Dr. David Fajgenbaum

I think that our filthy environment contributes and probably increases risk and increase the numbers.

I think all the conditions you mentioned have happened as long as we've been around.

They're in textbooks from the 1700s.

But they maybe weren't as common.

And so one reason why they might not be as common, I think, is exactly what you said.

There's things in our environment that are making them more common.

The other is that we're thankfully living a lot longer.

We're not dying from infections from bacteria that's in our water, for example.

So we're living longer, which means there's more opportunity for these other diseases to sort of emerge.

So I think that my experience with a lot of these things is that I think that there is definitely a lot of truth and data backing up the idea that our environment

is playing a really important role in increasing the number of these cancers and conditions.

But oftentimes it's a lot more complicated than just like, it's just the environment because these things have been in textbooks for a lot longer than a lot of these chemicals have even been around.

There has to be.

Yeah, I mean, my feeling is that I and we just want to help patients with the medicines that are available.

And if it's from a holistic doctor or if it's from sort of traditional Western medicine or if it's from pharmaceutical companies,

The drug that I'm on, sirolimus, it actually was discovered in the soil on the island of Rapa Nui in the Pacific.

It literally was discovered in the soil, and then a drug company figured out ways to manufacture it.

My drug is about as natural of a drug as you could ever take, but it's a pharmaceutical drug, and it's used for transplant rejection, and it destroys your immune system.

We like to oftentimes think of things as very black and white.

There's the natural stuff, and then there's the pharmaceutical stuff.