KevinMD.com

Why physicians need to learn cannabis medicine now

Meds

May 31, 2026

I am a geriatrics and hospice and palliative medicine physician with over 20 years of experience. Over the years, I have seen how cannabis has helped my patients, and I am very comfortable with my patients using cannabis.

But like many physicians, I was not formally trained in cannabis medicine. In fact, for the longest time I thought people smoked the leaves. It was only much later that I learned that …

I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside

Ahmed Elsonbaty, MD

Tech

May 31, 2026

For most of my career I was an unlikely candidate to build software. I am a consultant cardiac anesthesiologist. My world was the operating room, the bypass machine, the bleeding patient, the next case.

What changed wasn’t ambition. It was a quiet realization: Life had become loud and fast, and I no longer had time to sit down, open a textbook, and read the way I once did. And I started …

GLP-1s and neurotech are colliding over chronic pain

Amir Friedman, MD

Conditions

May 31, 2026

Fifty million Americans wake up in chronic pain every day. Not soreness. Not the dull ache of a hard week. Pain that has dismantled careers, ended marriages, and driven people, my patients, over 25 years, to suicide, overdose, and a slow erasure of self. I trained at USC and UCLA, spent three decades in interventional pain management, and I can tell you with clinical certainty: the system we built to …

Physician contract review is about what is missing

Vikram Chahal, CFA

Conditions

May 31, 2026

She had already signed the lease.

A friend of ours, a hospitalist, had accepted an attending position in the Chicago area. The contract stated she could be assigned to work at any of the practice’s contracted hospitals. She read it carefully. She asked which hospital she’d be based at. They told her. She found an apartment nearby, signed a lease, and started planning her life around a commute she could live …

Violence against doctors: 5 forces that ignite it

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

May 30, 2026

You might recall the 2002 film John Q., in which a desperate father takes a hospital emergency room hostage because his insurance company refuses to cover his son’s heart transplant. It is a gut-wrenching depiction of medical rage. But now looking back at that scenario from the vantage point of 2026, the moral direction of that anger feels fundamentally different from what physicians face today. John Q. was furious at …

Why protein timing after bariatric surgery matters

Kevin Huffman, DO

Conditions

May 30, 2026

I have noticed something interesting. Most patients become obsessed with how much protein they eat. They track every gram. They compare protein shakes. They know their daily target by heart. But very few pay attention to when they are eating that protein.

This creates a problem I see regularly in practice. Patients come into my office convinced they are doing everything right because they reached their daily protein goal. Yet they …

Medication adherence is a communication problem

Vimal Patel, RPh

Meds

May 30, 2026

I still remember the moment clearly. A patient stood in front of me, frustrated and exhausted. She had been prescribed medication for her diabetes months ago, yet her condition was worsening. As I reviewed her profile, everything seemed “correct.” The prescriptions were filled. The claims were processed. The system showed adherence.

But she looked at me and said something I couldn’t ignore: “I never really understood why I needed to take …

What aviation safety can teach surgery about culture

Colin G. Knight, MD

Physician

May 30, 2026

I spent four years as an Air Force flight surgeon before I finished surgery residency, and the safety culture I learned on the flight line still shapes how I run an operating room. Aviation learned long ago that the smartest person in the room is sometimes the most dangerous one. Surgery is learning the same lesson, but we are not there yet.

My path to becoming a surgeon was unusual. I …

Paid peer review is overdue in academic publishing

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

May 30, 2026

For many years, peer review has been an expected but largely invisible part of academic life, undertaken quietly, without compensation, and often without formal recognition. In my experience, peer review requests now arrive almost weekly, often competing with teaching, mentoring, and administrative responsibilities. While not all are accepted, many are taken on out of a sense of professional obligation, even when time is limited. This work has been sustained by …

Physicians must shape AI in medicine, not watch it

Sonal Patel, MD

Tech

May 30, 2026

Physicians need to demand a seat at the table in deciding how artificial intelligence is integrated into medicine. This is not a luxury or a branding slogan; it is a necessity. If physicians remain engaged, AI can become a powerful tool. If we disengage, we risk allowing others to define medicine on our behalf.

AI is already here. It is being used in documentation, diagnostics, risk prediction, imaging, scheduling, prior authorization, …

Cardiovascular disease in Black Americans is structural

Teddy A. Teddy, MD

Conditions

May 30, 2026

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, yet its burden is not evenly distributed. Black Americans experience higher rates of hypertension, heart failure, and premature cardiovascular mortality. These patterns are often called “health disparities,” but that language risks understating a central reality. Cardiovascular risk does not arise in isolation. It accumulates along lines of social and structural inequality.

The relationship between social conditions and cardiovascular health …

How to raise teenagers ready for the real world

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

May 30, 2026

After sharing numerous thoughts on pain management and the health care system, which are topics I am deeply passionate about, I decided for a moment to step out of my role as a physician and share some personal insights I encounter regularly as a parent raising teenagers. At times, this journey can feel even more challenging than practicing medicine.

Raising a teenager today feels like navigating a beautiful storm. One moment, …

Why does post-discharge care keep breaking down?

Katherine Owen, RN

Conditions

May 30, 2026

At 10 p.m., the phone rings. A patient discharged three days ago is back in the emergency department. The care plan was clear. The medications were correct. The follow-up was scheduled. Nothing was missed, on paper. And yet, here we are again.

The uncomfortable truth

Health care does not have a planning problem. It has an execution problem.

We design excellent care inside the hospital, then we quietly hope it continues outside of …

Medical trauma and the betrayal of patient trust

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Physician

May 30, 2026

A patient entering a cosmetic surgeon’s office may remove her clothing, disclose fears she has not told her family, submit to anesthesia, reveal pain, expose scars, ask embarrassing questions, or place her body in the hands of strangers. When her privacy is violated, psychological and lasting harm may ensue.

That is why the recent judgment from the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario against Toronto plastic surgeon Dr. …

The recovery no one schedules after maternity leave

Anonymous

Physician

May 30, 2026

As a doctor, I often explain to patients how long recovery is likely to take. We offer timelines because uncertainty is often the hardest symptom to bear.

I know this from the other side too. Four weeks after giving birth, I found myself jogging outside at 11 p.m., with an app counting my steps. I was 12 kilograms heavier than before pregnancy and could barely look at myself in the mirror. …

The anticoagulant standard of care nobody tested

David K. Cundiff, MD

Meds

May 30, 2026

In 1997, the LA Times published my article titled “Good Medicine, Fewer Hospital Beds.” Writing as an attending internist at a large public teaching hospital, I criticized a decision to spend $900 million on a massive 600-bed replacement facility. My experience affirmed what federal, state, and county analysts already knew: Resources were poured disproportionately into expensive acute inpatient specialty services, leaving primary care and out-of-hospital services for millions of …

One hallucinated citation can end your expert witness career [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 29, 2026

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

One AI-hallucinated citation on cross-examination, and the expert witness career you built is over. It is already happening. Tracy Liberatore, a former physician assistant turned attorney and founder of the National Expert Academy, …

Why physician mentorship is a structural intervention

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

May 29, 2026

There is a quiet crisis playing out in medicine that we rarely name directly: physicians who are extraordinarily competent and profoundly lost.

In the current landscape of health care, “autonomy” often feels like a relic of the past. We were trained to diagnose, treat, and lead, to be clinical experts. Yet many find themselves trapped in systems that prioritize throughput over professional sovereignty. We were not trained to navigate a system …

Hope in cancer clinical trials is what we do not measure

Regina Portnoy

Conditions

May 29, 2026

In clinical trials, we measure outcomes, response rates, and survival. But after 20 years in hematology-oncology research, I’ve come to understand that what drives many patients to move forward is something we don’t measure at all.

It’s hope.

And for me, that understanding began long before my career, in the life of my father.

There are moments in life when things don’t go the way I planned, when something falls apart, when I …

A nurse in the Holocaust meets an impossible order

Dr. Jonathan Hammel

Physician

May 29, 2026

Lena spotted Dr. Kreindl, who without his cigarette, seemed a bit lost. But he knew better than to light up: the Gestapo would have never tolerated such an act of freedom, coming from a Jew.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “Listen, it’s quite simple. Most of these patients have ingested large doses of …