When a patient is diagnosed with cancer, the medical world often hands them a treatment plan. But what if what they really need is a healing plan? In this episode of The Cancer Doctor Podcast, DeAnn Richter, RN, sheds light on the power of holistic cancer coaching—addressing not just the physical body, but the mind, emotions, and environment as well. Through the lens of the “Seven Essentials System,” DeAnn explains why understanding your diagnosis, reducing toxic burden, managing stress, and nourishing your soul are just as important as traditional treatments. You’ll discover how coaching fills the gap in modern cancer care and why healing is a journey that requires more than medicine.
In episode #11 of The Cancer Doctor Podcast, host Robert Carrillo welcomes DeAnn Richter—Registered Nurse and breast cancer coach with the renowned Breast Cancer Conqueror organization. From the trauma floor of a Level 1 hospital to coaching women through one of the most challenging journeys of their lives, DeAnn’s path is anything but conventional. In this episode, she shares the powerful story behind her shift into holistic cancer coaching, introduces the “Seven Essentials System,” and explains how true healing often begins where fear ends.
When a patient is diagnosed with cancer, the medical world often hands them a treatment plan. But what if what they really need is a healing plan? In this episode of The Cancer Doctor Podcast, DeAnn Richter, RN, sheds light on the power of holistic cancer coaching—addressing not just the physical body, but the mind, emotions, and environment as well. Through the lens of the “Seven Essentials System,” DeAnn explains why understanding your diagnosis, reducing toxic burden, managing stress, and nourishing your soul are just as important as traditional treatments. You’ll discover how coaching fills the gap in modern cancer care and why healing is a journey that requires more than medicine.
[00:00:29] From trauma nurse to cancer coach
[00:05:09] Why every cancer patient needs a coach
[00:07:34] The healing power of calm: understanding parasympathetic mode
[00:10:54] How to choose the right cancer coach
[00:14:38] Coaching beyond breast cancer: who it’s really for
[00:15:03] Measuring progress on the healing journey
[00:17:07] Never fear cancer again
[00:19:53] The 7 Essentials System explained
[00:21:04] Let food be your medicine
[00:22:01] Reduce your toxic exposure
[00:23:09] Balance your energy and your hormones
[00:24:25] Heal your emotional wounds
[00:25:21] What your mouth says about your cancer risk
[00:26:00] Herbs, supplements, and what really helps
[00:27:01] How to monitor your healing and catch cancer early
[00:28:41] Can this work with chemo and radiation?
[00:30:13] Fasting before chemo: what the research says
[00:33:42] Should you tell your doctor about your holistic care?
[00:36:31] What to say to a friend newly diagnosed with cancer
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DeAnn Richter RN, Cancer Doctor, CancerDoctor.com, cancerdoctor.com, Breast Cancer Coaching, Seven Essentials System, Holistic Health, Integrative Oncology, Breast Cancer Conqueror, Faith and Medicine, Natural Healing, Cancer Support, Trauma Nurse, Functional Medicine, Toxic Exposure, Stress Management, Parasympathetic Nervous System, Nutritional Therapy, Biological Dentistry, Fasting and Chemotherapy, Cancer Prevention, Patient Advocacy, Dr. Veronique Desaulniers, ProLon, Dr. Nasha Winters
The information presented in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Cancer Doctor podcast. I am your host, Robert Carrillo, and today I have DeAnn Richter with me from the Breast Cancer Conqueror organization. She is a breast cancer coach, and DeAnn is also a registered nurse and she's worked in a surgical trauma center in Atlanta, Georgia, in a level one capacity, I believe. And their organization today provides breast cancer patients with something called the Seven Essentials Program, I'll call it for now. We'll get into it a little bit more. So I'm interviewing her today to find out what this is all about, how they might be able to help you if you've been diagnosed with the breast cancer itself. And with that, I just want to say thank you, DeAnn, for joining us today. Really do appreciate it. And just to start this off and kick us off really quick, how did you as a registered nurse become involved with the Breast Cancer Conquer organization? Because the way I look at it is, well, you were in a hospital, and now you decided to go and do coaching. What happened there? Please explain it to us.
DeAnn Richter RN:
Yeah, well, thank you for having me, Robert, first of all. That's a really good question. So I always knew I wanted to be in healthcare in some way, shape, or form. I settled on nursing, because that was at the time what I thought would be the best way to kind of combine my loves of taking care of people and caring for people. And I did really enjoy my time nursing, but on a personal level, I was always interested in healthcare from herbs and supplements, and natural things you can do, integrating the two of them.
So as you mentioned, working in a surgical trauma hospital, there's not a lot of space for herbs in a trauma. That's a time when medicine is really needed. You need hands-on care, it's urgent. So I wasn't really getting to incorporate that love that I had of natural healthcare medicine and integrating care. So I knew I wanted to do something with women. That was something I was always really passionate about. If I was going to change career goals or do something different, I wanted to focus on women's health. And as a background story, I got started with Breast Cancer Conqueror, because I knew Dr. V, Dr. Veronique Desaulniers, who is the founder of the Seven Essential System, she wrote a book Heal Breast Cancer Naturally. I knew her on a personal level. I've known her since I was a teenager.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Oh wow, okay. All right.
DeAnn Richter RN:
She actually offered me a job.
Robert A. Carrillo:
But that wasn't that long ago.
DeAnn Richter RN:
No. Yeah, a time period ago when I was a teenager, she offered me a job before I graduated nursing school. I didn't take up her up on it at that time. And then fast-forward years later, I actually ended up marrying her son.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay.
DeAnn Richter RN:
So I'm married to her son, I'm her daughter-in-law. And a year into our marriage, I was kind of shifting my career, I loved surgical trauma nursing, but it's a job that requires a lot of adrenaline. You're running all day long. It wasn't sustainable for me. I didn't feel like it was very healthy to do that long-term for me personally. So I was thinking about shifting careers and I was married to her son, and she came, and she was like, "You know, I have still been doing all of this on my own. I've never hired a coach. I offered this to you years ago, but I'm thinking maybe now's the right time. Would you be interested?" And it was just the perfect time. It was a marriage of all of my love, so to speak. My husband, my mother-in-law, my love of natural medicine, all at the right timing.
Robert A. Carrillo:
That's fantastic. That's a great story. It's great when paths cross like that, right? It really is. For the audiences that are not familiar with what is a trauma nurse, what is a surgical trauma nurse, because you mentioned it's high adrenaline, but I think it'll give others an appreciation for your personal experiences in healthcare. Could you describe that a little bit more, like unpack it? It sounds special. Tell us about it.
DeAnn Richter RN:
I don't like to describe myself as special, but I see what you're saying. So surgical trauma nurse. So I specifically, as you mentioned, I worked at a trauma one hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. So a pretty big city and a trauma one hospital is the highest level of trauma. That means the worst of the worst goes there. They have the higher levels of care for trauma patients. So I cared for patients who were coming in from car accidents, stabbings, gun shootings, falling from things, head injuries. We dealt with a lot of broken bones. We dealt with life emergent situations from traumas. So I say that specifically, because there are emergency nurses who work with heart care or cardiovascular trauma, or I should say cardiovascular emergencies, things like that. I was specifically on the trauma route. So just with patients who had dealt with some type of injury, bodily injury that was potentially life-threatening.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Wow. Okay. Then we're in good hands today. All right, that sounds great.
DeAnn Richter RN:
Hopefully we don't have to do, hopefully we don't have to fall back on that knowledge today.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Absolutely, absolutely. So let me ask you this now, you're a coach, you're a health coach with Breast Cancer Conqueror. Why should a breast cancer patient involve a health coach into their healing strategy? What is the wisdom behind all that? Why should that take place?
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's a really good question. Yeah. Even coming from my background of nursing, I have a little bit of a knowledge of what it's like to deal with doctors on a day-to-day basis. And I always say, because I have that experience, I know how fast-paced that life is. I know how difficult it is to spend time with your patient and really be able to work with them in a slow way. Unfortunately, I think for most doctors and nurses, it's impossible. That's just the healthcare system and how it works. So I don't blame the doctors, I don't blame the nurses. I know they're doing this a good reason. They're not there out of harm, but they're just so busy and so fast-paced. They don't have enough time to really spend time with patients. So where I see the benefit of a coach coming in is someone who feels like they need someone to really take things slowly with them.
We try to help our clients understand what their doctor's recommendations are and why that doctor might be recommending that. We also deal with emotions and stress management, and things like that, that your doctor's probably not talking to you about. We try to incorporate things with your doctor's recommendations, natural things you can do alongside them to help increase their effectiveness or minimize side effects. So the way, we kind of have a saying, we'll say that your doctor will give you a game plan. They'll give you like, this is your game plan for your healing, your health plan, I should say. But we like to provide a healing plan, so we're not just planning for how to get rid of the dis-ease only. We're planning all the little steps in between, that helps you get to that place in a safe and a calm, because being in that parasympathetic nervous system mode's very important in a cancer healing journey. So in a calm way, try to help you through those steps your doctor is recommending to you.
Robert A. Carrillo:
So you just said something really important, so I just want to restate it. One of the key things you said is that you help the patient understand what their doctor is telling them or saying to them, that's really important. You're translating all that terminology for them, and now you just said something at the end about keeping them in a parasympathetic state. For someone that's never heard that word, what does that mean and why is that important to the patient?
DeAnn Richter RN:
Sure. Yeah. So we have two different nervous system modes. We have sympathetic, which is commonly called flight or fight, and then we have parasympathetic, which some people call the rest and digest. So when you are in sympathetic mode, which we live in a very, and I'll say the common terms, just to keep it easy, the fight or flight mode. We live in a very fight or flight world.
I mean, when you're driving down the road and you have cars honking at you, when you turn on the news and you see the bad stuff happening around the world, you get a phone call that makes you nervous. We live in a very high-paced society as well. So you're going to work, you're working really hard all day. That's all encouraging your body to be in that fight or flight mode. And we need that fight or flight, because if you're walking down a dark alley and someone comes at you with a knife, you need to be able to really quickly either run away or fight for your life. So it's an important part of our nervous system, but we are not designed to stay in fight or flight. We're supposed to really switch back and forth, and mostly stay in the rest and digest mode. So when you're stay... Oh, I'm sorry.
Robert A. Carrillo:
No, no, go right ahead.
DeAnn Richter RN:
When you're staying in that fight or flight mode, really important things happen. It's bad for a gene, so it actually turns on cancer-causing genes. It can encourage cancer activity, it can encourage angiogenesis, which is the supply of blood. So cancer cells and tumors need a supply of blood. It can increase inflammation. Inflammation is really important in a cancer healing journey. It messes with your digestion. So it's not good for your health, your physical health to stay in that fight or flight mode.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Wow. So this has far-reaching implications, it sounds like, because especially in our society there's a lot of people that are stressed out. But if I hear you correctly, again for our audiences, if a patient that's been diagnosed with breast cancer, if they're stressed a lot, if is counterproductive for healing, is that what you're saying?
DeAnn Richter RN:
I would absolutely. My opinion is yes, being overly stressed. And I'll add to that, it's not necessarily always being stressed. I like to say that, because if we say it's bad to be stressed, then we get stressed about being stressed. When something stressful happens, then it makes it even worse, because we know it's, I shouldn't be stressed, I'm stressed now about it. So it's not always about the stress part, as much as it is knowing tools and using tools to manage your stress. So when you have stressful situations, we like to teach our clients some of our favorite tools to help your body get back into that parasympathetic rest digest, not the fight or flight. So it's management of that stress, more so even than it is trying to not have any stress, because that's impossible.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Got it. Okay. That's wonderful. All right, makes sense. All right, so here's the next question, because this coaching is starting to sound a little bit more valuable to me now, but what qualifies a person to be a coach? And here's what I'm asking. If a patient decides, "Yeah, I want a coach, but how do I qualify? Who's a good health coach, in this case, for cancer or breast cancer? What do I do and why do I select them instead of going to my medical doctor or to my naturopath? Why this health coach?" What does that look like? What should the patient be evaluating here is what I'm asking?
DeAnn Richter RN:
Yeah, I think a really big one for me is pay attention to what they are suggesting. You can read their blogs, look at their website, look at their book, pay attention to what they're suggesting. If there are not studies to support the suggestions they're making, that's a big red flag to me, especially on social media. I feel like there's a lot of clickbait these days with healthcare and even in the cancer world, which is kind of upsetting. There's a lot of clickbait for things to do to prevent or help with cancer. But a lot of it doesn't have studies based on, it's not based on actual studies. So ask them for studies, ask them for the research, make sure they're basing what they're telling you to do based off of actual studies. And I would also ask about their background. It helps for them to have some type of a medical background, but there are some health coaches out there who have focused their studies on nutrition specifically.
So ask about what their research was and what kind of education they had in nutrition or whatever their focus was. For our coaches that we hire, we go through a special training process with them before they start taking their own clients. So one of our coaches, Laura, she has a background in nursing as well. So also trauma nursing, believe it or not. So there's something with the trauma nurses here. So she has a background in nursing as well, and she went through training with us to start coaching. We have another coach who's going to start with us soon, who has a background in holistic nutrition. So a little bit of a different background, but the marriage of those is really great. And so, then like I said, we train our coaches. They have to go through case studies with me or one of the other trained coaches before they can start taking clients. There's a trial period where we make sure that they're kind of set to be able to answer questions appropriately and help give suggestions. So they go through a personalized training program for the seven essentials specifically.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay. You have said some very valuable things there, and I want to just recap it a little bit for everybody that's listening. So one of the things that the patients should look at when evaluating a coach is, are there recommendations backed by any kind of published studies? That's one. What is the background of the coach professionally in the health or wellness space? They should have something. And when it comes to your organization, you actually have some other nurses or people in holistic health, but they're coming out of this arena. And finally you train them, you train them on what it is that you do and how you do it, and how you approach the patient's care. Is that a fair assessment?
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's perfect. Yeah, exactly.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, wonderful, wonderful. Now, so my next question as I'm thinking about this, do you only coach breast cancer patients? Are you exclusive to that?
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's a great question. Yeah. I mean, the name definitely attracts mostly women, but no, the answer is no. We have coached people with other types of cancer before. We absolutely can coach other types of cancer. There's a saying in the alternative cancer world that cancer is cancer. Now granted, there can be some nuances, some small differences between breast cancer and prostate or breast cancer and colon, but the fundamentals tend to stay the same. What allows cancer to develop in a body, high blood sugar, just name some, high inflammation, oxidative stress, these things tend to be the same from one cancer to another. So yes, there's some nuances, but we have absolutely and can coach people to have other cancers. I've coached multiple men with prostate cancer. We've coached people with multiple myeloma. We've coached people with brain cancer before. So yeah, we have a wide array of people, although the majority of our clients are definitely breast cancer clients.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, wonderful. It's good to know. So now let's say that a patient selects your organization or let's say somebody else as a cancer coach, some type of health coach. Once that relationship begins, how should the patient go about measuring the value of that relationship? In other words, they begin, everybody asks themselves, "Is it worth it?" It's like taking a supplement. Should I be taking it? How do they measure the value of that coaching in your professional opinion?
DeAnn Richter RN:
I think it depends on what a person's goal is to come into the coaching. So some people come to us just with, we actually coach people who don't even have cancer, who just want to be as preventative as possible, because I know we'll talk about the seven essentials in more detail later. But those seven essentials really can address almost anything. It's just basic foundationals. So some people come to us with a preventative goal in mind. And so, for someone like that, I would say if they're feeling more confident in their knowledge and in their ability to day to day, know that they're implementing things that are being as preventative as possible, that would be a good way to know if it's successful. With someone on an active healing journey, people heal at different stages, different links I should say. Some people take a little longer, sometimes quicker.
Our coaching programs tend to last about six months, but there are opportunities to extend that if you need to. But within those first couple of months, I would say a client really needs to be able to say that they have learned valuable information that they're learning in conjunction with what their doctor is suggesting to them that has benefited them in some way, whether that is lab results, which is often case the case or reduced side effects, or they're feeling healthier than they've ever felt, or even emotionally, maybe they're feeling more emotionally supported, because everyone's needs are just different. So we learn to adjust to what each client's needs are coming in.
Robert A. Carrillo:
So here's what I wrote down regarding that, and again, let know if you agree, but one of the things that the patient, after they've connected with you and after a couple of months they should ask themselves, "Do I feel more confident based on the information, has my confidence regarding health, my understanding of laboratory tests, what these things really mean, have my side effects gone down and am I overall feeling better about my health and wellness overall, a general sense of wellbeing?" Is that fair?
DeAnn Richter RN:
Yeah, that's fair. And I'll add to that, if you don't mind. One of our big mottos at Breast Cancer Conqueror is never fear breast cancer. Again, you could say never fear cancer again if you wanted to make it more generic. And that's because we feel this kind of has ties with that fight or flight again, right? Cancer is oftentimes presented to patients as this really scary thing. When you hear the word cancer, you think bad stuff. I always think back to that movie, I think it's called Stepmom, it's heart-wrenching. In the media, cancer's like the worst thing that can happen in a movie. It's like this is a horrible tragedy and cancer isn't really like that. Not in my experience, at least.
The women I work with, yes, they have cancer. Yes, they're going through treatments. Maybe they're not at their top. Maybe this isn't the best they've ever felt, but they're very healthy, they're lively, they're living a great, healthy, happy life. So never fear breast cancer is a big part of our motto and our goal as well. So I would also add to that, that someone should start feeling their fear dissipate. That fearful feeling maybe they get when they go to their doctor or that fearful feeling they get when they're thinking about repeating their scans, or getting new lab work. They should start to feel that fear dissipate. And that's a big goal with our coaches is to help people learn to not fear that stuff as much.
Robert A. Carrillo:
That's great. Yeah, because that sounds like it's getting replaced by confidence or courage, right? And we need that in order to win in life, I think in a variety of places. So that's great. So here's the next question I have. You did mention prevention, that you work with people that are trying to prevent. And so, I think this already answers the question, but when it comes to somebody saying, "I got cancer," are you looking to work with individuals that have an official diagnosis of cancer or not necessarily? If they just have a hunch you're willing to work with them, is that-
DeAnn Richter RN:
Absolutely. Yeah. So as a coach and as a coaching program, we are not someone's doctor or nurses, or traditional care. So it's always important that they also have some medical professionals on their healing team. But with that being said, the client is the one in control, and I think that should be more important in traditional medicine as well. Again, our medical system now is set up to where there's rules that doctors have to follow, there's standards they have to follow, and although those things are trying to reduce harm and keep things standardized, it does sometimes take the control away from the patient, from their body. So in our coaching program, the client, they are the ones in control. They get to decide what they implement and what they don't implement. They get to decide how they're going to go about whatever healing journey they're on. We're just there to offer support, suggestions, and again, support them in whatever their decision is.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, that's wonderful. So now describe to the audience the seven essentials that you are advocating for them, right? Is a big deal. So dive right into it. I'm somebody that comes to you, I don't know anything about this. What is it all about? And just bullet point, why each of those seven is so important.
DeAnn Richter RN:
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So how the seven essentials came about, my mother-in-law, Dr. V, Dr. Veronique Desaulniers, so she had a breast cancer diagnosis. And I always say if you go to Dr. Google and you type in, "Natural things to help support myself with cancer," you're going to have a thousand pages pop up.
There's so much information out there. And that's what she felt. She was starting this diagnosis, this healing journey. She didn't know really where to start. And so, she kind of in her genius decided, "I need to figure out what the commonalities are. I need to out what all these studies and research are saying, what are the common things I'm hearing and make these essential so to speak," which I kind of like to think of building blocks. So it kind of gives you the stepping stones one by one, piece by piece things to do to implement in any healing journey whatsoever. But for her specifically, it was her cancer diagnosis. So the first is, the first essential is to let food be your medicine.
And that one, oftentimes people are like, "Yes, of course." We all know food is foundational on the most basic form. On the days that we eat well, we feel better, on the days that we don't eat well, we don't feel good. So it's very simple. But a big piece of that essential to me that I like to remind people of is that there is no one size fits all diet. There's a lot of fad diets out there. Again, there's a lot of clickbait on social media for diets, but each of us are very unique. We all have genetic differences, we all have metabolic differences, we all have ancestral differences. So the combination of foods that works best for me and my body might not be the same that works for Robert or that works for someone else. So within that essential as a coach, we try to help people hone in on what combinations of foods, what foods work best for them individually. It's very unique to each person.
The second of the essentials is to reduce your toxic exposure. So we live in a really toxic world. There's pesticides, non-organic foods are everywhere our farms are getting stuff sprayed on them. And then even within that world, I feel like even worse than that, are the electromagnetic frequencies we're getting exposed to these days. Our cell phones, our laptops, this technology, yes, our world revolves around it. And yes, it's important we use it. I love technology, but we haven't really done the research to figure out how to protect our bodies from physical harm from those things.
So reducing your exposure, and I'll add that I always like to emphasize the name, is not eliminate your exposure, because you can't. People will come to me sometimes without essential and they get stressed out, because they're like, "Ah, I know this isn't great for me, but it's in my house, blah, blah." It's reduced. So we're just doing our best to try to reduce our exposure. So again, your coach will work with you with what your unique situation is to try to figure out what a good balance is for you within that. The third essential is one that people sometimes are like, "What does that even mean?" So it's to balance your energy.
And so, in medicine, typically medicine is just addressing the physical body, right? It's addressing the heart beating, the blood pumping, the muscles, the bone. It's that physical body. And within cancer care, traditional cancer care, it's very physical. It's about shrinking the tumor, right? That's the goal, get rid of that tumor. But your body is actually made up primarily of moving energy. We're only about one billionth physical matter, which is a very small percentage. I don't even know what the zeros on that would be. One billionth physical matter. So our bodies have energy that needs to move. Within that is that parasympathetic versus sympathetic fight or flight balance. Also within that would be things like chiropractic care that helps with your nervous system function. And a big piece of that with breast cancer specifically would be hormone balancing. Because we know going back to a toxic world, many of the toxins we're exposed to are pro-estrogenic toxins, which means they encourage or stimulate estrogen in the body.
So for women, that's really detrimental to have an imbalance of those estrogens. For men as well, but women will be a little more sensitive to it. So again, within that balancing of your energy is also balancing your hormones, making sure you are knowing tools you can use to keep your hormones balanced. Number four is to heal your emotional wounds. So this is one earlier that I said, your doctor is going to be great about giving you a game plan and telling you what he thinks you should do physically to address this cancer, but they're not going to address those emotional wounds. That's not a part of healthcare. And even if they want to be emotionally supportive, oftentimes they don't have the time to be. So addressing those emotional wounds, a big part of that is going to be if there are traumas you've had in your life that you maybe have been burying deep. Cancer's an emotional disease, so taking care of unresolved traumas.
But another big part of that is stress management, because stress is a really big part of cancer development and cancer care as we've talked about. So tools to manage stress. Number five is another thing that people don't think about with cancer, and that's biological dentistry. So your mouth is the gateway into your body. So the health of your mouth kind of foreshadows what the health of your body is. And within that, a lot of modern common dental procedures can actually have some toxic exposures. For example, silver fillings. Those amalgams contain mercury, which is an estrogenic compound. So for breast cancer, having that exposure to that mercury, those estrogen compounds would be important to address. Number six, essential number six. This is usually the first question I get asked when someone starts coaching with me. It is healing with therapeutic plants and herbs. So usually within the first five minutes of my first coaching call with someone, someone will say, "What herbs do I need to take? What supplements should I be taking?"
We're all very physical people. We like to open a bottle and take a pill. That's kind of like how we feel like we're helping ourselves. Now, they are an important part of a healing journey though. So there's, once again, if you go on Google and you search herbs that have anti-cancer properties, there's so many, there's thousands. So within that essential, we're going to try to help people based off their lab results or based off their unique situation. Fine-tune, hone in on which ones would be the priorities for them to consider taking. In addition to that, if they are incorporating things like chemotherapy or radiation, or surgery, that would be another factor to consider as to the unique supplements they would want to use and how they would use them alongside those treatments. And then finally, the last one, essential number seven.
How do you monitor? How do you make sure all of this is working for you? So that's early detection and testing. So a part of that, the early detection part is traditional medicine. The way that we detect breast cancer for most cases, for most women, is mammography. That's the golden standard. And then mammography is effective at finding something, but it has to already be there for mammography to show it. So we're trying to use tests that can be early detecting. If you can address something before it becomes a problem that's better than once it's already become a problem. And then also different tools and methods you can use while you're on an active healing journey to monitor your inflammation, to monitor your vitamin levels and your nutrient levels to make sure that the steps you're implementing, not just with us but also with your doctor, are actually working for you, that you're getting the results. Test and reassess.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, perfect.
DeAnn Richter RN:
That was a mouthful. I'm sorry. I hope that wasn't too much.
Robert A. Carrillo:
No, no, no, no. Catch your breath there, because I was taking notes. And to recap it, one was, let food be your medicine, right? Two was reduce your toxic exposures. Three, balance the energy in your body. Four, heal your emotional wounds. Do some biological dentistry, is what you said was number five. And six, repair your body with therapeutic plants or herbs, et cetera. And then seven, doing early detection and then also knowing what tests to do once you've already gotten into the whole diagnosis of cancer itself. Is that correct?
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's A+.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay. All right, fantastic. So here's the next question. So does this, because someone out there is going to be listening to this or watching this DeAnn, and they're going to want to know, all right, does this compliment my conventional chemotherapy that I'm getting now, my radiation that I'm getting now, or is this supposed to replace all of that? What does that look like?
DeAnn Richter RN:
So again, that's a very unique, each individualized approach. Some women do come to us with the goal of trying to avoid chemotherapy, radiation. Maybe they're working with a naturopath or something like that, and they're trying to avoid those traditional treatments. But then I would say the vast majority of our women that we coach are women who are working with an oncologist, going through chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, whatever is suggested for them, and they're looking for a marriage of the two. And to answer that question, yes, there is absolutely a marriage of the two. A lot of people refer that to integrative care or integrative oncology, where you're using the main medications, but you are complementing that by supporting your immune system, supporting your digestive system, helping with reduction of side effects, helping your healthy cells protect themselves from damage, while making the cancer cells as vulnerable to damage as possible.
So there are an array of things, again, depending on what drugs you're using, depending on when you're getting those treatments done, there's an array of simple things you can do to complement those chemotherapies or whatever treatments you're having done. If I can just give one of my favorites, that's such a simple thing to implement. So there's a lot of research around fasting and chemotherapy. So research has shown that people, and a lot of this came from a doctor Dr. Valter Longo. So he started the ProLon, you can look ProLon up. There's a lot of information on their website, once again, backed by studies. So that's what you're looking for. So he did a lot of research. He found that anywhere from a 48 hour or so fast prior to the chemotherapy, those cancer cells got really weak and vulnerable. Your healthy cells went into survivor mode.
So they're better equipped to protect themselves from damage. Less people lost their hair. There was a less incidence of nausea and vomiting. There was more energy after the treatments, and there was an increased tumor reduction. So the tumor size reduced more for those practicing fasting. So what a simple tool, and I always tell my clients, there's always some balance there. For some people, especially people undergoing chemotherapy, the thought of not eating for two days might be really hard. So there's some balance. Some fasting I think is going to be better than none. So do what feels good for your body, but such a simple thing as just focusing on bone broth and water, and lemon water for a day or 18 hours, or whatever you can do prior to that, chemotherapy can make a huge difference.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Yeah, I'm a big fan, personal fan of fasting and all the benefits that come from it, so I think that's fantastic. One of the things that you mentioned was you have individuals that come to you, they want to stay away from anything conventional and you're willing to help them, but a lot of your clients have already started some type of conventional care, and so you're here to complement it with some alternative care, doing an integrative approach. So it sounds to me that you're pro-patient outcome, whatever's going to get the best outcomes for the patient. Would you say professionally, just speaking for yourself, that you're finding that an integrative approach is the best approach currently today?
DeAnn Richter RN:
So actually there was some, I wouldn't call it study, but research. They were doing some census work, and they did find that the best way for a disease-free lifestyle, that's the key, disease-free lifestyle, is to incorporate some of those conventional medicines as well. So what a disease-free lifestyle means in traditional medicine is there's no tumor whatsoever. There's no sign of cancer activity in the body. So yes, they did find that, and I have seen that with my clients as well. Disease-free, if that's the goal, most people do best with those integrative care.
Now, where there's an interesting kind of understanding, and this is where people can decide what their goal is for themselves, Dr. Nasha Winters, she's a really great person. I love her research, her information. She has decided for herself, she doesn't need that disease-free label. She is comfortable living with a tumor in her body. She has a tumor, she's had it for I think over 20-something years. It's not growing, it's not spreading. She's keeping it what she calls maintained. So for a strictly natural approach, if someone is thinking that they are comfortable with that, that's an option to consider. But yes, for people looking for that disease-free label, that clear scans, everything, research is pointing towards a conventional integrative care being maybe the better option.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, great. I like that. Thank you so much for explaining that to the audience. So question, DeAnn. When a patient comes to you and they ask you something along these lines, they've enrolled, they're working with you, and they say, "DeAnn, do I tell my doctor that I'm doing this stuff with you or do I keep it a secret?" What do you recommend to the-
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's a very common question.
Robert A. Carrillo:
I'm sure it is.
DeAnn Richter RN:
That is a very common question. I'm a big believer that it's important to have open communication with your doctors. I know that can be intimidating. It's like that white coat thing. We've been raised in a society that just puts doctors on this pedestal, what they say goes, we can't do anything different. And that's not really the best way of looking at them. I do think doctors deserve a lot of respect. They've done a lot of research, they've done a lot of work to get to where they are, but ultimately, you are the one in control. And realistically, in one way or another, they're getting paid for their service, right? Whether it's through your health insurance or from your pocket. So you are the consumer in this situation. So they need to be able to be flexible to work around what you want, not the opposite.
You don't need to be flexible to work around what your doctor wants. So that open communication, respectful communication, but open communication I think is really important. And that's very important as well, because we don't want to take away, they are the experts of these chemotherapy drugs or these radiations. They're the ones who have really studied them. So maybe there's something we don't know that they know that we need their input on. So big believer in open communication, I don't think it's a good idea to hide anything from your doctors that you're doing.
But with that, what I've told my clients to do before is if you're getting pushback, if your doctor's saying, "No, no, no, don't do any herbs, any supplements." Bring them the research, bring the studies to them. And once again, that's a big piece. You want to work with someone who can provide that research. So print out the studies, hand it to them and say, "I really appreciate your opinion. I know you're doing what is best through your knowledge, but here's the reason why I am going to do X, Y, and Z, because this research supports it. And if you want to read this, maybe you'll learn something from it." So in an honest, open, respectful way, you can kind of let them know, "I appreciate it, but I'm the one making this decision."
Robert A. Carrillo:
I like that. I think that's great. That's great advice, especially taking a study to your doctor, whether the doctor's going to read or not, that's a whole other discussion, but nonetheless, at least the doctor knows that, "Hey, I'm reading too and I'm trying to learn about my health and wellness."
So I think that's great advice. Let's say it was your best friend comes to you, DeAnn, and she tells you, "I just got diagnosed with breast cancer." It's your best friend. What is some of the most important advice you're going to give that best friend right at that moment? What are you going to say?
DeAnn Richter RN:
Yeah, so I was saying earlier, when you get a diagnosis of cancer, it kind of automatically puts you in that fight or flight mode. And a part of that is because it's presented in such a fearful way. And so, yes, cancer is something you want to address. I'm not trying to downplay that at all. However, coming from a surgical background, surgical trauma background, it's not as if you're having a heart attack. If you're having a heart attack, you need to get in an ambulance, you need to get to the hospital right now. You need to do something about it. Cancer, by the time it is found, has already been there for some time. You've been living with it where some time. You might not know how long, but it's been there. It didn't just show up the moment you had that scan.
Cancer also typically doesn't change overnight. There are faster growing cancers, so pay attention to those details, but it's not something that from one day to the next is going to have completely changed necessarily in every case. So my first advice would be take a deep breath, give yourself some time. In the traditional world, typically you'll get your diagnosis. Sometimes it happens so quickly, you'll get your diagnosis on a Tuesday and they're having you come in for surgery on Thursday, or they're starting your chemo the next week. So this stuff happens really, really fast in the traditional world, and some women have felt like they got swept up in that fear and in that fight or fight mode. And then three months down the line were like, "What did I just do? I didn't have enough time to build myself up. I didn't have enough time to get prepared mentally or emotionally."
So take a deep breath. I'm certainly not saying to wait forever, but take a little bit of time, take a couple of weeks, do some research, read books, like Dr. V's book, Heal Breast Cancer Naturally, or look on blogs, look at research, gather some information, make a game plan to know what your goal is and then how you're going to reach that goal, and then how you're going to support yourself to get to that goal. So don't get swept up in that kind of fast pace, have to do it tomorrow type mentality.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Got it. Right. That's great.
DeAnn Richter RN:
I'm sorry, if I can add too. Fear in general is not the best mindset to make a decision in, especially when it's about your health. So when you're feeling fearful, your mind's just not working at its top capacity. So take some time to digest the news and to adjust to it, to accept it, get out of that fear and then you'll be in a better mindset to make your decisions.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Yeah, absolutely. That sounds like such great wise counsel, DeAnn. Thank you so much. Now, in closing, if anyone wants to reach your organization, what is the best way to contact you? And depending on what that looks like, how long will you take to contact them back?
DeAnn Richter RN:
Right. Now, if it's on a Saturday, I can't guarantee it'll be Saturday. So best way to contact us. We have a website, breastcancerconquerer.com. That also is our handle on Instagram and Facebook, so you can search for us there. The fastest way to get in contact with us, I would say would be through the website. We have an email, that's info email, and we get back to those within 24 hours usually. So pretty quickly. So that would probably be the quickest way. We also still look at Facebook and Instagram messages, but those things can roll so quickly. Sometimes they get lost. So I'd say the website would be the best.
Robert A. Carrillo:
Okay, wonderful. So breastcancerconqueror.com is the URL. That's the best place to go, fill out the form, 24 hours, except if it's a weekend. Wait until Monday through Friday, you'll contact them back. Is that fair enough?
DeAnn Richter RN:
That's fair enough, yes. On the weekend I might be doing some parasympathetic things myself. I might be laying on a beach or relaxing. You should be doing the same thing on the weekend.
Robert A. Carrillo:
All right. All right. Thanks you so much, DeAnn, for joining us today. I appreciate it. I think our audience is going to find this very, very helpful and I do appreciate your time. You take care.
DeAnn Richter RN:
Thank you, Robert.