Casey: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast. Today, we are doing something a little different and very special. As we wrap up the year, we're going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our top five episodes of 2025, including some of our favorite clips and how these conversations came to life. I'm Casey, the executive editor at WebMD Health Discovered.

Lauren: And I am Lauren, Health Discovered’s producer. This show is truly a team effort, so we're here to take you inside the moments that shaped the stories you heard this year. Together with host Dr John Whyte and Dr Neha Pathak, we released 52 episodes of the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast, each one guided by your questions, your feedback, and the very real challenges you and your families face navigating healthcare today.

Casey: Every week, we dig into the topics that matter most to you. From new treatments and prevention strategies to the emotional aspects of living with chronic conditions, our mission is simple: to help you walk into your next appointment feeling informed, confident, and supported. That's why each episode focuses on step-by-step guidance, shared decision-making, questions to ask your healthcare provider, and inspiring stories from real patients.

Lauren: This podcast has been honored with some of the industry's most prestigious awards, but the episodes we're sharing today earned their place in our top five because of the impact they made with you. So let's dive in, revisit some of the most powerful moments of the year, and share what was happening behind the scenes as these conversations unfolded.

Samantha Banerjee: I think the most critically important thing for anyone to hear who is going through this is that this is not your fault.

Casey: Our first top five episode of the year began with a simple but urgent request from host Dr John Whyte. During a pre-production call, he said, “Let’s talk about maternal care gaps, and let’s not shy away from stillbirth.” We all knew it would be one of the hardest episodes we'd ever work on, but also one of the most necessary. Families navigating stillbirth often face not only profound grief, but also medical, emotional, and financial gaps in care, along with an invisible postpartum period that many people never talk about.

So we created the episode Stillbirth and Maternal Care Gaps: Risks, Support, and Advocacy. This episode was designed to bring clarity, compassion, and real solutions to families coping with loss after a stillbirth.

Lauren: Dr Whyte sat down with OB-GYN Dr Heather Florescue and Samantha Banerjee, executive director of Push for Empowered Pregnancy, who shared both the science and the lived experience of what parents need to know, where the system falls short, and why stillbirth is not your fault. This episode breaks the silence around stillbirth and provides families with a roadmap for better support.

Most importantly, we offer the message so many parents need: You are not alone, you are not forgotten, and there are resources out there to support the very real loss you have endured. This is an episode that we hope will transform silence into action and grief into informed, compassionate care. Here's a powerful moment from that conversation.

John Whyte, MD, MPH: Losing a child is a profoundly heartbreaking event. Could you speak about the emotional and psychological impact of stillbirth on families, and what resources or support systems have you found to be the most effective?

Heather Florescue, MD, FACOG, OBGYN: One of the things with stillbirth is people often don't know what to say, and so often people say nothing at all, and it makes it a very marginalizing thing. It makes people feel very much alone. A lot of times, even when they don't feel alone immediately after, because people will rally around somebody after they've lost a baby, unfortunately people have to go on with their own lives. And so it's in the weeks and months that follow that the weight of the loss can sometimes even become more profound.

There's a lot of ideas that people move on from this grief, or that they're gonna get better. And yes, they do. The grief does dissipate a little, and then there are overwhelming triggers that even people 30 years out from losing a child will, on that anniversary or that birth birthday, be grieving profoundly. So we really want society to not tell them they need to move on, to not use things like, “At least you can have more babies,” or anything like that. We want to really respect that this is a huge loss. This child is never replaceable. Even if they have a healthy child that follows, that does not replace what has happened for them.

One of the best things for patients, or if this happens to you, is to talk to your social worker at the hospital. They are really good at connecting people with local therapists and grief counselors and people like that. I highly recommend getting a therapist for one-on-one support. There are many, many people out there via social media and via organizations who are there to provide support for you. You are not alone if this happens to you. Resources include things like Star Legacy Foundation, Pregnancy After Loss Support. I really like SAD Dads Club because dads are grieving as well, and they need a different, sometimes, way of connecting. You can connect with the moms at PUSH. You can connect with anybody out there who has lost a child, and sadly, you'll be a part of a really great group who are there to support you.

Whyte: You're not alone. That's an important message that you're bringing. Heather, I want to talk about this concept of the invisible postpartum. Can you explain that?

Florescue: So one of the phrases that people use a lot is that they’re stillborn, but they’re still born. This is a mother and father who still delivered a child and lost a child, but they still have milk that's coming in. They are still having bleeding. They have tears they are recovering from. They may have had preeclampsia, so they're recovering in terms of high blood pressure disease, or even, very rarely, a C-section.

So we want to give them the same postpartum care we give our other patients, but add, like, 50-fold to that. They're at increased risk for postpartum depression, and they're actually at increased risk of dying. And that's because any complications that they had, because they're acutely grieving, they're gonna be less likely to call, right? They may be less likely to call because they have a high fever. They may be less likely to call because their blood pressure's high, because simply the act of breathing is too hard to possibly make the phone call that they need to make.

We know that their mortality and their morbidity, meaning getting very, very sick, is so much higher, so we need to respect their postpartum period. And when it comes to things like lactation, we really need to make sure that they are learning all the methods they can to suppress lactation as well, because that is such a huge trigger for postpartum depression and blues. And we want to make sure we're addressing all those postpartum needs, regardless of the fact that they didn't bring a healthy baby home.

Casey: Our next episode highlights a message we return to again and again on the WebMD Health Discovered podcast: prevention and early detection save lives. This episode began when we received an email from Dr Christopher Scuderi, a primary care physician, cancer survivor, and author who wanted to share his own story to inspire others to follow cancer screening guidelines.

His lived experience reminded all of us why screenings matter, why symptoms should never be ignored, and why taking care of your health is an act of self-advocacy, not fear.

Lauren: In this episode titled The Risk of Delay in Routine Cancer Screenings, Dr Scuderi breaks down the misconceptions that keep people from getting screened, the life-saving role of early detection, and how everyday habits—nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress—play into cancer prevention. He speaks with such empathy, acknowledging something many of us feel but rarely admit: that fear and anxiety can be powerful barriers to making these appointments.

We're grateful for his honesty and hope this episode helped at least one listener feel calmer, informed, and ready to take that next step for their health. Here's a moment from that conversation with Dr Scuderi.

Chris Scuderi, DO: I think there's a lot of emotions and a lot of reasons. And some common ones I hear from my patients, you know, one of the biggest is fear. People just don't wanna know. They're afraid. If they are diagnosed, how am I gonna deal with it? You know, how can I still take care of my children? Or how can I keep my job? You know, when can I get treatment? How can I pay for treatment?

So I think there's a lot of fear. There was one study that showed 26% of Americans identified that fear was the reason why they skipped screenings. Another big one that comes up often is people say, “Hey, I'm not having symptoms. Why do I need to be screened?” I think there was one study that shows that 37% of Americans felt that way, and that really defeats the purpose of cancer screening, ’cause a lot of times, by the time you have symptoms, you now have a later-stage cancer.

And the goal of screening is to find those stage zero, stage one cancers that are very treatable and very curable. And the last one, a big one, is there's just a lack of clarity amongst the screening guidelines because they've changed so often recently, and a lot of times people don't realize that they're due for screening. They don't realize that a lot of the ages have changed, that now some of them are 40 for breast cancer screening or 45 for colorectal cancer screening.

A lot of people aren't aware that there's even a screening out there for lung cancer. And so having a family physician to be able to guide you through these conversations is really important because it's difficult for us as physicians to keep up with these guidelines. So I think, as a patient, it's very challenging. And so you need someone that could kind of walk you through and say, “Okay, based on your age, based on your risk factors, this is what you're due for.” And then based on your family history, you may be high risk. We may need to do some more for you.

And so I really challenge everybody today—one big take-home is have a great relationship with your family physician, ’cause they can really help create a unique plan for you.

Scuderi: I think a big misconception that I hear often is that no one in my family had cancer, so I'm not at risk of cancer. And so it's interesting because when we look at cancer in America, only five to 10% of cancers are hereditary. You know, the rest are a combination of other factors.

And so just ’cause you don't have a family history—I had no family history of bladder cancer. I didn't have the typical risk factors that someone with bladder cancer would have. And so I think that that's a huge fallacy that I hear often. And so I just challenge our listeners today that, you know, really this is a great opportunity just to think about it.

And it's something you don't think about often, but just, “Hey, am I up to date?” We all work so hard, and we do so many things to have a great future, and cancer screening is one that, if you take some time and, again, look at it holistically into my whole health portfolio, you know, the one thing that I would challenge our listeners to today is really be proactive about your own health.

I think if you take the steps to say, “Okay, you know, my life is a gift. What can I do today, small, to be healthier?” You know, let me take a 20-minute walk at night. You know, what can I do to eat a little bit healthier? What can I do to make sure that maybe I'm working a little less? What can I make sure to do that, you know, I vacation a couple times a year? What can I make sure—am I connecting with my friends that I haven't connected with for a long time?

These things are all part of health. It's very holistic, and I think cancer comes into that, ’cause I think the healthier we are, it lowers our cancer risk.

Casey: A theme that comes up so often in our pre-production meetings is the impact of harmful myths and misconceptions in healthcare. And nowhere is that more true than with eating disorders. In our planning meetings for 2025, we kept returning to how misunderstood these conditions are. And we wanted to clarify who they affect, what drives them, and how deeply they can shape a person's emotional and physical world. Our goal was to create an episode that cut through the stereotypes and stigma, offering clarity, compassion, and real guidance.

Lauren: To do that, we turned to Dr Kamryn Eddy, co-director of the Eating Disorders Clinical and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the episode titled Understanding Anorexia: Signs, Support, and the Role of Hope and Recovery, Dr Eddy helped us understand anorexia as a complex but highly treatable condition influenced by psychological, biological, and social factors.

She emphasized that eating disorders affect people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds, and she shared evidence-based strategies that truly support recovery. Most importantly, she highlighted the power of hope—how naming it, holding it, and communicating it can change the course of someone's healing. It's the kind of perspective we want every listener to walk away with: informed, supported, and never alone. Here's a moment from our conversation with Dr Eddy.

Kamryn Eddy, PhD: Anorexia nervosa is really defined by undereating, by a restrictive pattern of undereating that leads to a low body weight, and the low body weight or failure to grow, especially in young people. It's also defined by persistent fat phobia—so being scared of gaining weight—and, in addition to that, kind of a body image disturbance.

The body image disturbance could be looking in the mirror and seeing yourself as fat even though you're underweight. It could be something like overvaluing being thin, so feeling like your body weight and shape and being thin is really, really central to who you are as a person. And it could also be not recognizing that your degree of underweight is really dangerous for your health and your well-being. And so those are really the key criteria for anorexia nervosa.

One of the biggest questions that I get is one that has resonated with me for three decades, which is this question of, “Will I ever get better?” I have a really important role in carrying hope for my patients and in communicating to them that, in spite of where they are with their illness, they absolutely still have a chance to recover. And I think carrying a little bit of hope is really, really important because fighting anorexia is incredibly difficult and even more difficult to do when you don't have people who are being hopeful with you.

And it resonates with me a lot with my patients now because that is a really common question that I get from patients and from their families: “Is this a life sentence? Is this a death sentence? Am I going to get better?”

Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: I'm curious about the types of signs and symptoms that we should be looking out for in our loved ones, in our children, that can be helpful as we're sort of thinking about this as a potential reason for our loved one's relationship with food.

Eddy: So some of the things that I would be looking out for—you know, as all parents are usually looking out for everything, so it's hard to figure out. It's kind of like being a pediatrician: how do you find anything when you're always on guard about everything? But for looking for eating disorders, some of the things that I would start by looking for are changes in eating patterns.

I know it sounds kind of simple, but I mean it in a big way. So are folks cutting out certain foods from their diet? Have you noticed that they're no longer comfortable eating X, Y, or Z? Are they starting to talk more about weight and shape or feeling badly about their bodies? Are you noticing more isolation both around mealtimes and outside of mealtimes?

Those aren't things that are one-to-one correlations with having an eating disorder. They could also be pretty normative things that happen in adolescence, but they're going to be things that could give you a sign that something's going on. And so, as parents, and as caregivers and other providers, or just as friends, you want to be curious and open to finding out what's going on.

And so even curious questions like, “Hey, I've noticed this. I've noticed you're not eating dinner with us anymore. What's up with that?” Curious questions can be a good way in to find out a little bit more about what's going on and then figure out how you're going to address it.

I encourage those first conversations to be from the expression of, “Hey, I've noticed this. I'm really concerned about you. I really love you. How can I help? I'm here when you're ready. And can we go in together? Can I support you? Can I make the call for you? Can I bring you in? Can I share some of what I'm worried about?”

Because, again, eating disorders cut really deeply, and they don't usually go away on their own. They take some time, and they often need a lot of support to actually really make change because they are so ingrained. So one thing I would encourage people to sort of hold for themselves is, “You know, this isn't my fault. I didn't choose this. I wouldn't have picked this.”

And so for people who are with them, trying to destigmatize the illness and trying to recognize that they're probably doing their very best—they're trying to get out of this. They wish that they could get out of it, and they don't really know how. So I think that would be one thing.

And the other is that, you know, we have a lot of good treatments out there, and we are always working to develop new ones. So being aware that there is help and that you can get better, I hope, would encourage people also to come through the door.

Casey: When we think about our WebMD Health Discovered audience, we often picture caregivers who are going above and beyond in many areas of their lives, especially those in the sandwich generation—individuals who are caring for both aging parents and growing children.

We wanted to create an episode that truly saw those listeners and acknowledged a reality that many families experience but rarely feel permission to talk about, and that is resentment. During our pre-production meetings, we talked about wanting to explore resentment not as a failure, but as a signal—one that can reveal unmet needs, emotional overload, and interpersonal dynamics that may need reshaping.

To help us navigate this conversation with insight and compassion, we turned to one of our favorite guests, Leah Love Avellino, a modern love therapist and host of the Unprocessed podcast.

Lauren: In the episode titled Redefining Parenting Dynamics: Moving from Resentment to Collaboration, Lia helped us drop beneath the surface to understand what resentment is really trying to tell us. She shared scripts, reflections, and everyday techniques that listeners can use to communicate more clearly, set healthier boundaries, and create more collaborative relationships at home.

It's a conversation that reminds us that emotional health is family health, and that resentment can be the beginning of positive change when we listen to it. Here's a clip from that episode.

Lia Love Avellino, LCSW: So, I think one of the biggest surprises is that people believe that resentment is something that they should just live with, right? That there's something that's cathartic about venting and complaining about what isn't working, but that most people don't understand the way they are taking part in their suffering and the social influences and conditions that are making that suffering.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what resentment is, and I've been studying it for 10 years professionally and working with couples and families and women. And I also used to hold on to a lot of resentment, because I like to think about it as the nice person's anger. Nice people are some of the angriest people in the world because none of that anger gets expressed, right?

We're sort of imploding on the inside, but nobody really knows that because we're doing all the things on the outside. We're showing up. We're making the lunches. We're asking the good questions. We're put together, but really there's so much going on internally. So the way that I define resentment is the indicator that you've gone past your limit.

And why this is so complex for so many people is it requires acknowledging that you have a limit. And living in our society today, we're encouraged to break glass ceilings. We're encouraged to push past our internal limits, not own that we have limitations.

The other misconception about resentment is many people don't know that it's actually a shade of anger. And anger is letting us know that there's something that's not fair. There's something that's unjust, and we have to tune into that to figure out what it is. What is not quite right here? Why am I giving more than I'm receiving?

And I see this primarily with women, but across different identity groups, where a lot of women give to get because we haven't been taught to own our wants and needs, to say, “Hey, I'm getting the short end of the stick, and I need you to pay attention to that, and this is what I need.”

As a result, we treat people the way we wish they would treat us. So we empty our cup, hoping that eventually someone will see that we have this freaking empty cup and that they're going to pour back into it. But what we find is we wait a really long time, because even though we may have been socially trained or in our families to be need anticipators, other family members and community members are not.

Avellino: So the first is understanding that you have a limit and accepting that, and reminding yourself that even if you've been rewarded for self-denial and self-sacrifice, that that is not the way you have to move forward.

The second thing is looking at the places where you overdo it and enable people to underdo it. The third is not hiding your needs under complaints, but rather owning them in the speaker-listener technique and making room for your partner to do the same.

And also reminding yourself that you both can join together to be mad at the forces that are making life hard right now, right? Whether that's your job, both of your jobs and the demands on your time, unaffordable healthcare, sexism that's made it hard for women to advocate for their needs.

All of these, whether or not we name them, are working us over. So looking at the places we can both be like, “Yeah, this is messed up. We've got too much on our plate, and we're struggling, and we're turning against each other because there's nowhere else to turn.” Knowing someone will accept this dumping can be really powerful and strengthen the foundation of the family.

And to remind yourself that your needs are always changing, so you can always ask for different needs. You can always acknowledge different needs as those circumstances shift. So will your needs. And it's okay to be needy. Neediness is humanness, and my liberation has been tied to me owning that neediness as a wife, as a daughter, as an employee, as a friend.

Casey: Our team at WebMD Health Discovered is always drawn to the cutting edge of medicine. We are endlessly curious about what's next, what breakthroughs are emerging, and how they might change access, outcomes, and hope for patients and families.

So when Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, reached out about his new documentary on xenotransplantation, we knew immediately this was a story our listeners needed to hear. In the episode titled Exploring Xenotransplantation with Dr Sanjay Gupta: Inside the Future of Organ Transplants, we explored a frontier that feels both futuristic and urgently relevant.

Lauren: More than 100,000 Americans are currently waiting for a kidney transplant. Dr Gupta helped us understand why traditional organ donations simply can't keep up, and how gene-edited organs from pigs may one day save countless lives.

He shared what he witnessed inside biosecure pig facilities, the ethical conversations shaping this field, and why the science is advancing faster than many realize. This episode gave us a rare look at a future where fewer families wait, hope, and suffer as loved ones grow sicker while waiting on the transplant list. And as your companion in navigating health and healthcare, it was powerful to bring you behind the scenes of a breakthrough that could redefine what's possible.

Here's a clip from Dr Gupta.

Pathak: I’d love if you could give us a high-level definition around xenotransplantation.

Sanjay Gupta, MD: Broadly speaking, it means transplanting organs from one species to another. Xeno is this cross-species sort of term. But what it means more specifically is really transplanting organs from animals into humans.

Pathak: Why are we pushing these barriers?

Gupta: Well, you know, the idea of a transplant waiting list—people who are sick and dying, oftentimes waiting for an organ—it is one of the most human stories. Neha, I think as physicians that we deal with, we know there’s an answer. We know that there’s a cure for many of these people: kidney transplant. So there’s that hope, and yet there are so many people who are waiting—100,000 or so people who are waiting. Seventeen people die every day, and these numbers sometimes wash over you, but I think when you do a documentary, you get to meet these people. You spend time with the families of people who lost loved ones waiting.

So can you imagine knowing that there was an answer to have helped your loved one, and yet, because of where we are in society right now, they never got that opportunity? So that is, I think, what’s driving this more than anything else. Some of these numbers are so staggering. It’s hard to really understand what we’re talking about in terms of the human toll, but we’re talking about 37 million adults, if we’re just talking about kidney disease with chronic kidney disease—800,000 of them end-stage kidney failure—and, to your point, 100,000 people waiting on an organ transplant list. Yeah.

Pathak: So why is it so hard to find human organs for transplant?

Gupta: So this is a really interesting question, because this surprised me. I often thought that this was an issue of, are there enough donors? Are there enough people who are willing to say, “Look, upon my death, my brain death, I’m willing to be an organ donor”? And it turns out it’s far more nuanced than that, because a very small percentage of people die every day in the United States in a way that is suitable for their organs to be transplanted.

So they have significant disease. Sometimes they have cancer that has, you know, made their organs unusable. Sometimes they’re too old. I mean, most of the organ donors—and this is tough to talk about—but the ideal organ donor is young, healthy, and then suddenly dead. That is not how most people die, thankfully, you know? So even if every single person in the country said, “I will be an organ donor,” you still would not have enough organs in this country to satisfy the demand.

And keep in mind the demand that you’re talking about—again, the 100,000 people on the waiting list—that’s a really pared-down demand. There are a lot of people who spend the entire rest of their lives on dialysis. They may never qualify for a kidney transplant, but if you suddenly have more organs available, you could suddenly expand the criteria for transplantation as well. So you could not only save lives, but improve lives as well.

What does success look like right now for a patient that receives one of these xenotransplants? What can they sort of look forward to as being that benefit?

People all know the term dialysis, I think. I think what they don’t realize is what a toll it takes on someone’s life. So first of all, just the time—several hours a day, several days a week. It is your life. You can’t plan anything else. And the day after you get dialysis, you may feel good, but right away you start to feel miserable again.

So maybe you have a day or two in a week where you feel reasonable, as was explained to me. You can’t really do anything, but you don’t feel very, very sick. That’s it. And one of the patients that we talked to got the transplant. He told me that he felt like he was breathing normal air again for the first time. He had energy. He was going on walks with his wife and doing things that he hadn’t done in years because of the tolls of dialysis.

Transplants can be fundamentally not only life-saving, but life-giving, in terms of giving your lifestyle back to you. So it’s a significant, significant benefit. So I think there are going to be all sorts of benefits for different types of organ recipients, but it’s not just life-saving. I think it’s life-giving in terms of what they’re able to do.

Casey: Thank you for being with us today. We are looking forward to working behind the scenes to bring you 52 incredible episodes in 2026. We hope to be your Companion Health podcast—always one click away in your pocket or on your computer—offering health information, resources, and reminding you that you are not alone, no matter where you are on your health journey.

To find out more information about the episodes mentioned in this podcast, please make sure to check out our show notes.

Lauren: Thank you for listening.
Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform. If you’d like to send us an email about topics you’re interested in or questions for future guests, please send us a note at [email protected].

Casey: This is Casey.

Lauren: And Lauren.

Casey: For the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast.