Out of Patients EP423: The Nicest Bus in Cancer: Julia Stalder
Julia Stalder got diagnosed with the "best kind" of breast cancer. DCIS. Ductal carcinoma in situ.
(Latin for "we don't know what the hell this is but we're cutting it off anyway.")
She's a lawyer. A mediator. A mom. Her doctor dad told her to get second opinions. Three surgeons gave her three different explanations. Same diagnosis. Different planets.
Standard of care: Surgery. Radiation. Five years of hormone blockers. For something that 50-80% of the time would never turn into actual cancer.
So Julia did what lawyers do. She questioned everything. Then she chose active surveillance - watching instead of cutting. The same thing 30% of men with prostate cancer do. But when women want to keep their breasts? Revolutionary.
(Funny how ED got research funding but mastectomies were just the price of doing business.)
She started "DCIS Understood" mid-diagnosis because the internet had jack shit for real information. Just pages saying "trust us, cut it off." No nuance. No options. No acknowledgment that overdiagnosis isn't prevention.
We talked about the football-with-lungs conversation. How many organs you can remove and still get cancer. Why cutting off all your limbs won't save you from skin cancer. Dark shit only survivors can say.
Julia's monitoring her DCIS with mammograms and MRIs every six months. If it progresses, she'll catch it early and deal with it then. Sleeping fine at night knowing she didn't amputate body parts "just in case."
Listen to this episode. Leave a review. Five stars helps other women find alternatives to scorched earth medicine.
DCIS affects 60,000 women yearly. They deserve better than Latin and fear.
Matthew Zachary
Producer
Matthew Zachary invented healthcare podcasting before podcasting was a thing. In 2007, fresh off building Stupid Cancer, he grabbed a mic, launched The Stupid Cancer Show and started broadcasting patient stories on internet talk radio when everyone else was still writing blogs.
17 years and 400+ episodes later, Out of Patients is still the most unfiltered healthcare show anywhere.
Matthew doesn't do softball interviews. Brain cancer at 21 taught him that time is finite and bullshit is expensive. He gets guests to say things they'd never tell Congress. CEOs admit what's broken. Patients name what actually hurts. Scientists explain what industry doesn't want you to know. The conversations other shows won't touch because of sponsor concerns or political correctness.
What makes him different: He's been on both sides of the mic. Featured in documentaries, testified before Congress, keynoted hundreds of conferences.
But he's also been the guy puking from radiation, fighting insurance denials, and watching friends die from paperwork.
That dual perspective creates interviews you won't hear anywhere else. He knows which questions make power squirm because he's asked them from hospital beds and boardrooms both.
No pre-approved questions. No PR handlers. No seven-minute segments. Just real conversations with people brave enough to tell the truth about healthcare. After 17 years, Matthew's still the guy Mark Cuban reposts when he wants to understand what patients actually think. Read More
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