Cut & Tell

About Cut & Tell

Cut & Tell is a real-time account of becoming a surgeon—at the exact moment the training wheels come off. Hosted by plastic surgery chief resident Elizabeth Malphrus, this show follows the transition from residency to “year one”: the first, most disorienting, and most defining stretch of a surgical career. It’s where the identity you’ve spent a decade building is suddenly tested—clinically, professionally, and personally. This is not a retrospective. It’s happening now. Through solo episodes, unfiltered conversations, and stories from inside the operating room and beyond, Cut & Tell explores what it actually takes to become a surgeon: the structure of training, the emotional cost, the invisible curriculum, and the tension between perfection and reality in a high-stakes field. It also asks harder questions—about trust in medicine, the role of physicians in a changing cultural landscape, and what it means to step into authority when you’re not sure you’re ready.

Publisher

Hippocratic Collective

Category

business · health & fitness · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

23 Apr 2026

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

23 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Coaching, panic, and the arrival fallacy: a surgery chat with Mel Thacker, MD

   What happens when you become the surgeon, pay off the loans, and still feel empty? On Cut & Tell’s first guest episode, Dr. Mel Thacker (ENT, surgeon coach, and host of Surgeons with Purpose) joins me to talk about her new memoir, Scrubbing In. It covers her path from childhood neglect to surgery, the arrival fallacy, and the panic attacks in the OR that finally forced her to face it all. We also get into how insurance incentives quietly shape clinical decisions, why Mel walked away from private practice, why residency needs coaching, and how she built a part-time locums career on her own terms. 📚 Referenced: Scrubbing In: A Surgeon’s Journey from Self-Doubt to Wholeness by Dr. Mel Thacker; “When Incentives Become Instinct” (Hippocratic Collective); The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek Enjoyed this episode? Rate, review, and subscribe, and find more shows at hippocratic-collective.com. Host: Liz Malphrus, MD Connect with Liz: https://www.hippocratic-collective.com/members/liz-malphrus-md IG: @dr.malphrus Produced By: The Hippocratic Collective Subscribe to @hippocraticcollective on Youtube for all of the other shows and content the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

2. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Financialization of Healthcare: How Money Became the Mission

   Administrative bloat, skyrocketing CEO pay, hospital mergers, rural closures. These aren't separate problems. They're symptoms of one syndrome: financialization. In this episode, Liz breaks down how hospitals and practices went from places that care for people to assets that exist to generate returns, and why nonprofit hospitals now behave almost exactly like for-profits. We cover the vocabulary that gets thrown around in boardrooms (marketization, corporatization, privatization), the administrator arms race between hospitals and insurers, what hospital CEOs are actually paid to optimize for, and how consolidation drives up prices without improving quality. Then we get to what doctors can do about it, from unionization to clinician leadership requirements to cutting out the insurance middleman. It's Goodhart's Law on a massive scale: when growth and revenue are the targets, healthcare stops being the point. 📚 Referenced: Bruch, Roy & Grogan, "The Financialization of Health in the United States," New England Journal of Medicine (2024) Blumenthal & Galvin, "The Vocabulary of Our Discontent," JAMA "Money has become the mission," The Lancet (2025) ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Welcome to Cut & Tell 00:19 From the administrator boom to a bigger problem 02:22 Financialization as a syndrome 04:56 Defining financialization 07:30 Marketization: the 1980s shift 12:52 Corporatization and consolidation 14:14 Why nonprofits act like for-profits 15:15 Privatization and Medicare Advantage 16:38 Money has become the mission 21:02 The administrator boom, by the numbers 24:45 The US vs. Canada and the VA 27:51 The hospital–insurer arms race 29:59 Executive pay 33:20 CEO-to-employee pay ratios 36:05 What CEOs are actually paid for 39:08 Mergers, prices, and hospital closures 44:30 The administrative accountability gap 46:30 Recap 48:00 What doctors can do about it If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate us five stars, and leave a review. Better yet, send it to someone who should be outraged, or at least better informed. Check out more shows and content at hippocratic-collective.com. #HealthPolicy #Healthcare #HospitalCEO #Financialization #PhysicianLife #MedicalPodcast #CutAndTell #DoctorsOfInstagram Host: Liz Malphrus, MD Connect with Liz: https://www.hippocratic-collective.com/members/liz-malphrus-md IG: @dr.malphrus Produced By: The Hippocratic Collective Subscribe to @hippocraticcollective on Youtube for all of the other shows and content the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

3. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Healthcare's Obsession with Metrics, and Why it keeps Backfiring

   What happens when a well-intentioned healthcare metric gets turned into a target? Nothing good — and Liz has the receipts. Before medical school, she spent two and a half years as study director for a major National Academies report on healthcare measurement. Then she went to residency, and everything she believed fell apart. This episode walks through the VA wait-time scandal, MIPS, and the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program — three cautionary tales about what happens when you attach incentives to healthcare data, and why Goodhart's Law keeps winning. 📚 Referenced: Vital Signs: Core Metrics for Health and Healthcare Progress (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) Host: Liz Malphrus, MD Connect with Liz: https://www.hippocratic-collective.com/members/liz-malphrus-md IG: @dr.malphrus Produced By: The Hippocratic Collective Subscribe to @hippocraticcollective on Youtube for all of the other shows and content the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

19 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

14 ratings

Contact Cut & Tell

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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