Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

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 LINKSEmily MendenhallInvisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long COVIDScience PoliticsGeorgetown UniversityFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 FoundationFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 LINKSSarah GromkoGramco VoiceMelodic Intonation TherapyFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.