Healing with Dr. Newman

Trauma can hide in plain sight and sometimes healing starts with a stranger in the back seat of an Uber. Dr. Sherika Newman and veteran TV news journalist Rick Martin unpack what it means to carry grief, fear, and survival through a career built on witnessing the worst of humanity up close. Rick shares how 30 years in breaking news, including the Sandy Hook tragedy and years of newsroom pressure, quietly affected his mental health. He also opens up about surviving COVID, spending five days on a ventilator, enduring a second life-threatening medical crisis, and confronting the grief he had carried for years. Dr. Newman brings a clinical perspective to the conversation, naming the trauma, reframing Rick’s anger as grief, and explaining why direct communication, emotional support, and professional help matter more than many people realize.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why witnessing tragedy from a distance can still cause real trauma
• How grief can appear as anger, resistance, or emotional shutdown
• Rick’s L.A.S.E.R. stress-management framework: Listen, Assess, Support, Execute, Respond

• Why men especially may need permission to ask for help
• How therapy, faith, and community can become lifelines
• Why healing is not about forgetting—it’s about moving forward

Rick also discusses his memoir, Unmasked: Overcoming Death, a Story of Family, Faith, and Forgiveness, how writing became part of his healing, and why sharing your story can help others feel less alone.If you’ve been carrying invisible stress, navigating grief, recovering from trauma, or trying to stay strong while life keeps demanding more from you, this conversation offers language, perspective, and hope. You do not have to heal alone.

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What do you do when the doctors give your mother less than a 1% chance of survival and your faith says otherwise?

In this episode of Healing with Dr. Newman, Dr. Sherika Newman sits down with her longtime friend Bo to talk about the hardest season of his life: watching his mother and best friend, go from prolonged post operative recovery to kidney failure to and ICU admission to to septic shock with three organ systems failing. Bo opens up about the moment He got the message no one wants to get, the prayer that changed how he showed up as a caregiver, and the tiny words from his mother, "I'm gonna be okay" that became the turning point in a fight doctors didn't think could be won.

This is a raw conversation about the collision of medicine and faith, what it really means to advocate for a loved one in the ICU, why it's so hard for caregivers to accept help, and what healing actually looks like when it's not just physical. If you've ever cared for a sick parent, sat in a hospital room not knowing what to pray for, or wondered how faith and medicine can work together instead of against each other, this episode is for you.

🎙️ Healing with Dr. Newman — new episodes every month.

"The healthcare system killed both my parents."

That's not a hyperbole from Rich Goldstein, it's his reality. His father died of sepsis after being sent home with a fever. His mother spent 15 years in a hospital bed after a surgery she never should have had. Both were intelligent, resourced, capable people. The system still failed them.

In this episode, Dr. Newman sits down with Rich, a healthcare data and advocacy expert, to unpack why having money and intelligence isn't enough to protect you inside a system built for billing, not healing. They dig into the CARES Act's unintended consequences, why medicine has shifted from relational to transactional, and the four things Rich says can measurably improve your outcomes in any healthcare encounter.

In this episode:

• Why "people of means" are not immune to medical system failure
• The CARES Act: progress, and its unintended anxiety
• Why most people remember only 10-25% of what's said in a doctor's appointment
• The 4 pillars of better outcomes: personalization, continuity, engagement, and literacy
• Why doctors are not God -- and why uncertainty is part of medicine
• What Rich's company, Tanara, is building to help patients self-advocate

What does it take for a Black woman to finally stop pushing through?

For Marlene, it took a resident in an assisted living hallway offering her a walker.

In this episode, Dr. Newman sits down with Marlene, a lupus warrior navigating five years of chronic illness -- diagnosed in the middle of COVID, while changing jobs, managing properties, and showing up to work too exhausted to hold her head up. Marlene opens up about the moment everything shifted, what no one tells you about invisible illness, and how lupus ultimately led her to her purpose.

They also get into the uncomfortable truth about "Black Girl Magic" -- and why anything that pushes us to not rest isn't magic at all.

In this episode:

• How COVID symptoms masked early lupus signs
• Why being connected in healthcare made all the difference
• The real cost of the "push through" mentality on Black women's health
• What Marlene wishes she'd known about chronic illness and relationships
• Why healing isn't fixing -- it's sitting still

"Lupus forced me to sit still. And in that stillness, I found my purpose." -- Marlene

The conversation delves into the journey of a cancer diagnosis, the impact on the individual and family, the challenges in healthcare, the importance of advocacy, and the concept of healing. It highlights the significance of listening to doctors and understanding the role of spirituality in medicine.

Takeaways

• Advocacy in healthcare
• Importance of listening to doctors