When a functional medicine doctor gets diagnosed with stage four cancer, you'd expect the story to go one of two ways. Either he turns down conventional treatment and goes all natural, or he quietly drops everything he's taught and does exactly what his oncologist tells him.
Dr. Patrick Hanaway didn't do either one. He did both at the same time, on purpose. In this episode of The Trusted Pharmacist, he explains why that combination matters so much more than either approach on its own if you want to help your body heal.
Dr. Hanaway is a functional medicine physician and educator known for his work in systems biology and gut health. He was the first medical director of the Center for Functional Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, where his team published outcomes data showing their approach beat the standard of care. He's also a stage four laryngeal cancer survivor. Seven years out, there's no evidence of disease.
I've filled thousands of prescriptions in my career. This conversation reminded me that the most powerful things in medicine might not come in a vial.
Why "What Drug Treats This" Is the Wrong First Question
A medication works on a single receptor. It does one very specific thing, like a rifle shot. That's what makes drugs useful, and it's also why they can't be the whole answer.
Dr. Hanaway explained it in a way I wish more patients could hear. The receptor a drug targets doesn't live in just one organ. You aim at the heart and you end up touching the blood vessels, the liver, sometimes the brain. And through all of it, nobody's asking what tipped this person out of balance in the first place.
That question is what he's built his career on. Not what disease do you have, but which function is off. Is your body absorbing what it needs? Getting rid of what it doesn't? Making energy? Repairing itself? When you restore the function, you're not just managing an illness anymore. You're letting the body do what it was built to do.
What You Actually Need to Know
He Starts With Food, Not Testing
This one surprised me. One of the most respected testing experts in functional medicine rarely starts with testing anymore.
When a new patient comes in, Dr. Hanaway starts with food and nutrition changes and watches what happens over six to eight weeks. He wants to see how motivated somebody is before spending their money on labs. There's a practical reason too. If you test on day one and the patient changes everything by week four, you're now making decisions off a snapshot of a person who doesn't exist anymore.
I see the same two groups in my pharmacy every week. There's the patient who wants a pill to fix it, and there's the patient willing to give the body six to eight weeks of real food and real change. The second group is where the transformations happen.
Simple Labs Can Point the Way Before Expensive Panels
Micronutrient panels are getting a lot of hype right now. I asked him straight out what he thinks of the commercial ones, and his grade was honest: pretty good, not excellent.
So he often starts with cheap pointers instead. Homocysteine, which he likes sitting around seven to nine. The MCV on a basic CBC, a two dollar number most people scroll right past, which can flag B vitamin issues worth digging into.
He also hit on something I say at the counter all the time. Minerals work in ratios and relationships, not in isolation. Too much copper, for example, can feed the new blood vessel growth that cancer depends on. That doesn't mean zero copper. It means balance, and balance takes someone actually looking at your whole picture.
The Short Supplement List From a Man Who Could Recommend Anything
There's a supplement being marketed for every ill these days, so I expected a long list from him. I got a short one.
A quality multivitamin, because by his estimate the mineral content in our food supply has dropped substantially over the last century. Polyphenols with prebiotic fiber, because they feed the gut microbiome, which he called one of the most potent antioxidants in the body. And an omega 3. He's published research on plant based options like ahiflower oil that convert well, unlike flaxseed, which converts poorly in humans no matter what the label promises.
And what's overhyped? A lot of the longevity and mitochondrial products, including NAD and NMN. Promising but overstated, in his words. When a guy with his credentials tells you to slow down on the trendy stuff, I listen.
What He Did When It Was His Own Diagnosis
Right before Thanksgiving in 2018, Dr. Hanaway found a firm lump in his neck. The biopsy came back squamous cell cancer, sitting on the larynx with lymph nodes involved on both sides. Stage four.
He called colleagues at the top cancer centers in the country, and every one of them said the same thing: radiation and chemotherapy. He said yes to that treatment. Then he built the terrain around it. A ketogenic diet, based on data suggesting it improves how treatment goes. Fasting before chemo, drawing on Valter Longo's work. A feeding tube placed early, before he needed it, because a friend who'd been through the same cancer waited too long and paid for it. Acupuncture. And community. Friends showed up with bone broth and blended sardine smoothies for that feeding tube.
One more piece stuck with me. His heart rate variability wasn't budging until he started spending real time in nature. Then it climbed. Three months after treatment, no evidence of disease. Seven years later, still none.
I watched a version of this play out in my own family. My dad was diagnosed with stage four melanoma and started immunotherapy while doing many of these same terrain practices. Fifteen months into a planned two years of treatment, his doctors told him they don't see many people respond the way he did. The medicine did its job. The body he brought to that medicine helped it work.
What to Actually Do With This
Start with the six to eight week test. Before you buy another panel or another product, give your body a focused stretch of real food, real sleep, and lower stress, and pay attention to what changes. How you respond to that experiment is data, and it's free.
Then if you're going to spend money, spend it on the foundation. A quality multivitamin, prebiotic fiber with polyphenol rich foods, and a well sourced omega 3 will cover more ground than a cabinet full of trending products. Not sure if what you're taking is any good? That's exactly the kind of question to bring to a pharmacist.
Your Body Is Already Trying to Tell You Something
The biggest lesson from Dr. Hanaway's story isn't about cancer. It's that his body responded because someone finally paid attention to everything it needed, not just the diagnosis on the chart.
The same is true for whatever you're dealing with right now.
Most people spend years bouncing between appointments and half answers, treating each symptom like its own separate problem, because nobody ever taught them to see the whole picture.
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It's where you can ask the questions your fifteen minute appointment never has room for, get straight answers from pharmacists who look at the whole person, and learn to read what your body has been telling you all along.
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