Before the Cure Is Here

Hello friends,

There is a moment in every documentary when you have to stop editing.

You’ve spent months, sometimes years, filming, shaping, questioning, cutting, and trying to make the story as strong as it can be. Then eventually, you have to let it go and put it in front of an audience.

For me, that moment has usually happened at a film festival premiere, with a theater full of people seeing the work for the first time.  

Today feels a little like that.  Except this time, you are the audience in the theater.

After nine months of filming, editing, writing, and countless cups of coffee, Before the Cure is officially out in the world.  And we’re launching with two episodes.

Days before this conversation was recorded, Dr. Tim Nelson acquired a 600,000-square-foot hospital — for one dollar. He left one of the country’s leading medical institutions after spending 20 years learning how to rebuild hearts that surgeons could only repair. This is a conversation about what he was willing to risk, why promising science moves so slowly, and whether a new model can bring potential cures from the laboratory to patients faster.

Ilana Jacqueline spent the first nineteen years of her life being told her symptoms weren’t real. She turned that experience into fifteen years of patient advocacy and a provocative belief: patients have never had more power to change the healthcare system than they do right now.

These are very different stories, but together they capture what Before the Cure is about.

One is about trying to rebuild the system from inside medicine. The other is about what happens when a patient refuses to accept the system as it is.

Both begin before the outcome is certain, which is the territory David and I want to explore.  These are the stories before the breakthrough, about the people who keep going before anyone knows whether it will work.

Before the Cure is still taking shape, too. We know the kinds of stories we want to tell, but the show itself will keep evolving as we make it and as you experience it.

So as you listen, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. If there’s a guest you think we should know, a question you wish we’d asked, or simply something that made you think differently, hit reply and tell me.

And if you hear a conversation you think someone else would appreciate, please send it their way.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Onward,

Timothy Wheeler
Co-host, Before the Cure