Dr Nina Fuller-Shavel discusses the use of injectable mistletoe as a cancer treatment in conjunction with the standard treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy.

Nina was working as a doctor in the UK’s NHS when she discovered in her early thirties that she had breast cancer. That was a decade ago, but that experience helped focus her mind on the reality of being a cancer patient and of the importance of treating the whole person not just the disease.

Injectable mistletoe therapy is used widely in hospitals in Germany with up to 60% of patients having it as part of their cancer care, but it is rarely used in the UK or the states. Yet results and published data suggest it can help a patient’s fatigue, general quality of life and may even be able to help improve white cell count, which could be critically important for chemotherapy patients who sometimes have to delay further treatment if their therapy causes their white cell count to drop too low.

Nina has now had patients who have been on the treatment for years and is keen to persuade the British authorities to adopt it as recommended, cost effective cancer treatment .

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The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on X and read further information about the podcast on her Substack newsletter.

Medical Matters with Liz Tucker has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 15 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Dr Guido Frank discusses his research in the use of ketogenic diets to treat anorexia nervosa. Although, his research is at an early stage his results appear do appear promising.

Anorexia is a disease which is one of the hardest psychiatric conditions of all to treat with a depressingly high mortality rate, so this work is of huge potential interest. Up to now, there has been no effective treatment for the disease and no medication has ever been approved for it.

Guido believes the critical key to treatment may lie in uncovering what happens in the brain chemistry of anorexic patients when they starve themselves. He argues by stopping eating, they actually put themselves into a ketogenic state, which calms their brain and makes them less anxious. But this has the consequence of stopping them wanting to eat again.

So Guido and his team wondered what would happen if they put anorexic patients into ketosis not by starvation, but by feeding them a ketogenic diet.

In an initial small study five anorexic patients who had regained weight but still had major food anxieties and concerns, were put on a ketogenic diet. Normally, in patients like this the relapse rate is around 50%, but in this case, all four patients who remained on the diet stayed healthy and the researchers also saw a dramatic reduction in their eating concerns and phobias. And Guido is now in the process of recruiting patients for a new study.

So could this work offer a potentially successful approach to managing a disease which has proved so intractable to treat?

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at or via PayPal.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on X and read further information about the podcast on her Substack newsletter.

Medical Matters with Liz Tucker has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 15 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Laura Delano, was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder when she was a teenager and would go on to spent 13 years receiving psychiatric care, both as inpatient and outpatient. In the process, she accumulated more and diagnoses, and was given more and more drugs. But - as she explains in her new book: Unshrunk – How the mental health industry took over my life and my fight to get it back, published by Monoray - there was a problem, Laura wasn’t getting better.

Despite being a high achieving student for whom it had once appeared a glittering future awaited, her life had fallen apart. She had dropped out of university, was unable to hold down a job and had tried to kill herself.

But then one day Laura had a life-changing epiphany - was it possible that rather than the care and medications she was receiving helping her, might they actually be causing her problems?

Gradually over several years, she weaned herself off all her medication – no easy process given the withdrawal effect of many psychiatric drugs . But the impact was transformative and today Laura has completely turned her life around.

So what went wrong with Laura's care? And why was the medical system unable to recognise how the treatment was making her worse not better?

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at or via PayPal.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on X and read further information about the podcast on her Substack newsletter.

Medical Matters with Liz Tucker has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 15 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/