Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary
Matthew Zachary is the healthcare policy love child of Jon Stewart, Howard Stern, Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Seinfeld. He has 19 years of receipts to prove it. Editorially independent. Answerable to no one. What started as The Stupid Cancer Show in 2007 became Out of Patients. The first online health podcast in America, predating the medium itself. Zachary survived brain cancer at 21, built the young adult cancer movement from scratch, and spent two decades channeling patient rage into something the system never saw coming. Now he is marching into Washington. Out of Patients goes where the comfortable shows will not. Politics. Healthcare policy. Economics. Institutional accountability. Consumer protection. The forces shaping what 330 million Americans can access, afford, and survive. Battle-scarred patients. Exhausted caregivers. Rare insiders brave enough to name what is killing us. And the occasional elected official about to find out what an organized patient constituency actually looks like. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.
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Feb. 16, 2026

Reclaiming the Vowels: Sarah Gromko

Reclaiming the Vowels: Sarah Gromko
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Sarah Gromko and Matthew Zachary go back to SUNY Binghamton in the early 1990s, when they were barely 19 and living inside rehearsal rooms. She starred in campus musical theater productions. He served as pianist and music director for many of those shows and played rehearsal piano for the THEA101 repertory company. This episode reunites two former theater nerds who grew up and took very different paths through art, illness, and work that still circles the same truth.

Gromko trained as a singer and composer, studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music, worked in New York and New Orleans, then moved into healthcare as a speech language pathologist and recognized vocologist. She explains aphasia, apraxia, dysarthria, and dysphagia with clarity earned from the clinic. She recounts helping a 16 year old gunshot survivor in New Orleans speak again using Melodic Intonation Therapy. The conversation covers voice banking for ALS, gender affirming voice care, and the damage caused when medicine confuses speech loss with intelligence loss. The result feels like an epic reunion powered by 1990s nostalgia and sharpened by decades of lived consequence.

RELATED LINKS

Sarah Gromko

Gramco Voice

Melodic Intonation Therapy

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