Videos

Jenny Opalinski has spent more than a decade inside hospitals where people lose the ability to speak, breathe, swallow, and sometimes survive. A medical speech language pathologist by training, she worked in ICU, neuro rehab, and long term acute care settings, including a Level 1 trauma center, where she watched…

Fitz Koehler is a fitness expert, race announcer, author, and breast cancer survivor whose career spans decades of helping people move, train, and live healthier lives. After earning a master’s degree in exercise and sport sciences, she built the Fitzness brand, launched the Morning Mile school fitness program, and became…

Jeremy Heffner, MD, FACS is a board-certified trauma surgeon, former Chair of Surgery at Lima Memorial Health System, and cofounder of Surgery Unified, one of the largest physician-led communities in surgery. His perspective carries weight because he has spent decades inside operating rooms, hospital leadership, physician culture, and the growing…

I’ve don’t know how to feel today except that it’s probably one of the greatest days in American history for patient advocacy, says me, of course. 🔥🎉🙏🏻🤯🎉🥰🥳 #WeThePatients Order now! readwtp.com

In 1971, the National Cancer Act transformed cancer into a national research priority. More than 50 years later, the next frontier is no longer defined solely by scientific discovery, but by how quickly knowledge, lived experience, and patient voices can reshape healthcare itself. The concluding chapter of The Cancer Mavericks:…

In 1987, Mary P. Lovato, a member of Kewa Pueblo in New Mexico, was diagnosed with acute leukemia. To receive a bone marrow transplant, she had to travel more than 800 miles from home because specialized cancer care was unavailable through the Indian Health Service. When she returned, she discovered…

In 2000, Katie Couric underwent a live colonoscopy on national television following the death of her husband, Jay Monahan, from colorectal cancer at age 42. The broadcast demystified a procedure many Americans feared, led to an estimated 20% increase in colonoscopy screenings, and became one of the clearest examples of…

In 2006, a landmark report titled Closing the Gap: Research and Care Imperatives for Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer confirmed what young survivors had been saying for years. While survival rates for children and older adults had steadily improved, adolescents and young adults had experienced decades of stalled progress.…

In 2006, the Institute of Medicine published From Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in Transition, concluding that millions of Americans were surviving cancer only to find themselves navigating a healthcare system unprepared for life after treatment. The report challenged oncology to recognize that curing cancer was not the end…

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…