Kyle Hartfield had already watched other people go through TMS. He knew it was not supposed to hurt. And he still sat down for his first session braced to start seizing.

That confusion between TMS and ECT is one of two beliefs that do real damage. The first keeps people out of the chair entirely. The second sets up the people who make it in.

Dr. Nanos sits down with Kyle Hartfield, founder of iTalk TMS, a patient advocacy platform he built because he could not sit through five seconds of the content that already existed. He is not a clinician and says so repeatedly. He came to this as a patient, after his best friend died by suicide sent an addiction he had carried since childhood out of control. He is four and a half years sober, and careful to say he did not do TMS in order to get sober.

So here is the honest version of both halves.

On the fear: ECT deliberately induces a seizure under general anesthesia. TMS does neither. You sit in a chair, you are awake, you drive yourself home. Across more than 586,000 sessions, the seizure rate was about 0.31 per 10,000 sessions, and within published guidelines in people without risk factors it appears to be fewer than one in 60,000.

On the expectation: it does not work for everyone. In real-world treatment-resistant depression, roughly six in ten respond and about three in ten reach remission. Kyle says it plainly, and his metaphor is the best thing in the episode. TMS is a crane that lifts you out of the hole and sets you on solid ground. You can turn around and fall back in, or you can start climbing. The climbing is still yours.

This is The Kind Revolution — where we bridge science, compassion, and courage.

If you are struggling, call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Hosted by Dr. Georgine Nanos, MD, MPH | Kind Health Group, Encinitas, CA

Guest: Kyle Hartfield | iTalk TMS

For education, not medical advice. Kyle Hartfield is a patient advocate, not a clinician.

Sixteen percent of Americans who have heard the term "palliative care" believe it means giving up. Thirty-eight percent think it is the same thing as hospice. Neither is true.

Dr. Nanos sits down with Dr. James Ross, founder of the Brain and Body Institute in Tulsa. He is a board-certified family physician who is also board certified in hospice and palliative medicine, and across nearly 25 years he has delivered thousands of babies and later sat with those same families at a grandmother's bedside.

He offers the sentence that clears up most of the confusion: all hospice is palliative care, but not all palliative care is hospice. Palliative care is about quality of life at any stage of serious illness, given alongside treatment meant to cure. As he puts it, while medicine works on helping you live longer, palliative care comes behind and asks what would help you live better.

And the research is not soft on this. In a landmark 2010 trial, patients with metastatic lung cancer who received early palliative care alongside standard care had better quality of life, better mood, less aggressive treatment at the end of life, and longer survival. Less aggressive care, and they lived longer.

Then the part that should move people. Half of hospice patients die within 17 days of enrolling. About one in four signs up in the final week of life. One documented reason for that delay is families resisting what feels like giving up. The misconception is not harmless.

Also: the question he asks patients that reframes everything, which is who do you want to be when you die, and what you do with the answer.

This is The Kind Revolution — where we bridge science, compassion, and courage.

Hosted by Dr. Georgine Nanos, MD, MPH | Kind Health Group, Encinitas, CA

Guest: Dr. James Ross, MD | Brain and Body Institute, Tulsa, OK

For education, not medical advice.

Colorectal cancer used to be an older person's disease. It is not anymore.

Dr. Nanos sits down with Sonia Ramamoorthy, MD, FACS, FASCRS, Chief of the Division of Colon and Rectal Surgery at UC San Diego and the 2024-2025 president of the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons, where she is the fourth woman and the first Asian woman to hold the office in 125 years.

Here is the shift, in her own practice. 24 years ago, nearly every colorectal cancer patient she operated on was in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. Today they are in their 30s and 40s. Incidence is now climbing about 3% a year in adults aged 20 to 49, and about 14% of new US cases are in people under 50.

They get into why it keeps getting caught late, and the answer is uncomfortable. The early symptoms are rectal bleeding and a change in bowel habits, which are also the symptoms of hemorrhoids and of nothing at all. So the patient waits. The majority of young patients later diagnosed with this waited three to twelve months before seeing anyone, and most of them delayed because they did not recognize the symptoms as serious. Then, sometimes, the clinician waits too.

Dr. Ramamoorthy's answer is not a scary campaign. It is one instruction, pointed in both directions: if the treatment does not fix it, circle back with your doctor, and doctors, circle back with your patient.

Also: why screening now starts at 45, why this is one of the few genuinely preventable cancers, what the exercise and microbiome research actually supports, and the colonoscopy discussed honestly by two physicians who have each had one.

This is The Kind Revolution — where we bridge science, compassion, and courage.

Hosted by Dr. Georgine Nanos, MD, MPH | Kind Health Group, Encinitas, CA

Guest: Sonia Ramamoorthy, MD, FACS, FASCRS | UC San Diego Health

For education, not medical advice.