KevinMD.com

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

America spends nearly a fifth of its economy on health care, yet chronic disease keeps rising and prevention lags. Narinder Singh Parhar, an internist and intensivist with four decades of experience across outpatient, hospital, and ICU care, argues that American…

Listen on Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Listen and followApple Podcasts Spotify YouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

Medical Education

Clinical experience for pre-meds shapes career choices

Amit Pandey, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

An excerpt from The Premed Paradox. As I had seen my senior residents do in the past, and without a second thought, I picked up the sterile gauze, folded it over to create a padded protection from the glass of…

An excerpt from The Premed Paradox.

As I had seen my senior residents do in the past, and without a second thought, I picked up the sterile gauze, folded it over to create a padded protection from the glass of the lidocaine vial, and snapped off the top as required. To my absolute shock, I immediately felt the glass tip of the vial penetrate both gauze padding and sterile glove, …

Medical Education

Lessons from a pediatrician in conversation with her son

Loretta Cody, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Intro My son is presently in his second year of internal medicine residency. When he was about to enter medical school, my older son thought it might be interesting for this "about to become a doctor" and his mother, "a…

Intro

My son is presently in his second year of internal medicine residency. When he was about to enter medical school, my older son thought it might be interesting for this “about to become a doctor” and his mother, “a long-time doctor,” to have a conversation about the journey. I realize now after transcribing and editing our conversations that this was much more than my life as a pediatrician; it was …

Real physician voices, twice a week

Free, and one click to unsubscribe.

Health Technology

The patient’s story has no place in the electronic record

Michael Duben, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

About 80 percent of a diagnosis comes from the patient's story. The electronic health record has no place to keep it. I learned the first half of that in my second year of medical school, in a physical diagnosis lecture…

About 80 percent of a diagnosis comes from the patient’s story. The electronic health record has no place to keep it.

I learned the first half of that in my second year of medical school, in a physical diagnosis lecture by the late Dr. Arthur Aufses Jr., chairman of surgery at Mount Sinai for 22 years and a man of extraordinary skill and intellect. In that lecture, he said that about …

Patient

Older adults refusing help may need choices, not arguments

Ian Hu & Pao Hsuan Huang

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

My phone lit up in the dormitory: "Can you come back after camp? Mom needs you to help persuade Grandma." I was at a summer program in Seattle. I booked the earliest flight I could, already marshaling arguments in my…

My phone lit up in the dormitory: “Can you come back after camp? Mom needs you to help persuade Grandma.”

I was at a summer program in Seattle. I booked the earliest flight I could, already marshaling arguments in my head: statistics on cognitive decline, studies about social engagement, the kind of evidence-based reasoning I had absorbed from years of watching people around me in Silicon Valley try to optimize everything, …

Patient

Delayed Parkinson’s diagnosis: when symptoms don’t fit

Stephanie Hanko

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

In October 2024, I finally heard the word that made sense of five years of confusion: Parkinson's. For years, my symptoms didn't align with the diagnoses I was given, and each specialist saw only a piece of the puzzle. What…

In October 2024, I finally heard the word that made sense of five years of confusion: Parkinson’s. For years, my symptoms didn’t align with the diagnoses I was given, and each specialist saw only a piece of the puzzle. What changed everything was the moment a movement-disorder specialist looked at my symptoms as a whole and recognized the pattern immediately.

When symptoms don’t fit the labels

My first symptom appeared in 2019: …

Physician

Why antipsychotics for depression need physician oversight

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Atypical antipsychotics have quietly migrated from inpatient psychiatry to primary care offices, urgent care clinics, and telemedicine platforms staffed increasingly by nurse practitioners and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs). The drugs have not changed. Their risks have not changed. What has changed is who is prescribing them, and how casually they are being marketed to the public. These medications were designed for psychosis, bipolar disorder, and acute agitation. They now …

Physician

What if emotional immaturity has always been endemic?

Deepak Gupta, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Looking at emotional maturity through an epidemiological lens may unravel the endemic status of emotional immaturity in postmodern humanity. Is its epidemic proportion a new-age phenomenon? Has its endemicity been innate since the dawn of humanity? Does it extend beyond humanity into the nonhuman systems that humans devise? Humans have long invented historical myths and fictional entities in order to organize nonhumans and to prevail over them by tradition. Are …

Conditions and Diseases

When can you have sex after hip replacement surgery?

Cory Calendine, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Every joint replacement patient leaves my office with a plan. When to walk, how to ice, when to drive, when to come back. We talk about stairs, showers, sleep, and the first night home. What most of them do not leave with is an answer to a question they are thinking about and almost never ask: When can I have sex again?

They don’t ask, and too often we don’t offer. …

Health Policy

Coverage cuts strengthen the case for Medicare for All

Bruce A. Silverman, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) lays bare a brutal truth about American health care: When coverage depends on politics, paperwork, employment status, and state budgets, people lose care, and some will die because of it. Cuts and administrative barriers to Medicaid, new hurdles for Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage, and continued failure to guarantee stable access to care all point in the same direction: Our fragmented system …

Podcast

Amazon and Uber set the bar that primary care is judged against [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A car shows up when you click a button and groceries arrive by tonight, but a doctor's appointment takes weeks. Payam Zamani started MY DR NOW while he was still a resident, in a clinic of twelve hundred square feet,…

Listen on Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Listen and followApple Podcasts Spotify YouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

A car shows up when you click a button and groceries arrive by tonight, but a doctor’s appointment takes weeks. Payam Zamani started MY DR NOW while he was still a resident, in a clinic of twelve hundred square feet, and now runs more than eighty of them as …

Conditions and Diseases

Brain capital: the $11.7 trillion case for brain health

Alice Luo Clayton, PhD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A new kind of capital For decades, we have treated brain health solely as a medical issue, something to address only when it begins to fail. That's beginning to change, as more experts recognize that the capabilities of the human…

A new kind of capital

For decades, we have treated brain health solely as a medical issue, something to address only when it begins to fail. That’s beginning to change, as more experts recognize that the capabilities of the human mind (our ability to think, adapt, learn, and make decisions) impact more than just the day-to-day lives of individuals. They influence the well-being and stability of families, workplaces, populations, and society …

Conditions and Diseases

The real risk of medical tourism complications is distance

David Feldmar, MD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A meaningful portion of my practice involves reconstructive work, not the kind that follows trauma or cancer, but the kind that follows cosmetic procedures that went wrong. Patients come to me after abdominoplasties that developed into sepsis, after injections administered by unlicensed individuals, after hair transplants that left permanent scarring. Much of what I do in the consultation room is assess what can be improved, what cannot be reversed, and …

Medical Education

5 competencies the future of medical education requires

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

Medical education has always carried an enormous responsibility: deciding what a future physician needs to know. For generations, the answer seemed relatively straightforward. Give medical students a rigorous foundation in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology, and other basic sciences.…

Medical education has always carried an enormous responsibility: deciding what a future physician needs to know.

For generations, the answer seemed relatively straightforward. Give medical students a rigorous foundation in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology, and other basic sciences. Build clinical knowledge upon that foundation. Then provide supervised clinical experience until the student becomes capable of practicing medicine. That model has served medicine extraordinarily well.

But the world in which today’s …

Health Technology

AI chatbots and psychosis: Families see the harm first

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A new scoping review in npj Digital Medicine should be read by every clinician who treats serious mental illness. Diel, Torous, and colleagues reviewed 119 articles on the mental health harms of large language model chatbots. They sorted the harms into five categories: direct psychiatric harm, behavioral and relational harm, cognitive harm, safety failures, and governance risks. Psychosis and severe mental illness came up again and again as the …

Conditions and Diseases

Hearing screening in primary care is a single question

Rachel Artsma, AuD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

We measure blood pressure before a patient has a stroke. We check cholesterol before a coronary event. We evaluate vision before impairment interferes with driving or reading. So why is hearing treated differently? For many people, the last routine hearing…

We measure blood pressure before a patient has a stroke. We check cholesterol before a coronary event. We evaluate vision before impairment interferes with driving or reading.

So why is hearing treated differently? For many people, the last routine hearing test they remember was in elementary school. Decades pass before anyone checks again, often after the problem has become impossible to ignore. Conversations are frustrating, family members are repeating themselves, and …

Health Technology

After-hours charting isn’t a backlog. It’s a team problem.

Karan Kanwar

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

The last patient leaves around six. Dinner happens, eventually, and the kids go down around eight. The laptop comes back out after that, open to a stack of notes from a day that had exactly zero room in it for…

Two-fifteen was the closest thing to a gap today, and a nurse used it to grab labs. Four-thirty had five minutes, spent walking a worried mother back to the …

Conditions and Diseases

Autism behavior therapy needs a physician in the room

Suzanne Goh, MD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

This month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new 173-page toolkit to help states ensure more effective and less costly autism care for children. The launch came as government data shows spending on care increased by 421 percent between 2021 and 2025, far outpacing the 67 percent growth in the number of children receiving services. It also followed recent investigations by the New York …

Health Technology

AI and physician judgment: the risk when AI is mostly right

Matt Hasan, PhD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

For many physicians, the first truly useful encounter with generative AI has been remarkably mundane. It takes notes. Ambient AI listens to the encounter, organizes the conversation, drafts the clinical note, and gives the physician something increasingly scarce in medicine:…

For many physicians, the first truly useful encounter with generative AI has been remarkably mundane. It takes notes.

Ambient AI listens to the encounter, organizes the conversation, drafts the clinical note, and gives the physician something increasingly scarce in medicine: time. That is a genuine accomplishment. But it may also have created a misleading picture of where clinical AI is headed.

The next generation of AI will not simply document what the …

Conditions and Diseases

Physicians and the death penalty: There is no humane way

Ali Abdullah, RN

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

"Do No Harm" is perhaps the most famous medical maxim. But reciting it is one thing; living by it is another. Sometimes, the question of "harm" is up for debate. Throughout history, physicians have lent their knowledge to all manner…

“Do No Harm” is perhaps the most famous medical maxim. But reciting it is one thing; living by it is another. Sometimes, the question of “harm” is up for debate. Throughout history, physicians have lent their knowledge to all manner of atrocities, warfare, torture, and mass sterilization, often justified under the supposedly noble pursuit of “reducing harm.”

Capital punishment or the death penalty is another instance of this dilemma. Doctors shouldn’t …

Real physician voices, twice a week

The Podcast

Latest episodes

The Podcast

Latest episodes