Why the burnout diagnosis keeps slipping through the net

Conditions and Diseases
August 15, 2026

Humankind has forever sought a peculiar comfort in naming. Anything our senses can perceive or our minds can conjure has been subject to a unique identifier. The mantle of an experience is heavy, but naming it makes it easier to bear. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing that the rocks weighing us down are the same rocks the person next to us imagines. But ever so often, reality imprints on …

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Why the burnout diagnosis keeps slipping through the net

When your labs are normal but you still feel sick [PODCAST]

Podcast
August 14, 2026
YouTube video

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

Your blood pressure is fine. Your cholesterol looks great. So why do you still feel exhausted, wired, and unwell? Internal medicine and functional medicine physician Shiv K. Goel returns to explain what standard lab panels miss when chronic stress quietly reshapes the …

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When your labs are normal but you still feel sick [PODCAST]

Patent before publication without limiting open science

Conditions and Diseases
August 14, 2026

“Academia produces knowledge brilliantly. It distributes it appallingly,” Professor Dorina Buda wrote recently on LinkedIn.

The statement made me pause because it brought back two experiences from nearly a decade apart. Both involved the same molecule, peroxynitrite, a peroxy isomer of nitrate. The first occurred when I knew virtually nothing about patents. The second came after I had worked as a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office …

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Patent before publication without limiting open science

Emergency alerts should never sit behind a login

Health Policy
August 14, 2026

When catastrophic floods struck Texas on July 4, 2025, killing 78 people, questions quickly emerged about the timing and accessibility of public emergency warnings. In the hours before the disaster, some alerts were delayed amid staffing shortages and funding cuts. Others were posted on private social media platforms, which can often only be viewed with an account. In a crisis where every minute matters, even the smallest obstacles to …

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Emergency alerts should never sit behind a login

Physician peer review must balance safety and fairness

Physician
August 14, 2026

Medicine is one of the few professions in which a colleague may understand exactly how difficult the journey has been and simultaneously possess enormous influence over whether another physician is permitted to continue that journey.

Becoming a physician requires years of education, medical school, residency, examinations, credentialing, sacrifice, and continual professional development. For surgeons, the pathway often includes additional fellowship training and years spent developing technical judgment that cannot be acquired …

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Physician peer review must balance safety and fairness

AI-assisted writing can extend a writer’s creative life

Health Technology
August 14, 2026

The debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and writing seems destined to have no definitive conclusion.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has pleaded with readers not to write with AI, arguing that writing is inseparable from thinking and that outsourcing the former eventually weakens the latter. Others make a more accommodating case: Use AI as a copy editor, researcher, critic, or sparring partner, but do not let it replace the …

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AI-assisted writing can extend a writer’s creative life

Testosterone therapy for men requires precision care

Medications
August 14, 2026

Testosterone is one of the most discussed and misunderstood tools in modern men’s health. On one hand, it is portrayed as a remedy for aging. On the other, its legitimate clinical value is frequently downplayed. The evidence suggests a more nuanced view: Testosterone replacement can be life-changing for appropriately diagnosed hypogonadism, while many broader benefits remain evolving or indirect.

The well-known benefits are in hormonal and sexual health. For men with …

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Testosterone therapy for men requires precision care

The radiologist shortage behind your scan delays

Physician
August 14, 2026

Waiting seven days or more to get a report of your recent CT scan? Welcome to today’s new normal. Until a couple of years ago, the digital transformation of radiology dramatically shortened turnaround times of report delivery. The last-century process of audio dictation, manual transcription, editing, and signing final reports was replaced by direct voice recognition software. Radiologists became the transcribers and editors. Turnaround of reports from study time shortened …

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The radiologist shortage behind your scan delays

How the benefits of active sitting change desk work

Conditions and Diseases
August 14, 2026

“That which is used develops; that which is not used wastes away.” Hippocrates wrote that around 450 B.C., and it turns out he understood office ergonomics better than we do.

Dozens of companies sell “ergonomic” office chairs, and they are all built around the same idea: a backrest, usually armrests, and always lumbar support. If this design solved the problem of sitting, why do 80 percent of Americans eventually develop …

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How the benefits of active sitting change desk work

BPC-157 safety remains uncertain without human evidence

Medications
August 14, 2026

This patient had done everything right. Six months earlier, he had come into my office barely able to lift his arm above shoulder height, the result of a rotator cuff injury that had quietly worsened over a year of ignoring it. We treated it with the art of clinical approach: an image-guided intra-articular injection to calm the inflammation, followed by a disciplined course of physical therapy. He showed up for …

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BPC-157 safety remains uncertain without human evidence

Why AI governance in health care falls on clinicians in 2026

Health Technology
August 14, 2026

Another state just added itself to the list of places with its own AI health care law. Another compliance memo just landed on somebody’s desk. It’s easy to file this under bureaucratic noise, something legal will sort out. It isn’t. A physician documents why she overrode an ambient scribe’s note. A nurse practitioner checks a disclosure banner before a generative AI-drafted message goes out to a patient. A physician assistant …

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Why AI governance in health care falls on clinicians in 2026

Why medical cannabis for seniors is surging

Medications
August 14, 2026

Seniors are increasingly turning to cannabis to find relief from the suffering and medical indignities of aging. I see this every day in my primary care clinic. Whether it is the grinding discomfort of chronic pain, the anxiety associated with losing friends and abilities, or the soul-crushing misery of insomnia, older adults are discovering that medical marijuana can often do what many of our standard prescriptions cannot. They are finding …

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Why medical cannabis for seniors is surging

Medical students aren’t cheating on their essays: They’re afraid [PODCAST]

Podcast
August 13, 2026
YouTube video

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

A medical student offered a professor $1,000 to write their residency essay, and the reason why was not laziness. In this episode, Kathleen Muldoon, a certified coach and medical education professor, shares what she learned when she sat that student down for …

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Medical students aren’t cheating on their essays: They’re afraid [PODCAST]

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Collaborative care must reshape psychiatry training

Conditions and Diseases
August 13, 2026

The landscape of psychiatric care has shifted beneath our feet, yet residency training still clings to an older map. Programs continue to imagine a world where the psychiatrist alone sits with each patient, weighs the options, and steers the course of treatment. That tradition endures, but it is no longer the only current running through the field. Across the country, in clinics and hospitals both large and small, a new …

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Collaborative care must reshape psychiatry training

The physician compensation check almost nobody does

Physician Finance
August 13, 2026

Every physician on a production contract gets a compensation report. It arrives on schedule, formatted and official, with your wRVU total sitting in a box near the bottom. And almost every one of us treats that number the same way: We glance at it, feel vaguely that it seems low, and file it away.

Here is the uncomfortable question I would ask every production-paid clinician. If that number were wrong, how …

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The physician compensation check almost nobody does

The mass shooting aftermath health care workers rarely name

Health Policy
August 13, 2026

As mass shootings become more and more common around the country, communities are having to face the aftermath of these horrific events at an ever-increasing rate. Hospital-based health care workers are often faced with treating patients in what is known as a mass casualty event, which we train for, but hope to never see. In the last eight years, I have worked in two separate communities and witnessed mass shooting …

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The mass shooting aftermath health care workers rarely name

What to expect on weight-loss medication, beyond the scale

Medications
August 13, 2026

I have been a registered nurse for more than thirty years. I am also a bariatric surgery patient and a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) user.

I thought that combination would put me in a good position when I started treatment. I understood medications and adverse effects. I knew hydration, nutrition, and maintaining strength mattered, and that success could not be measured only by the scale. Even so, I found myself working things …

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What to expect on weight-loss medication, beyond the scale

Triaging patient portal messages is a staffing problem

Physician Finance
August 13, 2026

Patients now have a way to reach a physician that no phone call ever offered: directly, in writing, at any hour, with no one screening it first. That was the entire point. It was also, it turns out, the entire problem.

A patient types “not feeling great today” into the portal. It could mean a cold. It could mean chest tightness they’re downplaying. The message looks the same either way, sitting …

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Triaging patient portal messages is a staffing problem

Why breast cancer in young women goes undetected

Conditions and Diseases
August 13, 2026

As I watched the breast biopsy occurring across from me, I could not believe the woman in front of me was 26. I held her hand as she cried from the anesthesia, and I thought to myself, that could be me. She had been diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast a couple of months ago and was getting a lymph node biopsy. At 26, she was nowhere near …

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Why breast cancer in young women goes undetected

Physician inventors need more than an issued patent

Physician Finance
August 13, 2026

Physicians are trained to recognize what we know and, perhaps more importantly, what we do not know. We take a set of clinical findings, develop a differential diagnosis, gather more information, and work toward a treatment plan.

I assumed that same discipline would help me navigate the commercial development of a medical device. It did, but not nearly as much as I expected.

After decades as an anesthesiologist, I co-founded a company …

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Physician inventors need more than an issued patent

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