DoctorOz: Suzanne Somers on Her Cancer Misdiagnosis & Environmental Toxins

Whether you know her as Chrissy from Three's Company, Carol from Step by Step, or simply because you love The ThighMaster, which I do, everyone knows Suzanne Somers. She's here today. You go ahead and celebrate her. I love her. She's here today revealing her personal health crisis and her new health mission. She says saved her family's life. Please welcome my friend, Suzanne Somers. Oh, please. Dancing with the star superstar. You do everything. Well, clearly I don't. I'm not on the show anymore. You did a fabulous job. I did. You know, I wanted to show that it's not about your age. It's about your energy and your health. And I did that. I stayed on for five weeks, right? Yes. Yeah. Very well. Can you share your age with everybody? Are you bashful about that or is it okay? No, I celebrate it. 68. 68. I want you to keep that in the back of your mind because a lot of things we're going to talk about are issues that a lot of folks think are attributed to age. And, in fact, you're arguing. And this is a fantastic book. It's called Toxic. Suzanne does one thing very well, and she does it very passionately, which is write books. And this is one of the ones I think you're most passionate about. I am. This is a very personal story for you. It's a journey that you started on because you were trying to figure out what was going on with your family. What was the inspiration? Well, our house burned down, and so that's like something to deal with. And then we moved into this beautiful leased house on the mountain overlooking Malibu. It was so beautiful, I thought, let's buy this and, you know, not rebuild and go through all the trouble. in the four years that we lived there we started getting sick my husband's eyes went red and watery and it made him look so much older than he is and and um and then and then he started developing facial tics and facial spasms and then my stomach my i was eating right and exercising and my stomach i wake up with a flat stomach and by the end of the day my stomach was a basketball anybody have that basketball stomach yeah basketball stomach the bloat it's oh it's the lowest it's terrible and so I couldn't depend on what I was going to wear what how I was going to look and um and then my granddaughter started getting sick and they lived in a different house and I couldn't figure out what was going on but what I was really worried about was my husband was we went to two doctors diagnosed with Parkinson's or pre-Parkinson's and I'd say no no no no no he is so healthy the guy eats fruits and nuts all his life he eats so healthy and then I ended up in the hospital for six days I was in anaphylactic shock I was rushed to the emergency room and the ER doctor kept saying why can't you breathe why can't you breathe and I'm going I don't know anaphylactic shock is you can die from it and it's one of the scariest so you're allergic to something but you don't know what it is I don't know what it is I don't know why I'm in the hospital i'm in the hospital i had rash all over my body i mean in my nose in my ear every rash and my extremities my hands blew up my feet blew up and the doctor comes in and he says you got cancer oh and he said i have never seen so much cancer now can you imagine how i felt i i live a healthy life and i had beat cancer 15 years ago i and and um it was confirmed by six doctors six days in a row and each one would validate what the first doctor said you had cancer right and the widespread cancer widespread cancer and the doctor said what we can do is we can start you on chemotherapy today well because i live a natural life i said you know with all due respect i i would rather die he said well then i think you need to think about getting your things in order and so I looked at my husband and I said what has happened to our life and he is spasming in his face and a chronic nose and things and something something was eating us and now cancer is that what it is well it it it um I finally had surgery on the sixth day they opened my neck to go in and they said you have a mass on your lung it's so large it's it's covering your liver he said you have so many tumors in your chest we can't count them they all have masses in them and uh when i was wheeled into surgery i said goodbye to my husband as though it was the last time i was ever going to see him and um i had a this a little caveat the night before the surgery i you know I heard a voice and it was like a microphone came on, but I guess it was in my mind. And I looked at my husband who was holding me in my little bed. My children were asleep at my feet. And the voice said, it's not who you are. It's not what you do. It's not what you have. It's only about who you love and who loves you. I still want to cry when I hear that. And I looked at my husband and I looked at my children. I thought, I have more love than most people. And I was ready. I know what it feels like. I had no idea the story was... It was the night Obama was elected, because I know it was six years ago. I'm lying in bed, and I went, he won. Oh, wow. And I'm dying. That's what I thought. I know what it feels like to know. So how do you get from there to here? From there to here. So when the house burned down, and we moved into the beautiful house on the hill, I didn't know there was an unfinished room. I knew there was an unfinished room, but I never went down there, because it was unfinished, I didn't know there was standing water. And in that standing water was black mold, Stachybotrys, which is the worst kind of black mold, crawling like a little shop of horrors up into the drywall through all, it was everywhere, in the air conditioning ducts, in the heating ducts. I had seen mold in my closet, but I never thought much about mold. I did not have cancer I had mold and then it dislodged a dormant fungus called Coccidioides mycosis, everything got activated and so then I realized wow we have to get this out of our bodies and that's what we've spent the last four years doing we've talked about toxic mold on the show organized medicine, the CDC I think speaks for a lot of physicians like me we acknowledge that it happens in respiratory tracking causes infections of your lungs, eyes and skin irritation, some of the things you mentioned And I think most doctors appreciate, but a lot of us aren't aware of these deeper possibilities. And I bring it up because it makes you wonder what's really happening out there. Right. You know this. Yeast, candida, mold, fungus, they're all similar organisms. And so if you don't understand what they thrive on, which is sugar, you can set off an episode. Everybody's got a different tipping point. My husband was gluten intolerant. we knew that we didn't realize that his liver was overloaded with toxins from the environmental assault from what we were cleaning the house with what we were putting on our skin we always did eat organic food that the mold was his tipping point threw him over the top and evidently it was mine too and you know i talked to some i interviewed such amazing doctors in this book and a lot of them are worried about like the flooding in Sandy Hook one doctor Dr Shoemaker he said, they think the problem is their wet houses. He said their problems haven't even begun. And having experienced mold to the degree that I've experienced it, I shudder to think because insurance doesn't really recognize mold as an issue. You went on a journey for the book. You interviewed a lot of environmental experts, doctors, people who are just beginning to uncover what's really there. And because it's so difficult to tell if it's mold or not, but because it could be mold. People end up trying to search sometimes in places they don't expect to look. So when you actually did your homework and began to uncover some of these deeper opportunities for us to be healthy, what are some of the big takeaways? Well, I think one of the things we have to recognize now is there's an epidemic of ADD, ADHD, OCD, bipolar, schizophrenia, autism, asthma, autoimmune diseases, MS, fibromyalgia, lupus. Now, when you and I were kids, who did you know who had lupus who did you know who had ADD when did that happen we have to be alarmed you're hearing about more and more children with brain conditions so my granddaughters one of them straight A student Violet they're both straight A students, one has ADD and the other one has ADHD, mold exposure in their school, their house was clean but their school was not clean then she got bit by a Lyme tick so now we're hitting a tipping point, here's this smart girl really super smart who can't think, she lost almost a year of school because as an example bring the bring the plate to the sink and she'd sort of stare at it for a while trying to process it and this is common with children today so your detractors say that they're unconventional approaches are often dangerously wrong. What do you say to them? I never give advice ever. I always say there are a couple of ways to go. You can go that way. Great. I go this way. If you want to know what I do, this is how I go. I am 68 years old. I do take hormone replacement. I don't have any bone loss. I don't have any brain fog. I don't have senior moments. I am a productive member of society, I'm not a drain on society because my brain is working so I can keep on working, I I'm living the life that I write about, I walk my talk and I love that I'm able to be a messenger to women and that is one of the other reasons I did Dancing with the Stars and one night I started to cry because you're so emotional on that show and I said I am doing this for women out there so that they can understand that if you take good care of your body, just as if you had a Maserati you would never put inferior fuel into a Maserati. You would never wait till it all broke down before you took it to a mechanic. You listen to the language of your body. And that's what I write about. The language of the body, a new way to age, and how to thrive and survive in the greatest environmental assault in the history of humanity. And one more thing. People always say organic food, oh, it's so expensive. I always say, you know, it's more expensive to be sick. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss out on new videos to live the good life.