching in Ayurveda, is you cut them with a scalpel, you don't get normal healing. And of course, surgery was part of ancient Ayurveda. They were doing nose jobs, 2,000 years ago in India. Not for cosmetic reasons, okay? They were doing among soldiers who had their noses injured in battle. And they developed all these advanced surgical techniques, skin flaps and all these techniques that, when western scientists discovered this, just in the last couple hundred years, they were floored. Because, they were way more advanced than what was happening in western medicine. And indeed, Sushruta, the famous author of one of the main Ayurvedic texts, from thousands of years ago, is now considered by western medical doctors, the father of plastic surgery, the Indian doctor, Sushruta.

Timothy McCall: So, one of the things that all Ayurvedic surgeons would have been aware of, is you don't cut on a Marma point. And there are stories of people who've had Marma points cut, and they wind up with very bad results. And sometimes, systemic illness or not healing well from the surgery, all kinds of problems. And that wasn't even my concern, I was like, "This is unnecessary. You guys have the technology, so, you want to do it. But, I don't think it's going to help." So, I turned it down. So, that's an example of my being in this kind of, I decided to go in an integrative route, I wanted to take advantage of the best of scientific medicine, and the best of holistic healing, because I knew that the scientific medicine gave me some tools that appeared to be more effective than just going a purely holistic route. But, I also knew that western medicine is systematically missing all kinds of tools for body, mind, and spirit that I knew would help me do better.

Jo Stewart: There is actually a really beautiful quote in your book, if you don't mind me reading a quote from your book back to you. So, "Holistic medicine treats the body like an organic gardener who helps the plant by strengthening the soil, saying this way, 'I'm fighting the invasive way that is cancer by dousing it with toxic chemicals, while simultaneously using diet, stress reduction and Herbs to nurture the soil of my body'". And I really love this analogy, and we took a similar approach when Rane got his diagnosis, we had a good friend who was a naturopath. And she gave us a whole list of herbs, and even dietary things like drinking green juice, that his conventional medical team absolutely shot it down and said, like, the green juice would interfere with the chemo, a lot of the herbs are metabolized through the liver. So, that wouldn't work out. I'm wondering how your medical routine responded to your own holistic treatments, and if maybe there was some you didn't mention to them.

Timothy McCall: Right. So, I started off by mentioning, and in fact, I had the advantage, or you could call it a disadvantage too, I suppose. But, in America, health insurance, generally is, unless you have a very expensive private policy, a state by state, you've got to have insurance for the state that you live in. And I had decided that I wanted to get treated at a particular place in the southeastern United States. I'm being vague, because I decided to disguise the identities in the book.

Jo Stewart: Because you talk quite a lot about the hospital and your team, I understand [crosstalk 00:13:39].

Timothy McCall: Right. So, I got diagnosed in late November. And so, it turned out, I wasn't going to be able to start my health insurance in the new state, until the first of the year. So, I suddenly found myself with a month I didn't know what do with, and I was like, "Let's go to India, get some Ayurveda, get myself balanced and centered and rested, before I have to go through these heavy duty big gun, chemo radiation, whatever it would turn out to be," which is what it did turn out to be. And so, while I was there, I read an integrative oncology textbook, cover to cover. And so, I read about all herbs and which ones had scientific data. And I basically, I didn't have advantage of being an herbalist myself or having extensive training. But I just took the principle of taking several things in small doses and combining them. All things that had been tested and found to be safe in cancer treatments, not to interfere with western medicines. And I had really done my homework.

Timothy McCall: My strategy was, I'll do anything that seems like it has a reasonable chance of helping, as long as it's not going to screw up the chemotherapy or screw up the radiation therapy. So, I wasn't going to push it so far that I was going to risk that. And so, for example, I did not take antioxidant vitamins, because some chemotherapy drugs work by causing oxidation in cancer cells. And so, theoretically, antioxidant vitamins might interfere with the effectiveness of chemotherapy. That was the kind of chance I didn't want to take. But, herbs don't do that. And so, I just put together a thing of some medicinal mushrooms, basically food. But, powdered medicinal mushrooms of various kinds, a couple of tonic herbs that are felt to be good for immune, one from Ayurveda, one from Chinese medicine, and a few other things I put together in a little cocktail.

Timothy McCall: And it's interesting, because there's really a sea change that's happening in medicine, where there's a new generation coming in, who's more open to integrative stuff. But a lot of the old school and a lot of the big shots in medicine are still like not into that stuff at all. And so, the junior varsity, the oncology fellow came in, and I printed out sheet of this whole routine of herbs and other things that I was going to do. And he said, "Every herb in this list looks good to me, but I'm just going to check with the pharmacist to make sure." He had one question, something I hadn't yet started taking and I didn't end up taking it. And then, what happened was, the oncologist, the real team, the real authority, she comes in, and she says, "I don't want you taking any of this." And my philosophy was, you have just lost the right to be fully informed of what I'm doing. Because, you're just saying this because you're ignorant. I did my homework, I was really careful. I wasn't choosing reckless things at all.

Timothy McCall: And I know that some people just read some stuff on the internet, I know what she's probably used to, and I know why she's being careful. She's trying to protect me, I get it. But she was over her head and I knew it, and I had done my homework and I knew it. So, I was just like, okay, so, for example, then I decided I was going to fast during chemotherapy. Which, by the way, I was on Cisplatin, which is a platinum based chemotherapy drug, which is, as they like to say in medicine is a metagenic, which in English, you might say pukegenic, okay. And it's one of the most nasty drugs, it's well known. Cancer patients sometimes call it Cisflatin, okay, instead of Cisplatin. So, I started fasting every two days before every chemotherapy infusion, I had no nausea and vomiting, nothing. But, I didn't tell my doctors about it. I decided to not inform them. So, I let them know some stuff, mostly they were agnostic. My radiation oncologist, he was similarly ignorant, but he knew I knew what I was doing. And so, he was more trusting.

Timothy McCall: My oncologist, I think she's a good doctor, and a caring clinician and all that things. But she was just old school, don't do anything that's going to interfere with this stuff. And so, I had to... that's part of the story of how I danced around these restrictions. And a lot of advice they give is just stupid. You should eat this sugar-laden processed crap, just to keep your calorie count up, so you don't lose weight, because most people with oral cancers, who get treated end up losing a lot of weight. I'm sure it's true for stomach cancer as well.

Jo Stewart: Yeah, ice cream after every meal.

Rane Bowen: Yeah, I was encouraged to have ice cream, maybe three times a day.

Timothy McCall: Yeah. And of course, this is not mainstream accepted, but there's this very interesting theory, which is coming out of some hardcore scientists, they call them metabolic theory of cancer, which posits, and there's some strong evidence in support of this, that, dysfunction in mitochondria is the cause of cancer. That what happens is that, and this, by the way, is the theory of a Nobel Prize winner from the 1940s named Otto Warbug, a German guy. And he insisted, until his grave, even after the genetic theory of cancer came in, that he was going to be vindicated. And he didn't have the technology that we now have, that's starting to give some of the support for his theory. So, the idea in mainstream medicine is that genetic mutations cause cancer. The metabolic theory says, yeah, but the cause of the genetic mutations is the radical increase in reactive oxygen species, aka, free radicals, within cancer cells, caused by deranged mitochondria that cannot metabolize oxygen normally, which is normally an energy source, but instead have to rely on fermenting sugar for their energy source.

Timothy McCall: And, in fact, the test that's used to stage cancer, the PET scan, takes advantage of the fact that cancer cells take up sugar in about 10 times the rate of normal cells. And so, insofar as this theory is true, and it's unproved, but there's some highly suggestive evidence that it's true, ice cream three times a day, is going to be feeding the cancer, at least, as much as it's going to be feeding you. And for them, it's not empty calories, for them, it's like what they need to grow more vigorously. And part of the theory for why fasting reduces side effects, is that our species evolved to be able to deal with periodic famine. Because there were times in the history of our ancestors, where food was simply not available. In some cultures, every spring, when the tubers and the potatoes and other things ran out, then there was no food for a while. And our bodies actually learned to deal with that quite well and not be damaged by it. And it turns out there're certain advantages.

Timothy McCall: And one of the advantages, which was a subject to another Nobel Prize just a few years ago, was for this thing called the [inaudible 00:20:58], which is that, in fasting states, after you've been in them for a couple of days, what happens is, the body normally devotes a tremendous amount of energy to digesting food. And when you're not digesting food, it takes that energy. And one of the things it does, it calls senescent old, not so effective immune cells from the body, and facilitates new immune stem cells that essentially kind of reboot the immune system, okay. And so, there's a huge advantage in fasting. So, when you fast, cancer cells are taxed. They don't have their normal nutrition, it makes them, and this has been shown in animal studies only, but very compelling data from animals, that chemotherapy and radiation therapy are more effective when you're fasting, when you get it, and they have less side effects. Because, normal cells kind of shut down to emergency mode, which makes them less susceptible to the damage from the cancer treatments. Cancer cells become more sensitive to the radiation and chemotherapy.

Timothy McCall: So, it's a double advantage for the patient when you fast. In fact, in some of the mouse studies that were done, doses of chemotherapy that killed the mice that were eating normal diets, were tolerated in the mice who were fasting. And that's completely consistent with this idea that, because they can't metabolize oxygen for energy, they have to ferment sugars, when you deprive them of sugars, when you lower the glucose levels, when you lower the insulin levels, when you lower the amounts of a hormone called IGF-1 insulin related growth factor, potentially are harming the cancer, make it more vulnerable to the treatment. So, anyway, yeah, the standard advice they give is probably going to turn out to be very bad, probably counterproductive. Unproved at this time, but the other thing is that, I mean, ice cream isn't really got that much nutrition, really. It's just kind of like sugar and okay, yeah, it's got some butter fat. So, it's got some utility, but maybe a downside too. But, that's another whole issue.

Rane Bowen: How are you? Rane here, just popping in to ask you a quick favor. Now, one of the main ways a podcast gets shared is through word of mouth. And we all know that you'd love to let the whole world know about our podcast, right? Well, I'll make it really easy for you. The next time you're sitting down with your friends for a soy chai latte after a great yoga class, why don't you turn to your friends and say, "Hey, guys, have you heard of the Flow Artists Podcast? They are amazing. Rane, well, he's a little bit pushy, but Jo asks some really intelligent and insightful questions, backed by her years of experience teaching yoga and Pilates, and they have some really interesting and inspiring guests on fascinating and important topics. The show is always fun, the conversation flowing, and you can subscribe to them via iTunes, Spotify, or any good podcast app." Now, if your friends are tired of hearing you endlessly talk about us, I have an even better idea.

Rane Bowen: Your reviews on iTunes or shares on social media always help. And it would really help us reach a wider audience, so, please do. Jo and I would really, really appreciate it. All right, that's enough of me spruiking the podcast, let's get back to the conversation.

Jo Stewart: So, it's interesting to wind back a little bit how, as you were going through all of your treatment and everything, you never considered that it was going to become a book. Because, as I was reading your book, your approach to tackling your illness, seems like somewhat of a research project. And I was wondering if getting into that headspace of treating this as an exploration and as a project that helped you manage emotionally, and helped you stay engaged and involved and proactive. Because, there are a lot of studies that show, the more passive or receiver you are of treatment, the less empowered you feel as a person.

Timothy McCall: I suppose all of that is true. All I can tell you is I felt compelled to do that. I felt like I had this month before I was going to start treatment, I just scooped up every piece of information I could. Now, I did have, and you may recall a story from early in Saving My Neck, where I talk about, right after I get down there just about to meet my radiation oncologist, where I actually just met them the day before selling into my yoga practice, I end up having this huge fear. And that kind of terror come up. And it occurred to me that, "Oh, I think I got so involved in the project of figuring it all out," very male behavior. "Going to figure this all out and tackle this and make all the appropriate decisions," that I probably hadn't dealt with all the emotional stuff. I hadn't really... I mean, I definitely, initially, when I first got diagnosed, I went through a lot of the fearful stuff, and turned out, the cancer I had, had a better prognosis than I initially thought.

Timothy McCall: And so, I definitely went through a dark period there for a while, where I really thought, I got metastatic cancer. It was bad news. But then, I just very much got into this mode, where I dealt with it all. And then, at that moment where I had that big emotional reaction, and I thought about it, I was like, "Yeah." I probably hadn't dealt with the emotions that were natural in that situation. But, go into yoga, go into meditation. And lo and behold, it bubbles up to the surface. And I just dealt with it when it happened, and it was thing where I was doing a long asana practice, actually. And all these fearful emotions came up. And I teach this to students all the time, when emotions rise in the practice, try to make the physical sensation of the emotions your meditative practice. Try to go through that. The same way you would study an itch on your nose when you're meditating and trying not to scratch it. The way you would watch it wax and wane and change, and you realize that emotions are not fixed things.

Timothy McCall: There're those things that come in waves, and then, if you study them, if you meditate on them, so to speak, that they eventually pass. Now, this is a big one, usually, I find that worse in a couple of minutes and emotion passes, this was hours. And it was, on some level, excruciating to pay attention all that time. But I did, and it's like they passed, and I really didn't have a lot of fear and other stuff that came up. Now, there are other instances where other emotions come up at different times related to different things, but, I use that same yoga [inaudible 00:28:08], a Buddhist same technology of just making the physical sensation, emotion, the meditative focus and trying to be with it, and noticing when you get hijacked into the story, you tell yourself about the emotion. Because, the story is a Samskara, it's a habit pattern. And the more you repeat the story in your mind, the deeper the habit pattern gets.

Timothy McCall: The more you get away from the story and back to the physical sensation, the more you have a chance of actually really feeling it fully, and then, letting it have its natural course, and then, pass. And that's what happened. But, yeah, I think that all kinds of emotions are going to come up in experience, and I definitely had that thing, had that experience and I tried to welcome them. We have a culture that teaches us, we should try to make bad emotions go away as soon as possible. You feel sad, your friend will come take you to the movies, or get you stoned, or something else. So, you don't have to feel that bad feeling you're feeling, it never says no. As long as you're not like suicidally depressed, and then, you're like, you really do need to go to the movies, if you have the wherewithal, stay with it, be there with it, let it pass through. And maybe learn what that emotion is trying to teach you. Because, often, there's a lesson in the emotion.

Timothy McCall: When we get depressed, for a toxic relationship, we're supposed to get depressed. It's like survival skill. We have this idea that emotions are bad, Yogi is not supposed to be angry. Baloney, anger is a normal human emotion. Throwing a plate when you're angry is not skillful use of anger, but anger is just an emotion just like sadness, just like shame, just like fear to be felt and studied, and maybe learn from, and then, hopefully, to pass through it and get back to life.

Jo Stewart: And there's definitely a perception in literature around cancer and just bear names around it, where it's all about staying strong and staying positive. And it just sets up this really unhelpful and unrealistic dichotomy when you're going through something super intense, and now you have the pressure to stay positive as well.

Timothy McCall: Or, to pretend you're positive.

Jo Stewart: Exactly.

Timothy McCall: And by the way, this is something that people who have depression do all the time. They make like they're okay, because they don't want to be a burden on everyone else. When actually, when they say they're fine, they're not fine. They're just not telling you, because they don't want to bother you, they don't want to deal with it. But they're not fine. And hopefully, if you know someone well enough, when they say, "I'm fine," you say, "Okay, now please tell me the truth. What's going on?" Because, a good friend will feel it.

Jo Stewart: So, this isn't lining back a little bit to before sitting with your emotions, when you were in project mode?

Timothy McCall: Yeah.

Jo Stewart: And one passage that I loved reading about, was when you were sitting in the hot tub, neck deep, in the hot tub water, because there is some literature that says that cancer cells are susceptible to heat, and also chanting. Would you like to take us through the thought process?

Timothy McCall: Well, so, again, my philosophy was, anything that might help, as long as it's not going to be dangerous in any way. So, my brother is a professor of medicine at a big medical school, big famous medical school in States. So, I arranged to live at his house, and his and his wife's house, they're empty nesters. They had a spare bedroom I could stay in, and the cancer center was only a couple of miles from where they were. And so, it just made a lot of sense and it was rural class quality. And so, it just seemed like a good place to be. So, my brother has this enormous hot tub in his backyard. And I had been reading... So, in my research, I didn't just read the medical literature, I read crazy, fringe stuff. I mean, I read stuff that cancer doesn't kill you, it's only cancer treatments that kill you. Now, certainly, cancer treatments kill some people, but you know what? Cancer also kills people, and that's just baloney. Okay, I'm being polite.

Timothy McCall: But I wanted to read fringe stuff, I wanted to read and I read hardcore chemo therapists' memoirs and patient, I read everything. I read blogs, everything. And so, one of the treatments I learned about is hyperthermia. Now, this is done in various ways. But, one of the ways of doing it is actually, I think they stick some kind of small electrodes into the tumors, and they heat the tumor up to a certain temperature, and it's felt to be benign, and it's felt to have some kind of synergistic benefit along with radiation therapy and other treatments. Now, I didn't have that kind of access to that. But my brother has got this hot tub in his backyard, they keep it so hot, that you can't just jump in. You've got to make your way in slowly, because it's just, you've got to get your body acclimate to it.

Timothy McCall: So, I started doing it, and I started thinking, "Well, my nodes are right near the surface of my neck," and I thought, "Well, if I can get my body, so that..." But the thing is that, your body is so buoyant in the water that you float up. So, my nephew had these 10 pound barbell in his bedroom, I was staying in his bedroom, he's long since married and off out of the house. And so, I held, I sat in cross-legged yoga position, and I had a barbell in either hand that kept my neck, my chin, right at the top of the water bubble, and I started staying half an hour at a time. Now, I took my temperature, and I don't know it in centigrade, but normal body temperature, 37 for you guys, 98.6 in Fahrenheit, and then, I got my temperature up to 102.9 with staying in the hot tub. So, definitely, systemically getting it up, and maybe even more right on those lymph nodes.

Timothy McCall: And so, I thought, well, maybe that's going to help. And then, one of the principles of Tantra, is this idea of combining different tools. And so, I thought, "Well, here I am in the hot tub. One of the teachings of yoga, is that, chanting has strong vibratory effects, that you can direct the vibration to different areas of the body, and chant at different sounds, at different volumes, at different pitches, will resonate in different tissues of the body. And you can use those factors to direct, along with your awareness, to direct the vibrations, the literal sound vibrations, wherever you want in your body. And then, there are certain chants in yoga, like the Gayantra Mantra and Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, which are felt to have healing benefits. And then, another teaching in yoga, is that, when you chant in water, that it potentiates the effects of the chants, that it makes it much more powerful. That's one of the ancient teachings." Now, as I wrote in the book, I'm pretty sure they had the Ganges in mind, and not a hot tub. But I'm figuring, "What the heck?"

Timothy McCall: Here I am sitting in this hot tub. And so, I just started chanting these Mantras in the hot tub. And the thing is, when you chant in water, you actually feel the vibrations in your body, much more strongly than when you chat on dry land. So, I'm doing an unproved thing with the hot tub, I'm doing an unproved thing with chanting. And I'm combining them, but it's very relaxing, it softens my muscles, it feels good. And I don't think it's doing me any harm, at least, once I started drinking enough water before I got in, because I got dehydrated the first couple times I did it, because I stayed so long. But, once I got that sorted out, I felt like it's safe, and if it turns out that cancer cells truly are more sensitive to the effects of heat than normal cells. And if it's true that chanting, these chants has therapeutic benefit, and if it's true that chanting and water potentiates a chance, if any of those are true, then I might get some benefit. And it's not doing any harm, and I kind of like it, and so, I did it.

Timothy McCall: And so, that was my philosophy. It's like, I'm not going to wait for the data to all come in, because maybe, what if they have a study that comes out in 10 years, that says that chanting helps, lower or improve cancer healing rates? They're probably not going to do this study, but assuming they did, and they found... Was I supposed to wait until the data is in? We had this idea.

Jo Stewart: And no one is funding that study. [crosstalk 00:37:18].

Timothy McCall: No one is funding that study because no one is going to financially benefit from it. And who's going to pay for a study of fasting? Who benefits when you fast? Only you, because you're eating less food, you're not consuming any... It's like, no one is paying for a study, maybe some government someplace, but, pretty much, this stuff isn't getting studied. It might be a benefit, I mean, certainly, I have no doubt that fasting helped me. I mean, my doctors were amazed that I sailed through the first day of my chemotherapy. I mean, they'd given me these lectures on anticipatory nausea and vomiting. That's when the vomiting is so bad with the first round of chemotherapy, that people start vomiting hours before the next infusion of chemotherapy. And anticipation becomes just like conditioned response, and it's debilitating. I'd had two or three separate lectures on this by my ecologist and the nurse manager who was assigned to my case. And I didn't have any nausea or vomiting at all.

Timothy McCall: And I also think it probably made the treatments more effective. Am I convinced that the hot tub and the hyperthermia and the chanting had any benefit? No. Would I rule it out? Also No. And the thing is, what's never studied in western medical studies, is the potential synergy between things. Because reductionist science needs to isolate one variable, and study just what happens when you change that one variable. That's the way modern science works, and it's a brilliant methodology, but it's limited. And then, it doesn't notice interconnections and synergies. And what if chanting by itself wouldn't be shown to be valuable in a study? But, what if chanting on top of meditation, on top of asana practice, on top of chemotherapy, on top of fasting, what if in that instance, it does add some incremental benefit? Well, that study is never going to be done, just because we don't study things that way. We don't study multiple things, and how they work. And in fact, doctors don't like that kind of study, because then you can't isolate, which are the parts that are effective, and which ones are not.

Timothy McCall: But, if in fact, something isn't effective in isolation, but is effective in combination, those effects are systematically never examined or found.

Jo Stewart: With your background, you're pretty uniquely placed to be able to research different treatments and really analyze them, what advice do you have for the rest of us? So, people who don't have that background. Because, looking online, there are so many really predatory people, who just want to sell shonky remedies to people who are in a desperate phase of their life. And there's also well meaning people, who have advised that is not going to be helpful for everyone.

Timothy McCall: I did have the advantage, not only of being a physician, not only of having spent 25 years studying holistic healing, but I've also been connected in those worlds. Being able to pick up the phone or email or a friend, who's, one of the stories I tell in the book is I have a friend who's trained in Chinese medicine. And when I started to get a lot of side effects from the radiation and chemotherapy, we ended up setting up a video conference, and we spent like an hour, hour and a half on the phone. And she went through options, she ended up recommending some Chinese herbs and a Chinese medical [inaudible 00:40:50], which I ended up using for a while. And when I was trying to avoid fibrosis of the neck, which is a potentially debilitating after effect of the treatments, which nobody mentioned to me, I only uncovered it in my research, she recommended I start using castor oil packs. But the point is, yeah, for someone who doesn't have this training, I think it can be overwhelming. And I think, if you can, you need to get help.

Timothy McCall: And I think, whether it's an integrative physician, or somebody else who's, ideally, I think, someone who can put a foot in both worlds. Now, my particular bias, and I talk about this in a great deal in the book, and I'll just go to briefly here, I think we've got a misconception about healthcare. We've been taught to divide the world into conventional, medical, modern medicine, scientific medicine, whatever you want to call it in one hand, and alternative medicine, complementary medicine on the other hand. I think it's false distinction, not philosophically defensible. It's arbitrary which category many things get put in. The real difference in health care is between holistic remedies and approaches, and reductionist ones. So, drugs and surgery and other things are reductionist measures. These can be extremely effective, but reductionist measures tend to have more side effects, they tend to cost more money. And often, there's someone profiting from their use. And so, there's a lot of marketing, and sometimes, that marketing is subterranean, you don't even know then the information you're getting, you're reading in the magazine or on the internet about the drug, is influenced by the drug company. But, it is.

Timothy McCall: Well, unfortunately, because of this false distinction into alternative conventional, a lot of stuff in alternative medicine, is what I call alternative reductionism. It's basically high doses of specific chemicals, often in pill form, sometimes even infused intravenously, that are used trying to create a specific biochemical effect in the body. That's a reductionist mechanism of action. Okay? A holistic mechanism of action, is it goes back to that quotation you read at the beginning, which is the idea of retraining the soil to benefit the plant. And so, we're doing things to strengthen the person, to detoxify the person, to give them better nutrition, to boost their immune function. All these things that are not disease specific, they're not based on the western medical diagnosis. And these various symptoms like yoga therapy, and Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine, have diagnostic methods, where they detect imbalances of various kinds.

Timothy McCall: Three people could have the same diagnosis, but have it for different energetic reasons, as seen by these traditional systems. And their approach would not be to treat the diagnosis, but to treat the energetic imbalance. And this is one reason, by the way, why almost all studies of holistic healing, are going to underestimate their benefits. Because, advocates of evidence based medicine, which is the dominant ideology in health care these days, insist that you study things by disease. And so, they don't allow the Ayurvedic doctor, they don't allow the Chinese medical healer, they don't allow the yoga therapist to detect the imbalance, and then, tailor the treatment to the imbalance. They're supposed to say, "Well, this person has low back pain, which yoga poses should we use?" And part of what I teach in my yoga therapy workshops, is that, this is not how yoga therapy works. I mean, it's like kind of a third rate imitation of your therapy. What it is, is a holistic system turned into a reductionist disease based tool, which is not what it's meant to be.

Timothy McCall: And so, the problem is, when you're treating using these holistic systems, using these reductionist protocols based on western medical diagnosis, some people are getting the wrong treatment, as seen by the traditional system. Because, they're being treated for probably the more common energetic imbalance, but it's not the one that they've got. And so, it's the wrong treatment. But, that's the way that right now, conventional medicine, when they even study, holistic healing methods, insist they be studied. And part of the reason I wrote, Saving My Neck, is I want to blow up this idea, because it's bankrupt. And I'm basically using science, and not some kind of woo-woo analysis. I'm showing why it's scientifically flawed to study holistic healing in this way, and how it leads to mistakes. And because of this false clumping of everything alternative into one category, you have all these beautiful ancient healing systems, and all these dietary supplements, and all these mega dose vitamins, which, sometimes can be helpful. But they're reductionist treatments, they have more side effects, they become less effective over time, they often have subterranean marketing.

Timothy McCall: And if you don't understand that, if you think, "Oh, vitamins are in the same categories as yoga. I like yoga, I'm going to take vitamins." In fact, there are studies, and I talk about one in the book, heavy cigarette smokers, who take Vitamin E supplements, have been shown to develop lung cancer at higher rates than people who don't take them. These are not benign, even though they've been put in the category that makes people think they're benign. So, I think you're generally safe going with acupuncture, Chinese medicine, from someone who knows what they're doing. Off the shelf patent medicines that are made in China and other places where you're maybe not quite so sure of the quality, can you be careful. But, if you know where to get your herbs and you have sources you trust, and you have people who are advising you what you need, based on their ability to read your energetic imbalances via pulse diagnosis and tongue diagnosis, and interviews and the other methods they use, I think that stuff is safe.

Timothy McCall: I think, body work is generally safe. Yoga, not just going to a random yoga class, but yoga therapy, which is someone who's trained to look at what imbalance you have. When I teach yoga therapy, I divide the holistic terrain into structure, nervous system, and breath, Ayurveda, psychology and spirituality. And so, I look for imbalances in any of those categories. And then, based on the imbalances, I target yoga tools, lifestyle interventions, dietary interventions, based on Ayurveda mostly, to try to tackle the imbalances we see, to bring the person into better balance, with the idea that they'll do better with any condition will tend to get better, when, as you said, like an organic gardener, you make the soil stronger.

Jo Stewart: And I remember you mentioning in the book that your Ayurvedic doctor in India, initially didn't want to treat you, because he said there was no evidence that Ayurveda will help cancer.

Timothy McCall: We all know that there's 100 different schools in yoga. What many of us don't realize is there're 100 different schools of Ayurveda too. And there's different gurus and different systems. And the system in Kerala is different than the North Indian stuff that's in almost all the books that make it to the west. And so, generally, I have a doctor who died a couple years ago, didn't take any patients who didn't have something he knew he could help them with. And so, metastatic cancer is something that he's not convinced he can help. Now, because I've been a student for many years, they made an exception for me. But generally, no, they don't treat it. But, one of the things I said to... So, Krishna is my buddy who was my doctor of ayurveda, main assistant for many years. And I told him, "Krishna, I'm not looking to Ayurveda to cure my cancer, I just want to balance me and strengthen me, and get me ready for what's coming.

Timothy McCall: And then, after I had all the toxic chemicals and the radiation therapy, then I went back, and I specially spent three months just doing this super long, slow treatment, just to try to bring me back into balance. And really, Saving My Neck starts in the month before I begin treatment, when I go to India for treatment, and ends pretty much in the three months that I'm recovering from treatment, and then going back to all the stuff in between.

Jo Stewart: Yeah, that's a really interesting part of the book, actually, that was my favorite part. Because, I feel like that the first third, was the acute phase. That was your treatment, that was how you navigated that. But then, the rest of the book was the rest of your life that led up to that point when you got this diagnosis. When you were writing it, did all that stuff just pour out? Or, was it a conscious exercise to be like, "All right, I am going to sit down and untangle this and see where it takes me"?

Timothy McCall: Okay. I went to India with the files I would need if I decided to work on the book, because I had the book idea and I started to work on it a little bit in the summer. And so, this was November when I went. So, summer, Northern Hemisphere being June, July, I started working on the book. And then, by November when I went there, I felt like, if I ended up working on the book, I would work on it, but I had no expectation that I would, but just, I was open to the possibility, I was prepared for it if it happened, I brought some files and things that I would need if I was going to work on it. Now, normally, when I'm home writing, which between workshops, I'm primarily a writer, I consider 1000 words, a good day. I write 1000 words in a day, I'm pretty happy. And what happened to me about four or five days after I got it to India, it just started pouring out of me. And I wrote in a little more than three months, 250,000 words. So, the final book is only about 100,000 words.

Timothy McCall: So, I just wrote and wrote and wrote, there's probably like another whole book on the cutting room floor that may be, somehow have some kind of second life, I don't know. So, yeah, it just poured out of me. And the other thing that was so beautiful about it, is that, because I knew I was running about it, because I'm now in these experiences that I figured out are going to be in the book, because I've known Krishna for like 10 years, but I started asking Krishna more questions. And I started noticing things in more detail. And not only did I learn more and see more, but my friendship with Krishna deepened, because I was just in such a different place of where I was really trying to take it in, in a kind of a writerly way and notice the details. And suddenly, I wanted to know more about his childhood, and how he got it and what it was like. And he told me all these stories that I hadn't known before, and several of them made it into the book. And so, yeah, it was effortless. It really was effortless.

Timothy McCall: And the thing is, I have a lot of friends who are writers, and most of them hate writing. They like having it written but they hate writing. I love writing, and I have fun writing. And I really enjoy it. And I actually even have fun editing and going over stuff and like trying to make the language better and more musical or whatever I'm trying to do. I have fun with that. It's like a puzzle and solving it. So, it's like a yoga pose, you come back to the same yoga pose, day after day after day, and you find new things. I remember when I first started staying with Patricia, she said, "I've done [inaudible 00:52:57] and asana for 30 years. It's never the same pose twice." Am already thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but now I get it.

Jo Stewart: Do you think it was about integration for you as well? Like, the time in Kerala after your treatment, that was your healing time physically and-

Timothy McCall: On all levels, on all levels, spiritual. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that just unfolded there, new insight that came. And, of course, when you're in a place where you're writing and I'm writing about my family. So, there's one kind of epiphany about my brother, that ends up happening toward the end of the book. It's crucial to the story in a certain way. I think it was because I was writing the book, and because I was thinking about our family, and the crazy dysfunctional Irish Catholic family that I came from. That I saw some stuff and went deeper, and that led to an emotional breakthrough. And that, in turn, led to my initiating a difficult conversation with my brother, that took our relation to the best place has ever been. And so, had I not been writing that book, I'm not sure that that part of the story would have happened. But, yeah, it was a physical recovery, it was energetic recovering.

Timothy McCall: I've had, those who are listening who are familiar with Ayurveda, my Vata, I'm pretty sure, started to be out of whack when I was still not even born yet, like as a fetus. I know, because my mother had very difficult pregnancy, and third trimester hemorrhaging, and placenta previa, and emergency surgery and all this other kind of stuff. And she was fearful, she was told, if she started hemorrhaging, she had six minutes to make it to the hospital, they live 14 minutes in the hospital, so, it was a problem. So, I think, she was scared. So, anyway, my Vata has been out of whack my whole life. A dozen years after doing Ayurveda, and hundreds of days of treatment in India and self massages at home and trying to make my diet more and more, trying to bring my Vata back in balance, it never came back into balance, until about two weeks into my long stay in India.

Timothy McCall: And then, for the first time in my life, my Vata came into balance, and it's now a year and a half, over a year, a year and a few months since I came into balance, and it has stayed balanced the whole time. Even with transcontinental flights and hectic teaching schedules and all this kind of stuff. And so, had I not done all the stuff I tried to do, to bring myself into better balance to treat the cancer, I'm not sure that my Vata would be normal today the way it is. So, there were benefits energetically, benefits psychologically, benefits in my family, spiritual breakthroughs, greater understanding. And, yeah, so, it's one of these things. And it sounds so trite. Like, cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me, blah, blah, blah. But, in some ways, it has actually really been a tremendous gift to my life. And all this stuff has come, that I'm not sure would have otherwise come.

Timothy McCall: I don't wish it on anybody, and I certainly wasn't thrilled about it when I first found out, or when I first suspected it, you're never quite out of the woods. And I'm aware of all that. But, I feel great, and I've got myself in balance, and that trip was a crucial part of it.

Rane Bowen: I feel pretty much the same way, I don't think this podcast would be happening if it wasn't for my cancer. So, yeah.

Timothy McCall: Yeah, and you wouldn't be a yoga teacher.

Rane Bowen: I guess not.

Timothy McCall: Wow, yeah, no, I mean, and this is, I think, the interesting point, the message in mainstream society is to do everything you can to get back to normal, to get back to your life. To get back to all the same crap that might have got you in trouble the first time. Like, get back to being able to do all that stuff again, that's the goal for people who have cancer. But, what some of us do, is use this as an opportunity to actually reevaluate everything, and try to make improvements and try to change, to not get back to where we were, but to get back to a better place than we were. And I think, these are the people who really thrive, who, and again, no guarantees, not promising anything to anybody. But, when you use it as an opportunity to grow, and change, and improve, and study yourself, and free yourself of the shit you don't need anymore, there, I finally did it, I finally [crosstalk 00:57:51]. I mean, it's potentially transformational.

Timothy McCall: And of course, this is one of the great lessons of yoga. Because, we all get some bad stuff that happens to us, and can we take the challenges in our life, and use them as an opportunity to craft something that's even better.

Rane Bowen: So, maybe to conclude things, if you could distill everything that you've learned during your life and during this journey down to one core thing, I know it's a...

Jo Stewart: It's a big ask.

Rane Bowen: Big ask. But, if you could distill all down to one single thing, one single quotation, what do you think that would be?

Timothy McCall: Well, I think this notion of samskaras from yoga, this idea that we have habit patterns, and it's a big problem in medicine. Because, patients come in, they're eating a bad diet, they're not exercising, they're not wearing their seatbelt in the car, whatever it is, they got these bad habits. They're smoking, they're drinking too much, whatever it might be, and the doctor gives them an advice. And a lot of times, the patient wants to do what the doctor says. And of course, big joke in our society, New Year's resolutions. People have big ideas, but they can't stick to them. So, yoga therapy is this technology of creating a new habit pattern, and then, repeating that over time. And the idea is, it's not making the old habit go away, it's creating a new habit pattern, that when you do it enough, it starts to outcompete the old habit. That's the methodology.

Timothy McCall: And so, the self-study of yoga and yoga therapy is to notice when you have habit patterns that are not serving you in your life. You don't have to admit it to anyone else other than yourself, but you have to own it yourself. And then, you can look at those habit patterns. So, say, it's smoking, and you can make pretty good guesses, that if you're 30 years old and you're smoking, where you're going to be in 30 years if you keep that habit up. And you can make the decision, "Is that where I want to be in 30 years?" Or, you can make a decision to create a new pathway. Maybe it's starting a pranayama practice, that raises your sensitivity to your breath, that makes you not want to smoke, because you notice what happens when you smoke. And like, "What happens if I start a daily..." And you can start with one minute, and you can start with five minutes, whatever. "What happens if I start this pattern? And what if I keep this up for 30 years, where am I going to be?"

Timothy McCall: And you don't have to worry about the 30 years part, by the way, you just got to worry about getting going. And then, along the way, you can worry about the next month and the next week. But, you've got to get going. So, the point is, see your habit patterns, own your habit patterns. If you can tell, they're not really serving you where you'd like to go in your life, finding a better habit pattern that will serve you, and then, as Petacci says, do it regularly without interruption and with enthusiasm over a long period of time, sound familiar? So, that's really the secret. And the bonus is that, the more you do practices like yoga, that they're one of the healthy habit patterns that can substitute, the more you wake up your felt sense, the more you wake up your ability to tell the consequences of what you're doing, the more you learn to listen to what your body tells you. And as I was saying just a moment ago, that's what really helps you, know what to do. Because, your body has all this wisdom in it.

Timothy McCall: And most of us are just on kind of autopilot and powering through, and we're drinking coffee so we can feel awake, and whatever else we're doing, and this is a different pattern. It's a pattern of cultivating your inner thermostat to know where you're at. And interesting thing is, part of the reason New Year's resolutions don't work, is that, fear, this has been studied scientifically multiple times, fear is a crappy motivator. People don't change habits, because it's better for them, like, it's sick if they keep doing this. What turns out to be a powerful stimulus to change habits, is noticing that when you do something, it makes you feel better. Or, when you do something, it makes you feel worse, those are both really powerful, stimulated change behavior, really strong impetus, whereas fear doesn't work. So, go inside, find out what you need to do.

Timothy McCall: And then, use this technology of yoga, which, as I said, I got exposed to not through yoga, but through tennis. Okay? I use yogic, identify the habit patterns, pick the ones that don't serve you, whether that's your forehand, or whether that's drinking too much. Okay? And then use this methodology to develop a new habit pattern that will serve you better. And then, same way you get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice.

Rane Bowen: Thank you so much, we could probably listen to you talk for another hour or so, but, we have to cut it short, unfortunately. So, thank you so much.

Jo Stewart: Thank you so much for joining us.

Timothy McCall: Thank you. This is a real pleasure. You guys are great interviewers, and I'm really happy we made this happen.

Rane Bowen: And that was our conversation with Dr. Timothy McCall. He's a fascinating guy, and he's a really inspiring guy. He's really been through a lot and came out through the other side. So, to me, personally, I find that really inspirational, and it was truly an honor to sit and learn from the guy who literally wrote the book on yoga as a medicine. Now, for our next episode, we have another great guest, his name is Tim Sousa. Tim is a yoga teacher and a fireman, who moved all the way from Canada, to now live in the far north of New Zealand. It's a great conversation, and as well as getting to know Tim, we learned about the stresses of working as a first responder. And how yoga and meditation can help in this very intense line of work. It's a powerful conversation, so, I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. And this episode will come out in two weeks time.

Rane Bowen: Our theme song is Baby Robots by the incredibly wonderful Ghostsoul, and it's used with permission. You can buy his music from ghostsoul.bandcamp.com, and you should. All right, thank you so much for listening, Jo and I really appreciate you spending your time with us. Arohanui , big, big, love.