Blog Posts

July 28, 2026

Out of Patients EP4534: Your Benefits May Vary: Rebecca Bloom

🚨NEW EPISODE 🚨 Rebecca Bloom spent years inside one of the least sexy but most consequential corners of American healthcare. Employee benefits law. Executive compensation. HR policy. The part of the machine where cancer quietly turns into paperwork…

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July 22, 2026

Out of Patients EP453: Mission, Margin, and the Women Left Waiting with Vasanta Pundrika

WOMEN MAKE 80% OF HEALTHCARE SPENDING DECISIONS. THEY ALSO SPEND 25% MORE OF THEIR LIVES IN POORER HEALTH. THE SYSTEM FINALLY NOTICED THEY HAVE WALLETS. 🚨NEW EPISODE ALERT 🚨 Vasanta spent 20 years in healthcare investment banking before walking aw…

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July 15, 2026

Out of Patients EP452:You Shouldn’t Need AI to Survive Cancer: Brad Power

Brad Power spent years helping corporations understand systems, incentives, and operational failure points before cancer forced him to study a very different machine. Now he runs Cancer Patient Lab and Open Cancer AI, which sounds futuristic until y…

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July 7, 2026

Out of Patients EP451: The Doctor Will Leave You Now: Jessica Peatross

Dr. Jessica Peatross spent years practicing hospital medicine before she reached a conclusion that would make most healthcare executives deeply uncomfortable. Many chronically ill patients improved only after they stepped outside the conventional he…

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June 30, 2026

Out of Patients EP450: The Patient Wears Prada: Farla Efros

🚨NEW EPISODE 🚨 Farla Efros ran companies before she ran her own cancer. She built a career fixing broken businesses, then got a call while on a client meeting in Spain that she had breast cancer. She did what she knows how to do. She treated it li…

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June 23, 2026

Out of Patients EP449: Coding the Invisible: Emily Mendenhall

🚨 NEW EPISODE 🚨 YOUR SUFFERING CANNOT BE CODED OR BILLED. THE SYSTEM MOVES ON. Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist at Georgetown who studies what she calls coding the invisible. She examines what happens when people get sick in ways the s…

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June 11, 2026

Out of Patients EP447: Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt

Dr. Sarah Matt heard a human cough at 4am in a dairy barn and thought she was about to die. It was a sheep. That moment killed her plan to become a vet and pushed her into medicine, then surgery, then straight into the machine that runs healthcare. …

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May 26, 2026

Out of Patients EP445: Fatal to Relentless: Kathy Giusti

In 1996, Kathy Giusti sat on the floor of a Borders bookstore reading Harrison’s like her life depended on it. It did. She was 37, staring at a 3 year prognosis for multiple myeloma, with an 18 month old at home and a system that offered confusion i…

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May 20, 2026

Out of Patients EP444: Discharge Instructions Not Included: Shlomit Liberty

At 19, Shlomit woke up unable to speak. Half her body went numb. The ER sent her home and called it stress. Years later she stood at bedsides in top hospitals watching families nod through explanations they did not understand. That gap became her li…

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May 5, 2026

Out of Patients EP442: Faith, Fraud, and Finding Himself: Ben Unger

Ben Unger grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn and trained in Israel to become a rabbi. At 19 he told his community he was attracted to men. Their prescription: ritual baths, marriage to a woman, and this gem from his therapist. "If there's friction, it wor…

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May 1, 2026

Out of Patients EP441: Defender Energy: Drew Flugstad-Clarke

Drew Flugstad Clarke played Division I soccer at Georgetown, survived 4 a.m. investment banking emails, and built a life around oil paint and portraiture. Then in June 2022 her father Jim received a glioblastoma diagnosis at 57. He died 1 day shy of…

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April 21, 2026

Out of Patients EP440:Not Today, Jesus: Janine Durso

Janine Durso and I met in 1996 in a pharmaceutical ad agency when pagers still felt advanced and we thought 3 hours of sleep counted as self care. She built a 30 year career shaping healthcare messaging. In November 2024 her own brain ruptured durin…

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April 14, 2026

Out of Patients EP439: Mental Health, Wicked Problems and Dodgeball: Rebecca Benghiat

Rebecca Benghiat JD runs impact at Inner Foundation after leading JED and advising across the mental health ecosystem. She sits where money, policy, and care collide. I wanted her on because she understands how decisions get made and still has the n…

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April 7, 2026

Out of Patients EP437: AYA Family Affair: Jansher Naim

In February 2022, at 19, Jansher Naim went from random stomach pain to a Stage 4 fibrolamellar diagnosis most oncologists rarely see. By the time he landed in my studio in 2026, he had already lived through 41 rounds of chemo, a Whipple, and the kin…

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March 31, 2026

Out of Patients EP438: First in (Wo)Man: Jessica J. Federer

Women were banned from U.S. clinical trials until 1993. Not because they didn't matter. Because the system decided protecting them meant ignoring them. For decades. Jessica Federer spent 10 years inside Bayer as the first female Chief Digital Offic…

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March 24, 2026

Out of Patients EP436: “But You Look Great” with Monique Gore Massey

I invited Monique on because she refuses to smile through harm. She spent 2.5 years in and out of NYC ERs while her body shut down. Her weight dropped from 122 to 72 in 3 months. Fevers hit 105. Her hair fell out in clumps. No one ran the right test…

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March 17, 2026

Out of Patients EP435: Not Today, Life: Teresa Baglietto

Teresa Baglietto walked through colon cancer at 10, survived a postpartum crisis that almost killed her, fought lip cancer, then heard the words you have breast cancer while raising 3 boys and rebuilding after 2008 wiped out her income. She sells en…

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March 10, 2026

Out of Patients EP0424: Neuro Spicy on the Front Line: Dr Pamela Buchanan

Dr Pamela Buchanan came on Out of Patients because she tells the truth without flinching. She spent over 20 years in emergency rooms watching American medicine chew through its own people. During COVID in 2020 she logged 80 to 100 hours a week while…

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March 5, 2026

Eczema, Exit, Repeat: The Business Model of Chronic Disease

Barbara Paldus built biotech for a living. Then a serious mental health scare involving her young son forced her to rethink everything. This moment pushed her from manufacturing cancer therapeutics into the $100,000,000,000 skin care industry after …

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Feb. 24, 2026

Out of Patients EP432: Callus on Your Soul: Jenny Opalinski

Jenny Opalinski earned her credibility the hard way. She worked ICU floors and neuro rehab units where grief screams, codes fail, and the debrief ends with moving equipment instead of naming trauma. She watched good clinicians stack 10 to 15 traumat…

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Dec. 30, 2025

🎄 The Most Famous Kids In Cancer Advocacy Are Back 🎄

Every December since they could speak, my twins hijack the Out of Patients podcast feed. Koby and Hannah are now 15½ and High School sophomores who own their moniker as the “Truman Show of Cancer Advocacy.” Rest assured, this isn't your typical yea…

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Dec. 23, 2025

Out of Patients EP427: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Jason Gilley

Jason Gilley was 19. Stage 3 testicular cancer. Lymph nodes. Lungs. First question after diagnosis: "Will I lose my hair?" College pitcher. Threw heat. Got cut from middle school basketball. Then cancer cut him down at his peak. Now he's in my stud…

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Dec. 16, 2025

Out of Patients EP426: Otherwise Healthy with Scott Capozza

Scott Capozza belongs on this show because he lives on both sides of the exam table. He survived testicular cancer in 1998 at Strong Memorial in Rochester while trying to graduate on time. He now works at Yale New Haven Health as the only oncology p…

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Dec. 9, 2025

Out of Patients EP425: Doctor No More: MaryAnn Wilbur

Dr. MaryAnn Wilbur didn’t burn out. She walked out. She left a career she trained her whole life for because the system told her to lie to patients, ignore her conscience, and run faster on a rigged treadmill that turns doctors into data entry clerk…

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