How do you choose which psychedelic medicine is right for your cancer journey when you're navigating legal restrictions, confusing terminology, and your own intuition about what feels safe?

In this episode, Dan speaks with Angela Amirault, founder of Altered Healing and a psychedelic-assisted therapist practicing in Nova Scotia. Angela holds a BA in Psychology, a Graduate Diploma in Counseling and Psychotherapy, and advanced credentialing in mindfulness-based psychedelic therapy from the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness. She has guided over 500 medicine sessions with cannabis, ketamine, and psilocybin, and was the first practitioner in the United States to legally offer retreats combining cannabis and psilocybin.

Angela and Dan explore how to navigate the landscape of psychedelic medicines for cancer patients. They discuss the distinct qualities of cannabis (embodied, gentle, holding), ketamine (disconnective, observational, brief), and psilocybin (expansive, ancient, transcendent), and why Angela asks clients "what do you feel called to?" rather than prescribing specific substances. The conversation covers practical protocol details—preparation sessions, medicine experiences, and integration support—and addresses the challenging reality that legal access often determines options before personal preference can. Angela emphasizes finding guides who can create genuine safety, explains how different medicines help with the bodily alienation cancer creates, and shares why self-compassion emerges as the common thread across all psychedelic experiences for cancer patients.

Healing Cancer Journeys is a non-profit organization providing education and community for people exploring psychedelic medicines in their cancer journeys. Learn more at www.healingcancerjourneys.org and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack where our handle is 'healingcancerjourneys'.

What if the tumor trying to kill you could actually heal you? And what if the boring policy details around psychedelic access matter more than the mystical experiences themselves?

In this episode, we speak with Ashley Lukens, cancer thriver and co-founder of Clarity Project, Hawaii's leading psychedelic advocacy organization. Ashley holds a PhD in Political Science and has spent over two decades advancing environmental justice, food sovereignty, and now psychedelic medicine access. After receiving a premonitory vision during an ayahuasca ceremony just ten days before her stage II brain cancer diagnosis in 2017, Ashley has integrated psychedelic medicines into her healing journey alongside conventional treatment.

Ashley shares her radical reframing of cancer through the mantra "I heal my tumor and my tumor heals me"—a perspective most cancer patients struggle to imagine. We explore how psychedelic medicines helped her work with the nine key factors in Radical Remission, particularly around trusting intuition, finding purpose, and becoming CEO of her own cancer care. We also dig into the unglamorous but critical nuts and bolts of psychedelic access: cost structures, insurance coverage, banking regulations, and implementation frameworks that determine whether cancer patients can actually access these medicines or just read about them in headlines.

This podcast is brought to you by Healing Cancer Journeys, a non-profit organization providing education and community for people exploring psychedelic medicines in their cancer journeys. You can find us online at www.healingcancerjourneys.org or follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack where our handle is 'healingcancerjourneys'.

Why does modern cancer care excel at extending survival while often struggling to address the existential suffering that defines so much of the cancer experience?

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Manish Agrawal, founder and CEO of Sunstone Therapies, the world's most active psychedelic research site. Before founding Sunstone in 2020, Dr. Agrawal spent nearly two decades as a practicing oncologist and holds advanced degrees in medicine, philosophy, clinical research, and bioethics.

Dr. Agrawal explores how modern medicine has been optimized to measure quantifiable outcomes—tumor size, survival rates, lab values—while systematically overlooking the psychological and existential dimensions of illness. He discusses why psychedelics represent a fundamentally different kind of medicine, one that addresses love, meaning, connection, and our relationship with mortality.

We examine critical open questions facing the field: which patients benefit from which psychedelic compounds, whether lower doses might produce more sustainable benefits, and how to provide safe access as these treatments move toward FDA approval. Despite overseeing several hundred psychedelic treatments, Dr. Agrawal demonstrates remarkable humility, acknowledging that he sometimes knows less now than when he started.

This podcast is brought to you by Healing Cancer Journeys, a non-profit organization providing education and community for people exploring psychedelic medicines in their cancer journeys. Visit us at www.healingcancerjourneys.org or follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack where our handle is 'healingcancerjourneys'.