Julia Schopick Interview

What You Should Know About “Anecdotal” Medicine That Could Save Your Life

Julia Schopick Interview "Listen...I've been searching Health and Wellness information for over two years. Then one day, by accident, I stumbled across this site, it totally impacted my life and changed my mind-set about completely. " Jim Davis a true disciple of Michael Senoff

Julia Schopick

Overview :-

Julia Schopick discovered alternative medicine when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Like many cancer patients, after one of his surgeries he was left with a wound that wouldn’t heal. Doctors tried everything, but nothing helped. So Julia took matters into her own hands and found a medicine that not only healed him; it healed him immediately.

She thought the doctors would be thrilled and curious about the magical medicine that had finally healed her husband’s wound. They weren’t. In fact, they were mad. And that began a journey for Julia to find more proven methods of treatments that doctors still consider “anecdotal.” And in this audio, you’ll hear all about them.

You’ll also Hear…

• Why most doctors don’t stray away from “industry standards,” when you should think twice about their advice, and options you have instead
• A method that regenerates the liver, helping people with hepatitis and cirrhosis
• What advice Julia has for those of us struggling with disorders
• A method that helps epileptic seizures that was even made into a Meryl Streep movie
• A method for treating autoimmune diseases like lupus, arthritis, and chronic fatigue
• What all these treatments have in common and why you probably won’t hear about them from your doctor

No pharmaceutical companies make money off the treatments spotlighted on Julia’s website, and that’s probably why you may not have heard of them before. But the best part about these alternative methods are, they’re usually cheaper and less harmful than traditionally prescribed medications. And in this audio, you’ll hear all about it.  

Audio Transcript :-

Chris: Today, we are talking with Julia Schopick. Julia Schopick is an author and patient advocate, also a PR consultant. In October of 1990 when her husband Tim Fisher was diagnosed with a brain tumor, her life changed dramatically. Julia then became Tim’s medical health advocate. For the next fifteen years until his passing in 2005, Julia’s first commitment was to helping her husband survive the medical system. With her help, he lived twelve years beyond his doctor’s predictions. Julia credit’s Tim’s increased survival and quality of life, at least in part, to the fact that she found several treatments for him that his doctors didn’t know about, treatments most doctor call anecdotal. She decided after that that one of her missions in life would be tell other patients about treatments like these, which she calls patients evidence based medicine. A year after Tim’s passing, Julia created her award-winning website, Honest Medicine. You can find that HonestMedicine.com. It is to help educate people with the healthcare system, and its many dysfunctions, but also to tell them about treatments like the patients evidence based treatments she found for Tim. Julia now has a book, and it talks about these four incredible patients evidence based treatments, and we’re going to be discussing that with her today. Thank you, Julia for being here today.

Julia: I am so glad to be with you, Chris. I admire your interviews so much.

Chris: Thank you, and through your research and your hard work and your life experience, you have discovered some amazing treatments to help people with all sorts of different chronic illnesses and cancers. This all came about from your experience though going through cancer with your husband, Tim.

Julia: My husband was diagnosed as you said in 1990 with a huge astrocytoma. By the way, that’s a very serious cancerous tumor, brain tumor. For the first five years actually, we did exactly what the doctor said, and did not do anything terribly holistic or terribly different. Then, I began to see that he was having terrific side effects from a lot of the medications and he of course had had things going wrong like his skin breaking down and all of that. So, I decided I better start doing some research, and I did. That kind of got us through until 2001. I’m going very quickly through this because he did have a radiation caused stroke in the middle of their procedures – several side effects of the treatments.

Chris: So, for his brain tumor, he had chemotherapy and he had multiple surgeries?

Julia: Well, that’s very interesting. Yes, he had chemotherapy. He had radiation, and this is something very interesting about brain tumor patients. A lot of times, they patients will have things like him not healing. Hydrocephalus is a big thing, water on the brain. He had all of those. When I was writing my book, I was talking about that he had just about every complication you could have. So, this was a problem in that by the time we got to the point which I’m going to tell you about in a minute where I found this lifesaving treatment for him, he had already had multiple surgeries not connected with his brain tumor. His first one was a brain tumor surgery. The others were to repair things that had gone wrong. As I had said, many times – he had trouble with the skin not healing in the very beginning, and this often happens by the way. Radiation is a killer to the skin. It’s a burn. Often, people who have had radiation have terrible skin healing problems. So, he had had the surgery in 1990. He had the radiation, and that of course, made his skin fragile. He had shunts put in. I’m going to give a link to your listeners to the whole story of all the different things that went wrong. In any case, he did not have a recurrence of the actual tumor until 2001. The doctor assured me that it would be an easy surgery. So, Tim went in and said, “Guess what? It didn’t heal.” It would not heal for eight months. After eight months, you have to picture this. What the doctors were doing was the standard of care. The standard of care in a situation like this with a non-healing wound, head wound or any kind of wound, is to keep operating. I know this sounds silly. It really does, but to keep opening it up and trying to find two pieces of skin that will hold together. His skin, as you can imagine, on his head got so fragile that they even went and took pieces of skin from other parts of his body. He had walked into the surgery in 2001 absolutely terrific. He walked in. He was joking. He was with it. By the time he had had eight more surgeries to try to close the wound, this was in 2001-2002, he was severely disabled. Eight surgeries in just a few months, and meanwhile I was doing all of this research. All of it together, 200 pages and put them on a CD, and it was all this stuff about wound healing because I said to myself, “This is a wound. The surgeons are closing it up like a neurosurgeon would.” The only way they know to do is to keep operating. So, I have got all this stuff. They promised me they would read it. They didn’t read it. I later found out, they just thought they were humoring this little wifey here. Then finally, it was one of the coincidences. Bernie Segal who was actually a friend of mine, he is a wonderful supporter, the author Medicine and Miracles. We were talking on the phone. He said, “You know Julia, there are no coincidences, just God incidences.” This was a God incidence in the name of Dr. Carlos Ramos. He is an Oak Park, Illinois doctor, and I was working with him for a client actually. He said, “How’s your husband doing?” I just broke down. He said, “Have you ever heard of Silverlon?” I said, “What, silver-who?” He told me this FDA approved – it’s not a cream. It’s not a drug. It’s really a different kind of healing system with just pieces of clothes that have silver ions in them, and you put on the person’s whatever part of the body, and Dr. Ramos’ case, he had used it for diabetic wounds. I was later to research a good deal about it. It’s also used very successfully for burn cases. You put it way over the wound itself, and it does some kind of magic which is explained in the article that I will give a link for, and the doctor at the hospital agreed to let us put it on. I don’t know if you know how unusual that is to bring something into the hospital that isn’t normal there, but this doctor, he had run out of tricks. So, he allowed us to put it on Tim’s head. The day that it was put on Tim’s head was the last day he leaked. He started healing right away. I was over the moon. Yes, my husband was severely brain injured. Yes, he was unconscious, and yes, he was almost paralyzed, but he was still my husband. What amazed most was that none of the doctors were at all curious about what this was that had done it. Well, it gets even worse. They actually got mad at me a few of them. One of the residents who had adored me before that, I guess since I was a passive wifey. He came up to me. He sought me out and said, “You know, Mrs. Fisher, I don’t think it was the silver that worked.” “What do you think it was?” “I think it was the Bancomyacin.” That’s the antibiotic that Tim had been on for six weeks. I said, “But, Tim’s been on that for six weeks.” He said, “I know. Banco” – they have little nicknames for their beloved drugs – “Banco is like that. It kicks in.” I was speechless, but I was also speechless not because my feelings were hurt, and I do have to admit they were, but because if the doctors aren’t curious about things that work that they’re not used to, then other people will die. I said to myself, “Well, none of these doctors are interested. I owe it to the world to get the word out.” I’m a writer as you pointed out, and I’ve done public relations for twenty years. So, I picked up the phone and I called the National Brain Tumor Foundation, and the story is a little more complicated, which you’ll find out in my book. They said, “Yes,” they would love to have a story about this. This is a common problem – this non-healing. Since the doctors were not that interested in the hospital we were at, that Tim was at, about this treatment, I was really crestfallen about that because I knew that other patients would be coming through those doors in the coming months and year, and they just wouldn’t take advantage of this wonderful treatment to help their skin heal if it wasn’t healing. So, I called the National Brain Tumor Foundation, and they were very interested in having this as an article, how I found this wonderful thing that healed Tim’s skin. So, it turned out that it was a cover story of their wonderful newsletter called search. So, that when the story went out, when people would get this magazine, this newsletter, they would see this story first. So, you can well imagine – I told you that a lot of people have this problem – I got so many calls, you would not have believed it. I purposely by the way did have my phone number there because I had a feeling that this would happen, and I wanted to help people. My phone was ringing off the hook. I could barely do my work. For more interviews on health, mind, body and spirit, go to Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com.

Chris: So, were people calling that were going through cancer surgeries or different kinds of surgeries?

Julia: Remember, this was the National Brain Tumor Foundation publication. All of them had relatives who were going through brain surgery and were not healing. The calls were from the United States. The emails came from all over the world, and I convinced the inventor of this product – his name was Bart Flick – I convinced him to send samples of Silverlon to all these places where the people were begging for it. He agreed, but he did warn me, Chris that the doctors might not be open to it. I said, “Oh, Bart, I’m sure they will.” He said, “Don’t be so sure.” Guess what? He was right. Not one of the doctors would allow the patients to have it put on the relative head. One girl called me sobbing, one young woman. She said, “My brother’s doctor said he was kidding, but when I told him about the…” – oh, I forgot to tell you this. I provided a lot of materials for these people to read, to give to their doctors, and apparently this doctor said to here, “Will this put me out of business?” He said, “Oh, I’m only kidding.” But, she was weeping. The upshot was that nobody got the treatment, and I was just heartbroken. One of them ended up making it by the skin of his teeth – the one I told you about. He ended up being on life support because he did have another surgery instead of trying to Silverlon, but apparently he made it in the end. Do you know something? To me, having somebody go through a surgery, what did they have to lose by just trying it? I think the resistance is as one of the people that I interviewed for my book, Burt Berkson who has a treatment that is also life-saving patient evidenced based medicine, etc. He claims that doctors are trained, and they’re trained to just take what they know from med school and from their medical magazines and from their colleagues, and never from a lay person. This is quite troubling. So, the main thing was that after all this I knew that nobody would believe my story. If you didn’t know I was reputable, and if I hadn’t found all these other similar treatments, and I hadn’t found that all of these treatments doctors don’t want to learn about. I knew that nobody would believe my story if I were written out. I think this one was actually quite convincing because it had been eight months. All these people had seen it because – because.

Chris: Right, but they’re not versed in how to explain it except for how you say the one doctor. Julia; Well, he explained it, and it’s in the articles that I’ll have a link for on his medicine so that your listeners can read the article. They explained in terms of silver ions and all of that, and I don’t even want to get into that because as you know, I’m not a medical person, but I decided that I was on to something here, and what I was onto was the fact that I knew – you know how you know in your gut – that there were several treatments out there that doctors were calling anecdotal, and by the way, I want to say up front that certain things I do believe are anecdotal. If I have an itchy nose and I put an onion on that itchy nose and my itchy nose stops itching, that is anecdotal, but one person and it just – it could have been something else, but something like silver, I know that there were other examples. Don’t forget, Tim’s experience really was for head wound, only one. It was in a sense anecdotal, if you want to say a story of one person. So, I said, “I’m onto something because I know that these doctors just aren’t being curious enough.” So, I set out to find other treatments that I could write about for honest medicine that were also life-saving that doctors were almost hostile to, the conventional doctors were almost hostile to. Believe it or not, the treatments that I ended up profiling both in this article that I will give a link to on my site for your listeners, and in my book, all of these treatments really have amazing track records, amazing. They’ve all been around for a huge number of years. The shortest numbers of years is twenty-five, and that’s for two of the treatments that it’s been used in the particular way. One of the treatments the ketogenic diet has been used as Johns Hopkins since the 1920s, and still doctors would rather use drugs or surgery.

Chris: As you research these different treatments, did you find that they all had a lot of commonalities?

Julia: Yes, and it was to me amazing because the commonalities were that as I said, they had been around for a long time, and they had a huge number of patients that have either been healed, cured or made better, whatever you want to say by these treatments. They all treated life- threatening either chronic diseases or very terminal diseases, in the case of one of them, which is intravenous alpha-lipoic acid, Burt Berkson’s treatment. That actually turns around terminal liver disease like hepatitis, cirrhosis, and it’s incredible. So, this was another thing that they had, a common characteristic that they worked on very serious conditions and diseases. Another one was that they all have champions, in many cases doctors, MDs, and in the case of the ketogenic diet, even though there are doctors who champion the ketogenic diet, I decided to profile Jim Abrams who is the father of a patient who was cured by the diet and has devoted his life getting the word out there. That’s another thing. They all have champions. They also have – and this is the amazing thing – patient champions, people who just say, “Okay, I’m out there, and I’m spreading the world.” In the case of low dose Naltrexo which is one of the three treatments, there are thousands of patients worldwide. There is a website that I urge people to go to called LDNAware.org which has all the countries that are using LDN. It’s incredible. The other thing is that they are not pharmaceutically based. No big pharma company is masking money off of them because they’ve lost their patents or they’re dietary, or they’re not drugs, and nobody even the doctors who are championing these wonderful treatments, they’re not making big money. With someone like Burt Berkson, he is not even marketing at all because he’s the only one doing the treatments because he just doesn’t trust – other doctors have done it wrong. Unless they go through a training with him, he will not give his secret of the intravenous way. Burt Berkson is actually – I heard him speak and tell the story in 1999 at a meeting, and this story blew my mind. He was a resident in a big teaching hospital in the eighties, and these two patients named Eunice and Don Goostree, they came into the emergency room with end stage liver disease from mushroom poisoning. Dr. Berkson was told there were no livers for transplants, and he’d just watch them die. Remember, he was the resident and was supposed to take orders. He was supposed to take notes and do rounds the next day. So, Burt says there was no way he could do that. He said, “I had to try to save them.” So, luckily who knew somebody at the NIH National Institutes of Health. So, he called Dr. Fred Barta, and he said, “Is there anything that might regenerate livers? You know there’s no harm in trying because these people are almost dead.” Fred Barta said, “Yes as a matter of a fact, there is. We’re using this substance called intravenous alpha-lipoic acid for diabetic neuropathy, which is the deadening of the feet. He said, “However, it seems to regenerate organs including livers,” and he said, “I can get some to you.” Burt said, “Yeah, I’ll be there.” So, Dr. Berkson went to the airport a day later, got the alpha-lipoic acid, infuse it into his patients, and guess what happened? They got better. No, wouldn’t you have thought – again are out thinking about my Silverlon story? Wouldn’t you have thought that the doctors would have been, “What did you do young man?” No, they told him that A, he must never do that again. He was chastised roundly because he had not followed orders. He said, “Besides we don’t have this in the formulary. You can’t give a drug that’s no in our formulary.” It was supposed to save lives. No. So, they said, “Never ever do that again.” Well, guess what? The next weekend, more people came in liver poisoning. The way Dr. Berkson’s puts it was, “Those mushrooms were in bloom.” So, he did it again, and guess what happened? The people got cured again, but Dr. Berkson says and this to me is so amazing, he says, “You know I was very lucky that the NIH was interested in my work. If they hadn’t been, I would have been fired, and that would have been the end, but since the NIH was involved, Dr. Barta was over the moon with joy, and said doctor came to this institution and had Dr. Berkson as the golden boy. Then, they couldn’t get rid of him, or the way that Dr. Berkson puts it, “They have to put up with me.” I think he does do some training of people. I believe he’s the main person, and his waiting list is now I hear getting up near a year because people are coming from all over the world. As he puts it, “I’m quietly saving lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.” To give him real credit, he does not charge that much to do it. For more interviews like this, go to Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com.

Chris: And, this is curing people from what kinds of diseases?

Julia: The mainstay what he had been doing for years of course was liver disease, end stage liver disease, hepatitis, cirrhosis, but then one day he had a patient who came in to him and said to him that he had a few conditions that he needed help. Dr. Berkson was able to help him with one or two of them, but with the cancer, he was not. This person had cancer, too. So, this person said, “You know, there is this person named Dr. Bernard Bahally in New York, and he just got this little office, but he claims that his treatment can cure cancer in addition to autoimmune diseases.” Dr. Berkson said, “Well, why don’t you go to see him? What do you have to lose? Go see Dr. Bahally.” So, a few years later, this guy comes back, the way Dr. Berkson puts it, a normal looking fellow, “Hello, how are you?” John says, “I’m fine, but I have…” he mentioned some little funny condition. He says, “No, no, no, I mean…” I think he had both an autoimmune disease, don’t laugh, and cancer. He said, “How about your lupus?” He said, “That’s gone. Dr. Bahally cured that.” He said, “How about your cancer?” “Gone.” So, Burt Berkson, remember I told you that Burt Berkson is curious unlike conventional doctors? He set out to learn about low dose Naltrexo. After this guy that is called John, that I’m not sure that’s his real name, came back and said he had been cured by Dr. Bahally, Dr. Berkson started doing research, met Dr. Bahally, and now does amazing stuff. What he’s doing now in addition to treating the liver disease with alpha- lipoic acid intravenously is he’s found a combination of alpha-lipoic acid and low does Naltrexo has cured several people of cancer, and several of them with pancreatic cancer. Do you know how difficult that one is to cure? One of the people interviewed for my book is Paul Marros, the first person he cured of pancreatic cancer. So, he’s now published three papers about his treatment of cancers with alpha-lipoic acid and low dose Naltrexo, and I’ll be having those up on my site as well. I can have links to those as well. Jim Abrams, his son Charlie, had intractable seizures. That means they just wouldn’t stop, and Jim, when Tim was so sick, Jim was trusting the doctors and this poor little baby was getting more and more drugged up. He was on, Jim said, about nine different drugs, a combination I think of two or three or four at a time, even had a surgery that ended up nothing worked. Jim started, just like me, you start, “Hey, I better do some research.” He started researching, and he heard about this diet called the ketogenic diet, which is very high fat diet that had been done at Johns Hopkins since the 1920s, but kind of fell out of favor when the pharmaceutical drugs started coming out. It was still being done I believe only six or seven cases a year at Hopkins, but because of all the drugs, the drugs were the treatments of choice now. So, Jim goes to Charlie’s doctor with all of the information and he says, “I think I really would like to try this diet.” The doctors said, “Don’t do that. It won’t work.” So, as a matter of fact, the same day, Jim had said, “I’m either thinking of going there or to a mall in Texas where there was an herbalist, and the doctor said, “Flip a coin, neither of them will work.” Jim did. He said, “I know it sounds stupid, but I flipped a coin and we went to Texas, and that didn’t work. It broke Jim’s heart.” So, finally after the herbalist didn’t work, they went to Johns Hopkins, and the diet worked. Jim told me sometimes these drugs will even seem to work for a few days. You don’t get excited right away. It wasn’t like Tim’s suture line healing because that had never happened before the Silverlon, but he said, “After I was sure that it was the real deal, I got angry, first relieved and then angry.”

Chris: How long did it take for the ketogenic diet to actually kick in? Was it like a week or two?

Julia: That I’m not positive about. I think it was about a week before they were positive. It was a short period of time, and by the way, with the ketogenic diet, you know how with anti-epilepsy drugs, the person has to stay on them forever? With the ketogenic diet, they just have to stay on them; I believe it’s a year. It’s high fat, practically no carbs, and less protein. I believe the ratio is 4-1-1, but that’s in the book also. I forget the exact ratio.

Chris: People can go to HonestMedicine.com to find out about your book, and then also find out about your book, and then also Jim Abrams, where can they go if they want to find out specifically about the epileptic diet?

Julia: It’s a wonderful site. It is CharlieFoundation.org. The rest of the story is that Jim said, “As long as I had this background in the entertainment industry,” the first thing he did, Chris was he put together a video of instructional types of things with Meryl Streep, and if you go to CharlieFoundation.org, you can even see that video then, telling people about the diet. One of the tech people on that short film that he did knew people at Dateline NBC, and before Jim knew it, the lead story was on Dateline NBC, and the doctor by the way was asked, “Why did you tell these people not to go?” He said, “Because we hadn’t tried all the drugs yet,” but the upshot was that after that show, Dateline NBC, Jim got piles and piles and piles and piles of letters, and one of them was from a woman who had had a very similar experience. From that experience, Jim made the movie First Do No Harm, again with Meryl Streep playing the mother, and that was a made for TV movie. By the way, people can buy that movie still. Go on Amazon.com, and look for First Do No Harm. I did. It was wonderful. So, Jim has been spending the rest of his life with the Charlie Foundation. He hired a registered dietician named Beth Zupec-Kania who is one of the people interviewed in my book. She goes around the world training people to do this diet at various hospital – India, Saudi Arabia. It’s incredible. So, he’s a real hero, too.

Chris: Also, you should say that Jim Abrams’ son Charlie is now a healthy and recovered teenager.

Julia: Yes, he sure is. Charlie is I believe eighteen years old, and he’s doing fine. Again, I’m glad to be putting the link to the article that I did about these four treatments so you can get the whole background on wonderful Dr. Bahally. Dr. Bernard Bahally had been working with high dose Naltrexo which is an FDA approved drug, at 50 milligrams. By the way, FDA approved in 1984 for drug addiction, and a few years later, for alcohol addiction, that’s high doses. So, we know it’s safe because it’s been approved at these high doses, and somehow Dr. Bahally found that very, very low doses, one tenth the dose helped autoimmune diseases but modulating the immune system. He started giving it to people with lupus – first MS. I believe MS was first. Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and as you said, several people with chronic fatigue had tried it. There are people all around the world who are using low dose Naltrexo now.

Chris: Julia, are there some other sites that people can go to if they want to find out more about low-dose Naltrexo?

Julia: There are lots of them. Each one of these treatments is something unusual, different from any others. I gave the things that make them similar. The things that make this different, these treatments different is the numbers of local champions and the fact that they put together all sorts of conferences about LDN, and the doctors themselves paid for these little trials. They can’t afford the big ones like the big pharamaceutical companies can, but they have websites. LDNers.org. As a matter of fact, I did a 116 page free ebook for International LDN Awareness week in October, which I’ll give a link to also for your listeners, and that will show you all the sites because I don’t want to offend anybody by leaving any out, but there is one that is www.LowDoseNaltrexo.com. That’s the site of Dr. Bahally’s childhood friend, Dr. David Brock. There’s one in England called LDNResearchDrug.org. There are also several books. Mary Boyle Bradley wrote, Up the Creek With a Paddle, about her husband with LDN and Multiple Sclerosis. There are several books about it.

Chris: So, Julia, we are just really looking forward to seeing your book, and people can go to HonestMedicine.com to find out more about it, but what do you say people right now that are saying with any of these autoimmune disorders, cancers? What’s your best advice? Where do they start?

Julia: To me, their best advice is to be open to other treatments because one thing I forgot to say when I gave all the things these treatments have in common is that the normal standard of care treatments don’t work that well. So, I would tell them to try these less toxic treatments first. I really would because there’s going to be one gentlemen who wrote a chapter in the book, Malcolm West. It wasn’t until he lost his insurance that he was to get better because he needed to look for a cheaper treatment. I would say please trust your gut. Trust your own research. If you don’t know how to research, go into the forum. Hire somebody to do your research, but don’t just listen to your doctor.

Chris: Great Julia, and if people want to get a hold of you, how do they do that?

Julia: I also have a Facebook page, and I’d be glad to give my email it’s julias1573@aol.

Chris: They can also go to HonestMedicine.com. Thank you so much Julia for spending the time with us, and we are just really looking forward to your new book.

Julia: Thank you so much, Chris. I enjoyed talking with you.

Chris: That’s the end of our interview, and I hope you enjoyed it.