Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

Matthew Zachary Worldwide
  • 4.9 (159)
  • Health & Fitness
  • Updated Weekly

The longest-running independent healthcare podcast, Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary has supplied 19 years of unfiltered truth about American healthcare. The first online health podcast when it launched in 2007, it predates the medium itself. A 30-year brain cancer survivor, Matthew built the young adult cancer movement from scratch. Now he channels patient rage into political power, featuring on the air battle-scarred survivors, exhausted caregivers, and the rare insider brave enough to name what's killing us. Real stories from real people who refuse to accept that healthcare has to hurt this much. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.

  1. 2d ago

    You Shouldn’t Need AI to Survive Cancer: Brad Power

    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 Lab and Open Cancer AI, two projects built around a blunt reality most patients discover too late: the healthcare system rewards people who know how to navigate it. Everyone else risks getting steamrolled by information asymmetry, insurance barriers, administrative friction, and institutional incentives designed around efficiency instead of human survival. The conversation starts with Harvard Business Review and Tumblr blogs before moving directly into the darker architecture underneath modern cancer care. Power explains how hospitals optimize for throughput, how insurance companies reward operational consistency over personalized medicine, and why many patients quietly end up needing a crash course in oncology, reimbursement policy, and behavioral psychology while fighting for their lives. The discussion digs into CAR-T therapy, functional testing, AI assisted decision support, and the growing collision between personalized medicine and standardized care pathways. Power argues that engaged patients often get better outcomes because they learn how to push for off guideline treatments, contest denials, and ask smarter questions. The counterpoint lands hard: patients should never have needed to become experts in the first place. The episode also explores the cultural consequences of AI entering cancer care. OpenAI advertising, data privacy, trust erosion, pharmaceutical influence, and “agentic AI” all collide inside a healthcare economy already drowning in distrust. Power sees artificial intelligence as a force multiplier for patient literacy and access. The larger system still decides who gets approved, who gets delayed, and who gets left behind. By the end, the conversation lands exactly where modern healthcare keeps forcing people to land: survival increasingly depends on learning how the machine works before the machine works on you. RELATED LINKS Brad Power Cancer Patient Lab Open Cancer AI Harvard Business Review Research to the People CAR T Cell Therapy FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    You Shouldn’t Need AI to Survive Cancer: Brad Power

  2. Jul 9 ·  Bonus

    Standard Deviation S2 E5: Pitch Imperfect

    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 science still wasn’t getting over the line. The problem wasn’t the work. It was the translation. On this episode of Standard Deviation, host Oliver Bogler talks with Dr. Nirosha Murugan, a biophysicist and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Tissue Biophysics at Wilfrid Laurier University, about what happens when a scientist working at the edges of quantum biology, bioelectricity, and tissue regeneration runs headfirst into the unwritten rules of academic publishing. Murugan’s research asks biologists to think beyond molecules and chemistry alone, and to consider the physical signals, electromagnetic fields, and invisible forces that shape development and healing. It is ambitious science. It is also exactly the kind of work that can make gatekeepers nervous. Bogler follows Murugan through the less glamorous part of discovery: the hidden curriculum of getting a paper published, securing scientific credibility, and learning that data do not simply “speak for themselves.” Murugan describes how jargon buried the pitch of her own work, how a lack of editorial support left her at a disadvantage, and how the JEDI program at the Life Science Editors Foundation paired her with a former journal editor who taught her how to structure a manuscript, write a cover letter, and survive peer review. The result was publication in Science Advances, but the larger story is about power. Who gets taught the rules of biomedical research. Who has access to grant writers, editors, and institutional polish. Who is left to brute-force their way through the maze. And how one scientist, having finally found the map, now makes sure her own trainees do not have to learn it the hard way. RELATED LINKS Dr. Nirosha Murugan⁠ Wilfrid Laurier University⁠ Life Science Editors Foundation⁠ JEDI Program⁠ Science Advances paper on limb regeneration⁠ FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Standard Deviation S2 E5: Pitch Imperfect

  3. Jul 7

    The Doctor Will Leave You Now: Jessica Peatross

    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 medicine entirely. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia during the opioid crisis, she entered medicine believing the system existed to heal people. Instead, she found hospitals driven by billing codes, liability management, and pharmaceutical dependence while patients with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, mold exposure, and chronic pain cycled endlessly through appointments and prescriptions. Dr. Peatross explains what pushed her toward functional medicine, cannabis therapy, and prevention focused care after watching patients improve only after leaving conventional treatment pipelines behind. The conversation tackles physician burnout, chronic illness stigma, healthcare incentives, and the growing collapse of trust between patients and institutions. The discussion also moves into supplements, environmental toxins, ultra processed food, and the uncomfortable economics behind keeping people permanently sick but continuously billable. Dr. Peatross describes the professional backlash that comes with challenging medical orthodoxy while Matthew connects her experience to the broader erosion of public trust across American healthcare. Together they unpack what happens when patients stop believing the system can help them and start searching elsewhere for answers. RELATED LINKS Dr. Jess Peatross Instagram Marshall University Brave New Weed FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    The Doctor Will Leave You Now: Jessica Peatross

  4. Jun 30

    The Patient Wears Prada: Farla Efros

    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 call in Spain when the diagnosis came through. A clear mammogram had missed it. An MRI caught it. Within hours, she was ordering binders, building a plan, and structuring her treatment like a turnaround strategy. Every appointment became a meeting. Every doctor faced an agenda with dozens of questions. She paid out of pocket for PET scans that were denied and hired a third party firm to validate her treatment path when her own doctors resisted outside input.   The conversation tracks what happens when a high-functioning executive enters a system built on delay, denial, and fragmentation. Efros describes negotiating for tests, managing physician relationships, and assembling an “executive board” of advisors across conventional and alternative care. She calls the experience “the worst client I ever had,” exposing how administrative burden shifts onto patients and families. The tension sits between what worked for her and what is inaccessible to most. Her approach requires confidence, time, and fluency in navigating power. The system rewards that behavior while quietly failing patients who cannot replicate it. Insurance coverage still left her paying out of pocket. Doctors pushed standard protocols over precision medicine. Survivorship offered little support once treatment ended. This episode examines how cancer care operates as a series of incentives rather than a coordinated system, and why patients are forced to become operators just to get through it. RELATED LINKS Farla Efros Farla Efros on LinkedIn F*ck Cancer F*ck Cancer on Amazon Accenture CTOAM PULL QUOTES “I treated cancer like the worst client I ever had.” “They wouldn’t approve the test, so I paid for it myself.” “Every appointment was a negotiation.” FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    The Patient Wears Prada: Farla Efros

  5. Jun 23

    Coding the Invisible: Emily Mendenhall

    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 man told her family they would not be served if they kept theirs on. Her 6 year old daughter cried, confused.   Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist at Georgetown University, did what she always does. She started asking questions. Over months, she interviewed neighbors, former classmates, and local officials, including her own brother in law who helped lead the local COVID response. The result became Unmasked, a case study in how community identity, economics, and politics shaped public health decisions in real time.   That work led directly into her latest book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID, where she tracks a much older problem. Patients with chronic illness, especially women, often fail to meet medicine’s demand for proof. Without a clear diagnosis, they lose access to care, insurance coverage, and legitimacy. Mendenhall argues that long COVID did not create this failure. It exposed it. This conversation centers on how healthcare systems reward certainty and punish complexity. Long COVID clinics send patients to 17 specialists without resolution. Insurance structures require diagnoses that many conditions cannot provide. Medical training still struggles to integrate trauma, mental health, and chronic disease into a coherent model of care. Mendenhall brings lived experience into the conversation. After COVID, she dealt with months of fatigue and escalating anxiety that altered her baseline health. She does not claim the label of long COVID, but she understands how quickly the system becomes harder to navigate once symptoms stop fitting clean categories.   The stakes are not theoretical. In the United States, access to healthcare, disability benefits, and treatment still depends on whether a condition can be measured, coded, and reimbursed. For millions living with invisible illness, the burden of proof becomes the illness itself. RELATED LINKS Emily Mendenhall Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVID Science Politics Georgetown University FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Coding the Invisible: Emily Mendenhall

  6. Jun 16

    Jace Beats Cancer

    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 life split into before and after.    Now in remission, he talks about cancer the way people actually live it, not the way nonprofits package it. He gets into survivorship, mental health, young adult isolation, and the deadening absurdity of prior authorization. One of the sharpest parts of the conversation lands on a simple American insult disguised as policy: treatment innovation means very little when insurance can still deny the scan, the drug, or the next step. Jace has seen that firsthand, including during routine monitoring after active treatment.    This episode tracks what happens when a young cancer patient becomes a public voice and refuses to play mascot. It covers oncology, insurance, remission, advocacy, and the long mental hangover that follows survival. It also names the part too many institutions dodge: the system works great right up until it doesn’t, and when it fails, patients get handed the bill, the panic, and a camera if they want anyone to care.    RELATED LINKS Jace Beats Cancer Jace Yawnick on LinkedIm Conquer Cancer Article CURE Today Article Pyure Brands FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Jace Beats Cancer

  7. Jun 11 ·  Bonus

    Standard Deviation S2 E4: The Invisible Load

    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 notes during an exam because nobody had told him that was expected. In a matter of minutes, he watched what felt like his entire career flash before him. On this episode of Standard Deviation, host Oliver Bogler examines the hidden architecture of academic science through the experiences of Dr. Benjamin Suarez Jimenez, Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester and a neuroscientist studying PTSD, anxiety, trauma, and spatial cognition through virtual reality and video game environments. Benjamin traces his path from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States, through the NIH, Columbia University, and eventually to leading his own laboratory. Along the way, he encountered a series of barriers that had little to do with scientific ability and everything to do with access to unwritten rules. From academic gatekeeping to grant writing expectations, he learned that success in biomedical research often depends on knowledge that never appears in a textbook. Oliver explores how those invisible obstacles shape careers, influence research funding, and determine who gains access to opportunity. The conversation also examines the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Program at the Life Science Editors Foundation, which pairs scientists from underrepresented backgrounds with experienced scientific editors. Through that mentorship, Benjamin transformed a critical grant proposal into a successful pilot award that helped launch an NIH R01 application. The discussion extends beyond one scientist’s experience. Benjamin describes helping a former mentee navigate dissertation roadblocks that threatened her graduation, illustrating how institutional bureaucracy can delay careers and discourage talented researchers. Together, they explore the hidden administrative burden, cultural barriers, and bias that many scientists carry alongside their research, and what happens when someone who receives support turns around and opens the door for others. RELATED LINKS Life Science Editors Foundation Benjamin Suarez Jimenez Lab Dr. Benjamin Suarez Jimenez Benjamin Suarez Jimenez FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Standard Deviation S2 E4: The Invisible Load

  8. Jun 9

    Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt

    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 a day. The system surrounding those patients decides the rest. She moved into health technology, held leadership roles in startups, and built global infrastructure at Oracle to scale care across populations. Then she watched billions of dollars in digital health and AI initiatives stall out when they hit real clinical environments. This episode follows that pivot from surgeon to strategist and back into direct patient care in rural New York, where she now treats uninsured patients, migrant workers, and communities pushed to the margins. The conversation centers on a persistent failure across healthcare systems. Products get built for regulators, executives, and investors instead of the people who use them. The result shows up in failed adoption, broken workflows, prior authorization delays, and rising physician burnout. The discussion cuts through health policy language and lands on lived consequence. The system rewards speed over usability, scale over trust, and compliance over care. Patients absorb the fallout. Physicians carry the liability. The incentives remain intact. RELATED LINKS Dr. Sarah Matt The Borderless Healthcare Revolution The Clinical Realist Jessica Federer Sovato FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    Taco Thursday Meets Broken Healthcare: Dr. Sarah Matt
See All (504)

4.9
out of 5
159 Ratings

About

The longest-running independent healthcare podcast, Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary has supplied 19 years of unfiltered truth about American healthcare. The first online health podcast when it launched in 2007, it predates the medium itself. A 30-year brain cancer survivor, Matthew built the young adult cancer movement from scratch. Now he channels patient rage into political power, featuring on the air battle-scarred survivors, exhausted caregivers, and the rare insider brave enough to name what's killing us. Real stories from real people who refuse to accept that healthcare has to hurt this much. This is the show that started the conversation America is still not ready to finish.

Information

You Might Also Like