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Why your overhead percentage is the wrong benchmark

Physician Finance

June 8, 2026

In primary care, practice overhead is commonly described as 50 to 60 percent of collections. That range is repeated in continuing education, in vendor marketing, and in the operational frameworks new practice owners are handed when they ask what normal looks like. The range is not wrong. It is just too broad to be operationally useful.

A primary care practice running at 58 percent overhead might be perfectly stable, undercompensating its …

The opioid crackdown is harming chronic pain patients

Bill Bauer, MD, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 8, 2026

I once cared for a patient I’ll call Maria, a middle-aged professional with severe spinal disease and years of stable function on a carefully monitored opioid regimen. She’d never lost a prescription, never shown signs of misuse, and passed every urine drug screen. Then her clinic was acquired by a large health system, and new policies arrived with a single message: cut opioid doses or risk scrutiny. Within months, Maria’s …

ED boarding fails patients before treatment begins

Sarah Whaley

Conditions and Diseases

June 8, 2026

I am writing this from a hospital bed, though it took far longer than it should have to get here.

I was directly admitted by a surgical team for treatment of a post-surgical infection. The expectation in such cases is straightforward: admission to an inpatient unit for monitoring, treatment, and recovery. Instead, I spent hours in a secondary waiting room, followed by placement in a chair in a shared emergency department …

RFK’s HHS cuts leave the U.S. open to a bioweapon attack

Harry Severance, MD

Health Policy

June 8, 2026

Both during and since the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple theorists and pundits have postulated that COVID-19 was being developed as a bioweapon, and was mistakenly (or purposely) released from a containment lab, purportedly in China. Other researchers say no. But, either way, the effects upon our country, our society, our health care delivery (with emergency departments and hospitals overwhelmed, while many clinics were forced to shut down), our …

Insurance denial after transplant: Approval isn’t access

Payton Herres

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

I am alive because of a heart transplant.

That heart belonged to a young man in his twenties. His mother is now part of my life. She loves me, worries about me, and carries the unimaginable reality of losing her son while knowing his heart is still beating inside someone else. That “someone else” is me.

Because of that, taking my anti-rejection medication is not optional. It is survival.

For my entire transplant, …

The MCAT requirement persists as a norm, not as a tool

Aniruth Ananthanarayanan

Medical Education

June 7, 2026

I said something in a medical school interview that I probably shouldn’t have said in a medical school interview.

It was a group interview, and we were waiting for one of the other interviewees in our group (he had back-to-back interviews and was running late). To pass time, the examiner, who just so happened to be the head of medical admissions at the medical school, asked why we applied to that …

Physician burnout is not the whole diagnosis

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

June 7, 2026

Reason for consultation

Burnout. Workforce decline. Moral distress. Concern regarding physician formation.

Chief complaint

Burnout.

History of present illness

Medicine presents with burnout. Chronic. Recurrent. Poorly responsive to treatment.

Associated symptoms now include workforce shortages, declining interest in primary care, moral distress, loss of meaning, and concern regarding what kind of people the profession is forming.

Treatment efforts have been substantial. Wellness initiatives. Resilience training. Mindfulness. Workflow redesign. Administrative intervention. Repeated attempts to improve work-life balance. Partial …

Prenatal testing for Down syndrome is not a verdict

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

Recently, a popular YouTuber and his wife shared a deeply personal and painful decision with their large online audience. After announcing their pregnancy earlier in 2026, routine screening tests indicated a high likelihood that their baby had Down syndrome, also known as Trisomy 21. They reportedly followed up with amniocentesis, a diagnostic test that confirmed the diagnosis. In an emotional video, they reacted to the results live on camera, clearly …

Why scientific creativity and aging defy citations

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Medical Education

June 7, 2026

Recent discussions surrounding aging and scientific innovation have raised important questions about how scientific creativity should be measured. A recent article in Science approached this issue primarily through bibliometric and disruption-based analyses, perspectives that were subsequently discussed and amplified in other outlets, including Nature.

Still, scientific creativity may not always be fully captured through disruption metrics or bibliometric patterns alone, a concern raised in recent responses discussing the limitations …

What does mental health when bedbound actually look like?

Kristian Keefer

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

The first time it really hit me how small my world had gotten, it was not during a hospital stay or anything big like that. It was something simple. I remember thinking about running out to grab something quick, just a normal errand. And then it hit me that even that was not really an option for me anymore. It was just a regular day. That was the part that …

Built for physicians, by physicians: our founder story

J. Todd Walker, MD & Justin T. Smith, MD & TurnKey AI Practice

Health Technology

June 7, 2026

My colleague had a vision. Not the kind that comes from a business school classroom or a venture capital pitch competition, but the kind that comes from years of practicing medicine and watching colleagues slowly lose the thing that brought them into this field in the first place. Autonomy. Joy. The feeling that you are actually helping someone, not just generating documentation.

The three of us, my CEO colleague and two …

How clinicians with chronic illness lose more than health

Jamie Lynn Bagley, DNP

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

I built my career on caring, compassion, and a deep desire to help others.

As a psychiatric nurse practitioner with a doctorate, I was trained to understand suffering: to listen closely, recognize patterns, and validate experiences that others might overlook. That work wasn’t just professional. It was personal. Long before I became a clinician, I was a patient.

I have lived with symptoms for most of my life. But like many patients, …

Physician advocacy can close the gap between appointments

Samantha Jackson Dilts, MD

Physician

June 7, 2026

My father’s melanoma diagnosis arrived on a Tuesday. By Thursday, we had a plan of care. By the following Monday, I was back at work seeing my own patients, pretending the world had resumed its normal shape. But it hadn’t. Not really. Because his cancer didn’t pause between appointments, didn’t stop growing or spreading, and neither did the fear, the questions, or the quiet unraveling that comes with navigating a …

Medical hierarchy is silencing young doctors who want to write

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Physician

June 6, 2026

When people wear hierarchy as a badge of honor, they literally stunt the growth of young doctors, especially in settings where resources are already limited.

I graduated from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba in 2023, and have since returned home to serve my community. I am the first doctor from my village of Logwerle, Central Equatoria State, South Sudan, East Africa, and the first to speak four …

Is anticoagulation bleeding risk worse in the real world?

David K. Cundiff, MD

Medications

June 6, 2026

For decades, the medical community has accepted a foundational principle of cardiovascular care: patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AFib) require aggressive, lifelong stroke prophylaxis. When a patient also presents with stable coronary artery disease (CAD), standard practice has historically gone a step further, layering an antiplatelet such as aspirin on top of an oral anticoagulant such as warfarin or a modern direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC). To frontline hospitalists and patients, …

5 layers every dengue prevention plan now needs

Melvin Sanicas, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 6, 2026

Dengue is often described as a tropical disease, but that label no longer captures the size of the problem. Over the past six months, dengue has continued to appear across continents, from the Americas and the Pacific to Asia, Europe-linked travel cases, and the Caribbean. Some regions are reporting fewer cases than during recent record-breaking years, but the overall message is clear: Dengue remains a major and growing public health …

Fragmented care is the gap digital health left open

Robert Nieves, JD, MBA, MPA, RN

Health Policy

June 6, 2026

One of the unintended consequences of digital health is that we became extraordinarily good at collecting information without spending nearly enough time teaching clinicians how to use it together.

For years, health care informatics focused largely on documentation itself. We trained clinicians to click, complete, reconcile, acknowledge, and navigate increasingly complex systems. Conversations emerged around reducing clicks, decreasing documentation burden, and improving workflow efficiency. Those things matter.

But somewhere along the way, …

Musculoskeletal health may be the foundation of prevention

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 6, 2026

Few would argue against the extraordinary success of modern cardiovascular medicine. Over the past half century, physicians, researchers, public health leaders, and policymakers have invested enormous effort in understanding and reducing cardiovascular risk. Smoking cessation campaigns, blood pressure control, cholesterol management, diabetes treatment, cardiac rehabilitation, and advances in acute cardiac care have collectively saved millions of lives.

As a result, Americans today are far more aware of cardiovascular health than previous …

Physician spouses are paying an uncounted price

Kendra Harvey

Conditions and Diseases

June 6, 2026

The story medicine tells about itself is a good one. Dedicated professionals. Years of sacrifice. Lives saved. We celebrate Match Day. We honor long residencies with the understanding that something great is being built.

What we don’t count is who else paid the price.

I’ve been married to a neurosurgeon for 22 years. We moved through one of the longest, most demanding surgical training programs in medicine, and I want to be …

Why military patients carry pain a chart can’t explain

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 6, 2026

He came to me with chronic neck pain and headaches that would not quit. The diagnosis was already there: neck pain, degenerative disc disease, chronic headaches. But a diagnosis is not the same thing as a story.

We built a sports medicine treatment plan around what I could find on exam: trigger point injections, massage, soft tissue work. The pain would improve, then return. Every four weeks became every two because …

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