259: Plot Twist: Why Traditional Healthcare Isn't Working & How to Fix It with Dr. Robin Berzin, Founder of Parsley Health

In this Plot Twist episode, Light Watkins introduces Dr. Robin Berzin, whose unexpected career pivot reveals how life's challenges can lead to meaningful transformation. After watching her grandmother's battle with preventable cancer and feeling unfulfilled in her role at the U.S. Attorney's Office, Robin realized she wanted to help people rather than prosecute them—a realization that would eventually revolutionize modern healthcare.

Through a series of serendipitous events, including landing a volunteer position with Dr. Oz before his TV fame, Robin discovered her passion for making health information accessible to everyone. Her experience producing Dr. Oz's early radio show challenged everything she thought she knew about nutrition and wellness, opening her eyes to new possibilities in healthcare.

The episode takes listeners behind the scenes of modern medicine, where Robin shares candid insights about the unsustainable reality of 15-minute doctor visits and the broken system that prioritizes quick prescriptions over lasting solutions. Despite facing criticism for choosing primary care medicine at Columbia Medical School—where a neurosurgeon dismissed it as "a waste of a spot"—Robin stayed true to her vision of creating better healthcare.

Listeners will find themselves deeply invested in Robin's story of transformation, learning how personal experiences, including her grandmother's battle with cancer and her early exposure to integrative medicine, shaped her innovative approach to healthcare. This episode is perfect for anyone questioning their career path, interested in healthcare reform, or simply seeking inspiration to trust their instincts and make meaningful change—even when it means challenging the status quo.

Transcript

RB: “ All the things I was writing prescriptions and referrals for high blood sugar, high blood pressure, migraine, headaches, joint pain, anxiety and depression, gastrointestinal issues, hormone stuff, all of it, they were very dependent on what we were eating and how we were moving and how we were managing stress. And yet there was no place on my prescription pad for food in any serious way or for movement or for meditation or for any of the things that were the root cause drivers of some of these conditions. And so what I saw was that we created a revolving door between primary care and specialists that was just spinning faster and faster while people got sicker and sicker and had a longer and longer list of drugs to take. And I was just like this is not going to work.”

[INTRODUCTION] 

I'm Light Watkins. And today I've got another bite-sized plot twist podcast episode for you, which is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of that pivotal moment in their life that directed them toward what ultimately became their path and their purpose. And sometimes that plot twist looks like getting fired from a job or losing a bunch of money.

Or in the case of today's guest, Dr. Robin Berzin, she was unfulfilled in what looked like a successful career path at the U. S. Attorney's Office, and that became her wake up call. Robin realized that she wanted to help people rather than prosecute them, and that, combined with the memories of her grandmother's battle with preventable cancer, led Robin to pivot to a path that would help to revolutionize how we think about health care.

Let's listen in…

RB: I soul-searched a bunch, because I sat there and I was working in the US Attorney's Office, prosecuting securities fraud on the paralegal level; supporting the prosecutors really. I knew I didn't really want to be doing that. That didn't feel right. It felt punitive, not helpful, and I wanted to be helpful.

I sat down and I wrote down a lot like, what do I want to spend my time doing? What do I like to do? I like to be on my feet. I like to help people. Then I thought, well, what did I like in college? Because I think a lot of us also, if you have the – I mean, it’s such a privilege to be able to go to school. Then, you go to school and you barrel your way through and you're told you're supposed to know what you already want to do and you take all these classes and what are they about?

I thought back to some of my favorite classes, and I realized that I had taken this course on cancer, I think, second year of school. It was at a time when my grandmother had been dying of colon cancer. She had gotten colon cancer early in life through her history of smoking and diet, basically, that 50 percent of all cancers are preventable, I learned in this course. She had developed colon cancer that way. Then she ultimately died of colon cancer early, because she hadn’t also gotten the right preventive screening, and hadn’t got a colonoscopy early enough.

In that class, I think I took that class because she was sick at the time. It was outside of the scope of whatever it was I thought I was supposed to be focusing on at the time. When I looked back at school and I remember taking that class and writing a paper on a holistic approaches to cancer therapy that had won an award at school at that time, and dug into other things I was interested in, I think I started to say, “Ah, I'm interested in health and I like doing medical research, bizarrely. And I like understanding the biology of these disease processes, and I'm interested in public health.”

It took me a beat to tease those things out. But between yoga and those memories, it started to feel like a clue and a pattern. I pursued that into switching jobs into a psych research job at NYU School of Medicine, where I wasn't so sure I was interested in psych, and I ultimately did not go into psych. I trained in internal medicine, but I got some experience with patients and I got some experience in a medical hospital setting, and I got some experience in healthcare in that job. That was enough for me to say, “Okay, yeah. This makes sense. I want to do this.”

I think, it was a matter of listening to myself, trying something, being willing to fail, like me, knowing that maybe I would have taken that job at NYU and I don't know, I hated it and not – said, “No, this isn't for me either.” It was the process of, is this right? Is this right? Is this right? Then, just trying to follow my heart.

LW: Speaking of experience, can you share the story of how you started working with Dr. Oz? Because I just love that story.

RB: Yes. For those of you listening, I was the first producer for Dr. Oz's first radio show, before he had a TV show. In these days, he was mostly a cardiac surgeon at Columbia. It was his main job. Then, he, at the time, he was writing some of his first bestsellers, and he was on Oprah, the Oprah Show, best show ever on television, as far as I'm concerned.  He was on The Oprah Show many times a year at this point, but he wasn't famous the way that he later became. He was going to do a radio show with Oprah.

I was back at my undergrad, my fifth year of college, taking bio and orgo and physics and all those courses I hadn't taken, because I hadn't been pre-med in undergrad originally. I had to go back and do all that, which is a total pain. I was doing that. I needed a job and I wanted to be back in New York.

I was researching who is doing integrative medicine research and who was doing really cool kinds of public health research and interesting research at Columbia? Maybe I can get a research job. Had no idea who he was. Looked up his email address on Columbia's website and sent him a cold email and attached to my resumé at the last second. Because he had gone to Penn, I think, for med school, and I was there for undergrad and post-doc. I said, “Hey, I went to your same school. I'm smart, I guess, and I need a job in health care. I've already done psych research. I've already done some research at NYU.”

 He called me and told me he was going to start this radio show working with Oprah. My dad who is a doctor is like, “Who is this person? Is this a real person?” I was like, “I think so.” I'm looking him up. I'm like, “He has all these degrees. Seems like he's a surgeon. Seems neat.” I took the job and it was awesome. I learned so much there and I'm really grateful for the experience.

 LW: You were volunteering, like you told him, that was your offer. I would love to just volunteer for you in whatever way I can help you. It wasn't like you were asking for him for a paid job, or anything like that, which I thought was really cool that you did that and it paid off. He said something while you guys were working together that really stuck with you, which was about a bagel.

RB: Yes. We were doing practice recordings for the show. At that time, he had never hosted a radio show before. So he was learning and we were all learning how to do this. We were in New York and the Oprah team were all remote in Chicago. It was just early days of remote work. These were like podcasts before podcasts were a thing, by the way. That was what this was back in the day. We would never have used that word then, which is weird to think about now.

We were doing a practice run, I think, on nutrition, talking about the insulin response for refined carbohydrates. He said, “Eating a bagel plain is like throwing a grenade in your stomach. You'd be better off putting on some butter, or some cream cheese, or some sort of fat to slow down your insulin response to keep your blood sugar spikes lower.” I thought about the way I'd thought about nutrition for literally my entire life. Everything we learned in the 80s and 90s; don't eat any fat, carbs are fine. It just threw all of that upside down and just made me realize, here I am trying to go to med school. I wasn't in med school yet at this point. Trying to be in health. I know clearly nothing about health and what it is that I'm eating every day and how it's impacting my body. How on earth does anybody else know this, too?

 I was just so fascinated by all of the information that I got to learn from him. Really, a lot of it came from reading the books of all the people who would be guests on the show. I would have to read all their books every week. I'd read five books a week. I'd summarize them. I do all the notes, so that he – He's a very busy man. He had to come in and be ready to record these shows, and so that was my part of my job. What an opportunity to read so much and learn as you're part of your job. It was amazing.

 LW: What were you most impressed with about that experience, working with Dr. Oz?

RB: So many things. First of all, how many really smart, incredible scientists and physicians and public health leaders. All the people who came on to that show as guests were extraordinary people whom I got to meet; from Oprah herself and Gayle King, to all these people in the medical field who were trying to pull together information in a way that was salient and actionable and interesting.

I give Dr. Oz and Oprah so much credit, because at that time, no one else had ever said, could health information be entertaining and interesting? This is before the wellness movement. This is before all the blogs. This is before the podcasts. No one had tried to say, “How do we make health information something that anyone could have access to and own and use in their daily lives? That was super cool. I learned so much about how to communicate, I think, health information in a way that's interesting and actionable both from him and from Oprah, but also from, again, all the guests on the show. It's such an amazing education, truly.

LW: Let's cut to medical school now. You have an aspiration to become a primary care physician, I believe. You overheard, one of your professors made a comment about why would anybody come to Columbia Medical School in hopes of becoming a primary care physician? Because obviously, those are the physicians that are least likely to be reimbursed by insurance companies and it's not very lucrative and blah, blah, blah. Talk a little bit about your motivation to become primary care physician and how you were able to navigate that snobby attitude around doing something a little bit more specialized.

RB: I was the daughter of a primary care physician. My dad was a PCP. I don't think I really understood when I went to med school that these different fields were valued so differently, and that surgeons were considered these gods and that fields ophthalmology and dermatology were paid these huge sums of money. Everyone would make fun of the people who wanted to go into those fields that they just wanted the easy cash money fields. I just didn't know. You’re a kid. You're just going to school. You want to learn. You want to help people.

I didn't know that these fields, fairly or unfairly in many cases, candidly, have these stereotypes. We need all these fields. I didn't understand that those biases were what they were. I'm in my third year, I guess, of medical school, which is the year that traditionally you spend five, six weeks in each specialty; internal medicine and OBGYN, and surgery. You're there to help, and then you're also there to learn what it's all about.

In a neurosurgery OR, the neurosurgeon’s there, and the skull is open, and he's literally dangling a tumor off of a forcep. This sounds really grotesque, I'm sure, if anyone's listening to this, and I don't mean to be laughing, but if you think about the absurdity of the moment, that's why I'm smiling, because it was just as students, you're just standing there with your eyes wide open, can't believe what you're seeing. Also, can't believe you're just having a conversation with this person as they're going through this procedure. It's amazing.

He asked each of us what we wanted to go into. One of the other women in my student group said primary care. He said, “Why would you want to do that? That's such a waste of a spot at Columbia.” I quickly changed my answer. I can't remember what I said. I think, I said I wasn't sure yet. In that moment was a realization and an important one, not just of some of the stereotypes in medicine, but also of just how we as a country have valued the most important part of medicine, which is in our primary care field, which is there to really be the one that knows us and takes care of us. Yet, it's paid the least and taken the least seriously.

That really doesn't make sense when you think about a country where we talk a lot about rising health care costs and chronic disease exploding. We have it backwards. It was a big wake up call.

LW: Can we talk a little bit about the early pre-Parsley days of you as a practicing doctor? Talk about the business of medicine. A lot of these appointments only lasts for 10 or 15 minutes, and a lot of prescriptions are getting prescribed. What's going on behind the scenes that the patient would not know about that is ultimately unsustainable for everybody's highest and best good?

RB: When I was in my training at Columbia, Mount Sinai, amazing places here in New York, and especially in our outpatient clinics. A bunch of the training you do is in the hospital, where people are already admitted for very serious conditions. Then, a bunch of it is outpatient, where you think of like you and me going to the doctor. Most patient care in our country is happening outpatient. It's happening in clinics. The majority isn't happening in hospitals.

In those clinics, I remember I had 15-minute visits with the patient. Those visits were so rushed. You were trying to do so much in those visits. You do this quick, basic physical exam and you figure out all the stuff that's going on and everything that's happened since the last time they saw you and all the specialists they saw, and the procedures that they had, and what drugs are they taking and are they actually taking those medications?

I mean, it felt good just to race to the finish line. I would spend two of those 15 minutes, two of those very precious 15 minutes printing out prescriptions, four to a page, and handing somebody a stack of two, three, four, sometimes five pages of prescriptions, four to a page, for drugs and referrals to specialists. The data said that 50 percent of drugs are never even filled at the pharmacy. No one even picks them up. The specialist visits would take months to get to and result in another procedure and maybe added another drug. Then they'd be on back to me.

I saw that all the things I was writing prescriptions and referrals for; high blood sugar, high blood pressure, migraine headaches, joint pain, autoimmune conditions and fertility, anxiety and depression, gastrointestinal issues, hormone stuff, all of it. The things that everyone is living with for years and maybe decades, all of us, that these conditions were highly interrelated to each other. They were highly multifactorial. They were very dependent on what we were eating and how we were moving and how we were managing stress. Yet, there was no place on my prescription pad for food in any serious way, or for movement, or for meditation, or for any of the things that were the root cause drivers of some of these conditions, let alone that I have been nowhere near enough time with a patient to ever address those things.

What I saw was that we created a revolving door between primary care and specialists that was just spinning faster and faster and faster, while people got sicker and sicker, and had a longer and longer and longer list of drugs to take. I was just like, “Gosh, this is not going to work. This is not working.” That really inspired me to say, what would a system look like that fixed a lot of this if we were to start fresh, start anew, start outside the system, be a little bit radical in the way that we want to approach it and do something totally different? That was a huge learning.

LW: I'm sure you're not the first physician to think about this, but what do you think made you take those next steps to actually start this platform? Why you? Was it your exposure to Dr. Oz? Did you have some tech relationships, or –

RB: What does that say of not –

LW: Was it the yoga? Was it the Vipassana course?

RB: I think, it was all those things. I think, it was back to knowing about functional medicine from Dr. Mark Hyman, who I met when I worked for Dr. Oz, and had sent me the Institute for Functional Medicine textbook. I knew that there was another way of practicing medicine that was effective, that existed, right? It might not have been widely available, but it did exist.

 I had started another company in end of the school in early part of my residency with a friend from medical school in the tech space and healthcare. He went on to run that company for a long time. It's still up there. We built a piece of software to help better coordinate care in hospitals. The experience of starting that company in medical school, I think, meeting my co-founder. He had had two companies before medical school.

I was exposed to someone who said, “Hey, I've started companies.” I was like, “Alright. There's not a lot of this, but it is possible. It exists.” You can start something from nothing. I had a little bit of experience by the time I started Parsley of what it was like to get a company off the ground from literally idea in your head to forming a company, forming an organization, building a product, raising a little bit of money. I had seen that. Not very much. I was in that company for a little while, but I'd seen it and had some exposure.

I think it was those things coupled with my passion for seeing that this care had to be better. Thinking back to my grandmother, how, yes, it would have been way better if she had gotten a colonoscopy on time, which is a lifesaving screening intervention. Not or, but and, and. She needed better primary care than she had had. However, and she needed functional medicine to change the way she ate and lived, so that she didn't get colon cancer in the first place. 

It was this combination of having this lightbulb moment, seeing the forest for the trees, thinking about what could be possible, and enough exposure to people and places who said, “Hey, let's do this a different way.” I mean, even the radio show that we did with Dr. Oz and Harpo, Oprah's production company, was a startup in and of itself. It was something that had never existed before that I was in the first year of getting off the ground. I don't know. All those things came together.

[END]

If you'd like to hear how the rest of Robin Berzin's story unfolds, head over to episode 104 and start around the 30-minute mark. 

And if you enjoyed this conversation, I highly recommend checking out my interview with Dr. Steven Eisenberg, which is episode 53. Steven Eisenberg is a cancer doctor who composes personal songs with his patients to help them find joy and strength during their healing journey. Also, you may want to try episode 162 with Shona Vertue, who's the creator of the Vertue Method, which is a holistic fitness platform that combines strength training, flexibility, and mindfulness to transform both body and mind. 

And if you know of anyone else who's had an incredible plot twist in their life, and they're making the world a better place, please send me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com . And also take a few seconds to rate and review the show. 

I will see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person who's out there doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place. 

And until then, keep trusting your intuition, keep following your heart, keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no, one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic day.