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The ethics of medical images begins with provenance

Physician

August 3, 2026

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault introduced the concept of the “medical gaze” to describe how physicians translate a patient’s lived experience into biomedical terms, emphasizing information that fits a clinical framework while setting aside what does not. Every gaze involves selecting certain details from the vast stream of sensory information. In medicine, that selection often privileges disease, symptoms, and measurable findings while overlooking the personal, social, and …

What hospice care really means to a grieving family

Ton La, Jr., MD, JD

Physician

August 3, 2026

Before my grandfather entered hospice, I believed it was where physicians sent patients to die. I saw it as the end of treatment, a quiet admission that medicine had given up. It was only through watching my grandfather’s final years that I came to understand hospice differently: not as the abandonment of care, but as one of its most compassionate forms.

A decade ago, Alzheimer’s disease slowly began taking that man …

Why there is no test for mental illness, and won’t be

Nebyou Belay, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 3, 2026

A mother sat across from me recently, her twelve-year-old beside her, and asked a question I have heard in one form or another hundreds of times over two decades of practicing psychiatry: “Can we just get her tested? I want to know, scientifically, what she has.”

She wasn’t asking for a diagnostic interview. She was picturing something closer to what happens elsewhere in medicine when a symptom is uncertain: a scan, …

Why drug advertising is not the public service it claims

M. Bennet Broner, PhD

Medications

August 3, 2026

I have authored previous articles on pharmaceutical advertisements. I noted that they used glitz to sell their products, which was not helpful to patients, especially as many new products had potentially more severe side effects than older ones and were not necessarily more effective. The only significant difference may be that newer products are more expensive.

Safety is a greater concern at present, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has …

What 40 years of technology in medicine gained and cost

Mark McConnell, MD

Physician

August 2, 2026

I have been practicing medicine since 1985. With good fortune, I hope to continue practicing for several more years.

When younger physicians ask what medicine was like when I began, I am careful not to romanticize the past. The pre-computer era had many shortcomings. Paper charts were often unavailable. Records were fragmented. Laboratory results could be misplaced. Communication was slower. Finding information could be frustrating. Many aspects of modern medicine are …

Active listening in medicine starts with slowing down

Scarlett Saitta

Conditions and Diseases

August 2, 2026

Medical school had trained me to move quickly; there was always another exam to prepare for, another deadline to meet, another task to attend to as I worked toward the next milestone. When I learned that I would need to remediate, what initially felt like an academic setback gradually became something else: an opportunity to notice habits I had carried into both medicine and my relationships.

Without the familiar rhythm of …

Oxytocin for autism is the wrong question to ask

Carrie Friedman, NP

Conditions and Diseases

August 2, 2026

Oxytocin is frequently reduced to an appealing but misleading nickname: the “love hormone.” In reality, oxytocin is a hormone and neuropeptide involved in childbirth, lactation, attachment, stress regulation, social learning, and the brain’s response to interpersonal information. Rather than simply creating trust or affection, it appears to influence which social signals receive our attention and how strongly we respond to them.

In a safe relationship, greater sensitivity to another person’s face, …

How AI gait analysis helped me walk again after surgery

Natalia Eden, RN

Health Technology

August 2, 2026

I never expected artificial intelligence to help me relearn how to walk.

After an osteotomy on my left second metatarsal, something about my gait felt wrong. I had previously undergone the same surgery on my right foot, yet this recovery was different. I could feel myself compensating on the left side, trying to match my right leg’s rhythm. I wasn’t limping exactly. In fact, I had become remarkably good at disguising …

The clinic closes at 5. Illness does not.

Alan P. Feren, MD

Physician

August 2, 2026

At 5 p.m., the clinic closes. The appointment schedule ends, routine messages move into the next business day’s queue, and results that arrive later may wait for review. Patients are directed to an after-hours line, urgent care, or the emergency department if the situation cannot wait.

Illness follows a different schedule. A medication started on Wednesday causes dizziness on Friday night. A fever rises on Saturday. Pain that was intermittent during …

AI data centers are a public health crisis

Jessie Hsu

Health Policy

August 2, 2026

There’s a hum in the warm summer air in Lowell, Massachusetts. A low hum, more felt than heard. What could it be? Cicadas? A small plane overhead? Perhaps something much larger, more permanent, and more concerning to public health: an AI data center.

During the summer after my first year of medical school, I was asked by everyone back home my thoughts on AI in medicine. In those conversations, I saw …

When mental health labels become part of who we are

Nebyou Belay, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 2, 2026

Psychiatry occupies a place in public discourse that no other medical specialty does. Its language permeates everyday conversation, its concepts appear in film and literature, and its diagnoses are invoked casually in both social and digital spaces. No cardiologist or gastroenterologist encounters anything quite comparable.

Psychiatry deals directly with the domains that define human experience: emotion, thought, behavior, and relationships. Unlike ischemia or amyloid deposition, these are not biological processes removed …

Healing with compassion: Hope is a key ingredient to survival

Ashley McCray

Conditions and Diseases

August 2, 2026

It was all over his face. I couldn’t help but notice Mr. P’s unspoken disappointment in missing the target goal weight for his anticipated bariatric (weight loss) surgery, the recommended treatment for his obesity. The number on the scale this day had trended slightly upward from what was documented at his last appointment. The physician was displeased at his noncompliance in picking up the medicine that was prescribed to him, …

Lead aprons carry MRSA. Most are never cleaned.

Justin McKay

Conditions and Diseases

August 1, 2026

While in New Orleans last month for the 2026 AORN Global Surgical Conference and Expo, I attended a session called, “Is It Really Clean? ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) Contamination Monitoring.” The discussion got into the nitty gritty of rapid measurement of cleanliness: what ATP testing is, where it is used inside a hospital, and the surfaces that fail testing most consistently. The real gem of the presentation was the list of …

Moral injury and the cost of a parasocial society

Ryan Michael Nick, EdD

Conditions and Diseases

August 1, 2026

According to a 2023 essay in the Atlantic by a Harvard happiness researcher, the term parasocial interaction has a specific origin. As the essay notes, “The term parasocial interaction was introduced in the 1950s by the social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl.” In their groundbreaking 1956 paper, Horton and Wohl open with a now-familiar observation. One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media, radio, …

Women physicians die sooner. Hospitals still won’t act.

Ali Novitsky, MD

Physician

August 1, 2026

In nearly every occupation in America, women live longer than men. This is one of the most stable findings in public health, true for teachers, lawyers, engineers, retail workers, and factory workers alike. Medicine is the exception.

A 2025 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine, led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, examined more than 3.6 million deaths recorded in the National Vital Statistics System between 2020 and 2022. Physicians as a …

4 conversations that lower a patient’s dementia risk

Dr. Emer MacSweeney

Conditions and Diseases

August 1, 2026

Every day, primary care physicians speak to and counsel patients about controlling blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, maintaining a healthy weight, exercising, and getting preventative cancer screenings. Yet conversations about brain health often don’t happen until patients or their families notice memory problems. Forgetfulness is often thought of as a normal part of aging, and dementia is viewed as something physicians cannot proactively address.

But prevention and risk reduction can, and should, …

AI chatbots and suicide: what our tests found

Robert Pak, MBA and Thomas Pak, MD, PhD

Health Technology

August 1, 2026

Zane Shamblin was a 23-year-old recent graduate of Texas A&M University who died by suicide in July 2025. Shamblin had talked with ChatGPT for hours on the day of his suicide. CNN published an investigation of the case in which it reviewed nearly 70 pages of chats from the day of Shamblin’s suicide and excerpts from thousands more pages of conversations from the preceding months. Shamblin had been using …

Learning medicine with AI before learning to think

Ritika Segireddy

Medical Education

August 1, 2026

Artificial intelligence has been part of conversations about the future of medicine for years. As a medical student, I have heard about its potential in lectures, read about its development in health care, and watched discussions about how it may change the way physicians practice. For a long time, though, it felt like something that would arrive later, after I had already learned how to be a doctor.

Then I saw …

A physical therapy referral needs more than a signature

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 1, 2026

One of the reasons I chose to specialize in physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) was influenced by Puerto Rico’s distinctive regulations governing physical therapy. At the time I trained, a physical therapy practice could not legally operate without a physiatrist’s license on file. Only a physiatrist could refer a patient to physical therapy, and only a physiatrist’s credentials permitted the clinic to function, as defined under Puerto Rico’s physical …

Treating a narcissistic patient who would not sit down

Paul J. de Keyzer, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 1, 2026

An excerpt from Behind the Couch.

If you were to ask me how many patients I have seen over the years, I could only give a very rough estimate. Unless, of course, I were to dig deeply into my records. But from that great mass of people, a number of patients will always remain in my memory. Some were simply more remarkable than others, more unusual, or they came with …

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