Episode 15 - Holistic Approaches In Cancer Prevention And Recovery with Dr. Monisha Bhanote, MD, FCAP, ABOIM

In this episode of The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show, Dr. Monisha Bhanote, a quintuple board-certified physician and expert in gut health and longevity, discusses her extensive background and multidisciplinary training in pathology, integrative medicine, and culinary medicine.

She explains the importance of understanding cellular health, the role of oxidative stress, and the connection between diet, the microbiome, and disease prevention. Dr. Bhanote also shares her holistic approach to patient care, emphasizing personalized nutrition, the integration of yoga and meditation, and the benefits of incorporating phytonutrients and natural foods into daily routines. She invites listeners to explore her retreats, which focus on plant-powered longevity, and offers insights into her upcoming book, "The Anatomy of Well-Being."

Key Discussions:

🔍 Understanding Pathology and Cellular Health
📜 Holistic Approach to Health
🌿 Nutritional Insights and Recommendations
💉 The Role of Microbiome in Health
👨‍🔬 Yoga, Meditation, and Cancer Recovery

Tune in at https://www.beljanski.org/beljanski-cancer-talk-show/episode-15-holistic-approaches-in-cancer-prevention-and-recovery-with-dr-monisha-bhanote-md-fcap-aboim/

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Chapters

• 1:54 Introduction and Guest Welcome
• 2:33 Dr. Bhanote's Medical Background
• 3:23 Understanding Pathology and Cellular Health
• 6:27 Cellular Health Explained
• 9:39 Holistic Approach to Health
• 17:44 The Role of Nutrition in Cellular Health
• 18:01 Womabel: an exceptional dietary supplement specially designed for women to support overall health and wellness
• 34:44 Probiotics, Prebiotics, and Gut Health
• 37:51 Yoga, Meditation, and Cancer Prevention
• 39:31 Conclusion: Retreats and Resources

Transcript

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Sylvie Beljanski: Hello, Dr. Monisha Bhanote. We are very excited here at The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show to have you here with us today and you have a kind of extraordinary achievement, academic achievement. You are a quintiple board-certified physician and a gut health and longevity expert. Quintiple board certified physician is not something you see very often.

Would you tell us what are those five specialties you are certified in? 

Dr. Bhanote's Medical Background

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Great. So, thank you so much, Sylvie, for having me at The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show. I'm excited to talk to you guys today about my experience in health and wellness, and it really stems from my background and my background is actually I trained in Europe.

Okay. So I trained in Hungary of all places. And when I trained there, 1 of the foundations that their school was really strong in was the anatomy of the body and pathology. And I remember I cried during my pathology exam because I'm like “What is this? What does this have to do with treating patients?”

And then later, who would have thought that was how I would start my career in medicine. 

Understanding Pathology Specialties

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: So I'm trained in Anatomic Pathology, Clinical Pathology, Cytopathology, and then Integrative Medicine and Culinary Medicine. And now for people who might not know what those different things are, Anatomic Pathology is looking at your body, your cells, your tissue under the microscope to see the progression of disease.

So it can be anything from something benign say you went into the GI doctor's office because you were experiencing reflux and they put, they took a biopsy of the esophagus and the stomach to see what was going on to something even more malignant. Maybe you had a mass show up on your mammogram and now the radiologist is you have to come in and get a breast biopsy and they do a core needle breast biopsy.

I'm the person who's been looking at your cells under the microscope for decades. And that's just the anatomic pathology part of it. The clinical pathology part is where if you go to get your blood drawn, or say, for example, you have a pleural effusion or ascites fluid or something like that.

So that's more body fluid analysis or even you can think of clinical pathology when you have to have a blood transfusion. We're the ones who are also looking at that. And then cytopathology, which is even more detailed than those two is looking at single individual cells under the microscope and diagnosing disease.

So, what have I done? I trained in cytopathology at Cornell in New York City. I know you're in New York City. So I trained on the Upper East Side. And what we used to do is, if somebody had a palpable mass, or even if it wasn't palpable and radiology was taking it out, we'd go around the hospital with our little carts.

And we would take very small tissue samples. Smaller than I would say, a few millimeters, even smaller than that, sometimes just even like drops of cells and we would prepare slides to look at under the microscope so we could give something we call an immediate evaluation. So, that way we would know, do we have the lesional tissue that we're going after?

So, that's what I've been doing for my pathology career and then after decades of doing that and realizing, “Oh, my God, I know so much. I have to go help the people who are getting the answers now”. That's when I then delved into integrative medicine and culinary medicine to really come full circle about how the human body works and what we can do to make it heal

Sylvie Beljanski: And so it is this observation for so detailed observation of the cells that led you to become a cellular health expert. 

Cellular Health Explained

Sylvie Beljanski: What is cellular health? What is, what is cellular health and what does it mean exactly? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: What does it mean? Absolutely. So I have looked at probably, I don't, I couldn't even count how many millions of cells under the microscope, right?

Because a cell is such a small structure in the body and we have 37 trillion cells in the human body. With that, what we see as pathologists is that there's certain different morphologic features. The cell changes from being something normal to being something abnormal, going through this transition of diseases. It doesn't necessarily need to go to malignant, but there's pathologic changes that happen. 

Sylvie Beljanski: For example, you are able to see if a cell is inflamed, for example? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So, me and my cell model, we walk around together. I use this with my patients, right? So, imagine you have 37 and they're much smaller than this, but you have 37 trillion of these cells in your body and inside the cell, you have certain features.

So, you have your nucleus here. You have your nuclei here. You have your mitochondria. Everybody's talking about mitochondria these days. So, there's all these organelles that are inside of the cell and no, we can't see the mitochondria without, in just a regular light microscope, but we can see the nucleus, okay.

And the nucleus is what holds our DNA. It tells us who we are, how we're functioning, right? So, one of the morphologic changes we see under the microscope is the nucleus changes. In fact, I call it, it gets angry. So, when we have cells that are creating disease and eventually possibly becoming malignant,  these nuclei enlarge in size, becoming angry, and they actually grow within the cell structure, taking place of where the cytoplasm, which holds the other structures is, and not allowing the other structures to be there. That's why we often see when people are experiencing cancer that they don't have energy production because they don't have the mitochondria that are actually found in each and every one of the cells.

So, there is morphologic changes and these changes vary from tissue to tissue organ to organ. And I've spent a lot of time focusing on breast cancer. I have a breast cancer fellowship and I've also done bone and soft tissue tumors. And I've spent a lot of time in the GI when I actually worked in New York, I was working at a GI doctor's office and the number of colonoscopies, endoscopies they were doing, I was looking at tons and tons of biopsies and inflammation cells will influence that. And at the end of the day, what the body is trying to do, the body is trying to survive.

So, if those cells cannot survive in the state that they are, they start transforming.

Holistic Approach to Health

Sylvie Beljanski: As an expert, as a doctor, how do you help your patient when you see that something like that is happening?

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, so when I see that their cells are angry, we really come look at it from a holistic approach. So, we want to look at it, and what are the things we can control as an individual?

Because there are going to be some things that are out of our control, but we want to take the entire approach from a lifestyle perspective. What we fuel our body with, so what we're eating, how we move our body is meant to move, how we sleep. It's not just that we sleep, it's the quality of our sleep. How we think how we communicate? What are our relationships?

All of that is going to play a great factor in the health of your cells I know often when I'm talking to my cancer patients, I'm always asking them, “Before this diagnosis, can you tell me, was there anything 6 months, 12 months, 18 months prior to this diagnosis that you found overwhelmingly stressful for you to deal with in life?”

And I can tell you 99 percent of the time, there is something that, they didn't have the tools emotionally to handle it and not having those tools created a immune system response where they also weren't able to fight off disease because we are all developing cancer cells each and every day.

Why do some grow become malignant and turn into something whereas others go through the natural process of apoptosis and die off. So, there's a lot of factors there. 

Sylvie Beljanski: So, you identify, let's say, a trauma that happened 10 months before the patient is now sitting in your, in your office.

And then what happens? How do you address the need of this patient? Now you have identified and emotional need, an emotional problem, but you are not, for example, a couple of therapies. If there's a trauma was, is there's a wife or God knows what, what do you do as a doctor? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah. So, for me, that is just one, one aspect of it. So, we want to examine what is there a man, emotional component there. With that, we also want to look at, is there another factor?

Recognizing the emotions is one key. Then, what I do in my office is I am rebuilding up their structure from a cellular aspect. So, we are looking at what are the deficiencies the person might be experiencing. I'm finding that many people are overfed yet malnourished, meaning they're eating, but their cells are completely depleted of the nutrients that they require in order to replicate healthy DNA.

Victor Dwyer: I did want to ask you a question though. When it comes down to, you said there's always a stressful event before, there's usually 99 percent a stressful event before the initial cancer sighting.

What is the proper way to handle that stress, in your opinion, of like how would you let that cycle go through naturally in a healthy way that doesn't cause cancer? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: I don't know if there's 1 answer really for that, because I think it's going to depend on the individual and, how I would handle stress compared to somebody else is going to be very different.

But I do believe that kind of holding onto that stress factor and not having a tool to really process it, whether you are processing grieving of an elderly parent or you are processing a divorce or the loss of a child or something like that, that we do need to have tools in place and those tools include having some compassion around the experience and just going, yeah, this is an experience and reaching out to the community for whatever kind of help you need. But what I find often is that some people don't like to talk about difficult times. It's not very much looked upon as a “Oh, I don't really want to talk about it.”

So, they tend to hold it in more so, and then that in a way energetically builds up a, I don't want to say a mass in the body, but it doesn't allow the body and the energy to flow the way it should. And honestly we should be teaching this to our kids at the age of 5, like, how do I process my emotions?

Because we are going to be dealing with stressors all day, every day. 

Sylvie Beljanski: Indeed it's the one thing we never learned at school. We are, the learning French, English, Math, Physics, whatever, but processing our emotions, we don't learn that. And that's maybe the most important. I'm sure that just the understanding the link between the diagnosis and the, what is a perturb, emotional perturbation is “aha” moment that allows to to open the gates and start processing the event, the stressful event in different ways.

And just by inviting them to wonder if something happened in the previous month is tools that you are providing them to put them on the right direction to search for answers. 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: I do feel that once a person can recognize, because that's the other thing they don't recognize that this might have been stressful for them. They just think that, “Oh, it's normal to go through this experience” and not really understand that it can be so stressful down to the cellular level where your cells aren't communicating because now your immune system has been suppressed. And because we also haven't been taught in school how the human body works to understand that.

So. that's really what I do in my office in my clinic. I joke that I am putting people through med school on their individual body in 6 months because I want them to understand how their body works, what's connected to what, that may be an experience they had at the age of five is influencing what they're experiencing now, whatever chronic disease it is, and the best way to heal it is really to look at that whole, whether that's 30 years, 40 years, 50 years of existence, really looking at that and putting that together, because then you can go, “You know what, now I understand why I'm this way, what I have to do deal with and how can I move forward?”

That's the most important key is you recognize it, you create that self awareness, and then you take those tools and move forward. 

Sylvie Beljanski: Yeah, so you started with the cell and you arrived to the whole body, and that's indeed what we are so much more than just a bunch of cells. And understanding and recognizing that is, what is really often missing in Western culture because we are too much focusing on organs and missing what is happening between, the overall thing that is happening beyond the organs and the cells. 

Nutritional Insights and Recommendations

Sylvie Beljanski: So, you were speaking about feeding those cells properly with the proper nourishment.

Can you tell us more about how you achieve that? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, absolutely. As I was saying I'm often finding when I'm looking at individuals that they are missing a lot of the nutrients that they need for proper cell function. Whether that is antioxidants to fight oxidative stress, or that is certain vitamins to produce DNA, RNA, ATP, the energy for the cell. We're eating, but we aren't really getting fuel.

So, that's where I, with the testing that I do, I'm really looking at, Alright, from the perspective first off, we know that oxidative stress which, back to our cell, right, oxidative stress is, every day, our cells are being attacked. When they are attacked, they're creating free radicals, so free radicals are circulating around our body, and then causing more cell damage.

When the cells get damaged, they don't know what to do. They stop functioning. Something as simple as damaging thyroid cells can influence whether you have thyroid hormone or not. So, thinking about it from that perspective, that everything we do from the environmental factors, like air pollution, UV radiation when it comes to skin cancers, lifestyle factors, like that diet, poor diet, poor quality sleep, inactivity. We're extremely physically inactive these days because we don't even have to leave our house to get food delivered now, like, I know my mom is still in the garden, gardening and getting her fresh veggies to prepare her food, but that is not the lifestyle we live in modern culture.

So, with all of that, just our entire environmental lifestyle, modern lifestyle has accumulated toxins in the body. So, we are accumulating a lot of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is the precursor to all chronic diseases, not just cancer, every single chronic disease!

And I know when I say the word stress, people think about mental stress. No, this is the stress on your cells, on your actual cells where they are starving for nutrition. They are starving for adequate sleep. They are starving for movement. They are starving for all the things that we should be providing the cells so they can function and keep us disease free. 

Sylvie Beljanski: So, what is your recommendation? You see somebody who is depleted. 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah. So, my recommendation is always diet first. So, we start with a nutritional aspect and everybody is on their journey when it comes to food. So, I actually don't even like to think of food as a diet because you shouldn't be restricting what you're eating, but mostly focusing on nutrition.

So, that means that you are nutritionally supplying yourselves with a variety of foods. And not only are you supplying yourselves, you're also supplying your cell’s BFFs. And those BFFs are your microbiome because we might have 37 trillion cells, but we actually have a bigger microbiome. And that's your microbiota or bacteria in your gut.

And that's really who is going to be our best friend that's going to go, “Oh, thank you for feeding me. I can now make vitamins. I can now make minerals. I can now, I have fiber to feed off of so I can keep your colon clean.” So that's really what we're doing. 

Sylvie Beljanski: And to achieve that, you highly favor plant, phytonutrients. You are yourself a vegan, is it so?

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: I myself am a vegan, yeah, so phytonutrients for sure, and even if you're not a vegan you will see that most of the longevity diets when it comes to health, whether that's Mediterranean, anti-inflammatory, about 90 to 95 percent of the food they're eating is whole foods plant based. So, it's not just, your veggies and your fruits, but it's also your whole grains, your legumes, your lentils, nuts, and seeds, right?

So, it's a variety and trying to get about 50 of those things in a week at a minimum is very important. Right now, I see, I have my patients do a food diary. So, they do a 7 day food diary for me, and it's very interesting to, and they don't just do a food diary, they're also telling me their emotions when they have their meals.

Were they happy? Was it a good day? Was it a bad day? Did they feel good? Did they feel tired? They're also telling me what they were doing while they were eating. So, were they eating at their desk? Were they eating while they were driving? Were they eating at the table? Were they watching TV? All of these play a factor in how well you are going to absorb nutrients because digestion actually starts before you put food in your mouth, right?

It starts with a smell when you're, your olfactory nerves are awakened to the smell to help produce the salivary enzymes to help digest your food. So, it's an entire digestion process. So, when I'm looking at that, I'm looking at their food diary. They are eating a lot of ultra-processed foods, quick food, frozen foods that don't really have the nutrients their cells need.

So, then when I'm able to pull up their food diary, pull up their test results and go, “When was the last time you ate, say, a vitamin C rich food?,” and people are like, “Oh, I, I eat vitamins, like, I eat strawberries all the time.” But they don't realize how much of that nutrient you need to keep your immune system healthy and especially for, from a cancer perspective.

So, when we're looking at this, we're looking at all. What they're doing, what they're not doing and slowly moving them into a better direction. 

Victor Dwyer: I have a quick question. So, when it comes down to the difference between like a one a day vitamin and digesting that through a whole foods or whatever it may be.

What is the difference between a, like a supplement vitamin versus the way of getting it through food?

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: That's a great question. It's very important for people to understand that.

There are a lot of ingredients in food that we have not even identified their health benefits from, which, there's chemical processes going on, enzymes, all these different things. So, you're always going to get more value from food. The problem is our food these days is not what it used to be 100 years ago, right?

We've got only so many variants of grains and tomatoes and all that. So, we just don't have that variety And what does their gut microbiome love? It loves diversity. So, we're not even able to get that. So, even if you eat the best diet, I feel from my experience, especially living in this modern world with all these exposures to things, that we still require certain nutrients that we have to get from supplements.

At the end of the day, a supplement is exactly that. It's supplementing what you're already doing. And that's where I don't want people to think that “Oh, let me just go take 30 supplements and then i'll be fine” because it doesn't work that way either. I always like to do the Christmas tree analogy which is like when you go shopping for a Christmas tree, you're gonna go and you're gonna pick the freshest, greenest, fluffiest, the one that smells the nicest because why?

Your decorations will look very nice on that. You're not going to pick the brown sickly, one where your decorations are going to be drooping. Same thing with supplements. You are that Christmas tree. That is your body. That is your foundation, right? So, when you put on the supplement, they're going to enhance it even more. So ,think of it in that way.

Sylvie Beljanski: And do you make a difference doctor between a whole food based supplements and synthetic care supplements? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Preferably, we do want whole foods based supplements as much as we can get them. Anything that's synthetic and processed is not going to be the best. So, as much that we can get from plants, I'm a big proponent of using what nature has given us.

So, I use a lot of botanicals and herbs, especially ones from a Ayurvedic perspective that, I grew up with, my mom giving them to us and me going “No, we need the antibiotics. We need this medicine” and then going, “Wait, maybe we can do a little bit better without causing harm to the body?”

Sylvie Beljanski: So, you are in one way, looking back to eating naturally, a whole food diet, which is some very traditional approach to health, and at the same time, you are very much interested into new research and especially new research about phytonutrients. Can you tell us more about this new research you are excited about?

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, absolutely. So, from a research perspective, it's very tricky when it comes to phytonutrients to get adequate research because with all the pharmaceutical companies really having research and trials around medications and drugs. To get that size of population to do that, we just don't have those equivalent studies.

But for me, and what I see from a experiential point of view, I do see tremendous changes in my patients when I am incorporating more of those phytonutrients, when I'm incorporating more botanicals and herbs. Things that they never thought of, and I really do it not just from a supplementation perspective, but I'm also doing it from a culinary medicine perspective.

So, when I, because really, it's not what we do some of the time. It's what we do most of the time. So, when I'm thinking about making my morning latte, it's not just coffee and non dairy milk. I've got some adaptogens in there. I've got some Moringa in there. I've got some mangoes. I've got all kinds of like concoctions because I'm looking at it as in “What can I continually add have in my bloodstream in my supply, not just from 1 meal, but from every meal. How can I up level that?”

Once you start understanding the practice of how these nutrients can be beneficial, then you go, “Oh, this is really easy. It doesn't take me any longer than anybody else to do stuff.” It's just a matter of understanding the benefit, and then putting it into your lifestyle and I really place it into rituals where it's like I have my morning ritual of this is what I'm doing.

I have my lunchtime ritual where I'm making sure that I'm getting the rainbow of food. It's always a, “Let me see if I can do this better. If I can get all my ROY G. BIV rainbow in 1 meal. And then let me see if I can do it even better” every time. So, always trying to improve with what I'm doing.

Sylvie Beljanski: And so, with those phytonutrients, you see an improvement of the microbiome? 

The Role of Microbiome in Health

Sylvie Beljanski: And how does this improvement of the microbiome translate into the health of your patient and, specifically, cancer patients? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: That's a great question, Sylvie. So, what I often find is I get a lot of referrals from cancer centers.

I used to work at a large cancer center. So, the oncologist, the surgeons all know me. So, depending on what treatment they've had, I'm really looking at their microbiome. So, if they've had surgery, we are finding that post surgery individuals have lower diversity of their microbiome, specifically, lactobacillus is lower and they have an increased risk of getting pseudomonas.

Now, if they had chemotherapy, we definitely know that their microbial diversity is lower. We also see that these individuals who have had chemotherapy have neuro inflammation and the gut and the brain has a very strong connection via the vagus nerve. So, we are looking at the diversity from that.

Now, if an individual is getting immunotherapy, which is what I've been seeing a lot more, especially for individuals who have not been successful just with surgery and chemo alone. Now, immunotherapy, the purpose of that is to stop tumor at certain checkpoints. When you're stopping things at those certain checkpoints, you can actually develop a resistance of certain bacteria.

That bacteria will influence what kind of inflammation you have in the gut. And then, of course, the last thing is when a person has radiation, they definitely have lower bacterial diversity. So, this is where I'm seeing it in the patients who have had the conventional treatment. And where I come in as we look at, “Alright, where is your microbiome so depleted and deficient. What, like what is your commensal bacteria?” and how can we shift that commensal bacteria to a healthier microbiome. Because we know when, and I talked about this at The Beljanski Conference, right? When you've had a disruption in your microbiome with reduced biodiversity of the micro biota, and you have dysbiosis, which is that imbalance, and you have the accumulation of pathogenic bacteria or disease causing bacteria.

At the end of the day, what does it do? It creates chronic inflammation. And what does chronic inflammation do? It creates DNA instability. DNA instability will increase the risk of tumor onset. More tumor onset, tumor progression, more tumor progression, MEPs.

It's really filling in that gap that, “Yes, okay, do this, but don't stop there because now your body has also been depleted from some of these treatments.” And if you understand and you believe that a significant portion, 70 to 80 percent of your immune system lives in your gut, you will work very hard to keep that gut healthy and strong.

Probiotics, Prebiotics, and Gut Health

Sylvie Beljanski: Do you favor a diet? Do you add probiotics? Do you make a mix of, how does it work? Yeah, especially for for vegan patients because if you don't want to take dairy there is a lot of probiotic, source of probiotics that you cannot look into. 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, absolutely. Food first, regardless.

So, always making sure that we're getting enough prebiotic food. Enough probiotic food. So, two different food groups, but we want both prebiotic and probiotic. Ultimately, the purpose of that is to make postbiotics or short chain fatty acids, which are produced by your gut bacteria, and that's what keeps inflammation down.

Now, from a probiotic standpoint, you can do. nondairy yogurts, nondairy kefirs, because the bacteria lives in there. I'm a big fan of miso. Miso is a fermented soy product. Having miso soup for breakfast and starting your day off that way instead of black coffee which will, kind of, mess with your hormones there.

Also, if you look at each of the cultures that, from the Far East, almost all of them have some form of probiotic food in their meals. So, whether you're looking at Korea for Kimchi, Japan for the miso, India uses a lot of yogurts, right? Kefir, sauerkraut, all of these from a perspective of culturally.

In America, we do not have this. The American diet is not balanced in the sense of where we're thinking about every meal should have probiotics. But for me, naturally, I grew up that way, and I'm like, “Oh, yeah, I remember,” maybe not at lunch when I was at school, but for breakfast, I would have it, for dinner, I would have it when I'm at home and now I'm much more intentional about it. 

And then prebiotics is another thing when the focus really goes on, “Oh, I just need protein and I just need meat” and you now create this imbalance terrain in your body.

The body needs balance. So, that's really where we work from that perspective, food first. And then, I test before I give probiotic supplements because some people actually have a overgrowth. And the last thing you want to do is give them more to overgrow because you want a nice commensal bacteria balance there. 

Sylvie Beljanski: And that people will know by checking where they stand, if they are depleted or if they have an overgrowth.

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yes. 

Yoga, Meditation, and Cancer Prevention

Sylvie Beljanski: I know that you are also a very big proponent of yoga and meditation, that parts of, goes with your background but also your way to stay healthy and you have include that in your approach to cancer prevention and management, right? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, absolutely.

So I, I am a trained 500-hour plus yoga teacher and Yoga For Cancer Recovery teacher. And there's plenty of studies now that really show that the quality of life for individuals living with cancer is so much more improved when they are able to take a more mindful approach.

Yoga is not what some people might think “Oh, you need to go to a studio and dress in this clothing and do these positions.” No, this is more about really becoming connected with yourself and looking inwards and being more self aware. And I think that self awareness also helps you create a better connection with how you can heal because we're living so much on autopilot that we just never take the time to slow down and go, “Alright, this is what I need today. Maybe I do need to rest. Maybe I do need to go out for a walk.” We're not really paying attention to our cells or ourself, but our cells are always talking to us. 

Retreats and Final Thoughts

Sylvie Beljanski: That's wonderful. Thank you. So, for the people who have been hearing you and say what I need is to go to see this doctor. Where can they make an appointment and come to see you? 

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, absolutely. So my website is DrBhanote dot com. You can learn more about my medical clinic there. My social media, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, YouTube is Dr. Bhanote. I'm the only 1.

And then I also do annual retreat. If you want to have some of these experiential experiences, because I will tell you in five days, I can actually heal your gut. Actually, my last retreat, I will say everyone on the first day had the best bowel movement of their life which is very important for your microbiome, but just to be able to experience what health feels like in your body.

Because, we get into this place of, “Oh, this is normal to be tired. It's normal to be bloated. It's normal to be dealing with stress.” Who made it normal? That's not necessarily normal. Your normal is when you are feeling lively and happy and energetic and able to do the things you want to do.

And your disease or your health problems is not slowing you down. That's what helped it. 

Sylvie Beljanski: So, tell us a little bit more about this retreats programs that you have in addition, that people can find that on your website? Also, what is the next one? What is it?

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Yeah, the next retreat is this November 2024 and it is on my website.

It is a Plant-Powered Longevity Retreat. Even if you don't eat plants, and you just really want to explore eating plants, I know my last retreat, the people who attended weren't plant eaters, but they enjoyed the food tremendously and they couldn't believe that food could taste that good. But that retreat is happening in Playa del Carmen this November 2024 and that is the next one coming up that they can find out about on my website.

And then the other resource I will recommend to them is my book ‘The Anatomy of Wellbeing. Intentional Practices To Embrace Your Body's Unique Design And Revitalize Your Health’. And this is really a blueprint to how your body works and how, by incorporating different lifestyle practices every day, you can create health and stay away from disease.

Sylvie Beljanski: That was absolutely wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Monisha Bhanote. I'm sure that a lot of people will who are listening will want to go to your website and learn more about your, your research and your retreats. And we really enjoyed having you a lot at the first Beljanski Integrative Cancer Conference in Jacksonville last year.

I know you were largely responsible for the delicious food, which was served at the buffet. Everybody was writing about the buffet and we look very much forward to having you to the next conference, which will take place in Austin, Texas in April, 25 to 27 of  2025. So, that's, we look very much forward to having you and we hope you will help us also with the buffet because it was fantastic.

Dr. Monisha Bhanote: Absolutely! My pleasure to help with the buffet and I'm looking forward to coming and talking in Austin. And to the community and really providing you more updates, more of the research on how you can really tap into the gut microbiome when you're dealing with cancer. And I'm also looking forward to the Beljanski updates on stem cells for breast cancer, because as an individual who's done a breast cancer fellowship and looked at lots and lots of angry breast cancer cells and then, unfortunately, also seen that a decade later, many of these individuals are having recurrences and it's not a recurrence of the same tumor, it's actually a new tumor that I think that your research you're doing at Beljanski is just absolutely critical in this day and age.

Sylvie Beljanski: Thank you very much. Thank you. 

Victor Dwyer: Thank you so much for joining. Thank you everyone for listening. This is The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show and we'll catch you next time. Thanks guys.