Mark Allen Ruegg: A Living Miracle

**Hal Elrod** (0:02)
Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.
My guest today is a living example of why doctors, experts, and statistics don't have the final say in our healing. Two and a half years ago, Mark Allen Ruegg was told he had only a few months to live after he was diagnosed with a stage for pancreatic cancer. Today, he has defied the logic of doctors and is here to share his unbelievable story that will challenge everything you think you know about healing faith and what it means to fight for your life. In this powerful conversation, I sit down with Mark to unpack his mindset after receiving that terrifying diagnosis, the integrative approach that helped him go from terminal cancer to cancer-free, and the mindset shift that may have been just as important as any of his treatments. This is not just a cancer story. It is a conversation about belief, surrender, and resilience, and the kind of faith that can carry you through the darkest moments. Stay to the end because Mark reveals the one insight that changed everything, as well as his healing recipe, both of which may change the way you think about healing forever.
Mark Allen Ruegg, it is so good to be with you, brother.

**Mark Allen Ruegg** (1:48)
So good to be with you, Hal. I can't believe I'm talking to you. We will get into it, but this has been very serendipitous.

**Hal Elrod** (1:56)
Wow. Wow. Yeah. I don't know the context of that statement, which is exciting. I'm going to give full transparency. You and I had a call scheduled today to get to know each other.
I spent about, if I have a call with somebody, I want us to do a little prep. I spent 30 minutes this morning just going, okay, who is this Mark that my friend Jeremy introduced us?
As I dug in, I'm like, I don't just want to have a call. So I texted you, I go, Mark, can we turn this call time into a podcast? I would love to, yes, we're going to get to know each other, but like you have a fascinating story. Diagnosed with stage four cancer, we have so much in common, life-threatening cancer, both took an integrative approach to healing, didn't just trust the doctors blindly. And we were both recently on Heal With Kelly, which is within a matter of weeks of each other. There's a lot of commonalities. So let's start here. For those who don't know what an integrative approach is, and before we started recording, you were saying that there's all this new stuff that you've discovered that you're sharing now. So you know what? The floor is yours, Mark. You begin where you want to begin. And at some point, defining what an integrative approach is and the approach that you took when you were given, and you can take us back to that time, like you're given this stage four cancer, you're going to die in four to six months. Like, how did you approach it?

**Mark Allen Ruegg** (3:12)
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy how we got here. And I will try to keep it as a reader digest version. That's hard, I know, I know.
It's hard. But dude, the reason I'm talking to you is, two and a half years ago, I was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, a very rare pancreatic cancer. It's called a neuroendocrine carcinoma. It's high grade. A lot of times it gets confused with a neuroendocrine tumor, which is what Steve Jobs had. They call that an NET, mine's an NEC. NETs are actually slow growing. There's different protocols in treating it. Mine, very high grade, very aggressive. They do what they call a KI67 to measure how fast the cells are dividing and multiplying.
Typical, like a neuroendocrine tumor would be around 20%. Mine was greater than 90%.

**Hal Elrod** (4:13)
What does that mean? What percentage what?

**Mark Allen Ruegg** (4:14)
So greater than 90%.
So it was dividing and multiplying fast and spreading. It had already spread. It was a four centimeter tumor in the head of my pancreas. It had already spread to my liver and my lymph nodes. My first oncologist gave me four to six months to live. We fired him.