Out of Patients EP420: Stand By She: Allison Applebaum
Allison J. Applebaum, Ph.D., FAPOS grew up surrounded by symphonies, not stethoscopes. Her father, Stan Applebaum, arranged Stand By Me. (Yes. *That* Stand By Me) Her mother was a prodigy. She was supposed to live behind a piano. Instead, she became a ballerina. Then 9/11 shattered everything, and she ran north through the dust into a new life at Mount Sinai. That pivot gave birth to one of the most radical concepts in modern medicine: therapy for caregivers.
She didn’t wait for permission. She built the country’s first mental health clinic for caregivers because no one else bothered to care about the people doing the caring. Now she’s rewriting the rules of medicine by treating caregivers like patients—with charts, billing codes, and actual humanity.
Our conversation hit every nerve: art, trauma, policy, parenthood, legacy.
We laughed about White Nights, Running Scared and Carrie Bradshaw dating Baryshnikov. We called bullshit on a system that praises love while ignoring the labor it takes to sustain it.
Allison reminded me that caregiving is both an act of defiance and survival. Her story proves that empathy without infrastructure is just sentiment.
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 EP4534: Your Benefits May Vary: Rebecca Bloom
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