In this episode, I’m looking forward to introducing you to Dr. Jenn Simmons. She is a breast surgeon who turned into an integrative oncologist, now specializing in helping women identify breast cancer early and prevent breast cancer from happening in the first place. 

She has opened two QT breast imaging centers and is preparing to open more of them to help women in this effort to reduce breast cancer nationwide and even worldwide. Dr. Simmons is also author of “The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer.”

The book, as Dr. Simmons explains, is not just for women with breast cancer – it’s necessary reading for every woman. In fact, she’s considering publishing the same book without the pathology report explanations, perhaps titled “The Breast Owner’s Guide,” because the information is so vital for all women. She’s already started working on her second book, showing her commitment to spreading this essential knowledge to as many women as possible.

Dr. Simmons’ approach represents a paradigm shift in how we think about breast health and cancer prevention. Her work combines the precision of conventional medicine with the holistic understanding of integrative healthcare, creating a comprehensive approach that addresses both the immediate concerns of breast cancer and the underlying factors that contribute to its development.

The work she’s doing is revolutionary in many ways, especially in terms of how we approach breast cancer screening and prevention. By opening QT breast imaging centers and writing educational materials, she’s creating accessibility to better healthcare options that weren’t previously available to most women. 

Her centers provide a more comfortable, less invasive, and potentially more effective way to screen for breast cancer, while her educational materials help women understand how to take control of their breast health proactively.

I’m so proud to be sharing her work here on How Humans Heal.

Dr. Simmons’ Journey to Integrative Medicine

Dr. Simmons’ journey wasn’t a single moment of clarity but rather an evolution. Coming from a breast cancer family, she never knew a time in her life when she didn’t know about breast cancer. 

Her first cousin, Linda Creed, was a singer-songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s who wrote “The Greatest Love of All.” Linda died of metastatic breast cancer at age 37, just one month after Whitney Houston released the song. 

This loss gave birth to Dr. Simmons’ life’s purpose, leading her to become the first doctor in her family, the first fellowship-trained breast surgeon in Philadelphia, and the first oncoplastic surgeon in Pennsylvania.

She then saw her aunt diagnosed with breast cancer after having Graves’ disease, and then her mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer followed. But it was when she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer that she realized that a whole new approach was needed. 

The Turning Point: Personal Health Crisis

About 15 years into her career, while running a breast surgery practice and cancer program, Dr. Simmons experienced her own health crisis. 

Despite being one of the most high-functioning people you might ever meet – running her breast surgery practice, managing a cancer program for her hospital, being a wife, mother, athlete, and philanthropist – she suddenly couldn’t walk across a room without losing breath. 

After an intensive three-day workup, she found herself in the office of her friend and colleague, hearing words she herself had said to countless women: she needed surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and would be on lifelong medication.

Though these were words she said to women daily without hesitation, hearing them directed at her had a completely different impact. An inner voice kept telling her there was something more to find. She knew this was the gold standard of care – what she had advised women to do every day for 15-16 years – but she couldn’t quiet this persistent voice telling her to look for another answer, another solution.

This experience led her to explore nutrition, something she realized she knew very little about despite her extensive medical training. As a conventionally trained physician who attended one of the finest medical schools in the United States, she had received only 15 hours of nutrition education in her first year of medical school – the minimum requirement. This was out of ten years of higher-level training, including four years of medical school, five years of surgical residency, and one year of fellowship.

She entered a certificate program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, though initially skeptical about what more she could learn. It was there that she encountered Dr. Mark Heyman, a functional medicine physician who would completely change her perspective on medicine. 

Though initially skeptical of the term “functional medicine physician,” her own health crisis had humbled her enough to listen with an open mind. What she learned over those two hours would not only transform her path to healing but would also reshape the remainder of her career.

Understanding the Root Causes of Breast Cancer

One of the main revelations Dr. Simmons had was that conventional medicine focuses on the wrong thing. The tumor isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom of the problem. Unless we figure out what’s driving that symptom, removing the tumor doesn’t address why it was there in the first place. 

Most women who get breast cancer don’t die of breast cancer – they die of heart disease, either because it’s the same inflammation at the core or because almost all breast cancer treatments cause heart disease.

We need to shift away from talking about “curing” breast cancer, as there’s really no such thing. Instead, thegoal should be helping people build their health, make them resilient, and create an environment that promotes wellness rather than one that fosters disease. 

This requires examining every aspect of someone’s life – finding the root cause of inflammation while simultaneously helping them establish the foundations of health.

These foundations include creating a nourishing diet, proper hydration, avoiding toxins, prioritizing sleep, incorporating appropriate movement, establishing detoxification practices, removing “social trash” from their lives, and living with purpose. 

Dr. Simmons believes that the main predictor of why we’re here and how long we’re here is our purpose – as long as we’re serving our purpose and living our purpose, we generally will live, and when our purpose is complete, that’s when we move on to the next world.

This comprehensive approach represents a fundamental shift from conventional medicine’s focus on treating symptoms to addressing the underlying causes of disease. It’s about creating an environment in the body where health can thrive, rather than just fighting against disease.

The Systemic Problems in Conventional Healthcare 

Dr. Jenn shares that the current healthcare system is designed around treating symptoms rather than promoting health. Physicians and practitioners are unintentional victims of this system because they only get paid when people are sick. 

She says “There’s no reward for keeping people healthy, and doctors receive minimal education about nutrition – just 15 hours in their first year of medical school. The newer generation won’t tolerate this system; they want practitioners who walk their talk and explain the “why” behind their recommendations.”

This system is very much by design, leading to a never-ending game of “whack-a-mole” where treating one symptom leads to another, requiring another drug, which leads to another symptom, and eventually requiring hospitalization. The physicians and practitioners inside this system are often unaware victims, as they have no way to be compensated for keeping people healthy.

Making the transition to integrative medicine requires a huge commitment and leap of faith. As Dr. Simmons points out, how many people are willing to walk away from being a department head with an extremely lucrative job to start over at age 50? Most doctors aren’t gamblers – they chose medicine because it was a steady profession. Going into the alternative space is scary and takes tremendous courage.

That being said, integrative/functional/naturopathic medicine is really the medicine of the future. 

The upcoming generation will not accept the “do as I say, not as I do” approach. They want practitioners who embody health themselves and can explain the reasoning behind their recommendations. They’re questioning things that don’t make logical sense, like how processed food could possibly be equivalent to real food.

What makes the current healthcare system particularly challenging is how it’s normalized people feeling unwell. We’ve normalized being tired, gaining weight, not being able to do what we used to do, not sleeping well, and aging poorly. We’ve normalized all these things because conventional doctors don’t know what to do about them. They’re not trained to address these issues, and they don’t know how to say “I don’t know,” so they say it’s “normal.”

But there’s a crucial difference between what’s normal and what’s common. While most Americans aren’t healthy – less than 10% have ideal metabolic health – we shouldn’t consider this normal. We’ve been told you can be overweight and healthy, but that’s not true. These are terrible statistics, yet we’ve normalized them.

Prevention and Root Causes of Breast Cancer 

The encouraging news is that 80% of chronic disease is preventable. Breast cancer, like many chronic diseases, is both an environmental and metabolic disease that we can largely control through what we eat, drink, breathe, and put in, on, and around us. 

While we can’t control factors like age or viral exposures, these are small compared to the elements we can influence.

The causes of breast cancer include chronic inflammation from diet, particularly processed foods that have been transformed into states our bodies don’t recognize as food. We are modern beings living on an old gene code – our bodies know how to recognize real food, but when we feed them “Frankenfoods” and food-like substances, they don’t know how to respond properly.

A sedentary lifestyle is another major factor, though over-exercise can be equally problematic. 

Stress is also a major factor. Our bodies are designed to understand two states: safety and danger, with danger being primitive (like running from a predator) rather than modern stressors like traffic or family disputes. When we’re in a stressed state, blood flow is shunted away from non-essential organs, including the breasts, leading to toxic buildup.

Other significant factors include radiation exposure from repeated mammograms, chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes, thyroid disease, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and PMS. Chronic infections from viruses, fungi, mold, Lyme disease, parasites, and bacteria can also play a role, though they’re only problematic if the immune system is compromised.

Heavy metals pose a significant risk, whether they’re in drinking water, dental amalgams, food, or cosmetics. We need to be mindful about metal amalgams in our mouths and have them safely removed if present. It’s important to check your drinking water quality through resources like the Environmental Working Group (ewg.org). Recent reports have highlighted concerns about heavy metals in certain dark chocolates, and many commercially available cosmetic lines still use heavy metals in their product development.

Chemical exposures from pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and preservatives are all highly inflammatory and have xenoestrogen properties. Chronic antibiotic use and chronic dental infections are also significant concerns. People often walk around unknowingly with chronic dental infections, and if you’ve ever had a root canal, that’s essentially a dead tooth. Even if you don’t feel it, there’s almost certainly an infection there.

Frequent toxin exposure is definitely a critical factor. Alcohol has been in the news repeatedly, and this time correctly. For many years, we were told that a glass of red wine was good for the heart, but now we know the alcohol industry did a really good job of convincing people otherwise. Because alcohol was so normalized and socially acceptable, people did not heed the warnings. The bottom line is that alcohol is a known carcinogen that causes at least eight kinds of cancer, with breast cancer being one of them.

Smoking is similarly problematic. While people generally associate smoking with lung cancer, it’s also a risk factor for breast cancer and cervical cancer. This is because smoking creates a chronic inflammatory state – you’re introducing toxins into your body multiple times a day, overwhelming your body’s ability to clear them. 

We all have an allostatic load that we can deal with, and when we exceed that, dysfunction occurs. Some people exceed it at 30, others at 40, 50, or 60 years old. We’re all different in our ability to detoxify and in the amount of exposures we have daily.

Chronic constipation is another significant issue because one of the major ways we clear toxins from our body is through our stool. This is especially important when we talk about estrogen detoxification – we break estrogen down into byproducts and then eliminate those byproducts in our stool. If we’re not doing that effectively, these toxins come back into circulation. 

Our livers are busy enough trying to get rid of toxins the first time; they don’t want to deal with them twice. Moving your bowels less than once a day is considered chronic constipation, though even once a day might not be enough.

Insomnia is a huge problem because sleep is where healing happens. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not healing, and if you’re not healing, you’re not detoxifying or repairing. This is where cancer can develop. Chronic sleep deprivation, being a “short sleeper,” and night shift work all fall under this category of risk factors.

Unresolved trauma is significant because if you don’t deal with trauma, it will manifest as physical illness. Chronic stress, whether from a difficult relationship, bad marriage, horrible boss, or being a caregiver to a sick family member, keeps us in a sympathetic drive state far longer than we’re meant to be.

It’s not the stress itself that matters, but your perception of the stress and how you’re dealing with it. The stressors will always be there – divorce, job loss, unwanted moves, job changes – these are all major life events. What matters is having good tools to deal with stress healthfully, because turning to alcohol, pills, or other unhealthy coping mechanisms only works against you.

To create a prevention plan, you need to think about eating in a way that’s nourishing, optimizing your metabolic health, prioritizing sleep, and getting daily movement. The type of movement needed often depends on your age – you can focus more on cardiovascular exercise when premenopausal, but as you move into the postmenopausal years, your goal should be muscle building or preservation, as this is the center of your metabolic health.

You also need to think about minimizing toxins you put in, on, and around you, implementing detoxification practices, and developing effective stress management techniques. Living with purpose and joy is equally important. When you’re checking all these boxes, you’re likely to live a less inflamed life, which is the key to prevention.

A New Approach to Breast Cancer Screening

Dr. Simmons recommends three main components for breast cancer screening. First is self-breast examination, because no one knows your body better than you do. She emphasizes that every woman thinks her breasts are lumpy – she hasn’t met a single woman in thousands of examinations who says her breasts aren’t lumpy. The key is to know what your lumps feel like when they’re “normal” so you can identify when there’s been a change.

The second component is the Auria test, which Dr. Simmons recommends twice a year. This test uses a small piece of litmus paper placed in the eye to collect fluid and test for two inflammatory proteins (S100A and S100A9) associated with the earliest stages of breast cancer. 

The test is 93% sensitive, meaning if you have breast cancer, it will detect it 93% of the time – far better than mammogram accuracy. If you have a clinically significant result, there’s a 58% specificity, meaning that percentage of the time you actually have breast cancer, and 42% of the time you may have the inflammatory proteins that precede cancer development.

The third component is the QT scan, recommended if you have a clinically significant Auria result. This innovative imaging technology uses circumferential sound waves through a warm water bath to create a true 3D reconstruction of the breast without pain, compression, or radiation. Dr. Simmons has opened the first independent imaging center on the East Coast called Perfection Imaging, with an additional center in California.

This screening approach is revolutionary because it’s creating an experience for women that they won’t avoid. Breast cancer is scary enough, and we need to take the trauma out of breast cancer screening. The QT scan provides a spa-like experience where you’re in a room with dimmed lights, on a comfortable table, with your breast in a warm water bath. This will forever change how we screen for breast cancer.

Dr. Simmons feels strongly that we should not be using a test to screen for breast cancer that causes breast cancer. The conventional mammogram approach, while standard, involves radiation exposure that increases breast cancer risk with each screening. The more mammograms you have in your lifetime, the higher your risk becomes of developing breast cancer.

This is particularly concerning when we consider that most people who are in the mammographic screening program are getting screened every year, starting maybe at age 35 or 40, and continuing year after year until they’re 70 or 80. Dr. Simmons has even seen 90-year-olds still going in for their yearly mammograms. 

We need to recognize that radiation exposure, whether from mammograms, X-rays, or radiation treatment in childhood, has a significant impact on breast cancer risk.

Taking Control of Your Health

Health doesn’t happen in a doctor’s office, hospital, surgical suite, or chemotherapy suite – it happens at home with the things we do every day. We have much more control than we think, and tests like Auria can inform us when to take action. Dr. Simmons is working to open fifty QT imaging centers by 2025 to make this technology accessible to everyone who wants it.

In the meantime, everyone in the United States can start with the Auria test at home (available at Auria.care). Even if you don’t have access to a QT center, if you get a clinically significant result, you should still get imaging. If they can’t find anything on that imaging, it’s okay – it means the process is so small that you have the opportunity now to address the inflammation in your breast and use this knowledge to optimize your health.

When we grow our health, disease tends to go away. As discussed throughout this conversation, health promotion happens through daily choices about what we eat, how we move, how we manage stress, and how we avoid toxins. We don’t have to be victims of our environment – we can take control of it. 

This approach represents a fundamental shift in how we think about breast cancer prevention and treatment. It’s not about waiting for disease to occur and then fighting it – it’s about creating an environment in our bodies where disease is less likely to develop in the first place. Through education, early detection, and comprehensive lifestyle changes, we can work toward a future where breast cancer becomes less prevalent and where women have more control over their breast health outcomes.

The beauty of this approach is that it works not just for breast cancer prevention but for overall health. These principles apply to preventing and addressing most chronic illnesses. Whether you’re dealing with breast cancer, cervical cancer, autoimmune conditions, or other health challenges, the fundamental approach remains the same – address the root causes, reduce inflammation, and create an environment in your body where health can thrive.

The goal isn’t just to prevent or treat breast cancer – it’s to optimize overall health and create resilience in the body. When we focus on building health rather than just fighting disease, we create an environment where disease is less likely to develop in the first place. Through education, early detection, and comprehensive lifestyle changes, we can work toward a future where breast cancer becomes less prevalent and where women have more control over their health outcomes.

The time for this change is now. The current generation is demanding more from their healthcare providers and seeking out practitioners who understand the importance of addressing root causes rather than just managing symptoms. 

By taking control of our health and making informed choices about our lifestyle, environment, and medical care, we can create positive change not just for ourselves, but for future generations.    

If you want to learn more about Dr. Jenn and how she can help you make sure to check out her website here.She also hosts a podcast called “Keeping Abreast with Dr. Jenn,”. You can also find her on Instagram @drjennsimmons and Facebook @KEEPING ABREAST with Dr. Jenn.

The time has come for women to take charge of their health and well-being, understanding that preventive care now leads to better outcomes in the future.

It is important to know that it is possible to recover from stress and trauma and truly heal, because you’re not likely to hear that from your standard doctor’s office. Keep in mind, they are not educated about diet, exercise, supplements, or stress recovery. 

I am living proof that it is possible to heal holistically and naturally. 

It’s possible to balance your hormones or to use hormone replacement safely and effectively, as well as to clear HPV and get a normal pap result, and to eliminate the effects of stress, trauma, anxiety and depression. I help patients with to do this in my practice every day – by phone and zoom, anywhere in the world. You can set up a one-on-one appointment here.

Once I meet with you one on one, we will create a strategic plan based on your health needs, including sessions with the health coach on my team to help guide you to implement my proprietary C.A.R.E. and Stress Mastery programs. 

If you’re dealing with persistent HPV I encourage you to check out my Say Goodbye to HPV Program. You can access it from anywhere in the world because it is online videos, with handouts, recipes, resources, as well as live group sessions and a private app, where I teach you to implement my protocol to help you prevent cervical cancer and other HPV-related cancers.

You’ll also get access to order specialty testing I recommend to help us understand what your body needs in order to heal, as well as vaginal suppositories. I’d love to teach you how to heal and protect yourself from HPV. 

You can also go to clearhpvnow.com. There, you’ll find lots of resources and stories from women who’ve followed my protocol and cleared HPV to negative. 

Thank you all for joining me for this fascinating discussion with Dr. Jenn Simmons. If you found this information helpful, please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes of How Humans Heal. 

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