KevinMD.com

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 …

Postpartum lactation support is a health care gap

Maddie Beans

Conditions

May 29, 2026

Feeding an infant is often described in the language of choice. Breast or bottle. Preference or plan. It is framed as something intimate and personal, even private. Yet in clinical reality, especially in the earliest weeks after birth, feeding is also a physiological process that depends on maternal recovery, access to care, and structured medical support. When that support is missing, what appears to be a personal decision begins to …

Metrics got you into medicine and are making you unhappy in it [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 28, 2026

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

You hit every number: top grades, top test scores, top patients-per-hour. So why does practicing medicine feel hollow? Ben Reinking, a board-certified pediatric cardiologist, medical educator, and certified physician development coach, argues that …

Psychiatry and human suffering are not always the same

Devina Maya Wadhwa, MD

Physician

May 28, 2026

By most measures, the treatment was working. The symptoms had improved. Sleep was more consistent. The edge of panic had softened into something more manageable. The medications were tolerated, the therapy was progressing, and the follow-ups were steady.

On paper, this was what success in psychiatry is supposed to look like, and yet, something in the room said otherwise. It is not always obvious. There is no scale that captures it …

Can peer review in academia survive faculty overload?

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Education

May 28, 2026

One of the most difficult moments in scholarship is deciding when a piece of work is ready to leave the desk of the author and enter the public domain. Peer review continues to rely almost entirely on voluntary scholarly labor, even as the academic environment supporting it becomes increasingly strained.

Over the past several years, many faculty in higher education in the United States, whether at public or private institutions, have …

3 fixes for primary care access in the ChatGPT era

Payam Zamani, MD

Tech

May 28, 2026

A new patient in her 40s recently walked into one of our clinics with a printout of a ChatGPT conversation. For three days, she had been typing her symptoms into the chatbot, describing chest tightness and a fatigue that was not going away, asking whether she should be worried.

The reason she turned to AI was straightforward. She had tried to schedule a primary care appointment with her previous provider and …

School nursing for medically complex kids is not guaranteed

Ashley Youngdale

Conditions

May 28, 2026

We didn’t know that school districts have the power to ignore medical decisions made by doctors for medically complex children. We found out when we switched districts, assuming our son’s complex care would follow him the way it always had. It hadn’t been an issue before. His home care nurses went to school with him, and his needs were consistently supported. Our new district was one of the strongest and …

Communication access is a patient safety issue

Chris Ross, PhD, CCC-SLP

Conditions

May 28, 2026

Imagine nearly dying while being unable to communicate your health needs, and the important medical decision-making doesn’t involve you. All that is left for you to do is to feel frustrated, helpless, and afraid.

I had such an experience at the height of the pandemic when I contracted COVID-19 and landed in the intensive care unit. I was put on a ventilator and then on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, the highest form …

Psychedelics and neuroplasticity are rewiring the brain

Marc Arginteanu, MD

Conditions

May 28, 2026

For most of my career as a neurosurgeon, I’ve worked under a cold, hard assumption: The brain’s wiring, once trashed or locked into a pathological rut, is remarkably stubborn. We can resect a tumor, clip an aneurysm, or untether a nerve, but the deeper circuits driving depression, PTSD, and trauma often laugh at our scalpels and stay stubbornly resistant to standard medications. For decades, the standard fix for PTSD or …

The balloon catheter bleeding risk no one talks about

Deanna Vargo, RN, Nish Chasmawala, and Simone Hugar

Conditions

May 28, 2026

For the longest time, indwelling balloon catheters have been the norm in the care of ICU patients. They are often used to help nursing staff keep high-acuity patients clean, manage fecal incontinence, and curb breakdown of skin. Initially, they have been seen to be a useful and reliable solution for problems related to fecal incontinence (FI).

But in oncology ICUs, their use brings up an important question that is overlooked: Are …

After Match Day, orthopedic surgery is finally open to every kind of surgeon [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 27, 2026

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

When you open your Match Day envelope, you step into an orthopedic surgery field that looks nothing like it used to. John E. Klibanoff, an orthopedic surgeon, discusses his article “Navigating your …

The quiet shift that changes physician decision making

Bertina Marie Hooks, MD

Physician

May 27, 2026

There is a subtle but profound shift that happens when your identity changes.

Not the kind of shift that comes with a new title or role, but the kind that is forced. The kind that emerges when something foundational is altered, and the assumptions you once relied on no longer hold in the same way.

For physicians, identity is often tightly interwoven with decision-making. We are trained to trust our judgment, to …

Interventional pain procedures for chronic back pain

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

May 27, 2026

Chronic back, leg, and pelvic pain frequently result from degenerative spine conditions, disc herniations, spinal stenosis, facet arthropathy, sacroiliac joint dysfunction, or vertebrogenic pain. When conservative measures such as physical therapy, medications, and activity modification fail, interventional pain procedures provide targeted, minimally invasive options to address specific pain generators.

These techniques are typically performed on an outpatient basis with image guidance, offering shorter recovery times and lower risk compared to open …

5 principles for protecting physician reputation

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

May 27, 2026

Health care workers understand the power of a record.

One sentence in a medical chart can follow a patient for years. A diagnosis, a risk label, or a preliminary impression may shape how future clinicians see that person. That is why we are taught to document carefully, update records when new information appears, and avoid turning uncertainty into a permanent label.

Public institutions should follow the same principle. When a state medical …

Profit motive in medicine: lessons from private detention

Patrick Hudson, MD

Physician

May 27, 2026

Who staffs the immigration detention centers, the temporary holding camps, the privately run facilities where thousands of frightened people are waiting behind fences and concrete walls?

That is not a rhetorical question. It is a practical one. There are doctors, nurses, administrators, guards, transportation workers, and contractors working inside these institutions today. Some believe they are helping under difficult circumstances. Others regard it as employment within a structure that continues because …

The quiet art of building trust with patients in pain

Khadija Kane, PT, DPT

Conditions

May 27, 2026

Before I ever stepped into a clinic, I learned diplomacy at the dinner table. I learned how silence could be strategic. How tone traveled faster than words. How disagreements could unfold without becoming rupture. How laughter, timed well, could soften a room. I watched adults negotiate boundaries, expectations, and emotions in real time and internalized something I would not be able to name for years: authority is not volume. It …

RFK’s food pyramid is a win for industry, not health

Martha Rosenberg

Policy

May 27, 2026

When Robert Kennedy Jr. (RFK) was confirmed as HHS director last February, overseeing the CDC, NIH, CMS, and FDA, many worried that modern medicines would become unavailable or scarce.

Instead, industry has received unexpected windfalls and green lights from the new policies. Exhibit A: the exoneration of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) from its well-documented links to cancer and cardiovascular effects. The “timing theories” at Wake Forest that helped turn HRT on …

35 years after choosing psychiatry as a specialty

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

May 27, 2026

35 years ago, I stood in a hospital hallway and made a decision that would define the rest of my professional life. I was halfway through my internship year in radiation oncology, a field of high-tech linear accelerators and clear-cut protocols, but my heart had drifted toward psychiatry. When I finally voiced my intent to switch, I didn’t find the collegial support we are taught to value in medical training. …

The physician gender pay gap is an engineering problem

Michael Suk, MD, JD, MPH, MBA

Physician

May 27, 2026

The physician gender pay gap persists after adjustment for specialty, hours, and productivity. A 2016 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found female physicians earned roughly $20,000 less per year than male counterparts after extensive controls. Subsequent analyses confirm similar patterns across specialties and career stages. Most of this literature treats the gap as evidence of discrimination. That framing identifies the problem but offers no mechanism and few remedies.

This …

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts