Kicking Cancer's Ass

On the one-year anniversary of Kicking Cancer's Ass, host Joelle Kaufman answers the question the show's name keeps provoking: what does it actually mean to kick cancer's ass? A lot of people hate the warrior language around cancer, and Joelle thinks they have a point. In this solo episode she makes the case that kicking cancer's ass has nothing to do with winning. You can do it an...

Naturopathic oncologist Dr. Jessa Landmann joins Kicking Cancer's Ass to make the case that most cancer-treatment side effects, from fatigue to joint pain to poor sleep, are easier to prevent than to fix. She explains why cancer-related fatigue lingers long after chemotherapy ends, the role of inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, and why her head-to-toe approach starts with nutrition an...

The Thing Nobody Warns a Man About Joelle ended the episode with a lightning round. One or two words per answer, quick as she could ask. Then she got to this one: complete the sentence. The thing nobody warns a man about cancer is _______. Three men. Four time zones between them. Not one of them paused. Loss of friendships. Don said it first. Michael said “yep” before Don finished the word. Jay ex...

Two Stages. Same Silence. A few months into her Stage 4 lung cancer treatment, Annabelle Gurwitch’s son came home from college and found her unconscious on the bathroom floor. She’d been on the recommended dose of her targeted therapy. She’d known for weeks it was unlivable. She hadn’t told her doctor. She thought tolerating it was what a good patient did. I knew Annabelle’s book before I knew her...

Heidi Kay Carson's husband Chad was 33, healthy, and holding a PhD in computer science when a routine blood test set off a 14-year medical odyssey that ended with two simultaneous organ failures and no US hospital willing to treat him. In this episode, Heidi walks through the decisions, the dead ends, and the unconventional moves that got them further than anyone said was possible, and what she ha...

Two weeks after her last chemo infusion for HER2-positive breast cancer, yoga teacher Larissa Noto hiked Zion National Park. Her oncologist found out about the trip mid-call when she mentioned she was already in Vegas. Joelle Kaufman talks with Larissa Noto, founder of The Lovely Little Lotus. Larissa spent years as a corporate attorney before pivoting into a full-time career teaching yoga and min...

Why does the second cancer hit harder than the first? Even when it’s smaller? Even when you’re a psychotherapist? Dr. Erin Gray, two-time cancer survivor (BRCA2 breast cancer in her early 40s, then thyroid cancer eight years later), had her own answer when it happened to her. The thing that separates the diagnoses you survive well from the ones that wreck you isn’t preparation. It isn’t knowing wh...

Everyone said Joelle was done with cancer. She wasn't. Three years past her pathologically complete response, she has a urologist, a cardiologist, and an annual abdominal CT scan she'll get for the rest of her life. The word done was on the chart. It was not on the calendar. And she's one of the easier cases. The most common cancer post on Reddit is some version of three words. Done. Now what? One...

Twenty-five years of friendship trained Jessica Rosenbaum for the call she didn't want. When Joelle was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer the day before her preventative mastectomy, Jessica didn't ask what Joelle needed. She'd already designed the role only she could fill. Jessica Rosenbaum, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and Joelle's best friend of 25 years. W...

The technology exists. The blood draw is simple. So why won't most oncologists order it? Amy Delson has been treated for cancer four times. She's currently in active treatment. She's also a longtime breast cancer patient advocate — she reviews research grants for the Department of Defense, sits on lab teams asking researchers to do fewer biopsies on patients, and edits the informed-consent forms p...

"You're the only person who truly cares about you." Jeffrey Eisenberg faced three cancer diagnoses during the pandemic: stage 1 colon cancer that turned into a four-month ileostomy after his intestines burst during surgery, large B-cell lymphoma, and then a 2cm lymphoma tumor behind his brain where his MD Anderson oncologists couldn't promise the chemo would cross the blood-brain barrier. He came...

"30 times more women die from breast cancer than need a liver transplant because of UPA. And yet the drug is paused." What if the drug that could prevent your breast cancer is already on pharmacy shelves — and regulators won't let your doctor prescribe it for that purpose? Dr. Sasha Howell, a medical oncologist from Manchester who runs one of the UK's leading breast cancer prevention programs, joi...

A drug that reduces pre-cancerous breast cells has been sitting in U.S. pharmacies for twenty years. OB/GYNs prescribe it every day. Most oncologists have never heard of it. Dr. Abigail Liberty, an OB/GYN at OHSU, attended a cancer prevention conference in Manchester where British researcher Dr. Sasha Howell (next week’s guest) presented findings on anti-progestins — drugs that block the progester...

"If someone would have told me there was a vacuum erection device — I wouldn't have even had to have it in my hand yet. But if I had just known that was there, it might have kept me from having those thoughts." Three men — a stage four prostate cancer survivor dating in his 60s, a gay man navigating anal cancer and an ostomy, and a married man who overheard nurses discussing his own...

"8% of female patients said they would forgo chemotherapy due to fear of hair loss. We actually had one of those patients that we worked with that became not a statistic anymore." Bethany Hornthal, co-founder and executive director of Hair to Stay — the only national nonprofit exclusively funding scalp cooling access for low-income chemo patients — built the infrastructure behind scalp cooling's F...

"The leading cause of non-cancer death in cancer survivors is heart disease. The treatments for cancer may be increasing your probability of getting heart disease.." Dr. Anju Nohria runs the Cardio-Oncology Program at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's Hospital. She's one of the few doctors whose entire job is protecting cancer patients' hearts while they fight for their liv...

"The majority of cancer drugs are registered at the dose which is intolerable for the majority of women. It causes a lot of clinical and financial toxicity." Dr. Andrea De Censi has spent his career asking one question: what's the lowest dose that still works? His answer to that question changed how tamoxifen is prescribed—and now he's testing whether a common diabetes drug combined with skipping...

"I found one anchor. It was unique to me." Matthew Zachary was 21, a piano prodigy, when a brain tumor diagnosis stripped him of nearly every bodily function and left him completely alone in a system that had no language for what he was. He went on to build the most successful AYA cancer ecosystem on the planet and now he's starting America's first cancer patient voter bloc. They dive into: Gettin...

"I normalize all my traumas according to my therapist. But seriously — how can you not normalize it? Because this is reality now. It's my normal now." Bill Thach was 33 when he was diagnosed with neuroendocrine carcinoma — a subtype occurring in roughly 1 in 100,000 cancer diagnoses — with a five-month-old daughter at home. He spent over five years managing it alone before finding Ma...

I told my oncologist that treatment's going to have to wait 'cause I'm booked up. And she just looked at me with eight eyes and said, “Valerie, if you don't treat this, this is fatal." Performer and playwright Valerie David has had cancer three times: stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage 2 breast cancer, and stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. During chemo and radiation, she journaled about her exp...

"I felt like I had been derailed. We had built our careers over several decades and we knew what the challenges were in building our careers as well. We had to overcome a lot of bias... and when something like this hits you, there's the fear that… Am I slipping in taking care of business?" Patricia Muir was at the peak of her consulting career, three decades of building her business, when breast c...

“I talk about my sparkle and I just felt like… hormone blockers took my sparkle. That cognitive side of it, the lack of desire, feeling just fatigued... during cancer treatment, it was like the last thing that I wanted to do." In this essential conversation, clinical sexologist Richelle Menzies, USA Today bestselling romance author Cara Lockwood, and pharmacologist Dr. Erika Reith (all breast canc...

"Why can't we build a contraceptive that reduces breast cancer risk? That's the way to get rid of breast cancer. I don't want to just keep treating it. I want to prevent it altogether." In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Laura Esserman, Director of the UCSF Breast Cancer Center, joins Joelle Kaufman to reveal how her 47,000-patient WISDOM study just proved we can eliminate late-stage breast cance...

"Call us. Get into the program and allow us to help you. You need someone there to help you. Cancer is a journey—you've got to have a support system."  In this eye-opening episode, Steve Cain, CEO of UnitedHealthcare California, joins Joelle Kaufman to reveal how insurance companies are transforming from claims processors into active care partners during the most vulnerable moments of a patient's...

“I love the idea of kicking cancer’s ass. It’s what I get up every day to do.” In this powerful and eye-opening episode, Dr. Karen E. Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, joins Joelle Kaufman to reveal how we’re finally turning the body’s own immune system into cancer’s worst enemy. They dive deep into: The three types of immunotherapy reshaping cancer treatment Why 98% o...