Top Oncologist Warns: Nothing In Cancer Treatment Was Designed To Kill The Cells That Cause Recurrence — Except One Thing, And It Isn't A Drug

By Dane Rubin, ND, Oncologist

June 8, 20269 min read

The Most Misunderstood Phrase In Oncology

There are four words I said to patients more than almost anything else in 26 years of practice.

"No evidence of disease."

And every single time I said them, I understood exactly what they thought they were hearing. They thought they were hearing that it was over.

But that's not what those words mean.

That phrase was chosen deliberately. Not "cured." Not "cancer free." No evidence of disease. Because what we are actually telling you is this: with the tools available to us, we cannot find any cancer in your body right now.

Most patients are never told that a CT scan, a PET scan, an MRI, all have a floor.

Below a certain size, a cluster of cancer cells simply does not appear on the image. Depending on the scan and the location, that threshold is usually somewhere around 5 to 10 millimeters.^[1]

So when your scan comes back "clear," what it has actually ruled out is a mass big enough to see. It has not ruled out a few hundred cells sitting somewhere in your bone marrow, or any other organ. Nothing we currently have can find that.

This is why recurrence surprises people. But it is also why it shouldn't.

When a cancer comes back years after a clean scan, it does not appear out of nowhere. It was almost always there the entire time, quietly growing until it finally crossed the line into something a machine could see.

The biggest issue post-treatment is that surveillance isn't a prevention plan. It is designed to tell you when something has come back, not to stop it from coming back in the first place.

And for most patients, once treatment ends, watching is the entire plan.

There are real answers to all three. They're just almost never explained to the person they matter most to.

So I'm going to explain them.

The Real Cause Of Recurrence

Not every cancer cell is the same.

Most of the cells in a tumor are "ordinary" cancer cells. They divide uncontrollably, they grow, they respond to treatment, and when treatment kills them they don't come back.

But a small fraction of cancer cells are different. They're called cancer stem cells, and they behave nothing like the "normal" cancer cells.

A cancer stem cell can copy itself indefinitely. It can also produce every other cell type the tumor is made of. Which means that just a handful of them, left behind anywhere in the body, is capable of rebuilding the entire disease from scratch.^[2]

That is what recurrence is. Not new cancer. The same cancer, regrown from cells that were never killed.

And they were almost certainly already there before you were diagnosed.

Long before a tumor grows large enough to find, cells break off from it and travel through the bloodstream and lymphatic system into a different part of the body. They settle in the bone marrow, the liver, or other organs. This happens early on, and it happens silently, and it has usually already happened by the time anyone gets diagnosed.

Now here is the part I want you to sit with.

This is the same for every cancer.

Treatment isn't. Breast, colon, lung, prostate, they all get different chemo drugs, different surgeries, different treatment protocols, because the tumors themselves are biologically different. That's why oncology is so specialized.

But recurrence doesn't work that way. Whatever kind of cancer you had, it comes back for one reason: cancer stem cells.

Recurrence is not caused by what you ate after treatment. It isn't caused by the stress you couldn't avoid, or the weight you didn't lose, or the glass of wine at your daughter's wedding. Those cells were in your body before you ever got diagnosed.

You didn't do anything wrong.

But that leaves an obvious problem. If we know these cells exist, and we know they're what brings cancer back, then the next question is: why doesn't your treatment kill them?

The Gap Your Treatment Doesn't Cover

Because nothing in cancer treatment was built to kill them specifically.

There are two reasons, and each one is a wall on its own.

First, chemotherapy can't reach them when they're dormant.

Chemo works on one principle. It attacks cells that are actively dividing. That's why it's so brutal on hair follicles, on the lining of your gut, on your bone marrow, because those are the fastest-dividing tissue in the body, so they take the collateral damage.

But dormant cancer stem cells aren't dividing. They stop replicating and "sit still," sometimes for years.

A dormant cell is unaffected by chemotherapy. There's nothing for the drug to act on, because the drug's entire mechanism depends on catching a cell mid-division.

Second, they're treatment resistant.

This is the part almost nobody hears, and it's the worst of the two.

Cancer stem cells carry defenses ordinary cancer cells don't have. They pump drugs back out before they can do damage, which is why chemotherapy that works on the rest of the tumor often isn't effective against these cells, even when they are dividing.^[3]

• They repair treatment-damaged DNA far more efficiently.
• They neutralize the oxidative stress that radiation depends on to kill.
• They evade immune detection, which is what makes immunotherapy less effective against them.

So it isn't only that they hide. They're built to survive even when they're dividing.

What 30 Years Of Research Points To

In the early 1990s, researchers at Johns Hopkins were studying how cells defend themselves against carcinogens. They were looking for compounds that activate the body's detoxification enzymes, and one turned out to be the most potent natural activator they found.^[4]

It's called sulforaphane, and it occurs in cruciferous vegetables, with the highest concentrations in young broccoli sprouts.

In the 30 years since, it's been studied at Johns Hopkins, the National Cancer Institute, and MD Anderson across hundreds of published papers. It's one of the most heavily researched natural compounds in oncology.

Here's what that research points to, and notice how directly each piece maps onto what I just described.

It activates the NRF2 pathway.

NRF2 is the master switch for your cells' own defense system. When it's on, cells produce the enzymes that neutralize carcinogens and repair damaged DNA before that damage causes a cell to mutate. Sulforaphane is the most powerful known natural activator of it.^[4]

It switches your tumor suppressor genes back on.

Your body already has genes built to stop cancer. p53 finds cells with damaged DNA and either repairs them or forces them to self-destruct. p21 stops a damaged cell from dividing. PTEN shuts down the growth signals cancer uses to spread.

Cancer doesn't destroy these genes. It silences them. As it spreads, it chemically switches them off so they can't interfere. The genes are still there, still intact, just shut down.

And here's what almost nobody tells you. Treatment kills the cancer. It doesn't switch those genes back on.

So you finish chemo, your scans come back clear, and your own defenses are still sitting there switched off, exactly the way the cancer left them.

Sulforaphane blocks the enzymes responsible for that silencing. Research indicates this switches those genes back on.^[5] You're not adding anything foreign to your body. You're turning your own defenses back on.

Lastly, it targets cancer stem cells specifically.

Cancer stem cells survive by keeping a few internal signaling pathways switched on. Those pathways are what let them copy themselves without limit and stay dormant enough to survive treatment.

Ordinary cancer cells divide too, but they burn out after a finite number of divisions. A cancer stem cell doesn't. That's what makes a single one of them enough to rebuild an entire tumor.

Shut those pathways off and it loses that. It becomes an ordinary cancer cell with a limited lifespan, dividing like any other, which means chemotherapy can finally kill it.

That's where sulforaphane acts. It interferes with those pathways directly, reducing the ability of cancer stem cells to copy themselves, and in laboratory studies, triggering them to self-destruct outright.^[2]

But there is one problem, and it's the reason most people who try sulforaphane get nothing out of it.

The Problem With Sulforaphane Supplements

Sulforaphane doesn't exist in broccoli.

What's in the plant is an inert precursor called glucoraphanin. It only becomes sulforaphane when it contacts an enzyme called myrosinase, stored separately in the same plant. Chewing raw sprouts ruptures the cells, the two make contact, and sulforaphane is produced.

No enzyme, no sulforaphane. And myrosinase is fragile. Heat destroys it.

Which is where nearly every supplement falls apart. Most use a heat-treated seed extract. The label says sulforaphane. What's in the capsule is glucoraphanin with no enzyme left to convert it.

That's why people try sulforaphane, feel nothing, and conclude it doesn't work. They were never taking sulforaphane. They were taking an inactive precursor.

The second problem is dose. The amounts used in research are far higher than you'd get from food.

So you need a supplement that preserves active myrosinase, and that tests how much real sulforaphane it produces rather than how much glucoraphanin it contains. Most don't disclose their yield at all, because if they measured it honestly there wouldn't be much to report.

The one I found that solves both is called BROC, by a company called Nivora.

The myrosinase is intact, so the conversion actually happens. The yield is third-party verified. And the dose is in line with what the research uses.

It's non-hormonal and safe to take alongside standard treatment. Bring the panel to your next appointment if you want — there's nothing on it that should concern your oncologist.

What Survivors Notice In The First 90 Days

You can't feel a supplement working on cells too small to see. Nobody can.

But a lot of survivors are left with side effects from treatment that never fully went away. Fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. Trouble concentrating. Numbness or tingling in the hands and feet. If that's you, it's cellular damage your body hasn't finished clearing, and NRF2 is the pathway responsible for clearing it.

That's where people notice something.

Weeks 1 to 2 is usually energy. The afternoon crash is the first thing to go. Most people report they're still functional in the evening instead of running out by four.

Weeks 3 to 4 is mental clarity. Focus improves and holds longer. Reading and work stop taking twice as long as they should.

If you suffer from post-chemo neuropathy, like tingling or pain in the hands and feet, then weeks 6 to 12 is usually when that starts to shift. It's the slowest of the three and the most noticeable when it moves. Temperature sensation typically returns before touch.

None of that proves anything about what's happening at the cellular level, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But it tells you the compound is active in your body and doing what the research says it does. And unlike everything else in your follow-up plan, it's something you can actually verify yourself.

The Only Risk Is Doing Nothing

I'll be blunt about where this leaves you.

Nobody can promise you a supplement will keep your cancer from coming back. Not me, not Nivora, not anyone. The trial that would settle it has never been funded. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something they can't deliver.

But you're not choosing between a guarantee and nothing.

You're choosing between doing something aimed at the actual mechanism of recurrence, and doing nothing at all while you wait for your next scan.

That's the real decision, and most survivors never realize they're making it.

BROC comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Take it every morning for three months. If your energy hasn't changed, if you don't feel sharper, if nothing is different, send it back and you get every dollar returned. No forms, no questions.

So trying it costs you nothing.

Not trying it costs you three months. And those cells don't pause while you decide. They've been there since before you were diagnosed, and right now nothing in your plan is touching them.

Keep going to every scan. Follow your oncologist's plan exactly. Nothing I've said replaces any of that.

But if you've finished treatment and been handed nothing but a schedule and an instruction not to worry, this is the one thing I'd recommend you take.

Stop waiting between scans and start doing something about the cells nobody else is targeting.

Try BROC Risk-Free Today

90-day money-back guarantee. Individual results vary. Not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.