Integrated Cancer Care: Medicine, Mind & Healing

Dr Chérine Bazzane spent years training as a family physician and teaching medicine. Then cancer entered her own family, and the system she understood professionally became something far harder to navigate as a daughter.

In this episode of The Wellness Algorithm, Anshu Bahanda speaks with Dr Chérine about integrated cancer care and the gap many patients and families experience between medical treatment and everyday coping. They explore why a diagnosis can unsettle even those who know the language of medicine, and how stress, exhaustion and uncertainty can shape the way people move through treatment.

The conversation also looks at the role of sleep, nutrition, emotional resilience and nervous system awareness in supporting patients alongside conventional care.

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Transcript

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AB: I’ve been in a room twice when my loved ones were given cancer diagnoses. It’s devastating. It’s devastating not just for the patient, but for their loved ones as well.
What can we do about it? That’s the question today.

Cancer is not only a diagnosis; it is a shock to the whole body, the mind and the nervous system. Even as doctors begin discussing treatment, the breath changes, the heart races and fear settles in before we fully know what to do with it.

Research now shows that sleep, stress, nutrition, immune function and emotional resilience can all shape how patients cope with treatment and recovery. So I want to specify: this is not about replacing treatment and medicine. It’s about strengthening it alongside conventional medicine.

This is Anshu Bahanda, and today on Wellness Curated, we’re exploring integrated cancer care: medicine, mind and healing. A conversation about how cutting-edge treatment and whole-person care can work together.

Joining me is Dr. Chérine Bazzane, who brings together evidence-based oncology with a broader, patient-centred perspective on cancer care. Together, we will explore what truly comprehensive cancer care can look like in practice.

I have a small request for you. I do these podcasts because I feel that if I can make a difference to even one person with every podcast, that’s amazing. So please help me. Please share these podcasts and do subscribe to them. It’s free, and the only thing I ask you to do is share and subscribe. Thank you.

Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Chérine. I’m so delighted we could finally make this happen.

CB: Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

AB: Thank you. And thank you for coming with all your various commitments. I’m really grateful.

CB: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

AB: Lovely. Now, the first thing that I want to ask you is: when someone is diagnosed with cancer, irrespective of the prognosis, there’s this overwhelming fear which seems to take over. It takes over the patient, it takes over the family. How can we help people with that?

CB: So, allow me to introduce a little bit about my work, if I may, and then answer your question from that angle.

I’m a family physician by first hat [meaning: by training/as my first professional role]. That means that when I trained in medicine, I was trained to look at the whole picture, look at the whole diagnosis, look at the whole person. Still with a conventional eye, of course. When you do regular medical, or mainstream, or allopathic medical school, which was 11 years for me to graduate family medicine, I was taught to look at the whole person, but never at their fears, never to know how to truly communicate with them.

So I did learn how to break bad news, which was one course over the span of 11 years. It was like an hour and a half. And that’s it. That’s about the training I had for how to break bad news to someone who has just been diagnosed with a serious illness, whether that be cancer or another illness, right?

And unfortunately, the cultural conditioning, or the cultural thought, is that as a doctor, you need to tell them, “Yeah, but you stay strong, you stay positive. Right?” And in my opinion, that is absolutely not what is needed at that moment, because that person just received a slap on their face.

And part of healing is to acknowledge the grief and the loss that is going to be faced in the upcoming months. Yes, not to be desperate — or despair, not to fall into despair, that’s the most accurate word. But dealing with the deep difficulty of the emotion that will arise is part of the healing journey.

And bypassing that is just bypassing the journey itself and looping into more coping mechanisms that are not going to serve the root cause of why the disease appeared in the first place.

So, first, acknowledging that the person in front of us just had an immense shock to their life. And that grief that they’re going to do for themselves and their old identity is going to go through phases: phases of complete denial, phases of raging anger at life itself and at themselves perhaps, for making maybe bad choices. Or, everyone has their own story.

AB: Has their way of dealing with it, yes.

CB: Then they’re going to go into bargaining — with life, with God, perhaps, you know? With, “Why did this happen?” and I’m like bargaining. “But if you give me cancer, then at least you’re gonna—” Right? They bargain [for] things.

And then they’re going to accept it. And this is where — I think this is the hardest part, but the most magical part. And then there’s the transmute, like the transformation. That’s where the healing happens.

AB: So how long do you think this process takes from the time they hear it to acceptance, on average? Of course, every person, like you said, is different.

CB: I’m going to answer from my experience, not from the books. Because the books tell you something, as if this journey is a linear journey.

AB: Right. That’s why I had you here, because I heard you talk and I decided that, you know, it’s not what the books say. Exactly. When you’re feeling something so immense.

CB: So the books say six months. That’s what the books say. And the books give it in a way that this is like a linear journey. Like, first there’s denial, then there’s anger, then there’s bargaining, et cetera.

What I feel is that in one single day, these people who are dealing with strong, you know, I would say storm in their life, they’re fluctuating all these emotions on the same day or the same week. Right? It could be two, three days of denial. Then they go into deep grief or despair or depression. Then they can have hope again or acceptance.

So that’s like waves of emotions that are coming and going, coming and going. And the waves start strong at the beginning, but then they ease out. And when you know they’re easing out is when you know that you’re finally into acceptance and integration.

So I think six months is fair. But in my experience, 18 months is the true identity shift. Yeah. Because if you take, like, the most common cancer that I saw in women, which is breast cancer, right? I always tell the woman, you know, between the shift in your life that you had to deal with, that first appointment with your oncologist or your physician who’s breaking that news to you, if you’ve been through surgery or chemo or radiosurgery and chemo, or whatever it is, right — for you to find yourself again, you have to have completed all of this.

So including if you’ve received surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, that’s about a year at least in terms of treatment. It depends on the protocols.

AB: Right.

CB: And then for you to integrate the experience, it’s six months on top of that. And then I think that is the window of transformation: 18 months.

AB: So I’ve been in the room twice when loved ones were given the diagnosis, and that’s why I asked you about the fear, even before we get into talking about integrated cancer care. Because, like you said, the fear was so overwhelming that just talking about the care, the treatment, it all just seemed to fade away.

So tell me about cancer care. What is integrated cancer care, and how do you approach it when someone is going through this diagnosis?

CB: I lost my father to cancer.

AB: Oh gosh, I’m sorry.

CB: I think this was the “why” I went into cancer care, although I didn’t want to go into cancer care. I even said, if cancer care was the only thing that’s left, I’ll quit medicine.

AB: Gosh. My daughter had cancer. That’s why I do these podcasts. Touch wood, she’s really well, but at that point, when she was one and a half, it was devastating.

CB: Bless you.

AB: So, I know, exactly—

CB: Yeah. It’s a journey, you know?

AB: Yeah, it’s a crazy journey.

CB: So, why did I start with that story? Because what is integrated cancer care? I did not have that answer, being a doctor who studied for 11 years. I was already a doctor and a specialist when my dad got cancer. I was already a family doctor in residency, final year of residency.

Believe me when I tell you, I had zero clue about any of what was going on, even with 11 years. Eleven years, right? But what I saw is that care is fragmented. This was clear to me. Care was fragmented. We had the oncologist obsessing about the chemo protocol and the doses, and that was about it.

AB: Yes, yes.

CB: And then we had the palliative team obsessing about morphine or not, and that was about it — like pain and pain management. But even when we got to the palliative team, it was already too late. We should have gone with the palliative team long before. Not for palliative care, meaning terminal care, but for active pain management.

AB: Yes, for active pain management.

CB: For active human management. Just pain. Pain is such a big chapter. Pain is not just physical pain. Pain is caregiver pain, it’s patient pain, it’s systems pain, it’s so much more than that.

But still, I was too young to understand because — also I was involved, I was a daughter, I wasn’t a doctor.

AB: You were emotionally involved in the whole situation.

CB: But the personal experience as a family member who is also a doctor — and he was a doctor, too. That full experience told me: if I have, presumably, all the knowledge, and my father, who’s a doctor, has all the knowledge, and we’ve been through that, then people who have no knowledge of biology and no knowledge of the medical system, and they don’t even have anyone on the inside who’s talking to the nurse or, you know, understanding the small little things that could really make a difference to my dad, like his food or things like that — what would they do? Like literally, what would they do?

Oh my God. And I was stunned with that realisation. And I think part of my inner soul going into cancer care was just to be able to save or salvage some of the pain that we couldn’t — or I couldn’t — do for my dad.

So there, I started working soon after I graduated in cancer care, and I realised that there is a need for more than just a family doctor to be there. What does a family doctor mean? A family doctor is someone who studied seven years of medicine and then specialised in a non-specialty.

AB: So this is like a general practitioner?

CB: Yes, but not just seven years. It’s seven years, plus four years of deep, deep residency and sciences and a lot of tools. Because if you do seven years, trust me, it’s really nothing. It’s like you know nothing. You’re just learning biology, but you’re not learning the clinical, the human.

Then integrated care started becoming obvious, and this was looking at the person as a whole, as an entity, and not just as an organ that is damaged or sick. Looking at fear, emotional pathways, hope, pain, psychological support, nutrition, recovery, sleep, movement, being part of their treatment protocol, community, being part of their journey, and getting the right people involved, and getting the right people talking to each other.

AB: Yes, that’s a very important point.

CB: I’m sure you noticed that.

AB: But tell me, at that point, people are so overwhelmed that they just don’t know what to do. Now you’ve got all these specialists. How do you manage who talks to them? Do they all talk to the patient?

CB: That’s a fragmented model. In the integrated model, you have either a nurse, an integrated nurse or integrative nurse, or a GP who is doing all the communication with the person and their caregiver.

AB: Okay.

CB: I come from Lebanon, so all the family needs to be involved. So sometimes I repeated the same information for 17 members. I’m not joking. So it’s important to have one caregiver for that, or two, right, for the person. And so one person should be communicating with one or two people at most, to keep that clarity. Otherwise, the communication will be fragmented.

Of course, the oncologist will come and communicate, but the oncologist is only, you know, doing the protocol. There are few oncologists that are integrative in nature, in approach. For example, I was lucky enough to work with my mentor and colleague back in Lebanon, who was an integrative oncologist by spirit. So he was the one who actually got me inside cancer care, and his approach made it possible for us to help more people, genuinely. Not just cure the disease, but feel well.

AB: So can you explain to people listening what it would mean to have integrated cancer care? So, what are the different things that would be offered to them and that would be handled?

CB: Yeah. I’ll give you an example, like a question. So oftentimes, I would get my patient asking me, “Doctor, is it true that sugar will cause cancer? Doctor, can I eat everything? Is red meat bad for me while I’m on the treatment? I was told I wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol, but, you know, I just finished and it’s my birthday.” Like, simple things. Simple, everyday questions.

Honestly, the oncologist doesn’t have time to go for the evidence, and fairly so. They’re too busy doing much more difficult things. Right, maybe. Not that it’s better or less, it’s just a different job description, right?

So you have to have a person who takes care of the lifestyle aspect, of the functional aspect, of the nutrition, gut health, movement, psychology, spirit — I mean, the morale, the psyche. And a psychologist, perhaps, on the team, an integrative nurse on the team, pain management.

So, this is the integrated model where the patient is at the centre of care, where the outcomes are based on their satisfaction and their quality of life, rather than if the tumour shrank or not. If I have an image where the tumour is shrinking and we’re celebrating, but the person can’t get out of bed—

AB: And the person’s gone into depression or something like that.

CB: How do you say this is health? This is not health.

AB: I remember the doctor saying to us at that point — amazing, brilliant oncologist — but [my daughter] was a baby. She was one and a half, and we were like, what should we feed her? Exactly what you said. And we were told — I mean, he said, “Whatever. Just make sure she eats. Give her chocolate if she wants chocolate, you know, give her whatever it is that’ll make her eat.”

So, like you’re saying, the oncologist’s job is to deal with the cancer itself, the organ that needs to be dealt with. Amazing.

So you have a nurse or a GP at the centre of it who deals with you along with your oncologist and who will maybe, to give some examples, recommend hyperbaric oxygen, or maybe—

CB: Maybe ozone therapy.

AB: Ozone therapy. Maybe a nutritionist, if required.

CB: And supplements.

AB: Supplements. Maybe a psychologist?

CB: Yes, a psychologist. And that gatekeeper is the one communicating with the whole team so that the patient doesn’t carry their file and fragment the file in different offices.
Even forget about cancer, just as an example: how many women do you know that have their files — because they have bloating and brain fog — at their neurologist’s office, and their gastroenterologist’s office, and their GP’s office, and perhaps their orthopaedic surgeon’s office—

AB: Because you don’t know what it is.

CB: Yes. So that is integrated care. That’s one contact point. Multidisciplinary team, communication inside the team, patient at the centre of everything. Outcome is not just organ-based, but quality-of-life-based.

AB: Okay, so just coming back to the fear aspect. What I’ve seen a few times is that people are being very strong on the outside, right, because of the state of the family. Like you said, families start falling apart, caregivers start freaking out, but they’re terrified on the inside, even though they’re putting up the strong front. How do you help them?

CB: If the GP, or the person or the nurse in charge, isn’t qualified to offer emotional support, then you use a psychologist who is trained in these types of matters. This is the real model of care.

But I would say — to add to that, I would say that the best, best thing to do is to train all healthcare givers, to train all practitioners inside an integrated department, to understand what is the true science of listening and the true science of emotional communication.
So it’s not just a psychologist who needs to take that part. I had to learn this myself. I had to learn that I’ve never been taught to listen. I had to learn what was said, then what was unsaid. I had to really, really listen deeper than what’s being spoken about. In my opinion, that is the forte of helping people deal with things they don’t even understand.

AB: Their blind spots, almost. Figuring out what their blind spot is.

CB: Exactly. You develop an intuition and an ability and the skill to tackle patterns and blind spots, as well. Blind spots that might be the reason why they healed or not. Truly.

AB: Now, tell me — you mentioned family, which, like, you know, I’m Indian, you’re Lebanese, a lot of my friends internationally, we’re all very involved with each other’s families. And very often what happens is: you want to help, families want to help, but it becomes pressure. So what advice do you give them, and how do you handle that? Like you’re talking about — one time you have to talk to 17 family members — what advice do you give them to handle the patient?

CB: Everyone who has an opinion, please keep it to yourself. That’s the first advice I would give, because even if you think you know better, at this moment, you don’t. And at this moment, if the person didn’t ask for your advice, probably your advice is a bit hurtful rather than saving advice.

So if someone asks for your advice or for your help, you offer it wholeheartedly. If they don’t, you just give love. Your job is to be present and give love, and to respond to the help that is asked of you.

Now, the caregiver who is really all the time handling medication, perhaps painkillers, handling care, handling night shifts, whatever it is — this is the person where they can actually advise or actually lead. You need one co-pilot for handling that journey. But not everyone is a co-pilot. Let’s determine who that person, or two people maximum who are doing shifts, are. Let’s determine what is the best way to communicate with the patient according to their preferences.

Sometimes talking too much is not good. Sometimes staying silent is better. Just holding space, really. Minimise visits, I would say. I mean, we know you want to come and support, and that’s beautiful. Sometimes, a short visit or a text message or a heartfelt gesture means so much for the person who, at the moment, is dealing with so much information, so much input, so much data, and so many internal fears and transformation that your energy isn’t required at the moment.

AB: Yeah. So, someone told me a story the other day, which happened with her. Her daughter was going through treatment. A relative actually — they didn’t allow anyone in because of her immunity — so [the relative], three times a week, would leave food at the entrance. I mean, that was just a simple gesture. She didn’t go in. She’d leave the food, she’d ring the bell and she’d leave. That is help, right? So when people want to help, find ways like this which can be helpful.

CB: Yeah. My best friend is going through a journey right now. She’s in Paris. So I know I’m supporting her from afar, but I wish I could just leave food at her door. This is such a thing that she needs, like gestures. Like, anticipate what they could need, without you being aggressive inside the space. Just be of service.

AB: Yeah, yeah. Because what I’ve seen is sometimes when — aggressive is a good word because sometimes when people are trying to help, but they feel like they’re not reaching, they feel like they’re being shut out, but they’re not. It’s just that you’re so busy dealing with your situation.

CB: Yeah, it’s not about you. Don’t take it personally. It’s about the person who is going through the transformation.

AB: Exactly. The other thing I want to ask you is that a lot of times when people are going through cancer, they completely feel like there’s a loss of control over their whole life, over everything they’d worked on. What do you use here that could possibly help them?

CB: Surrender. That’s a big one.

AB: That’s a very big one. Yeah.

CB: Surrender. Because the loss of control is what is needed to let go of the old personality that wasn’t serving, and that got you sick. So, this is the hardest thing. The hardest thing to do is to trust and surrender. However the process moves, do what you need to do, listen to the right people, who you trust and you have appointed to be your trustees at the moment, and surrender to the rest. And it’s so hard.

AB: It’s very hard, you know? Yeah, that’s very hard. I mean, when you look at Vedanta, that’s the crux of the Vedanta: surrendering to God, the universe, to a power. That is such a hard thing to do.

CB: And I do understand that.

AB: And, yeah, you’ve been through it, so it’s very hard to. And what about the physical exhaustion that people go through?

CB: Oftentimes, what I see is people demand so much of themselves, especially when they’re too tired to handle, as if they want to keep the old performance with the new transformational journey.

We want to be kind. We need to learn kindness towards the body. The body is going through this because, probably, we didn’t know how to talk to the body in the first place. The body is going through this because it had to revolt to get your attention on things you were not paying attention to.

The body needs kindness and compassion at the moment, and sometimes accepting the fact that you’re weak, and you need support, and you need merciful kindness to yourself, is the lesson. And once you accept that your energy lasts until 12 p.m., and that you can’t see everyone, and that, you know, just thinking about your food takes the whole day, and that a walk of 10 minutes equates to a walk of 50 or 60 minutes. But you show up for these little, little milestones, like these micro milestones. I think these are the micro wins that will be tremendously effective for your healing.

AB: You said something here which I thought was really interesting: talking to your body. Talk to me more about that.

CB: Yes. I think this is my mission right now. Moving from cancer care, I discovered that my mission is to help people not get sick in the first place.

AB: That’s what I was trying to get to.

CB: I felt that we did not learn the true language of the biology and the body. I felt that, what if? What if there was an encrypted language that was never taught to us as humans and doctors, frankly, that makes us miss the signals before symptoms?

What are these signals? And what is the language of the body? How is my body communicating to me?

I will give you an example. I had a patient today in my office who’s not a cancer patient, who suffered for 12 years, almost, with fibromyalgia, which is chronic pain. Very bad pain.

AB: Can be excruciating. Excruciating pain.

CB: Depression. And she’s on [antidepressants], so multiple, multiple problems. And she’s telling me about a brutally painful story in her life. The pain started at the same time that this brutal story started.

And she’s telling the story without any emotion, as if she’s not the person who is going through the story. Even I, as a listener listening to the story, I could feel my stomach cramp. And then I had nausea. And then all I wanted to do was to run and vomit. So I was feeling what she was supposed to be feeling in her body at the time of that story.
But because especially women, we were taught to silence our body. We were taught to be good girls. We were taught to, you know, be strong. The community wants us to be individuals. All of these fragmented, conditioning ideas lost us the connection with our body.

So, what is it to listen again? What is it to really understand when I’m too tired to get up and do what I need to do because I need to do it and people are counting on me? What does that look like? How can I be so aligned with what the body is saying, with my tension that is here, with that weird feeling as if it’s not me? Or how can I listen deeper to that?
And if I do, and if I learn the code with which my body speaks to me, perhaps that is the true key of prevention.

AB: I agree with you. And the other thing I actually think, which I say to people, is actually talk to your body. Talk to yourself, talk to your body, talk to your mind.

CB: I always do that.

AB: We think no one’s listening. But, you know, a lot of times people’s initial reaction is to laugh when I say that. But it’s so important. If something is paining, talk to it and say, “What did I do wrong? Have I, you know, this knee, have I used you badly, worn six-inch heels and danced all night in them?

CB: You’d be surprised to hear the answers. You’d be surprised if you listen. The answers are brilliant.

AB: So I want to ask you about identity and confidence, because that goes for such a six [meaning: takes a serious hit]. Besides taking someone to a psychiatrist and helping them through that, what would you advise people do? Is there something we can tell them here?

CB: I will say it. The psychiatrist is not the answer. Yeah, really. It might be the answer when things are too advanced. Let’s hope things don’t get to that point.

A psychologist is a great point to start, like verbal therapy. But I would say transformational journeys in nature, where you truly try to meet yourself. And I know this sounds abstract, like, what do you mean if I want to love myself or meet myself? The moment you understand what would be required of you to look at your entire psyche, at your entire subconscious, to look at your fears, to look at your conditioning, to look at your upbringing, at your values, at belief system, at your attitudes, at your reactions, at your behaviours — the moment you see the pattern, you can break the pattern.

AB: So you’re saying try and — you’ve got to help yourself. No one else can help you. And I guess that’s there for people who are totally shattered by the diagnosis as well, that what has led to this? What is the pattern? You talk about patterns, which you talk a lot about.

CB: You can’t give your power away when it comes to your health. You have to take your power back and you have to trust that you can figure it out, with the help of trustees who are professionals in the field.

AB: So for people listening in, do you have any tools or techniques which would help them? Because not everyone’s based here, not everyone can come to you. Our audience is all over the world. So what tools and techniques can you give them?

CB: Free tools that are tremendously useful are your first 15 minutes in the morning. Your morning routine, your morning ritual is as sacred as your health. Free that space. Don’t have noise in that space. Don’t pick up your phone, don’t read your emails. Sit with yourself, perhaps meditate, listen to what’s surfacing, listen to your emotions. Journal.
Journaling is a tremendous free tool. It actually has evidence-based, science-backed outcomes on quality of life in cancer patients, on healing after surgery, on wound healing. I mean, it’s crazy, the evidence on journaling, physical evidence. So these two tools are where you kind of release your emotions and where you align with yourself.

AB: It’s amazing that everyone talks about journaling. It doesn’t matter what field, what area. And I love my mornings. Those are, like you said, very special.

Now we’re going to do a rapid-fire round. I’ll tell you a word or a phrase, and you tell me your instinctive response. So, Google diagnosis after a cancer scare.

CB: You’re just condemning yourself to sleepless nights.

AB: Thank you. Detox juices during chemotherapy.

CB: Fad diets.

AB: Meditation?

CB: One million percent.

AB: Wow. The phrase “stay positive,” which you hear so much?

CB: How do you respond to passive-aggressive people?

AB: The most underrated tool in cancer recovery?

CB: Prayer.

AB: Oh, amazing. Amazing, thank you. Is there anything you want to tell people before we go?

CB: A human being is psyche, body and soul. Any illness imbalance inside a human being is an imbalance of all three, not just one. Targeting just organs is, I would say, a useless/missing skill.

AB: Missing the rest of the picture.

CB: Yeah, missing the rest of the picture. So I guess we need to work on all three to achieve true healing, not just the stabilisation of symptoms.

AB: Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Chérine. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I hope people start looking at things in a more integrated way.

CB: Thank you so much, Anshu. It was a pleasure.

AB: Take care.

That was such a thoughtful and grounding conversation with Dr. Chérine Bazzane.
If today’s conversation highlights anything, it’s that integrated cancer care matters because it recognises the full reality of what a person is going through. A person is not just going through cancer; they’re going through all this anxiety, they’re going through all this worry, they’re going through nervous system collapse.

Cancer can be treated, and it can be treated more and more successfully every day. Cancer care is becoming increasingly personalised, but treatment does not happen in isolation from the rest of the body or the person living in it.

The immune system interacts with stress hormones. Recovery interacts with sleep and nutrition. Emotional support influences how patients engage with cancer, and integration does strengthen outcomes. It does not compete with them.

As oncology continues to advance, the future of cancer care may become more collaborative, more personalised and more attentive to the whole human being undergoing treatment.

This is Anshu Bahanda. Take care of your body, support your mind, and remember that medicine and healing are more powerful when they work together.

Thank you. And we get you these podcasts for free. Our mission is to help people. We feel that if we can help even one person per podcast, that’s a huge service that we can do for you. Please help us by sharing it and subscribing to it. Thank you.