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The Medicaid reckoning for applied behavior analysis

Conditions and Diseases

June 5, 2026

The growing scrutiny of applied behavior analysis (ABA) within Medicaid is widely misunderstood within the behavior analytic community as an attack on the profession or its science. It is neither. The root cause is structural. Medicaid programs, whether state-managed or administered through managed care organizations, operate on fixed annual allocations called “premiums,” funded by a blend of federal and state dollars. Each child’s premium is essentially a predetermined budget meant …

What the eGFR race correction teaches us about AI

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

June 5, 2026

The number was wrong for twenty years. Nobody could see it.

For more than twenty years, a number quietly shaped the care of millions of patients. It told nephrologists when to refer. It told transplant committees who qualified for the waitlist. It told primary care physicians which patients were stable, and which were declining.

For Black patients, the number was wrong. By design.

The number was eGFR, and the formula behind it included …

End-of-life decision-making is never a solo act

Chinmeri Nwuba

Health Policy

June 5, 2026

Technological and biomedical advancements are undeniable blessings in today’s health sector. These advancements have improved life-prolonging technologies. So, clinicians can often sustain biological life long after meaningful recovery is unlikely. Consequently, there is a subtle shift happening in modern medicine, where we are no longer asking whether we can keep people alive but who gets to decide when not to.

This shift becomes clearer when viewed through Ronald Dworkin’s distinction between …

Why ChatGPT can’t write your residency personal statement

Kathleen Muldoon, PhD

Medical Education

June 5, 2026

I recently worked with a medical student who had spent weeks writing and revising her residency personal statement. Her essay was layered and thoughtful, tracing the arc of her experiences and establishing a clear through-line for why she wanted to pursue palliative care medicine. Most importantly, the narrative sounded like her. It was honest. She was proud of it.

Then she showed it to a resident on a rotation. The resident …

Military sports medicine and the cost of readiness

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 5, 2026

I came to military medicine as a sports medicine physician. At first, it seemed like an unexpected place for that training. But the more soldiers I treated, the more obvious it became: What better place for sports medicine than the military?

Sports medicine is built around performance, load, recovery, rehabilitation, and preserving function over time. In military medicine, the language changes but the principles are the same. Return to sport becomes …

How to assess liver fibrosis in primary care

Radhika Vayani, DO

Conditions and Diseases

June 5, 2026

A 22-year-old came to my office because he wanted to “get on track” with his health.

He was not in crisis. He did not feel sick. His labs were concerning, but not unusual for primary care: triglycerides in the 250s, a hemoglobin A1C near the diabetic range, elevated blood pressure and central obesity.

Then I reviewed his liver stiffness measurement. F3 fibrosis.

That result was hard to believe. Over time, it prompted me …

Why AI has outpaced medical malpractice law, and what to do about it [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 4, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Medical AI is evolving faster than the legal system can regulate it. Richard E. Anderson, CEO of The Doctors Company, the nation’s largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurer, argues that the gap between what AI can do clinically and what courts are ready …

Neonatal care in humanitarian crises is conditional

Maddie Beans

Health Policy

June 4, 2026

Neonatal survival depends on continuity that modern health systems often assume as stable. Thermoregulation, oxygen delivery, infection control, trained clinical staffing, and reliable electricity must function together as an integrated system. When that system is intact, care follows a predictable sequence from delivery through stabilization and escalation when needed. When it is disrupted, survival becomes conditional rather than assured.

In Gaza and Lebanon, ongoing humanitarian conditions have placed neonatal services under …

When medicine confuses professionalism vs. compliance

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

June 4, 2026

Medicine changes in many ways. Some changes arrive with public debate, policy announcements, and formal declarations of progress. Others arrive more quietly, through repetition, habit, and the slow accumulation of what becomes normal. In my experience, the most consequential changes in professional life often come that second way. They are absorbed long before they are named.

We speak often of the hidden curriculum in training. Young physicians learn not only science …

Insurance consolidation is a patient safety problem

American Society of Anesthesiologists

Health Policy

June 4, 2026

Imagine a physician who has been practicing anesthesiology for 20 years. She is skilled, board-certified, well-liked, and respected by her team. She now works more hours than she did 10 years ago, covers more call, cares for sicker patients, and manages an …

When difficulty swallowing pills looks like noncompliance

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 4, 2026

An older patient tells the health care team that swallowing medications is difficult. Pills get stuck in the throat. Some trigger gagging. Others are skipped altogether because taking them has become an ordeal. The concern is documented, the difficulty is acknowledged, and in some cases, a swallowing assessment is even performed. Yet the prescription remains unchanged.

Weeks later, the patient has missed doses or stopped the medication altogether. The medical record …

The gut microbiome and mental health are interconnected

Sidhartha Gautam Senapati, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 4, 2026

Physicians tend to view conditions affecting mental health as entirely different from those affecting the digestive system. Depression is managed in one clinic, irritability and constipation in another, and chronic fatigue somewhere in between. However, mounting evidence indicates that these conditions are potentially interconnected. The connection might start in the gut.

Human intestines are host to trillions of microorganisms collectively referred to as the gut microbiota. They are involved in a …

Why are doctors prosecuted for prescribing opioids?

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 4, 2026

As a prominent health care educator and advocate for chronic pain patients and their clinicians, I receive a large number of emails and potential papers in venues where I am active. Every week, I hear from people who have been harmed by U.S. government misdirection and outright health care fraud. Increasing numbers of those who come to me are doctors who have been railroaded into prison and had their lives …

Leaving insurance-based practice while burned out is a trap

Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MD

Physician

June 4, 2026

During and after the pandemic, I was actively looking for a non-clinical position. Despite my love of medicine and two decades as a partner in a busy, prestigious OB/GYN private practice, I would have left clinical medicine entirely if the right opportunity had come along. That is how depleted I was. That is how broken the system had become for me.

It didn’t come along. Eventually, I stopped waiting for an …

Health care affordability is now a moral crisis

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Health Policy

June 4, 2026

“If gravity pulls everything down, why are my health insurance premiums and co-payments skyrocketing?”

The question sounds humorous, but beneath the humor lies frustration shared by millions of Americans. Health care spending in the United States continues to rise year after year. Medical technology has advanced dramatically. We have better imaging, more sophisticated procedures, and an ever-expanding list of medications. Yet many patients are finding health care increasingly difficult to afford. …

U.S. drug shortages threaten national health security

Anmol Gupta, MD, MPP

Health Policy

June 4, 2026

The third pharmacy turned him away. My patient had already driven across Northern Michigan in search of his life-saving cancer medication. The first pharmacy was out of stock. The second was out too. At the third, he was told they hadn’t received a shipment in weeks.

On the other end of this crisis are the physicians. We spend our late evening hours calling store after store, a desperate game of pharmacy …

What happens when physicians cede AI to direct-to-consumer startups [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 3, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Rural doctors hit a ceiling around 35 patients a day, and hiring more clinicians will not move it. Tod Stillson, a family physician, medical device inventor, and health care entrepreneur, argues that the …

How a self-driving car medical escort could work

Deepak Gupta, MD

Physician

June 3, 2026

Ensuring a patient escort has long been a standard safety requirement for discharge after outpatient anesthesia. The rule is increasingly difficult to satisfy for patients who live alone. Even when a loner patient can arrange for someone to closely oversee them at home until the effects of anesthesia have completely worn off, which is generally presumed to be a 24-hour period after administration, they cannot always ensure someone to physically …

Clinician trust in AI is not a one-time milestone

Susan Grant, DNP, RN

Health Technology

June 3, 2026

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care is reshaping how clinical teams diagnose, document, and deliver care. Adoption is rising quickly, with the American Medical Association reporting that two in three U.S. physicians already use AI tools in practice, a 78 percent increase in just one year. To keep pace with this acceleration, health care organizations must focus on building and maintaining clinical trust in the technology before …

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