Whole-Person Healing: When Spiritual Care Meets Medical Care w/ Dr. Marvin Delgado Guay

Most of us have been trained to think of treating people as a technical problem. If something hurts, we look for the right drug. If something fails, we look for the right procedure. That picture is incomplete.

We’ve built a system obsessed with fixing bodies, while quietly ignoring the inner worlds of the people living inside them. Their fears, their beliefs, their unanswered prayers, and the meaning they’re trying to make of suffering.

Illness doesn’t just attack organs. It raises questions about God, identity, guilt, fear, and loss of control. And when those questions go unanswered, suffering multiplies, no matter how advanced the treatment plan is.

Modern medicine has no real language for this kind of pain. It knows how to measure blood pressure, inflammation, and tumor size, but it doesn’t know how to sit with grief, spiritual doubt, uncertainty, and loss.

Yet when clinicians slow down enough to listen, something shifts. Patients begin to speak about meaning, about God, about unresolved relationships and fears they’ve never voiced before.

And often, that is where real healing starts — the kind of whole-person healing that restores connection, dignity, and a sense of being spiritually held in the middle of suffering.

What if some of the deepest healing doesn’t come from doing more, but from being more present? How can clinicians learn to care for the soul as intentionally as they care for the body?

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Marvin Delgado Guay, a palliative care specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center. We talk about what it looks like when medicine includes spiritual care in its everyday practice. 

We explore why “total pain” includes the soul as much as the body, and how healthcare can become not just a place of treatment, but a space for healing, meaning, and connection with God.

With all these advancements in medical care, we often focus only on the physical aspects of health, forgetting the emotional and spiritual elements. -Dr. Marvin Delgado Guay

Things You’ll Learn In This Episode

Pain isn’t always physical
Many symptoms labeled as “medical” are actually expressions of emotional or spiritual distress. What happens when we treat suffering instead of just symptoms?

Fixing vs. healing
Medicine is trained to solve problems, but some forms of suffering can’t be solved, only witnessed. How does presence become a form of treatment?

How spirituality shapes medical decisions
Beliefs about meaning, God, and purpose influence everything from treatment choices to end-of-life care, but are clinicians equipped to address this?

The power of the “collective soul” in healthcare
When doctors, nurses, chaplains, and therapists work as one, care becomes something deeper than specialization. What changes when healing becomes a shared human act?

About my Guest

Dr. Marvin Delgado Guay is an internist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he provides symptom control and supportive care for patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers. He completed his internal medicine training at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, followed by a fellowship in Geriatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a clinical and research fellowship in Symptom Control and Palliative Care at MD Anderson. Earlier in his career, he coordinated palliative care services and worked within geriatrics at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital through the University of Texas Medical School. Dr. Delgado Guay’s work focuses on what medicine often overlooks: the full experience of illness. His research explores physical, psychological, and spiritual distress in patients with serious disease, as well as aging-related issues such as frailty and cognition. He has authored and co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications on symptom burden and spiritual care in advanced cancer, and is deeply committed to improving quality of life when cure is no longer the goal. Connect with Dr. Delgado Guay on LinkedIn.