Out of Patients EP415: Sorry, Your Awareness Campaign is Showing
Katie Henry once handed out 500 vibrators at my cancer conference and accidentally rewrote the national conversation on sex after breast cancer. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a Tuesday in Katie Henry world.
She’s a nonprofit bruiser turned pharma insider, fluent in the language of boardrooms and band camp. She worked her way up from J.Crew retail shifts and bank teller jobs to managing national grants, fixing broken trial designs, and making sure patients don’t get erased in the strategy decks.
I brought Katie on Out of Patients because she’s the kind of voice that cuts through the performance. She’s smart without the ego, funny without the fluff, and emotionally grounded in the actual human toll of our system’s failures.
We talk shop, we talk family, we talk trombones and trauma and why her alter ego “Didi” is the most terrifying grandparent in America. She calls herself a learner. I call her a field general disguised as a marimba nerd.
This episode is everything I want this show to be: irreverent, disarming, deeply true, and free from the marketing machine. Katie reminded me that outrage is only useful if you can convert it into action.
Listen. Share. Argue. Laugh. Then do something about the system.
Producer
Matthew Zachary invented healthcare podcasting before podcasting was a thing. In 2007, fresh off building Stupid Cancer, he grabbed a mic, launched The Stupid Cancer Show, and started broadcasting patient stories on internet talk radio when everyone else was still writing blogs.
19 years and 2000+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.
Matthew does not do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they would never tell Congress. CEOs admit what is broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry does not want you to know. The conversations other shows will not touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.
What makes him different: he has been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries. Keynoted hundreds of conferences. Published in The Hill. Now marching into Washington with a national patient constituency behind him.
But he has also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.
That dual perspective creates interviews you will not hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he has asked them from hospital beds and boardrooms both.
No pre-approved questions. No PR handlers. No seven-minute segments. Just real conversations with people brave enough to tell the truth about American healthcare.
Still the show where whistleblowers go first. Still the show … Read More
Out of Patients EP456: Fitz Happens: The Marvelous Fitz Koehler
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