The first two installments of this series sorted podcasts by who holds the microphone. In some, researchers invite people with lived experience (PWLE) on as guests. In others, we make the show ourselves.

This installment breaks that sorting on purpose.

Both shows below are made by people who live with fibromyalgia. Both are also made by people with professional credentials in the condition they live with. A health coach who has the diagnosis. A physician who has it too.

That combination is rarer than it should be. In most rooms I sit in, the expertise and the experience arrive in different chairs, and someone has to carry meaning between them. These two shows let you hear what happens when that carrying is not needed.

Fibromyalgia Podcast®

Host: Tami Stackelhouse. Audio podcast, with show notes on the web. Here, the coach has the diagnosis.

Tami Stackelhouse describes her own path as diagnosis, then disability, then a framework she built for living with fibromyalgia. She founded the International Fibromyalgia Coaching Institute, which trains other people with fibromyalgia to coach, and she produced the fibromyalgia documentary Invisible.

The show has run since 2019. It passed Episode 180 in the spring of 2026 and publishes roughly every two weeks. The format is an audio magazine: interviews with clinicians and researchers, before-and-after stories from people with fibromyalgia, and coaching segments. Every tenth episode is an “Ask the Coach” episode built from listener questions.

Where to start: Episode 158, “Powerful Partnerships,” from April 2025. Stackelhouse interviews Ginevra Liptan and Sharon Waldrop about the launch of The Fibro Show, the absence of fibromyalgia from medical school curricula, and why the two of them decided to make a show at all. It is the natural bridge to the next entry.

What to listen for: how often the guest is a person with fibromyalgia, and whether they are there to testify or to teach. On this show they are often there to teach. That is the point.

The commercial layer: The show promotes the institute’s coaching consultations and its coach-training classes, and some episodes are built around them. That does not disqualify the content. It does mean you should know whose business the microphone belongs to before you decide how much weight to give a recommendation.

Access: Free on the usual podcast apps and on the show’s website. Written show notes accompany each episode. I could not confirm that full transcripts are posted. If you need one, write to the show and ask.

The Fibro Show

Hosts: Ginevra Liptan, MD, and Sharon Waldrop, NBC-HWC. YouTube, video and audio. Here, so does the doctor.

The Fibro Show launched in December 2024, when Liptan rebuilt her existing YouTube channel around the two of them. It calls itself part talk show, part vlog, part webinar. Episodes range from interviews with specialists to the two hosts talking through a single practical problem.

Ginevra Liptan developed fibromyalgia while in medical school at Tufts University, treated herself until she found enough relief to finish, and has built her career on treating the condition. She is board-certified in internal medicine and wrote The FibroManual.

Sharon Waldrop was diagnosed in the mid-1990s after a childhood of being told her pain was growing pains. A year after her diagnosis she started a fibromyalgia support and education group in Michigan that grew into the Fibromyalgia Association, a national nonprofit. She still leads its support group, which now meets on Zoom. She is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach.

What to listen for: the moments when one host answers as a clinician and the other answers as a person with the symptom, and then they trade places. That trade is the show.

The commercial layer: Liptan has a book and a clinical practice. Waldrop runs a private coaching practice. Both are mentioned on the show. Same rule as above: know it, and weigh it.

Access: Free on YouTube. Because it is video first, captions are available on the episodes, which makes it the most accessible entry in this series so far. The Fibromyalgia Association also runs a free Zoom support group and an annual virtual Fibromyalgia Awareness Day conference, both listed on its website. I could not confirm how often new episodes post in 2026; the channel’s full-episode playlist was updated in June 2026.

Reader submissions

Here, you tell us.

Issue 3 asked you to send the show you listen to on a day when you cannot read. The invitation stands. Send it to editorpwlevoices@gmail.com with one sentence on why. I will listen, and if it fits, it runs here in December.

A note on access

Every show named here is free to listen to. Free is not the same as accessible.

Captions and transcripts remain the gap across this series. The Fibro Show is the first entry where I could confirm captions without asking. For the Fibromyalgia Podcast, show notes are posted but I could not confirm transcripts. If you need one and cannot find it, write to the show. The asking is its own small piece of advocacy.

Streaming an hour of video costs more data than an hour of audio. If data is tight, the audio version of The Fibro Show is also on YouTube, and downloading over a connection you are not paying for by the megabyte is still the cheapest route.

One last thing

Neither show will get you a seat at a research table.

What they will show you is what it sounds like when the expert and the person with pain are the same person, and nobody in the room has to translate.

Most of us have spent years being one or the other. It is worth an hour to hear both at once.

A continuing article. Worth a Listen returns in Issue 8, in December, with Installment Four: The Societies. The shows the pain societies make themselves, and where we sit when the field holds the microphone.

— Tom