Videos

In 1967, breast surgeon Dr. Harold P. Freeman arrived at Harlem Hospital expecting to treat cancer. Instead, he confronted a healthcare system where poverty, racism, lack of insurance, and institutional barriers often determined who lived long enough to receive treatment. Patients frequently arrived with advanced disease, not because medicine lacked…

Welcome to a very, very, very special bonus episode of Out of Patients, and one unlike anything published on this feed before. For nearly 20 years, Matthew Zachary has handed these microphones to patients, caregivers, doctors, advocates, troublemakers, and people with something worth saying. This time, he handed them to…

A man is struck by a car on the streets of Los Angeles. In the emergency department, a CT scan ordered to look for traumatic injuries reveals something nobody expected: a mass in his colon. Days later, sitting across from Dr. Belinda Waltman, he calls the accident “a blessing in…

In 1986, 23 survivors, physicians, nurses, attorneys, and community organizers gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a weekend that would permanently change the language and politics of cancer. Working late into the night, they debated not only strategy, but identity, ultimately declaring that from the moment of diagnosis, every person…

In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, transforming cancer research with an unprecedented federal investment and launching what became known as the War on Cancer. The legislation did not emerge from scientific discovery alone. It was the culmination of decades of relentless advocacy by researchers, philanthropists, journalists,…

Long before cancer survivors organized into a movement, Hollywood had already shaped how Americans understood the disease. Films rarely used the word “cancer,” physicians often withheld diagnoses from patients, and the people who survived were almost nowhere to be found on screen. Recorded before The Cancer Mavericks: A History of…

Rebecca Bloom is a former employee benefits and executive compensation attorney who spent more than 25 years helping women navigate cancer, work, insurance, disability coverage, and financial survival. She is the founder and author of When Women Get Sick, a book built from decades inside the legal, workplace, and patient…

Vasanta Pundarika built her career inside healthcare investment banking before launching Lotuspring, an advisory firm focused on women’s health and behavioral health. She spent nearly 20 years advising healthcare systems, treatment providers, and growth stage companies on mergers, financing, and operational strategy while watching the industry repeatedly misunderstand the people…

Brad Power spent years advising major corporations on systems design, process engineering, and decision making before lymphoma shoved him into the patient side of American healthcare. Instead of accepting the experience at face value, he started reverse engineering the machinery around cancer itself. Brad is the founder of Cancer Patient…

By the time the paper hit version 71, Dr. Nirosha Murugan had already done the hard part. The data were real. The experiment had worked. A team of researchers had used a wearable bioreactor to trigger limb regeneration in frogs, a result with obvious implications for regenerative medicine. But the…

Dr. Jess Peatross trained in conventional medicine and worked as a hospitalist before she started questioning why so many chronically ill patients kept getting worse inside the healthcare system she trusted. Her perspective carries weight because she spent years following every protocol exactly as taught before walking away from hospital…

Farla Efros is a senior retail executive and former CEO who built and sold companies before facing her own breast cancer diagnosis. She brings that same operational mindset into a healthcare system that expects patients to manage complexity while they are at their most vulnerable. She was on a client…

In 2020, Emily Mendenhall drove from Washington, DC to Okoboji, Iowa, a town of 800 that swells to 200,000 every summer, and walked into a pandemic that looked nothing like the one dominating national headlines. Inside gas stations and bars, masks marked you as an outsider. In one stop, a…

At 25, Jace Yawnick was building a career in health and wellness sales, chasing growth, status, and the usual young adult fantasy of getting somewhere fast. Then his body stopped cooperating. Fatigue turned into chemotherapy. The diagnosis was primary mediastinal B cell non Hodgkin lymphoma, and the rest of his…

At 20 years old, newly arrived from Puerto Rico and trying to build a future in science, Benjamin Suarez Jimenez found himself sitting in front of two senior faculty members accused of plagiarism. He knew the material. He had done the work. His mistake came from failing to cite class…

Dr. Sarah Matt trained as a burn surgeon, working in a field where patients arrive with catastrophic injuries and survival depends on speed, skill, and resources. She left the bedside after confronting a limit that medicine does not like to admit. One physician can only see so many people in…

In the late 1980s, a child exposed to fallout from the Chernobyl disaster lay in a hospital bed while doctors told his family there were no clear answers and no reliable path forward. Decades later, that same child, Yan Leyfman, walks into exam rooms as a hematology oncology fellow, expected…

Matthew Zachary is a brain cancer survivor, healthcare advocate, founder of Stupid Cancer and We the Patients, and host of Out of Patients. In April 2026, he returned to the stage at Merkin Hall near Lincoln Center for his first solo public piano concert in almost 22 years while launching…

In December 1996, a 37 year old pharmaceutical executive sat in a Borders bookstore reading medical textbooks on the floor, trying to understand a disease she had never heard of. Multiple myeloma carried a three year prognosis. Her daughter was 18 months old. Her father had just died of cancer.…

On April 28, 2026, Matthew Zachary returned to the stage at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City for his first public solo piano performance in nearly 22 years. The evening marked 30 years since his brain cancer diagnosis at age 21 and celebrated the launch of his new book,…

At 19, Shlomit woke up unable to speak. The right side of her body went numb. An emergency room sent her home and called it stress. That moment did not end in a diagnosis that changed policy or triggered reform. It sent her into a decade long pursuit of understanding…

In 2020, developmental biologist Dr. Crystal Rogers drove the country roads outside Davis, California crying between grant rejections, wondering whether she was about to lose her lab, her career, and the scientific future she had spent years building. She had already done what academia tells young scientists to do. She…

In 2008, Katy Talento walked away from Capitol Hill and into a Catholic convent. Within a year, she walked out. Within another decade, she sat inside the White House shaping health policy. Somewhere in between, she got labeled “infertile” after a single cycle of testing and spent years believing it.…

Brain cancer at 21. Piano comeback at 51. Mr. G from PIX11 came to Merkin Hall and told my story to millions of New Yorkers. My Dad was with me every second during treatment. But the system still forced him to spend his nights in the basement on a fax…