Medicine is not stupid.

Medicine is skill under pressure. It’s science. It’s judgment and pattern recognition. It’s a trauma team working in sync. It’s helping someone through the worst day of their life.

But the system wrapped around it?

That often makes no sense.

Premiums no one understands, regulations that never end, hours of documentation to justify obvious care, and terabytes of data that exist but aren’t usable when it matters.

Most of the people working in healthcare are thoughtful, hardworking, and even sometimes heroic; the problem isn’t the people. It’s the accumulation of incentives, rules, and workarounds that have drifted far from the original purpose. 

Patients feel it as confusion, clinicians feel it as friction, and no one likes it.

We’ve spent decades inside this system — in exam rooms and conference rooms — and we’ve seen how it works, first hand. 

This podcast is our attempt to talk about it openly.

We’re not here to rant or make excuses, but we also realize that sweeping reforms are unlikely to happen any time soon.

We want to:

• Acknowledge the absurdity
• Explain how the system actually functions
• Explore the hidden forces that create the absurdity
• Separate what’s broken from what’s necessary
• And look for practical, directionally correct steps that make things slightly better
  

We realize that it’s nearly impossible to “fix healthcare.” But maybe we can make it a little less stupid. 

One conversation at a time.

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Who we are

Rahul Parikh, MD

Rahul Parikh is a pediatrician who cares for children and families.  Alongside clinical work he has held leadership roles focused on improving care delivery, refining operations, and introducing modern technology into everyday clinical practice.

He has spent years writing and speaking about medicine in public spaces, translating complex medical issues into language patients and parents can actually use. His work has explored topics ranging from vaccination and neonatal ethics to the cultural forces that shape how people interpret health information. 

That perspective informs his conversations: healthcare does not fail only because of policy or systems, but because meaning is negotiated between professionals and the public. Much of his work focuses on closing that gap — helping clinicians explain uncertainty honestly and helping patients understand how medical decisions are actually made. 

Through the podcast, he is interested in examining not just what medicine knows, but how society comes to believe or distrust it. how society comes to believe or distrust it.

You can read more about Rahul on his web page. Follow him on LinkedIn

Jonathan Mates, MD

Jonathan Mates is a diagnostic radiologist working at the intersection of medicine, technology, and operations. His career has centered on understanding how care is actually delivered, not just clinically, but through the layers of software, data, and organizational decisions that shape every patient encounter.

In clinical practice he interprets imaging and makes diagnoses. Alongside that work, he has led clinical departments and broader service lines, helped design and implement clinical systems, worked with operational and analytics teams to understand performance, and worked in technology companies trying to turn healthcare ideas into usable tools. His background informs his view that many healthcare problems are less about competence and more about mismatched incentives, information flow, and accumulated complexity.

Years spent inside clinical operations and technology efforts have convinced him that transformation in healthcare usually isn’t delivered all at once. It is built through many small decisions that steadily reshape the system.

Jonathan writes about healthcare, technology, and leadership on his blog Red Goggles. Follow him on LinkedIn