Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary

The Dispatch You Love About The Healthcare You Hate

In June, I promised I’d be better about sending this newsletter.

Anyway, it’s September.

When I last wrote, We the Patients had been out for two months and was already doing things I didn’t expect.

Turns out that was the warm-up act.

The Book Left the Bookstore

Somewhere over the summer, people stopped telling me they liked the book and started telling me what they were doing with it.

Professors are bringing it into classrooms. Healthcare organizations are buying it for their teams. Patient advocates are passing it around. I’m getting invited into conversations about policy, medical education, and patient rights that Teenage Cancer Guy™ did not exactly have on his 2026 vision board.

Wiley has now moved We the Patients into its academic ecosystem.

And there are somehow 86 five-star Amazon reviews, which is lovely and statistically suspicious.

At some point, this stopped feeling like a book launch.

And Then Academia
Got Weird

This one means a lot to me.

People who actually educate doctors, nurses, public-health professionals, and future healthcare leaders are saying We the Patients belongs in the classroom.

Which is hilarious, considering how aggressively mediocre a student I was.

But it’s also kind of the point.

Medical education is very good at teaching people how to treat disease. It’s considerably less good at teaching them what it feels like to be the human being trapped inside the machinery surrounding it.

Apparently, that perspective belongs on the syllabus too.

Then the Question Changed

It used to be: “Where can I buy the book?”

Now I’m hearing: “What can I do?”

Well, shit.

For almost twenty years, I’ve watched patients, caregivers, clinicians, and assorted healthcare weirdos discover that whatever happened to them inside this system probably wasn’t happening only to them.

Healthcare has a constituency for practically everyone.

Patients?

We’re still remarkably good at arriving separately.

I’d like to screw around with that.

So I Have a Mildly
Unreasonable Question

Who wants in?

I’m building the We the Patients WhatsApp Street Team.

Think Breakfast Club meets Goonies meets an ’80s prom rave for healthcare troublemakers.

It’s the unofficially official home for people who read We the Patients and thought: Well, shit. Now what?

Now we make some noise.

Patients. Caregivers. Nurses. Doctors. Advocates. Healthcare insiders, outsiders, and professional agitators.

There’s no committee. No scorecard. No matching polo shirts. No homework. Take the missions that fit your life, skip the ones that don’t, disappear when you need to.

The idea is ridiculously simple:

Everyone knows someone. Everyone has a door they can open.

Let’s see what happens when we start opening them.

New Here?

A lot of you joined this list over the summer, so if you somehow got here without reading We the Patients: Understanding, Navigating, and Surviving America's Healthcare Nightmare, welcome to the circus.

It’s my field guide to how American healthcare became…this.

And what the rest of us can do about it.