Can Patients Actually Win?

I sat down with Troy Reichert & Dr. Jonathan Bushman to discuss what the health care system doesn't want you to know, how I found my way out, and what happens when a clinician finally tells the truth.

At 21, a doctor told me I had PCOS and pre-diabetes and then handed me a Metformin prescription.

“This is just what you’ll have to live with,” she said.

So I did. Until I didn’t.

(Turns out eating real food and moving your body is a treatment plan. Who knew?)

But that was the first time a strange thought crossed my mind. Maybe the people who say they know how this works… don’t actually know anything about how this works.

Hmm.

Years later — after the NFL, foreign medical school, PA school, the ER, and COVID — I read The Price We Pay by Dr. Marty Makary and suddenly understood things I hadn’t been able to articulate before.

• Why I’d been handed a pill instead of a lifestyle prescription.

• Why my employment contract said I wasn’t allowed to tell patients that a cash-pay clinic existed across the street.

• And 1000 other horrific, uncomfortably true things about medicine, and the system we call ‘health care’.

(I’m still looking for a word to describe it that doesn’t start with an F-, but haven’t found one yet)

Somewhere along the way, a realization crystallized.

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I could keep saving people one-by-one in the ER, but if I did, I could never fix what was actually breaking them. So I left.

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And that’s the real story behind this episode.

In this conversation, Troy Reichert and Dr. Jonathan Bushman gave me the space to tell the full, messy, nonlinear version — the NFL years, the diagnosis that reversed itself, the ER shifts where the incentives finally became impossible to ignore, and the moment I realized something most clinicians eventually confront:

• We can hold someone’s hand.

• We can stabilize them.

• Sometimes we can even save them.

But we can’t repair a system that was never designed for patients to win.

And that raises a much bigger question…Why are patients losing in the first place?

Watch the full conversation below.

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If you’re new here, this episode is a good place to start.

It’s the origin story behind everything I’m working on now — helping people understand the system they’re navigating (and paying for), and helping clinicians speak honestly about the one they’re working inside.

Because once you understand how the incentives actually work…the entire healthcare landscape suddenly makes a lot more sense.

And don’t we deserve to know?