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 …
What does mental health when bedbound actually look like?
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 …
Built for physicians, by physicians: our founder story
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, …
How clinicians with chronic illness lose more than health
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 …
Physician advocacy can close the gap between appointments
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 …
Medical hierarchy is silencing young doctors who want to write
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, …
Is anticoagulation bleeding risk worse in the real world?
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 …
5 layers every dengue prevention plan now needs
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, …
Fragmented care is the gap digital health left open
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 …
Musculoskeletal health may be the foundation of prevention
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 …
Physician spouses are paying an uncounted price
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 …
Why military patients carry pain a chart can’t explain
At 6:41 on a Tuesday morning, a physician sits in the hospital parking garage after a long shift and reads an email on her phone three times. “We would love to understand how your clinical background translates to this role.” She has been a physician for twenty years. She has taken care of septic children at 2 a.m. She has told families their child won’t make it. She has built …
Leaving medicine is a translation problem, not a loss
I came into nursing to take care of people. I truly love people. I want patients to feel safe and heard around nurses and medical staff, not scared, not worried. Not just their vitals, medications, or charting requirements, but them as people. Their thoughts, fears, stories, and the moments that don’t fit neatly into an “Epic” checkbox.
Somewhere along the way, something shifted.
“If you didn’t document it, you didn’t do it.”
This …
When “I’ll be right back” becomes a broken promise
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!
Is medicine a calling or just a job? Christie Mulholland thinks that question is the wrong one, and answering it keeps physicians stuck in burnout. Christie, a palliative care physician and certified physician development coach, returns to the show to introduce a …
You don’t have to feel called to medicine to be a good doctor [PODCAST]
Anyone who has been gaslit knows it feels like hell on earth. We might as well be soldiers in a foreign war. When we return from the war of gaslighting, we deal with PTSD. Eventually, we feel the healing of the wounds.
I am one of thousands of victims of gaslighting in Colorado. All victims have unique stories. In pursuing justice for many of these victims, I’ve learned that lawyers, judges, …
When a divorce ends a physician’s career
For the first time in American history, more than 100,000 babies were born through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in a single year.
According to data released in March 2026 by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), 100,158 IVF babies were born in the United States in 2024, across 449,772 reported treatment cycles at 364 fertility clinics nationwide. Behind each of those births is a patient who faced uncertainty, made …
How to read IVF success rates before choosing a clinic
The growing scrutiny of applied behavior analysis (ABA) within Medicaid is widely misunderstood within the behavior analytic community as an attack on the profession or its science. It is neither. The root cause is structural. Medicaid programs, whether state-managed or administered through managed care organizations, operate on fixed annual allocations called “premiums,” funded by a blend of federal and state dollars. Each child’s premium is essentially a predetermined budget meant …
The Medicaid reckoning for applied behavior analysis
A physician in our network was having dinner with a group of entrepreneurs. None of them worked in health care. But one mentioned a former health IT executive who had built a technology platform for hospital operations. The physician, who spent his days inside hospitals and immediately recognized the problem the product was solving, picked up his phone, called me, and said, “You need to look at this.”
That call led …
Why physician-led deal sourcing beats traditional VC
The number was wrong for twenty years. Nobody could see it.
For more than twenty years, a number quietly shaped the care of millions of patients. It told nephrologists when to refer. It told transplant committees who qualified for the waitlist. It told primary care physicians which patients were stable, and which were declining.
For Black patients, the number was wrong. By design.
The number was eGFR, and the formula behind it included …
What the eGFR race correction teaches us about AI
Technological and biomedical advancements are undeniable blessings in today’s health sector. These advancements have improved life-prolonging technologies. So, clinicians can often sustain biological life long after meaningful recovery is unlikely. Consequently, there is a subtle shift happening in modern medicine, where we are no longer asking whether we can keep people alive but who gets to decide when not to.
This shift becomes clearer when viewed through Ronald Dworkin’s distinction between …
End-of-life decision-making is never a solo act
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
