Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

Today’s episode of Out of Patients welcomes Dr Pamela Buchanan, an emergency room physician with over 20 years inside American medicine who refuses to sugarcoat what the job demands and what it destroys. She worked straight through COVID as protocols changed by the day and deaths arrived faster than anyone could process. She logged 80 to 100 hour weeks. She isolated from her family to avoid bringing the virus home. Over time, survival began to feel negotiable.

Dr Buchanan speaks openly about burnout as emotional flatline and about physician suicide as a predictable outcome that leadership prefers to ignore. She describes the ER as the catch all for a broken system and explains why chronic care collapses there by design. She shares the reality of trying to access mental health care while still practicing medicine, calling dozens of therapists, getting nowhere, and spending $10,000 to $15,000 out of pocket just to stay alive and functional.

Listeners will hear how neurodivergence shaped her career in emergency medicine, how race and trust intersect inside hospital walls, and why doctors are leaving in waves. This conversation carries clarity, anger, humor, and hard earned truth from someone who stayed long enough to name the damage.

RELATED LINKS

Dr Pamela Buchanan

Strong Medicine

Dr Pamela Buchanan on LinkedIn

Dr Pamela Buchanan on Instagram

Emotional Flatline article

KevinMD essay by Dr Pamela Buchanan

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Dr. Barbara Paldus is the Founder and CEO of CODEX Labs, the sponsor of this episode.

She grew up around Nobel Prize winners, built biotech manufacturing equipment for vaccines and cancer therapeutics, and then sold her company after an 8 year old threatened suicide.

Her son’s severe eczema pushed her into an unregulated $100,000,000,000 skincare market where parents are told to trust labels that nobody verifies. She explains how corticosteroid ladders leave patients with years long withdrawal, why U.S. ingredient oversight lags Europe, and how chemotherapy destroys the same skin and gut barriers seen in inflammatory disease.

The conversation tracks the real stakes behind “clean” marketing: a child’s immune system, hospital infections like MRSA, and patients trying to survive treatment without new damage. She also details the research path from Irish medical manuscripts to microbiome science and why sick populations become the only reliable regulators when policy fails.

RELATED LINKS

Explore Codex Labs with Matthew Zachary | Use code ZACHARY for 15% off

Meet Barbara Paldus

Sekhmet Ventures

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Dr Eugene Manley grew up in Detroit in the 1980s cycling through emergency rooms 20 to 30 times a year with asthma and anaphylaxis while hospital staff talked past his family and buried them in paperwork they could not decode. He responded by earning a BS in mechanical engineering an MS in biomedical engineering and a PhD in molecular biology cell biology and biochemistry. Along the way he tore his ACL training for a jiu jitsu black belt worked 86 straight days in a lab during his doctorate and learned how academic and clinical systems punish people who refuse to shrink.

In this episode Manley walks through a recent post surgery ordeal at Mount Sinai Queens where staff falsified records attempted an illegal discharge and nearly sent him home on the wrong blood thinner. He explains how medical racism shows up in charts staffing and decision making and why measurable equity fails without accountability. Listeners hear how his STEMM and Cancer Health Equity Foundation builds pipelines for underrepresented students challenges clinical trial design and teaches patients how to protect themselves when institutions lie.  

RELATED LINKS

• Eugene Manley Jr

• STEMM and Cancer Health Equity Foundation

• Village Voice

• LUNGevity Foundation

FEEDBACK

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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 clinicians absorb 10 to 15 traumatic events in a single shift and then get told to move the crash cart faster next time.

That lived reality pushed her to co found The Wellness Shift, an advocacy and education platform focused on healthcare worker burnout, suicide, and assault. In this conversation, Opalinski walks through the moment that changed everything for her: standing in a hospital hallway listening to a family wail after a failed code, followed by a debrief that addressed logistics and ignored grief entirely.

She also explains how that work led to Humanity Rx, her podcast about the human cost of medicine, and Dragon’s Breath: Calming Tricks for Big Feelings, a children’s book that translates evidence based breathing and regulation strategies into language kids can actually use. The episode covers moral injury, time scarcity, false wellness, respiratory muscle training, and why empathy keeps getting treated as an optional expense instead of clinical infrastructure.

RELATED LINKS

Jenny Opalinski on LinkedIn

The Wellness Shift

Humanity Rx

Dragon’s Breath: Calming Tricks for Big Feelings

Aspire Respiratory Products

FEEDBACK

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Sarah Gromko and Matthew Zachary go back to SUNY Binghamton in the early 1990s, when they were barely 19 and living inside rehearsal rooms. She starred in campus musical theater productions. He served as pianist and music director for many of those shows and played rehearsal piano for the THEA101 repertory company. This episode reunites two former theater nerds who grew up and took very different paths through art, illness, and work that still circles the same truth.

Gromko trained as a singer and composer, studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music, worked in New York and New Orleans, then moved into healthcare as a speech language pathologist and recognized vocologist. She explains aphasia, apraxia, dysarthria, and dysphagia with clarity earned from the clinic. She recounts helping a 16 year old gunshot survivor in New Orleans speak again using Melodic Intonation Therapy. The conversation covers voice banking for ALS, gender affirming voice care, and the damage caused when medicine confuses speech loss with intelligence loss. The result feels like an epic reunion powered by 1990s nostalgia and sharpened by decades of lived consequence.

RELATED LINKS

Sarah Gromko

Gramco Voice

Melodic Intonation Therapy

FEEDBACK

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Matt Hampton and Dr Tom Ingegno came into my world the way the best guests always do. They found me first. They pulled me onto their Irreverent Health Podcast, a show that blends medicine, curiosity, and unapologetic nonsense the same way Gen X kids blended Saturday morning cartoons with nuclear-war anxiety. We recorded together, we went off the rails together, and by the end I told them the rule. If you ever come to New York, you sit in my studio. No exceptions.

They showed up. They took the hot seat. They told Alexa to shut up. They joked about Postmates. They compared bifocals before I even hit record. From there it turned into a full blown eighties time machine powered by weed policy, AI diagnostics, acupuncture philosophy, art school trauma, cannabis data science, paranormal detours, and the kind of deep cut pop culture references only Gen X survivors can decode.

Matt builds AI systems. Tom heals people with needles and a lifetime of East Asian medicine. Together they make healthcare funny without pretending it works. They remind you that curiosity carries weight when the system collapses under its own stupidity.

This episode is a reunion of three loudmouths raised on Atari, late night cable, and the hard lesson that you either tell the truth or get flattened by it. Go subscribe to Irreverent Health. These guys earned it.

RELATED LINKS

• Irreverent Health Podcast

• Matt Hampton – Consilium Institute

• Envoy Design

• Dr. Tom Ingegno – Charm City Integrative Health

• The Cupping Book

• You Got Sick—Now What?

• Matt Hampton on LinkedIn

• Dr. Tom Ingegno on LinkedIn

FEEDBACK

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bill Thach has had 9 lines of treatment, over 1,000 doses of chemo, and more scans than an airport. He runs ultramarathons for fun. He jokes about being his own Porta Potty. He became a father, then got cancer while his daughter was 5 months old. Today she is 8. He hides the worst of it so she can believe he stands strong, even when he knows that hiding has a cost.

We talk about the illusion of strength, what it means to look fine when your body is falling apart, and how a random postcard in an MD Anderson waiting room led him to Man Up to Cancer, where he now leads Diversity and AYA Engagement. 

Fatherhood. Rage. Sex. Denial. Humor. Survival. All that and why the words good morning can act like a lifeline.

RELATED LINKS

• Fight Colorectal Cancer
• CURE Today
• INCA Alliance
• Man Up to Cancer
• WeeViews
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

FEEDBACK

Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email [email protected]

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shannon Burkett has lived about six lives. Broadway actor. SNL alum. Nurse. Filmmaker. Advocate. Cancer survivor. And the kind of person who makes you question what you’ve done with your day. She wrote and produced My Vagina—the stop-motion musical kind, not the cry-for-help kind—and built a global movement after her son was poisoned by lead dust in their New York apartment. 

Out of that came LEAD: How This Story Ends Is Up to Us, a documentary born from rage, science, and maternal defiance. We talked about everything from The Goonies to Patrick Stewart to the quiet rage of parenting in a country that treats public health like a hobby. 

This episode is about art, anger, resilience, and what happens when an unstoppable theater nerd turned science geek Jersey girl collides with an immovable healthcare system.

RELATED LINKS

• Shannon Burkett Official Site
• LEAD: How This Story Ends Is Up to Us
• End Lead Poisoning
• LinkedIn: Shannon Burkett
• BroadwayWorld Profile

FEEDBACK

Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email [email protected].

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Michael Kramer was 19 when cancer ambushed his life. He went from surfing Florida beaches to chemo, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant that left him alive but carrying a chronic disease. He had necrosis in his knees and elbows, lost his ability to surf for years, and found himself stuck in hospitals instead of the ocean. Yet he adapted. Michael picked up a guitar, built Lego sets, led support groups, and started sharing his story on Instagram and TikTok.

We talk about masculinity, identity, and what happens when the thing that defines you gets stripped away. He opens up about dating in Miami, freezing sperm at a children’s hospital, awkward Uber-for-sperm moments with his brother, and how meditation became survival. Michael lost his father to cancer when he was a teen, and that grief shaped how he lives and advocates today. He is funny, grounded, and honest about the realities of survivorship in your twenties. This episode shows what resilience looks like when you refuse to walk it off and choose to speak it out loud instead.

RELATED LINKS

• Michael Kramer on Instagram
• Michael Kramer on TikTok
• Michael and Mom Inspire on YouTube
• Ashlee Cramer's Book
• University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
• Stupid Cancer

FEEDBACK

Like this episode? Rate and review Walk It Off on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship inquiries, email [email protected]

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Daniel Garza had momentum. Acting roles, directing gigs, national tours lined up. Then anal cancer stopped everything. Radiation wrecked his body, stripped him of control, and left him in diapers, staring down despair. His partner, Christian Ramirez, carried him through the darkest nights, changed his wounds, fought hospitals, and paid the price with his own health. Christian still lives with permanent damage from caregiving, but he stayed anyway.

Together they talk with me about masculinity, sex, shame, friendship, and survival. They describe the friendships that vanished, the laughter that kept them alive, and the brutal reality of caregiving no one prepares you for. We get into survivor guilt, PTSD, and why even rocks need rocks. Daniel is now an actor, director, and comedian living with HIV. Christian continues to tell the unfiltered truth about what it takes to be a caregiver and stay whole. This episode gives voice to both sides of the cancer experience, the survivor and the one who stands guard.

RELATED LINKS

• Daniel Garza IMDb
• Daniel Garza on Instagram
• Daniel Garza on Facebook
• Christian Ramirez on LinkedIn
• Lilmesican Productions Inc (Daniel & Christian)
• Stupid Cancer

FEEDBACK

Like this episode? Rate and review Walk It Off on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship inquiries, email [email protected]

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.