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.
Nov. 3, 2025

Stand By She: Allison Applebaum

Stand By She: Allison Applebaum

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Allison Applebaum was supposed to become a concert pianist. She chose ballet instead. Then 9/11 hit, and she ran straight into a psych ward—on purpose. What followed was one of the most quietly revolutionary acts in modern medicine: founding the country’s first mental health clinic for caregivers. Because the system had decided that if you love someone dying, you don’t get care. You get to wait in the hallway.

She’s a clinical psychologist. A former dancer. A daughter who sat next to her dad—legendary arranger of Stand By Me—through every ER visit, hallway wait, and impossible choice. Now she’s training hospitals across the country to finally treat caregivers like patients. With names. With needs. With billing codes.

We talked about music, grief, psycho-oncology, the real cost of invisible labor, and why no one gives a shit about the person driving you to chemo. This one’s for the ones in the waiting room.


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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…