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National Nurses Week needs better nursing recognition

Brian Sutter

Conditions

April 15, 2026

I was recently speaking with an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse, and she described a moment that perfectly captures the weight of her profession. She was managing a post-surgical patient whose vitals were quietly deteriorating. Before the monitor alarms even registered the crisis, she had anticipated the drop, prepped the pressors, and calmly updated the attending physician. Through sheer clinical vigilance, she held the fragile line between stabilization and a …

Natural disaster trauma requires mental health planning

Kevin

Conditions

April 15, 2026

Super Typhoon Sinlaku got the coverage it deserved, the satellite loops, the wind speed updates, the landfall reports over the Northern Marianas. Every wobble in the eye wall drew a headline. No one was talking about what was happening inside people’s bodies. I have sat with patients days after a storm passed, experiencing blood pressure that will not budge and hands that will not stop shaking, and the sky has …

The reluctant achiever: Navigating identity in medical training

Jack Tiller

Education

April 15, 2026

I. Intake notes

Subject presents as a high-functioning adult with a long history of academic success and an unusual number of existential questions for someone who technically has their life together. Primary characteristics include intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and a persistent suspicion that the conventional path laid before them (while impressive) might also be some kind of elaborate trap. The subject is not failing by any objective metric. In fact, the opposite …

How imposter syndrome affects high-achieving professionals

Ritu Goel, MD

Conditions

April 15, 2026

He had just been named a partner. The youngest in the firm’s history. The first thing he said when he sat down in my office was, “I think they made a mistake.” I have heard some version of this more times than I can count, from physicians, attorneys, founders, and C-suite executives. People whose resumes would make anyone’s jaw drop, yet who live with a persistent, quiet dread that someone …

The medical practice marketing metrics that actually matter

Uday Rajaram

Finance

April 15, 2026

Every month, thousands of physician practices receive a marketing report. It has charts. It has graphs. It shows impressive numbers moving in the right direction. And in most cases, it tells the practice almost nothing about whether their marketing is actually working. After managing paid digital campaigns for cosmetic and aesthetic medical practices, I have seen this pattern repeatedly: practices spending $3,000 to $8,000 per month on marketing, receiving polished …

Finding humanity in medicine after a sudden illness

Salina Mansukhani

Conditions

April 15, 2026

The morning my mother passed away began like any other. She was getting ready for work. She finished her morning chai and just stepped out of the shower with the sunlight filling the bedroom. There was nothing unusual about that morning that was particularly alarming. And then, in a moment so small I almost missed it, she paused and pressed a hand to her back. “I don’t feel right,” she …

Silence isn’t neutrality: Why medical students can’t wait to find their voice [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 14, 2026

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

What happens when medical students witness dehumanization during clinical rotations but feel too powerless to speak up? Kathleen Muldoon, a certified coach and professor in medical education, joins the show to unpack why …

Coping with a childhood type 1 diabetes diagnosis

Howard Steinberg

Conditions

April 14, 2026

An excerpt from Confessions of a Problem Seeker: My Lifetime Journey From Busy Brain To Loving Heart.

In his own intuitive way, with only a second-grade education, my dad knew something was not right. Just hours after peeing in a paper cup at our pediatrician’s office, the doctor called my mom at my father’s butcher shop to inform her I had juvenile diabetes (now referred to as type 1 diabetes). …

The ROI of ambient AI in health care and autonomous coding

Pat Williams

Tech

April 14, 2026

When ambient listening and generative AI first entered the clinical mainstream, the value proposition was simple: Reduce documentation burden and give clinicians their evenings back. That promise resonated. Burnout was rising. After-hours charting had become normalized. Health systems needed relief. And ambient documentation delivered.

But as deployments scaled from pilot projects to enterprise rollouts, the conversation matured. CFOs and revenue cycle leaders began asking a harder question: Beyond time savings, what …

Artificial intelligence is changing medical writing today

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Tech

April 14, 2026

The moment was small, almost trivial. I handed my daughter her polished curriculum vitae (CV), clear, structured, and professionally phrased. All the information had been distilled and reorganized from her resume. She looked at it for a second longer than expected, then asked a single question: “ChatGPT?” I said yes, and felt an unexpected flicker of shame. Not because I had done something wrong. Not because I had tried to …

A humorous parody of medical specialties and the modern patient

Sidney J. Winawer, MD

Physician

April 14, 2026

Prologue

As a practicing gastroenterologist for more than 50 years, now emeritus, I was privileged to have had colleagues with expertise in many specialties to whom I could refer patients. Since my career began, the constellation of these specialists has increased considerably. Patients often find themselves moving from one “ologist” to another, each very skilled but focused on a particular organ system. From the patient’s perspective, maneuvering through the complexities of …

Managing food allergy anxiety through diagnostic testing

Tamara Hubbard and Gary Falcetano

Conditions

April 14, 2026

Food allergies affect roughly 8 to 10 percent of U.S. children and adults, and prevalence has risen steadily over the past two decades. Beyond the impacts on physical health, families managing food allergies experience persistent stress and vigilance preparing for unknown risks, whether it’s label reading, preparing for school, or going to restaurants or social gatherings. Seasonal allergies, in particular, have also been linked to generalized …

How generative AI in health care is changing patient expectations

Cybil Sierra Stingl, MD and Robert M. Kaplan, PhD

Tech

April 14, 2026

On a busy call shift as a resident doctor at Stanford, I have heard versions of the same sentence more than once: “That’s reassuring. ChatGPT said the same thing.” In clinic, patients increasingly admit they left visits hesitant to ask clarifying questions, then turned to a generative AI tool to explain their diagnosis in plainer language. Some return reassured; others come back more uncertain. But the pattern is unmistakable. Patients …

Oral Wegovy sounds easy, but the reality is more complicated [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 13, 2026

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

Is the new oral Wegovy pill a breakthrough or a risk most patients never hear about? Shiv K. Goel, an internal medicine and functional medicine physician, joins the show to unpack his KevinMD …

Surviving a hospital blizzard as a physician on call

George F. Smith, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

The recent record snowstorm in New England got me all in a deep wintery nostalgia. I contacted my friends back in Boston who have been living there for well over 40 years to get their perspectives, and it brought back memories of living on the East Coast and surviving the seemingly interminable long winters there before I moved to California in the late 1980s. Most prominently in my memory is …

Knee replacement marketing undermines informed consent

Cory Calendine, MD

Conditions

April 13, 2026

She came in having done the work. She had watched the clinic videos. Read the website. She knew the name of the proprietary technique for knee replacement that the surgeon’s practice was advertising. She used it correctly in the first sentence of our consultation. What she could not tell me was what the approach actually did differently, which structures it spared, or why it might matter for her specific anatomy …

Pharmacy closures threaten our entire public health system

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

We turned pharmacies into the backbone of public health during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Then we went back to paying them like retail stores. The result is what I think of as the pharmacy paradox. We expanded their role without changing the economics that sustain them. Now, across the country, those same pharmacies are closing, quietly and disproportionately in the communities that need them most.

In 2021, the corner drugstore ceased …

Pathogenesis of a medical startup: a physician’s diary of daring, doubting, and doing it anyway

Maxim Saksonov, MD, MBA

Physician

April 13, 2026

Intro

This is not a story of a 28-year-old successful serial entrepreneur, nor a work of personal development literature. It is rather an auto-dissection of a very regular and tired doctor who was arrogant enough to co-found a medical startup and become its chief executive officer (CEO) without having any qualifications for it whatsoever.

It is also not a story of great success (yet) merely because the journey is in its diapers …

The existential crisis of aging in medicine

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

We enter the cathedral of medicine with a specific architecture of the soul: high ambition, perfectionism fueled by a productive neuroticism, and a boundless capacity for self-sacrifice. For many of us, the “best years” (the physical and cognitive prime of our 20s and 30s) are traded for the fluorescent hum of the wards and the weight of six-figure debts. This financial burden does more than strain the bank account; it …

Rethinking the role of family physicians vs. specialists

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

Calls to declare family physicians the “backbone of health care” are emotionally appealing, but they do not withstand scrutiny. When we examine training pathways, cost structures, insurer incentives, and real-world performance, a different picture emerges, one in which many other clinicians are better trained for the populations they serve and, critically for insurers, far cheaper. This is not an attack on family physicians. It is a call for accuracy in …

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